“You make it sound magical.”
“It can be.”
I caught the suggestion in her tone. “Are you saying Arcanum makes magical tattoos?” I sounded skeptical.
“All tattoos are magical, if their owner wants them to be.”
“And what if the owner doesn’t want them to be? Can a tattoo be magic against someone’s will?”
She squinted then, but before she could answer, the door opened behind me. I knew it was Johnny. Eris patted the countertop. “Lance has some fabulous dragons in his binder. Why don’t you explore his portfolio, too? It’s on the table there.”
I watched her round the counter, smoothing her hair and not truly looking at her new patron until she’d stepped into the main area. “Welcome to the Arcane Ink Emp—” She stopped in her tracks, swallowed hard, and didn’t finish.
“Hello,” he said.
Johnny had fixed her with a look, and I knew how powerful his dark blue eyes ringed in the ebony Wedjat lines could be, peering out from under those black waves, the only sparkle coming from the white-gold hoops in one brow.
Eris was staring, openmouthed. “You …” She said it so softly, I almost didn’t hear it. But she recognized him.
My breath caught. My heart sputtered in my chest.
Sweet Goddess … my mother is Arcanum?
Before I could recover, she said, “Just a minute,” and headed down the hall at a quick pace.
I looked at Johnny; he nodded. We moved into the head of the hallway.
In seconds, Eris, who had disappeared, was backing into view again. Todd and Kirk had come in the back door when she tried to go out that way.
To her credit, she didn’t scream or call for help from the other artist. I could hear the men talking quietly and the tools of the trade buzzing now that I was in the hall. The rooms were separated only by curtains.
Eris faced Johnny squarely. “What do you want?”
“To talk,” he said.
She took a well-balanced, square-shouldered pose. “Then talk.”
Johnny walked forward three paces. “You recognized me. That means you’re Arcanum.”
A man burst through the curtain, slamming into Johnny. They crashed through the open doorway of the workstation opposite. The curtain was torn down and the curtain rod clattered on the wood floor. I glanced into the room to see the client—brows high and mouth hanging open—holding the still-buzzing tattoo gun that had been thrust in his grip.
The men grappled on the floor. The artist was straddling Johnny, and limbs were flailing every which way. Then Johnny got tired of trying to stop him without hurting him and cold-cocked him.
“Lance!” Eris shouted.
The guy slumped to the side, unconscious.
Johnny wrestled his way out from under the dead weight still partially atop him.
Then I felt a distinctive tingle.
It was energy, buzzing not unlike the instrument in the room beside me. Eris was calling on a ley line. Todd and Kirk are too close.
My feet moved, I raced and launched myself in a move not unlike the tackle that had just taken down Johnny. “Mom! No!”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Eris dropped whatever magic she’d been calling when I knocked her to the floor. She lay stunned and groaning under me.
Crouched over my mother, I craned my neck to check on the wæres. Todd, stricken, rubbed at his arms. Kirk shivered and resettled his overcoat. Behind me, Johnny was standing in the hall, where he could monitor the knocked-out artist and his customer. “You two okay back there?”
They nodded. Thank the Goddess it hadn’t been enough to cause either Todd or Kirk to go into a partial shift.
A hand jerked my hat and wig off. “Persephone!”
I must have been a frightful sight as I glowered down at her. “If you try a spell or call any energies, before I’m through with you, you’ll wish your curling iron had set a faster fire.”
After I let Eris up, she checked on her artist, then his client. She relieved the man of the buzzing thing in his grasp and set it aside. “Ray, you better just go on home.”
“But … are you okay? Is Lance?”
“They’ll be fine,” Johnny said.
Ray’s dirty fingernails made me peg him as a mechanic, and he sized Johnny up like he was considering whether or not he could take him.
I tore the bobby pins from my hair and shook it out, but maneuvered the metal hair fasteners around my fingers with the pointy sides out, just in case.
