IGNIGHT WAS PACKED. Like, wall-to-wall, elbow-to-elbow, shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip packed. A DJ worked in a high booth, buzzing techno music at us so loud you could feel it vibrate through the soles of your feet. Everything was black light and neon and sleek. Leather couches in the corners, high-top tables scattered everywhere, a long bar that stretched the perimeter of the entire room, an ornate hookah placed on it every two feet or so. It was hazy and loud and hot. Condensation ran down the windows, and our shoes felt squeaky and slick against the tile. People didn’t dance so much as writhe, mixing sweat and smoke and breath.
I didn’t know how I was ever going to find Shelby in there.
I turned to look at Chris; he appeared to be even more off-kilter than I felt. I laced my fingers through his and pulled him behind me toward an empty spot at the bar, on the dark end of the room.
“This is insane,” he said, when we finally found a place. He gazed at the hookah as if it were going to bite him. I laughed.
“Relax, jeez. You have cop written all over you.”
“Because I am one. I would rather be that than—”
“What’re you having, hon?” A waitress had appeared out of nowhere, wearing a tight hot pink romper and thigh-high black hose with a pair of combat boots. Her hair was pulled back slick on one side and dangled to her chin on the other in a flat black waterfall. She handed me a card with the shisha menu printed on it.
“Oh. Uh . . .” I leaned over. I had never smoked shisha. I knew this wasn’t exactly the same as smoking cigarettes, but it was a slippery enough slope that my palms started to itch. At the same time, my senses came to attention with craving. “Double apple,” I said, choosing the first thing on the menu.
“ID?” she asked, holding her palm out, looking bored. I dug for my license and gave it to her. She scanned it, nodded, looked Chris up and down, and then moved on.
“Apple-flavored smoke? Sounds delicious,” he said, deadpan.
“You never know until you try it.” I picked up the hose and slithered it at him like a snake.
“Can we just get to what we came here for?” he asked, turning his eyes back to the room. I dropped the hose. He was determined to make this suck as much as humanly possible.
I concentrated. Words came out at me in their usual colors, which got confused among the neon and made my eyes wonky. The room felt salmon to me. Peaceful. Not at all the kind of place I would expect to find someone like Luna.
The waitress returned with tobacco, foil, and lit coals, and we watched while she expertly filled the bowl. “Fifteen dollars,” she said in a voice equally as bored as everything else she did. I paid her and she disappeared into the crowd.
I picked up the hose and held it out to Chris. “You want to go first?”
He shook his head. “No desire, actually.”
His Mr. Straightface routine was getting old. “Whatever. Up to you.” I took a pull off the hose and felt the smoke roil through me, my whole world lighting up in apple green. “You should give it a try,” I yelled over the music, holding out the hose again.
“No, thanks,” he said. “I’m getting enough secondhand smoke to last me a lifetime.”
That was it. I was done with this nonsense. I brought the hose to my lips, took a deep pull, then stepped in close to Chris, backing him up against the bar. I angled my leg between his and pushed in until every part of me was brushing up against every part of him. The green apple burst and stretched until it was part of a brilliant rainbow, a curtain of color between us. I snaked my hands up over his shoulders, cupped the back of his neck, and leaned in. With my mouth only centimeters from his skin, I exhaled. I could feel him relax around me, and then, with effort, straighten up again.
“You should at least try to loosen up a little,” I said. But before I could say any more, I was distracted by a familiar laugh. I whipped around and saw Shelby Gray puffing on a hookah in a barely there backless halter and painted-on jeans. She was sitting on the couch, draped over the lap of some guy I didn’t recognize. Definitely not Gibson. Guess Vee was right—they were Split City. Shelby tilted her head back and the guy nuzzled her bare shoulder.
I forgot all about the green and the rainbow and the smell of Chris’s aftershave. My heart sped up and I felt a little tingly and dizzy. Probably part adrenaline and part green apple. Well, and part Chris, if I was being really honest.
“I’ll be right back,” I said. I started to weave through the crowd. Chris was saying something to my back, but I was singularly focused on one thing and one thing only: getting to Shelby Gray. Finding out where Luna was.
