❝They're searching a bunch of kids for a trickster spirit. They're not going to stop until they find one, and I'm not going to be the fool that tries to halt them. But the mark they leave behind the ear? That suggests more good than bad. It's the Ka...
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CHAPTER ONE TATTOOED
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Lena Roth cannot remember the last time she acted with reason. This is partially because she always, always leapt before she looked. And partially because there was never anyone around to give her one. Or four. Or twenty, if she'd been in need of that many.
So Lena Roth didn't need a reason to remove the Kanji emblazoned on the skin behind her left ear. She didn't need to have motive to strip her body of the tiny patch of blackened skin. But she did. She had a reason. She had motive.
And motive is what drove her to Beacon Hills, perhaps with some help of the town's reverberating energy. She was drawn to it, to its people and its history and its darkness. And motive led her here, a girl with an itch in need of expulsion, to a chair in the waiting area of a tiny tattoo parlor smack on the edge of an unfamiliar town.
"You have a design in mind?" the artist asked of her, his voice gravel on gravel. "'Cause if not . . ." He gestured up to the wall. There were sheets upon sheets upon sheets of decisions to make. Sprawling lilies, antiquated proverbs, women, snakes, scarier things.
"No." Lena said, chewing at her bottom lip, eyes on the neon sign hanging backwards in the window. Why was she nervous? She was simply removing a mark; the symbol wouldn't take its weight or its past with it when it was gone. "Actually, I'm here for a removal."
"Those are never as much fun." He joked, and she offered up a tiny laugh. "Have a seat," he continued, pointing toward an empty client chair. Lena did. Have a seat, she meant. She got comfortable and gathered her hair around the right side of her neck, a sloppy chignon of dark tresses, and turned at the neck so as to reveal her ink.
"A backwards five," he observed.
"It's a Kanji," Lena is quick to correct. It comforted her, as much as she hated to admit it, speaking of her roots. It wasn't a conversation she brought up often. "A writing system. Japanese."
"So it's a symbol?"
Lena nods.
"What does it mean?"
Lena considered his question. What did it mean? Did suggest her past? Her present? Life and death? Truth and lies? "It means 'self,'" said Lena after a beat.
"It has detail, meaning," he traced his thumb over the mark. "Why am I removing it?"
Lena inhaled deeply. My past has tailed me from city to city and this is the only way I can make the ties feel less physical, she wanted to say. Instead, she answered, "I'd like to say that I haven't been feeling much like myself lately, but even that would be simplifying the situation."
