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“I know. Drink it anyway. I’ll get the kitchen to send you some fries.”

“Mead,” he says. He leans in closer, and the bar groans under his forearms. “Now.”

“Not tonight, big guy.” I keep my voice friendly and level, and my hands where he can see them. “You’re done with the mead. Water’s free, fries are on me, and if you want, I’ll call you a ride.”

“You’re new,” he rumbles.

“I am.”

“New people don’t cut me off.”

“Then I’m setting a trend.”

I think he’s going to come over the bar. Then a wave of heat rolls in against my right side, and I don’t have to look to know who’s standing beside me.

“Problem, Gorrin?” Merek asks.

He doesn’t raise his voice. He’s just there, enormous and comfortable, with one hand resting on the bar next to mine.

The troll looks at him. Then he looks at me.

“She cut me off,” he says, sounding wounded.

“She did,” Merek agrees. “That means you’re cut off. Drink your water. Eat your fries. Pell will get you a car when you’re ready.”

A security guard, a slim woman with very long fingers, appears at the troll’s elbow. Gorrin looks from her to Merek and back to me, then picks up the pint of water and drinks it in one go, the same way he did the mead.

“Good fries here,” he tells me, as if that settles everything.

“The best,” I say.

Pell steers him toward a booth. Merek doesn’t take his hand off the bar.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I say. “I had it.”

“I know you had it.” He looks down at me, and his eyes are amused. “I’m making sure Gorrin knows you had it, so he doesn’t try it again next Saturday.”

That’s not a bad answer.

He has a job, and I watch him do it. A server comes to him with a scheduling problem, and he knows her name and her kid’s name and fixes it in thirty seconds. A barback drops a case of glasses, and Merek’s first question is whether he cut his hands. Everyone on the floor relaxes a little when he walks past, and nobody seems to find it strange that the man they’re relaxing around has horns and a tail.

But every time he finishes a job, he ends up back at my end of the bar.

The Club runs cold, the ventilation pumping chilled air across the floor to keep two hundred bodies comfortable, and by ten I’ve stopped feeling my fingertips. Then Merek leans on the bar beside me, and the cold just stops. He gives off heat like a woodstove. I find myself angling toward him before I realize I’m doing it.

He notices. Of course he does.

“You’re cold,” he says.

“I’m working.”

“You can do both.” He nods at my hands. “Your fingers are white.”

“Your bar’s air-conditioned like a meat locker.”

“My bar,” he says, with a grin, “has a lot of patrons who run hot.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”