Chapter 1
Dae-Jung
The low frequency of the bass thrummed against my ribs like a second heartbeat, deep and relentless, vibrating my bones in a familiar rhythm.
I rolled my hips to the downbeat, letting the music move through me the way it had a thousand times before. A flash of bright white light sliced across the stage, catching the sheen of sweat on my smooth, bare abs as I lifted my shirt in a teasing gesture and grinned as—predictably—the two women directly in front of the stage screamed and waved handfuls of dollar bills in the air.
I pointed at one of them, and her friend smacked her arm with mock jealousy as I kneeled in front of her and held my waistband open so she could stuff those bills down the front of my jeans. In a few minutes I wouldn't even remember what she looked like, but I'd remember the way she groped around in there trying to find my cock. However, I knew the game we played as well as I knew this song, and pulled away before she could make contact.
For one, they had to pay extra for that shit.
For two, there was only one woman whose hand I wanted wrapped around my cock, and I wasn't taking any other offers.
My body knew the choreography so well I could dance this entire set in my sleep. The drop, the roll, the slow drag of my hand down my stomach that always made someone in the audience start digging around in their purse for cash. I hit every mark. Flirted on cue. And flashed my fangs when the lights dipped low enough that the humans would think they were just part of the show.
But tonight, my head wasn't in the game. It was stuck somewhere else. Specifically, the memory of what had happened three nights ago in this same club, when an ethereal witch laid in my arms as I watched in disbelief as her eyes turned gold and she spoke words that weren't hers in a voice that wasn't hers either...
We've been waiting for you, Dae Jung.
I faltered. Just a half-beat, my shoulder dipping when it should've lifted, but I recovered fast enough that I seriously doubted anyone noticed. Actually, I could probably stop dancing completely, and no one would notice. That was the problem. The crowd was thin tonight. Tuesday thin. Except it was Saturday, and the women who were here had come for the cheap drinks, not the show.
Except maybe for the two ladies who were still in front of the stage, one of them wearing a tiara and a "Divorced AF" white sash draped over her too-tight red mini dress.
The show just didn't have the draw it used to, not now that I was the only real vampire still dancing on this stage amongst the human males who'd taken the place of my now-mated brothers.
The song shifted into something slower, heavier, and I used the transition to slowly peel off my shirt. It was one of my go-to moves, a reliable crowd-pleaser. A few bills hit the stage. One of them was a five.
We used to pull hundreds on a Saturday. Thousands. Sometimes more during Mardi Gras.
"Come on, ladies," I said into the mic clipped to my jaw, and the grin I gave them was practiced enough to look real. "I know y'all can do better than that. I mean, I'm up here working hard for you." My hand skimmed the front of my pants suggestively.
I heard some laughter from the direction of the bar, then a small group of ladies wandered over to join the other two at the front of the stage. A woman in a Saints jersey whistled and waved a twenty, and I dropped to my knees at the edge of the stage to let her tuck it wherever she liked. Her fingers lingered on my hip, warm and human, her aura a muddy gray. Loneliness and two-for-one margaritas. What a combination.
A few weeks ago, I'd have leaned into it. Taken her into the back for my dinner and sent her home happy and full of good memories. But tonight my skin wanted to slide off my bones and walk to the Garden District without me. I didn't want any hands on me that weren't attached to a witch with a fondness for rainbow dresses and sunshine emojis.
I winked at the Saints fan, anyway.
Old habits and all that.
For fifty years, we've been waiting for you to find her.
A shiver ran through me at the memory of the voice that had crawled out of Alice's throat. The way her body had gone rigid in my arms, first convulsing, then going terrifyingly still...
I'd thought she was dead. I'd thought I was holding a corpse, and the sound that ripped out of me wasn't human. Hell, it wasn't even vampire. It was something else entirely. Something that couldn't express the level of grief rising inside me.
My fangs punched down hard as a ghost of that pain whipped through me with the memory.
I turned upstage with a movement that was just a little too fast, away from the audience, pressing my tongue against the sharp points until the sting grounded me.
Breathe, Dae. Just breathe. Alice is fine. She woke up, and Judy came and took her home. And Alice texted you the next morning to say she was okay, and you said good and get some rest, yeobo, and she sent back a little sun emoji.
That was three days ago, and I hadn't heard from her since.
But she was fine.
Probably.
The song was only halfway through when I caught Tyler's eye in the wings. He was one of the new human dancers Killian had hired recently. He was twenty-three, with a good body, decent moves, and absolutely zero supernatural magnetism.
He blinked at me, confused as I jerked my head toward the stage. I had better places to be tonight.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I announced, cranking up the charm as I tried to rile up the small crowd, "let's give it up for Tyler, coming in hot to close out the night."
