“This is Heaven?”
I yanked open the door, immediately wrinkling my nose and rubbing my greasy palm on my jeans.
“Yeah,” Alex returned. “What did you expect? Clouds and harpsichords?”
Heaven was a dive bar at the mouth of Hayes Valley and nothing about the place reflected its name except for a chipping depiction of God giving life to Adam painted on the wall just in front of the illuminated restrooms sign.
I immediately felt a nervous blush wash over me. “Geez. Why is it that otherworldly information never comes from a stodgy man in a suit at the Burlingame Hilton?”
Though I wasn’t a teetotaler by any means, my last bar experience was trying my bloody best to fit in at the vampire bar, Dirt. It didn’t seem like I was doing any better at Heaven, where every face swung to scrutinize us once we stepped into the dimly lit place. Alex got the interested once-over from the ladies sipping brightly colored martinis at the table in the corner; Nina was being admired by a drag queen drinking a Sam Adams, and everyone else was focused on me.
“Blend in,” Alex ordered.
“With what?” I asked, my eyes sweeping the half-human, half-demon, half-other clientele.
I tried to paste on Paris Hilton’s patented too-bored-for-this-planet look, but I was having a hard time tearing my eyes from the gentleman at the end of the bar. His amber eyes were almond shaped and deeply focused; he took long, slow pulls from his beer without steering his gaze from me. There was something vaguely familiar about his ash-blond hair, something recognizable about the slope of his nose, his thin lips. My mind reeled as I tried to place him. I was still working on it when Alex nudged me.
“That’s Piri,” Alex said, gesturing to the man behind the bar.
“That’s the pixie you were telling us about?” Nina asked, incredulous.
On our drive to Heaven, Alex had filled us in on Piri, a local pixie who spent most of his time in the “upper world” (that’s ours), and was the go-to guy for finding out the seedy goings-ons of human-angel-demon dealings.
Alex looked at Piri, nodded his head. “Yeah, that’s him. Why?”
While it’s true that very few demons reflect their Dis-neyized Wes CravenHollywoodized images, pixies were generally fairly well depicted.
Except for this one.
Though he had the same fine-boned features and porcelain skin I was used to with other fairy folk, the stern set of his jaw and his narrowed, beer-bottle brown eyes—eyes that raked over us as we stood in the doorway—generally didn’t give off that cutesy Tinkerbelle vibe.
Piri stood behind the bar, his huge mitt-like hands set on the hardwood top, his fingers tapping in a slow, bored rhythm that made the tattooed coiled snake on his forearm jump. His bare, bulging biceps were littered with images of thorny roses and screaming eagles, their talons arched and sharp.
“You know, in the sixteenth century, rose tattoos were given to prisoners sentenced to death,” Nina said matter-of-factly.
I studied the burgeoning bush spewing rose blossoms out from under Piri’s leather vest and gulped. “Good to know.”
Piri’s thick eyebrows rose and he eyed our trio with an unwelcome glare. Nina paused when her cell phone trilled a jaunty out-of-place tune.
“I need to get this,” she said, pointing to the spastically vibrating jeweled device. “It’s Dixon.”
“This is Nina,” she trilled into the phone.
Nina disappeared out the front door and Alex and I shared a look. I shrugged, pasted on my most welcoming smile, and sauntered over to the bar. I seated myself directly in front of Piri and hopped up onto the cracked Naugahyde stool. “Hi there,” I said, all smiles and normalcy. “Can I get a cosmo?”
Piri said nothing; he just blinked, revealing a spiderweb tattoo that started at his inner eye and blossomed out toward his temple. I felt myself involuntarily wince.
Alex sat down next to me and faced ol’ baldy. “Scotch. Neat. You Piri?”
The bartender lined up two smudged highball glasses and upturned a scotch bottle over each one. He slid the half-full glasses across the bar to us. “Who wants to know?” was his response.
I looked at the amber liquid in my glass and dropped my voice. “Actually, sir, I ordered a—” I gazed up into unforgiving eyes. “Never mind.”
I caught a hint of movement from the corner of my eye and I noticed the guy with the ash-blond hair had moved one stool closer to me. I gave him a closed-lipped smile as he grinned at me and raised his half-full glass in one of those “Hey, how ya doin’?” bar salutes. He inched a small bit closer and opened his mouth to speak, but my whole body was on high alert, focused on Piri and finding my father.
“I’m with someone,” I said to the blond-haired stranger.