Tera Childs - Sweet Venom

After walking through a short corridor, we emerge into the main room.

It’s a total crush of people, like pictures of Times Square on New Year’s. Teens of all ages—and a few creepy older folks—are filling most of the room and the raised stage that runs the length of one wall.

“Wild, right?” Milo shouts in my ear.

I just nod. He won’t hear me above the blaring music anyway, and I’m hyperventilating a little at how close his mouth came to my ear.

On the plus side, I’m definitely not thinking about a bull-headed man. I’m not thinking of much besides Milo at the moment.

He leans back in and shouts, “Let’s get something to drink.”

He motions at the opposite wall, where a bar—with no liquor bottles in sight—seems to be the only spot to find a bit of breathing room. Thane and I follow as Milo weaves his way through the crowd.

When we get to the bar, he rises up on tiptoe and surveys the length. He throws me a grin over his shoulder and gestures for us to follow him. He makes his way to the far end, where a lone stool sits empty.

“Seats are like gold in here,” Milo says, not having to shout as loud in this corner of the club. He pats the black vinyl cushion. “Hop on.”

I glance at Thane, who rolls his eyes at me.

“Before someone steals it,” he mumbles.

The stool is a little tall, so when I try to lift myself onto the seat I come up short. I’m about to turn and make a leap for it when I feel warm hands around my waist. I can’t help the little gasp of shock as Milo effortlessly lifts me onto the stool. His hands linger for half a second, long enough to send a shivery tingle through my body.

“There you go,” he says, releasing me like it was nothing, before turning to flag down the bartender.

The only reason I know that little moment wasn’t a total figment of my imagination is the lingering tingle at my waist and the protective scowl creasing Thane’s forehead. Right now, his expressive face is saying, I’m not sure I want my new buddy making moves on my sister.

A girly giggle bubbles up inside me. If Thane thinks Milo is making moves, then maybe he actually is. Maybe this crush won’t turn into an unrequited lovefest like all my previous ones.

While Milo orders us three sodas, I grin and try to ignore Thane. If I attempt to reassure him or let him know that I welcome Milo’s moves, well then he’ll know how I feel and it’ll be all over. Instead, I concentrate on not girling out over the cute boy and pretending like the club scene is totally my average Friday-night agenda.

I turn my attention to the crowd and study some of the more colorful characters. Club attire is a broad spectrum of styles. I see girls wearing ankle-skimming maxidresses and others wearing miniskirts shorter than anything I’ve seen even on reality TV. Some boys sport ultratight skinny jeans, while others wear theirs so baggy that they’re falling off. Thane and Milo blend in perfectly in their everyday wear, but I feel a little underdressed. I’m really glad I’m still wearing the ruffled tee and the flats, despite the pinched toes. At least I don’t look like a complete slob.

“Here we go,” Milo says, handing me and Thane tall, thin glasses of bubbling pop. When Thane starts to reach for his wallet, Milo says, “These are on me. Consider it my San Francisco housewarming present.”

Thane nods.

I smile like an idiot.

Thankfully, neither boy seems to notice. Or care.

I’m about to take a sip of my drink when I’m overwhelmed by an awful smell. A vaguely familiar awful smell. I set the glass on the bar before it slips from my hand. Eyes clenched, I focus my thoughts on something else, anything else. The horrifying image of the minotaur won’t go away.

“Not again,” I whisper.

Milo leans in. “What’s that?”

Thane looks worried.

Do not be the crazy girl in the room. If I’m going to wind up in a nuthouse Monday morning, I want to enjoy my last days of freedom. I want to enjoy Milo. Forcing a normalish smile on my face, I say, “Nothing.”

But that doesn’t make the smell go away. In fact, it’s getting worse. My eyes start to water and my nostrils sting. I’m not far from the limits of my gag reflex when, over Milo’s shoulder, I see him. I see it.

This one isn’t a man with a bull’s head. Nope, I don’t see a single manlike feature on the thing. The body looks like a lion’s, complete with furry paws and a thick mane around the neck. The head, on the other hand, belongs to some kind of bird of prey. A pair of red-and-gold-feathered wings spreads wide above the grinding crowd.

Another memory from mythology lessons springs to mind, but I force it away. Clearly my mental state is deteriorating at warp speed. I shouldn’t have come to the club. I should have gone straight to Mom and insisted she drop me at the nearest insane asylum.

Anything would be better than going through this right here, right now, in front of Milo.

I squeeze my eyes shut as tight as possible—so tight I start seeing little blue flashes of light. Tears tingle at the corners and I take a fortifying breath. I can’t shut my nostrils, though, so I lean closer to Milo and inhale a lungful of his yummy-smelling cologne.

It’s enough to let me convince myself the lion-bird is a figment of my imagination. Which, of course, it is. It has to be, no matter how sane I feel.

“Are you okay?” Thane whispers in my ear. In those three words I clearly hear the concern in his voice. I want to tell him what’s happening, to confess the monster sightings and my failing grip on reality, but not as much as I want to pretend everything’s fine. Not as much as I don’t want to spoil this night.

I can only nod.

I sense him pulling away. He’s always superprotective, but he’s also ready to back off when I need him to. The best possible kind of older brother.

“I have an idea,” Milo says cheerfully.

He leans away from me, taking his lion-bird smell-neutralizing cologne cocoon with him, and I open my eyes to see if he’s trying to put distance between himself and the crazy girl. Instead, I see him setting his glass on the bar.

He holds out his hand to me and asks, “Wanna dance?”

