Dead Man’s Deal

5

AFTER LAST NIGHT’S clusterfuck, I was relieved to find that tonight was quiet at Asylum. Sofie had settled on the glass counter at the front of the shop, lounging between the cordless-phone charger and the framed article proclaiming Asylum the top tattoo and potion parlor in Low Town for 2012. It was the third year in a row we had won the local award. We didn’t get anything for the title besides a nice certificate and an increase in business. I preferred to display the article rather than the certificate, since it contained a cheesy photo of Bronx, Trixie, and me sitting in the lobby of the shop.

Business was steady, but far from hectic. Trixie finished up her appointment with a banshee in a matter of minutes. From what I overhead of the conversation, the death wailer had recently gotten a job at a nursing home. Unfortunately, she had been bemoaning the dying so much that she had gotten a sore throat, which was threatening to give way to laryngitis. Instead of a tattoo, Trixie gave her a mixture to be steeped with tea daily and advice to get a job at a day care.

From there, I tattooed a drake with an antiseasickness potion. Apparently the cannibalistic ogre was going deep-sea fishing with some friends off the coast of Florida in a few weeks but was having problems managing boat trips. I kept my mouth shut for most of the tattoo. Drakes, who are not related to dragons as many people believe, are more likely to take a bite out of you than hit you if you piss them off. Trixie enjoyed lightly teasing this one despite my glares, but then a pretty girl could get away with so much more than a guy.

Trixie then handled a pair of goblins wanting matching tattoos to express their love for each other. At least they didn’t want to get each other’s name tattooed on their shoulders. But I wasn’t being fair. From what I heard, goblins were among the few races that were good at relationships. Once they bonded with a mate, it tended to be for life and they were happy with each other the whole time. Humans couldn’t even come close to understanding something like that.

I was finishing up a tattoo on a young werecat when Bronx came in. The werecat had wanted a tattoo on her hip that would keep her from getting pregnant for the next five years. She’d still go into heat every season, but the ink would protect against pregnancy. There were special waivers required for that particular tattoo since I didn’t want to be sued in case something was off. I had yet to have that one come back to haunt me, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

The troll settled onto his stool with only the softest of grunts. The swelling had gone down in his face and there was only a slight discoloration around one eye. Otherwise, he looked normal. He was moving a little slower than normal, but most wouldn’t notice it.

“You know you could have stayed home tonight,” I said after the last client left the shop.

“So you said yesterday,” Bronx grumbled. He set up his station with his usual meticulousness, checking to make sure that he had all the supplies he had put aside the previous night.

Trixie flit across the room and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, laying her head on top of his. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” Bronx said, patting one of Trixie’s hands.

“I knew that Gage would be trouble. I don’t think you should hang out with that bad influence any longer,” Trixie continued in her best doting-mother voice.

At that, Bronx finally smiled. “Yes, Mother, but he’s my only friend.”

“No, dear, you’ll always have your mummy,” she said, earning a bark of laughter from me. Trixie kissed Bronx’s cheek and then walked over to where I was lying back in the tattooing chair in my station. She put a knee between my legs, a little too close for comfort. “What are you laughing at? I’m old enough to be a great-great-great-grandmother to both of you. Sometimes I think I need to take you over my knee, spank some sense into you.”

I placed my hands on her hips and tried to pull her closer, but she grabbed the top of the chair, halting her descent. “I could be up for that.”

“Good grief,” Bronx muttered under his breath with no small amount of disgust. I laughed. For the most part, when Bronx was in the shop with us, Trixie and I maintained a somewhat professional atmosphere. Well, as professional as it ever was before we started dating. Every once in a while I let something slip to make Bronx shake his head.

The chime for the front door sang through the lobby as someone walked in. “Saved by the bell,” I said, starting to push Trixie back.

“So it would seem,” she said with a glare before easing into a smile. “Stay. I’ll get it.”

I nodded and then watched her walk toward the front. Turning, I found Bronx relaxing on his stool, his back leaning against the counter behind him. He looked tired, both physically and maybe even a little emotionally. I opened my mouth, but he held up his hand, stopping me.

