The sign for the Rogue was easy to find—a brushed metal unicorn, rampant, that we’d gotten in a deal with the city a few years back when they were trying to push a new artist—but getting into the shop itself was quite the trick: you had to park in the back, climb rickety wooden stairs, and worm round the balcony to the Herbalist’s Attic. But—for the view alone—the trees, Little Five, the skull of the Vortex—it was worth it.
And I had the best view. My office was small, but streetside, with a broad front window whose dark-slatted blinds were always cracked to give me the aforementioned view of L5P. A glass, L-shaped desk held my computer, scanner and papers. A narrow bookshelf put all my books and tapes within easy reach from the desk… or from the sturdy marble workspace of the butcher’s block, whose locked glass cabinet held my precious magical supplies.
I started the scan and leaned back in my chair, regarding Spleen, who’d arrived right on time. He bounced back and forth in the little space like an animated garden gnome, rattling the cabinet periodically. “Wulfs one of my best clients,” he said. “I swear it, if you could just do this for me—”
“Hey. I said I’d do it.” I shagged my hands through my hair, trying to shake my deathhawk back to life after being pinned under my helmet. “So stop trying to persuade me, or I might change my mind.” The scanner whirred to life, and I kicked up my feet, staring out over Little Five. Something was wrong. Spleen was nervous, damp, almost sweaty. Damp and sweaty weren’t new, but—”Should I change my mind?”
“N-no,” Spleen said. Another lie. Not that he never did it, but— even more charming. At my scowl he turned away, stammering; but it was too late; I had him.
“What is it, Spleen?” I asked.
“Crap, Frost,” he said. “What can I say? The design is fucking Nazi.”
6. THE ACCURSED FLASH
“It’s what?” I said, falling forward in my chair to look as the scanner finished its pass and the image popped up on the screen. The contrast was all fucked, but a moment’s tweaking in Photoshop brought the contrast back up, along with all the nice German letters and genuine swastika printed on the bottom of the singed photo.
“It’s Nazi, Frost,” he said. “I don’t mean neo-Nazi or skinhead or anything. It’s a genuine fucking World War Two buzz-bombs-and-lost-arks Nazi tattoo design.”
“Holy… crap,” I said, staring at the image on the screen. Then, gingerly, I raised the scanner cover, hoping nothing would leap out and bite me. The photograph was very old, yellowing, and quite singed. Half the wording was gone, but a rescan at 600 dpi and a bit of fiddling would recover it. No amount of fiddling would bring back my forgotten high school language classes… but with what was left, I recognized the words as unmistakably German.
“Look, look, look,” he said, wheedling. “Wulf’s one of my best clients—”
“For how long?” I asked.
“The last six weeks—”
“Hell,” I said, disgusted. “What have you gotten me into?”
“He says he needs the discipline, or he’s going to lose it at the next full—”
“Next Sunday, I know,” I said, staring at the tattoo, at the German words I could no longer read. “I don’t know how I feel about inking some Nazi… occultism. If I was Jewish I’d probably throw this in your face.”
“I wanted to chuck it at first,” Spleen said, a bit bashfully. “But Wulf says he looked for years and couldn’t find a better design. And he paid me a lot of money—”
“Slide,” I said, standing, and Spleen moved so I could unlock the cabinet that held my supplies. I pulled out a long, plain wooden case and opened it slowly. The inside was divided into two long compartments, one holding a glass tube containing a fragment of a long spiral horn, and the other holding ten compartments for tattoo needles, six of them empty.
I held up the fragment and examined it. “Enough for the needles, I think—”
“Is that—” Spleen breathed, eyes gleaming, reaching out for the horn.
“Yes,” I snapped, “mitts off. It’s naturally shed, vestal gathered. I need needles made from untainted horn to ink a white charm—this is a white charm, isn’t it?”
“A… Nazi… white charm?” Spleen asked, perplexed.
“The Nazis had candy and ice cream, didn’t they?”
“Well…”
“Just because Hitler painted pictures of Baby Jesus, Jesus’s image didn’t suddenly ‘go bad,’” I said, checking the bottles of ink.