“Rosie,” I said, reaching for her. She turned away, though, tightening her arms around herself. Deep inside me, I felt my heart break, even as the dark bubbled up, wanting release. Wanting satisfaction.
Across the room, Kiera still stood at the bar, chatting up the girl next to her. I saw her slam back a tequila, then order another. Just as well. I wanted time for Rose to get her bearings.
After fifteen minutes, Rose’s feet were back down on the floor. “Rose?”
“I’m cool,” she said. She lifted a shoulder. “Honest.”
I didn’t believe her, of course, but I could hardly argue. Especially not since Kiera had finally decided to join us again. “Drink up, campers,” she said, sliding a Coke toward Rose and a tequila shot toward me. “Plenty more where that came from,” she added, after I slammed the shot back without even taking a breath.
“Glad to hear it,” I said. Right then, five or six more sounded like just the ticket.
“So what are we doing with Little Bit here?” Kiera asked, looking pointedly at Rose. “You gonna be okay sitting while we go hunting?”
Rose gnawed on her thumb, then nodded. “I’ll be okay.”
She would be, I knew. Because even if some badass demons wandered in and tried to get it on with her, Johnson was close to the surface, and he’d fight the bastards off.
Kiera cocked her head, then took off into the crowd. I eased out of the booth and followed her to the bar. She ordered another round of tequila shots for both of us, and while we waited, I scoped out the crowd. Definitely not a Harvard hangout—that was for sure. And while I had a feeling that no one in the crowded club had a rap sheet less than an inch thick, that didn’t make any of them demonic.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “There’s no way to tell the demons from the rest of them.”
She watched as the bartender filled up the shot glasses, and she slammed one back. “I can tell,” she said, tapping her nose and reminding me of the way she’d earlier smelled Johnson on Rose. “They gave me two gifts when they brought me back. I’m strong, but I guess everyone gets that one. And they gave me the magic sniffer.”
I’ll admit to a little flutter of envy. How come I couldn’t sniff out the bad guys? The answer, though, was obvious. Even if a supersniffer was a standard trait for your average brought-back-to-life-soldier girl, that was one trait they would have kept off the checklist when they were making me. After all, if I could sniff out demons, Clarence’s game would have been over before it started.
“Want me to prove it?” she asked, then sidled close to me. I stiffened as she pressed one hand on my waist, then eased up my body, leading with her nose until her breath brushed my ear. “I smell them in you,” she said in a whisper, and that was all it took to have the black edge of my temper flaring. I whipped her around until her back was to the bar and the point of my knife was right over her kidneys, my body shielding the blade from the view of those around us.
“You’re going to want to be very, very careful,” I said.
I saw a quick flash of fear on her face, replaced almost instantaneously with the cool calm of someone who faced death every single day. “Chill out, Lily. I get the way you work. Kill ’em and suck ’em in. I was briefed, okay. Clarence briefed me.”
I stared at her for one long moment, searching for the truth, wishing I could tell if she knew the whole story. Then I backed away, sliding my knife back into the thigh holster that was hidden beneath my duster.
“I didn’t mean anything,” she said, and this time I was certain I saw compassion in her eyes. “I mean, it must be a bitch to have all that crap floating around in you. But you have to admire the irony. You get to use their essence to go out and kill their buddies. It’s beautiful.”
“Trust me,” I said. “There’s nothing beautiful about it.” But I wasn’t inclined to slit her throat anymore, so I thought that was a good thing. I cocked my head toward the dance floor. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s find us one.”
With Kiera leading the way, we shimmied onto the dance floor, squeezing close to strangers, getting pulled into arms we’d never touched before, and grinding down in a hard, sexy beat that had all the juice I’d tried to turn on for the bouncer bubbling up inside me. A few yards away, Kiera had her arms around an Aryan-looking blond, with a jawline that would have made a New York modeling agency orgasm and just enough beard stubble to shift the androgynous beauty over the line toward masculine.
She was pressed close, her crotch rubbing up against him, and his erection straining in his jeans, announcing the state of his arousal to anyone who cared to look.