The cobblestones dulled the sound of our boots as we ran as fast as we could after Feish. Suzy was still yelping about her burning scalp, and a glance behind us revealed we were being followed by three men in black, and not one of them was Will Smith. Hell, I’d take Tommy Lee Jones at that point.

“Here, turn quick!” Feish grabbed my hand as we came around the corner onto Factors Row. Cobblestones under our feet, and a giant black spider covered in bristling hair right in front of us. Her eyes were glued to something she held between two long appendages. A book. She was reading? And she had a red pen in her mouth.

Oh, Gawd, did she think she could edit a book?

Not the time to point out to her that not many people would hire an editor that was also a giant spider. I waved a hand at Jinx. “Out of the way! Eat the ones behind us!”

Startled, she skittered away, her eyes swinging to us as she dropped what she’d been reading. Seriously, a giant spider reading and editing a book. Just when I’d thought this world could not get any weirder.

Feish grabbed my hand and yanked me through a door I’d never seen before, and Suzy spilled in with us. The door slammed behind us, and I would have said we were silent as mice being stalked by three black cats, but there was so much noise in the place we’d stumbled into that I could have hollered my face off and not have been heard.

Music pounded all around us, a bass that drove itself into my chest and made me want to slap my hands over my ears like the old lady I was so often accused of being. How in the world had we not heard that music from outside? Even as I thought it, I remembered a passage in my gran’s book.

Within the shadows there are doorways and there are doorways. Some are nothing more than a passage between one room and the next. Some are more than that, and yet there is no explanation for their existence, for they will not always function as such.

“A go between?” I yelled the words at Feish and she nodded emphatically. I wanted to ask her how she’d known it would be there. Go betweens were rare, expensive to make, and based on what I’d read in Gran’s book, they didn’t last very long.

I made myself look around the room, at the bodies gyrating to the music. Some had clothes on. Some, but not many. Feish pushed against my side. “Oh. This is not where I thought it would lead.”

“Where the hell did you think it would lead?” I yelped even as I looked behind us at the door. I was more than expecting the three men to spill in after us. For that reason alone, I pushed deeper into the crowd, ignoring the tug of Feish on one side and the pull of Suzy on the other.

Suzy shivered. “I like this a little too much, Bree. It calls to my siren blood!” She had to shout to be heard, which meant that a few people took note of our passage and her words.

Smiles slid her way, hands following. I smacked a number of them back because she didn’t seem inclined to push them back herself. Siren blood indeed. All the way to the back of the club we went, squeezing through the press of bodies, the smell of perfume, cologne, and cigar smoke, and the sounds of laughter muted under the pulse of the music. To say that it was overwhelming was an understatement. But it was a cover for us, and for the moment we were safe. I found a booth at the back of the club with just a single man in it.

“You”—I pointed at him—“out. We’re here on official business.”

His jaw flapped open. “Do you know who I am?”

I shook my head and let a hand drop to the knife handle on my thigh, just like an old-school gunslinger. “Nope and I don’t care. Out.”

His eyes followed my hand to the knife. “I see. Well. I know who I can and can’t do business with.”

Nothing else was said as he slid out of the booth, and I all but shoved Feish and Suzy into the newly freed space. I leaned over the table at them. “Don’t leave this booth, don’t invite anyone in, and don’t go off with anyone.”

Feish nodded rapidly, but Suzy was slower to agree. I reached out and slapped her in the face. “Snap out of it. This has got to be some sort of spell.” I shivered, feeling whatever magic was affecting her brush against my skin. A flush of heat ran through me, pooling in my nether regions. “I’m going to find the exit. Then we’ll go.”

Again, Feish nodded, then she leaned forward. “Be careful. Boss would not be happy we are here.”

What would I even say to Crash? Yeah, we stumbled into an orgy pit of weirdness? Not likely.

“Boss will never know that we’re here,” I said, turned around and found myself staring at a man on the far side of the room who hadn’t noticed me. A man whom I’d seen wrapped in nothing but a sheet more than once. A man whose kisses had set every part of me on fire.

His head was bowed over a stunning young woman with liquid black hair that rippled down to her too-tiny waist in perfect ringlets. A white dress clung to her every curve, of which there weren’t many, and she had not even a single cellulite ripple. What was she, eighteen? Barely legal? Her laughter turned heads.

Crash was making her laugh. I frowned.

