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bar frequented by the fanged and fabulous.
    That’s how I ended up walking into an Absinthe bar in the French Quarter at half-past midnight the night before Halloween. I would have brought Adam with me, but bringing a mage to a vampire meeting wasn’t just foolish—it was dangerous. Even though there was peace among the races, some old-school vampires still saw mages as prey instead of allies.
    The front of the bar was filled with late-night revelers who’d stumbled in off Bourbon Street to get their first taste of wormwood liqueur with its cloying anise flavor. The place was done up in ornate Belle Époque style with thick green silk curtains, gas lanterns along the wall, and vintage lithographs inspired by the work of Jules Chéret and Toulouse-Lautrec. Ornate armchairs and divans provided comfortable resting perches for customers to watch the bartenders conduct the ritual of dripping the bright green liqueur over sugar cubes and adding water from ornate funnels that looked like they belonged in an alchemist’s lab.
    I passed the bar with a wave to Jean-Paul, the vampire who ran the joint. He was a friend of my old pal Georgia’s, who’d moved to Los Angeles to work for Nyx. He jerked his head toward the back to indicate Damascus was already waiting for me upstairs in the Dark Races–only section. The upstairs area was a large open space that led out to a veranda that hung over Bourbon Street. Booths lined the walls, and each could be sealed off from the rest of the room using black velvet curtains. It created an intimate atmosphere that invited the sharing of confidences. Whether Damascus White was in a sharing mood or not remained to be seen.
    It didn’t take a lot to guess which booth my host inhabited. Two red-headed goons flanked the seams of the only closed curtains in the row of otherwise empty booths. Seeing them, I sort of regretted not bringing an entourage of my own. Not that I felt I needed protection. But vampires were all about displays of power.
    One of the vamps stepped up like he thought he’d intimidate me as a warning before I spoke to his leader. I shot a glare that promised painful, fiery death if he so much as breathed on me. He stepped back. Smart of him.
    Without much ceremony, I threw open the curtain. Damascus White sat dead center in the back of the booth. The power position. His face betrayed no expression at my arrival. His hair was red, like all vampires, but so dark it was almost black. He was old. Real old. Not as old as some of the vamps I knew in Europe, but old for American vampires.
    “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” I said.
    His eyes were gray and too shrewd for me to let my guard down. Those eyes had seen things and missed nothing. He wore a velvet blazer and dark denim jeans that hinted that Damascus, despite all his years, had kept up with the times. “Had Nyx not interceded on your behalf, I would not be here.”
    “Going through Nyx was merely a formality. If you’d refused, we’d be meeting under much less comfortable circumstances.”
    He chuckled. “Careful, or I’ll show you why they called me the Butcher of Belfast before I came to the States.”
    I failed to hide my complete lack of awe over his ridiculous nickname. “I’m here about Cadence McShane.”
    He frowned, as if I’d finally managed to catch him off guard. “Who?”
    I smiled tightly. “According to her diary, Cadence was on her way to meet you the night she disappeared.”
    “Oh,” he said with a twitch of his lips. “Her.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Her. What happened?”
    “Never showed.” As he took a sip from a glass of blood, I eyed him for signs of lying, but a vampire that old didn’t reach his age without knowing how to tell a lie well. “I assumed she’d changed her mind.”
    “What were you two meeting about?”
    His eyes flicked to mine and the corner of his mouth lifted. “Let’s not play coy. I had every intention of fucking her and drinking that sweet blood.