There were often a great many things that drove someone to drink. Say a bored housewife finds herself lusting for a life that may very well have been in their reach had they simply said a word to their husbands, say that very same bored housewife needs reprieve from her screaming, wet children and wanders into a bar. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, doesn't it? But say, as this woman leaves her house her husband finds himself feeling empty after a day of providing for said woman and their genetic replications that resemble snotty... little humans. He pours himself a great old glass of whiskey to soothe the loneliness created by an absent wife who assumes she's done her job mothering all day, when in reality? None of their ideas of how their life should have been are the same. There are a great many reasons to be driven to drink, and loneliness or confusion seem to, often times, be the winners. My father had partaken in the substance habitually, to a point where my sisters proclaimed they would never touch the drink. My brothers chuckled at their declarations, debating which one of us would be the first to have a habit to resemble our fathers. But did we really have reasons to drink? Finley had his youth, Troy had his absentee brain... And me? I found myself in a corner at a bar by the end of a night of work. When I was younger, I worked in bars as a bouncer or bartender, though with several years between me and those times I found myself a patron rather than an employee. As a client, I wound up in bars with either the accomplice of the leech- see vampire, that had become a partner of sorts. But on my own, I didn't tend to wind up in said locations, unless a job had brought me there.

After spending a night working with a dark hunter, it had dawned on me that the work I did as a ... gun for hire, wasn't too different than his work, although he might have worked with a seriously different set of morals and boundaries than I. There were no judgments in my world, no biases and no attachments. I did things for a cheque and to sate a scarlet kind of lust. And them? They had a hatred of supernatural beings that I only rivaled in my distaste of vampires. The hunters had seemed to be gathering, though, a cause that it would be prudent to worry about. At first, the hunt had seemed focused on all creatures but when you looked closer the hunt was clearly aimed at witches. Was this Salem? Where were the gallows? I had chosen to follow the Hunter's advice to lay low and keep my magic quiet for as long as I could, for as long as the council was following me. Instead of a job, or a jaunt with an accomplice, maybe that was my reason for a drink.

The soft voice of another in the bar rang above the music in a way only the familiar voices of those possessing a sort of magic did. Through the salt and fog of my worry that had manifested since the hunter's visit to my apartment, her voice sounded like a harmonic bell and drew my attention from the busy bartender I had been preoccupied with harassing for the drink he wasn't pouring me fast enough. The words were soft enough that she would feel the same magic buzz to them that had given me notice to her existence, but loud enough that the bartender might actually give me a chance to let him do his job.

"Do I have to wear a dress to get service, too?"