Demon's Vow: Part 2 of the Final Asylum Tales (The Asylum Tales series) by Jocelynn Drake Read Free Book Online

current problems, looking for an obvious answer I had not seen yet.
    Before flipping the sign over to open, I pulled my cell phone out of the back pocket of my jeans. There were no messages for Bronx, Trixie, or Serah. I tried to take this as a good sign. No news was good news, right? Not really, but I could really use some fucking good news.
    The parlor wasn’t typically open on Monday, but I’d recently started keeping limited Monday hours in an effort to make some extra money and catch up with clients after I’d been forced to repeatedly cancel due to some other obligations. I left it to Trixie and Bronx to decide whether they wanted to work on Mondays and was only a little surprised when they decided to join me at their usual times.
    The first couple of hours were quiet, with a few people stopping by to schedule appointments for later in the week after I finished an initial sketch of what they wanted me to do or acquired any of the ingredients that I might need for the potion. While I had a solid stockpile of items, there were just some things that were better if they were as fresh as possible. I’d recently learned that the hard way when dealing with a luck spell.
    For the most part, the local ingredients shops around Low Town provided what I needed, but occasionally I had to contact some less-than-legal sources to get the item. Those tattoos were quite pricey and required upfront payment. Those didn’t happen often, but when they did, you could smell the desperation on the client.
    When Trixie strolled into the shop around five o’clock, I had completed two small tattoos and the outline for another that would require several visits due to the level of detail. It was nice when a customer came in just for a piece of art. I glanced up from the guy’s bicep at the sound of her heels across the hardwood floor. I had been in the middle of inscribing a protection potion into an abstract piece I had completed a few years earlier. Flashing Trixie what I hoped was a reassuring smile, I clamped down on the nervous fear that was clawing at my heart. It was the first time I had seen her since she dropped her bombshell on me and I didn’t want working together to suddenly become awkward.
    “Hey, Trixie,” Gary called, waving with his free hand while I returned my attention to the man’s arm.
    Gary was one of my regulars. A bouncer for a seedy bar down on Main Street, he came in once every six months like clockwork to have the protection potion touched up. The potency of the potion faded with time and he relied on it to help keep a knife out of his back. He was a good guy, always paid cash, and had a strong work ethic. He’d been bouncing for more than a decade and with his experience, I wasn’t sure that he actually needed the protection potion, but I guess he was willing to accept any kind of help he could get if it could get him through his shift alive and in one piece.
    “Hey, Gary. How’s things?” she asked as she stowed her bag in one of the cabinets near the floor and shrugged out of her heavy coat. Her glamour was in place, so that the world once again saw her as the human with rich brown hair and a heart-shaped face.
    However, because of the antiglamour spell I kept on the shop, her brunette image was reduced to a shadowy ghost over her real appearance so that I could see both worlds. This was the way I’d always seen her.
    “You know, just more of the same shit, different day,” he said with a wide grin.
    The two amiably chatted as I continued to work and Trixie set up her station for the day. Unfortunately, I finished with Gary’s potion touch-up ten minutes later and he was out the door a couple minutes after that. Trixie and I were alone.
    The tension in the parlor immediately ratcheted up so that I was massaging the stiff muscles in the back of my neck while I stood behind the glass case in the front lobby. I felt like a coward lingering there when I had no reason to, but I didn’t know what to say