Now the warrior seemed surprised. One of his brows quirked in reaction. “He had a lot of tattoos, from what I saw. I’m no expert, but seems to me he had some hardcore art on him. Death scenes. Kill counts. Some kind of affiliation mark...”
Across the studio, Ozzy cleared his throat.
“I wasn’t looking at him that closely,” Nova said. “I wouldn’t know what other ink the guy had on his body. Even if I saw it, I’d make a point not to notice. That’s what we do in this line of work, especially with the kind of clients that come through that door.”
The warrior gave her a slight nod. “Why didn’t you finish the tattoo?”
“I didn’t have the chance. I didn’t like working on him. When I told him as much, he got upset. Really upset. He stormed out in a rage, and he didn’t come back.”
“Son of a bitch left without paying too,” Ozzy grumbled.
Those penetrating green eyes hadn’t strayed from her for an instant. They studied her, made her skin feel too warm, too tight under his stare.
“Besides demanding a tattoo to memorialize his dead friends, then storming off before you could finish the work, did the victim say anything else to you, Nova?”
He did it again, spoke her name in that smooth, deep velvet voice that made her forget for a second that he was not only one of the Breed, but the Order as well. A dangerous combination that she couldn’t afford to get too close to, for a hundred different reasons.
“Look, I don’t know what more I can tell you,” she said, impatient to be done with the conversation and get back to her work. Back to her life. “I didn’t spend much time talking to the guy, or looking at him. I didn’t want to. I just wanted to do whatever it took to get rid of him.”
“Kind of like you’re doing with me?” the vampire drawled knowingly.
Nova stared at him, refusing to take his bait. Ozzy didn’t give her the chance anyway.
He walked over to join her at the counter. “I got a business to run here, and Nova’s got a customer waiting on her out back. Like I told you, we don’t take walk-ins and we don’t have time for questions. Least of all, questions about our clientele. If the Order wants to conduct some kind of investigation, I’ll thank you to do it on your own turf, on your own time.”o;Wherever he had this work started was likely one of the last places anyone saw him alive,” Mathias said. “I want to find that tattoo shop. As in, tonight.”
Deacon cast a skeptical look in his direction. “London is full of tattoo shops. We’ll be looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
“We can eliminate the tourist traps and celebrity-hound studios right off the bat,” Thane said. “This guy would go to the real deal. Somewhere discreet, off the beaten path. Somewhere no one would raise an eyebrow if a thug like him walked in.”
Mathias agreed. “Callahan, take the Rover back to base. Thane and Deacon, we’ll cover the most ground if we split up, each of us taking the city a section at a time.”
He swiveled his head upriver, against the current that would have carried the body out to sea before long. Southwark’s least prosperous section of town loomed all around them, darkened buildings set against an even darker night sky.
He supposed it was as good a place to start as any.
CHAPTER 2
The buzzing drone of the tattoo machine vibrated through Nova’s gloved fingertips as she inked the delicate line of a spider’s web onto the left pectoral of her final client of the night.
The design was a favorite of many who came to Ozzy’s studio in Southwark, men and women who’d known little else but struggles and hard times, even a long stint in prison, like the middle aged man seated in Nova’s chair now.
Folks who frequented the hole-in-the-wall shop weren’t going to win any humanitarian awards or keys to the city, but most of them were good people at heart.
Fancy clothes and big, sparkling mansions didn’t make someone good. Nova had known that at a very young age. It had taken longer to recognize that there were plenty of good people walking around with ink all over their skin and miles of hard road in their weary eyes.
Ozzy had helped on that score.
Nova glanced over at him, puffing out her breath to blow aside the wisp of her asymmetrically cut, black-and-blue-dyed hair that had fallen into her face as she worked. The wiry, grayed and grizzled, tattooed old man who owned the shop was hunched over his latest creation, his bony, age-spotted hand as steady as a rock.
Oz had been focused on the piece for more than three hours now, the seventy-two-year-old artist working as meticulously--as reverently--as Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel. Ozzy’s canvas tonight was the masterfully designed, tattooed sleeve of an ex-con who’d lost his only grandson to cancer the weekend before last.
By hand, Oz had painstakingly reproduced the toddler’s smiling face, turning the child’s likeness into the tender image of a winged pixie, cavorting blissfully in the forbidding, Gothic forest that had already existed on the man’s arm.
As Ozzy wiped away the running ink and blood from the final details, the shop’s young apprentice took the opportunity to stop cleaning equipment and come over to have a look. Nine-year-old Eddie’s freckled face lit up as he took in the finished design.
“Fuckin’ righteous, Oz!” the street-wise kid exclaimed. Ozzy had taken in the former juvenile delinquent last year, much the same way he had Nova a decade ago. Eddie grinned through snaggled teeth and a scabbed lip healing over from a recent brawl at school. “Man, I cannot wait until you let me have my own chair and iron.”
“And I can’t wait until you clean up the storage room and swab down the toilet,” Oz said, not missing a beat. “Watch the fucking cursing, while you’re at it.”