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Inside the club, rather than thumping bass, the music was mellow and low, a sure-fire sign we had entered an establishment frequented by vampires. When your hearing was as acute as theirs, music blaring at top volume was an assault to the senses.
Sidling up to the bar, the human bartender gave me one look, then immediately shifted his attention to Simone. “What can I get you?”
She scanned the room with dispassionate boredom and lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I haven’t seen anything interesting yet, but I’ll let you know.”
He realized then that her drink of choice wasn’t going to come on tap and gave a nod. “How about you?”
“Gin and tonic. Heavy on the G, light on the T, thanks.” One of my favorite things about being human now was how much I could drink. When I had the metabolism of a werewolf and vampire in one, alcohol raced through me, giving me an almost instant buzz. These days it took at least four or five cocktails before I hit that stage. Which meant a gin and tonic was absolutely in order for the night.
It was weird what things had changed now that I was human, while some had stayed the same. I still had some of the quickness I’d had as a vampire, something I assumed was related to my werewolf DNA. I could also take a beating better than most humans, but that was probably due to all the practice I’d had.
The bartender slid the drink across the bar to me, and I paid him, then I turned so I was facing the same direction as Simone. The lights here were dim, like way darker than a normal human bar. It was almost as if the club had been designed so vampires could get the first look at whatever it was they were interested in, and humans just had to wait to be approached.
“This is what the cool kids do?” I asked, remembering I didn’t need to yell to be heard.
“If someone wants to know that the humans they meet are open to a little blood sharing, then yes, this is the easiest way to do that these days.”
Judging by how busy the place was, things were good for vampires right now. The novelty hadn’t worn off yet, and people were still interested in getting up close and personal with fangs.
The whole thing made my skin crawl. It wasn’t that I was against vampires having a bevy of adoring fans waiting around wherever they went, it was more the fetishization aspect that bothered me.
Vampires wouldn’t care who they fed from any more than a human would care which cow their burger came from. Food was food. But humans came into places like this with a twisted, overly romantic ideal of what that relationship was, and I had to think the end result would be pretty disappointing.
Of course, the human participants would never remember how disappointing it was because the vampire’s thrall would make it seem like the most exciting and pleasurable experience. And so they’d just keep coming back for more.
So yeah, you could see why that would up the ick factor for me.
I sipped my drink, savoring the tang of fresh lime in the mix, and scanned the room as best I could given the pathetic lighting. I had a good idea of what Davos looked like thanks to my hours of research, but it was going to be hard to spot him in here unless I tripped over top of him.
“How do I look? Young and impressionable?” I posed for her.
Simone gave me a cursory glance and said, “You look neither young nor impressionable, but you do radiate that special brand of neediness the male vamps seem to love, so if bait was what you were going for, bravo. Chum in the water.”
There were so many layers to her insults I couldn’t fully unpack how savage they were.
Simone was so mean. I seriously loved her.
“Off you go, little fish. The sharks are circling.” She nodded towards the other side of the bar, where sure enough a few male vampires lingered in the shadows, seeming to have attention only for me.
They would know she was a vampire, whereas I was now easy prey.
Another nice thing about being away from the city so often, I didn’t always get recognized immediately anymore. A blow to my ego, maybe, but it made work like this a lot easier when the vampires didn’t know who I was.
You’d think it would be even harder to maintain anonymity in this community now that I was on TV from time to time talking about vampires and werewolves, but no. Perhaps it was that vampires didn’t care about the twenty-four-hour news cycle because time was such a fleeting concept to them?
More likely I looked way different in a dress than I did with my minimal-makeup, zero-fucks-given CNN wardrobe.
With Simone having vanished into the room, one of the male vampires who had been lingering in the shadows approached me. It wasn’t Davos, which made my heart sink, but that didn’t mean this guy didn’t know Davos, or that Davos wasn’t somewhere else here watching this happen.
I had to play this just right.
In a normal bar I’d blow the guy off and enjoy my drink, but this situation required a bit more finesse. If I simply said thanks no thanks to this vampire, it could set the expectation amongst the others nearby that I wasn’t actually interested in being someone’s snack and was a casual fang tourist here to gawk at the storybook creatures.
It happened a lot.
No, I had to let him know I was interested, but not interested in him, and that was the tricky part. For a woman who had been married twice and taken a vampire lover, I was sorry to say I wasn’t very good at traditional flirting.
My expertise was more of the force them to spend enough time with you that they have no choice but to find violence and sarcasm sexy variety. Basically the adult version of punching a boy you liked in the arm and telling him he was stupid. And it had clearly worked for me.
