Page 9 of Demon Next Door

A bit of motion in my peripheral vision caught my eye: Scott beckoning me over to his DJ booth against the wall.

I headed his way, pausing only to flex my arm muscles and smile flirtatiously at a couple of women at a nearby table.

One of the other guys was already hanging out, but hey, two of them, two of us, maybe?

And they had a bottle of the expensive bubbly in an ice bucket. They might be good tippers.

Louie’s remembered laughter rang in my ears. Fucker enjoyed twisting the knife, maybe even more than he enjoyed getting his money back with interest.

I should’ve gone upstairs and milked it with those pretty little probably-college boys, damn it all. They were probably going to get sucked in by Dominic’s smarmy charm and lured back to a VIP room.

Hopefully no one would get sucked off in the process, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Dominic claimed to prefer women, but he had a few regulars who sucked his cock and paid generously for the privilege, and he was always open for new opportunities.

And while I liked blowjobs—in both directions, in fact—as much as the next sexually omnivorous alpha, and had been told more than once that the raspy texture of my tongue could send a sensitive recipient into the stratosphere, I never got that physical with customers. Just not a line I was willing to cross.

Whatever. Dominic wasn’t my problem, thank every deity above and below, because I had enough of my own—and I wouldn’t have wanted to be responsible for him even if I was bored.

The booth didn’t have a ton of space in it, but I managed to wedge myself inside and push the door closed behind me, shutting out a lot of the noise with it.

Scott looked up from adjusting some kind of switch on the board in front of him, and a club favorite with a catchy beat started playing out on the floor.

He had his headphones on one ear and off the other, and his sweaty black hair stood up in spiky tufts.

One of the only humans in the place, and he looked more like a hedgehog than anything else.

“I know you just got off stage less than an hour ago,” he said, “but Morgan’s supposed to go on, and he’s in the back.

Actually, peek into room three if you walk by.

Kind of an odd couple. Married, I think?

I’m not sure which one of them wanted to come here, they both seemed weird about it. Whatever, they were tipping a lot.”

Scott’s gossip washed over me, but I nodded, actually kind of relieved. Going around and making nice with people at tables, or trying to get them to do a private session, sounded exhausting. Dominic’s irritating conversation had been the cherry on top of my stressed-out sundae.

“I don’t mind dancing again,” I said. “I’ll be ready in like two minutes.”

“You gonna change?” he asked, looking me up and down.

In addition to the pleather pants, which still showed the thick bulge between my legs just fine, I had heavy boots, and also a sparkly black G-string under the pants, although he couldn’t see that.

My chest was bare, except for the glitter. “Or you want to just do Closer?”

My usual persona was a lot goofier and more fun than that, and people loved it.

My Nicki Minaj routine got a lot of cheers, especially the getting on the floor—and sometimes I even got everyone to do the hands up to touch the sky part, if I really worked the crowd.

Once they waved their money in the air, they felt stupid not tossing it on the stage afterward.

But yeah. Tonight, Closer would fit my mood a lot better.

Besides, I really didn’t feel like getting dressed up in anything fun.

For this song, I could rip the pants off during the song’s first chorus, right on “closer to God”—they had Velcro down the inseams, because I liked the quick, hard reveal—and then use my boots, G-string, and my very own claws, fangs, and glowing eyes for the rest of the “costume.” After all, that was why people came to Lucky or Knot in the first place.

We were the only all-alpha strip club in the world, as far as I knew.

And people went pretty nuts for it. When Vegas wasn’t in a slump like it was now, we always packed the house.

Declan MacKenna, who owned the Morrigan casino on the Strip and this place and who knew what else, was a fucking visionary.

If I had half his intellect and acumen, I wouldn’t have been about to lose my parents’ house because of a college loan I’d wasted by not graduating and a 28 percent APR on a pair of fake tits for a girl who’d cheated on me.

Fuck. Deep breaths.

“Tony? You okay?” Scott said, and I shook my head to clear it a bit and forced another smile. “I can have Dom go on if you’re not. It’s cool, dude. You look out of it.”

“I’m good. No, really.” I punched him on the shoulder—lightly, because human. “Seriously. Thank you. Closer’s perfect. Give me a minute, okay?”

