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the door and slipped a pair of
sneakers on. She had to force herself to smile when she asked,
    “Are we going, then?”
    When she threw her usual glance at the bedside
table before closing the door, Liam’s grin, for a second, seemed a
little brighter.

    * * * *

    Lena almost changed her mind about the whole
shindig when the car stopped and she stepped out with the others in
front of the club. She had never been there before, but one look at
the name scrawling in blue neon over the entrance—On The Edge—told
her all she needed to know.
    She gave Alice a hard look. “We’re going to a
vampire bar?”
    Carlos rolled his eyes at her as he encircled
Alice’s waist with his arm.
    “It’s not a vampire bar. It’s just more…friendly
to vampires than other places. And tonight, there’ll be more humans
in there than vamps anyway.”
    He started pulling Alice toward the entrance,
and she looked back at Lena with an encouraging smile.
    “Come on, it’ll be fun. Half the campus ought to
be here tonight.”
    Lena was still hesitating when she noticed the
fourth member of their little group, Carlos’ friend whose name she
had already forgotten.
    “It’s quite safe, really,” he assured her a
little shyly.
    Still unconvinced, Lena watched Alice disappear
through the entrance. “I’ve heard people were killed by vampires in
this bar.”
    “ Not in it,” the guy
corrected her. “You’ll be safe as long as you stay with—with the
group.”
    She could have sworn he had been about to say
‘with me’.
    “And there haven’t been any deaths linked to the
club for a while, now,” he added when she kept staring at the
glowing sign.
    Its color had now turned to a bright red, and it
seemed to bleed over into the crisp darkness of the night. Hardly
the best of augurs, a small part of her wanted to comment, and that
thought jolted her into action. She was being ridiculous, if she
was putting any faith into supposed signs and what they might mean.
Liam had often urged her not to look for meaning where she would
find only coincidences.
    She started moving so abruptly that the man—was
his name Tony? She thought it might have been—needed to take a few
quick steps before he caught up with her. He proceeded to walk by
her side, offering to buy her a drink only to lead her down the
club’s suspended staircases and bridges when she politely
declined.
    Lena had heard friends describe the club before,
but what she discovered was nothing like what she had imagined. In
her mind, a place that openly catered to vampires had to be dreary,
with dust, cobwebs, and cold stonewalls illuminated by torches, or
maybe candelabras. On The Edge, she soon had to admit, had none of
these dubious attributes. Metal staircases gave access to the lower
level, the dancing floor, where pulsating lights played over the
dancing crowd, following the fast beat of the latest rock hit. The
only flagrant difference that Lena could see from other clubs was
the conspicuous absence of mirrors anywhere in sight.
    “Would you like to dance?”
    She almost didn’t hear the question, Tony’s
voice all but drowned out by the sound of the music, but he leaned
closer to her as he finished. He had blue eyes, she noticed, full
of hope as Liam’s had once been.
    Her answer was a tiny nod, to which Tony
answered with a beaming smile. He took her hand and pulled her
after him to the dance floor. Lena got a glimpse of Alice and
Carlos in the middle of the crowd, but she lost sight of them too
fast to suggest joining them.
    At first, Tony kept her hand in his as they
danced. It made Lena uncomfortable, not because they had to look
rather ridiculous holding hands when everyone around them was
dancing wildly, but rather because she wasn’t used to anyone other
than Liam holding her hand. Tony’s hand was too large, too clumsy,
too…different.
    Under the pretext of dancing more freely, she
liberated her hand and tried to enjoy the music and the atmosphere
of sheer