Kennedy did lines on the coffee table next to her.
This wasn’t unusual. They often sneaked in here to get high. Hearing me, they turned their heads in unison.
“You started without me,” I said, and dropped down next to them to do a line. “Rude.”
We stayed like that until the sun had long since disappeared into black night, trading in our gowns for plush, oversize sweats.
“I need to get fucked,” Blaire said, sounding bored. She was on the floor now, her head propped against my couch at an awkward angle. “I only have, like, two days left before my period.”
“So?” Kennedy asked.
“So I don’t want some fucking psycho to tell a blog how he got his red wings with me,” Blaire snapped.
“Jesus Christ, are you sure you haven’t started it already?” Kennedy muttered.
As they bickered, I stared out my balcony’s French doors. A sliver of the stone railing was visible through the glass. I rubbed my fingers together, feeling the ghost of Grim’s ash from earlier this morning.
“Let’s go,” I said, standing up.
“Where?” Kennedy asked.
I know I shouldn’t want to go there. I should stay as far away from Grim as possible. And yet…
“The Underworld.”
Just a short while later, we arrived. In my silver-pink Hervé Léger, with my tits pushed up and rose gold hair to match my rose gold dress and stilettos, for a few minutes I felt at home. No quicksand, just time to be Queen Gemma.
Everyone thought of druggies as greasy,Requiem for a Dreamaddicts who steal your wallet. Not only was that, well,crazy rude, but it was a straight-up lie. Everyone I know is on something. From the Goody Two-shoes assholes at my old school who took addy to up their test scores, to my friends looking to party, to my own fucking mother.
It was a world of glitterati who are dead without an extra pill or two, where someone would pop a pill with one hand and donate to a senator who spent all his time funding anti-drug laws with the other.
Andthatwas the world Grim Reyes ruled.
“I feel like I’ve already fucked every guy here.” Blaire sighed. “And no one made me want to go back for seconds.”
“That guy in the black turtleneck just exited,” Kennedy offered. “He’s worth, like, acouple billion.”
“I’m looking to get fucked tonight, so unless his dick is as big as his portfolio, no thanks.”
“Why don’t you go stand in line?” Kennedy said. “Maybe they’ll call you up.”
Blaire’s mouth parted. “I know you didn’t just call me a groupie.”
Everyone wanted to fuck a Horsemen, so many that there was always a line at the bottom of the stairs, just hoping one of them glanced in their direction and waved them up.
“The stairs are never guarded,” Kennedy pointed out. “Anyone can walk up them.”
Blaire glared at her. “Then you go do it.”
She wrapped her “definitely not filled or anything” lips around a neon-pink straw, staying silent.
My eyes traveled to the balcony, where one lone shadow stood, his back to the club.
Grim.
He’d been there since we arrived, never turning around. I stared at his back, and a feeling—anurge—took over. My mother called it a pathological need for attention, but it was also darker than that. Primeval. Something that had existed in my soul before I’d had a body.
I climbed onto the table and started to dance.
