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The laptop snapped clean down the middle in a spray of golden sparks. Keys rained down, and the pair of them were left holding two mangled pieces. The screen had obviously gone black.

Tom Collins snorted. “Idiots.”

Zee growled. “Well fuck, vampire, that was your fault.”

Victor growled. “You were about to do more damage. Repentant has nothing to do with camping!”

“I obviously know that!”

The lights went out, plunging us into darkness.

Only the jukebox glowed its neon colors and sang jauntily about spooky, scary skeletons.

A deep, rich, Halloween laugh reverberated through the hotel.

Tom Collins cackled. “You’re so fucking screwed.”

CHAPTER 5

“What is happening?” Zee asked.

“The consequences have become dire,” Victor said, his deep tone adding a sense of doom we really didn’t need.

“Ribbit.”

Oh dear.

“What was that?” Zee asked.

“Nobody move.” That came from Victor. As the only vampire in the room, he could see better than the rest of us in the dark. And he was looking down, at the bar floor.

“Ribbit, ribbit, croak, ribbit . . .”

“No, no, no, nope, no, fuck no.” Zee’s stool clattered, and in the neon glow, I caught sight of him clambering onto the bartop. “Why is the floor moving?”

“We appear to have a small amphibian problem,” Victor said. “I’m sure it’s nothing to be concerned about.”

“Are those⁠—”

“Pfft, no.” I climbed onto the bar too. I didn’t mind frogs, in small doses. But the whole floor rippled and bubbled under the weird glow from the jukebox. “Tom?”

Tom Collins’s eyebrows lifted. “What the fuck do you expect me to do? Everything your side of my bar is your problem.”

Victor climbed onto the bartop too.

“You said it wasn’t anything to worry about,” I whispered.

“Ribbit, ribbit, croak,” the frogs sang.

“Those are clearly unusual amphibians.”

One little frog hopped onto the bar between Victor and Zee, who looked down between them.

Zee sucked in a gasp to scream, then poofed. Dancing purple light exploded in my vision, blinding me. Victor growled, turning his sensitive gaze away. I blinked the blur from my eyes and found Zee back on the ceiling, crackling with violet light, wings spread and aglow, veins lit up like frozen purple lightning strikes.

Now he’d lit up the entire bar, we could all see how the whole bar floor writhed and simmered with a layer of all kinds of frogs. Big ones, small ones, ugly ones, chonky ones, poisonous ones, stripy ones, ones that ate their buddies. It was a heaving, rippling pool of frogs.

This was Zee’s fear.