“Hurry up!” Damien shouted over his shoulder.
Leo and Evelyn followed him to the end of a dark street a few blocks over.
“I thought we were going to a bar?” Evelyn asked. “These are townhouses.”
Damien jogged up to the front door of the second-to-last house on the left. “It wouldn’t be ahiddengem if it were out in the open, Princess.”
He waved his hand over the doorknob. A lock unlatched and then the door flew open. A gust of wind billowed out of the house, carrying a faint scent of alcohol.
Evelyn peeked through the doorway, expecting to see an entryway to the home. Maybe a kitchen or hall closet. Instead, a brightly lit staircase descended below street level. “Thefront doorleads to a basement?”
“Amagically altered doorprovides access to an underground bar,” Leo clarified.
“Are you coming or not?” Damien asked impatiently.
They walked down the stairs, and the music became gradually louder. A short hallway at the bottom of the stairs opened up into a cavernous space, larger than the ballroom at the palace. A bar spanned the length of the wall, with several bartenders spaced out to accommodate all the patrons. Half the room had tables of various sizes, while the other half was open for dancing.
Damien went straight to the bar, forgetting his friends entirely.
“This is massive,” Evelyn reeled. “Is it all magic?”
“No, actually, someone fully built this place,” Leo explained. “We’re underneath the road. None of the homes here have basements.”
“There must be at least three hundred people down here.”
“Most of them are probably soldiers blowing off steam.”
Evelyn spotted Damien talking to a tattooed bartender. “Is that Angelina?”
“Yes.”
“Are they… together?”
“Sometimes.” Leo led her to a high table at a quieter edge of the room. “Wait here. I’ll get us something to drink.”
Leo risked Damien’s wrath to bother Angelina for service at the bar. Evelyn stood at the table and observed the room.
There’s a live band in the corner, so the music is real. But how much of the room is an illusion I can’t see?
There were dimly lit lamps along the walls; enough to see where you were going but not enough to feel exposed. Plenty of people were taking advantage of the dark privacy.
“You look familiar,” a silken voice told her.
Evelyn jumped. A man had appeared at her table, standing directly across from her.
Where did he come from?
The man looked young, like Leo and Damien, but that didn’t mean much with fae. He was lean, slightly taller than Leo, and had wavy silver hair. Not gray, but shiny silver. His eyes were dark and he had a cocky grin on his face.
“Do I?” Evelyn responded.
He gazed at her hair. “I would recognize those curls anywhere.”
“I think I would remember you if we’d met before.”
The man leaned toward her. “Is that a compliment?”
“No,” Evelyn lied.
