Page 6 of Inked & Bloodbound

After ensuring my other patients are stable and properly handed off to the night charge nurse, I pack up my stuff to go. My headache is steadily escalating into a screeching migraine, and the fluorescent lights hit like ice picks behind my eyes. I undo the messy bun at the nape of my neck and shake my tangled chin-length waves free. It relieves some tension on my scalp but barely makes a dent in the pain.

When I swing by the nurses’ station to say goodbye, Rami’s hunched over the desk, scrolling on the computer, a huge vat of coffee cooling beside him. His weary eyelids look heavy behind his thick black frames. When he speaks, he barely glances up from the screen.

I tell him I’m cutting my latest contract short and apologize for leaving him with the mess of arranging a backfill for the next few weeks. I already called the agency, and luckily my track record for reliability has been so flawless that they let me off. He gets it—he’s seen me get gradually more haggard over the last few weeks as the pain and hallucinations began ramping up.

The parking garage is nearly empty, just my well-loved Toyota and a few other cars scattered across the concrete expanse. I sit in the driver’s seat for a moment, letting the stillness wash over me, and then pull out my phone to text my stepdad Pat.

Lily:“Changed my mind. I’m going to come for Mom’s anniversary. I need a break from work. Hope that’s still cool?”

Pat:“Of course it is, Lilypad. Looking forward to it. It’s been ages x.”

I breathe a heavy sigh of relief. Seeing Pat will be good for me.We’re not blood-related, but he’s truly family. He was there for me when my grandparents died, and he’s been more of a father to me than the mysterious sperm donor who took off before I was even born.

We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, and we’ll dance around the memory of Mom. Carefully tiptoeing around the truth of how she was at the end when the drugs and the drinking had eaten through everything good in her.

“It’s important we remember her,” Pat likes to say. Sometimes I think forgetting might be easier.

But now…now I have questions. Real questions. About that tattoo, about why she had the same mark as a dying girl in my ER.

I start the engine and pull out of the garage, but instead of heading home, I start driving downtown. Drawn by some invisible force to an unfamiliar place, a mantra ringing in my head. Twenty years. That can’t be a coincidence.

My pulse quickens as I navigate the streets toward Sixth Street. The same tattoo. In the exact same spot. There has to be a connection.

Mom always said life was too short to play it safe. She got a tattoo of a lily on her shoulder when I was five, telling me she wanted to carry me with her, always. “You’re my whole world, Liliput,” she told me as she tucked me in one night. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”

I always promised myself I’d return the favor someday, but I never found the courage until now. I’ve never done anything remotely reckless, but as the neon lights of Sixth Street blur past my windshield, my mindset shifts. A fidgety energy that’s been building like a fire for weeks, maybe months. The same feeling I used to get right before Mom would announce we were moving to a new city, starting over.

I drive slowly down the street, scanning the various tattoo parlors. There has to be someone who recognizes that design, someone who can tell me what it means.

Then I see it.

A red neon goat skull glowing in a shop window, and above it, thesign: “Six6Sixth Ink” in gothic letters. But it’s the stylized “6” in the logo that makes my heart stop. The same ornate curves, the same twisted flourishes I just saw on Amber’s shoulder. The same mark my mother bore.

I pull into a parking spot across the street, my hands trembling on the steering wheel. This is it. This is where they came from.

Twenty years of questions, and I’m finally looking at an answer.

The pounding in my chest intensifies. I could drive away right now, pretend I never saw it. Go to San Antonio, visit Pat, mourn my mother the way I always have. Shut the box of secrets. Put up a wall, and live in blissful ignorance.

Or I could walk through that door and finally learn the truth.

Time to light a match and burn it all down.

3

CASSINI

At this unholy hour, there are only two types of people who come into the tattoo shop: drunken fools looking to make their next bad choice, or creatures of the night who prefer the uneasy embrace of darkness. As a nocturnal beast myself, I have a preference for the latter.

I recline in my chair and kick up my boots, fingers idly working on the sketch I started at the bar—the woman at the window. I smudge at the edges with my graphite-stained fingertips and feel a pang of satisfaction.

I never wanted to be a tattoo artist, but I’ve always loved to create art, and it’s the sort of job where you can move from place to place without raising too many eyebrows. The blood complicates things—it always does—but there aren’t many vocations suitable for a vampire in exile. Cocktail waiter at a beachside resort, for example, isn’t a job I’ve ever considered.

Still, I enjoy the work, and it’s important that I fit in here. They need to trust me.

Trust. What a fragile concept, especially when tested in a nest of paranoid, criminal vampires. It becomes more brittle. Despite living and working in Austin for half a year amongst my kind, keeping thepeace, flying under the radar, the Sixth Clan has only ever grown more suspicious. I see it in the way they watch me when they think I’m not looking. I hear my name on their lips, dropped to a whisper. I notice the way my possessions move around when I’ve been away, like someone’s searching my things for clues about my true identity.

For the other vampires, the Sixth Clan is family. One sworn in blood that demands absolute loyalty. When the bonds run this deep, you’ll do anything: dedicate yourself to their every need, kill for them, even lay down your fangs and your life to protect a bond so sacred. It’s pure love and belonging that fills our veins and twists itself around the arches of our minds. It’s a thing of beauty and magic.