“Apologize again and I’ll hit you.”

“I can’t help it.”

“If you hadn’t done something, I would have and I’d be feeling worse if not dead right now.”

My eyes hardened on his face while my hands clenched the arms of the chair I was sitting in. “I’ll get you out of this.”

“You’ll get us both out,” Bronx corrected, his eyes drifting closed. “I’m not leaving you alone with Reave. Both or none at all.”

I nodded in a sharp, jerky motion as Trixie’s heels thudded across the floor toward me. I looked up and forced a smile on my face. She’d talk to Bronx after I left for the night and then again to me when we met up after her shift. There was no hiding the Reave business from her now, but I didn’t want to worry her while we were in the shop.

Trixie motioned toward the front with her head. “He’s asking for the owner.”

“Problem?”

“I don’t think so. Doesn’t seem angry. I don’t remember ever seeing him before, so I don’t think we’ve tattooed him.”

“Got it.” I pushed to my feet and gave her hand a quick squeeze as I stepped around her and walked to the lobby. I hadn’t heard any of her conversation with the customer because my attention had been on Bronx. I hadn’t heard his voice, but I wished I had.

Stepping behind the counter, I felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach, forcing all the air out of my lungs. The blood drained from my face as I stared at the man. He was older than I remembered, but it had been more than ten years since I had last seen him. His blondish-brown hair was longer, brushing against his shoulders, but it was the same brown eyes.

“Shit! Robby?” I gasped when I found my voice.

The man’s brows snapped together as he stared warily at me. He even backed up a step. “Yeah, it’s Robert. Robert Grant,” he said slowly. He looked like he was about to bolt for the door, but he paused, squinting at me. “Ja—”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said, cutting him off. “Baby brother.”

“Holy fuck!” Robert shouted as I came around the counter. He pulled me into a rough hug, thumping hard on my back several times. I hugged him back, laughing. I hadn’t seen my older brother in a decade. What were the insane odds that he’d walk into my shop? I didn’t care. I had my brother back; didn’t matter if it was for an hour or for the rest of our lives.

Robert pulled away, holding me by the shoulders as he looked me over. We were about the same height. I was leaner in build, while Robert had become stockier, with a thick chest and neck. There was a small scar on his chin that hadn’t been there when I last saw him and more worry lines stretched around his eyes, but he was the same.

“You’ve changed,” he said, seeming to talk mostly to himself. I smiled, running one hand through my hair. When last he had seen me, it had been longer, stretching past my shoulders. And pale blond. “You dyed it?”

I shook my head, my smile changing to a cocky smirk. “Tattoo.”

“Then you’re not wearing contacts either?”

I shook my head again. Stepping from his grasp, I turned and pulled up my T-shirt to reveal the tiger tattoo that stretched across my back. It was my only tattoo and it had taken three months to complete. Woven throughout it were a series of potions that tweaked my appearance and the way people remembered me. It was as much for their protection as my own. “The tattoo permanently changed my hair and eye color to brown.”

“Must be easier than having to dye your hair once a month,” Robert joked as I pulled my T-shirt back into place. I turned to face him and he clapped me on the side of the head, pulling me close so he could press his forehead to mine. “Doesn’t matter. You’re still the same old Ja—”

Again, I had to stop him. “It’s Gage now.” I pulled back so I could see his smile fading and sadness enter his eyes. The Ivory Towers had come between us. He was trying so hard to bridge that gap, but it was crumbling under his feet. First, I no longer looked like the brother he had known, and now my name. There were other things, I had no doubt, but I wasn’t going to let him slip away. Grabbing one shoulder, I thumped him hard on the chest, right over his heart, with my fist. “I’m the same in here. They couldn’t change that. They didn’t take that away.”

“Yeah,” he said, then continued, his voice gaining strength. “Yeah! My brother. Gage?”

“Gage Powell,” I said with a smile as I released him.

