Dead Reckoning(18)

“You ever come here to watch him?” Sam asked as we pulled up to the back door.

He was not the first person to ask me that. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me, that I hadn’t felt the need to rush over to Monroe to watch guys take off their clothes.

“No. I’ve seen Claude naked. I’ve never come over to watch him do his thing professionally. I hear he’s good.”

“He’s naked? At your house?”

“Modesty is not one of Claude’s priorities,” I said.

Sam looked both displeased and startled, despite his own earlier warning about the fae not thinking kin were off-limits sexually. “What about Dermot?” he said.

“Dermot? I don’t think he strips,” I said, confused.

“I mean, he doesn’t go around the house naked, does he?”

“No,” I said. “That seems to be a Claude thing. It would be really icky if Dermot did that, since he looks so much like Jason.”

“That’s just not right,” Sam muttered. “Claude needs to keep his pants on.”

“I dealt with it,” I said, the edge in my voice reminding Sam that the situation was not his to worry about.

It was a weekday, so the place didn’t open until four in the afternoon. I hadn’t ever been to Hooligans before, but it looked like any other small club; set apart in a fair-sized parking lot, electric-blue siding, a jazzy shocking-pink sign. Places for selling alcohol or flesh always look a little sad in the daytime, don’t they? The only other business close to Hooligans, now that I was looking, was a liquor store.

Claude had told me what to do in case I ever dropped in. The secret signal was knocking four times, keeping the raps evenly spaced. After that was done, I gazed out across the fields. The sun beat down on the parking lot with just a hint of the heat to come. Sam shifted uneasily from foot to foot. After a few seconds, the door opened.

I smiled and said hello automatically, and began to step into the hall. It was a shock to realize the doorman wasn’t human. I froze.

I’d assumed that Claude and Dermot were the only fairies left in modern-day America since my great-grandfather had pulled all the fairies into their own dimension, or world, or whatever they called it, and closed the door. Though I’d also known that Niall and Claude communicated at least occasionally, because Niall had sent me a letter via Claude’s hands. But I’d deliberately refrained from asking a lot of questions. My experiences with my fairy kin, with all the fae, had been both delightful and horrible . . . but toward the end, those experiences had come down far heavier on the horrible side of the scale.

The doorman was just as startled to see me as I was to see him. He wasn’t a fairy — but he was fae. I’d met fairies who’d filed their teeth to look the way this creature’s did naturally: an inch long, pointed, curved slightly inward. The doorman’s ears weren’t pointed, but I didn’t think it was surgical alteration that had made them flatter and rounder than human ears. The alien effect was lessened by his thick, fine hair, which was a rich auburn color and lay smooth, about three inches long, all over his head. The effect was not that of a hairstyle, but of an animal’s coat.

“What are you?” we asked each other simultaneously.

It would have been funny . . . in another universe.

“What’s happening?” Sam said behind me, and I jumped. I stepped all the way inside the club with Sam right on my heels, and the heavy metal door clanged shut behind us. After the dazzling sunlight, the long fluorescent bulbs that lit the hall looked doubly bleak.

“I’m Sookie,” I said, to break the awkward silence.

“What are you?” the creature asked again. We were still standing awkwardly in the narrow hallway.

Dermot’s head popped out of a doorway. “Hey, Sookie,” he said. “I see you’ve met Bellenos.” He stepped out into the hall and took in my expression. “Haven’t you ever seen an elf before?”

“I haven’t, thanks for asking,” muttered Sam. Since he was much more knowledgeable about the supe world than I was, I realized that elves must be pretty rare.

I had a lot of questions about Bellenos’s presence, but I wasn’t sure if I had any right to ask them, especially after my faux pas with Sam. “Sorry, Bellenos. I did meet a half elf once with teeth like yours. Mostly, though, I know fairies who file their teeth to look that way. Pleased to meet you,” I said with a huge effort. “This is my friend Sam.”

Sam shook hands with Bellenos. The two were much the same height and build, but I noticed that Bellenos’s slanted eyes were dark brown, matching the freckles on his milky skin. Those eyes were curiously far apart, or perhaps his face was broader across the cheekbones than normal? The elf smiled at Sam, and I caught a glimpse of the teeth again. I shuddered and looked away.