“A reason for you to stay, that’s what.” His posture changed, softened, but he kept his hand on the door. “You can still get in the car, get out of here. Please, Del.”
Muffled complaints of “I can see you. I can hear you. Open up. Please, just hear me out,” came from the other side of the door. Fists pounded the glass as the woman pleaded for us to let her inside.
“You already talked to her?” I shook my head, unable to hide my disappointment.
“While you were loading the car.” Lars moved his hand from the door. He knew when he’d been beat, but it didn’t stop him from trying one last time to convince me to go. “I know you, Del. The moment you talk to this woman, I’ll be cancelling your reservations in Savannah. But the potential heat on this one, it’s too much. I would have tried to talk you out of it even if the Magistrate wasn’t sniffing around.”
I opened the door to a disheveled woman, her eyes red and puffy from tears, hair falling out of the bun she’d styled on the top of her head, outfit seemingly pieced together from a local thrift shop. There’s an old saying—when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me. I tried not to make too many assumptions, but it wasn’t a stretch to assume this woman didn’t have a lot of money or that she’d scrimped and saved to put my fee together.
People who had money tended to look the part and rarely found themselves outside my door. They knew their place in Magistrate society and were comfortable with the status quo.
“Thank you, thank you so much.” The woman glanced at Lars before fixing her pleading eyes on me. “He said you weren’t here.”
“Actually, I was on my way out of town.”
Lars had lied to me, but his intentions were good. I didn’t want this woman thinking he was the bad guy because he was far from it, and if I was going to help her, I needed her to trust him.
“Car’s all packed. I just came by to grab a few things and say goodbye to this lug head,” I said.
“Oh.” She gave Lars an apologetic glance. “I see.” With her purse clutched to her chest and on the verge of tears again, the woman turned to leave. “Thank you anyway.”
“Listen, ma’am, why don’t you come in.” I held the door open wider, hoping a Footman wasn’t watching the shop, and ushered her in. “You’re here. I’m here. I guess I’ve got a few minutes to spare.”
“I have a bad feeling about this.” Lars sighed, loudly, and made no attempts to hide his irritation when he closed and locked the door behind her.
“You are very kind. Thank you.” The woman ignored Lars and set her purse on the counter. Her hands trembled as she fidgeted with the buttons on her cardigan. “I won’t take up much of your time.”
“It’s no big deal, really.” Plopping down on one of the three chairs we kept in the waiting area of the shop, I pointed to the empty one on my left. “Why don’t you have a seat and tell me what this is all about.”
“It’s about my daughter.” The woman reached into her purse, freezing when Lars went into bouncer mode, puffing out his chest and taking a step toward her. “I...I have a card.” Her voice shook in tandem with the rest of her body.
“Funny, we had a guy say that same thing yesterday.” Lars motioned for the woman to get the card and hand it to him. After walking to the other side of the counter, he slid the card across the top and waited for the card to work its magic. “It’s legit.”
“Well, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, Mrs....” I waved her on.
“Brown,” she said.
Lars gave me the side-eye. It could be her real name, it could be an alias, or it could be total bullshit.
“Mrs. Brown, right. Why don’t you tell me about your daughter?”
“Ms. Brown,” she softly corrected. “My niece, Jennifer, she gave me your card.”
Jennifer. The unfinished piece from two nights before. Her ward was set, the outlining completed, but I still owed her an appointment for the shading. After we were interrupted at the bowling alley, I’d planned for Lars to finish it. Perhaps Ms. Brown was telling the truth after all.
“Jennifer had an appointment with you a couple days ago. I planned to follow up with her and see how things went.” Ms. Brown tipped her head in my direction, a meek smile on her face. “To make sure she was satisfied, you understand. But now my daughter has run out of time. You see, her father died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry for your loss.” The pain of losing Grim, the only father I’d ever known, bubbled to the surface.
