Title: "Haven's Veiled Whispers"

The raucous sounds of bass music, clinking glasses, and laughter from the dance floor barely filtered through the thick walls of the office—a kind of exhaled breath behind closed doors. The office, however, was quieter than it had any right to be on a Friday night. The half-burnt candle on the desk cast a wary glow over the club owner’s hands as she placed down her tumbler of whiskey. Beyond the mess of receipts and staff schedules, a pair of eyes watched her: ancient, red-rimmed, but hungry in a way that bordered on animal.

Shay kept her gaze steady, the businesslike sharpness of her voice betraying little hesitation.
“You said you were desperate,” she said.

The woman seated across from her—a pale, hunched figure in a worn velvet coat—swallowed hard, the veins in her throat blackening as she forced back the urge to bare her fangs. “I… forgive me. I’ve waited too long,” the woman croaked.

Outside this room, the club pulsed with people oblivious to the sorts of things Shay had, over the past two years, gotten very good at hiding. That included vampires.

Shay reached for the letter opener in her desk drawer, flicked it with practiced ease, and pressed its clean blade to her inner wrist. She didn’t flinch—she never did anymore. The cut was small, just enough so the blood welled up, shining dark in the candlelight. She nudged the cup over. “Here. Don’t be greedy.”

The vampire’s gratitude trembled out in a ragged exhalation. She grasped the tumbler with trembling hands and sipped, restraining herself with remarkable willpower. With each swallow, her posture straightened, the hollow intensity in her eyes faded to worn wisdom.

When she finished, she wiped her mouth with the back of one shaking hand. “It is… strange,” she murmured. “You taste so similar to her.”

Shay gingerly wound a scarf around her wrist, holding the cloth in place while she watched the woman. She had gotten used to the aftermath of this exchange: a vampire, visibly changed after just a drop or two of her blood.

“Her?” Shay asked, voice cautious.

“My sister once loved a girl who looked just like you,” she said. “Her name was Katherine Pelham.” The vampire’s voice dropped into a low, almost reverent hush, like she was speaking a forbidden prayer.

Shay’s brow furrowed. She combed her memory—the floods of club faces, long-standing regulars, arguments and secrets spilled across barstools—but the name stirred nothing. “That’s not a name I know,” she said. “Who is she?”

The vampire looked away at that, folding in on herself. “She vanished, years ago. My sister… she never found out what happened.”

The moment stretched, thick and wordless between them. Shay let the question of how this vampire—this desperate, half-mad thing—ended up in her office hang. Instead, her mind snapped to a new thread: the endless gossips drifting through the city library, a place few dared to linger in after dark. The same gossips who spun tales of blood and shadows and had, apparently, sent this woman to her club.

Shay’s jaw tightened, and she cursed the library gossips in her mind. Meddling, nosy old fools, half-drunk on myth and tattle. “Did the library women send you here?” she asked, more harshly than she’d intended.

“They said you… you know things,” the vampire said, shrinking back as if Shay might bite her in return.

I certainly know who talks too much, Shay thought with a vicious little curse meant for the librarians. But she knew the local supernatural web better than anyone. Years of operating Haven—an “exclusive” club by night and a tenuous sanctuary for unregistered vampires—had turned her into the city’s living ledger of secrets.

She leaned back, rubbing her temples. On the one hand, it was yet another problem she didn’t have time for; on the other, this was clearly important to the woman—maybe even the sort of favor that could keep Shay’s club under the radar from hungrier, rougher vampires.

“Look,” she said. “I’ll help you. I don’t know the name, but I have a good memory for faces, and I see most of the vamps in this sector pass through Haven sooner or later.” Shay tried, in vain, to recall a doppelgänger—someone who might’ve been her own reflection.

Just then, a knock, hurried and uncertain, rattled the door. One of her waitresses, Emma—her shadow tonight—stuck her head inside, eyes wide with stress.

“Shay. Sorry. But—uh—Tom hasn’t come in for his shift. And the bar’s—well, it’s slammed. It’s all…” Emma’s gaze flickered to the unfamiliar woman, instantly wary. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Shay held up a hand. Ideas clicked into place, and she fought back a smile. “It’s fine. Actually—I might have a solution.”

She turned her full attention on the vampire, whose bloody lips parted in surprise.

