Vex: Mythical Ink Series (book 1): An Exotic Ink Novel

by LS Anders

  “He's right,” Lucian spoke up. “I've walked Greene plenty of times and it really is a nice area. I think we should seriously consider it. How much did you say the lease was?”

  Sevin mumbled out the exorbitant amount.

  “Fucking A, Sevin, that's more than we agreed on,” Vex swore.

  “I have to agree with Vex on this. That’s a lot of money, and we don’t have much of a customer following yet,” Lucian backed up Vex’s curse.

  “Look you guys, if we're gonna do this, then let's do it right,” Sevin defended. “The location is perfect. I went by there last night. From what I could see through the window, it looks like a great space. Please, just go look at it. You gotta trust me on this. My money is being sunk into this little endeavor, too. You all know me, I would never make a bad investment.”

  As immature as Sevin acted, there was one thing that was certain, he was wicked good with money. The guy had managed to take their combined funds and turn it into something that could make a significant difference in all their lives.

  Vex finished his coffee without answering, so Sevin looked to Lucian for support. “C’mon Lu, you know I would never steer you guys wrong.”

  Lucian eased back in his chair, wiping his mouth. “What can it hurt to look at it, right? I mean, it’s not like we’re signing anything. Just looking.”

  Vex sighed, looking into Sevin’s soulful, silvery eyes reminding him of the day he and Lucian had found him. He’d always had a soft spot for animals, and Sevin’s shifter side was no exception. The wolf pup had been in a tight spot when they’d stumbled upon him cornered in an alley by three mean-assed purebreds.

  Growling and seething with fury, the tiny pup had been a terrified two-year-old, ready to put up a fight when they’d intervened on his behalf.

  Purebreds were prejudice when it came to their bloodlines and anyone not one-hundred percent was an abomination that needed to be destroyed.

  Sevin was only half-shifter as his mother had been a human. He was unique in that it was damn near impossible for human and shifter DNA to mix. But here he was, a living, breathing example that anything was possible.

  Vex had easily pushed through the purebreds while Lucian chased them away. Lifting a trembling Sevin from the ground, the cornered puppy had growled and taken a chunk out of Vex’s thumb, but he held his fuzzy little body close, and reassured him with soothing words that he would not be harmed. Returning to human form, the boy wrapped his tiny arms around Vex’s neck and buried himself deep into his heart. From that day forward, Lucian and Vex had become surrogate fathers to the little shapeshifter.

  “Fine,” Vex said giving in. “Let’s go look at what the puppy’s found.”

  Alea sat up in bed, snatching her ear plugs off the bedside table. The bitches in this house needed to learn the definition of common-fucking-courtesy.

  Ever since her best friend had moved out to marry her human boyfriend, her other roommates had become intolerable. Most fairies were, but Avie had been the exception. She was a lot like herself in that she wasn’t a huge partier or an obnoxious clothes whore. And, the female had a sense of respect for those around her that other fairies lacked.

  Stuffing the soft plugs into her ears, she could still hear the thumping base of the techno-dance-shit the fairies preferred.

  She had to find a way out of this tiny house, but her savings account held more cobwebs than cash, and her current employer wasn’t offering up a raise or any additional shifts anytime soon.

  Flopping back on the bed, she rolled onto her side and used her pillow as a shield from the noise, but the beat of the music still vibrated through her bones.

  Clenching her teeth through the irritation, she wanted to scream…so she did. And, it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. Her shrieking didn’t make a dent in the dense racket.

  Tossing her pillow to the floor, she ripped the covers away from her body. This was it, she couldn’t take it anymore. All the noise and lack of sleep were driving her crazy. She had developed a sensitivity to loud noises, so working in New York City with all the honking yellow cabs was taking a toll on her nervous system. She suspected she had developed a form of PTSD because of it.

  Sitting up, she could touch all four corners of her room from the bed, so reaching her laptop was just an arm's length away. Cracking it open, she blinked against the sudden light thrown from the screen and held her breath hoping she could capture an internet connection, otherwise she would be forced out into the chilly night to cop some Wi-Fi from the nearby coffee shop. Given her sorry assed income, she couldn't afford to part with the money a cup of overpriced java would cost to do some more job searching.

  Air blasted from her lungs when Internet Explorer rolled out the welcome mat. Rushing to check for any new job postings before the Wi-Fi changed its mind, she scrolled through the same list of jobs she still wasn't any more qualified for than she was yesterday. Sneering in disgust, she reached up about to slam the lid shut when a posting she hadn’t seen before grabbed her attention.

  Scanning quickly over the new listing, her heart began to thunder inside her chest. This could be it. Her chance to finally get out of here and find a place of her own.

  A new tattoo studio was looking for a receptionist and with the hours, she could still work her part-time waitressing gig in the evenings.

  Her fingers skittered across the keyboard as she filled out the application. Attaching her résumé to the form seemed a little much, but maybe the extra effort would pay off and help her stand out from any other applicants. Clicking send, she prayed to every God she could think of and smiled.

