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William leans over the back of the couch and turns my face up toward him with two clawed fingers under my chin, careful of the points. He kisses me upside down. His hand goes to stone along my jaw. He leaves it there.

I lie back on Merek, with Lenart’s hand on my ankle and Tav’s head against my shoulder and William’s fingers in my hair.

“It’s eight-forty,” Lenart says. “Doors at nine.”

“He set an alarm,” Merek says.

“I looked at a clock. She has to be on the premises when we open.”

“I know,” I say, and don’t move. Merek doesn’t either. Lenart sighs and waits two more minutes before he stands up.

Kit has my station, and she’s perfect, and I tell her so from my stool at the end of the bar. She tells me to go sit somewhere else, so I spend most of the night on the couch in Lenart’s office with my feet up.

At midnight, all four of them walk me around back to the brick room behind the bar. Tav goes in first and checks it, the way he said he would. Then he ducks under the pipe and stands aside.

I put my palm on the ward stone. It’s warm. Under my hand, the building settles.

I’ve done this enough nights now that it’s not the part I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about the four of them. Last week they crowded in here to keep me alive. Tonight Merek’s yawning, and Lenart’s checking the time, and William is leaning on the doorframe with his wings tucked, and Tav’s got his head bent under the pipe.

We close at three. Merek drives me back.

Nobody goes home.

Tav drags the guest mattress out of the spare room and puts it on the floor in front of the sectional, and when he lies down on it, his feet hang off the end. Merek gets on the long end of the couch behind me with his arm over my waist. Lenart doesn’t sleep at night, so he takes the armchair, pulls it up close, and puts my feet in his lap, and opens a book. William sits on the floor beside the mattress with his back against the sectional, close to my head, his wings folded.

Billy Bob can’t get up on the couch. He stands at the edge and howls about it until Tav reaches up and lifts him on. He walks straight up the middle, turns around twice, and lies down at the end of the couch. Then he stretches out and takes up the rest of the cushion.

Chapter seventeen

Tara

On Tuesday afternoon, three days before Lammas, I'm standing on a step stool behind the main bar, counting bottles of Bénédictine.

It's my stool. Tav finished it the second week of July. It has three steps now, not two, and he carved a T into the side of the top one where nobody would see it unless they were looking. It lives at my station. Kit uses it when I'm not here and puts it back right where it goes, because Tav told her to.

The Club is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, so the bar is quiet except for the dishwasher running in the back and Merek on the phone in the corner booth, yelling at a liquor distributor. My knees healed by the Fourth of July. Odette cleared me on the seventh and told me to stop climbing the speed rack, which is the other reason Tav finished the stool.

I've been on the schedule ever since. Five nights a week, nine to three. Every midnight, my palm on the ward stone in the brick room behind the bar, and one of them, or all four, standing in the doorway. I haven't missed one.

Most mornings I wake up at Merek's. Some nights after close I go up to Lenart's suite, or to William's room under the roof, or I fall asleep on Tav's green quilt with a record still going. Nobody keeps score. Lenart tried to put it on the calendar once, and Merek deleted the whole calendar, and Lenart restored it from a backup, and they didn't speak for a day.

Friday, it's supposed to become permanent.

I'm writing Bénédictine, 4 on the clipboard when William comes in through the kitchen door with his laptop under his arm and Tav ducking in behind him.

"Tara Iverson," William says. "Can you come upstairs?"

He doesn't say it's bad. He doesn't have to. Tav's carrying one of the gray maintenance binders.

"Merek," I say. "Hang up."

Lenart's office has the blinds down against the afternoon. William puts the laptop on the desk and turns it toward me.

"After the vault," he says, "I started comparing three things. Grady's work orders, the Club's payments, and what the cameras saw. They're supposed to agree."

"And they don't," I say.

"Two of them don't."