Page 37 of Soft Flannel Hank

The bass thumped so heavily in the club Esther could feel it reverberating in her ribcage. She wore a tight, ribbed, black tank top with the club’s name and logo on it. But instead of the usual red, the Sanguine logo was green. She wore a green sweatband around her forearm, a metal bottle opener tucked into it. Her red curls were piled high on top of her head, and she had a green silk scarf tied like a bandana just above her hairline.

Her black jeans were tight, and the bottoms of her Doc Martens stuck to the black honeycomb bar mats beneath her feet. She smiled and poured drink after drink after drink for a crowd that seemed to multiply as the night went on.

People in various states of dress and undress, all in green, crushed into the club. She was sure the club was over capacity and violating at least a dozen fire safety codes. But she could nothing about that, so she kept pouring. At least the money would be good tonight, if the overflowing glass tip vases were any indication.

Savannah, Georgia, hosted the country’s second-largest St. Patrick’s Day celebration. This was her first year participating, even if she was working. She asked the barback to empty the tip vases and turned to her next customers, a group of college-aged girls who were dressed as what appeared to be different shapes of Lucky Charms cereal. Esther mixed their drinks—two margaritas, a cosmo, an LIT, and a Bud Light.

A man slid up to the bar next to the girls, and as Esther leaned in to ask if they wanted to start a tab, she heard him say, “I bet you’re magically delicious,” with a wink. Esther rolled her eyes, but the Lucky Charms collapsed against one another in a fit of giggles.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the one with the horseshoe marshmallow painted on her green cropped shirt replied, tossing her hair.

Esther knew this guy. He was a vampire and hung out at the club often. He had blue eyes and dirty blond hair that he probably spent ten minutes arranging to make it look as if he just rolled out of bed. He loomed, tall and thin and slippery.

“Tab?” Esther interrupted, before he could say something else. “Do you want to start a tab?”

The vampire slid a matte black credit card across the counter without looking Esther’s way. “Put these on mine,” he said smoothly.

Esther rolled her eyes again, but turned and ran the card. He swiped it off the bar where she laid it, and then it was as if Esther never existed. He flirted with the girls, and they flirted back. Esther didn’t know this man personally, but she didn’t like him. Her intuition made her feel itchy looking at him, as if something was off.

But she wasn’t being paid to police the actions of the patrons in the bar or to refuse them service for only seeming shady without actually doing anything wrong. Shewasbeing paid to pour drinks. Her livelihood depended upon it.

Esther’s grandmother, the woman who had raised her and taught her all the witchcraft she knew, had died suddenly of an abdominal aortic aneurysm at the beginning of December, leaving Esther to observe Yule all by herself. Among everything else.

Her grief had been dulled by her panic as she found herself completely and utterly alone in the world. Kate MacLaren had been kicked out of her Savannah coven for reasons she never told Esther and so they’d been a coven of three with Shannon for as long as Esther could remember. But without her grandmother’s larger-than-life presence, Esther found herself completely adrift.

She’d been teaching art at a rural middle school but when the superintendent had called for budget cuts, art had been the first program to go. She’d lost her job just before losing her grandmother.

And then the bank started calling. It seemed that her grandmother had worked hard to keep her financial struggles a secret from Esther. The only way to pay off the debt was to sell the house, which had been in the family for more than one hundred and fifty years.

The profits had enabled her to pay the debts and left her enough money to get an apartment in a small town outside of Savannah. Nobody had been particularly interested in hiring a thirty-four-year-old with an art degree until Callum MacLeod.

She’d heard through a shifter friend of hers that a brand-new vampire nightclub was hiring bartenders, and she’d applied that same day. She remembered walking into Sanguine. From the outside, it looked like any of the other historical buildings one might find on the square. But instead of entering a foyer and multiple parlors and other rooms, the door opened into a wide, open space with staircases hugging the walls leading up to three more levels.

The decor was luxurious, black and gold and red, and the stained and sealed concrete floor swirled with the same colors. A large, circular bar sat in the center of the room, and at it sat a blond man in a suit. The door had closed loudly behind her, and in the blink of an eye, he was in front of her. Esther’s logical brain wasn’t surprised by his speed, even if her nervous system didn’t get that memo. She jumped.

“Apologies,” the man said, his voice deeper than any she’d heard before.

“I’m surprised you did that,” she said, adjusting her purse strap on her shoulder. “I could have been a normal human.”

“But ye are nae a normal human, are ye?” he replied in a thick, Scottish brogue.

“You didn’t know that, though.”

“Esther,” he said, rolling the r in her name, savoring it between his tongue and teeth, “Ye wouldnae have an interview at this club if ye were a normal human.” He chuckled. “But if ye had been a wee human lamb that stumbled into here and been scared, I would have glamoured ye, lass, and nae harm been done. Aye?”

She hadn’t at all liked that answer. A lamb is exactly what she felt like.

Callum MacLeod didn’t ask her any of the usual interview questions.Talk to me about your previous employment. Can you describe a time when you provided excellent customer service? Do you know the first thing about tending bar?

I taught art to preteens. I spent three hours last night on the phone with a credit card company. No.

Instead, he asked her about her witchcraft. Her potions. Her elixirs.

“Now, lass, say I wanted to make a few signature cocktails. Have ye any… mood-boosting tonics that ye make?”

“I don’t believe in giving people potions that they didn’t ask for.”

“What if it was in the description? What if they asked for the drink specifically?”