  Setting the laptop aside, she leaned over the edge of the bed snagging her pillow from the floor. Giving it a fluff, she placed it against the wall and rested back, lifting her computer back onto her lap.

  Might as well take advantage of the Wi-Fi connection while she could. After surfing the internet, she logged into her email not expecting to find a reply to the job application she’d just submitted.

  Hovering the cursor over the new email, she figured it was an automated reply and held back her hopes as she clicked it open. Her mouth fell open, and her eyes popped wide as she read the reply three times.

  Mythical Ink Tattoo Studio had sent her a list of appointment times to pick from for a job interview. Choosing the first available slot, she wasn't about to give anyone else an opportunity to get hired over her. Clicking send, she stared at the screen, shocked that any of that had just happened. A new email popped up and she wasted no time clicking on it. Some guy named Lucian would see her at her requested time.

  Holy shit!

  Hope filled her. With the notion that her situation could soon change for the better, the thumping music in the background didn’t seem quite so annoying.

  Minimizing her email account, she wanted to leave it open in case something else hit her inbox from Mythical Ink.

  Opening the word document she'd saved to her desktop, she smiled to herself as dreams of one day publishing the piece she’d been working on for the better part of a year might become reality if she landed this new job.

  Her first paranormal romance wasn't quite finished. She struggled with finding opportunities to write. All the noise in the house full of party crazy fairies had slapped writer's block firmly in place. Besides, without money for an editor, formatting, and a great cover, her dream of writing romance was never going to come true whether she finished the book or not.

  Reading back through the latest chapter, she tweaked a line here and there, added a comma and removed an apostrophe. Punctuation was not her strong suit always having to go back and reread the rules.

  She had to giggle over her sex scenes. She really did have a dirty mind.

  Finishing up the latest chapter she'd been struggling with was a breeze now that she had a new perspective on her future. Saving her work, she emailed herself a copy for safekeeping. Gmail was great for backing up her files, since she couldn't afford an external hard drive, and
she didn’t trust her second hand computer enough to leave her hard work in just one place.

  Nothing new had come in from Mythical Ink, but why would it? Shaking off her paranoia that the job was too good to be true, she took an easy breath. Her interview was setup for tomorrow morning at ten.

  Nothing is going to go wrong, she silently chastised herself.

  Setting her laptop aside, she pulled up the covers and snuggled down readjusting her earplugs. Sleep was what she needed. Dark under eye circles would not go well with the outfit she was piecing together inside her head.

  Mentally finalizing the touches on what she wanted to wear to her interview, she dreamt of what it would be like to have her own place. To be seen as an individual among many and not part of the collective.

  A place where she was in control of the environs, to have the choice of the absolute quiet she needed to write, or to listen to music of her choosing, or have the television on in the background while she cooked a meal in a kitchen that wasn’t littered with empty liquor bottles and the rotting remnants of take-out containers.

  To be the master of her own thermostat as she kept the dial cranked up to a toasty eighty degrees year-round. She loved to bask in intense heat.

  Snaking out a hand, she cranked up the dial on her electric blanket. Cold by nature, it always seemed to seep deep into her bone marrow, turning her to ice.

  Her coveted blanket was her only succor from the cold. That or a hot shower, but with all the females in a house that only boasted a forty-gallon water heater, it was a luxury only afforded if you were first in the bathroom.

  As wonderful as her dreams were, a shiver of fear snaked its way through her mind, crashing through the contentment of her thoughts.

  Living alone was a little daunting. It wasn’t that she couldn’t take care of herself, and she didn't actually need a house full of fairies to keep her safe. But being on her own, among humans, was a little frightening. Safety in numbers and all that shit.

  She'd always lived with her own kind, and even though other fairies worked her very last nerve, she felt more at ease around them. That sense of belonging with your own kind would be a difficult bond to sever even with her desires to break away firmly ingrained. To step out into the unknown where there were more opportunities that she could be discovered for what she wasn’t. A human.

  Out in the city, she had to stay diligent to hide the slight differences between herself and human women. At least with all her sistren around, she could let her guard down and not worry if the tips of her slightly pointed ears were showing, or if she had a lapse in concentration, that her translucent wings hadn’t popped out of their hiding place along her spine.

  Just the thought of being found out that she was a different species and what horrors awaited her was too terrifying to consider. It was hard enough to keep her guard up as she worked among them, being just friendly enough as she kept her distance. She supposed she came across as being snobby but becoming a sideshow freak or dissected into tiny pieces if she were ever discovered was a hell of a lot worse.

  Not many fairies had ventured out on their own, living in a coven had always been their way of life for as long as she could remember. Not that she was all that old, being one of the youngest in her enclave, it had just always been that way.

  She knew the few females that had managed a life outside their closely guarded groups. Arin had been the first. She had made a life for herself among the human population going into business for herself as an event planner. Parties had always been a specialty of fairies, so that wasn’t too far out of reach of the norm.

  But Avie had surprised them all when she'd fallen in love with a human man. And, a sick one at that. The chronic lymphocytic leukemia that plagued his body was incurable and needed constant healing, so every time Avie laid her healing hands on him to keep the disease at bay, she depleted her own life expectancy. An ever-giving sacrifice so she could prolong the life of the one she loved. Fairies lived for centuries, but at the rate Avie was going, she would age at the same rate as her human husband.