He nodded. “Gage Powell. I guess it’ll do. I can’t believe this. How long have you been in Low Town?”

“Ten years.” I shrugged. “It’s where I ended up after leaving Mom and Dad’s. It seemed far enough away. Big enough to get lost in, small enough to avoid notice.”

Robert chuckled. “You think like Dad.”

“What do you mean?”

“They moved here eight years ago. They live up in Shadybrooke.”

I felt my knees start to give out. Somehow I stumbled backward, so that I ended up sitting on the bench that ran the length of the back wall rather than sitting on the floor. Shadybrooke was one of the suburban outskirts of Low Town near the north side of the city. Nice if you don’t mind bland and monotonous.

“Here? Why? They loved Vermont.”

Robert plopped down next to me on the bench and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. They’re here and they like Shadybrooke.” He then cocked his head to the side as he looked at me. “I’m guessing you haven’t seen them.”

“No, not since I left.” I shook my head, lost in a sad memory for a moment, when my brain checked in with a thought. “Wait! When did you last see them?”

Robert grimaced, looking down at the hardwood floor. “Been a few years.”

I bit my tongue hard to hold in the questions. I had a feeling that I wouldn’t like the answers and I didn’t want to start a fight within five minutes of seeing my brother for the first time in ten years. I’d save the fight for when I was sure there was going to be a later. “What about Meggie?” Inwardly, I prayed our younger sister was a safe topic.

Robert’s smile returned, softening his features. “She’s in Romania, teaching English and French.” His hands dropped into his lap, where he loosely threaded his fingers together.

“She didn’t go vampire, did she?” I asked hesitantly. Romania was heavy vampire territory.

“No!” he said with a laugh. “Well, not since I last heard from her, which was about six months ago, and she didn’t sound like she had any plans to. She’s teaching a couple night classes for the vamps.” His smile faded and a frown returned to his eyes. “Though it does sound like she’s fallen in with some Gypsies. In her last e-mail, she was bragging about getting good with her hands. I thought it was best not to ask too many questions.”

I chuckled, scratching the back of my head. Yeah, that was our mom’s influence on us. She always seemed to know when it was best to pry into our lives with questions to put us back on the straight and narrow and when to let us run wild. “How’d she end up in Romania?” When I had last seen Megan, she had been twelve years old with blond pigtails, freckles, and a glare.

Robert relaxed on the bench beside me, stretching his legs out while rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. “How do you think? Some guy.” I laughed at the disgust in his voice, but he wasn’t serious. “You know, our sister didn’t turn out half-bad-looking. Good thing she was the one in the family that also ended up with the brains. As soon as she finished college and got her teaching certificate, she ran off to Germany with this guy she met.”

“She still with him?”

Robert snorted. “Lasted three months.”

“And she didn’t come home after that?”

“Would you?” He arched one brow at me, mocking. I shrugged. Truth was, the Ivory Tower I had lived in was in Europe and I’d seen most of the hot spots in Europe by the age of fifteen. They were nice, but I liked living in Low Town.

“She lasted in Germany for another few months, then ran off to Austria, Croatia, Uzbekistan—don’t ask me why—and then Romania. I doubt that’s everywhere, but our dear sister has been kind enough to censor her e-mails to me.”

I smiled at his tortured expression, leading me to believe that our dear sister wasn’t censoring her letters enough for Robert’s comfort. I held on to the smile, pushing down a nagging feeling. By my guess, Megan had been traveling Europe for a couple years and Robert hadn’t seen our parents in a few years, so who was watching over them? When I left my family the second time after escaping the Ivory Towers, I had consoled myself with the thought that my parents still had my siblings.

There was one other bothersome question nagging me. Why had they left Vermont? It could have been nothing, but I doubted it. I pushed the question down with the other and looked at my older brother. It could wait. He was living in Low Town. We had found each other again, and if I was careful, we could safely stay in contact without the Towers ever getting wind of it.

“You know that leaves only one important question,” I said.

Robert stiffened a little as he looked at me. “What’s that?”

