I closed my eyes as I helped her pull her button-up shirt on and then escorted her to the front room, where Trixie was already working on a client. She hadn’t bothered to come back for any ingredients, so it seemed safe to assume that it was a regular old tattoo with nothing special added. I collected my fee and followed Tera to the door where she gripped me in a tight hug before she left the parlor.

I wanted to say something hopeful or happy or encouraging, but there were no words that I could push past my parted lips. She was one of the few clients who I knew without a doubt I would never see again.

THE SQUEAK OF the front door opening and closing accompanied by the door chime echoing above the sound of Marilyn Manson on the speakers caught my attention, but I couldn’t hear any footsteps. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I didn’t let myself look up from the client I was working on until Bronx said my name. The troll was staring at the TV, which was showing the security-camera view of the lobby. No one was on the screen. Fucking vampires. I truly doubted that this was a pleasure visit. They rarely got tattoos and were never in a good mood when it came to dealing with anything remotely human. I guess it was simply a bad idea to get too friendly with something you viewed as food.

“Trixie, can you finish this tattoo for me?” I asked, dragging my gaze over to where she was sitting on the counter. “I need to take care of this.” She nodded and hopped down from her spot. The man I was working on didn’t seem to mind, as a smile crossed his lips when Trixie took the stool I had just vacated. I glanced over at Bronx, who was intently watching me. “Hang back for me.”

I pulled off the soiled latex gloves as I started to walk toward the front of the parlor. Dropping the gloves into a trash can near the entrance to the lobby, I forced an easygoing smile on my face as I stepped up to the glass counter. A pair of men were strolling around the room in black trench coats. One had bright red hair that hung down his back in a thick braid, while the second had shoulder-length brown hair that curled at the ends—both shades looking darker against their ultrapale skin. Their thin lips were pulled down into frowns as they looked over the small shop. I couldn’t make out their murmurs, but I had no doubt that they were critical and highly desultory. Asylum had never been designed for their type. There were a couple of high-end tattoo parlors around the city that a vampire might deign to visit, but I had my doubts as to whether they were actually turning a profit. This wasn’t a business built for exclusivity.

“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” I asked, struggling to keep my smile in place.

The dark-haired vampire stepped forward and pulled what looked to be a leather wallet from the pocket of his coat. Flipping it open, he revealed a little gold badge that made my blood run cold. There was nothing I could do to keep the smile on my face. They were representatives from the Tattoo Artists & Potion Stirrers Society (TAPSS), and they could make my life hell. All tattoo artists had to pass a series of tests set forth by TAPSS that covered both tattooing skills as well as potion stirring before you were given a license to tattoo. In addition, a parlor had to maintain a separate license that promised to uphold a certain level of quality and cleanliness.

Unclenching my teeth, I forced out the question I had to ask, but I already knew the answer. “What have I done to warrant this unexpected visit?”

“I’m sure that you already know why we’re here, Mr. Powell,” purred the red-haired vampire, as if he was trying to use his voice to get inside my head. Neither of them was attempting to glamour me and a part of me prayed they wouldn’t try to. The other part of me really wished they would.

“Look, Vlad, all my transactions and work have been on the up and up. You can look at my records if you want to,” I offered, throwing up my hands. They both laughed at me as we all knew that records were frequently falsified to hide the true nature of a tattoo or the identity of a client. It was normal operating procedure in the business. Any tattooist worth his salt knew how to protect his clients.

“No one would trust your records.”

I replied with a shrug of one shoulder, as if his opinion didn’t matter to me. “No one has time to run background checks on every client. You have to trust them to tell the truth when they fill out their paperwork.”

“Regardless, we’ve had an extremely dark complaint from one of your former clients.”

“You’ll have to be a little more specific. We do a lot of business every night.”

“Russell Dalton,” the vampire replied, and it was all I could do to not react to the name. I had a feeling this man was going to haunt me until he finally put a bullet in the back of my head, or worse. “I believe you personally gave him a tattoo of a four-leaf clover on the heel of his left foot with a potion earmarked for good luck. Recall him now?”

“Rings a bell,” I sneered. “I believe he told me that he had a complaint about the tattoo while he was waving a gun in my face the other day. I would have offered then to make any reparations he might have requested, but I found myself reluctant to cave to the ravings of an idiot when he was pointing the muzzle of a handgun in my face.”

“Gun or not, you should have fixed the tattoo,” the dark-haired vampire chided.

“Of course, the tattoo and potion that you mixed were basic and there shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with,” the other vampire added as he seemed to glide silently across the floor until he was standing on the other side of the glass counter.

“I would drop this case, gentlemen,” I warned them softly through clenched teeth. “Russell Dalton is a worthless piece of slime who crawled in here one night with fifty dollars to his name, wanting a tattoo that would give his wife an uncontrollable desire to give him a blow job every time he gave her a little pat on the back of the head. I talked him down to a good luck charm and sent him on his way, hoping he would never cross my doorstep again.”

“His potential depravity and initial desires have no bearing on this case. You should have done the tattoo correctly after you agreed upon it,” the vampire closest to me said.

“I did do it correctly, Dracula. It was simple. I used leprechaun hair, which is well within the bounds of use for a good luck charm. It was only after I spoke with Dalton yesterday that I discovered the hair had gone bad. I had had the supply for less than a week. By the standards set by TAPSS, that is still considered a viable resource.”

“Then you should have fixed the problem when it was brought to your attention.”

“Like I said, Lestat, I don’t bow to the whims of idiots waving guns in my face,” I replied in a low growl.

“Let me rephrase it for you,” said the red-haired vampire, drawing my gaze back to his pale blue eyes. “You will fix—” He didn’t even get the chance to finish the sentence as a burst of power threw him across the room so that he crashed against the wall between the front door and the picture window at the front of the parlor. It was all I could do to keep the smile off my face. The other vampire simply stood stunned, his head bouncing from me to where his companion lay crumpled on the ground several feet away.

The antiglamour spell had kicked in. Trixie didn’t feel anything when she used her spell, because she used it on herself. The vamp, on the other hand, had tried to use a form of glamour compulsion on me, which was then thrown back in his face—hard.

“There’s no spellcasting in my shop,” I snapped in answer to the unspoken question of “How?” hanging in the air. “If you haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t like being forced into doing anything that I don’t want to do.”