With that he practically bounced through the beaded curtain, narrowly avoiding braining himself on the low door frame that was far too short to be in a tattoo parlor full of supernatural creatures.
That just left Dallan, Cash, and Effie behind.
“You’ll keep an eye on her?” Dallan asked, glancing over at the woman behind me.
“Of course, I don’t have any of my own clients coming today. I’ll make sure Ambrose and tall, dark and scary over there don’t frighten her away.” Effie gave my shoulder a gentle pat, like she was soothing a skittish cat as she continued to glare at Cash.
“Why am I tall, dark and scary?” The gargoyle muttered, scrubbing a hand along his gray jaw.
Our eyes met and I was once again amazed by how silver his eyes were. I wondered if they would glow in the dark like a cat’s eyes did.
Effie scoffed. “Because your face is stuck in a perpetual glare?”
“If that isn’t the truth,” Dallan snickered, reaching out to clap the man on the back. “Now come on, you’ve got to get your shit together for Greg. What’s he getting this time?”
Cash gave me one last, strange look before he ducked into the hallway.
“Apparently he met a girl and wants to get her name on his bicep,” I heard him tell the Cthulhu man.
“What happened to Jessica? I liked her…”
“How often do monsters get a lover’s name tattooed on their body?” I asked, frowning. You would think with their long lifetimes they would have enough breakups that there wouldn’t be any room left on their bodies.
“More than you’d think,” Effie said with a shake of her head. “For some it’s not so bad. The shifters have lifemates, so that’s just one and done. But not all supes get that.”
“And Greg?” My eyes went back to the Talos’s appointment information that was still up on the screen.
Effie chuckled, her green eyes dancing as she brought up previous tattoo information for him. “He’s basically the signature page of a yearbook. The ladies love him, but not for a long time.”
A laugh bubbled up in my chest and out of my mouth, surprising both of us.
“I was wondering how long it would take me to get you to laugh,” Effie said, clearly pleased with herself.
The bell dinged overhead, signaling our first customer for the day. It was a woman with the head of a tabby cat.
“Just smile and I’ll help you through it,” Effie whispered.
Gathering up all of my courage, I offered the cat woman a bright grin. “Hi, how can we help you?”
* * *
“How’d you fare on your first day, lass?” Dallan asked as we watched Effie flip the shop sign to closed.
“It was all right.” I still felt a bit shy around anyone who wasn’t Effie. Most of the tattoo artists stayed back in their rooms and Effie walked the clients back to them, but Dallan kept popping up to bug Effie or to ask questions.
By the fourth or fifth time I realized it wasn’t that he was curious about me, but that he wanted to be near the woman who’d hired me.
“She did great, so stop annoying her,” Effie said as she rejoined us, one of her long vines snaking out from the back of her dress to push against the man’s chest.
That was another thing I’d learned over the past eight hours of working at Monstrous Ink. I was the only human employed.
I thought Effie might be human too, despite her odd coloring, but when one of her vines had reached for the cup full of pens on the desk I’d nearly jumped out of my skin.
Effie had apologized profusely for scaring me and had sheepishly explained what she was.
“Sorry, I forget humans don’t have supernatural awareness like most of us do and my vines kinda have a mind of their own,” she’d explained sheepishly as she snatched the green vine in question back to her chest. “I’m a bit of a weirdo even by monster standards. I’m half-tree nymph, half-witch. Hence the green color and the vines.”
“It’s okay, it just startled me,” I’d hurried to reassure her when I saw that her face clouded over with an emotion that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
