Page 3 of Grim’s Delight (The New Protectorate Syndicate #1)
ONE
She knew it’d be a shit night.
Dahlia McKnight didn’t like to think of herself as superstitious. She much preferred the term intuitive. The universe moved in predictable patterns. More than once, her survival had depended on being able to read the signs all around her.
That was why, when she woke up to no message notification, a knot of dread tied itself around the base of her spine and held fast.
It wasn’t an unusual occasion, necessarily. There were long stretches — weeks, months — where she heard nothing at all. But something about this evening felt off.
It was another bad sign when she stepped into her tiny cubicle of a shower to become the unsuspecting victim of a spray of frigid water.
Her yelp was loud enough to draw the attention of her closest neighbor.
Though that wasn’t hard, considering their bathroom windows faced one another with only a foot gap between them.
“If you trip and die in the shower, I’ll put panties on you before I call Patrol,” Cecilia informed her, as chipper and helpful as always.
Dahlia danced out of the shower, her teeth clacking, and snatched a towel off the hook.
She didn’t care if Cecilia saw her tits — they’d compared sizes when they were thirteen and had synced periods since the damn things started — but she needed the warmth.
It didn’t matter how warm the weather got.
Their apartment building was always freezing.
Kneeling on the toilet, Dahlia pushed the window open a bit more and stuck her head into the strange, dark gap between their apartments. Her best friend’s perfume drifted in the musty air.
“My hot water is out again,” she groused.
It only took a second for Cecilia’s face to appear in her open window.
Holding a curling iron in one hand, she pushed up her window with the other.
“You wanna use mine? Should be a little bit of warm water left.” She paused to squint her dark eyes speculatively.
“Wait, are you working tonight? I thought you were off.”
“I swapped with Alexa. There’s a VIP thing tonight, so I said yes.”
“Oh, big tips.” Cecilia jammed her thumb over her shoulder. “You don’t have a lot of time before opening, but you wanna use my shower?”
Dahlia shook her head and was immediately annoyed by the situation all over again when she felt how only half her hair was wet. She didn’t want to talk about how she’d spent half her getting ready time staring at her phone, waiting for her boogeyman to make himself known.
“It’s fine. I just wanted to inform you that today is cursed. I can feel it.”
Cecilia nodded solemnly. A little bit of the sincerity of the gesture was ruined when she began curling her hair again, but Dahlia could allow it. “That sucks. I have a date in a couple hours. You think I should cancel?”
“It’s worth considering.”
“Noted. If I get murdered, you get custody of Oyster.”
Dahlia wrinkled her nose as she climbed off the toilet. The salvage operation on her hair and makeup had to start soon or she’d really be up Shit Creek. “I so don’t want your dead cat, Cece.”
“It’s not about what you want,” she called back.
“It’s about familial responsibility, Dahlia!
You have to take care of Oyster, discreetly dispose of my sex toys, and for the love of the gods, pick a cute picture of me for them to put on the news feeds.
None of that senior photo or embarrassing selfie crap. ”
Yelling over the roar of her hair dryer, Dahlia complained, “I thought we both agreed I’d die first!”
“That was before you stopped going on dates. I’m on dating apps. My risk of being murdered is much higher than yours now.”
“That’s dark. Real, but dark.” Dahlia tipped her head over and violently blew hot air through her short blonde hair.
Scrubbing her fingers through it in a vain attempt to give it a little volume, she argued, “Cece, it’s not like you go on dates with criminals.
The last guy you had drinks with was a middle school math teacher.
And we both work at a vampire bar. I think that makes our mortality risk about equal. ”
“Ugh, Jason.” The sound of hairspray being more than liberally applied came a few seconds before the scent of it drifted across the divide and into Dahlia’s bathroom. “I really thought we had fun. I don’t understand what happened there.”
Personally, Dahlia didn’t understand it either. She didn’t date because she wasn’t willing to risk the life and limb of some poor schmuck who worked in finance, but Cecilia was a different story.
She’d always been the sweet to Dahlia’s tart.
The pink to her red. The baby to her brat.
