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In a fit of desperation, I flipped to my messaging app and opened my text chain with Kaylee. There was no more avoiding it; I needed a fucking job.

Anyjob.

I’ll check out the club. NO PROMISES. See you tonight.

Her reply came instantly.

Kaylee

Can’t wait to work together! Wear something sexy!

I rolled my eyes, telling myself that checking out the club didnotmean I was agreeing to anything. I was just… exploring my options.

Yeah, that’s all it was.

I was just doing what any rational adult with no money and no job prospects would do—going to the most infamous vampire club in the city for a couple of cocktails.

What could go wrong?

vi

. . .

With the helpof my phone’s GPS—and the line circling the block to get in—it didn’t take me long to find the club.

For a bustling vampire hotspot, O was extremely missable from the outside. Though I guessed that was the point. Beingdiscreetwas one of the club’s major draws, even if it was entirely defeated by the parade of night children shifting impatiently in the chilly night air.

Not that they could feel it,I thought with an internal eye roll at being antsy for the sake of it.

Okay, that wasn’t fair. Vampirescouldfeel temperature differences; they just didn’t produce their own body heat.

The building was nestled only a few streets away from Kaylee’s apartment and The Drip, part of a row of tall buildings with many windows. It looked like the top floors of the club were apartments, the facade made of light, carved stone with darker accents giving it a roaring twenties sort of feel. For all I knew, that’s when it was built. The Lower City was a mishmash of architectural styles built over hundreds of years when the shaders were installed, making it a bit of a grab bag for artistic direction and age of construction.

The effect was, admittedly,charming.

Overhead, a neon sign with the bar’s logo, a pair of cherry red lips puckered into anOthat showed an ample amount of fang, hummed with electricity. The image reproduced in bright distortions in the puddles lining the street alongside the reflections of the vampires standing in line.

Yep, no disappearing in mirrors or photographs. Vampire media really did geta lotof things wrong before the blood suckers stepped from the shadows and into the light.

Figuratively, of course.

Not that I was expecting much, since they wanted us to believe there were people out there who turned into monstrous half-human wolves once a month, like some kind of spectral period. For the record, werewolves?Fictional.

…I think.

I caught a glimpse of the stairs leading to the building’s basement, where a red door had been propped open to allow guests inside, tossing the thrum of bass and snatches of familiar lyrics into the night as I approached the bouncer.

There was one definitive perk to being besties with a performer—I wasalwayson the VIP list. No waiting out in the cold in shoes that killed your feet for me!

Not that I’d ever bothered to use that superpower before.

Hey, first time for everything, right?

I stopped short beside the VIP rope, taking in the massive vampire working the door. He glanced over the IDs of a few patrons in the main line, cracking jokes like they were old friends, before turning his rusty stare to me.

“Name?”

“Vi Knox,” I said, rooting around in my criminally small going-out purse—a remnant of my bar star days in college—for my ID and handing it to him.