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Occasionally, it was a woman. “You can’t seriously be saying you’re using drinking as therapy.”
Dahlia would shrug. “Why not?”
She’d start out at the Meck and migrate out of there if it seemed likely Niles might show up. She’d go to the Devonshire instead or just go home and drink in her living room, sometimes with Tommy, sometimes not.
Tommy hadn’t stopped trying to fuck her ever since she’d admitted to him that she and Niles were on a break. It disgusted her.
She had thought better of Tommy, but she was beginning to see that he was just shitty and entirely motivated by his penis. She had been stupid to think better of him. She was beginning to realize that he had never deserved all of the things she’d done for him over the years. Even if he had let her feed on him occasionally, she didn’t think that balanced the scales.
But thinking about feeding—well—that was the whole reason she was drinking.
One night, she was slumped over the bar, toying with the drink in her mostly-empty vodka cranberry, and she noticed the cerberus was there.
She didn’t know his names.
He had three heads—well, three torsos—and thus three names.
He was a werewolf. She knew about cerberism, that it was a certain kind of special magical genetic trait that wasn’t exactly like conjoined triplets, and that it only surfaced in werewolves.
He was—they were—she didn’t know how to talk to them.
But there was no one else in the bar. Even the bartender Jeff had gone on a walkabout to ostensibly empty ashtrays and gather up empty glasses, but he’d been gone a long time, and she suspected he’d gotten into a conversation with someone in the garden in the back. She was alone, and part of the reason to be in the bar was to not be alone, because being alone meant thinking, and she didn’t want to think. So she sidled up to the cerberus triplets, who looked like identical triplets with one pair of legs and three torsos and four arms. The guy in the middle had to share his arms with his brothers, she supposed. Their torsos were all fused, but the interior arms thrust out where arms should essentially be.
As she watched, one of the interior arms twisted all the way around to pick up a beer. It could face either way?
One of his heads turned to her, eyebrows raised, as if to say,Enjoying the show?
She flinched and looked away and felt shame rise in her. Shit. She swallowed hard. “I didn’t mean—”
“We’re used to it,” said one of them.
“That’s no excuse. Seriously, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for looking?” said another of them.
“Um, well, yeah.”
“It’s fine,” said the third one. “We’re rare. People are always curious how it works.”
“They ask a lot of really invasive questions,” said the second one.
“Oh,” she said, furrowing her brow. “I bet they do.”
“We don’t have a girlfriend often, but when we do, we only date one,” said the first one. “In case you were curious.”
She thought that through, thought of twenty thousand questions, swallowed them all, and sucked vodka cranberry through her straw. Time to change the subject. “I’m Dahlia.”
“Yeah, we know.”
“I know we’ve never met,” she said, because she would remember talking to the cerberus, no matter how drunk she was.
“No, but you’re Niles’s new girlfriend,” said the third one.
“How does everyone know about this?” She groaned.
They all laughed.
“I’m Leo,” said one of them. “These are my brothers, Lucian and Laird.”