Tyler scrambled out onto the stage with a slightly panicked look, and I grabbed my shirt from where I'd thrown it and ducked behind the curtain before he could ask questions.
The corridor backstage smelled like cheap cologne and energy drinks. We had five human dancers now, rotating shifts to cover what used to be wall-to-wall vampire. And they were fine. Competent, even. Brogan had helped me train them before he'd stepped back entirely, his green eyes going dark any time Esme came up in conversation, like even the suggestion that he might still be taking his clothes off for other women was an insult to her.
I couldn't relate to that, because I was the only one left of our coven who hadn't found their mate. And not the stepping-back part either, because stepping back meant stepping off the cliff into nothing. The stage was the only place my mask still fit.
Or, at least, it used to be.
I shrugged my shirt back on without buttoning it and pushed through the door back out into the main part of the club.
The Purple Fang looked tired. That was the only word for it. It had the same obsidian bar, same black tables, and the same low lighting it always had, designed to make everyone look a little more beautiful and a lot less sober. But the energy was all wrong without my vampire brothers here. Like someone had pulled the plug on the current that used to run through this place and replaced it with something that was all show and no power.
Elias still stood behind the bar, polishing a glass that was probably already as clean as it was gonna get. But that didn't stop the crazy bastard from trying. His dark beard was neatly trimmed, as always, his bottles perfectly aligned, and the compulsive precision of his movements should've been comforting in its familiarity…
But there was a mug of coffee next to his elbow. Coffee. I could smell it from twenty feet away. And underneath it, the scent of his not quite human blood, which had been doing strange things to my self-control ever since his little transformation.
"You stopped early," he said without looking up. "Everything okay?"
"Sure. Tyler could use the stage time." I dropped onto a bar stool and ran both hands through my oiled hair, checking that it was in place. Ginseng oil. It kept everything nourished and shiny. "When he tries to do a body roll, it looks like he's having a seizure. And practice makes perfect."
Elias set the glass down and stared me down. His eyes were the same dark brown they'd always been, but there was something behind them that hadn't been there before. Warmth, maybe. Mortality? That was yet to be seen as time went on. And every once in a while, the faintly bewildered expression of a man who'd woken up to find his entire existence rearranged overnight.
"You haven't been sleeping," he said.
"I'm a vampire. We don't sleep, we die for the day. Totally different vibe."
"Dae."
"I'm fine, Elias."
He gave me a look that said he didn't believe me, which was fair, because I was totally lying. But Elias had never been the type to push. If he got concerned enough about you, he'd say something, you deflected, and he went back to polishing his already spotless bar. It was one of the best things about him.
"Coffee?" he offered.
"Hard pass. Give me a bourbon."
He poured without comment, and I took the glass with a mumbled, "Thanks." The liquor did absolutely nothing to help me, but I still liked the way it burned its way down my throat and warmed my chest, if only temporarily. And it was one of the few things I could still tolerate from my human days, although I still loved to cook when there were people around to feed.
From the back office, I heard Kenya's voice, low and clipped, running numbers on the phone. She was probably talking to the liquor distributor, or the DJ service, or one of the other vendors she dealt with on a nightly basis. Kenya handled the books because she was brilliant and precise and kept this place from going under even when we had no customers.
She also hadn't left the office in days, and I was pretty sure she was sleeping back there on the loveseat Killian kept for "meetings." Not because she didn't have a place to go — Alex was home now, recovering in their room at Killian's — but because Kenya processed stress by working, the same way Elias processed it by cleaning and I processed it by pretending everything was a joke.
Surely, all that couldn't be healthy. But a head doctor wouldn't be of any help in this situation. We were all too stuck in our ways to change now.
"Where's Killian?" I asked.
"In the office with Kenya. He wanted to go over the quarterly numbers." Elias paused. "Again."
"That bad?"
"You know damn well the humans only bring in about a third of what we used to pull," Elias said. "But I don't know that that's a bad thing. The only one we need to worry about feeding now is you. Brogan isn't working. Jamal isn't working. I'm—" He stopped. Looked at his coffee mug as if it had personally offended him. "I don't need to feed anymore."
"Yeah." I took another drink. "I guess that's true."
The Purple Fang had always served two purposes: the public one, where beautiful men took their clothes off for money, and the real one, where vampires fed from willing humans who'd leave with a hazy memory of a very good night and spotty memory loss they couldn't quite explain. The business funded the feeding. The feeding sustained the coven.
But Killian only fed from Lizzy now. Jamal from Angel. Alex sustained Kenya. Brogan had Esme. Even Elias — whatever Elias was these days — didn't need blood anymore, and if he did, he'd only feed from Talin, his mate.
