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a hurried, fumbling grope in the woods with a passing shape-shifter when she was nineteen. Which she so did not.
    The bar was all she knew, all she’d ever known. She’d been serving drinks before she was ten, running the office and ordering supplies for her dad by the age of thirteen. She knew how to talk down a mean drunk and break up a fight. But she didn’t know how to mingle with townies, and she sure as hell didn’t know how to make small talk at a wedding.
    She looked around. The fellowship hall of the Episcopal church was narrow and long with arched windows along both sides and gleaming wooden floors. Candles glowed softly in the windowsills amid glossy bunches of magnolia leaves and white ribbons. At the far end of the room in front of three windows, two enormous wedding cakes commanded center stage. Additional cloth-covered tables flanked the wedding cakes, groaning under the weight of silver trays laden with a mouthwatering array of hors d’oeuvres, and a champagne fountain sparkled in one corner. Beck didn’t recognize half the fancy food on the platters. It was a far cry from bar food; that was for sure. Not a chili cheese dog or a chicken wang in sight.
    The noise level in the crowded room was incredible. Guests swirled around the loaded tables in impatient eddies, eager for the happy couples to appear. Beck caught snatches of conversations as people brushed by. The subject of football reigned supreme, followed by talk of the wedding and the food.
    Beck hung back near the door that led into the church garden, uncomfortably aware that she did not belong here.
    She caught several curious stares directed her way and wondered if she was overdressed. She’d been to exactly one other wedding in her life, and that was her dad’s, a simple ceremony at a country church with a preacher and a few friends. Not a formal society affair like this.
    Although she’d never lived in the city limits or gone to school in Hannah, she recognized a lot of the guests from the “What’s Going On In Town?” section of the local paper. Folks with money and comfortable, predictable lives; steeped in a sense of belonging and an unshakeable knowledge of who they were and their place in the scheme of things.
    She, on the other hand, ran a bar on the river for demonoids. She had plenty of society, just not the elegant kind.
    Beck took another quick look around. The fairies ignored her and swarmed around the wedding cakes in an ecstasy of anticipation. Fairies obviously liked sugar. Now would be a good time to try to sneak out, while the little stink bugs were distracted.
    Pasting a wide smile on her face for the benefit of anyone who might be looking, Beck edged closer to the exit. The fairies were trilling a song in their thin, little voices. “A Rhapsody to Wedding Cake,” most likely, Beck surmised. It was only a guess, because she didn’t speak fairy. The norms, of course, were clueless.
    The door was only a few feet away. She’d make a run for it, and hope like hell Silverbell didn’t catch her and gobsmack her with fairy dust again. She’d sat through the ceremony. She’d be damned if she’d stick around for the rest of this nauseating crap.
    She scooted around a group of guests, keeping her smile in place. Almost there.
    “You look lovely,” a deep voice said, stopping her in her tracks.
    Beck whirled around and almost fell off her princess shoes. It was Conall, looking all bad boy and delicious in a perfectly tailored dark suit and a blazing white dress shirt, open at the neck. She’d never seen him in daylight or in a well-lit room, for that matter. Until now, that is, and it was something of a shock to her system.
    Something of a shock? Try 9.0 on the Richter scale.
    The Dalvahni demon hunter pain-in-her-ass was a total babe.

Chapter Five
    H e wasn’t wearing a tie. No surprise there. Somehow, demon hunters and neckties didn’t go together.
    Swords, mayhem, and evisceration, yeah. Neckties . . . not so