Excerpt of Kindling The Moon by Jenn Bennett

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.