* * *
Dani was right: The music was different. But as I would soon find out, it wasn’t the only thing different about Chester’s. In fact, nothing was normal. The club would shift all my paradigms and slam home the many changes the world had gone through while I’d been otherwise … occupied.
The entrance to the club was now around back: an inconspicuous battered metal door in the ground that looked like a forgotten cellar entry. If Dani hadn’t been able to hear the music, I would have walked right past the place and never suspected a thing.
The door creaked as it opened on a narrow black maw. I sighed. I hate being underground, but somehow I keep ending up there. I unhooked the MacHalo from my pack, punched on all the lights, and strapped it on my head. Dani did the same, and we descended the ladder in a blaze of light, opened a second trapdoor, and descended a second ladder. We found ourselves in the middle of an industrial foyer of sorts—tastefully decorated in the height of urban chic—facing tall double doors.
I still couldn’t hear any music. The doors had to be seriously thick. I flexed the sidhe-seer place in my head, wishing I had some idea what to expect, but the channel was still full of static, just louder.
Dani slanted me a narrow-eyed look. “Don’t you kinda think there’d be guards or something?”
“I think making it through the Dublin night alive and figuring out where this place is might be all the guards it needs,” I said dryly. I shoved at the door. It didn’t budge. “That and getting the door open.” I slipped off my MacHalo and strapped it, still blazing, onto my pack. I tousled my hair to get rid of hat-head.
Dani joined me, and together we shoved open the door and got our first look at Chester’s.
I love you so much you must kill me now …
The music was so loud, the bass vibrated my bones. They were playing Marilyn Manson’s “If I Was Your Vampire,” but it had been rerecorded to a completely different beat—a little dreamier, a little darker, a thing I wouldn’t have thought possible.
I stood in the doorway and stared.
Here was the new Temple Bar. Gone underground.
Chester’s: slick, chic, the height of urban sophistication married to industrial muscle. Chrome and glass, black and white. Coolly erotic, basely sexual. Manhattan posh wed to Irish mob.
Everything’s black, no turning back …
The place was huge, the tables packed. The tiered dance floors were crammed with hot bodies. It was standing room only. I was astonished to see that so many humans had survived and were still in Dublin—partying, at that. Under other circumstances, it might have been a pleasant surprise.
These so weren’t other circumstances.
Dani grabbed my arm. It would bruise. “Un-fecking-real,” she breathed.
I nodded. I’m a sidhe-seer. To me, things are simple: There are two races—human and Fae. I work with V’lane because I have to in order to save my people. I’ll work with the Queen of the Fae for the same reason. But it’s programmed into my genes, coded into my blood, that these two races were always intended to live separately, and it’s my job to keep things that way.
Chester’s was a sidhe-seer’s nightmare.
It was crammed with Fae and humans—mingling.
No, it was worse than that. They were socializing.
Oh, who was I kidding? Young, attractive humans by the dozens were flirting outrageously with Unseelie. On one of the dance floors, half a dozen girls were licking a Rhino-boy’s sharp yellowed tusks with pretty pink tongues. His beady eyes gleamed; he was grunting like a pig and stamping a hoof.
On another dance floor, a blond had pulled up her shirt and was rubbing her bare breasts against a tall, dark faceless Fae, while two other women tried to push her away so they could have their turn.
In a booth, a shirtless male waiter, showcasing his chiseled abs with heavily oiled skin, was caressing the … uh … udders of a thing I’d never seen before and hoped I wouldn’t again.
Beside me, Dani stiffened. “Ew. Just ew! That’s disgusting.” She made a gagging noise in the back of her throat. Then she snickered. “Sure gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘I gave her the finger,’ don’t it?”
“What? Where?”
She pointed.
A woman was sucking erotically on the tip of a Rhino-boy’s stumpy finger—which he’d given to her by cutting it off his hand.
I inhaled sharply as, the reality of what was going on here smacked me between the eyes. Humans weren’t just cozying up to the newest exotic big-bad because it was something different and exciting.