'Ink It Over
A Touch Of Ink, Volume 1
Rachel Rawlings
Published by Rachel Rawlings, 2018.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
'INK IT OVER
First edition. October 19, 2018.
Copyright © 2018 Rachel Rawlings.
Written by Rachel Rawlings.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Further Reading: Soul To Keep
Also By Rachel Rawlings
About the Author
For my husband- my number one fan and biggest supporter. I couldn't do it without you.
Chapter One
“OKAY, JAMES, FIVE-MINUTE break."
My client sighed as the muscles in his back relaxed.
I pulled off my latex gloves with a satisfying snap and tossed them in the waste bin. "And go out back if you’re going to burn one. I’m tired of having to sweep up cigarette butts out front.”
James groaned, peeling himself off the table and detouring toward the bathroom before slipping out for a smoke break.
The bell above the door chimed, drawing my attention to the newest walk-in. James's nicotine addiction provided the perfect opportunity to talk to the walk-in instead of making him wait until the appointment was over.
“Welcome to Something To ‘Ink About,” I said.
Working the counter really wasn’t my forte. That used to be Grim’s job. After he passed and left me the shop, I’d been forced to work on my people skills. Let’s just say it was a work in progress.
“How can I help you?” I tucked a few stray strands of my chestnut brown hair behind my ears and plastered a smile on my face.
Lars—my co-owner and partner in crime—had given me some advice about my resting bitch face. I tried to soften my expression, but if the look on the guy’s face was any indication, it wasn’t working.
“Quote me a price on this piece.” He was young, barely legal, with blond hair, ice blue eyes and an obvious chip on his shoulder. Rather than hand me the paper, Blondie tossed it on the counter.
Instead of answering, I pointed toward the ceiling and the sign hanging above my head, explicitly Rule Number Two.
He read aloud starting with number one: “One - no screaming or squirming; Two - no tribal, Three - no Asian lettering unless you’re fluent in the language.” Blondie leaned on the counter, looming over me as he encroached on my personal space in a move no doubt designed to intimidate me.
Too bad for him I’d experienced it a thousand times before. At five foot two inches with a petite frame that kept me shopping in the junior’s department despite being a grown ass woman, Blondie wasn’t the first to confuse small with weak and he certainly wouldn’t be the last.
“You’re cute. I guess that’s why they keep you around.” He sucked in a breath through his teeth, tongue sliding between his incisors like he had something left over from lunch wedged in there. “Maybe I should be talking to your boss.” He nodded toward Lars who’d entered through the back door with James in tow, before tracing a finger along my forearm.
Grim wasn’t the only one with rules. I had a few of my own and no touching was right at the top of the list.
“Hey, Lars, you’re late.” I spared a glance over my shoulder as I reached under the counter, my fingers sliding over the base of the small bat I kept hidden for instances like this. “Blondie here wants to talk to the guy in charge,” I said, answering the unspoken question in Lars’s gaze. “I was just about to introduce him to Billy.”
“Shit, Adeline. He’s just a dumb kid.” The sound of Lars’s boot-clad feet against the linoleum floor echoed in the shop. He wasn’t stomping. At six feet three inches and two hundred seventy-five pounds, it was just how he walked. “Go sit down, James.”
“Hell no, this is just getting good.” James laughed. “I’m going to watch little Del kick this kid’s ass.”
“What seems to be the problem?” Lars stepped up beside me. With his beefy arms crossed over his chest, he peered down at the kid who was still leaning on my counter.
“Blondie doesn’t much care for the house rules. Number two in particular.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Lars chuckled as he gave the kid the once-over. “You know what your first mistake was, son? Apart from ignoring the rules, I mean.”
Dumbstruck by the sheer size and old-school biker appearance of Lars, the kid simply shook his head in response.
“Your first mistake was thinking she wasn’t in charge.”
The smile that settled on my face was not my customer service smile. It was a little wicked and accompanied by a glint of magic in my eyes. Just a flash. Enough to let him know I was dangerous but not enough to clue him in to what I was.
“There’s a shop about twenty miles from here. Pins and Needles. Ask for Doc. He loves pumping punks like you full of black ink.” With the tip of one finger, I pushed the sketch back across the counter.
Blondie snatched it up without saying a word and hauled ass out the door. James’s laughter over his hasty retreat filled the shop.
I bumped fists with Lars. “Thanks for having my back.”
“Like you need it.” Lars ran a hand over his freshly shaved head.
“Still, it’s nice to know someone’s looking out for me.” Sentimental moments didn’t last long at the shop. I pointed to the gray hairs that had recently appeared in Lars’s beard. “I thought you were going to get some of that hair color for men?”
“Nah, the ladies love it. Makes me look distinguished.” He puffed out his chest, giving the leather vest he wore a little tug before putting on airs and strutting past me toward the workstation next to mine. He pulled out the small hand mirror we let clients use to check out their back pieces and checked the gray in his beard.
