1

I knew better than to be preoccupied when Tambuku Tiki Lounge was overcapacity. Crowds are ugly; it doesn’t matter if they’re human or demon.

Our bar held a maximum of sixty-five people per California fire code. My business partner treated this rule as more of a suggestion on Thursday nights, when Paranormal Patrol made us a midtown hot spot. Easy for her; all she had to do was sweet-talk the county inspector out of a citation. She wasn’t the one being expected to break up drunken, demonic brawls.

“Hey!” My eyes zeroed in on a college kid stealing a drink off the bar. “Did you pay for that? No, you didn’t. Get your grubby paws off.”

“That woman left it,” he argued. “Possession’s two-thirds of the law.”

“Nine-tenths, jackass,” I corrected, snatching the ceramic Suffering Bastard mug out of his hand. An anguished face was molded into the side of the classic black tiki mug, half filled with a potent cocktail bearing the same name. When I dumped the contents in a small bar sink, the kid acted like I’d just thrown gold in the trash. He glared at me before stomping across the room to rejoin his broke buddies.

If I were a bartender in any other small bar in the city, I might be encouraged on occasion to double as a bouncer. As the only trained magician on staff at Tambuku, I didn’t have a choice; it was my responsibility. After two years of sweeping up broken glass and trying to avoid projectile vomit, I’d seen enough demons-gone-wild behavior that would make a boring, corporate desk job appear attractive to any normal person. Good thing I wasn’t normal.

“Arcadia? Cady? Hello?”

Amanda leaned across an empty bar stool, waving her hand in front of my face.

“Sorry, what?”

“I said that I need another Scorpion Bowl for booth three. Jeez, you’re distracted tonight,” she complained, unloading two empty wooden snack dishes from her tray before circling around the L-shaped bar top to join me.

“How wasted are they?” I craned my neck to see the booth while scooping up Japanese rice crackers from a large bin.

“They’ve passed over the halfway mark, but they aren’t there yet. No singing or fighting.” She wiped sweat from her forehead with a dirty bar towel. Amanda was one of three full-time waitresses we employed at Tambuku. Tall, blond, tan, and permanently outfitted with a stack of worn, braided hemp bracelets circling her wrist, she looked like the stereotypical California girl.

Her family had lived on the central coast for several generations in La Sirena, a small beach community thirty minutes away from the city; it captured its bewitching namesake with photo-worthy vistas of the rocky coastline and the blue Pacific that bordered it. Her parents had a ceramics studio there, and we’d commissioned them to make most of our tiki mugs and bowls, which now sat in neat rows on bamboo shelves behind the bar.

“I’m more concerned about the couple at hightop three.” Amanda peered into the cracked mirror over the cash register that allowed me to watch the bar when I had my back turned; she poked a few stray wisps of hair back into her braid.

Keeping our specialized clientele happy without sending them into a drunken frenzy was difficult at times. I strained to get a look at Amanda’s hightop couple, two women who were red-faced with laughter. One of them had dropped something under the table and, after retrieving it, was having trouble getting her ass back up onto her chair. They were verging on sloppy drunk, so I made a mental note to cut them off. Still, my money was on the obnoxiously loud group at booth three.

Amanda waited while I constructed the four-person Scorpion Bowl from brandy, two kinds of rum, and fresh juices. When no one was looking, I smuggled in a few drops of a tincture derived from damiana leaf, one of my medicinals that I kept stashed away in a hidden compartment behind the bar. Most of these were brewed from basic folk recipes, steeped herbs and macerated roots. They soothed nerves, calmed anger, or sobered the mind. Nothing earth-shattering. Well, mostly …

A few were intensified with magick. Spells in liquid form, I guess you might say. Just as perfume smells different in the bottle than on a person’s skin, magical medicinals react with body chemistry and produce unique results; the same medicinal that creates a mildly lethargic feeling in one person might put someone else in deep sleep. Sometimes I had to experiment to find the right one for the job. The one I was using now, the damianatha, has a calming effect that usually wears off pretty fast; I often use it to quell potential bar fights.

I didn’t feel guilty about dosing people without their permission. I had a business to protect, and the sign at the entrance—marked with the two interlocking circles that formed a Nox symbol, identifying us as a demon-friendly establishment—did clearly say ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

After putting away the damianatha, I strained the enhanced concoction into a serving bowl. Inside the ceramic volcano that rose up from the center, I floated a sugar cube soaked in 151-proof rum on top of an orange slice. When we first opened Tambuku, I’d light the Scorpion Bowls right there at the bar, until Amanda once caught her hair on fire during the trek to the table. Now I make her light it herself once she gets there. Not as dramatic, but much safer.

“Almost time for the show,” Amanda noted as she searched her pockets for a lighter. “I think there’s only that one table of savages to get rid of before it starts. Can you check?”

Savages. Slang for humans who didn’t believe in anything paranormal … which would be most humans. Savages didn’t believe in magick, and they certainly didn’t believe that a small but growing group of the population was made up of demons.