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I look up at him. He’s standing in the middle of the corridor with his arms folded and his tail swinging slowly, thinking, and I realize he knows every room in this building down to the ceiling height and the floor joists. He’s been doing this math the whole time I’ve known him. I just never asked.

“Is there anything with a high ceiling?” I ask.

He looks down at me. His ears come forward.

“The Arches,” he says.

The Arches is at the far end of the left-hand corridor, past the reinforced suite, behind a pair of iron doors that look like they haven’t been opened in a month. Tav opens them with one hand.

It’s an old cistern. That’s the only way I can describe it. A long, brick-vaulted room with arches running the whole length of it, the ceiling twenty-five feet up at the top of the curve, lit by iron lanterns. There’s a raised platform at one end, a parquet floor, and nothing else.

“Why isn’t anybody using this?”

“No bar,” Tav says. “Nobody wants to run drinks all the way back here. We use it for galas. Twice a year.”

“No bar,” I repeat.

I look at the length of the room. I look at the platform. I think about the siren suite, back up the same corridor, small and padded and warded. I think about twenty-six excited harpies and one bride.

“Tav,” I say. “The siren suite. Will the walls hold a harpy?”

He thinks about it seriously, the way he thought about the joists. “The wards are built for compulsion. Harpies don’t do compulsion. They do volume.” He pauses. “The panels will take the volume. We had a harpy choir in here in 2019 for a recording. Nothing broke.”

“Then here’s the plan.”

I talk to the bride.

Not the maid of honor, who has been doing most of the screaming, and not the bride’s mother, who has very large talons and has been tapping them on her purse in a way that makes the staff nervous. The bride. She’s standing in the corner of the reinforced suite holding a bouquet of black lilies, trying very hard not to cry, and nobody’s said a word to her in ten minutes.

“Hi,” I say. “I’m Tara. I’m one of the owners. I’m really sorry. This is our mistake, not yours.”

She looks at me. Her eyes are huge and gold. “We’ve been planning this since January.”

“I know. So here’s what I want to offer you.” I point back down the corridor. “There’s a room down here called the Arches. Twenty-five-foot ceilings. Nobody else gets to use it tonight. You can open your wings as wide as you want, all of you, and nobody’s going to hit a light fixture. We’ll put a full bar in it, just for your party, with a bartender who’s only yours all night.” I don’t say the bartender’s going to be me. “And at midnight, we’ll open the siren suite, just up the corridor, and it’s yours for an hour. It’s soundproofed for the loudest voices in the building. You can sing in there as loud as you want.”

Her lower lip stops wobbling.

“Harpies don’t usually get to sing indoors,” she says slowly.

“Tonight you do.”

“Can we name a drink?”

I think about the rail behind the main bar and what I can make in bulk out of what we have. “Gin, elderflower, lemon, and a little blackberry. We’ll call it whatever you want.”

She looks at her maid of honor. The maid of honor looks at the bride’s mother. The bride’s mother stops tapping her talons.

“The Lilith,” the bride says. “After me.”

“The Lilith,” I say. “Done.”

Then I go and tell the trolls they’re staying right where they are, and the father of the groom bursts into tears, which I wasn’t expecting. He’s at least eight feet tall and has a face like a landslide, and he pulls a handkerchief the size of a pillowcase out of his jacket and blows his nose on it and tells me his son has been in love with this girl since they were forty.

“Forty?”

“Years old,” he says, wounded. “Very young. Too young, his mother thought.”

“He’s lucky,” I say, and he cries harder.