Lars was like me, which meant he was different. Magical. We didn’t age like regular people, and people didn’t know we existed. His medium brown facial hair was natural—the gray was not. A reverse dye job if you will. Less likely to draw unwanted attention when you worked around mortals all day if you pretended to age like they did.
I left Lars at the counter and headed back to my client. “If by distinguished you mean old, then yeah, we’ll go with that.” Head cocked, I stopped at the entrance cut out of the four half walls that made up my section of the shop and took a look at the back piece on James. It needed something. At least I had two more sessions scheduled with him to figure out what it was.
“Don’t you know rules were made to be broken?” James shook his head, chuckling right up until the moment he heard the power supply kick on and the hum of my machine firing up.
“Not those rules. They’re like the Ten Commandments—set in stone.”
Rolling my head and then my shoulders, I did my best to loosen up before settling back in for the second half of my session with James.
The design was his own—the first rule of the house and the most important according to Grim. Your tattoo tells your story, not someone else’s. James had designed a cemetery piece, each tombstone a metaphor for the people and mistakes he’d left behind.
Apart from an unusual number of walk-ins, the day passed like any other. Lars cleaned up his station and started our daily routine for closing up shop. We were almost done for the day. Well, one of us was anyway. Where Lars’s day ended, mine had just begun.
“How’d you manage one actual appointment and an afternoon of consults?” After closing out James’s ticket, I stuffed his generous tip in my back pocket and locked the door behind him. Four hours in the chair and I felt like the dead – after rigor mortis set in. “I should let you handle my schedule.”
“I already do.” Lars checked his watch. “One down, one to go. You’re going to be late if you don’t hustle.”
“Damn, that consult I had this afternoon really threw off my groove.” I headed toward the small office in the back corner of the shop to grab my coat and the rest of my supplies.
“If you think gearing up to threaten someone with a club is a consult, I’m taking you off the front desk.” Lars followed me into the back.
“Promise?” After digging through the stash of snacks I kept in the bottom drawer of my desk, I grabbed a couple of those protein bars with a peanut butter center dipped in chocolate. Okay, they were candy bars. I took two of them. “Don’t judge. I need the sugar. I’ll grab a bottle of water from the fridge.” From the expression on Lars’s face, he was doing a lot of judging. “We can discuss my dietary needs another time. I’m going to be late, remember?”
“You’re not holding up your end of the deal.” The wood creaked in protest as Lars sat on the corner of my desk.
“I am so.” After shoving everything inside my pack with more force than necessary, I slung it over my shoulder and grabbed my keys.
“You’ve been moonlighting too much, Del. The underground won’t stay that way forever. Not if you keep working it the way you are.” His large hand clamped around my wrist. “Hey, are you listening to me?”
“Nope.”
Before I received my fifth lecture of the week on the importance of adhering to the food pyramid and being safe, I beat feet out of the shop, heading for my car and my second appointment of the night.
Chapter Two
SWITCHING THE HEADLIGHTS off, I coasted in the dark until I reached the end of the alley that led to a small parking lot behind the old Bowl-n-Brew. Located in an abandoned section of town, surrounded by boarded up rowhomes and vacant retail storefronts, the bowling alley struggled to stay open before calling it quits a couple years prior. Having scouted the location weeks ago, Lars assured me I wouldn’t be disturbed. Considering what I was about to do, that was an essential detail, one I wouldn’t trust to anyone other than Lars.
Except for Grim. But he was dead.
It had been just Lars and me since we laid Grim’s body to rest the year before. Prior to that, it had been the three of us - thick as thieves - working our trade in the tattoo studio by day and in abandoned buildings like the bowling alley at night, offering a unique brand of protection.
In other words, we were doing what the Magistrate should have been doing all along.
Providence was the epicenter of witch society, so much so that half of the city’s million residents could claim magical heritage. Everyone who could spin a spell answered to the Magistrate. The Magistrate, in return for our fealty, promised to protect us from the dangers lurking around every corner in the mortal world. For centuries, they did just that. But with more and more of us going mainstream, like kitchen witches whose powers focused on the home and hearth, the need for protection was long gone.
That didn’t mean the Magistrate gave up their power. After decades of searching for any way to stay relevant, they had essentially turned to organized crime. Basic freedoms and securities came at a price—a tithe, paid once a month to the Magistrate’s henchman who came around to places like my tattoo studio to collect it.
The more time passed, the more it became clear the most dangerous thing to a witch was the Magistrate itself.
Which is what brought me to the back door of a run-down bowling alley in the middle of the night with nothing but a tattoo machine, a few jars of spelled ink, and a couple of candy bars to hold me over. The abandoned spaces, like the old Bowl-n-Brew, were home to my real job. Grim used to say it was my calling, the reason he took me in when he found me dumpster diving all those years ago and taught me his trade.
