Page 1 of Her Drag Barbarian

1

ELOWYN

Iidentified the main problem with the Heavenly Lights Drag Club in the first five minutes I arrived. It was obvious that the problem with the city’s oldest and most popular nightclub was their big ticket French superstar queen Je Sweet.

That was going to make my job difficult as fuck.

I had been hired as a conflict management specialist through the firm Discreet Solutions to find and fix what was wrong with the city’s most popular drag club. There had been a series of dangerous accidents, with pieces of the set falling on stage. The backstage crew blamed the queens and the queens blamed the backstage crew. They had also received multiple death threats. No one was getting along, and the insurance company was pushing to shut down the club.

I realized almost immediately that I was in over my head. Not only was the problem the drag club’s hottest, most famous, and most popular star, but I wasn’t even a conflict management specialist. My father just owned the Discreet Solutions conflict management firm and wanted to get me into the corporate world. He didn’t think his only child, as he put it, should be “wasting her life digging up nasty pots” as a 27-year-old graduate student in archaeology.

I was trying to fund my upcoming trip to Egypt, so I agreed. How hard could it be? I’d walk in, tell everybody to be nice to each other, do a few team-building exercises, and I’d be done in a month. Now I wasn’t so sure.

Heavenly Lights was located right downtown, in the heart of the big city, in a glittering, glimmering, shining building, its tables both inside and out packed with patrons and fans, and they were mostly here for Je Sweet.

I watched the star as she performed on the brightly lit stage. She was tall and tanned, with a lithe, flexible body and she walked like she fucking knew it too, in a leather bikini top and leather skirt that showed long, toned abs and arms and legs. She had long dark hair and she looked like sex on a fucking stick, and she knew it.

I had barely met the owner, manager, and a few of the performers and workers at the Heavenly Lights Club, but it was obvious that Je Sweet was an unstable, selfish, temperamental asshole and that everyone was frightened of her. I watched as she leaped into a split on stage, the tall boots accenting her phenomenal ass and that long, lithe body arching in front of the audience.

They ate itup, too, whooping and hollering at her as she shook her ass and ran tanned hands over her long body, and I saw $50s and $100s getting pulled out of purses and back pockets. Je Sweet wasraking it in, I thought as I watched her stick her tongue out between her fingers at the audience, and even the merest suggestion that she could lick them sent the audience into waves of ecstasy.

I rolled my eyes and bent close to Miss Min’s ear. She was the manager of the Heavenly Lights Club, a very pretty woman in her 60s with a silvery gray braid and a flower child aesthetic. She was soft and gentle.

“How much more in tips does Je Sweet make than the other performers?” I asked her, almost yelling in her ear to be heard over the noise of the crowd.

Miss Min turned to me. “A lot,” was all she said.

On the other side of me, the owner of Heavenly Lights Drag Club tugged on my sleeve. Rupert Bartholomew-Buxton was a rabbity-looking man in his 40s with watery eyes and prominent front teeth.

“You’re a lesbian, right?” he shrieked in my ear.

I turned to look at him, startled.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m bisexual.”

“Oh Lord,” he said, suddenly turning anxious eyes to Miss Min. “Itoldyou to only hire a lesbian.”

Miss Min glanced at me. “Too late now,” she said shortly.

I felt a flutter of unease. What the fuck wasthatsupposed to mean?

I turned my attention to the finale of the show. The last number was an eye-catching Fire Dance, and I watched with an insurance adjuster’s eyes as Je Sweet was handed two flaming torches. She began to circle her body with them. Then she put one in her teeth, and grabbed a rope. The audience gasped and screamed in delight as she held onto the rope with her legs, turning upside down and spinning in a big circle over the crowd, the fiery torches in her hands moving so fast they were a blur.

“GoodLord,” I said.

“Yes,” Miss Min agreed, her eyes following Sweet. “She is really very good. It complicates matters.”

I could see that it did. She was the star. How the fuck did she manage to stay on that rope? I wondered.

Sweet dropped agilely to the ground, then began to dance around the stage, moving in between the other queens with her fire sticks.

My admiration suddenly turned to anger as I saw how close she got with the fire to the other queens.

The fire passed so close to a delicate, dark-haired drag queen that I gasped. Even all the way back in the audience I smelled the sharp, acrid scent of her burnt hair as Sweet singed the other queen’s wig. Je Sweet wasn’t phased, a cocky smile on her face as she turned and drove the two torches in a holder, so vigorously that sparks flew up onto the dress of a big, broad drag queen who had to slap her hands quickly over her sequins to stamp out the sparks.

It was a reckless, stupid, and selfish performance, and I started to feel cold fury rising in my body. Not only was Je Sweet a diva, but she obviously didn’t give a shit about her fellow performers. Or maybe she was trying to use their fear to show her dominance over them.

Either way she was going to have to cut that shit out, because I was here to fix the goddamn mess that the Heavenly Lights Club was in.

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