Reads
Updated January 2, 2008

The challenge was to describe a dangerous hero in 300 words or less. This scene relates to my WIP Marked.

Ink can last a lifetime when set just beneath the skin. One look, sharp as a needle, and he was under hers. One look, and she was...

Marked

Sharp eyes in shadowed faces; rolled up sleeves and crumpled collars—the gamblers stare at Calli as she strides across the Marked Man casino to the tall, black-lacquered door at the back. The one the gamblers call the Devil’s Door.

Before Calli can knock, the door opens to reveal an anemic-looking blonde with smudged rouge on her smiling lips and bruises blooming on her arm above the top of her long leather glove. “The new tattooist?” Blondie swings the door wide. “He’s all yours.”

Atop the black-lacquered desk, a cigarillo in a crystal ashtray bleeds blue-gray smoke into wavering lamplight. Shadows fill the space around. Calli’s hands tighten on her case when she hears the door close behind her.

“Mr. de Sein?”

“In the flesh.” His voice is deep as a puncture wound and rough as gravel on bare skin.

His hands reach into the light for the cigarillo, revealing sleeves of fine black wool suiting over white French cuffs. And the hands beneath the cuffs—she closes her eyes at the sight of them. Skin pale as death, writ all over in thick black ink; a pattern she can’t follow and doesn’t want to. Ink across wrist and palm, over vein and tendon, beneath buffed fingernails—she imagines the pliers, the knife, peeling them away for the needles.

He drums his fingertips on the desk and laughs when she winces.

“Squeamish?”

She wasn’t, before now.

He leans into the light. His face is perfection, vandalized. Like spray paint on white marble. Ink-blackened lips part on white teeth; a beautiful abomination. She can’t look away and she doesn’t want to.

“Afraid?”

She wasn’t, before now.

“You will be.” His words are cool and sure as steel, brushing her skin like the kiss of a needle. Leaving a mark.

His mark.