  Besides healing, fairies were also gifted with the ability of extreme insight that bordered on the edge of foreseeing the future of others. The eldest of them were sometimes called upon by souls on their way to the afterlife to help out loved ones left behind.

  That was how Avie had met her new husband, Cale Vahl. She had been selected to help a woman that had lost her husband. A sad tale of a cherished spouse lost to death way too soon.

  The man’s soul had cried out as he was being taken to the Realm of the Dead, begging that his beloved wife be looked after and to make sure she had a happy future.

  In order to maintain close contact, Avie had sought employment from the woman she was charged with watching over and had inadvertently met and fallen in love with another employee at Exotic Ink Tattoo Studio where they both worked.

  She had cried for days over the loss of her friend. Not just from her moving away, but for the centuries of life she had forfeited to be with Cale. She understood her friend’s decision. Romantic love was a powerful force that couldn’t be denied.

  At least, that’s what she thought. Never having experienced the emotion first-hand, she adored the idea of it. To love a male so much that you would give up your own life for them. Now, that was definitely worth living for.

  Rolling to her other side with a heavy sigh. That was one emotion she would most likely never know thanks to the creation of influenza vaccinations.

  Once the flu virus began to mutate, staying one step ahead of the newest vaccine, it was just a matter of time before the horrific fairy apocalypse. All it had taken was that one new strain to have a deadly effect on the males of her species. Within a matter of a few years, it had wiped out every single one of them, along with a great deal of the females. Even her own parents had been reduced to a couple of tick marks on the causality count, while a lucky few presented an immunity to the deadly virus escaping the brutal downfall.

  Their numbers were now in the hundreds, which she supposed put them somewhere between the mountain gorilla and the Malayan tiger on the endangered species list, since no other fairies were being born.

  Here they were, left to wither and die off in the few centuries they had left as they were unable to reproduce any more of their kind. It was a scary outlook that had turned the fairies towards living their lives as uninhibited as possible, hence the non-stop partying. Being city dwellers, there was never a lack of socializing.

  But, city life also had its advantages when it came to their survival. Living their lengthy lives, as they melded in with the extreme population, worked best as they were hidden in plain sight, because for whatever reason, they all appeared to be identical twins with only hints of variations among individuals. Although, they had to be careful and scatter out their places of employment which wasn’t too hard, since most only worked just enough to get by.

  The fairies had always been more careful than other species. Some non-human factions had been discovered a few centuries ago, but over the years they had learned to hide themselves better. Their discoveries ridiculed and not believed. Born into myths or legends, they became nothing but folklore passed down from one generation to another. Each time their stories were told, they were compounded with more and more fabricated bullshit, so what was told in modern times was complete horseshit.

  Thankfully the Homo sapiens had bred like rabbits and other species had fallen off their radars. Luckily, humans had never caught on that they were living among what they considered mythical creatures. If they only knew…

  Anyway, her having the inside track on other species and sub-species of Homo sapiens made for endless ideas for romance novels and made an outlet for her to write down the endless daydreams that played out like movie clips inside her head.

  She longed to have what Avie had found, but not with a human man. Bleck! They had never been to her liking.

  Which left her with what exactly?

  Shifters? Oth
erworldlies? Selkies? The list was endless, but she had yet to meet anyone that stole her complete attention.

  A crash sounded in the background and a roar of laughter overpowered the music.

  Tucking her head beneath the covers, this was the primary reason why it was taking her forever to put her stories onto the page, never any peace and quiet to write.

  Stepping inside Mythical Ink, Alea was greeted by an angel. The reason for the name of the studio now made complete sense, and she wondered what other mythical species would be working here as she shook Lucian's hand.

  “So, if you’ll follow me on back, Alea, we’ll get on with the interview.”

  Lucian’s smile knocked her out as she gladly trailed along behind him. The studio was beyond nice, but she wasn’t paying much attention to that. Not with the hottie and all that fabulous hair to admire.

  Now, he would be make a great cover model for a romance novel. Angels were rumored to be magnificently beautiful and for once the rumor mongers had gotten it right. Angels were rare, and he was the first one she’d ever seen, but she hadn’t needed to ask what he was, she had known instantly.

  Fairies could sense aura’s, not actually see them with their eyes, but got an impression of the hue that emanated from the soul beneath the flesh. His was transparent, void of any color marking him that of an otherworldly being and not born of the Earth. The only other option would be a demon and this male was way too gorgeous to be one of those.

  Her eyes glued to his ass, she followed him around the desk, bumping into him as he turned to sit.

  “Oh, sorry.” She flushed a bright pink. “I, uh…I guess I should sit over there. Duh.” She backtracked and took the seat on the opposite side of the desk.

  “That’s alright.” Lucian’s laugh was amazing as he took her rapt attention in stride, but with a face and body like his, the male had to be used to the constant ogling.

  Setting her purse beside her on the floor, she took a seat.