Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge by Paul Krueger

hand pressed to her temple and the other pointing to where a fat, glistening bulk of muscles was convulsing in the middle of the road. It was the first tremens Bailey had seen since her night of screwdriver bravery, and it was even more horrifying flailing—like a tumor with legs and teeth. Up on the car Mona twitched her fingers, and the tremens squeaked in pain.
    “Irish coffee,” Zane said in awe. “She’s making it hallucinate.”
    “Nice,” Bucket said, and he elbowed Bailey. “Study up, eh?”
    Bailey automatically pulled the book from her jacket pocket but then stopped. Neither Zane nor Bucket was doing anything—they were just watching as Mona made the demon thrash and wail.
    “Should I go get … backup or … something?” Bailey said hesitantly. “How’s she going to kill it with just”—she glanced at a page in
The Devil’s Water Dictionary
—“illusions?”
    But before Zane could answer, Mona had closed her hand into a fist and stood up. With one swift movement she ripped a windshield wiper from the car, raised it high, and jumped into the air. When she landed, she sank the wiper into the tremens.
    “Like that,” Bucket said, “I guess.”
    The twitching tremens burst, and its black blood sprayed onto Mona. She straightened, flung her hair out of her eyes, and wiped her face with her arm as casually as if she’d simply broken a sweat.
    Bucket threw up his arms and let out a whoop. “Yeah! That’s the spirit!” He grinned. “Hey, get it? Like spirits?”
    He nudged Bailey, who felt like she was going to puke. The first time she’d seen a tremens, she’d been so shocked that she hadn’t let the gruesomeness of killing it sink in. She’d been too pumped with the adrenaline rush of not dying to appreciate how gory it was. But this was literally bloody awful.
    “Holy shit,” Zane said. “Baby, that was—” He hovered reassuringly around Mona, but she didn’t look at all like she needed comforting. In fact she looked right at Bailey.
    “Bartending,” she said. The calm in her voice, while she stood there flecked with blood, made Bailey’s skin crawl. She handed the gory windshield wiper to Bailey, who took it without thinking. “It was bartending.”
    “She knows,” Zane said. “She’s ready. Aren’t you, Bailey?”
    Bailey gripped the wiper, the coating of warm tremens blood oozing between her fingers, and stared at her three fellow bartenders. “I’m ready.”
    Somehow Bailey managed to keep down her midnight breakfast until she got to Ravenswood.

THE DEVIL’S WATER DICTIONARY.
The Irish Coffee
    An elixir to induce illusions

    1
. Pour three ounces of fresh hot coffee into a glass mug
.
    2
. Add one teaspoon of brown sugar and one and a half ounces of Irish whiskey. Stir gently
.
    3
. Float one ounce of fresh cream on top of the drink. Serve without stirring or mixing
.
    T he emergence of a codified Irish coffee dates to the winter of 1940, when severe snowstorms grounded a commercial flight in County Limerick, Ireland. The local bartender, Padraic Kelly, had been attempting to perfect a coffee-based cocktail, but the recent bad weather that week had left him short on supplies and customers alike. When he found his bar unexpectedly full, he saw a golden opportunity to earn back his losses and engineer an alchemical breakthrough at the same time.
    Using the cold weather to his advantage, Kelly was able to sell his entire stock of whiskey and coffee to the stranded passengers. Each customer was served a slightly different ratio, allowing Kelly to observe a wide spectrum of results. He soon realized one of his customers had been imbued with the ability to manifest illusions in the minds of the other patrons. Though he later cited his knowledgeable eye for the supernatural, his barback claimed he’d been tipped off by the fact thatafter a certain point, all his customers had failed to notice they were sipping from now-empty glasses.
    C OFFEE .

    F IG. 23—
Coffea