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.”
The other vampire overcame his momentary shock and lunged at me with amazing speed. He grabbed me around the throat with one hand, nearly crushing my windpipe so that I couldn’t draw a breath. His long white fangs were bared as he snarled at me. “As my companion was stating before he was rudely interrupted, you will clean up this mess you created.”
“I’m not touching Dalton again.”
The vampire squeezed harder and slammed me into the wall, causing white spots to dance before my eyes. As my vision cleared, I noticed that the second vampire had regained his feet and looked even more pissed than his companion. This was turning out to be a great night.
A part of me relaxed when I heard the heavy thud of Bronx’s footsteps as he approached the front of the parlor. I expected him to execute some wonderful violence as he beat these two assholes to bloody pulps. If anything, I was looking forward to him freeing me from the vampire who was currently clamped on my throat, causing my lungs to burn from a lack of air.
To my surprise, the troll stopped at the glass counter and reached under it to some of the hidden shelves where we kept paperwork, ink pens, and our MP3 players. The troll pulled out a large mason jar of buttons of different sizes and colors, and unscrewed the top. I had no idea that the container had been under there, but then the troll was always full of interesting surprises.
The eyes of both vampires locked on the jar, and they seemed to grow even paler. I thought I even heard one of them whisper “No” before Bronx poured a large handful of buttons into his massive palm and tossed them in the middle of the floor. The vampire holding my throat released me so fast that I slid down the wall to the floor. Dark curses were muttered from each as they knelt on the ground, gathering up the buttons. With lightning-fast hands, they sorted the buttons, stacking them according to size, color, and design so that a rainbow of buttons covered the worn carpet on the floor.
Rubbing my throat, I patted Bronx on the shoulder as I stood. Instead of risking his neck and mine, the troll had decided to go the wiser route and take advantage of a known obsessive-compulsive trait in vampires. Seeds, buttons, and even flower petals: if they could be sorted and organized, the vampire was compelled to stop whatever he was doing and complete the task.
When the two were finished, they carefully eased away from the buttons so that they wouldn’t be disturbed. They both looked frustrated and more than a little humiliated. They also looked eager to take that frustration out of my hide, but right now Bronx was still standing by the glass case with his hand on the top of the jar of buttons.
Reaching into my back pocket, I pulled out my wallet. I withdrew fifty dollars and threw it at the nearest vampire. “Here’s Dalton’s refund. Tell him to take his problem to another tattoo parlor and to never step into mine again. Case closed.”
“This case may be closed, but it’s not forgotten,” said the dark-haired vampire as he scooped up the money and stuffed it into his pocket. “Dalton told us what really happened in the alley yesterday. You’re going to attract their attention and bring them all down on our heads. We can’t afford that. We will stop you before we come to that crossroads. TAPSS is watching you.”
The two vampires glided out of the parlor while I fought the urge to throw a handful of fucking buttons at their backs. Bronx gave me a dark look but said nothing as he returned to the back room. I sighed as I grabbed the jar and walked into the middle of the room. I picked up the little piles of buttons and threw them back into the jar. At least I now knew it was there in case we had another vampire run-in. In most cases,