“Let me bandage your arm then you can flip the closed sign and lock the door on your way out,” Eris said as she pulled bandaging items from a drawer. When she put the last piece of tape on him she patted his shoulder. “You know the drill, keep it covered, blah, blah, blah. And don’t forget to turn the sign and lock the door.”
“B-but,” Ray stammered. He clearly hadn’t made up his mind yet that he couldn’t lick Johnny.
“No buts, Ray,” she said. “And no fighting. Just go. Lance will finish you up soon and I’ll pay for your next tattoo.”
“Walk me out?” he asked.
“I’ll be your escort,” Johnny said. Ray stood, and the defiant glimmer in his eyes made his intentions clear. “Try it, Ray, and you’ll leave with some part of you broken.”
“Ray,” Eris snapped. “We’re fine. They just want an explanation and I owe them that. Don’t do anything stupid, just go home and fuck Julie. Come back tomorrow.”
Johnny walked Ray out. Eris crouched over her artist and smacked Lance’s cheek with increasing force. Lance looked like he’d barely graduated high school. “Shake it off, bitch boy.” His eyelids fluttered. “There you go, show me those baby blues.” He moaned, then blinked and focused on her. “How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked as she flipped him off.
“One,” he groaned.
She stepped back, offered him a hand up. On his feet, Lance moaned again, fingers inspecting the back of his head. “Holy shit.” He nearly toppled over. Eris grabbed him and kept him on his feet by slipping her arm around his waist.
“Whoa. I’m glad I never tried out for the football team. What hit me?”
“I did,” Johnny replied, rejoining us.
Lance faced him, then his gaze fell past Johnny.
Nana and Zhan stepped into view. Nana summed up the situation—and Eris’s clinging to the young man—in a glance. “Robbing the cradle now, Eris? I thought you didn’t like kids.”
Eris plopped Lance down in the nearest seat when she entered the break room. Lance propped his elbows on the table in front of him, face in hands. We were right behind her.
To one side sat a trio of tall stainless steel storage cabinets that would be the pride and joy of any car enthusiast’s garage. A refrigerator, a section of countertop with a sink, and a narrow dishwasher were lined up across the opposite wall.
“I’ve known this reckoning would find me sooner or later,” she said as she gave Lance an ice pack. Todd, Johnny, and I claimed the seats on one side of the table; Nana and Zhan sat opposite us. Kirk remained on his feet where he could take quick action if need be. Eris strode around to the table’s other end, her boot heels clacking authoritatively. She sat, then stood again immediately and retrieved a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray from the drawer.
She shook the pack until one stuck up from the others. After putting it to her lips, she offered the pack to Nana, who refused, muttering, “Menthol shit.”
Eris lit up, took a long drag on it, blew smoke slowly at the ceiling, then rejoined us, her seat slightly angled from the table, her legs crossed.
“When I left you with Nana, I stayed with Larry. He was an armorer and blacksmith who trained horses and jousted at Renaissance Faires. We traveled constantly. I read palms and picked up tattooing from a woman I befriended on the circuit.
“About nine years ago, Larry was cited for felonious assault outside a bar in San Diego, again at a bar in Oakland, and, a few months later, he did the same shit a thir
d time in Sacramento. You cause someone serious bodily harm with a weapon three times back-to-back in Cali, and they send you up for twenty-five years. That’s what they did to him, anyway.”
She shrugged like it was no big deal, but her crossed leg had begun bobbing to a nervous rhythm.
“His sister took the horses and the equipment. She sold them all at auction, and the bitch left me with nothing.” She seemed to be talking to her employee now more than me; he was the only person in the room who wasn’t giving her a pissed-off stare. “My last bit of cash was spent on a hotel room and that night I ran up a tab in the bar even though I hadn’t any hope of paying it. Lucky me, the bartender hadn’t checked to see that my room wasn’t secured with a card. Just before last call, a stranger approached me and asked if he could cover my tab. I figured he wanted sex.” She clicked her tongue. “Instead, he wanted magic.”
She swallowed hard enough to be heard and appeared to be mustering some inner resolve. I thought she was just being melodramatic.
