Ghoulish Delights

I never met a girl like Haven Sophora.

The bar was buzzing with activity. I was pulling another eight-hour shift on my feet all day, and my eyes already felt like they were drooping even though it wasn’t even midnight. Thank God I would have Saturday and Sunday off before I had to start the cycle all over again on Monday — though, thankfully, that wouldn’t be a night shift.

The life of a bartender in the seediest part of the underworld was quite the eye-opener. I was human through and through, but a witch had cast a curse on me after a bad break-up some years back. Ever since then, I’d had the Sight, which had been helpful to have after every job I tried to get human-side hadn’t worked out — likely another effect of the curse. The only place that would hire me had been Charon’s, the little shack of a bar right before the entrance to the City Styx. I had never gone into Styx myself, but I had heard enough things to know I shouldn’t crave a trip there unless I was desperate.

A couple nymphs were getting handsy in a booth near the back room, and the air smelled of fresh flowers blooming. I sighed, already dreading the clean-up of petals from the bar floor after closing. In one of the other few booths Charon’s had, a minotaur sat dealing out cards to a demigod with a forked tail and a girl with ram’s horns curling from her head of pink hair. Everyone else was human as far as I could see, and they were the usual crowd: the pool players, the sports fans glued to another game on the big screens around the bar, and the party-goers who flocked to and from the jukebox throughout the night.

There was one oddity that kept snagging my attention, though: a girl with her hood up sat at the end of the bar, and she had refused anything but a glass of Sprite. She had already paid for her drink and tipped me, yet she left her drink untouched as she stared at her phone and scrolled on the screen.

I thought about talking to her — her eyes were a strange color caught between gold and green, and her face was a shade darker than the moon — but I decided not to push my luck. Just because I had the Sight didn’t mean I couldn’t be fooled along the way. Most demigods probably could have gotten a few tricks past me, depending on their specific skill sets determined by their bloodlines. A…

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