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The Magic Mushroom was just gearing up for the time of night when it did most of its business. I glanced up at the old-fashioned “mushroom” shaped wooden sign over the door that advertised food, liquor, and "entertainment." Somehow it managed to be ridiculous and classy at the same time—just like the rest of the place.
A big human guy was manning the door and I nodded to him, recognizing his face and his shaved head, but not recalling his name. The owner of the establishment kept a passel of similar models on the payroll to act as bouncers. Life in a brothel wasn't safe at the best of times, but when half your employees were fiends or curs and a lot of your customers were human...well, the bouncer wasn't just for looks. He was a necessity.
I glanced around the place, feeling stupidly nostalgic at the sight of the plush, jewel-toned velvet and dark wood that filled the place. One half of the main floor was taken up by a small dance floor and a few dining tables with shadowy booths. The other half was occupied by a glossy, well-stocked wooden bar and an array of overstuffed furniture that would swallow you up like a lover's embrace.
I waved away a cloud of noxious, cinnamon-scented smoke from someone's pixie weed cigarette as I made my way to the bar. Creatures weren't the only things that had come through the rift. Some of the plants were just as deadly. And they'd get you high as a kite, though I had to question the sanity of whoever had been brave enough to try that first.
All around the room, there were little hints of non-human elements. A mermaid carved into the banister of the wooden staircase that led upstairs to the rooms, a pair of whimsical glass unicorns on the shelf above the absinthe, little winged people woven into the thick rug in the seating area. I smirked as I passed my favorite piece, a lamp that sat proudly in the center of one of the tables. It featured a fearsome-looking faun creature with a giant half-erect penis and a twisted, leering face.
There was a human working behind the bar, and I wracked my brain for his name. It had been quite a while since I visited the place. The bartender smiled at me warily from under a mop of fluffy, gray-brown hair, as if trying to remember whether he'd ever seen me in here before, and if I was trouble or not. The name popped into my head at the sight of that nervous look. Bunny. Stupid, but accurate, given the look on his face.
I slid onto a barstool and ordered a whiskey sour, refusing Bunny's offer to open a tab for the drink and "maybe a trip upstairs."
I glanced around the room again as I waited. The place wasn't crowded, but people were trickling in. A few prostitutes, male and female, draped themselves over the sumptuous furniture and did their best to look sinful and inviting, while a few others joined some visitors in a game of cards over in one of the dim booths. I picked out a few familiar faces, all of them quite obvious crosses. One of the women, a deliciously voluptuous woman with the darkest skin I'd ever seen, had small, shimmery wings protruding from the back of her strappy, low-cut dress.
I didn't see the woman I was looking for, though. And I wasn't sure if I should be frustrated or relieved.
When my drink arrived, I stopped the bartender before he could scurry away. "I need to talk to the madame," I said softly. "Preferably in her private office, if she's not too busy."
Bunny raised an eyebrow at me, and his nose twitched on his narrow face, just like his namesake. "She's not in today."
I sipped my drink and gave him a look. That’s what they’d told me over the phone two days ago.
"No, really," he said, wiping down the bar with a damp towel. "Madame Moonlight is away...on business."
I sighed. He was lying about the business part, if the tension in him was any indicator. But I didn't doubt she was actually away. She was a popular lady and a powerful political schemer. And I didn't have time to wait. We were leaving for our hunt in two days.
"Bunny," a silky voice said, sending chills over my body the way it always did, even after years of hearing it. "I'll handle our visitor. But I'll need some absinthe, please. They seem likely to be extra stubborn tonight."
I glanced to the side as a beautiful man slid onto the barstool next to me. His long silver hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail that spilled down his back to his waist, and his shimmery gold eyes were lined in black, a stark contrast to his long silver eyelashes. His skin had an almost opal tone to it, like something shimmered under the surface of the translucent white. He was about my height, with broad shoulders and a thin, graceful frame clothed in fitted gray pants and a black shirt that was shocking against his pale coloring. Long fingers curled around his drink and he smirked at me, his chiseled pink lips curling.