She looked up at Johnny. “This guy paid me—in cash—to perform the magic on you.” She breathed false calm from the cigarette again. “I knew it was unethical, but I had nothing. I was desperate. I bought this with it.” Her index finger made a circle meant to indicate the building around us. “Opened AIE. I’d never known independence before … I couldn’t resist.”
Johnny asked, “Who was the stranger?”
“I don’t know. He never gave me a name.”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Convenient.” His tone was mocking.
Eris leaned over the table. “I. Don’t. Remember. What I did to you was awful and I washed it out of my mind. I never wanted to remember, damn it.”
“But I do. I want to remember.”
The palpable glares they exchanged made it clear that neither intended to back down. So I interjected my question. “How did you do it?”
Again, she took a hit of nicotine before answering. “It was done over seven days. Arms first, eyes second, navel, then thighs. Each was bound to an element, set to a purpose. The chest was next, binding the previous four together through it.”
“Thought you washed it from your mind,” Johnny accused.
“Some of it won’t come clean.” She flicked the cigarette in the ashtray. “Your memories were bound down with that one, like an offering to seal the first five together and locking your past away. I’d worked a little on the foo dog and dragon each of the previous days, because the detail was too great to achieve in a single day. On the sixth day, I completed the foo dog. On the seventh day, I completed the dragon. The last three were more spiritual in the purposes I assigned them. And after the last tattoo was empowered and sealed, I locked each tattoo to a chakra point as an extra precaution.”
“How is that even possible?” I demanded.
She pushed the ashes around with the burning end of her cigarette. “Perhaps I misspoke when I said the stranger wanted magic. He wanted sorcery.”
“Who taught you sorcery?” Nana asked.
“The woman I knew on the Faire circuit.”
Silence filled the room for half a minute, then Johnny asked, “Did I talk while you did this to me?”
“You were unconscious.”
“For a whole week?”
“He was drugging you.”
Johnny took another long pause. “Why the variation of cultural symbolism in the tattoos?”
“For the strength in the diversity. Bringing so many pantheons to the task … I’d never even considered doing anything like this. So in my planning, I was thorough. I wanted to be certain. It’s still holding, isn’t it?”
“I can transform in spite of it.”
“The moon’s curse claimed you first, nothing I could do would stop that.”
“Perhaps I misspoke,” he mocked her. “I can still transform at will in spite of it.”
Eris’s leg stopped bobbing. She didn’t even seem to breathe. “At will?”
He nodded.
“Bullshit.”
Johnny stood and approached her end of the table. He put the heel of his hand on the corner and leaned over her so the room’s lights cast his shadow across her. “I’m the Domn Lup, Eris.” As he spoke, his hand darkened and fur sprouted, his nails thickened, black and sharp. “And now you’re going to unbind it all.”
“I can’t.”
“You fucking better figure out how,” he growled, nails piercing into the wooden table top.
“I’m not prepared. I need supplies, and … and … even if I was, I couldn’t guarantee that I could undo it. Spells can be broken, but this was sorcery.”
That wasn’t exactly true, but I wanted to know how long she’d lie.
Johnny shifted to rest his hip on the table edge and held his hand up between them, letting the transformation reverse. “Make a list of what you need.” He snapped his fingers. “Todd. I saw paper and pens at the front desk.” Todd retrieved the items.
Eris studied my boyfriend, who had switched on his intimidating persona like a true master, comfortable in his own power. Her features were stiff with fear. “It’s sorcery,” she repeated.
“I hear tell that witchcraft is like sand that touches the sea and the air and stretches along the coast and inland to the soil. Like waves of power that represent the gods and goddesses of the various pantheons, the tide touches the energy of nature, influencing and shaping it to a witches’ will through rituals and spells. And I’m told that sorcery digs through witchcraft, burrowing deep into places unseen to find the buried treasure—the power—below the surface. Sorcery consumes that power, creating a change then and there, not just influencing a future one.”
It was how I’d explained it to him.
Eris said, “You know a lot for a wærewolf.”
