Gil sized him up. “Normally, yes, but we’ll make an exception for you this time. The rules are different out here. I didn’t like the idea of leaving you alone at the cabin, and I sure as hell don’t like the idea of leaving you in a parking lot outside a bar full of werewolves.”
“Wow,” Asher said. “My first bar.”
I wagged my finger at him. “You’re still not getting any drinks, though, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Asher frowned. “I don’t care about that. If I did I would have sweet-talked you into letting me have a beer ages ago.”
“Touché,” I said.
“It’s still a rite of passage, okay? Don’t burst my damn bubble.”
Gil chuckled. “Yeah, don’t burst the kid’s bubble, Sterling. Just because you were old enough to drink back in the eighteenth century doesn’t mean you get to boss him around.”
I shoved Gil in the chest, prompting laughter. I wasn’t even pissed about it, just annoyed on principle. “I’m not that old, you prick.”
Asher patted me on the back as he passed me. “It’s okay, Grandpa. We’ll love you no matter how ancient and decrepit you really are.”
“Thin ice, Mayhew,” I grumbled. “And you too, Ramirez.”
A woman waited at the entrance. She wasn’t wielding the clipboard and wearing the headset I’d come to associate with glitzier clubs. Instead she wore something that looked just as comfortable for chopping wood as it was for getting in a fistfight. In a denim jacket, ripped fishnets, and combat boots, with her red hair streaked through with blonde slashes, the Dead Dog’s bouncer looked like she’d fit in just fine at a punk gig. She tilted her head, grinning with familiarity as we approached.
“Jackie,” Gil said, lowering his head. “Been a long time.”
“It sure has.” Jackie cocked her hip, trailing a finger down the side of Gil’s cheek, then his chest. Oh. That kind of history. Gil turned away, clearing his throat. “You here to meet someone?”
“You know I am.”
She cast a quick glance across me and Asher. “Who are these two?”
“Friends,” Gil said.
Jackie eyed me from head to toe and back, the distaste clear on her face. I grinned right back.
“The bloodsucker can come in,” she said. “But you gotta leave the kid out here with me.”
Asher gawped, unsure of what to say. Gil shrugged. “Fine by me.”
“I could lose my liquor license,” Jackie said, appraising Asher a little more closely. “Can’t let just any baby boy walk into the Dead Dog like that, can I?”
Asher gulped. I rolled my eyes. So did Gil, to my surprise. He gripped Asher by the shoulder. “You’ll be fine out here. Jackie will keep an eye on you. She won’t eat you. Probably.”
Jackie tossed her hair and laughed. “Not in the way you think, Ramirez. Now shoo. Asher and I have things to talk abo
ut.”
I grinned at Asher, gleefully ignoring his mouthed “Help me” as we walked towards the entrance. When Gil pushed open the door into the Dead Dog, the last thing I heard behind us was the smile in Asher’s voice as he put on his best, most charismatic self. Attaboy.
But whatever Asher told Jackie to make her giggle was drowned out by the strains of rock music piped through huge speakers, and a persistent roar of conversation. I’d somehow expected to walk into an active bar fight, but the denizens of the Dead Dog were more interested in talking than anything. Pockets of people uniformly dressed in various combinations of denim and leather lined the walls, or sat at chipped wooden tables, each little group occupied in its own conversation.
Our intrusion didn’t go unnoticed, though. Heads turned as we passed. Expressions of recognition or plain neutral apathy were saved for Gil. I got a more distinctly even welcome of annoyance, anger, even a little revulsion. A vampire walks into a werewolf bar, eh? Everyone knew what I was, and nobody liked it. You might say it’s the pale skin and the undead swagger. I say it’s the chiseled perfection of my drop dead gorgeous face.
A man about as rugged and hirsute as good old Gilberto Ramirez himself strode up to us, though he gave me quite the wide berth. He clapped Gil on the shoulder in greeting, then immediately tilted his head in my direction. Even in the din of a noisy bar, vampire hearing is perfectly sensitive enough for picking out disses.
“Gil, the fuck are you doing bringing a vamp in here? You know he’s going to be pissed.”
I draped myself along Gil’s shoulder, grinning full in the wolf’s face. “Just who is going to be pissed, exactly?” Him, I guess, for starters.
“Sterling,” Gil growled. “I told you to behave.”