“Great, isn’t it?” he says, letting go of me and heading behind the bar. “Now, what do you want to drink?”
I’m still stunned, running my hands over the luxurious leather of the chairs, marveling at how decadent and cool this place is, eyes drawn to every corner. There’s always something new to notice. “Anything is fine,” I tell him.
“That’s easy,” he says, and I hear him pop a cork. “I’ll make you what I’m good at.”
There are three other doors in the room, two on either side of the stage, and a glass door near me. I crane my neck and spot another smaller room inside, with books.
“Is that a library?” I ask.
“Cigar lounge,” Wolf says, pouring alcohol into a martini shaker. “Solon can’t live without his cigars.”
“And where do those other doors lead?”
He glances at them briefly. “One is to the backyard. That’s the official entrance.”
“And the other.”
He pauses, catching my eye for a moment. “For private events.”
Uh-huh. See, with these guys that could either mean something to do with sex or something to do with blood.
Or both.
Wolf finishes making me a dark-colored martini, then brings it over with a beer. We take the nearest table, my back to the doors we just walked through.
“For the lady,” Wolf says, and it’s such a gentlemanly gesture that I almost forget that he had his tongue shoved inside me for days.
I try not to blush at the thought as I take the drink from him, then busy myself by admiring it. It’s the color of caramel and smells sweet, garnished with a cherry and orange.
I take a tepid sip. It’s good. Like whisky and cinnamon and something else.
“It’s not blood, but hopefully it will do,” he says, cracking open his beer with ease.
“It’s much-needed,” I tell him, looking around. “So, tell me about this place.”
“Well, this is the infamous Dark Eyes nightclub. You may have heard that in the 1920s, Russian Czarists bought the house. This was originally the ballroom, which they then turned into Dark Eyes, and used the upper floors as meeting rooms. Everyone started calling it the Russian Embassy.”
“Were you here then?” I ask.
He nods. “We were. Living upstairs. The Russians were vampires, too. Stayed here for many years, then went back to their homeland.”
“Their homeland? So you’re not all from the same parts of the world?”
“Vampires?” he says. “We all come from the same place originally.”
“Oh really? Down to like a certain area or…?”
“Yes. There’s an area just above Sweden, land that’s Finland on one side and Norway on the other. That’s where it all started.”
“When was the first vampire created? I mean, do you know? Or is it impossible to tell?” I want all the history.
He gives me a somewhat sad smile. “Oh, we know. It was all Skarde.”
“Skarde?” That’s a hardcore name. “He like the vampire king or something?”
I was joking but he says, “Pretty much.”
“So…what happened there?”