A cooler girl would hesitate and then coyly accept. A girl with more boy skills wouldn’t want to look so eager. Or desperate.

Not me. Nope, I break out in a goofy—and grateful—grin and blurt, “Yes!”

As his hand wraps around mine, all thoughts of the creature hallucinations disappear. In this moment, there is only my hand in Milo’s as he leads me out into the center of the dance floor. Just as a slow song begins to play.

And as he tugs me close and guides my arms around his neck, I can almost convince myself that everything is perfect. I can almost completely ignore the feathered serpent I see slinking after the lion-bird into the back room of the club. Almost.

Gretchen

If a member of the monster squad is going to pull me out on a Friday night, the least it could do is pick a better club than Synergy. It’s bad enough I have to spend all day with the hormonal sheep at school, I’d rather avoid them in the off-hours. But this seems to be a favorite freakazoid haunt lately. I’m practically a resident.

Nightclubs give me the snooze in general, and Synergy is more nondescript than most. It’s on a side street in the industrial section of Potrero Hill—which might as well mean completely sketchy after dark—and from the outside it looks like any other warehouse building. The big, thuggy-looking guy at the door and the occasional line along the sidewalk are the only clues to the raging party inside.

Leaving Moira double-parked behind a Hummer in the empty lot next door, I do my mental gear check as I stifle a yawn. Hunting three nights in a row is tough, especially on back-to-back-to-back weeknights. I feel like I might never catch up on sleep again.

My boots crunch on the gritty sidewalk as I head for the front door. I hand my ID to the bouncer. He’s six four, about two eighty, with a buzz cut and bug eyes that indicate one too many steroid cocktails. A dead ringer for the Gegenees giant I took out a few weeks ago, only without the two extra pairs of arms. Even though I’ve been here a lot lately, he scrutinizes my driver’s license like he’s trying to read Plato in the original Ancient Greek.

“Gretchen Sharpe?” He eyes the photo, then me, and then the photo again.

This one is my actual ID. Synergy is all ages, which means my sixteen-year-old self is perfectly legal. On occasions when I have to track into an alcohol-serving, twenty-one-and-up club, I’ve got a collection of fakes to get me in the door, with my hypno powers as a convenient backup.

Bug boy takes his job a little too seriously. If I were in search of underage drinking opportunities, I wouldn’t be here. They don’t even serve alcohol.

“That’s me, Jocko,” I say, giving him my best I’m-not-trying-to-do-anything-even-remotely-illegal smile. He probably wouldn’t appreciate my I’m-just-trying-to-get-rid-of-the-deadly-monster-you-let-inside smirk.

After cross-checking my license and my face a few more times, he hands back my ID and says, “Ten dollars. Pay inside.”

I breeze past him and push open the door. The nauseating rotten-garbage scent of the griffin is worse than the overused fog machine. It’s so strong, I can’t immediately pinpoint the source. Guess I’ll have to rely on other senses this time.

After handing my cover charge over to the cashier, I step into the giant black box that is Synergy. The space is wall-to-wall people, most of them under twenty-one. It’s a sea of bumping and grinding, penned in on one side by the virgin-beverage-serving bar and on the other by a raised stage that is a favorite of PVC-pants-and-eyeliner-wearing boys who like boys. And the occasional girl who likes boys who like boys, despite their obvious lack of interest in what she has to offer.

Tonight there’s a DJ set up at one end of the stage, shouting out dance instructions and tweaking the bass on the unidentifiable music pounding through the speakers. Permanent eardrum damage in the making.

With the added filter of my sunglasses I mostly make out shapes and outlines. The lights hanging from the ceiling grid turn the throbbing masses into a sea of yellow, teal, and hot pink. A normal girl would be nauseous. I’ve never claimed to be normal. Putrid eau de griffin and the revolting color combination are everyday hazards of the job.

“If I were a bloodthirsty half-lion, half-eagle, where would I be?” I muse.

Being a few inches taller would definitely be a benefit at this point. I need line of sight, which means I need a better vantage point. Higher ground.

Shoving through the labyrinth of bodies, I make my way to the elevated stage. I place one hand on the front edge and vault myself up onto the platform. From my new perch I can see the entire room. I lift my shades to get a better look.

Plenty of gyrating hips, glitter-enhanced cleavage, and titanium body piercings, but no griffin.

After winding across the stage to the back wall, I leap down, landing Doc Martens–first in the doorway that looks onto the techno room. It’s almost as full as the main room, but with a tenth the lighting.

“Why do they always go for the back rooms?”

Easier to lure some lonely, heartbroken, or otherwise desperate human into a dark corner, I suppose. Synergy’s back room is darker than the deepest corner of Hades. Even if the monsters had no veil, no one would notice them standing two feet away in this black hole.

I sniff test the room and discover that the smell is coming from outside, from the open door leading onto the small courtyard to the right. As soon as I step out under the stars, I see it. Prowling around a pair of girls at a picnic table who look like they’ve been drinking something that didn’t come from the alcohol-free bar.

They’re sitting ducks.

I’m about to step through the doorway and introduce the griffin to a shiny pair of fangs when I catch a new scent.

I stopped my scan of the courtyard when I spotted the griffin and the party girls, but as I complete my survey, I see the second beastie. A great big serpent thing covered in dark green and brown feathers.

“What?”

Before they spot me—or notice that I’ve spotted them—I duck back into the techno room to regroup. Two monsters? That’s impossible. They can only get out of their realm one at a time. It’s one of the first things Ursula taught me when I followed her out of that warehouse four years ago.