To get to Shelby, though, meant I had to cross the dance floor, which was like trying to swim upstream, if upstream was filled with flailing arms and whipping hair. The DJ had just started a new song—a grinding remix of something familiar—and people were flooding the floor like crazy. I lost sight of the couch and caught myself balling up my fists at my sides, my shoulders tensing. If Luna was here, there would be no better place to shank me and take off.
The DJ yelled into the microphone about partying, and ratcheted up the volume another notch, which I wouldn’t have thought was possible. I turned to plead for help from Chris with my eyes, but I’d been cut off from him too. The crowd had closed in, and all I could see were the people surrounding me.
I didn’t like being surrounded.
I began to get disoriented as the lights went crazy, flashing and strobing and zipping colors up walls and across faces and clawing across the darkness of the ceiling like meteorites. My head began to pound from trying to keep it all straight.
Suddenly, a hand reached through the crowd and grabbed my wrist, tight. Startled, I yanked back, but I was too distracted to be strong, and I found myself being pulled through the knot of bodies. I slipped on someone’s spilled drink and almost went down, but the hand gripped tighter and I found myself being pulled back up again.
I had the thought that maybe I should scream for help. Try to get Chris’s attention. That I should fight back. But I was having too much difficulty getting my bearings. I couldn’t see through the haze and the lights and the panic. My voice felt locked inside.
Finally, I burst from the crowd, shocked to find myself spit out on the other side of the room. I could see Chris across the room. He had found a stool and was slouched on it, playing with his phone. So glad to know he had my back.
The hand let go and I spun around.
And found myself nose to nose with a familiar face. Familiar heavily painted cat-eyes. A familiar wave of blue. A familiar corseted body. The girl who had given me the key to Dom Distribution. The girl who lived in, and went missing from, Bill Hollis’s apartment building. The girl who I’d thought I’d never see again.
“Blue?”
“I thought that was you,” she answered. Her eyes were huge and sparkly in this light. Her chin came to a severe point. She looked like manga come to life. “I wasn’t sure what I would have done if I’d gotten you all the way over here and it wasn’t you.” She laughed. Tendrils of blue hair stuck to her forehead in sweat.
“I thought you were . . .” I struggled for words. “Bill Hollis said you were dead.”
“Dead to him, maybe. But alive and well. A little bit homeless, but whatever. That’s a detail.”
I was aware of my mouth hanging open, of my hand hovering in midair between us, as if there was a force field around Blue that kept me from touching her. “What about Ruby?” I asked.
She pressed her lips together and then let them spring apart again. “Hollis actually did try to kill her. Came to her apartment and tried to, like . . .” She wrapped both hands around her neck and stuck out her tongue. “He was trying to find out what she had told you. But Ruby fought him off and that was the end of that. She went home. Texas. One day there, next day gone. Day after that, he kicked the rest of us out. Said we were ‘too talkative’ and ‘dangerous.’” She made air quotes. “I’ve been here and there since. Mostly here. I know the owner. He doesn’t charge me to hang out. And usually I can find someone to go home with.”
“Does this mean Brandi is still alive too?” I asked, feeling a surge of hope that my mom’s friend—Dru’s real mother—had also somehow escaped Bill Hollis alive.
Her brow crinkled. “I don’t know anything about anyone named Brandi. Was she one of Vanessa’s?”
“Never mind.” I’d never checked the news to see if Bill Hollis had been bluffing about burning Brandi’s trailer down, but if he’d lied about killing Blue and Ruby, he could have lied about pretty much anything. Maybe it was time for me to do some looking around to see if I could find her.
Or maybe it’s time for you to let her live her own fucking life, Nikki. Since you’re toxic as hell.
“So what are you doing here?” Blue yelled. “This doesn’t seem like your kind of place at all.”
“It’s not,” I said. I gestured around me. “Too many people. I’m looking for Luna.”
Her eyes widened. “Fairchild?” She shook her head. “I haven’t seen her, and I’ve been here every night for months. I thought she was locked up.”
“Got out a few months ago,” I said. “She’s disappeared. And you know as well as I do, Luna doesn’t stay disappeared for long.”
Blue shrugged. “Maybe this time she will. She doesn’t really have anything to come home to, does she?”
Only me, I thought. Only me and my buddy, Revenge.
“I saw her friend, though. I was trying to get to her when you grabbed me.”
Blue turned and we scanned the crowd, both of us pulling up onto our tiptoes. “What does she look like? Do you see her now?”
