Page 160 of Golden Eagle

She said, “I think we need to talk to Will again.”

~*~

Mia hadn’t been inside a nightclub since she was underage and her friend Megan had gotten them both shoddy fake IDs and they’d smiled their way into an old warehouse lit up with neon, blacklights, and which had smelled like human sweat and feet. She remembered a blue drink in a plastic cup that tasted like battery acid and left her face half-numb, half-prickling with an ugly buzzing sensation. A pair of older boys with acne and too many facial piercings had hit on them, and Mia had ended up holding Megan’s hair back for her in the most terrifying bathroom she’d ever seen.

The experience hadn’t left her with a positive impression of nightclubs, just in general.

She didn’t want to go into this club. The Wet Whistle, the neon signage above the door read. All black from the outside, no visible windows. A place designed to trap the dark inside; a den for every laughing, wild, half-drunk person who wanted to throw their hands up and shake their hair in their faces and pretend, for a little while, that their savagery was an expressible, external trait, rather than the odd collection of daily cruelties that they inflicted upon one another, just because they could.

She liked calm, and quiet, and a more structured kind of exercise. She didn’t like feeling wild and unhinged; it reminded her too much of what it had been like to be sick; to feel like her body was running away from her, control sliding through her fingers like sweat-slick reins.

But Val wanted to go inside – saw it as another modern indulgence he was dying to explore – and she didn’t have it in her to protest, not when he’d been locked up longer than this country had existed. So she let him open the door for her, and invite her to lead the way with a courtly wave of his arm. It hadn’t been very long, but she’d already grown used to that – to his manners, so extravagant by today’s standards, so veryhim. She took a deep breath, steeled herself for the onslaught of sight, sound, and scent, and stepped into murkiness of the vestibule.

It was dark, but once the door had shut, she found it wasn’t as dark as she’d feared. Low-level can lights with a faintly purple tinge glowed in the black-painted ceiling, and tall, chrome urns on either side of the door held tall sprays of silver, purple, and blue faux grass. She spotted a counter – a coat check – where a sizable line had formed, patrons stripping jackets off of cocktail dresses, silk shirts, and even a suit or two, handing them over to efficient employees dressed all in black.

This wasn’t a shitty nightclub where kids with fake IDs came to get drunk; this was swanky, upscale. The people taking off their coats were young business professionals, tastefully decked out for the evening.

Some of her anxiety eased, though thereweretoo many smells to properly catalogue, and she felt the throb of music through the soles of her feet and back in her molars. Anxiety buzzed under her skin, in a way it never had when she was normal. She didn’t fit, didn’t belong, wasn’t supposed to be here…

She glanced at Val, though, and realized she fit better than him. She at least knew what a club was, and how to behave in one. She blended into the throng, and he stood out, striking as a lit match among dry stalks of wheat.

He stood just inside the door, as if rooted, his gaze flicking from person, to person, to person. His expression was calm, but Mia could see the faint spark of apprehension in his eyes; could sense the way his pulse fluttered and swooped. Overwhelmed, but not showing it; carefully controlling his outward reaction.

He’d had several lifetimes of practice on that front, she thought with a sharp pang. She reached for his hand and laced their fingers together. Smiled when he turned to her. “Come on, we’ll keep our jackets for now.” They might need to leave quickly, and she didn’t want to bother with receipts. “Let’s find Sasha.”

His returning smile was small and thankful. “Alright.”

The vestibule opened up into a wide, thankfully high-ceilinged lounge area. Black marble floors, black ceiling with more of the can lights – some purple, some blue, some soft white – and tiny pinprick lights that looked like constellations. A long, padded, leather banquette ran the length of one wall, until it ended in a low staircase leading up to a roped-off area, and down its length were round tables flanked with chairs, many occupied by snazzily-dressed patrons sipping drinks. The bar – lit from beneath with more tricolored lights, a dazzle of glass and chrome – sat off to the right, and beyond that a writhing dance floor, where lights swept in beams, crossing and panning like stage lights.

It was…a lot. A whole lot. Conversations that ebbed in tides, audible beneath the bass thump of EDM, the occasional shout breaking through, high, laughing whoops from the dance floor, the chime of feminine laughter, like bells. Hundreds of brands of perfume and cologne competed with the earthier scents of sweat and musk, and the sticky-sweet notes of liquor from all the candy-colored cocktails she spotted in stemmed glasses.

Mia took a few deep breaths – wished she hadn’t – and tightened her grip on Val’s hand, hating how comforting it was to have him grip back. She was supposed to be keeping him grounded, but instead they kept anchoring each other.

Maybe that was better; maybe that’s how it was supposed to be. Who knew.

A scan of the bar revealed two backlit bartenders, one a woman with a high ponytail and cat-eye shadow and mascara, the other unmistakably Sasha, his hair thrown back in a low, messy bun, his hands deft on the vodka bottle as he poured ingredients into the mixer.

She headed that way, Val towed along in her wake.

Sasha turned to them, smiling, when they bellied up to the bar. “Oh, good, he let you in.”

Mia felt her brows go up. “You thought he wouldn’t?”

“Oh. Um.” His face flushed, and he tucked a stray piece of hair behind his ear self-consciously. “Just…” He trailed off, and let the sentence hang.

Mia had been able to tell right away – through some new, vampire instinct that defied explanation, and was instead a matter of justknowingthings when she encountered them – that Sasha and Nikita were mates. The scent of sex, faint, but detectible, yes, but also a strange blending together of their individual scents. Aconnectedness. Like sensing Fulk’s aura laid over Annabel, even when they weren’t in the same room together. An intentional sharing of a bond that went beyond the physical. But not quite like the way she could sense Fulk and Anna were bound to Val.

Nikita hadn’t bound Sasha, Val had explained last night, with true sympathy in his voice. That shouldn’t have surprised her; he showed his sympathetic side often. To her, to his brother, to his Familiars. To poor Kolya Dyomin, who still gave Mia the willies, even if she could have picked him up and thrown him across the room. (This was something she knew, intellectually, but which was so new, so untested, and so alien that she still reacted the way she used to when she encountered a potential threat:felt threatened.) But Val seemed truly sad for Sasha; all day she’d sensed his urge to comfort him, always laying a hand on his shoulder or his arm, offering him smiles, being gentle with him.

She’d witnessed all this, and told herself it was innocent, because she didn’t like to think about the ugliness of her own jealousies. There were many things about Val she didn’t yet know; she’d chosen this life – chosen him – knowing there were large chunks of the unknown that she would stumble across as she went. She hadn’t expected Val to have this kind of connection with a young werewolf in New York. She was trying to be okay with that.

She looked at it analytically, compiling information about this new world she was a part of.

Val had a wolf friend named Sasha.

Sasha was mates with a vampire whose scowl seemed permanently etched into his face, and whose own jealousy put any Mia was feeling to absolute shame. The aggression had pulsed off of Nikita last night. She wasn’t sure he didn’thateVal, and all of that, she’d sensed, had to do with Sasha. With what Val meant to Sasha.

Val leaned an elbow on the bar and grinned, tossing his head just enough to send his hair cascading off his shoulder. He’d practiced that move, she thought, and finally had hair clean and silky enough to put it into his repertoire again. “Don’t worry about us, darling, your mate looks much scarier than he actually is.”

---