"Now look what the cat dragged in," he said, eying me like I was the strangest thing he'd seen all day. "I thought you said you'd never come back here after that incident with the centaur shifter."
I scrubbed a hand over my face and took a gulp of my drink. Angel. I was not drunk enough to deal with Angel right now. Not after the week I'd had. "She left you in charge, didn't she?"
He quirked a brow at me. "Who else? After all, I do know the ins and outs of the business."
A lot of people would probably look down on Madame Moonlight's business. But the truth was, Angel's mother was a smart lady. Once the dust settled and the humans stopped reeling from the revelation of what they had let through the rift, the first question that arose right after "Are they going to kill us?" was "Can we fuck them?" The madame had capitalized on that, and it had been very lucrative.
Nothing was more illicit and titillating than sleeping with the enemy, even if most of the rich clients would never admit it in the light of day. But hey, us curs got here somehow. Two fiends didn't just magically create a human hybrid.
Angel helped around the brothel, on the business side. He'd stopped turning tricks years ago, as far as I knew. I'd known Angel and his mother since I was a kid myself. One of my mom's friends got the brilliant idea in their head that hanging out here would be good for teenaged me, since it would theoretically teach me not to be ashamed of my sexuality, while exposing me to interaction with people outside the pack.
But really, the only reason I kept coming to hang out was to get into trouble with Angel. He was the most beautiful person I'd ever met, even as a little boy. But he was also one of the most vulnerable, under his charade of sensuous playboy. He needed me back then, just as much as I needed him.
And it didn't hurt that around here, no one seemed to judge me the way they did everywhere else. It had become a sort of haven, for a time. A place where I could go to eat good food and listen to the workers gossip in their underwear in the kitchen at breakfast, and no one would even bat an eye about the fact that they couldn't tell if I was a girl or a boy. They'd seen weirder.
Then we got older. Angel learned that he could use his cur abilities—a strange sort of sound magic that had earned him the nickname Siren—to manipulate people. He'd hated it, at first. I distinctly remember him crying on my shoulder, all red eyes and snot, as he told me how he had teased a john about tipping, and ended up with enough money to live on for months. He hadn't realized what had happened at first. Until he was singing to himself in the kitchen the next day and distracted one of the cooks bad enough the poor girl ended up with third-degree burns on both hands and up her arms.
It wasn't too long before he was offered money for his abilities. And I guess using magic on others and getting paid for it was better than spreading your legs for strangers.
I wasn't one to judge. I hunted my own kind for what amounted to just enough money to get by for another day.
Maybe humans were right. Maybe we were all monsters.
"Well, Sam," Angel said, bumping my shoulder with his own and leaving me awash in the scent of him, like clear water and amber, as the bartender ambled away to take care of a few new guests. "What's going on? It has to be horrid, if you're here trying to drown your sorrows."
I glared at him. "I didn't come here to drown my sorrows. I need a sound charm. I didn't know you were here, or I'd have asked for you straight off. I thought your mom—sorry, Madame Moonlight—might be able to get word to you if you were out on a job."
He sighed. "I made enough on the last couple jobs to take some time off. So, of course the old cow decides to up and flit off to fuck knows where with her newest admirer." His fair brows drew together in an ominous scowl.
I laughed. Angel doted on his mother. She was the only thing he cared about in this world. But he'd never let her know that.
"What do you need the charm for?" he asked in a bored tone, his gold eyes tracing lazily over me. "Does it have anything to do with why you're so mopey."
I took a sip of my drink, surprised to find it almost empty. Huh, when had that happened? "I'm not mopey, for fuck's sake," I muttered. "I just wanted out of the apartment for a while. And I needed the charm for a job. No one returned my phone call. So, I might as well sit here and drink while I'm begging for help."
He raised a silver eyebrow at me. "This is you begging? I don't hear begging."
I shoved him lightly and finished my drink. "Shut up. I need something that will sense vibrations, maybe? Let me know if a herd of heavy animals is headed toward me when I can't necessarily see them."
He snorted. "You mean like if there was a large herd of nastier-than-usual unicorns rushing at you and it was the wastelands so you couldn't trust your vision?"