He taught me to be a Warder.
A ward, a magical shell of protection around a place or thing, can be created by any first level witch. A Warder is next level, performing a rare form of magic even amongst the most powerful witches and rarer still among the Magistrate. There hasn’t been a Warder on the Magistrate since its founding.
A statistical fact most likely attributed to the Magistrate hunting Warders to the brink of extinction, simply because of what we were and what we could do. And what we could do was more than a superficial layer of magical protection.
It went skin deep.
Grim taught me an array of spells that, combined with ink and matched with the right sigils, could alter a witch’s chemical makeup, burying our ward under the epidermis. Unlike the tattoos I did at Something To ‘Ink About, which could be covered up or lasered off, my wards became a permanent part of a witch, burrowing into their magic until it was impossible to tell one magical fingerprint from another.
Juggling an armful of supplies, I bumped the door open with my hip and backed inside the bowling alley. It was dark except for the light filtering in from the streetlamps through the dingy windows. I made my way toward the lane Lars had cleaned and staged for me earlier in the day. Lane thirteen, my lucky number and conveniently located near an emergency exit.
That was not a coincidence.
I made quick work of setting up my station while eating the first of my candy bars. Honestly, the way my stomach was growling, it didn’t stand a chance. Once my spelled inks were lined up in a neat row, I hooked up my tattoo machine and plugged it into the battery supply Lars had left along with the rest of the more obvious supplies a tattoo artist needed.
Supplies I didn’t want to get caught hauling around together in case I had a run-in with a Magistrate lackey.
Two orbs of light flashed in the front window followed by the sound of tires crunching on loose gravel in the parking lot as a car pulled around back. I checked my watch—right on time. My favorite quality in a client, and while the odds were good that it was in deed my client, I wasn’t taking any chances.
An old-school ward had been set on all points of egress, standard protocol when scoping out a place to work. Tuned to three people—Lars, the client, and me—we’d know if someone else came through—especially the Magistrate or one of their henchmen. The wards were set in place before we outfitted the location. Silent, they sent out a vibration only Lars and I could feel. If the Magistrate managed to find us and lay a trap, we’d know long before they had a chance to spring it. If they happened to stumble upon me, an actual auditory alarm would have them blocking all the exits. Witches taken in to Magistrate custody found themselves in a saltwater bath and assigned to a lead cell.
Warders—well, the Magistrate preferred to simply kill us outright.
Lead box or pine box, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to wind up in either. Hence the precautions.
The small creak from the rusty hinges on the back door echoed through the empty bowling alley. I waited, my gaze shifting from the emergency exit on my left to the doorway that accessed the pit and pin distributors and the rear entrance beyond. When no small tremors worked their way up from my fingertips to my spine, I took my coat off and settled in for a few hours of warding.
&
nbsp; “Hey, Adeline.” Jennifer, my client, walked through the doorway, cutting across the bowling lanes with a letter-size sheet of paper in her hand.
“I told you, call me Del. Is that it?” I held out my hand, anxious to see the final design for her tattoo.
It was important for the ward to be designed by the client—it helped it stick. So I kept my input to a minimum, rarely seeing the finished product before the appointment. My one rule for wards: keep it simple. A full back piece did not make for a good underground tattoo.
“The Adinkra symbol for harmony. Nice choice.” I slipped on a pair of latex-free gloves. “Have a seat. This won’t take as long as I originally thought. Same place we talked about?”
Jennifer nodded, hiking up the back of her shirt and hooking the hem over her shoulders to expose almost the entirety of her back. She straddled the chair I pointed to and craned her neck to watch over her shoulder as I began filling thimble-size cups with ink. When she realized I saw her watching me, she faced front. She was nervous. Not that I blamed her. Underground tattoos were done by a relative stranger in sketchy surroundings.
But if she didn’t believe, the ward wouldn’t stick. Not like it should.
“You know how this works, right? Lars explained everything to you?” When she nodded, I continued. “I can do the ward, even if you fight it, but the results are unpredictable. Given your situation, I wouldn’t recommend continuing if you’re not absolutely sure.”
“My life is already unpredictable.” Jennifer didn’t turn to face me when she spoke. “I’m sure. Do it.”
I would have liked eye contact, but the determination was there in her voice. Enough to convince me to proceed.
Born with a dual nature, Jennifer didn’t have one dominant power, a defect which made for volatile magic. Rather than risk instability and weakness amongst the rank and file within the witch community, the Magistrate bound the witch’s powers, leaving her weaker than she was before. Jennifer’s case was less severe than others I’d seen since becoming a Warder, and her family had kept her under the Magistrate’s radar, so far. With the right ward and proper training, no one would know her magic was wrong.
'Ink It Over: A Touch Of Ink Novel Page 1