I understood better than to be distracted when Vinculus Star Lounge was overcapacity. Crews are terrible; it does not make a difference if they are human or demon.
Our bar carried a maximum of sixty-five folk per Portland fire code. My business companion dealt with this rule as more of a recommendation on Thursday nights when Paranormal Patrol made us a midtown hot point.
Simple for her; all she had to do was sweet-talk the county inspector out of a reference. She was not the one being predicted to break up intoxicated, demonic confrontations.
"Hey!" My eyes narrowed in on a college kid looting a drink off the bar.
"Did you pay for that? No, you did not. Get your grubby claws off."
"That woman abandoned it," he claimed.
"Possession's two-thirds of the law."
"Nine-tenths, jackass," I rectified, grabbing the ceramic Suffering Bastard jug out of his hand.
A bemoaning face was designed into the side of the definitive black Star jug, half served with a dominant cocktail breeding the exact name. When I tossed the contents into a little bar sink, the kid portrayed as I had just tossed gold in the garbage. He frowned at me before stomping across the compartment to rejoin his broke pals.
If I were a bartender in any other minor tavern in the city, I might be motivated by circumstance to make twice as much as a bouncer. As the only competent magician on staff at Vinculus, I did not have an option; it was my obligation.
After two years of sweeping up shattered glass and struggling to prevent projectile vomit, I had discerned enough demons-gone-wild demeanour that would make a grumpy, corporate desk job emerge desirable to any ordinary person. Good thing I was not ordinary.
"Dorathi? Dotty? Hello?"
Linda crouched across a vacant bar seat, hovering her hand in front of my face.
"Sorry, what?"
"I said that I want another Scorpion Bowl for booth three. Jeez, you are inattentive tonight," she grumbled, unpacking two blank wooden snack dishes from her tray before spinning around the L-shaped bar top to meet me.
"How squandered are they?" I craned my neck to observe the booth while scooping up Japanese rice crackers from a vast bin.
"They have crossed the halfway mark, but they are not there yet. No fighting or singing." She dabbed sweat from her forehead with a dirty bar towel.
Linda was one of three full-time waitresses we hired at Vinculus. Tall, fair, tan, and always dressed with a pack of worn, knitted hemp bracelets flowing her wrist, she appeared like the stereotypical Portland girl.
Her family had stayed on the prominent seaside for many eras in La Cotuna, a small beach society thirty minutes off from the city; it caught its bewitching namesake with paranormal's sceneries of the rocky coastline and the blue Pacific that adjoined it.
Her parents had a ceramics studio there, and we had assigned them to make the largest of our Star mugs and vessels, which now sat in neat lines on bamboo racks behind the bar.
"I am more anxious about the partners at hightop three."
Linda glanced into the broken mirror over the cash directory that enabled me to see the tavern when I had my back turned; she shoved a few stray wisps of hair back into her plait.
Keeping our laboured clientele delighted without dispatching them into a drunken seizure was hard at times. I stretched to get a glimpse at Linda's high-top duo, two women who were red-faced with laughs.
One of them had plopped something under the table and, after obtaining it, was having difficulty getting her ass back up onto her seat. They were tending on messy drunk, so I made a cognitive note to scrape them off. Still, my cash was on the obnoxiously boisterous group at booth three.
Linda stayed while I forged the four-person Scorpion Bowl from brandy, two types of rum, and fresh juices. When no one was staring, I smuggled in irregular drops of a tincture gotten from damiana leaf, one of my medicinals that I hid stashed away in an invisible compartment behind the tavern.
Abundant of these were manufactured from basic folk formulae, saturated herbs and macerated roots. They calmed nerves, soothed anger, or sobered the mind. Zero earth-shattering. Well, generally …
A few were strengthened with magic. Spells in fluid form, I suppose you might say. Just as fragrance scents different in the container than on a person's coat, magical medicines respond with body chemistry and generate outstanding results; the exact medicine that builds a mildly lethargic impression in one person might put someone else in profound slumber.
Sometimes I had to investigate to discover the correct one for the task. The one I was utilizing now, the damianatha, has a comforting effect that usually wears off pretty quick; I frequently use it to suppress potential bar quarrels.
I did not feel remorseful about dosing people without their approval. I had a career to conserve, and the buzzer at the door—marked with the two connecting circles that constituted a Nox emblem, recognizing us as a demon-friendly organization—did simply say "ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK."
After tossing away the damianatha, I drained the enhanced mixture into a serving pitcher. Inside the ceramic volcano that flared up from the middle, I meandered a sugar cube moistened in 151-proof rum on the lid of an orange slice.
When we first emptied Vinculus, I would blaze the Scorpion Bowls right there at the bar, until Linda earlier snapped her hair on fire during the cruise to the table. Now I make her light it herself once she arrives there. Not as spectacular, but much safer.
"Almost time for the exhibition," Linda pointed out as she rummaged her pockets for a lighter.
"I think there is just that one table of Warrens to get clear of before it commences. Can you check?"
Warrens. Jargon for humans who did not speculate on anything supernatural … which would be supreme humans. Warrens did not believe in magic, and they certainly did not understand that a small but growing group of people was made up of demons.
I double-checked to make certain Linda was exact about the lone table of Warrens, and she was. Just a committee of women adorned in corporate-grey suits, possibly trying out the "wacky" Star bar down the freeway from their office.
"They will evacuate. Should not be an issue." And apart from them, Linda and I were the exclusively non-Warren humans in the tavern. I tossed four extra-long straws into the Scorpion Bowl, and she whipped them away on her tray.
Now, when I say monsters, I don't mean huge, bad evil beasts with horns and tails and rows of bloodstained teeth. Don't get me wrong, those types of demons live, safely tucked away on another plane; Porphyric monsters can be conjured by competent magicians, such as myself, with the formal ceremonies and seals.
However, the Earth-bounds that promoted my tavern were much lower down on the magical food cycle.
Apart from their lesser demonic proficiency, which fluctuates from demon to demon, the only distinguishing characteristic of an Earthbound demon is a radiant arc of glow around the head: a ring.
Yep, that's true. Demons have rings. Everything preternatural does. Not a stagnant, unfasten ring as you see in ecclesiastical portraits, but more of a diffused, multicoloured cloud. Shocked? I might have been, the initial time I saw an Earth-bound, back in Florida, when I was a child … that is, if I had not already detected my ring in the mirror. I am not a demon. Just different.
My sentiment was kinda weird. Okay, it was absolutely weird, but the fact is that my parents were not all that shocked to find out I had a ring; they were just stunned that I could see it.
They could not, but that is because humans can not see rings. They are virtually colour-blind when it comes to distinguishing preternatural pictorial markers. But just because you can not see ultraviolet light does not indicate it is not there.