asses.
All the same, I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Lana’s number down at Curl Up & Dye. After a few minutes of mindless chatter and harmless flirting with the stylist, I got her to promise to bring me down a new tuft of leprechaun hair, from a different source this time, in the next couple of days. For now, I was stuck with what I had and we needed to be careful with it.
Slipping my cell phone back in my pocket, I walked over to the back of the room and pulled up the trapdoor in the floor with only a whisper of a creak. Most of the time, a chair was left on the trapdoor to make it look like it was unused, but I suspected that my coworkers were aware of my occasional disappearances down into the basement.
Despite the overwhelming darkness, I easily grabbed the pull chain on the single bare bulb in the basement and jerked it on before touching the dirt floor. Lined up along three of the walls were additional wood cabinets holding more volatile and rarer items. Some I had been lucky enough to inherit, while others were purchased on the black market. All of them were for my exclusive use, and they were what made me the most successful tattoo artist in town. When you wanted something done right and had the cash to pay for it, it was all about the ingredients in the ink rather than the design on the skin.
On the one bare stone wall was another pentagram spray-painted in black. This one held the power to attack any intruders. I glanced over the items one time and did a quick check on the spell to see that it was still intact and cast by me. No one had been down here without my knowledge. The same tension that coiled in my stomach every day I walked into the shop finally unwound and I breathed a sigh of relief. The basement held other spells, cloaking special items from view, protecting both them and me. There were things down here that people would kill for and ones that were an automatic death sentence for possessing without being a witch or a warlock.
Overhead, I heard the sound of the front door opening and slamming shut followed by the heavy pounding of heels across the hardwood floor. I knew that cadence. Trixie was in early.
Hurrying up the stairs, I shut the trapdoor behind me and dropped my bag on it to keep it partially hidden from view. It was time to get to work.
“Is there a reason a gun is lying on the floor?” Trixie asked casually as I met her in the main tattooing area.
Shit. I’d forgotten about the gun. It was now sitting quite obviously on the floor, beside the front door where I had left it. Not exactly the best thing to leave lying around a tattoo parlor where any of your more unstable customers could pick it up.
“Rough afternoon,” I muttered, but the words didn’t come out sounding as indifferent as I had hoped; then my eyes fell on Trixie’s outfit for today. Instead of her usual shorts, she wore a pair of jeans with some strategically placed holes and tears. Her top was a black leather bustier that accented the swell of her breasts and left a broad swath of her flat stomach bare. Her long blond locks were pulled back in some twist thing that allowed some thick strands to frame her face. As she turned to drop her bag on the counter, I could easily make out the butterfly-wings tattoo between her shoulder blades. Somehow, they seemed to sparkle in the light as she moved.
Clenching my teeth, I ducked my head as I walked out into the lobby and picked up the gun. She was going to be the death of my sanity. I positively ached to touch her, to run my hands along skin I knew would be as smooth as satin, and bury my nose in her neck to drink in her sweet scent. I knew better than to mix business with pleasure. It NEVER worked out. Never.
To make matters worse, Trixie had gone out of her way to disguise the fact that she was an elf when it was well-known that some of the best artists in the industry were elves. They had the patience and the natural talent to not only learn to stir a good potion, but to also learn the art. Trixie was hiding, and that wasn’t good under any circumstances. It had been on the tip of my tongue to ask her about it on more than one occasion, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to start that conversation without giving away my own abilities and dark past. Among humans, the only ones who could identify a glamour spell were warlocks and witches. My hands were tied.
For now, I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open, content with her working five nights a week.
“What are you doing here so early?” I asked as I came back into the tattooing room with the gun. I opened one of the cabinets on the far side of the room with the toe of my worn black boot, removed the magazine from the bottom of the grip, and threw the gun and magazine in with the others that I had collected over the past few years. This was a somewhat dangerous business even under the best of circumstances. Luckily, having a troll on staff helped to keep the scuffles to a minimum.
“You said today was inventory day. I thought I would come in early and help,” she said with a bright smile.
I made some nondescript noise in the back of my throat as I kicked the cabinet door shut, mentally plucking the wings off the butterflies that took flight in my stomach. After working with her for roughly two years, I would like to think that I could get through a workday without acting like a hormone-filled idiot.
My shift at the Asylum usually ran from the middle of the afternoon until midevening, while Trixie came in a few hours after me. Bronx didn’t show up until a couple of hours after the sun set and stayed until a couple of hours before dawn. Oddly enough, these were typical hours for tattoo parlors. No one worked mornings. Who the hell wanted a tattoo first thing in the morning with their coffee?
“Are you ever going to do anything about those guns? Or are you just collecting them as mementoes of your past conquests?” Trixie continued.
One corner of my mouth lifted before I could stop it and I shook my head. “Would you rather I called the cops so I could hand them all over like a good boy?”
“And then try to survive the barrage of questions that would accompany that armory?” she scoffed. “I’d like to stay below the radar of all the local law enforcement.”
“Agreed. I’ve got some contacts. I’ll start asking around to see what I can get for them. We could use some new equipment,” I said, letting my eyes skim over the work area while carefully avoiding Trixie. We could always use some fresh ingredients, and some of the tattooing equipment was starting to get worn in such a way that we were making personal modifications just so it kept working through a tattoo. I had made some nice cash from this business over the past few years, but it was obvious that it was time to start reinvesting.
Walking over to the counter opposite where Trixie was currently perched, I turned on the small television linked to the security camera that looked over the lobby of the parlor. It allowed us to see who came through the door when we were all busy with a chair. It wasn’t completely foolproof—some creatures didn’t show up on camera—but it caught most who wandered through our door.
“So are you going to tell me what happened?” Trixie prodded after a moment of silence had stretched between us.
I shrugged as I turned to face her. “Nothing important.” I finally raised my eyes to look at her again, feeling as if I had better control over myself following the initial shock of her outfit.
“Nothing important, but it involved a gun,” she said, crossing her arms over her bosom. “Come on, Gage. Spill it or I’ll get Bronx to sit on you when he comes in and we’ll crush it out of you.”
“Russell Dalton caught me on my way into the parlor this afternoon. Seems he’s a little pissed regarding the results of his tattoo.”
“Dalton? I don’t remember him.”
“Came in a couple of weeks
