Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge Read Online Free PDF Page B

to make.
    “What did you say?” Bailey said again, her voice quavering.
    He jerked his head toward the street. “Walk with me?”
    “How about you come inside and tell me?”
    Zane craned his neck past her, toward the inside of the house, and lowered his voice. “This isn’t anything your folks need to hear.”
    Bailey frowned. The silence of the last four years notwithstanding, Zane had been close enough to Bailey’s parents to practically be family. The same had been true of Bailey to Zane—well, to his uncle Garrett, anyway, who was basically Zane’s father. Secrets weren’t really a thing they did.
    Unless …
    She looked Zane in the eyes, the one part of him that seemed unchanged since first grade. Behind his glasses, they were that same cool gray, always on the verge of sparking with excitement about something. Like right now.
    “My place,” Zane said. “Come on. I think I’ve got a box of doughnuts or something.”
    Bailey considered.
    “Fine.” She opened the door a crack. “I’m going out! Be back, uh, soon!”
    They headed down Sunnyside toward Welles Park, where together they had spent a lot of time climbing around the playgroundor running through the fields, pretending to be dinosaurs or cowboys or robots, depending on what movie had just come out. But they weren’t kids anymore, and Bailey didn’t feel like playing. Suddenly every rustling leaf was the two-second warning of another skinless hellbeast, about to drag her to the ground and devour her from the inside out.
    “You all right?” Zane asked. “You look scared.”
    “Fine,” Bailey said, a little too quickly. “Fine.”
    “You’re safe during the day. Tremens don’t like the light—burns those weird muscles of theirs. And there’s fewer drunk people for them to feed off of.”
    “Tremens?” said Bailey with the nonchalance she imagined cool people used to greet everything, even descriptions of skinless not-a-dog demon things.
    “The thing you saw—killed, rather.” He nodded. “I caught the end of it. You did well.”
    Bailey’s fake coolness evaporated. “You
what
?” She stopped abruptly, and Zane overshot her by two steps. Her voice was shaking. “You saw me there and you didn’t
help
?”
    Zane put up his hands. “I showed up just in time to see you punch it. And I didn’t approach you afterward because you had superstrength and none of the training to use it. You would’ve been a danger to anyone near you. Even me.”
    “Superstrength,” she said. “I have superstrength.”
    “Had,” he corrected. “But if you want to take a moment to try flexing your guns, be my guest.”
    Bailey didn’t have time for this. Zane was being too cryptic. “Well, did you catch the other one or—”
    “There was no other one. Tremens hunt solo. They’re too greedy to share. And too stupid to work together. Come on.”
    Zane led her out of the park and up to Wilson, then hung a left until they reached the blocky sand-colored apartment buildingwhere Zane lived—just Zane, alone, like an actual adult. The place was classic Chicago style: three floors, high ceilings, and sunrooms that stuck out toward the sidewalk and made Bailey twitchy with envy. In her price range, natural light was as easy to come by as reliable hot water.
    “Zane,” she said, because he was humming to himself as he rummaged for his keys, “you promised you’d explain. Stop fucking around.”
    “I’m not—” He stopped humming and sighed. “Look, this whole thing is best shown, not told. You trust me, right?”
    Once upon a time Bailey would’ve trusted Zane to do anything, whether it was keeping quiet when she’d gotten that C+ or keeping his back turned while she changed out of her bathing suit. But that was before he tried to tell her that skinless demons stalked the streets of Chicago. Nothing, in other words, was what it seemed.
    Unfortunately she didn’t really have a choice.
    “Right,” she said, and she followed him up the