Of Shadow Born by Dianne Sylvan

couldn’t work; her supervisor left a message on her voice mail that she had been let go, and she didn’t even spare a moment to worry about the rent. It was a part-time thing anyway. It sure as hell wasn’t worth her life.
    By the time she emerged from hiding, the Prime was dead, and that name she’d heard was no longer invoked around the District. As far as anyone knew, Jeremy Hayes had returned to New York and was no longer recruiting. Almost everyone he’d hired to go up against the Signet was dead, and those who weren’t had fled Austin fearing reprisal. Once the Signet’s dark gaze fixed on you, you were dead, and that was all there was to it; Hayes must have been offering obscene amounts of money to persuade anyone to join his cause.
    But he was gone now. And there was no way he or anyone else would know she was here.
    She was dead, after all.
    The nights passed without anything calamitous happening. Life went on both in the Shadow World and outside it. She had to make a choice: either give up her life in Austin and run again, or find a new job and stick it out.
    She decided to stay.
    For once, luck favored her—she called George at Madre Luna to see if he had a chair open, and wonder of wonders, one of his artists had been fool enough to moonlight as a thug for Hayes and was now deceased. After months of waitressing she finally got to reclaim a little of her dignity, trading in the sound of clattering dishes and irritable humans asking if they could get their dressing on the side for the warm, familiar hum of a tattoo gun.
    Tattooing vampires took a lot of skill, but it also took patience; a lot of vamps who wanted ink didn’t understand that they had to be actively involved in the process and couldn’t just sit there and bliss out from the endorphins. If they didn’t consciously slow down the healing process, the skin would reject the ink and heal over before she even finished the outline, wasting her time and theirs.
    She’d had more than one customer scream and yell at her for what was essentially their fault, and she’d had to resort to violence at her last job, which was how she ended up waitressing. Old instincts had flooded through her, and she’d nearly killed the dumb bastard who was yelling in her face. She’d scared herself as much as she’d scared him and had steered clear of the District for weeks afterward just in case anyone had gossiped, even idly, about the dreadlocked tattoo artist who seemed unusually skilled in martial arts.
    That was the best thing about working for George—he was big and scary and nobody fucked with his artists. He was also upscale enough that she could be more selective with her clientele, so she mostly picked vampires who had experience with getting tattooed. When it was right, when the client knew what he was doing and so did the artist, the experience was amazing, even borderline tantric.
    “How long have you been a tattoo artist?” the woman asked, sounding a little nervous. It was her first time, but they’d discussed the process and she had signed the waivers.
    Olivia, hands encased in latex, looked at her over the needle she was preparing. “Fifty years, give or take—off and on.”
    “That’s longer than I’ve been alive.” The woman laughed. “I only came across four years ago.”
    Olivia didn’t say what she was thinking—that wearing a butterfly on her shoulder for all eternity was the sort of thing only a baby vampire would go for—but the woman was nice enough, and it would be an easy hour’s work assuming she could handle herself.
    “So why do you have to wear gloves?” the girl asked. “It’s not like you can give me HIV or anything.”
    Olivia smiled. “Health department regulations—as far as the state of Texas knows this is a regular tattoo parlor. We follow the rules and nobody sticks their nose in our business.”
    The woman seemed to accept that and went into the deep-breathing exercise Olivia had shown her in the