Page 10 of Heat Lightning

I blinked. “Yes, it is.” I’d spent many warm summer nights outside with my mom as a kid, catching fireflies and watching the heat lightning zip through the atmosphere. It was her favorite thing about this time of year.

“It’s normal lightning, kid. We’re just too far away to hear the thunder. Heat lightning is a myth. The air can’t actually get so hot it forms lightning.”

My cheeks warmed, and I looked away, afraid he’d see the embarrassment on my face. “Oh.”

Thankfully, he turned off the main road not long after, distracting me from feeling like a popped balloon. We slowed, creeping down a derelict strip of asphalt that’d definitely seen better days.

A large, unmarked, metal warehouse came into view up ahead, lit by a single dim street lamp. The sparse windows spaced along the roofline glowed red, intermixed with a pulsing strobe light.

It did not look like a normal club.

“What is this place?” I asked, gripping the safety handle above my head again as we bounced down the pothole-laden drive.

Joey parked in what was once a grassy meadow next to the building, but was now a mud pit, torn up by tire tracks. There were too many other cars to count lined up in haphazard rows fading into the night.

How many people knew about a place like this?

He peered over at me, but I couldn’t make out his face in the gloom. “It’s for a certain kind of crowd.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean?”

Sensing my reticence, he sighed, exasperated. “It’ll be fine, kid. Just loosen up a little. Undo a few buttons, if you know what I mean.”

My earlier embarrassment calcified. I hated when he called me kid. Twenty-three years old with dead and non-existent parents wasn’t a kid. I may not be worldly and all-knowing about clubs for a certain kind of crowd, but I paid my own goddamn taxes. I stressed about health insurance, bills, and retirement. I took care of myself, every fucking day.

Sure, maybe I was more cautious than most. But you don’t grow up with a single omega mom and not learn a thing or two about alphas and how they’ll push your boundaries too far.

It was on the tip of my tongue to demand he drive me back home. Or, I could just start walking back to the road and call an Uber. But then, over his shoulder, I swore I saw something shift in the darkness outside.

My senses tingled. A predator watches.

I thought of my apartment, dark and lonely with a scary, masked alpha lurking nearby, and sighed. Fine. I could loosen up a little to blow off the stress and hopefully shake the creep off. “Sure. Okay. Let’s go,” I said.

“‘Atta boy,” he replied with what was closer to a sneer than a smile.

Fuck, I already regretted this.

Bass pounded through the walls of the single-story, long, metal-sided building when I stepped out of the car. For real, who built a club in a warehouse?

Following Joey, we stopped in front of a door manned by no less than four bouncers—which was odd, considering there was no line—who looked us both up and down, lingering a little too long on me. I couldn’t tell if they were leering or merely assessing our age.

The fact that they didn’t demand our IDs indicated the former.

I was of average height and build for an omega, but still carried some baby fat in my cheeks. Paired with blonde hair I could never keep out of my eyes and glasses, I probably looked closer to a Jehovah’s Witness youth than someone who went to a club for a certain type of crowd.

Apparently deciding I wasn’t going to ask them to attend church on Sunday, one motioned us inside. “Have fun.”

His tone gave me the heebie-jeebies.

The temperature wasn’t any more comfortable inside. In fact, it grew worse when a narrow hallway spilled out into a large, open area full of entirely too many people to be code-compliant.

I stifled a cough. “Somebody needs to turn on a fucking fan,” I hollered over the loud music. It smelled awful, like body odor and weed mixed with something tangy coming from the thick fog pumped out of machines placed along the perimeter of the room.

I was certain I’d rather not know its purpose.

“C’mon,” he yelled back, ignoring me. Gripping my arm, he dragged me forward.

Assuming he knew where we were going, I let him lead me through the crowd of people who weren’t exactly dancing, but more grinding all over one another.