They’d been thick as thieves since the first day of kindergarten, and despite having seen every single one of Cecilia’s most awkward phases and catastrophic fashion choices over the years, Dahlia still thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
And kind. Fundamentally. Wholly. In all the ways Dahlia had beaten out of her before she ever got a chance to understand what she’d lost.
Cecilia deserved a gorgeous, doting nerd with obscene amounts of money and a high tolerance for pastels, not the milquetoast jerks who kept disappointing her.
Flipping her hair back, Dahlia switched off her blow dryer and scrambled to throw on a halfway decent face of makeup. Patting concealer under her eyes, she said, “I hope Jason gets hit by a bus.”
“Nooo. Didn’t you hear about the substitute teacher shortage in San Francisco’s school district? His untimely death would put a strain on our education system. Let’s hope he gets hit by an electric scooter instead. He can still go to work with a broken leg.”
Dahlia reached for her eyelash curler and bit back the retort that it might be helpful if Jason did have an accident that took him fully out of commission. Her friend had recently finished her teaching certification and was jockeying for one of those open positions.
Meanwhile, Dahlia drowned in coursework as she clawed her way to the finish line of her business degree. If she could’ve gotten to the finish line of a better job with a well-placed shove off a curb, she would’ve done it.
“Face?”
“Face.”
They both appeared at their respective windows.
Cecilia looked as soft and sparkly as always, with her warm brown skin glowing and her hair curled into gentle waves.
Glitter caught the light on her eyelids and her lip gloss was just the right shade of purple-pink.
With those doe eyes and soft lips, Dahlia was almost tempted to date Cecilia herself.
“You’re wasted on men,” she said, nodding sagely.
“As are you, my sexy friend.” Cecilia disappeared for a moment before she leaned out the window, her arm stretching to pass along a tube of lipstick. “Here. This is my lucky red. Wear it as a good luck talisman tonight.”
“Thank yo— Wait, Cece, this is my lipstick!”
“That’s why it’s lucky,” she replied, utterly shameless. “It was free!”
Popping the cap off, Dahlia warned her friend’s retreating back, “If you die, I’m gonna leave your sex toys out on your bed for your parents to find. That glow-in-the-dark dildo is going under your pillow. Your mother will think you used it as a night light, you animal!”
“I guess you’ll just have to die first after all. Have fun at work!”
There was no time to plot a more immediate revenge for the theft.
Dahlia raced around her studio, pulling on her skimpy uniform, grabbing her purse, and shrugging on her coat with impressive speed.
There were many serious downsides to her apartment being so close to The Lush, the vampire bar she’d worked at for five years, but she forgot every last one of them whenever she ran late.
The sun was just beginning to set when she wheeled into the back entrance, out of breath but exactly on time.
No one paid her any mind as she stuffed her belongings into her locker.
Inputting her code into the lock, she resisted the urge to check her phone again.
Tonight was a big night with — hopefully — big tips.
Even if it wasn’t, she tried very hard not to think about how reliant on her boogeyman she’d become over the years.
She didn’t miss him. And she definitely wasn’t stupid enough to worry about him. She was just used to his constant annoyances. That was all.
Dahlia tried to shove him from her mind as she scrubbed her hands and forearms in the sanitation station. Someone had already turned on the music for the night. The thumping beat bled through the thick walls. She’d never liked it much, but it was easy to tune out after so many years of practice.
Drying her hands under the UV light, she quickly donned the long white gloves they were all required to wear.
All vampire bars made their staff wear gloves, but the ones the staff at The Lush wore were one part utility and three parts kink.
The length added something special to their uniform, Devon said.
As if the low neckline, mesh décolletage, and high hemline weren’t enough.
Her lips thinned. Working VIP events meant great tips, but it also meant exposure to her boss. She’d never seen anyone as desperate to schmooze with bigwigs as Devon, which was saying something.
She hadn’t known very much about vampires before she took the server position at The Lush. Dahlia would admit she was still pretty ignorant about the finer details, but it only took her a few months to pick up on the fact that there was just one thing in the world they valued more than blood.
Status.
The nebulous ideals of prestige and respect ruled the vampire underworld, all the way from the lowest of the low to the highest rung.
She’d seen fights break out over the smallest of perceived infractions and heard stomach-turning rumors about what happened to servers who thought they could survive an entanglement with one or more of the deadly predators.