I was the only one left who still needed to hunt. The last vampire at the party where someone had already turned the lights on and was shooing everyone out.
"He's thinking about closing it," Elias said quietly.
My hand tightened around the glass. "The club?"
"He hasn't said it outright, but I know it's on his mind. The numbers just don't work without the vampire draw, and we don't really need—"
"It works fine."
"Dae—"
"I said it works fine." The hard edge in my voice surprised us both. I set the glass down with an unsteady hand and stared at the amber liquid like I could will it to make me feel something other than the slow, creeping dread that had been building in my chest for weeks. Maybe months.
Hell, years, if I were being honest.
But I wasn't going to go there, because that way lay a darkness I'd been outrunning since before New Orleans existed as a city.
The office door opened, and Killian walked out and came to join us at the bar. His sandy brown hair was pushed back from his face like he'd been running his fingers through it, and his black eyes swept the nearly empty club with a carefully controlled expression I recognized.
"Dae." He pulled up a stool next to me. "Ye're done early."
"Tyler needed—"
"Stage time, aye, ye said that about Derek last night." He signaled to Elias, who set a whiskey in front of him with mechanical efficiency. "And Jeff the night before. But yer right. Besides, the crowd is shite tonight."
"It's February. The tourists are always fewer between Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest."
"It was shite last Saturday too. And the one before that."
Killian took a drink, his jaw working. "I've been going over the numbers with Kenya."
I nodded. "Yeah. Elias was just saying."
"We're bleeding money these days. The humans are fine for the stage, but they can't — they don't have what—" He stopped himself, glancing at Elias, then back at me. "The business model just doesn't work anymore. Not the way it's set up."
"So we adapt. We've been adapting our feeding habits for hundreds of years."
"Aye, but we adapted together. All of us were invested. Now it's—" He gestured at the empty room. "It's you on yer own. Elias is over there drinking coffee, for fuck's sake."
Elias made a small, tight sound that might have been offense or might have been agreement.
"I can carry it," I said.
Killian looked at me. Not with pity, Killian didn't do pity, but with something worse. Understanding. "Aye. Maybe. For now. But for how long? And why bother when ye could just go find some sweet blood on the streets like olden times? One vampire won't bring any notice to us."
I didn't answer.
The silence stretched out between us. On stage, Tyler was attempting the body-roll move, and it looked exactly like I'd described — a full-body spasm set to a Weeknd track. The two women at the front table were trying very hard to be supportive.
Bless their hearts.
"I'm not closing it tomorrow," Killian said, more gently than I expected. "But we all need to talk about what this place is now, and where we're going to go from here. And we need to do it soon."
"It's home," I said, and the word came out rougher than I wanted. "That's what it is."
Killian's dark eyes softened, but he didn't say anything as he and Elias exchanged a glance. Just finished his whiskey and stood, squeezing my shoulder once before heading back toward the office.
Elias was quiet after he left. The music thumped from the stage, tinny and distant, the pulses of the women watching Tyler slowing to a normal rhythm with his less than sexy dance moves, and somewhere on Bourbon Street a woman laughed too loud and too long.
"You should go see her," Elias said suddenly.
I stiffened. "See who?"
The look he gave me was unimpressed by my attempt to be coy. "Don't do that, Dae. I know what it fucking looks like."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Leaning his elbows on the bar, he stared at me hard. "You've checked your phone eleven times in the last twenty minutes."
Had I? I glanced down at the device on the bar. The screen was dark. No messages. No little sun emoji.
"She's recovering," I said, which was true, and also an excuse. But I thought it sounded like a pretty good one.
"She came to you, Dae. Not Judy, not the coven. Not even her brother." He pointed at me. "You. Don't you think that means something?"
I went very still as he pointed out the obvious.
He was right. I knew he was right. I just wasn't sure how I felt about it.
"I need another drink," I said.
He filled my glass without another word.
It'd been three days since Judy had peeled Alice out of my arms with a look that said this is witch business, vampire. And I'd let her go because what else was I going to do? I didn't even know how the hell Judy knew to come help her, but I assumed it was some bond they all had. Just like we did. And Alice belonged with her family. They'd know how to help her.
But, dammit, I could still feel the weight of her warm body against mine. Her heart hammering like it was trying to break free of her chest. The jolt of electricity when she touched my cheek.
That had been real. That had been Alice. Not the thing that crawled into her afterward. That small touch had gone straight through me like a live wire, shooting heat down my spine to pool low in my stomach in a way that had nothing to do with hunger. Well, not that kind of hunger. And for exactly one second I'd known with absolute certainty what this was, what she was, and what we could be.
