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“What does that mean?”
She rolls her eyes exaggeratedly. “You know, seduction recon. Don’t tell me you’ve never done that before.”
I look upwards, shrugging and staying quiet.
“Oh, come on, Lay,” she rolls her eyes even harder. “What have you been up to the last ten years?”
I just turn my eyes on her. “Studying with the best techs and mages in the world to find out how to get revenge on my family. And when that didn’t work, or, well, when I forgave them instead, I just sort of… Well, you know the rest since I got back in touch with Sabra last year. I never had time for women.”
“Oh.” She frowns. “I just assumed…” Then she looks me up and down, reaches over, undoes the top two buttons of my shirt, and fusses with the collar. My beast leaps at the brush of her fingertips against my skin. “Look aloof. Turn down anyone who asks you to dance unless you see me signal.”
“Oh yeah? And how will you know who it is?”
“I’ll know.”
“How? Is there something about spirits—”
She rolls her eyes. “Look, you’ll be the hottest guy in there, and I know women. Human women will approach you differently than a goddess would. They won’t have the same confidence and will play dumb games. She won’t. Just watch me for the signal.”
Does she know that from experience? What has she been up to for the last ten years? I know better than to ask. She was confident when I first met her, but now she’s… incandescent with this surety in everything she does.
Except around the dickhead professor. I frown.
“That’s perfect,” Phoenix grins at me. “Just keep looking broody like that. Women eat that shit up.”
I roll my eyes, and she claps me on the shoulder as we get to the front of the line of the club. “Here we go, champ.”
The bouncer asks for the cover charge, but Phoenix just leans in. “You want to let us in.”
He stumbles over himself as he leans over to pull back the velvet rope.
“Remember,” she breathes in my ear as we pass through the door.
“I know, I know, the signal. Wait, what exactly is the signal?”
But we’re already through and into the club, and she walks away as if she’s never met me before.
I get it; we’re going incognito. Still, I don’t like losing sight of her in the sea of writhing bodies and strobing lights.
I head for the bar, trying to keep track of Phoenix amid the crowd of people. If I can’t find her, how the hell am I supposed to know what this mysterious signal is? Oh well. Now that she’s told me what to watch out for, maybe I can suss Ammit out myself anyway. Plus, I know that even if I can’t see her, Phoenix will be watching me.
A couple moves away from the bar right as I approach, and I slide onto one of the stools. Unlike Remus, I never found much point in human alcohol, so I don’t know what to order when the bartender yells and asks what I want.
I just repeat the last order I heard. “Whiskey and coke.”
He nods and disappears again. Before it arrives, a woman smoothly seats herself beside me.
She chatters at me in Romanian, angling her barely covered chest toward me before eventually asking me to dance. I’ve always been good with languages, and this is just another variation of an old one I knew long ago.
I gently tell her, no, I’m not interested. She looks offended and flings her hair extensions in my face as she swings off the stool to walk away.
My drink finally comes and I sip it slowly. It burns my throat a little. I look around. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness of the club. Lights swirl from several points in the ceiling, and I can feel the bass of the speakers thumping up through the floor.
As I’m doing a slow scan of the room, I spot eyes on me from across the huge, square bartop. Phoenix gives me a quick wave before looking like a completely disinterested stranger again. Ah, so that’s the plan. The bar is in the center of the club, with people packing on all sides around us.
The night stretches on, and the club gets wilder and more crowded with each passing hour. The lines stretching out from the bartop get longer and longer, more people shouting for the six bartenders’ attention.
I keep sipping my first drink and turn down woman after woman who asks with varying levels of confidence to dance with them. The ones with giggling packs of friends around them are easy to turn down. I don’t even have to glance across the bartop at Phoenix for those or for the women who are all but shaking with nerves.
