Dusk's Defiance

The housed packed wall-to-wall every Saturday, always humming and writhing above the throb of bass. Lexi loved it—the chaos, the freedom, the flash of light off glass and sweat. She’d built Wraith from nothing, and she played her bar like a performer: bottle in one hand, shaker in the other, grin charming the tips right out of wallets.

Tonight was no different, except it was. She sensed it in the prickling at the back of her neck before she saw the girl.

She almost missed her: a thin figure caught in a liminal beam of the strobe. Petite, wearing a long-sleeved black dress anachronistically conservative for Saturday. Her posture was not that of someone here to party; she flinched at the music, lips pressed to a thin red seam. When someone with glittery cheeks brushed her arm, she actually jerked away with a hiss of disgust.

Lexi’s hands never stopped moving—rum for one, gin and tonic for another—while her attention tracked the girl warily.

Lexi herself was small, though wiry, and in her trade you learned to trust instincts. To know when someone was trouble.

This one? She was rot. Trouble so thick you could taste it in the air.

The girl drifted along the perimeter, moving more like a cat than a club rat. Everything about her prickled. She knew it was odd to zero in on her so intensely. But something demanded Lexi do so.

A memory unspooled, unbidden: her grandma’s warnings about evil things, pale hands under the bed, promises of something more ancient than fairy tales.

When the black-dressed girl glanced up, their eyes locked. Lexi saw—unequivocally—gold, flickering, inhuman irises. Lexi dropped the shaker. Ice skittered over the varnished oak.

The girl moved toward the bar, drawn like a broken compass needle. Lexi’s mind whirled. She didn’t serve underage, but age wasn’t the problem here. Nor was drunkenness. What she faced was something older, something public mythology mocked, but which now stared back at her.

Lexi knew fear, but did not surrender to it. Instead, she dried her hands on her jeans and circled out from behind the bar, her body a mask of confidence. She intercepted the girl just before she reached the counter.

The moment Lexi touched the girl’s arm, every muscle in the girl’s body tensed, but Lexi wouldn’t let go. “You don’t want to be here,” she whispered, and all the warmth dropped from her tone.

The girl’s mouth opened. Her canines were…too long, too sharp. “And yet, here I am,” she spat, eyes darting over Lexi’s shoulder—panic, fear, need.

Lexi acted fast. She dragged the girl back through the crowd, threading past servers, past flush-faced dancers, down the narrow hallway, all the way to her private office and slammed the door behind them.

The girl scrambled away, clawing at the locked doorknob. Her movements were too fast, too wild. “Let me go!” she rasped. Tears—actual tears—stood in her eyes. “Please…”

Lexi didn’t feel sorry for demons, or whatever this was. But she kept her voice level, arms blocking the only way out. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

“I—I don’t drink,” the girl gasped, pressing herself into the shadows. Lexi realized she meant she didn’t drink alcohol. But she was hungry. She could see it in the way the girl eyed the pulse brushing Lexi’s throat.

“Then why come to a nightclub?”

“Because it’s…loud. Smells cover things. I don’t…want to be what I am.”

Lexi tilted her head, heart thundering, wracking her brain for everything she’d ever read. Was it possible to talk a vampire down? Was she even safe?

“Look, I’m not here to hurt you. Hell, I’m not sure what you are. I just can’t have you—” She grappled for words “—snacking on my guests.”

The girl flinched. “I haven’t fed in days. It’s—harder to control when they’re dancing, sweating—” She moaned, gripping her stomach. “I don’t want to—God, please, you have to help me.”

The vulnerability caught Lexi by surprise—a monster, terrified of herself.

“Fine,” Lexi said. “Sit down.”

She rummaged in her desk, emerging with a bottle of Vitamin Water and a packet of beef jerky—offers of comfort for a predator.

“My name is Lexi. Who are you?”

The girl hesitated, eyes flickering gold again. “Sora.”

To her own shock, Lexi found herself sitting down, pulse slowing. “You have to tell me what you’re really doing here.”

Sora’s hands shook as she clutched the water. “There are more like me. But not all…kind.” Her lips twisted around the word as if it tasted poisonous. “I ran from them. They’ll kill me if they find me before I can—before I can learn to feed only on the willing. I tried! But—I can’t—I need help.” Something desperate, hopeless, in her eyes. “I read online that some bars have like, donors. I thought maybe here—it’s so loud—no one would notice if…”

She trailed off, shame painting her cheeks gray.

Lexi weighed her options. She could throw Sora out with the trash and pray whatever hunt she was on did not bleed into Wraith. Or she could do something far stranger: try to believe her story, to give her a chance.

“Okay,” Lexi said, voice steady, betraying none of her terror. “Stop running. You’ll stay here, in the basement, for tonight. You get hungry, you come to me first. You do anything stupid—anything—and I’ll stake you myself.”

Sora’s eyes widened. “You’re not—I mean, you’re not afraid?”

Lexi cocked an eyebrow. “Scared shitless, actually. But someone’s gotta be in charge, and that’s me.”

For the next hour, Lexi figured things out. She arranged a cot in the dry storage, brought in a space heater, a stack of old books. She gave Sora a used phone with an alarm set for dawn—a hard limit. The sun, Sora admitted in a tiny voice, was still death.

All the while, Lexi squashed panic beneath the press of responsibility. Wraith was her territory. Anything—anyone—dangerous who entered, she would deal with personally. Her reputation, her people, her city. But as she watched Sora curl up on the cot, curled into herself like a broken sparrow, Lexi felt something slide into place between terror and empathy—something like resolve.

***

That night, when last call cleared out the crowd and Lexi let the throb of music bleed into memory, she returned to storage and checked on Sora. The girl had not moved, had not eaten, eyes wide and bright in the dark.

“Someone’s coming for you, aren’t they?” Lexi said.

Sora only nodded, a tear on her pale cheek.

As the first glimmer of pale dawn filtered through a dusty window, Lexi braced herself for a new type of war—a war fought not with fists or teeth or fangs, but with grit, secrets, and the stubborn, reckless kindness of a human who refused to let her territory fall to monsters.

Outside, a limousine idled in the empty street. And Lexi, club owner and now something much stranger, switched off the last light, her hand unconsciously curling around the stake taped beneath her counter.

She would not run. Wraith was her house. If monsters came, they would face her—and, maybe, the vampire she kept safe in her basement.

After all, in the city’s darkest hours, even the wary needed sanctuary. And Lexi, behind the sultry glamour of her nightclub, was prepared to fight for it.

This story was generated by user ziggo.zane with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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