The Lank home looked just as Xochitl had left it.  She paid the little cab driver with the unpronounceable name, including his big tip, and watched the vehicle drive away before approaching the house.  Rather than go to the front door, she opened the side gate and stepped quietly up to a kitchen window.  Looking inside, she didn’t see Novelyne or either of the Lanks, but nothing seemed out of place.  She continued on.  The Lanks had a beautifully landscaped back yard, with a large pool fed by a waterfall.  Just as Xochitl was rounding the back corner of the house, she heard a noise from across the yard.  She dropped to her knees.

At the back edge of the yard was a garden shed, and right beside that was a metal gate in the cinder block wall that surrounded the property.  As she watched, the gate opened just wide enough to admit a person, and one after the other, three passed through.  The last closed the gate behind him.  They crossed toward the house, stepping past the waterfall and into the light streaming out from the large double-paned windows.  All three men appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties.  All three had pistols, two still had them in their belt holsters; one carried his in his left hand.  This meant they wouldn’t be vampires.  Vampires didn’t need to carry firearms.

“Freeze,” said Xochitl from her kneeling position.

The man with the gun raised it and fired.  The bullet whizzed by close enough to her head that it brushed her hair.  She shot him twice in the chest.  Without pause, she shot the second man twice above his right eye.  He hadn’t quite reached the hand grip of his weapon.  The third man had.  He managed to raise it halfway before she shot him twice, one bullet hitting lower than intended, a gut shot, but the second right through the heart. 

Xochitl stood up before she realized that the first man was still standing.  He had two bullet holes through his chest, but he raised his gun again.  She shot him twice in the face and then emptied her clip into his body.  Though he staggered backwards, he still didn’t go down.  A growl brought her attention to his face.  It had a grotesque hole in the forehead, but that wasn’t the most disturbing thing about it.  It had shifted to the face of the blood-sucking fiend, with long fangs and yellow eyes.  Alright, so don’t make generalizations.  Vampires might carry guns after all.

Xochitl stood in front of the bathroom mirror, with Novelyne behind her, and painted a thick coating of Goth white makeup over her face and breasts.  Then she took out her eyebrow stencils and painted dark upswept anime brows punctuated by tiny stars.  She had replaced her combat boots with black seven and a half inch fetish knee-highs.  Her fishnets didn’t quite reach the bottom of her black leather pleated mini skirt, revealing the two tattooed names written in script across her right thigh.  The black lamb skin corset was laced up tight in the back, squeezing her waist to six inches smaller than her natural form and pressing her pale breasts up over the top.  She had already arranged the dread falls in her hair.

“I’m not sure what you’re supposed to be,” said Novelyne.

“A Gothic slut.”

“Oh, well, mission accomplished then.”

Making her way down the alley, Xochitl entered the back door of Robot Slut Tattoo to find Sid’s friend Terry had turned the back room into a photo studio.  He was no slouch either, with a big Hasselblad set up on a tripod, surrounded by flash umbrellas.  His white backdrop was arranged against the wall, and just in front of that, a large white wing back chair.

Terry was a tall and very skinny man in his early thirties, with short cropped hair just going grey and a John Waters mustache.  For the next two hours he used his sweaty hands to place Xochitl in a variety poses draped across the white chair.  Halfway through, the miniskirt was discarded, leaving her in a vinyl microbikini, and several minutes later the corset followed the skirt, leaving her naked above the waist except for two pieces of electrical tape forming an X over each nipple.

“You are awesome,” said Terry as he snapped away.  “We could make some serious scratch from fetish magazines, if you’re into that.”

“The pictures are for Sid.” 

“It’s not like nobody’s going to see them.  You know he’s putting them on his sign… probably a billboard too.”

“That’s Sid’s business.”

As Xochitl was shimmying back into her skirt, the tattoo artist came back from the front of the store where he had been etching a fairy and mushroom on a redhead’s left breast in between games of Angry Birds on his laptop.

“Are feeling alright, Xochitl?  I can see your ribs.”

“You’re not looking at my ribs.”

“When did you last eat something?” he asked.

“I honestly don’t remember.” She slipped the corset around her and zipped it up the front.  “Why don’t you take me out to lunch?”

“Really?” 

She laughed at his eagerness.  “Sure.”

“Do you want to go change?”

“No.  Come on.  We can hit Food Factory.”

Oh What a Night by the Four Seasons was playing about as loud as Sid’s radio would go.  Sid was in the center of the room dancing—sort of.  He was swinging his wide butt, which was actually a bit too small in proportion to the rest of him, back and forth.  His arms were above his head like a stripper showing off a new boob job.

“Shit, Sid!” she yelled.  “Nobody needs to see that!”

Sid jumped and turned around, then blushed.  “I didn’t hear you come in!”  He stepped over to the radio and turned the volume way down.  “I didn’t hear you come in,” he repeated.

Xochitl handed him the paperback book.

“H.P. Lovecraft?”

“Michael Whelan is the cover artist,” she replied.  “I want to use this, this, and this.”

“That’s pretty dark.”

“I’m pretty dark.”

He nodded while shrugging.  “Alright.  Get in the chair.”

The tattooist worked all morning on her arm, stopping only to walk a fiery redhead and her boyfriend through a selection of fairies sitting on mushrooms, and then scheduling them for the next day.  When he was done, Xochitl’s entire right arm was completely covered in an intricate panorama of the macabre.  In between Stephen King’s head and Marilyn Monroe’s feet was the shape of a human cocooned in a spider web, the bright red arachnid crawling across him the only color in the whole sleeve.  Between Batman and Betty Page, whose nether regions were covered by the 75^th Ranger Regiment banner, was a pile of grinning skulls and a tree whose trunk was made up of gasping mouths and ogling eyes.  The entire thing was tied together with a background of bats, spider webs, and tentacles.  Only the lacy edging at her wrist and shoulder were not images of horror and even they seemed now somehow threatening.

“That’s definitely my best work,” said Sid, as he slathered on antibacterial gel.  “I’ll have Terry over here at noon tomorrow.”

“You can’t wait until Monday?”

“I’d really like to get it done.  I need to get my signs and ads done.  I’m losing money.”

“Fine.”

“And um…”

“What?” she asked.

“You’re going to get cleaned up, right?  You look… bedraggled.”

“Fuck you, Sid.  Bed… that’s not even a real word.”

“Don’t be like that, Xochitl,” Sid whined.  “You know you’re my perfect woman.”

Xochitl rolled her eyes, but she could tell by the breathless way that he said it that Sid was completely serious.

“You can drive my truck out to get your hair and I’ll set up some time at the spa there for you too.  It’s my treat.”

“Fine.  I’ll leave right now.  I don’t want to look bedwrangled.”