“She was on a couch.” The music changed to something less frantic, and the lights settled down. The waitresses took advantage of the lull and were hurrying back and forth over the dance floor, holding drinks and tapas and trays with hookah supplies on them.
Blue grabbed my hand again and we pushed through the thinning crowd, but when we popped out next to the couch, the boy was still there, but Shelby was gone.
“Hey, where’s that girl you were with?” Blue asked, tapping the guy’s leg with her knee. He turned his eyes slowly toward us, and it was easy to see that he was completely stoned. I guessed Vee was right; igNight was full of potheads who wanted to dance and smoke.
“Left,” he said. He cleared his throat and said it again, louder. “She left.”
“Left, like, gone?” I asked, pointing toward the door.
He nodded, then leaned his head back against the couch and closed his eyes.
“Thanks, you were a ton of help,” I said sarcastically. “Come on, let’s go after her.”
It took us a solid ten minutes to fight our way to the front door, and I knew by the time we heaved ourselves into the fresh night air that Shelby would be long gone. Just to be safe, I asked the doorman if he’d seen where she went. Of course, he couldn’t remember anything. Lots of people come and go, sweetheart, he told me. I’d told him not to fucking call me sweetheart.
“Sorry you missed her,” Blue said. “It was probably my fault. If I hadn’t grabbed you . . .”
“That’s okay,” I said. I leaned against the wall. Now that I was outside, it was obvious how much of a rabbit hole igNight was. Impossible not to lose track of where you were, and even who you were. “It probably would have been like always. Nobody knows anything. Nobody ever does.”
Blue reached out and touched my shoulder. “Maybe it’s possible that she really did leave,” she said. “I mean, she hasn’t bothered you yet. Maybe she’s not going to. It doesn’t seem to go very well for her when she does mess with you. You should just let it go. Focus on something else.”
I tried to imagine a life where Luna was still out there somewhere and I was living normally, focusing on other things. Forgetting that she existed. Forgetting that she’d tried to kill me twice and had failed. Forgetting that I had caused the deaths of everyone in her family.
Not possible. Not in a million years.
But it would be stupid to try to convince Blue of that.
But she was right about one thing—I did have other things to focus on.
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the newspaper clipping I’d found in Dad’s closet. I had pocketed it on the off chance that I would be able to work up the courage to tell Chris about my parents’ connection to the Hollises, but the time had never seemed right. It was hard to let someone in when they desperately wanted to stay out. It was hard to let someone in, period.
I’d let him in once before. And he didn’t remember any of it. I would be stupid to try it again.
I unfolded the clipping and showed it to Blue. “You see that guy right there?” I pointed at the man with white-blond hair. She nodded. “Have you ever seen him before? Like, with the Hollises?” She nodded again. “Who is he?” I asked eagerly.
She shook her head. “I don’t really know. All I know is he’s some sort of director or something, and he was always hanging around Vanessa. And Bill too, but more Vanessa. He always kind of creeped me out, so I stayed away from him. I think Ruby called him Mr. F once, but she said it stood for Mr. Fuckface.” She giggled. “I doubt that’s his real name. Why do you ask?”
I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “No reason. I think he knows my parents or something.”
“Your parents are friends with the Hollises?”
Yes. No. Depends on who you ask and when.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“I would tell you to ask Jetta about him. She seemed to know him a little better. I think sometimes he was her john.”
“Jetta?”
“New girl. Came around after Dreams shut down. We figured she was one of the girls and we just didn’t know her. She’s not around here anymore either, though.” Blue pulled a cigarette out of her pocket and tucked it, unlit, into her mouth. It seemed strange to me that she would come outside to smoke in front of a hookah lounge. “I think Mr. Fu—Mr. F got her a job at some film studio in Vegas or something,” she said around the cigarette. She pulled it from her mouth and held it between her fingers as she scratched her head. “Something like Mad Cow?” I jolted as orange and pink lit up in my mind. Totally not the colors I would associate with Mad Cow. But I knew what colors I did associate them with.
“Angry Elephant?”
She snapped her fingers. “Yeah. That’s it. Angry Elephant. I think he must have connections there or something.”
So maybe that was why the man was always in the background of the photos with my mom and dad. He was connected to the studio Mom worked for. But he was also Luna’s accomplice—of that, I was positive. Which could only mean one thing.
I had to go to Vegas.