“Don’t be. We were estranged.” Ms. Brown pulled a rumpled tissue from her pocket, waving off my sympathies before dabbing her nose. “He was never good at being a husband or a father, but he managed to do one thing right—keep the Magistrate at bay.”
“That’s a tough break, but I’m not sure what that has to do with Del,” Lars interjected.
“It has everything to do with her,” she said.
Dressed in her dime-store attire, Ms. Brown seemed disheveled, a little timid, but we’d misjudged her. Grim had always said it’s the quiet ones you need to watch out for.
“With her father gone, my daughter needs a Warder. I know what you can do, Miss Severance. Help my Karen, or the Magistrate will know what you can do as well.”
“What makes you think they don’t already?” I spared a quick glance at Lars to see if he had that I told you so look in his eyes. Lucky for him, he didn’t. “You caught me on my way out. Maybe I’m a wanted woman, and I’m about to go on the run.”
“You can’t outrun the Magistrate, Miss Severance. Not for very long, anyway. But you seem smart and you have some power. You might be able to get away.” She leaned in, elbows resting on her knees. “Help my daughter. I keep quiet, and you get the head start you need.”
With my legs outstretched, I crossed my right ankle over my left and did my best to act calm. What I wanted to do was grab Ms. Brown and toss her out on her ass. I didn’t respond well to threats, and she’d threatened me not once, but twice.
Lars didn’t respond well to threats, either.
“The head start she needed slipped away the moment she let you in the door.” Lars stepped out from around the counter, a small vial in one hand and a sawed-off double barrel shotgun in the other.
“Do you know what this is, Ms. Brown?”
Eyes wide with surprise, she shook her head.
“When you got up this morning, got dressed and brushed your teeth, mentally preparing yourself, trying to find that dark place we all have inside, did it occur to you that people who provide underground wards are a lot more comfortable with the dark than you?”
“This is a Forgive and Forget spell, Ms. Brown. We forgive you for thinking you can waltz in here and threaten us with the Magistrate because you’ve forgotten everything, from the business card to your niece’s tattoo. You could look right at it and not know what it was or pass Del on the street and never recognize her.” Lars worried the cork out of the vial with his thumb. “Now, me on the other hand, you’ll remember. Not who I am or how you know me, just a nagging feeling to run as far and as fast as you can when you see me. And you will see me, Ms. Brown.”
Lars could be terrifying while he slept, like a massive grizzly bear in hibernation. Wide awake and with his mind set, he could be the stuff of nightmares. I never knew his past, just that he had one. He was one of Grim’s rescues like me. He was the closest thing to a brother I’d ever had. We were family and you did not fuck with Lars’s family.
“Wait.” Ms. Brown held up her trembling hands. “Wait, please. I can see I went about this all wrong.”
“You think?” Uncrossing my legs, I smacked my palms on my thighs and pushed myself up out of the chair. “Drink the Forgive and Forget, Ms. Brown. It’s easier that way.” I gave Lars a pat on the shoulder and moved to stand behind him. “I should have listened to you.”
“I hate to say I told you so.” Shotgun still pointed at Ms. Brown, Lars held out the vial.
“But you’re going to say it anyway.” I
couldn’t help but laugh as I walked toward the back of the shop.
“Please,” Ms. Brown all but screamed. “I made an error in judgment. I have enough for the retainer but not the full fee. I thought I could force your hand, make you help her, and you have to help her, Miss Severance. She never should have been born into our family. She’s too powerful, and we can’t afford the tithe that would keep her home. Not since her father died, and you can bet his widow won’t be spending her inheritance on her stepdaughter.”
Sounds of a struggle interrupted her pleas. The crack of an open palm against someone’s cheek. I couldn’t see for sure from the back of the shop, but Lars would never raise a hand to a woman. A memory charm? Sure. But he’d never hit a woman. The grunt and profanities that followed confirmed what I already knew. Ms. Brown had put up a fight for a minute, maybe two, before Lars got her under control.
Something glass hit the floor.
“Damn it. Dell, I’m going to need another Forgive and Forget,” Lars called out after me.