“What the hell are you doing here? I mean, of all the tattoo parlors in Low Town, how did you end up here?” I laughed.

The tension instantly flowed out of his body and he lounged against the bench again. He waved one hand at me and smiled. “Oh, that. Reave sent me.”

6

I DON’T RECALL getting to my feet, but I suddenly found myself standing in the middle of the lobby, barely holding together the rage that was burning through my brain. That fucking bastard! Reave had my brother. My older brother was working for that low-life Mafia scum. The dark elf had found a way to get even with me. I thought it was over when he had ordered Bronx’s beating. I had been punished and I thought we would be starting fresh, but Reave had shoved the knife a little deeper into my gut.

The Svartálfar was using my brother for whatever horrible job he needed done, putting him in danger. It was the perfect way to force me to do exactly what he wanted. I had to protect my brother. No matter what he was doing or how he was involved, I had to protect my brother.

“Reave?” I demanded in a rough voice when I could get my teeth to unclench enough so I could speak. “You work for the fucking Svartálfar bastard Reave?”

Robert pushed to his feet and pointed one finger at me, his expression losing all its earlier lightness. “Watch what you say about Reave,” he warned. “He’s my boss and he’s been good to me.”

I pressed my hands to my temples, my fingers threading through my hair as I swallowed a scream of frustration. It had suddenly become hard to breathe, as if the air had been sucked from the room. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to block out the sound of blood pounding in my ears like a tribal drum. Energy sizzled against my skin. The magic was building, pressing against the seams of the walls. With a push, I could blow the entire building down. I could rip it apart like a twister blowing through a trailer park.

Trixie’s voice was suddenly there. Soft, breathless, and desperate. Her pleading penetrated the fog, so that I could feel her gentle hand on my cheek and the other arm wrapped around my back, her slim fingers digging into the side of my waist.

“You have to breathe, Gage. Just let it go,” she was saying. “Let go of the magic. If they catch you, they’re going to kill you. They’ll kill us all.”

Another, larger hand landed on my shoulder opposite to where Trixie was pressed against me. Strong and firm. Bronx. “Let it go, Gage.”

Overhead, soft popping followed by the tinkle of glass echoed through the shop. The lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling were exploding and the glass was falling inside the protective containers that surrounded them. I opened my eyes to find that the parlor was black except for the light coming in the front window and door from the street. Robert was standing with his back pressed against the far wall. There was no missing the terror on his face.

Fresh pain lanced through me. I flinched and Trixie pressed closer, holding me a little tighter as if she could absorb the pain. Robert was working for the devil but he was looking at me with fear in his wide eyes—as if I would ever hurt him. We had had scuffles as kids, but I didn’t hurt him and I had never hurt him with magic.

“He’s got my brother,” I whispered in a rough, broken voice. My world was breaking apart around me, but Trixie and Bronx continued to press close.

“We’ll fix it,” Trixie murmured in my ear, and Bronx’s hand squeezed my shoulder.

Dropping my hands from my head, I dragged in a deep breath in an attempt to relax the muscles that had tensed throughout my body. The energy dissipated. The soft snap and crackle faded to nothingness and the air seemed less thick. Trixie loosened her grip on me, but remained close.

Bronx waited for a nod from me before dropping his hand. He looked up at the darkened light fixture above us. “I think we’ve got some spare bulbs in the storage closet. I’ll go get them and the stepladder.”

“It could have been worse,” Trixie said, drawing our gazes. “It could have been the front window … again.”

Bronx shook his head as he left the room. I tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it. Trixie was trying and I appreciated it. “I’ve yet to break the front window. That’s Bronx.”

Trixie dropped her arms from around me and grinned. “It’s not like you didn’t want to.” She was right. Less than a year ago, a customer Trixie was tattooing had hit on her hard. She was polite but it was obvious that she was becoming uncomfortable with his persistence. Bronx gave the asshole one warning, but he didn’t listen. A minute later, he was flying through the front window.

