Bit of a Bite

I Take it Back

**DEDI to @kuraigirl for the amazing cover. Go say hi, follow her, bombard her with cover requests, and read her works! Okay, seriously though check out her profile and I was pretty serious with the 'hi' and 'read her works' part.**

There was a dried coffee stain on the light blue cotton blazer, flaunting its dirty brown self in an entirely displeasing manner.

Working in a New Age shop surrounded by teenage humans armed with java coffees, there was bound to be couple of stains every now and then. Today was a now, apparently. The stain stubbornly clung to the fabric as Allison tried to scrub it away with her Tide to-go pen. She paused, wiping at with a tissue only to see the stain was still there. The jacket was ruined, and the splotch just above her left breast still felt tingly from the first degree burn it was now sporting.

Yes, today was one of those days.

With a heartfelt sigh she abandoned the blazer and sipped her own black coffee from a personalized mug that read ‘Head Witch.’ Today would be boring, as every other day, but that was okay she thought. Allison liked boring. Eight hundred years of excitement and running for her life, she enjoyed the simplicity of her new normal and uneventful life.

Though in all fairness, most people would never consider jasmine incense and fair skinned adults with sloppy dreads as normal. She thought it was cute. Like when a boy child gets into his mother’s makeup and says ‘look at me, mommy! Now I’m pretty too.’ Yes, it was adorable.

Smiling now she watched the large windows at the front of the shop, enjoying the view of the somewhat busy street.

Belated Gifts was a small New Age shop, crowded between a shady dentist’s office and a small Mexican restaurant called El Charro’s. The food was good; the dentist scared the hell out of her. He was always dropping things on his way in and out of work. She couldn’t help but picture him doing the same thing during work, with the few low income clients who came to see him.

It was no wonder she never saw the same face twice.

Boredom had her fingers curled around a pen, using it to scratch her scalp beneath thick plaited black hair. She’d pinned up the hundreds of tiny braids today in an intricate pattern that would survive her constant nitpicking she did whenever there was nothing else to do. It was better than fidgeting with her clothes, trying to get them to cover just a little more skin.

Even without the smart blue blazer she looked professional in a matching blue skirt and black lace blouse that was only partially transparent, enough so that her black bra was a darker shadow beneath the fabric. Conservative, compared to Beth Ann’s shirt-dress contraptions that barely fell past her hips.

Beth Ann always complained about how formal she always looked. It made Allison wonder what Beth Ann would think if she saw the skirts and corsets that filled her trunks back at the apartment. She had collected all matter of clothes through the centuries, though she just couldn’t find trousers as comfortable as a good skirt. So used to covering every inch of skin, even the conservative business suit felt revealing to her. The shadowy glimpses of permanent spells tattooed over her back, shoulders, and down her arms and legs made her nervous.

To a human the marks were tattoos. To any immortal that got a glimpse, they would know they were incantations. Spells carved out by her mother when she was still in the cradle. Eight-hundred years ago no one but her husband would ever see the marks—now they were harder to hide. She relied on heavy concealers and air brushed makeup that covered her legs and arms. The only one she left uncovered was the one that covered her entire back from just below her shoulder blades to her hips. Many human women had tattoos on their backs and with the sheer black fabric of her shirt she knew the writing was illegible.