Free The Rise of the Hotel Dumort by Cassandra Clare, Maureen Johnson Page A

enjoyed feeling the body heat and being carried by the movement and the surge of the dancers as they more or less became one solid, pulsating mass.
    The little vampire was young—no more than sixteen—and she only came up to Magnus’s chest height. He leaned down and spoke into her ear.
    “Perhaps I can buy you a drink?” he said. “A private one? In the back?”
    The tips of the fangs popped out again when she smiled.
    Magnus already felt somewhat reassured—the half-fanged smile probably wasn’t from hunger. Drunkenness could cause fangs to poke out a bit. But vampires, like mundanes, often sought after salty foods and amorous encounters when inebriated.
    “This way,” he said, pushing back a curtain and revealing a short hallway leading to a single door. Right behind the main club, Magnus had constructed a small and intensely private room with a zinc bar. This room was lined in large stained-glass panels, illuminated from behind with electric lights, portraying Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. This was where he kept the very best and the very worst of his stock, and this was where he conducted his most private business.
    “I don’t believe we’ve met before,” he said as she plopped happily onto a bar stool and spun around.
    “Oh, I know who you are. You’re Magnus Bane.”
    She had one of those New York accents that Magnus was still getting used to, even though he had been here for several months. It was brassy and big, like a blinking neon sign. Her kid-leather dancing shoes had scuffed toes, and there was a mud stain halfway up the base of the heel, plus flecks of other substances that Magnus didn’t want to know anything about. These were shoes for dancing and shoes for hunting.
    “And what may I call you?”
    “Call me Dolly,” she said.
    Magnus pulled a bottle of cold champagne out of the large tub of ice that contained at least sixty identical bottles.
    “I like this place,” Dolly said. “It’s got class.”
    “I’m glad you think so.”
    “Lotsa places are classy,” Dolly said, reaching into a jar on the bar and helping herself to some maraschino cherries, plucking them up with her long (and probably dirty) fingernails. “But they’re fake classy, you know? This seems real classy. You got good wine. Like that stuff.”
    She indicated the cut-rate champagne Magnus was holding and pouring into a glass for her. The bottle, like the others in the tub, was certainly nice, but they’d all been filled with fizzed-up cheap wine and cunningly recorked. Vampires could drink quite a lot and could be expensive to have around, and he felt certain she would not be able to tell the difference. He was right. She drained half the glass in the first sip and held it out for a top-up.
    “Well, Dolly,” Magnus said, refilling her glass, “I certainly don’t care what you get up to on the street or anywhere else, but I do like my clientele. I consider it a matter of good service to make sure vampires don’t eat them under my roof.”
    “I didn’t come here to eat,” she said. “We go down to the Bowery for that. I was told to come down here and ask about you.”
    The shoes did bear out the Bowery story. Those downtown streets could be filthy.
    “Oh? And who is so kind as to inquire about little me?”
    “Nobody,” the girl said.
    “Nobody,” Magnus said, “is one of my favorite names.”
    This caused the vampire girl to giggle and spin on her stool. She drained off the glass and held it out for more. Magnus refilled it once again.
    “My friend . . .”
    “Nobody.”
    “Nobody, yeah. I just met h—this person, but this person is one of mine, ya know?”
    “A vampire.”
    “Right. Anyways, they want to tell you something,” she said. “They said you gotta get out of New York.”
    “Oh really? And why is that?”
    In reply, she giggled and half slid, half fell from the stool and broke into a shuffling and drunken private Charleston to the music that came pounding through the