Dae-Jung #2
She also hadn't left the office in days, and I was pretty sure she was sleeping back there on the loveseat Killian kept for "meetings.
" Not because she didn't have a place to go — Alex was home now, recovering in their room at Killian's — but because Kenya processed stress by working, the same way Elias processed it by cleaning and I processed it by pretending everything was a joke.
Surely, all that couldn't be healthy. But a head doctor wouldn't be of any help in this situation. We were all too stuck in our ways to change now.
"Where's Killian?" I asked.
"In the office with Kenya. He wanted to go over the quarterly numbers." Elias paused. "Again."
"That bad?"
"You know damn well the humans only bring in about a third of what we used to pull," Elias said.
"But I don't know that that's a bad thing.
The only one we need to worry about feeding now is you.
Brogan isn't working. Jamal isn't working.
I'm—" He stopped. Looked at his coffee mug as if it had personally offended him. "I don't need to feed anymore."
"Yeah." I took another drink. "I guess that's true."
The Purple Fang had always served two purposes: the public one, where beautiful men took their clothes off for money, and the real one, where vampires fed from willing humans who'd leave with a hazy memory of a very good night and spotty memory loss they couldn't quite explain.
The business funded the feeding. The feeding sustained the coven.
But Killian only fed from Lizzy now. Jamal from Angel. Alex sustained Kenya. Brogan had Esme. Even Elias — whatever Elias was these days — didn't need blood anymore, and if he did, he'd only feed from Talin, his mate.
I was the only one left who still needed to hunt. The last vampire at the party where someone had already turned the lights on and was shooing everyone out.
"He's thinking about closing it," Elias said quietly.
My hand tightened around the glass. "The club?"
"He hasn't said it outright, but I know it's on his mind. The numbers just don't work without the vampire draw, and we don't really need—"
"It works fine."
"Dae—"
"I said it works fine." The hard edge in my voice surprised us both. I set the glass down with an unsteady hand and stared at the amber liquid like I could will it to make me feel something other than the slow, creeping dread that had been building in my chest for weeks. Maybe months.
Hell, years, if I were being honest.
But I wasn't going to go there, because that way lay a darkness I'd been outrunning since before New Orleans existed as a city.
The office door opened, and Killian walked out and came to join us at the bar. His sandy brown hair was pushed back from his face like he'd been running his fingers through it, and his black eyes swept the nearly empty club with a carefully controlled expression I recognized.
"Dae." He pulled up a stool next to me. "Ye're done early."
"Tyler needed—"
"Stage time, aye, ye said that about Derek last night." He signaled to Elias, who set a whiskey in front of him with mechanical efficiency. "And Jeff the night before. But yer right. Besides, the crowd is shite tonight."
"It's February. The tourists are always fewer between Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest."
"It was shite last Saturday too. And the one before that." Killian took a drink, his jaw working. "I've been going over the numbers with Kenya."
I nodded. "Yeah. Elias was just saying."
"We're bleeding money these days. The humans are fine for the stage, but they can't — they don't have what—" He stopped himself, glancing at Elias, then back at me. "The business model just doesn't work anymore. Not the way it's set up."
"So we adapt. We've been adapting our feeding habits for hundreds of years."
"Aye, but we adapted together. All of us were invested. Now it's—" He gestured at the empty room. "It's you on yer own. Elias is over there drinking coffee, for fuck's sake."
Elias made a small, tight sound that might have been offense or might have been agreement.
"I can carry it," I said.
Killian looked at me. Not with pity, Killian didn't do pity, but with something worse. Understanding. "Aye. Maybe. For now. But for how long? And why bother when ye could just go find some sweet blood on the streets like olden times? One vampire won't bring any notice to us."
I didn't answer.
The silence stretched out between us. On stage, Tyler was attempting the body-roll move, and it looked exactly like I'd described — a full-body spasm set to a Weeknd track. The two women at the front table were trying very hard to be supportive.
Bless their hearts.
"I'm not closing it tomorrow," Killian said, more gently than I expected. "But we all need to talk about what this place is now, and where we're going to go from here. And we need to do it soon."
"It's home," I said, and the word came out rougher than I wanted. "That's what it is."
Killian's dark eyes softened, but he didn't say anything as he and Elias exchanged a glance. Just finished his whiskey and stood, squeezing my shoulder once before heading back toward the office.
Elias was quiet after he left. The music thumped from the stage, tinny and distant, the pulses of the women watching Tyler slowing to a normal rhythm with his less than sexy dance moves, and somewhere on Bourbon Street a woman laughed too loud and too long.
"You should go see her," Elias said suddenly.
I stiffened. "See who?"
The look he gave me was unimpressed by my attempt to be coy. "Don't do that, Dae. I know what it fucking looks like."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Leaning his elbows on the bar, he stared at me hard. "You've checked your phone eleven times in the last twenty minutes."
Had I? I glanced down at the device on the bar. The screen was dark. No messages. No little sun emoji.
"She's recovering," I said, which was true, and also an excuse. But I thought it sounded like a pretty good one.
"She came to you, Dae. Not Judy, not the coven. Not even her brother." He pointed at me. "You. Don't you think that means something?"
I went very still as he pointed out the obvious.
He was right. I knew he was right. I just wasn't sure how I felt about it.
"I need another drink," I said.
He filled my glass without another word.
It'd been three days since Judy had peeled Alice out of my arms with a look that said this is witch business, vampire.
And I'd let her go because what else was I going to do?
I didn't even know how the hell Judy knew to come help her, but I assumed it was some bond they all had.
Just like we did. And Alice belonged with her family. They'd know how to help her.
But, dammit, I could still feel the weight of her warm body against mine. Her heart hammering like it was trying to break free of her chest. The jolt of electricity when she touched my cheek.
That had been real. That had been Alice.
Not the thing that crawled into her afterward.
That small touch had gone straight through me like a live wire, shooting heat down my spine to pool low in my stomach in a way that had nothing to do with hunger.
Well, not that kind of hunger. And for exactly one second I'd known with absolute certainty what this was, what she was, and what we could be.
My gums throbbed at the memory, and I pressed my tongue against the inside of my teeth, willing my fangs to stay put. This was getting out of hand. The aching, the obsessing, the wanting, the way I couldn't close my eyes without seeing her face…
Then I frowned, remembering what else had happened, the way her aura had changed after the djinn had spoken through her.
Alice was always silver-white and shimmery, clean and pure as starlight.
But afterwards, there'd been something else.
A thread of gold woven through her natural colors, so faint I'd almost missed it.
At the time, I thought it was beautiful.
I'd thought maybe it was her djinn blood finally surfacing, stirred up by everything that had happened with Alex and Marcus.
Now, though, I wasn't sure what I'd seen.