The man must’ve noticed the twitch at the corner of her lips. He reached down and grabbed her neck, bent over and brought his face close to hers. He started to say something through a toothy sneer, but there was a crash at the other end of the room.

The man looked up.

“What the flank?” he asked again, louder, this time.

Or maybe Molly just heard it more clearly as the carefully wrought fog began dissipating from her senses. She felt it in her temples again: her pulse. Betraying her.

ѻѻѻѻ

“Jesus,” Cat said, looking out across the room of bodies. They were spread across a grid of tables, the forms as still as the two men she’d dropped behind the counter. She saw the bags hanging from one of the gurneys, saw the insulated cooler below a table stamped “Votes,” and a sickening puzzle fell together. She felt like she’d wandered into the back of a morgue to find them churning out links of sausage.

A short, bald guy with a beard came running over, yelling something. Cat drove her fist into his trachea to shut him up. She felt a lot of meat give way under the blow, felt her knuckles impact the ridge of spine beyond that softness—and figured she’d gone a little hard on him.

The man collapsed in a quiet mound. He just folded up on himself and remained as he landed, strangely still. He weren’t the sort of guy she usually tangled with. Part of her felt horrible for him. The other part wondered what it had felt like to get hit like that. Had it hurt? Or been done and over too quick?

Looking up, she saw two men more her likable size: brutes with lots of muscle and mean faces. Her favorite combo.

“Paulie? What the flank is going on here?” She turned around and made sure the door to the front was closed, saw the Palan kid rushing over to check the bald guy. “You goddamn draining people?” She walked across the room. The two guys formed up in the aisle, both wearing aprons splattered with brown smears of dried blood. Except for Paulie’s. His looked awful fresh.

“Oh, hell, Cat, we’re just making a living.” He reached over and held the other guy back. “We can get you in on this if you want. Guarantee it pays more that the performin’ arts. You could make enough to get yourself a real ass-whoopin’.”

Cat scanned the room. There were at least a dozen bodies in there, most of them too pale to be alive. “Where’s the girl?” she asked.

“Don’t know nothing about any girl. Look, you’ve had a rough night. Why don’t I give you enough coin for a few fights and you let us see to our friend over there.”

“Why don’t we just flank her up?” the other guy asked.