Ms. Brown sobbed. “The Magistrate will take her, make her work off the payments. She’s an Angel of Mercy—do you know what they’ll do to her? The things they’ll make her do?”
Death magic.
Apparently it ran in the Brown family because her niece had it, too. But an Angel of Mercy? That was something else entirely. They help a person transition to whatever awaits them on the other side.
Or they don’t.
An Angel of Mercy could make your death as beautiful or painful as they wanted. They could wait for your time to come or cut your life short. They were rare. Rarer than a Warder. Revered by the Magistrate and feared by the citizens, Angels of Mercy became anything but. They were judge, jury, and executioner for the Magistrate.
Keeping an Angel of Mercy out of the Magistrate’s clutches would normally be enough for me to take the job, but with Footmen breathing down my neck? Lars lined up a sweet working vacation for me in Savannah. The perfect place to lie low until I dropped off the Magistrate’s radar. No, I needed something more to sway me, to keep me from getting in that car and heading south for the winter—because that’s how long I planned on staying.
I stopped walking, the rear exit just within reach. A few more steps and I’d be outside, in the car with just under a thousand miles ahead of me and Providence in the rearview.
Grim had made me promise. The words echoed in my ears, spurring me on, but I couldn’t do it. Had Grim been this conflicted when he’d seen me? I often wondered as a kid but never asked, too afraid to hear the answer. As I got older, it didn’t matter. What mattered was he’d saved me.
“I’ll do it,” I called. “Lars will set everything up and be in touch.”
Ms. Brown’s thanks and Lars’s swearing were muffled as I closed the door behind me.
With a prayer to the Goddess and a muttered apology to Grim’s memory, I rooted through my private stock of infused inks. I took my sweet time packing up the necessary supplies for the job, waiting for Lars to leave the shop before I headed home for the night.
Avoidance wasn’t the best way to win an argument. Neither was facing Lars before either of us had had time to cool off.
Chapter Five
AFTER A RESTLESS NIGHT due to Grim haunting my dreams, I gave up hope for sleep somewhere around four o’clock and made coffee. More often than not, Grim sided with Lars, who began making an appearance in my dreams to argue with me around midnight.
An argument that would no doubt continue when I arrived at the shop.
One pot of coffee and four Pop-Tarts later, the hour was reasonable enough for me to get dressed and head to Something To ‘Ink About. The sun crept over the horizon, bright yellow chasing away the pink and purple hues as night begrudgingly turned into day.
Lost in my thoughts about Karen Brown, Grim, the good-looking guy with the phony business card, and the Footman who’d paid me a visit, I was on autopilot. I’d made the trip from my apartment to the shop so many times, the old Chevy II practically drove itself. Lars’s VW Vanagon barely registered as I pulled into the small lot behind the building and parked beside it.
True to form, Lars was waiting for me in the office and picked up the argument almost verbatim from my dream.
“I don’t suppose I can convince you not to do this?” Arms folded over his massive chest, he blocked my path to the compartment of inks in the wall. They were hidden behind a caricature of Grim I had framed after our last trip to Rocky Point before the amusement park closed.
“We’ve had this conversation before.” Rather than try to move an immoveable object, I decided to wait him out. Lars would have to go to the bathroom eventually, leaving the hidden compartment and the inks inside exposed. “Is there coffee?”
“Is the sky blue? Of course there’s coffee. And we’ve had this conversation before because you refuse to listen.” Lars followed me to the makeshift coffee bar we’d set up by our stations.
“My mind is made up, Lars.”
“You’re going to break your promise, just like that? Go back on your word since Grim’s gone?” Lars grabbed my hand, stopping me from pulling the coffee pot off the warming plate and forcing me to look at him. “You think I haven’t noticed? You’ve been reckless since he died. Taking chances you never would have if he were alive. He would have walked from this one.”
“No, no, he wouldn’t have.” I flicked my gaze from his hand over mine to his eyes—a silent warning for him to let go.