“I’m not just any wærewolf.”
Todd thrust the paper at her and slapped three pens down in front of Eris. “Don’t try anything,” he growled at her. “The other witches here will know if your ‘supplies’ are accurate for your purpose.”
Eris’s look of surprise zeroed in on Nana. “I thought witches and wærewolves weren’t meant to mingle? How the hell did you end up with these guys?”
“If you’d had the guts to stick around, I might respect you enough to answer that.” Nana stood and shuffled away to the front room.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Eris finished her list, handed it to me, and lit another cigarette. The wærewolves had retreated to the corner and were whispering to themselves. Zhan leaned on the wall at the entrance to the hallway, arms crossed, and periodically glanced into the front area. Lance had given up on his ice pack, but seemed to be doing his best to be forgotten.
As I skimmed down the list, Eris said, “After you slammed the door … I thought I’d never have the chance to see you again.”
For three heartbeats we stared at each other, then I laid down the paper. I grabbed the cigarette from her, stubbed it out, then tossed the pack into the garbage. “If Johnny didn’t need you to do this—and what irony that it was you—then you wouldn’t be seeing me.” I sat and calmly resumed reading.
Or trying to read. My mind was still reeling from the knowledge that she, my deadbeat mother of all people, had been the one to magically dam up Johnny’s power.
She recrossed her legs the other way, and the bouncing resumed. “How does the vampire fit into this equation?”
“You’re in no position to press me for information.”
“But you’re Erus Veneficus to a Regional Quarter Lord—I saw it on the news, Pittsburgh is part of his domain—and you’re here with a wærewolf claiming to be the Domn Lup.”
I ignored her and assessed the list. Candles. Yellow, blue, red, silver, purple, green, black. Stones. Amber, moonstone, red jasper—
“You’ve accomplished so much.”
—aventurine, amethyst, jade, hematite. Herbs. Cinnamon and rosemary. Eucalyptus and myrrh. Basil
and allspice. That wasn’t even half the list. I wagged the sheet in the air. “Do you have all of this somewhere or are we supposed to hit your local witch supply store in a shopping spree? This stuff needs to be consecrated and empowered and we’re in a waning moon phase.”
“The moon is new tomorrow—” She stopped herself, stood. “Shit.”
“What?”
“I told you: It took me a week to do this in the first place. If we’re going to attempt to undo it, we have to get going and I mean now.”
She had everyone’s attention now, and she thrived in the spotlight. “The moon will be new at nine minutes after five, tomorrow evening. The sun will set at five-ten. In order to best break the bonds put on you, I have to banish those bonds, and that’s best done under the sliver of a waning moon. There’ll be no moon tomorrow.”
“But that’s magic,” Johnny said. “This is sorcery.”
“The influence of the energies is still relevant.”
Johnny asked me for confirmation with a wordless glance. I nodded.
“So either we make this an all-nighter tonight,” Eris said, imbuing her words with the sense of having the advantage in the situation, “or we get the gang together again in a few weeks and take a more subtle one-per-night schedule.”
Johnny’s dark look reminded her that she hadn’t ever had the advantage here. “I don’t intend to leave until it is done.”
Eris tucked hair behind her ear, revealing three piercings in her earlobe and a tribal line tattoo behind and beneath her ear, along the hairline. “I have the supplies. Upstairs.”
Zhan drew the gun from her shoulder holster. “Then let’s go get them, shall we?”
Eris, Zhan, and I headed for the back door where Kirk still held his position. Zhan grabbed Eris’s arm to hold her back. “You go first,” she told me. To Eris, she said, “Don’t try anything stupid. You won’t outrun me or a bullet. I never miss.”
I noticed Kirk’s spine stiffen. “Never?” he asked.
“Never,” Zhan affirmed.
Kirk gave her the once-over like he’d never seen her before. While wæres are notoriously horny, they would rather spit on a vampire’s Offerling than look at one. But these two had a couple of things in common, for one, guns. Kirk was an ex-military sharpshooter. And they both were Asian.
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