Another night, another job? Nope. This was his night off. This was his chance to enjoy more than a ritual worship in a circle of six. After the last three nights, that was done for another month. Nothing was going to ruin this night. There was no security tonight; that was only four nights a week and not very good pay besides, but it got the job done. He didn't need the money - not with the fresh supply of organs coming from the ring.

The ring: now there was an interesting topic of conversation. Then again, so was his diet. For years, they'd provided weapons and drugs to anyone rich enough who knew how to keep their mouths shut, but the nagas had turned them in a whole different direction; how could you say no to someone who could just as easily crush you to death in the blink of an eye as look at you? Cold blood ran through the body of every naga from Bayfield to China and back. The fact of the matter was that the ring served its purpose out of a need to survive; they had plenty of money from their deals of roughly twenty years, so money wasn't the problem.

The problem was survival. It was always about survival, though, wasn't it? The cops didn't understand, and if they had they would've been eager to pump every last naga full of lead. That's why they could never find out. That's why the ring was protected. That's why there was an elf walking up the steps at the end of the green-carpeted hall, its peeling walls speaking not at all the secret that bound the elf to the naga. There was something even deeper than a secret, though - something that couldn't be broken so easily. There was friendship.

He could taste the elf. He could taste the cheap cologne and the three-day-old polyester of his cheaper wardrobe. He really needed to learn how to hide better; didn't he know the seventies had ended a good forty years previous? But it didn't matter. He could hear the footsteps now, just outside the door. Elves were notoriously silent when they moved, like bats stalking their prey in the night. But this one seemed to think it was an inside joke letting himself be heard; that's why he wore the miniature cow bell in his left lobe, why he always laughed that stupid laugh when he was asked a question he didn't want to answer. He thought he was blending in; but he wasn't, really.

Not that it mattered. The naga didn't really fit in, either. Then again, who really fit in when confined to a city of this size? Everyone was different. Everyone had a different style here, a different way of talking and walking. The elf and the naga were no different.

Actually, they were very different - too different for any unnish to understand, which brought him back to his original thought: tonight was his night. Tonight, he refused to be what he was one second longer than he had to.

The knock came at the door. He was already changing, slipping some jeans on as he did. He buttoned and zipped them, then walked over and opened up the door. He was met by a cocky, blonde-haired, blue-eyed version of John Travolta. That smile was like a cheese grater on his skin, but he tolerated it; the guy might've been irritating, annoying, even a pain in his scaly arse, but he was still his friend - even if he was smiling that stupid, shit-eating grin like he always did.

"Reynaud."

He was smart. He'd learned quick not to touch a naga unless they initiated contact within a week of meeting Reynaud's father. He was lucky he'd just gotten smacked upside the head; he could've been standing before Reynaud now completely blind, deaf, and limbless - and that's assuming he'd lived to tell the tale. Turning around, he went to the bureau and grabbed his keys. He locked the door behind him, the metallic click of the key touching steel symbolic in so many ways. To one imprisoned, it was the same as the hammer being pulled back on a .45 right behind a cop's head. To a free man, it was just another insignificant sound, something to be ignored, taken for granted, forgotten.

Different people saw different things different ways.

The night was cold, but Reynaud hardly noticed. He never talked much, whereas Jonas - his elven friend - always seemed to talk way more than he should have. It didn't matter, though; he was good at talking his way out of tough situations. It was thirty-two blocks away from the naga's apartment building that they saw it: that pitch-black door standing there like some invisible barrier just waiting to be breached - and breach it they did.

The door man was inside and he didn't look happy to see either one of them. Reynaud pulled his card out of his jeans pocket; it was faded from six years of use and worn around the edges, no longer able to slice a throat the way it had back in Toronto. Of course, it had saved his life then; he'd been told to look the man up, and he'd done so. James had been there sing long before even the elf had been, and Reynaud had met the elf at the club. Neither really knew how it was that the door man never seemed to age; Reynaud thought it might have something to do with Athanasius, but neither seemed bold enough to ask. You didn't go around asking who the god of death and dreams was blessing or cursing.

His jeans were off already, the card back in his pocket and the door shut behind him. The elf's glamors faded gradually, like a curtain being pulled back. It was dark enough in the hallway that no one seemed to notice the slow appearance of a tail or the stashing of a wrinkled pair of faded Levis being shoved into a pay-per-hour locker with better locks and alarms than a military compound in Russia. When they entered the main attraction, a giant of a room with two balconies and a huge dance floor - not that there was much room for dancing, people packed wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling as they were (and in some places, even the ceiling had its odd visitors) - the pair clasped arms and said their good-byes. They'd meet up later: Reynaud with a couple of fresh hearts in his belly and maybe a few vodkas down his throat, Jonas probably with a human girl in each arm. Sure, they were friends, but they led very different lives; that wasn't to say Reynaud didn't have his own brand of fun, but let's face it: friends or not, he and the elf definitely had different views on entertainment.