“You want to find your sister’s lost love. I want my bar to run without a riot. I know vamps trust vamps more than they trust daylight folk.” Shay gave a little shrug. “How about we help each other out? You tend the bar tonight. The crowd’ll listen to you. And with so many regulars in, you’ll have a chance to ask around for Katherine. More efficient than asking me alone, anyway.”

Emma blanched. “The bar? She’s not on payroll—”

“She’s a temp,” Shay said, voice sharp. “You’ll train her on register. She can make Bloody Marys and lure our special customers to high-tippers. Got it?”

Emma nodded, though she looked ready to protest, but catching Shay’s eye, thought better of it.

The vamp—whose name Shay still didn’t know—considered, licking a last trace of red from her lips. “I… I could try. I haven’t… worked behind a bar.”

Shay smiled, this time without showing her teeth. “It’s mostly just listening and pouring.” She leaned in. “Vampires gossip worse than those librarians, you know,” she whispered. “If your Katherine has been seen, you’ll hear of it tonight.”

A nod, hesitant but hopeful. “Thank you.”

Shay fished a black vest out of the little closet in the office—the spare for emergencies or clumsy spills. “Wear this. Emma will show you the ropes.”

With that, she watched as the pale woman—now a little less wild, with a clear task before her—left the office at Emma’s side.

*

By midnight, the bar was even more crowded. She watched from a half-open office door as the vampire wove between dozing drunks, elegant predators, and sweating, anxious clubbers—her new black vest fitting oddly over her antique blouse. Oddly, the vampires seemed drawn to her. Was it a scent? A kinship? Shay realized: they recognized the tremor of grief and hunger in her, the desperation she still carried. In this club, these were often passed around more than cocktails.

At intervals, the woman came back to Shay’s office. Sometimes she had news—a regular remembered a Katherine, maybe, but memory grew slippery after midnight. Other times, she just stood in the doorway, voice uncertain.

“No one’s seen her. Or maybe they have. A girl who looks like you… at Sefton Bridge, or in the old church on Rail Street. The stories aren’t clear.”

Shay jotted down names, jotting possible meetings and places in her battered spiral notebook.

“She might have changed her name,” Shay guessed. “Or gone abroad. Some vampires go off the grid when they tire of city life.”

The woman—she’d finally offered her name as Mirena—shook her head. “She wouldn’t leave. Not without saying goodbye. My sister… she would have known.”

“Then she’s here, somewhere. We’ll ask around. I hear more than they think.”

By last call—near three a.m.—Mirena’s hope had grown brittle, but it was no longer desperation. She’d spoken to nearly every regular in the club, poured drinks until her hands were sticky and her eyes were red with effort. The vampires and mortals alike told stories, passed around rumors. Shay helped where she could: pulling aside a few trusted faces, pressing for details about vampire arrivals, disappearances, favorites.

When the last guest finally staggered onto the street, Shay locked the doors and poured two glasses of whiskey—one for herself, one for Mirena, who sniffed it and, out of politeness, took a sip.

“I heard from one of the old-timers,” Shay said quietly. “There’s a woman who only comes on New Moons. Keeps to the shadows. They say she looks like a ghost… like she’s seen too much. Maybe Katherine’s still around, just avoiding old ghosts of her own.”

Mirena smiled, a little, as if hope had become something solid. “Thank you. For your blood, for your help. For… everything.”

Shay waved it off. “This is Haven. We find people here. Sometimes it’s themselves. Sometimes it’s someone lost.”

And as she tidied up the night’s mess, scribbling a reminder to ask more questions at the next library gathering, Shay sent another curse to the busybodies who’d gotten her into this—but with a grudging nod of respect. Sometimes, the city’s stories needed to be probed, even when they hurt.

Upstairs, Mirena drifted from table to table, gathering scraps of rumor like breadcrumbs in a forest, and for the first time, Shay thought maybe that mysterious Katherine might not be so lost after all. And when the next New Moon came, both women would be waiting. For answers in the dark. For old wounds to close, or to open anew.

Another night at Haven. Another mystery in the blood-soaked city. And the promise—between a club owner, a vampire, and a vanished love—that secrets, at last, might find their voice.

This story was generated by user vivi.lex 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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