Nope, I did not like this one bit. The slice across the mid-region of my heart was not welcome, and I tried to reason the feeling away. So what if he’d kissed me? He could have been trying to distract me, and it had worked.

A tiny voice pointed out that he’d taken care of me after I was shot. That he’d sent me away from danger.

But what if he’d been the one to set the danger in motion?

I was muttering under my breath as I stalked through the room, and people knew enough to move out of my way. I found the bar quickly and the bartender leaned in close. “What can I get you, lovely?”

I put my hands on the bar. “The exit.”

He chuckled and I could smell a good amount of alcohol on his breath, beer by the ferment of it. I wrinkled my nose. “What’s so funny?”

“You go out the way you came in. Why would you do it any other way?” He polished up a glass and set it on the bar. “Have a drink, take off your clothes, have a good time.”

He poured me something from a bottle that glittered. Not in an edible glitter kind of way—this was magic. I grimaced. “I don’t do magic I don’t know.”

Turning on my heel, I meant to go back to the girls. Only now, Crash stood directly in my path. He still hadn’t noticed me. And now he had a second girl on his arm, this one with hair the color of mahogany, eyes that matched, and a slinky blue dress fighting a losing battle to cover a pair of boobs the size of melons. Considering how tiny her waist was, I wasn’t sure they were real.

He had an arm draped over the brunette, keeping her close to his side as he talked to the first girl in the white dress. Damn it, I did not like feeling this way. The green-eyed monster wanted me to stalk over there and punch him in his family jewels, let him see if he was any good in bed after that.

The old me would never have done it.

The older me was tempted.

I just needed a little stiffening up first.

I turned back to the bartender and snapped back the drink.

“Changed your mind?”

“Yup.” I put the glass down and tapped it. One more and I’d still be able to walk. He filled the drink up and I tipped it back like a pro, if I do say so myself. Leaning on the bar, I looked up at the bartender and squinted. “You’re not human?”

“Nobody in here is, darling.” He winked and the image of him flickered, like seeing two pictures superimposed over one another. One was human looking, the other . . . the other was covered in fur but still standing upright, so not a werewolf. More like Eric.

“Bigfoot?” I asked, shocked at how numb my mouth felt. Oh no. That numbness spread through my body far quicker than any alcohol should.

“Close. Abominable. You know Eric?” he asked. I nodded, but that made the room spin horribly.

“Good guy, sad about his cousin,” I said. With that, I turned and headed out onto the floor where Crash still stood with those two very young and beautiful women.

To be clear, I didn’t begrudge them their looks or youth—I just didn’t want to feel like I had to compete with them.

“Hey!” I snapped the word out, only it sounded far from snappy, more like slurred.

Crash turned and his blue and gold eyes widened. “Breena. What in Hades’s name are you doing here?”

“Never you mind.” I pointed both hands at him as if I were doing a sloppy hex. “This is not cool. Just so you know. Not. Cool.” I waved my quickly flopping hands in his general direction to take in the two women.

The ladies smiled at me, and the one in the white dress spoke up first. “You think you could handle him? Please. You’re human.”

I made a pffffing noise. “Handle? Handle? Who says that? Are you twelve? Ten? Are you even allowed in here? Shouldn’t you be taking selfies and posting them all over?” Yup, I knew I was drunk as a skunk and didn’t care.

Crash didn’t take his hands off either woman—girl—they were practically girls. So that was how it was then. I bobbed my head a few times, which made the world spin hard. “Karissa was right about you.”

He jerked as if I’d slapped him, which was going to have to be good enough for me. Because I could feel the sparkly drink doing terrible, terrible things to me. And I’d just outed that fact that I knew Karissa. Would he put two and two together and realize why I’d been out in the wildlife reserve?

Tears pooled up in my eyes, damn it I hated crying when I was mad. I stumbled hard, bumped off some guy, and managed to direct myself back toward the booth at the end. I needed to get back to Feish and Suzy. They would look out for me because right then I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to see in three, two, one.

Lights out.

Only it was literal.

14

I fell forward as the sparkling magic liquor’s potency hit me right between the eyes, and as I fell, the lights and music went out, plunging us into darkness that was only silent for a second before people started hollering, or maybe they were singing? It was hard for me to tell. My knees met the floor, followed rapidly by the palms of my hands. Barely hanging onto consciousness, I knew that if I didn’t stand up, I’d face being trampled as everyone tried to blindly find their way out.