Three hours into the wildly successful opening night, Jessie winked at a departing Elvis impersonator who’d left her a twenty-dollar tip. She glanced up at the mirrored glass of Nate’s office, adding a dash of grenadine to a Blazin’ Apple Martini, one of her signature drinks. Was he upstairs watching the dance floor crowded with sweaty monsters and skimpily clad sirens?

She’d thought—okay, hoped—that he’d spend a good share of the evening within eyeshot. Not that she needed help or wanted him sitting smack in front of her, but she wanted to tell him how much she appreciated her set-up. This bar was a total dream, with each of the mixologists having their own stations with ice makers, individual soda and liquor guns, garbage cans, speed rails up front with the most common spirits used in mixed drinks, and—thank you, God—their own cash registers. Best of all, there was a separate station for waitresses and runners to pour their own beers and wine, so the bartenders could focus on their liquor art.

Mostly, though, she wanted him around because she enjoyed having him around.

Ugh. That doesn’t sound needy at all.

He was responsible for the safety and welfare of the five hundred imbibing customers. Of course he had a thousand things to attend to instead of mooning at her while she juggled cherries and martini glasses.

“JBlaze! When you gonna get yo’ sweet ass up on them rails, sugar?”

Jessie looked over at Eugene, the club promoter who didn’t spare her the courtesy of eye contact before shoving his head in a young coed’s cleavage. In between classes and spending time with Nate this week, Jessie had managed to catch up with a few of her uncle’s previous employees. Based on those brief conversations, Eugene seemed the likeliest candidate for bringing the drugs into Mason’s club.

Her uncle had been aware of the illegal activities and did nothing to stop them.

How many people had he hurt by turning a blind eye? It was so disappointing.

Earlier this afternoon, Mason’s sometime girlfriend Sonja had reached out, saying Mason hadn’t returned her calls for a couple days. She worried he was having a breakdown. Was it due to drugs or a chemical imbalance? Her uncle obviously needed an intervention. Maybe rehab? Jessie’s shoulders dropped. Gramma and Grandpa would be devastated. It was like her mother’s situation all over again.

First things first. Find Mason and make sure he wasn’t hurting himself or anyone else. She wanted to talk to Nate, too, because she trusted his insights. She would go from there and hope she didn’t have to involve law enforcement, but she would if she had to.

Receiving a drink order from a server, Jessie reached once more for the Goldschlager, unable to tear her eyes from the scene in front of her as Eugene raised his glass in a toast to those gathered around him. For some reason it brought to mind the Bible passage etched on the aged fireplace mantle in Nate’s special room:

You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

A shiver passed through her. Eugene turned her way in slow motion, his eyes morphing to slits of a glowing, repellent yellow. His lips retracted in a snarl to reveal a mouthful of dagger-like teeth, the black plastic spiders above his head quavering as though awakening from a long slumber.

The Goldschlager bottle slipped from her fingers to shatter on the floor. She felt the cool wetness of the liquor all the way up her thin socks, smelled the bold tang of cinnamon, and heard blood rushing in her ears, shutting off even the heavy bass of Dante’s band on the stage.

Suddenly weightless, she pushed at a solid chest. “Put me down, José!”

When he placed her atop the counter, she glanced back at Eugene.

All was normal.

No yellow eyes. No mouthful of tiger teeth. No vibrating spider web. The club promoter was merely a man in a perverted doctor’s lab coat, smiling and drinking amid a circle of laughing women.

Then he looked over once more and winked. Her breath came out in a quaking rush. Jessie swallowed with difficulty. How silly she was being. How utterly ridiculous. The Halloween decorations were influencing her imagination. Clearly, this week’s lack of sleep was catching up to her.

But she could sleep all she wanted next week.

Alone.

She closed her eyes, determined to push loneliness and thoughts of intervention aside until tomorrow. Her eyes snapped opened when someone’s hand groped her breast, but almost immediately the offender was lifted from his stool and escorted out of the club by Nate’s head of security, Dorian.

Why couldn’t Nate come to her rescue instead of José and Dorian?

A hot tide of shame filled her. She was acting clingy and insecure and purposeless. The next thing she knew she was going to start crying like a spoiled brat who’d had her candy plucked away. How could she be an example for the downtrodden if she couldn’t even pick herself up from the weight of her emotions?

Maybe a mood disorder thing ran in her family after all.

“You gonna get back to work, Blaze, or you gonna sit there all night looking tasty and gettin’ the men riled up enough to get their asses kicked out the club?” The other mixologist, Drake, tossed a bottle up in the air, caught it, and poured a shot with his unique flair. José wheeled the mop bucket to the edge of the bar where a member of the kitchen staff retrieved it.

Jessie slid off the counter. She’d clean José’s station later, since he’d tidied up her Goldschlager mess. She’d have a few more messes to deal with shortly, but she would do it on her own like she always had.

A girl didn’t climb out of a dumpster only to fold at the first prick of hardship.

“Yo, Jessie, I need two Blazin’ Heat Moonshines and one Legal Brief with three cherries, please!”

Jessie nodded at the sleek, cat-suited server, grateful for the order. Grateful to have created something people enjoyed even if it was only sweet-tasting liquid courage. When she placed the last drink on the server’s tray, she glanced toward the stage. She smiled and started to wave in greeting to Dante, but his hands holding the drumsticks had frozen, pausing mid-song, staring at someone or something in the crowd so intently it made her stomach drop.

Jessie’s gaze rapidly scanned the faces below Dante, trying to identify who or what was affecting him so keenly, but the dance floor was too crowded and half the faces were covered with costume paint or a mask.

Dante had always been a rock amid sifting sands in her life. Not much rattled him. Not giving up an MIT scholarship so he could help his sister build her motorcycle repair business after their parents’ death. Nor being wrongly convicted and spending a year of his life behind bars in place of one of his buddies, so his friend could stay home and care for his dying wife.

He’d told her he’d sought ugliness so he could better appreciate beauty. Exposed himself to hate so he could feel the depths of love. He said extremes forged character. For how could he know one if he didn’t intimately know its opposite?

Jessie poured a whiskey neat as the Dead Enders launched into the final set of their allotted gig. What could have given Dante such pause? A small voice inside urged her to ignore it all. To carry on with her job, and later, enjoy her last night with Nate. To return home with Scourge and make a fresh start tomorrow when she’d have fewer worries and more money in the bank after fulfilling her contract.

Dante can take care of himself.

Yes, but...

Something was wrong.

She knew it. Call it a sixth sense, intuition, whatever…

She felt it.

Jessie turned and motioned to Stark, a security team member here temporarily from Katherine’s Hawaiian club AQUA. Stark nonchalantly pushed away from the pillar that belched green mist from a fog machine and wove toward her through the crowd, his golden haired, blue-eyed looks capturing more than a few interested gazes along the way. Jessie capped the whiskey and set it on the mirrored shelf behind her when Stark none-too-gently nudged aside the frat boys in front of her station.

“These jokers bothering you, Little Red?”

She shook her head rapidly, pressing her hand against her fluttering midsection as the uneasy sensation multiplied. “Can you find Nate and ask him to stop by when he has a minute?”

She should have felt better when Stark was en route to Nate, but she didn’t. Her eyes scanned the dance floor, lifting to take in the balconies, and all she saw were angels, devils, and monsters.