Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris Page B

Not that I think Claude would hurt Hunter. But Sam and I had known each other long enough that I was sure he’d understand all that.
    “I’m glad we’re on the same page,” Sam said, and I felt relieved. But I was far from comfortable. We might be on the same page, but I wasn’t happy about reading it.
    Spring was verging on summer, and the day was beautiful. I tried to enjoy it all the way east to Monroe, but my success was limited.
    My cousin Claude owned Hooligans, a strip club off the interstate outside Monroe. On five nights a week, it featured the conventional entertainment offered at strip clubs. The club was closed on Mondays. But Thursday night was Ladies Only, and that was when Claude stripped. Of course, he wasn’t the only male who performed. At least three other male strippers came in on a rotating basis pretty regularly, and there was usually a guest stripper, too. There was a male strip circuit, my cousin had told me.
    “You ever come here to watch him?” Sam asked as we pulled up to the back door.
    He was not the first person to ask me that. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me, that I hadn’t felt the need to rush over to Monroe to watch guys take off their clothes.
    “No. I’ve seen Claude naked. I’ve never come over to watch him do his thing professionally. I hear he’s good.”
    “He’s naked? At your house? ”
    “Modesty is not one of Claude’s priorities,” I said.
    Sam looked both displeased and startled, despite his own earlier warning about the fae not thinking kin were off-limits sexually. “What about Dermot?” he said.
    “Dermot? I don’t think he strips,” I said, confused.
    “I mean, he doesn’t go around the house naked, does he?”
    “No,” I said. “That seems to be a Claude thing. It would be really icky if Dermot did that, since he looks so much like Jason.”
    “That’s just not right,” Sam muttered. “Claude needs to keep his pants on.”
    “I dealt with it,” I said, the edge in my voice reminding Sam that the situation was not his to worry about.
    It was a weekday, so the place didn’t open until four in the afternoon. I hadn’t ever been to Hooligans before, but it looked like any other small club; set apart in a fair-sized parking lot, electric-blue siding, a jazzy shocking-pink sign. Places for selling alcohol or flesh always look a little sad in the daytime, don’t they? The only other business close to Hooligans, now that I was looking, was a liquor store.
    Claude had told me what to do in case I ever dropped in. The secret signal was knocking four times, keeping the raps evenly spaced. After that was done, I gazed out across the fields. The sun beat down on the parking lot with just a hint of the heat to come. Sam shifted uneasily from foot to foot. After a few seconds, the door opened.
    I smiled and said hello automatically, and began to step into the hall. It was a shock to realize the doorman wasn’t human. I froze.
    I’d assumed that Claude and Dermot were the only fairies left in modern-day America since my great-grandfather had pulled all the fairies into their own dimension, or world, or whatever they called it, and closed the door. Though I’d also known that Niall and Claude communicated at least occasionally, because Niall had sent me a letter via Claude’s hands. But I’d deliberately refrained from asking a lot of questions. My experiences with my fairy kin, with all the fae, had been both delightful and horrible . . . but toward the end, those experiences had come down far heavier on the horrible side of the scale.
    The doorman was just as startled to see me as I was to see him. He wasn’t a fairy—but he was fae. I’d met fairies who’d filed their teeth to look the way this creature’s did naturally: an inch long, pointed, curved slightly inward. The doorman’s ears weren’t pointed, but I didn’t think it was surgical alteration that had made them flatter and rounder than human ears. The