“Shem! For fuck’s sake!” I snapped at him, but he just smirked at me,
“Lighten up, Lil. I’m only joking.”
“It’s not funny,” I grumbled.
Suddenly, Rafael appeared and slid onto the barstool next to Shem.
“Okay. I got someone to cover, but he’s a friend of mine. He doesn’t have any Voodoo experience. He’ll have to essentially act as a glorified barback until we can get him trained up.”
I frowned at that. “No one who works here could take the shift?”
Rafael shook his head and picked up one of Shem’s lemon wheels, eyeing it critically. “No, and we needed to hire someone to replace Jezebel anyway, so I suppose now is as good a time as ever to try out someone new. If the two of you pull tonight off, I’ll offer him a full-time job, and you can train him.”
This was highly unusual for Voodoo. Rafael rarely hired bartenders without previous Voodoo experience, even if they had worked at other bars. You had to start as a server and work your way up. Considering we were now down two bartenders, I supposed it made sense that he needed to make an exception.
Beggars couldn’t be choosers, after all.
“All monsters are human.”
— SISTER JUDE, AMERICAN HORROR STORY: ASYLUM
My heart was pounding. I chewed on my thumbnail nervously as people started to file into the restaurant. Shem was strategically seating them in rotation. He was doing the best he could to steer people away from the bar to keep me from getting overwhelmed, but it was inevitable. Soon, we would be on a waitlist, and people would crowd around to get drinks and mingle while they waited for a table. The chit machine sprang to life, and I went to work making the first cocktails of the night.
I was shaking up a Poisoned Pear Sour when Rafael approached service with the most attractive man I had ever seen in my life.
He towered over Raf and was dressed in Voodoo’s mandatory black collared shirt and dress pants. Like Shem, he had rolled the sleeves up to his elbows, but his arms werecompletelycovered with tattoos.
Skulls and snakes twisted together up his forearms, and I imagined they covered the rest of him under his shirt because they continued up his neck to his cut jaw. He was lean but well-muscled. His arms were corded with veins, and his fingers were dripping in silver rings. The one on the middle finger of his left hand had a goat’s head on it, with two wickedly curved horns that nearly grazed his knuckle.
The man’s eyes were the clearest hazel I had ever seen. They were a brandy amber around the pupil that bled to a shocking teal green on the outer edge of the iris. His eyes were lined with thick, black lashes, and his dark, ashy-brown hair was faded short on the sides but left long on top. A series of silver earrings and cuffs marched up his right ear, and his brow was furrowed into one of the most aggressive and unfriendly scowls I had ever seen.
“Here’s your name tag.” Raf handed the man a small piece of plastic, and he glanced down at it, his lip curling up into a disgusted sneer.
“Really?”he asked Raf, looking at the nametag like he would rather light himself on fire than put it on. Raf gave him a stern look and nodded.
“Yes, really.”
The man’s scowl deepened, but he pinned the tag to his shirt and turned those angry, hazel eyes on me. My frantically beating heart nearly stopped at the hostility in his gaze.
Great, this was going to fuckingsuck.This guy seemed like a huge asshole.
Maybe you won’t get him killed then if he wants nothing to do with you.That mean little voice was back, and this time, it was right. Maybe it was a good thing this guy seemed to hate me on sight. My demon probably loved that I would be trapped behind a bar with this douchebag all night.
“Lilith, this is Reaver. He’ll be standing in for Sam tonight, but if this goes well, we’ll make him more of a permanent fixture.”
“Hi,” I said, giving him a friendly wave despite the fact that he was looking at me like he wanted me dead. I wished I could tell him to quit while he was ahead—I tried... more than once. I wouldn’t be dying anytime soon, no matter how hard he willed it into existence.
He just curled his lip like he smelled something terrible and flipped up the drop-hatch to let himself behind the bar.
“Alright, I’ll leave you to it,” Rafael said before heading over to the host stand to help out Shem, who was already looking a little overwhelmed.
I turned around to find Reaver leaning back against the floor-to-ceiling liquor display with his phone out. I gasped.
Who did this asshole think he was?!
Phones werenotallowed behind the bar. Guests were already starting to crowd the wood, looking at him expectantly, but he ignored them in favor of whatever the hell he was reading on his phone.
“Um, hey. No phones on the floor,” I said, trying to sound sure of myself. He looked up at me and gave me a once-over. His hazel eyes skimmed the hem of my skirt, and I clenched my thighs together, suddenly feeling naked under his gaze. Finally, he glanced back up at me, and I thought he might say something, but then he thought better of it and decided to completely ignore me, looking back down at his phone instead.
