Free Doubletake by Rob Thurman Page B

heard.”
    A naked puck slammed and bent an equally naked male lion over the end of the counter—my end—and I commented in resignation as the bar, glasses, and bottles began to shake furiously, “I think you heard wrong.”
    I moved around to the other side of Niko, which was tight to be pouring drinks, so I started handing out bottles instead. Whiskey, scotch, tequila…whatever I could grab the quickest. Pucks had a tolerance that made a case of forty-ounces seem like a thimbleful to them anyway. I also started drinking myself. Heavily, which I rarely did in a business where you needed to stay alert to stay alive. But if I had to see what I was seeing, I preferred to see it with blurry vision.
    The bar was packed, less than inches to spare. Seventy or so pucks, which was equal to about seventy thousand egos, plus seventy horny lions—the Ninth Circle wasn’t built for a crowd half this size. But everyone seemed willing to share their personal space in helpful ways such as wrapping their legs around someone else’s waist or hips, from the front or the back or upside down. There was also a tangled pile of heaving bodies—I didn’t count—in each available corner, skin-to-skin, not a millimeter of space between. Anything to keep the fire marshal away.
    Wasn’t that obliging?
    There were also those who hadn’t gotten past the strip shows yet. They were probably the equivalent of pucks with sexual dysfunction. It took them at least two to three minutes to get warmed up for a full-on ménage à whatever the French word for “twenty” was.
    The dancers were gyrating on tables, chairs, and an agile two impressively on top of one of the thrusting and groaning mounds of sweating flesh. Female lions’—lilitu’s—breasts were bouncing, which I approved of, although the wish on the shaving or waxing issue hadn’tchanged. The male lions had bouncing going on as well, but it had nothing to do with breasts.
    I groaned myself, but there was nothing sexual about it. I looked in another direction quickly, but unfortunately it was where I’d been ready to serve drinks earlier. How’d I forget that? The puck and the male lion hadn’t stopped shaking the bar yet. The puck was nuzzling through the lili mane to bite the back of his neck, and the lion was roaring and then purring as his wings flared and he lifted them in the air, the puck’s legs clamping around the thickly muscled waist. The lili roared again and there was a sudden rain of russet-colored fluid that smelled of cinnamon and desert sand.
    I hadn’t seen it, but I’d bet
Brokeback Mountain
wasn’t anything like this.
    “I am so not cleaning that up,” I said, taking another swallow from my bottle of whiskey.
    Robin wasn’t going to be forgiven for this, not until the day I died and was a year in the ground. Niko was fending off probably the twentieth puck of the night—they definitely liked blondes—with his sword. “Bartenders are off-limits,” he was repeating. “Tell your brothers. No means no. It also means I will remove a very different kind of sword from them if they don’t respect that.”
    I looked up to see the air full of sequins that had fallen from tossed-off clothing. They glittered in the flashing lights. Money flew in gusts of wind caused by flapping wings. It was like being inside a giant kinky snow globe. The pucks weren’t interested in me, although from their dubious glances they didn’t know why, and I drank on. Another puck tackled one of the female dancers off a table and was already inside her by the time they landed on the floor. She laughed as his mouth closed over a dark golden nipple.
    Okay, that I missed. “I need to get laid in the worst way,” I said mournfully.
    “And that would be more than enough alcohol for you.” Niko plucked the bottle from my hand.
    It passed, the “entertainment” part of the reunion. Rather like the bubonic plague passed: slowly and leaving madness and despair in its path.
    Then came the