Page 24 of Half Dead

I burst into laughter. “I’ve got it covered. Go outside and get in touch with nature. I’ll see you two later. I’m going to get changed and drive over to see Kane before the club gets busy.”

It was Saturday, which meant the clientele would start arriving around noon and stay until the wee hours of the morning. The conversation I wanted to have with him required privacy. To be fair, everything I wanted to do with him required privacy, but there were more urgent matters than my base desires. If Birdie was right and the cufflink belonged to Lucifer, we had far more pressing problems than my standoffs with Aunt Hestia and The Corporation.

CHAPTER FOUR

Music pulsedfrom inside the Devil’s Playground. The nightclub was hopping for an early Saturday afternoon. Larry stood sentry outside the entrance. As always, the bouncer looked ready to break your windpipe if he disliked the way you breathed.

“What’s with the crowd?” I asked. “Is Kane throwing twenty-dollar bills at people?”

“There’s a battle of the bands today.”

That explained the smattering of passenger vans in the parking lot.

“The one up next is from the Pacific Northwest and rarely travels to the East Coast, so every fan in the midAtlantic seems to have turned up.” He craned his neck to look over his shoulder. “They’re due to start in ten minutes, so you might want to get in there before it gets too loud to talk.”

He knew me too well.

The lounge was crammed with people. They seemed more interested in getting a spot close to the raised platform than dancing to the current techno beat. It seemed that Larry was mistaken; it was already too loud to talk.

As I elbowed my way to the bar, I spotted Josie on the balcony that overlooked the main floor. She leaned her forearms on the railing as she scanned the crowd for any potential problems. She scowled at the sight of me. Guess she found one.

I waved. “Hey, bestie,” I mouthed.

Her eyes narrowed.

I slithered through the cracks in the wall of bodies until I reached the counter. Dantalion and Alessandro manned the bar. There was no sign of Kane.

“I didn’t expect to see you today,” Dantalion said, cheerful as ever. “I assumed you’d be recovering from your big meeting. How are you feeling now that you’ve had time to process the visit?”

Two bright diamonds had been forged in the fiery pits of hell and I was looking at one of them. The grand duke’s capacity for genuine care and compassion never ceased to amaze me. Given his background, he should’ve been stringing up people in the room by their intestines. Instead, he was serving them cocktails with sunflower toothpicks.

“I’m home and alive, so I’m feeling pretty good overall.”

“We feel pretty good about that, too,” Alessandro said.

No surprise there. I’d recently saved the incubus from an involuntary stay in Helheim, the Norse land of the dead.

Sunny leaped onto the counter between us and trilled.

“Nice to see you, too,” I said, greeting the chimera.

The catlike creature padded closer for a scratch behind the ears. Like all the best warriors, she knew my weaknesses.

Alessandro wiped down the section of the counter where she’d stepped. “Sunny isn’t supposed to be up here during business hours.”

The chimera turned the dark half of her face toward Alessandro. From this angle, she had the coloring of a regular orange tabby.

“You know she understands you, right?” I asked. “You can tell her yourself.”

The incubus took a step back from the counter. “Oh, I know she understands me, which is why there’s no way I’m giving her a direct order.”

I smiled at Sunny. “Are you intimidating the new recruit?” I gave her head an affectionate pat. “Try to be nice. I’m sure Kane doesn’t want to hire yet another bartender.”

The strong scent of cologne sparked a coughing fit. A body jostled mine, shoving my stomach against the hard edge of the counter. “One more drink before we start,” a gravelly voice said.

I turned to observe the olfactory offender. “I know middle-aged women are invisible in this society, but this is ridiculous.”

Dantalion attempted to smooth over the incident. “Lorelei Clay, meet David Jordan. He’s in the band.”

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