My gums throbbed at the memory, and I pressed my tongue against the inside of my teeth, willing my fangs to stay put. This was getting out of hand. The aching, the obsessing, the wanting, the way I couldn't close my eyes without seeing her face…
Then I frowned, remembering what else had happened, the way her aura had changed after the djinn had spoken through her. Alice was always silver-white and shimmery, clean and pure as starlight. But afterwards, there'd been something else. A thread of gold woven through her natural colors, so faint I'd almost missed it. At the time, I thought it was beautiful. I'd thought maybe it was her djinn blood finally surfacing, stirred up by everything that had happened with Alex and Marcus.
Now, though, I wasn't sure what I'd seen.
"Elias." I turned the glass in my hands. "When you grabbed Marcus's thread… When you felt him… What did—" I stopped. This wasn't fair to my friend. Elias had nearly died unmaking himself to pull that thread. He'd burned through a century and a half of immortality in a single act of desperate courage to save Talin and Alex, and I didn't have the right to drag him back into it. "Never mind."
"It felt…like a god," he said quietly. "And not the fairytale kind all of these religions would have you believe in. The kind they were much more likely to be if they ever existed."
I looked up.
His hands had gone still on the glass he was holding, and his dark eyes were somewhere else entirely. "I felt every year, every decade, every century, peeled back like layers of skin. Everything I was as a vampire, everything Killian's blood made me, burned away between one heartbeat and the next. And underneath—" He set the glass down with exaggerated care. "Underneath was just a man. Standing in a field, listening to mortar fire, wondering if the next shell had his name on it."
My chest ached. Not for me. For him.
"Marcus didn't feel like any kind of creature I'd met before," Elias continued, his voice dropping. "He felt like a black hole. He's a void shaped like a man, trying to fill itself with anything it can reach. Power, control, love, hate—" He shook his head. "It doesn't matter what. He just wants to possess things. Hold them. Keep them."
We've been waiting.
We.
Who the hell was we?
"But how—"
My phone buzzed against the bar, and I grabbed it so fast I nearly knocked over my glass. My dead heart doing something embarrassing in my chest before I registered the name on the screen.
Not Alice.
It was Alex, her twin brother. The text was short and direct.
She won't talk to me about what happened when she came to see you. She says she's fine. She's not fine. Can you go over there? Maybe she'll talk to you since you're the one she went to.
I read it twice. Three times. My thumb hovered over the screen.
I typed back:
When? What time?
The response came immediately:
Now. Obviously.
Something cracked the careful nothingness I'd been holding in my chest for three days and allowed something very dangerous to leak through.
Hope, maybe.
Or dread.
The two felt exactly the same these days.
I pocketed the phone and drained my bourbon. On stage, Tyler was taking his final bow to scattered applause, and the two women from the front table were already putting on their jackets.
A few months ago, I'd have to kick the women out at closing time. But now the Purple Fang was emptying before Bourbon Street even filled up. I listened to the hum of the stage lights beneath the music and chatter, soaking in this place where I'd been performing for decades. And for the first time since we opened the club, I didn't want to be standing under them. I didn't want the attention.
I wanted to be standing at a ward line in the Garden District, waiting for a witch in a rainbow dress to step through.
"Lock up for me?" I asked Elias.
He nodded once. "Go on," he said, without bothering to ask what the text said. "I got it."
So I went.
The cool February air hit me as I stepped onto Bourbon Street. After a brief warm snap, it seemed the city had decided to give winter one last chance, which only made me feel slightly better about our lack of customers.
Still, the usual human chaos swirled around me. Drunk tourists stumbling between bars with plastic beads hanging around their necks, a jazz trio playing for tips on the corner, the smell of vomit and beignet grease, and the lingering notes of a strong floral perfume that was probably way overpriced. Normally I'd walk through it all like a shark skimming through the water, reading auras, feeding on the ambient energy of a city that almost never stopped.
Tonight, though, I barely noticed anyone else was even on the street because I couldn't get my mind off the woman I was going to see. The food smells reminded me of how she usually forgot to eat when she was stressed or scared, which meant she'd probably been living on little more than the herbal tea she liked. I didn't crave the things humans loved anymore, not really. But I remembered the way something like a beignet would melt in your mouth, and there was a place two blocks down that had an all-night window.
I made a small detour and bought a dozen, tucking the bag under my arm and feeling like the biggest fool in the city. She might not even want to see me.
I didn't know what I'd find when I got there. Would she even be my Alice? Or would I find that thing back inside her? Would she tell me what happened? Did she even know?
Would she look at me the way she had before?
Pushing those thoughts from my head, I kept walking.
Because for the first time in a lot of years, I was walking toward something instead of away from it.
And that scared me more than any djinn ever could.
