I knew better than to be preoccupied when Tambuku Tiki
Lounge was overcapacity. Crowds are ugly; it doesn't matter
if they're human or demon. Our bar held a maximum of
sixty-five people per California ?re code. My business
partner treated this rule as more of a suggestion on
Thursday nights, when Paranormal Patrol made us a midtown
hot spot. Easy for her; all she had to do was sweet-talk the
county inspector out of a citation. She wasn't the one being
expected to break up drunken, demonic brawls.

"Hey!" My eyes zeroed in on a college kid stealing a drink
off the bar. "Did you pay for that? No, you didn't. Get your
grubby paws off."

"That woman left it," he argued. "Possession's two-thirds of
the law."

"Nine-tenths, jackass," I corrected, snatching the ceramic
Suffering Bastard mug out of his hand. An anguished face was
molded into the side of the classic black tiki mug, half
filled with a potent cocktail bearing the same name. When I
dumped the contents in a small bar sink, the kid acted like
I'd just thrown gold in the trash. He glared at me before
stomping across the room to rejoin his broke buddies.

If I were a bartender in any other small bar in the city, I
might be encouraged on occasion to double as a bouncer. As
the only trained magician on staff at Tambuku, I didn't have
a choice; it was my responsibility. After two years of
sweeping up broken glass and trying to avoid projectile
vomit, I'd seen enough demons-gone-wild behavior that would
make a boring, corporate desk job appear attractive to any
normal person. Good thing I wasn't normal.

"Arcadia? Cady? Hello?" Amanda leaned across an empty bar
stool, waving her hand in front of my face.

"Sorry, what?"

"I said that I need another Scorpion Bowl for booth three.
Jeez, you're distracted tonight," she complained, unloading
two empty wooden snack dishes from her tray before circling
around the L-shaped bar top to join me.

"How wasted are they?" I craned my neck to see the booth
while scooping up Japanese rice crackers from a large bin.

"They've passed over the halfway mark, but they aren't there
yet. No singing or fighting." She wiped sweat from her
forehead with a dirty bar towel. Amanda was one of three
full-time waitresses we employed at Tambuku. Tall, blond,
tan, and permanently outfitted with a stack of worn, braided
hemp bracelets circling her wrist, she looked like the
stereotypical California girl.

Her family had lived on the central coast for several
generations in La Sirena, a small beach community thirty
minutes away from the city; it captured its bewitching
namesake with photo-worthy vistas of the rocky coastline and
the blue Paci?c that bordered it. Her parents had a ceramics
studio there, and we'd commissioned them to make most of our
tiki mugs and bowls, which now sat in neat rows on bamboo
shelves behind the bar.