Remy slid him a haunted glance. “You’re wrong.”
Owen blinked. As the lyr representative in the Pacific Northwest, Remy had submitted to the alpha of the Lost Legacy pack years ago. It had been a routine thing in Owen’s view.
Or not.
He’d never asked Remy about his life among his own kind, simply assuming the lyrinye had hierarchies similar to that of the were packs.
Just then, Chill’s front door thwacked open, and a new crowd swept inside on a wave of perfume punctuated by chatter and the clickety-tap of heels on the planked wooden floor. More women—just what his overheated hormones needed.
Owen sighed, and was about to turn back to Remy when something sharp pierced his gut.
Not a physical thing, but more dangerous for that reason. It was like a tiny barb shot from the never realms straight into his solar plexus. His inner wolf howled, and Owen hunched in pain, gasping and slamming his palm against the table.
“What the fuck?” Remy straightened, his hand sliding under his leather jacket for his weapon. As head of security for the Lost Legacy Preserve, he never went anywhere unarmed.
With gritted teeth, Owen raised his head and stayed Remy with a hand while he scanned the bar, hunting for the source of the attack. He found it, and cool shock dulled the pain to a bearable level.
Tasha McNeil.
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic
CHAPTER TWO
Lilith jammed her time card into the antique machine, muttered a brief spell while it clunked and stamped her work start time two hours earlier than the current moment. It wasn’t like her boss would bother checking or that any of the other employees cared. Smiling, she stuffed the card back in the rack under D for Darke, hefted a steaming rack of bar glasses and shouldered through the swinging doors.
Chill was jammed from the dance floor to the outside terrace with the first big wave of vacationers of the season. She hated bartending through the long, damp winters when the owner stayed open out of sheer stubbornness, refusing to admit he didn’t have enough business to justify keeping the lights on, let alone pay salaries.
She liked summer because she liked being busy. Busy meant more tips. Busy meant there would be fewer quiet moments to think about the way mortals stumbled through their shockingly short lives with utter blindness to the greater worlds that surrounded them. But if it weren’t for that same blindness, it would be much more difficult for her to part the fools from their money, so all in all, their ignorance was her bliss.
She deposited the glass rack on the stack next to the ice bin and started pushing a bar rag around to make it look like she’d been there for a while. The antique oak bar was dented and dinged by the decades, carved with initials going back to before World War II. Some frugal renovator in the past had re-done the bar top with a do-it-yourself pour-on acrylic mix and studded it with flattened beer bottle caps, old matchbooks, printed cocktail napkins, business cards, candy wrappers, plastic game pieces and a thousand other bits of stuff normal people had tossed in the trash back when it was called trash, not recycling.
Lilith had begun using the bar top as a divination tool when she’d started working at Chill a few years ago. Half the time she didn’t need to whisper a spell or invoke a level one charm because the bar top with its infinite variety of embedded crap was a virtual time machine. It started conversations and helped her read the clientele, making her selection of the night’s mark more efficient.
Benedict Ross wiped his brow with a damp, filthy rag. Lilith deftly snatched it out of his hands, replacing it with a clean one from the stack on the shelf below the bar top. None of the cards by the time clock bore Benny’s name, but that didn’t stop him from slipping behind the bar and covering for Lilith. Nor did she bother discouraging him.
“Good thing you got here when you did,” Benny said, gesturing at the crowd. “We been so busy, I was afraid somebody’d ask me to make one’a them Long Island Iced Teas.” His short, wiry gray hair stuck out from his head in wild spikes and probably hadn’t been washed in a week. He didn’t smell too bad, so Lilith counted that as a win.
“Anytime you want to learn how, Benny. Just say the word.”
Benny ambled to the civilian side of the bar. “I’m a’gonna leave the fancy stuff to you professionals.”
By Lilith’s reckoning, Benny had been afraid of complicated mixed drinks since sometime late in the second Clinton administration. He’d never taken Lilith up on her training offer, however. Every fall he disappeared, most likely hitching his way south to California where he spent the winter on a warmer beach only to return in the spring. One of these years, he wouldn’t survive the journey and she would miss him. Benny had his uses as another kind of divination tool. He wasn’t as dependable as the bar top or her best spells, but if he didn’t like someone, there was usually a good reason.#p#分页标题#e#