I slipped out of the booth before he could keep questioning me and headed for the same door I’d come out of a few minutes ago, on my way to the locker room and then backstage.

It only took me the promised minute to get myself ready: a little more glitter, silver and black this time to fit the song’s darker fantasy, and some leather armbands, because why the fuck not.

Scott announced me as I jogged up the short flight of backstage stairs, and then I was under the lights and center stage, the distinctive staticky opening beat of the song accompanying me.

Fluid movements, getting them enticed, prowling…I’d started stripping simply because it paid the best out of the jobs that depended mostly on my having muscles for days.

But when the audience stopped their conversations mid-sentence, their drinks held poised in the air as they forgot to take a sip, their eyes fixed on me with complete focus…

well, that gave me a certain amount of satisfaction.

Not an erotic type of satisfaction—luckily, because Nevada law wouldn’t let me take everything off on the stage in a club that served alcohol, and some genius in a bureaucratic hellhole somewhere had decided that erections, even clothed, counted as nudity.

So since attention didn’t really turn me on, it didn’t take me too much effort to keep my cock under control, and honestly, not to brag or anything, but even totally flaccid it made itself known under any type of fabric.

But the crowd’s reaction did give me a bit of a frisson, a charge of energy that fed my alpha shifter magic. My eyes started to glow, and my claws were a millimeter from sliding out. My gums tingled where my fangs wanted to drop.

My hips gyrated, Trent Reznor rasped his way through those X-rated lyrics, and I reached down, groping my groin, really massaging my balls, getting more than a few gasps and little screams from the audience. Someone right up front had already thrown a handful of fives, fucking sweet.

And even sweeter, those guys up above were hanging over the railing with their mouths wide open, a scowling and ignored Dominic standing behind them with his hands on his hips. Ha! I resisted the urge to blow him a kiss.

I turned my back to the audience right as the first chorus started and spread my legs wider, ready for the reveal, getting my fingers in position to yank off the pants…

…And then, as if Scott had flipped one of his switches, Trent’s voice faded into a meaningless hum, the noise of the crowd became a murmur, and the lights on me seemed to dim. My body froze, fingers rigidly digging into my thigh.

Jesus fucking Christ, that was…

The scent of love, of home, of desire and want. It washed over me, teasing me, wrapping around all my alpha senses: wild, fresh, tantalizing, a sweet-tart aroma, lemon blossoms and honeysuckle and oxalis flowers, like my parents had in their garden.

It stirred a hopeless craving in a part of me that I usually suppressed in order to get along in society: my instinct to hunt and capture and claim and possess, to have something that was mine . Some one , actually. Someone as beautiful and alluring and sweet as that scent…

All the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and my cock was trying to get hard, pushing insistently against the G-string, throbbing as if in response to a physical touch. My claws pushed out, my fangs dropping. My heart pounded.

Fuck. This wasn’t natural or normal.

It had to be magic. Literally. Someone was using magic on me. But fucking why? I didn’t have any enemies that I knew of. Or stalkers, either.

A prank? Had Dominic hired a warlock or someone to hide out in the audience and screw with me and ruin my dance, or worse, make me flip out and get fired? Or even arrested?

No. Hell no. Damn it, I’d been doing this and doing it well for three years, and I could do it now, no matter how tantalizing that scent might be.

I forced my brain and body to reboot almost instantly, barely missing a beat of the song, quickly enough that no one probably even noticed.

But as the music blared into full volume again, and the lights flashed in my eyes, and I tore my pants off in one go to a shrieking wave of applause—seriously, fuck you, Dominic—and spun around to show off the front of my G-string and its alpha bulge, the combo of being angry, off-kilter, and drenched in that magical scent slammed into me all at once.

More critically, my foot found the body oil residue on the floor at the same instant.

My leg flew out from underneath me as I flung my pants aside, and I went straight down and landed on my alpha ass with a thud that shook the whole stage.

A tiger. Tripping on his own feet and falling over.

I’d never live this down.

The hate that it brings , Trent wailed.

Truer words. I was going to stuff Cassidy’s body oil bottle down his throat, or maybe up his ass, and then I’d fucking kill him.

Right after I got up off my own ass and figured out who’d brought that incredibly distracting magic into the club, and fucking killed them .

Damn it.