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“That,” says the troll standing on the other side of me, who is about eight feet tall and roughly the shape of a refrigerator in a tuxedo, “is our room.”

The room in question is the reinforced suite at the end of the left-hand corridor, the one with the steel frame Tav said was his. Somebody has taken the frame down and stacked it against the wall. There are already two dozen harpies inside it, unpacking crates of decorations and gold balloons, and there are at least as many trolls in the corridor, in suits and dresses, holding gifts. One of them is holding a cake the size of a tractor tire. A few of them have been drinking in the lounge for an hour while they waited, and it shows.

I have been an owner of this Club for four days. I’ve worked one shift. I’ve done payroll paperwork, been locked in a freezer, and had sex with a vampire.

Nobody prepared me for this.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Let’s figure this out.”

Behind me, a troll sits down on an ordinary lounge chair that someone carried down the corridor for him. It makes a sound like a gunshot and folds under him like cardboard. He lands on the floor and looks very surprised about it.

“I want to speak to a manager,” says somebody.

“I want a refund,” says somebody else.

Everybody looks at me.

A week ago, I was arguing with Rick about whether I was allowed to cut off a drunk who’d grabbed my wrist. Now I’m the manager.

Technically, I’m the boss of the manager.

“Give me ten minutes,” I tell them both.

Corinne finds me halfway down the corridor, with her tablet already out and her face pale.

“It’s my fault,” she says. “Or the system’s. Both.” She turns the screen toward me. “We moved bookings into the new software in May. The reinforced suite used to be listed as Suite R. Now it’s Room Nine. The trolls booked Suite R last winter, under the old system. The harpies booked Room Nine in March, under the new one. It looked like two different rooms. It isn’t.”

“So nobody’s lying.”

“Nobody’s lying. Both parties paid in full.” She pushes her hair back. “I’m so sorry, Tara. I should have caught it.”

I look at the screen. Two bookings. Two deposits. One room.

I’ve seen this before, at a much smaller scale. Lucky’s once double-booked the back room for a fortieth birthday and a funeral reception, and Rick’s solution was to hide in his office.

“Okay,” I say. “Where’s Tav?”

He’s on the loading dock, signing for a delivery of ice, and he gets to me in under three minutes.

Yesterday, he drove me out to Sauvie Island in a delivery truck and back again, and in three hours he said maybe forty words, most of them about mint. I spent the whole ride thinking he was the quiet one. The big, sweet, quiet one, who doesn’t talk much because he doesn’t need to.

That lasts about thirty seconds.

He comes down the corridor ducking his horns under each light fixture, takes one look at the room, the trolls, the harpies, the broken chair, and the cake, and starts talking.

“The trolls can’t go anywhere else,” he says. “This is the only room down here rated for them. Floor’s on a steel slab. Every other lounge is joists. You put forty trolls on joists and dance, you have damage.”

“Okay. So the harpies move.”

“The harpies can’t go in a lounge with a low ceiling. That’s twenty-six wingspans.” His ears flick back toward the room. “They’ll open them when they dance. You need fourteen feet, minimum, or somebody loses an eye.”

One of the barbacks, a skinny kid with gills, raises his hand. “What about Lounge Four? It’s big.”

“Eight-foot ceiling,” Tav says, without looking at him. “And there’s a sprinkler head right in the middle.”

“What about the siren suite?”

“Seats eight.”