I sighed. "Yeah. That."
Of course he knew about the unicorn contract. Everyone would by now, thanks to all the pissed off hunters who had missed the opportunity to claim the contract. Level two contracts weren't exactly a dime a dozen. Plus, people would be taking bets as to how long it took us to get murdered by the beasts and in what sort of gruesome detail.
Angel laughed. "I think I can make something to help. I can get it to you by tomorrow night." That smirk again. "I'm assuming you want it as soon as possible, since you always leave this sort of thing until the last minute."
I shrugged. "Magic is never my first thought when it comes to murder. I prefer to do it the old-fashioned way."
Angel sipped his disgusting drink and shook his head. "Well, not all of us were blessed with shifter strength and that crazy berserker mentality."
I rolled my eyes. "I'm not even a real shifter." My thoughts drifted to earlier in the evening and I felt like someone just squeezed all the air out of my lungs. "I'm not a real anything." Not a man. Not a woman. Not a human. Not a fiend. Just...not quite anything.
The bartender slid another drink in front of me and I pounded it. Angel put his hand over the third drink, stopping me from inhaling that one too. He had the most graceful hands. Like a musician. I could imagine him stroking the fret of a stringed instrument and singing in that sexy, smooth voice. He could stroke me anytime he wanted. I shook my head. Ugh. I was a mess.
"Maybe you should slow down and tell me what's really bothering you, Sam. I can tell something's got your panties in a twist."
I pushed his hand away from my drink and glowered at him. "Shows what you know. My panties aren't twisted. Because I'm not wearing any."
He widened his eyes at me and put his elbow on the bar, the wooden edges of the bangles he always wore clinking together. Putting his chin in his hand, he peered at me in mock wonder. "Is that what the problem is? You came here to rent a room, but you're too embarrassed to say so?"
I took a swig of my drink. Maybe he was right. I needed to slow down. This one didn't sit well on my stomach and left a too-sweet aftertaste on my tongue. It was cloying. I shoved the glass away. "I didn't come here to pay for sex."
He shrugged and fiddled with his glass. "There's nothing wrong with it, if you did. Even great, fearsome hunters feel lonely sometimes."
I huffed. "I'm not lonely. That's stupid." Then, because apparently, I had no brain cells left, "Why did he say he wanted to kiss me and then tell me he's only into women? What kind of sense does that make? He thought I was a guy and he wanted me, and it was freaking him out. But I couldn't tell him I'm not a guy, now could I?"
Angel stared at me for a minute, his bottom lip trapped between his perfect white teeth. Then he grinned. "You got turned down and you wanted a shoulder to cry on. How cute."
I sighed. "I didn't even know you'd be here. Don't be dumb."
He bumped my shoulder again with his. "But you were hoping. Admit it."
I met his eyes. "You're the only person who knows what I am and doesn't give a shit."
He reached out a hand and stroked my cheek. "Oh, Sam, sweetheart. It's not that I don't give a shit. It's that I like who you are. There's a big difference."
I stared at him as sudden heat uncoiled low in my belly, rising through my body to stain my cheeks with what I'm sure was a furious blush. "What?"
He leaned forward, pressing his forehead to mine. "Don't be dense, Sam. You know why you're here. And it's about damned time."
I swallowed, hard. I'd been half in love with Angel since the day I met him. But I'd never say so. He was my friend. One of the few I had. And he fucked other people for a living. Then, later, he led some sort of life of intrigue where he got by on his beauty and his magical voice. What the hell would he ever see in a rough, weak cur cross like me?
His eyes were sad. "Well," he said as he pulled away. "I hoped today might be the day you finally realized you were madly in love with me." He sighed. "But alas, I seem to be mistaken." He finished his drink and stood. "I'll get you your charm by tomorrow night."
I reached out and snagged his sleeve. I was pathetic. Really, really pathetic. "Don't go."
He tilted his head and gave me a look that was full of understanding—and a little bit of pain, maybe pity. "You could...come upstairs with me?"
I nodded.
"Finish your drink then, Sam."