Trixie tried to step away from me, but I grabbed her wrist, holding her in place. “Trixie, this is my older brother, Robert,” I started, looking at my brother. He was still pressed against the far wall as if he were trying to sink into the plasterboard rather than be in the same room with me. The fear was gone from his eyes, but so was the easy laughter. “Robert, this is Trixie. She’s a tattoo artist here, and she’s … my girlfriend.” The last two words fumbled from my mouth, but then it was the first time I had ever introduced her as such.

Trixie shot me a smile before turning to face Robert. She extended a hand toward him and he hesitated before quickly shaking it. “It’s nice to meet someone from Gage’s family.”

Robert mumbled something that I didn’t quite catch before sinking back against the wall. Trixie turned to me and gave a little roll of her eyes. She wasn’t afraid of me and I loved her for it. Bronx wasn’t afraid of me, and in my own way, I loved him for it, though I was grateful that I didn’t feel the need to kiss him like I needed to kiss Trixie.

She wrapped her long arms around my neck as she snuggled close. “Get out of here. Your shift’s done. Spend some time catching up with your brother.”

“I’ll see you later tonight.”

“You’re stopping by?” she asked, going for innocent, but the wicked light in her eyes ruined it.

“Oh, yeah. Gonna need to.”

Trixie gave me one last lingering kiss that managed to put a different kind of tension into my body before gracefully sauntering from the room. I glared at Robert when I saw his eyes following her. My older brother opened his mouth, but I stopped him.

“Watch what you say or I will give you a reason to be afraid of me,” I warned.

Robert glared at me. “She’s hot,” he said as if daring me to argue with him.

I snorted and shook my head. “Yeah, I’ll give you that one. Let me grab my jacket and we can get out of here.”

“What about the tattoo Reave said you’d work on?”

Rage flooded my veins once again, but I kept my head this time. It wasn’t as much of a shock as it had been the first time. “I doubt what Reave has planned is something I can slap on in a few minutes. We’ll need to talk and plan. And drink.” The drinking probably wouldn’t help much with the planning, but it would help me from exploding again—safer for all those around.

Using the dim light from the front window, I walked into the main tattooing room to find that Bronx had already lit some candles and was in the process of setting up the stepladder so he could replace the fluorescent bulbs I had destroyed.

“I’ll be upstairs in case you need anything,” I announced. I crossed to the far cabinet and knelt down as I pulled it open.

“You taking the Mordred?” Bronx asked from the stepladder in the center of the room.

A little shudder racked my frame. “Absolutely not. I need to mellow out, not get stupid. I’ve got a bottle of Jack that should get us through without killing each other.” I may have hated Reave and held no love for the entire Svartálfar race, but by all that was sacred and pure, they knew how to make a damn good whiskey. Mordred was fucking hard to get your hands on if you weren’t Svartálfar and like liquid fire going down, but damn, it was good.

“I can take your keys to the shop. Protects against intoxicated tattooing,” Bronx offered.

“Fuck you,” I grumbled with no real venom. The last time Bronx and I had drunk Mordred together, the results were not good. Suffice to say, Bronx had tattooed an incubus, resulting in an outbreak of mass fornication that needed to be stopped.

I grabbed the liter bottle and stood, shutting the cabinet with my knee as I scooped up my jacket off a nearby chair. “I’ll talk to you guys later.”

Robert was out in the lobby when I returned, looking as if he wished he had left but was afraid to after my temper tantrum. He followed me out the front door of the parlor, but paused when I started down the alley beside the shop.

“Where we going?” he demanded, stopped at the mouth of the alley.

“Somewhere we can talk and drink.” I held up the new bottle and gently shook it back and forth as if trying to tempt him. Or hypnotize him. I’d take that. He frowned, but started to follow after me through the alley to the back of the shop and then up the wooden stairs to the second floor of my building.

After Asylum took off, I managed to buy the entire building from the owner instead of renting. I had lived in the second-floor apartment for a while, but had moved out a few years ago so I could get a little space in my life from work. The apartment above the parlor was kept empty for times like these, when it was better to deal with matters here rather than drag anyone into my home.