“Why, because he saved you?” Lars removed his hand from mine, but he was like a dog with a bone. There would be no stopping him until I heard him out. “I remember when he brought you home. He wasn’t the hero you made him out to be.”
“To a starving street rat, he was.” I flew my hand up, and my palm connected with his cheek. The sound cracked the air before I realized what I’d done. It was too late to take it back, though, so I went with it. “He saw me when everyone else looked away. Took me in when everyone turned their backs. That was enough to make Grim a hero in my book. In anybody’s book. He was all I had.”
“No, he wasn’t.” Lars shook his head, shifted his gaze so I couldn’t see the hurt in his eyes, but I knew the words had stung sharper than my slap as soon as I said them. “Look around you. Look at what you have. Is it really worth risking?”
“Did you say the same thing to Grim when he brought me home?”
“No. Not that he would have listened if I did. But sometimes I wonder if things would have been different.”
My hurt must have shown on my face because he immediately held up his hand.
“You’re not the only one who lost the closest thing they’d ever known to a father when Grim died,” he said. “You don’t get to own that loss alone. It’s not just yours.”
“You think he died because of me? All this time you were by my side, like my brother, and you secretly blamed me for losing Grim?” Deep down, I’d blamed myself, but knowing Lars did, too, threatened to shatter my heart into a million pieces.
“No, that’s not what I meant, and you know it. It wasn’t your fault, but if he wasn’t looking out for a kid, he might have been looking out for himself.” He reached for me, but I backed away. “That’s my point, Del. That’s all I’m trying to say. You’re not looking out for yourself.”
My stomach soured to the point where drinking coffee had become an impossible feat, I shoved past Lars and locked myself in the office. With my back pressed against the door as I tried to keep myself together, I could hear Lars breathing on the other side and imagined him having taken up a similar position in the small hallway.
One raised panel door made of an inch and a half of solid wood separated us, but it might as well have been a gorge the size of the Grand Canyon. We’d skirted this argument so many times since we’d put Grim to rest that I’d lost count. Now that we’d actually had it, I wasn’t sure we could ever come back from it.
Even if Lars was right.
Grim was the only person who would
understand my need to not only pay the chance I’d been given forward but to dim an Angel of Mercy too. And Grim was six feet under. While standing in the office I’d inherited, surrounded by all of his things, my best friend just on the other side of the door, I felt the most alone since Grim had died.
With shaky hands and tears streaming down my face, I started filling my pack with essentials for the dimming ward.
I COLLAPSED IN THE office chair behind my desk with the intention of going over the few options I had for locations to perform the ward, but the mental exhaustion from arguing with Lars and the physical exhaustion from lack of sleep caught up with me. The smell of coffee and light tapping on the back of my head woke me up.
“Peace offering.” Lars waved the cup of coffee back and forth under my nose. “I could hear you going through your things, packing up, and decided to wait until you came out so I could apologize, but it went quiet. So, I used my key.”
He had a key. You forget details like that in the heat of an argument. He could have barged in at any moment but chose to give me time and space. Lars could set a perimeter ward better than anyone I’d ever met, but his ability to diffuse a situation was real magic.
The smell of coffee was enough to have me raising my head. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and my fingers trailed across the near perfect imprint on the side of my face from the backpack I’d used as a pillow. I rubbed my face, but the lines were still there. I would have to rock the Jensen logo on my cheek until they faded on their own. With muttered thanks, I took the olive branch Lars offered in the shape of a coffee mug.
“Listen, Lars, I...”
He held up his hand. “For the record, I never questioned Grim’s decision to take you in. Not once.” Lars settled into the chair opposite me. “You’re so much like him. Same temper, same stubborn streak. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were his biological kid.” He cocked his head to the side, squinting as he looked at the papers scattered across my desk. “We get into it because I don’t agree with what you’re doing, and you’re cutting me out? Just like that? That’s cold, Del.”
'Ink It Over: A Touch Of Ink Novel Page 3