Chapter 8: The Shop

By seven in the morning half of Penn Avenue stood on the pavement outside my shop.

Glass lay across the sidewalk in glittering drifts.

Red paint ran down my door in letters three feet tall.

HUMAN.

The pharmacist, the barber and the woman from the bakery all watched me get out of Mathias's car.

"Bryn, honey," the baker said. "I saw them do it. Four men in a gray truck, at three a.m."

"One of them had a scar on his lip."

I knew who had a scar on his lip.

Alden's son had stood behind his father in the lodge hall, a heavy man of twenty-nine with a split lower lip and a smirk.

I took a broom from the pharmacist and began to sweep.

"Don't," Mathias said quietly.

"I'm not leaving this for the neighbors."

"I'll have it cleaned within the hour."

"Then I'll sweep until your people get here," I said.

A gray truck turned onto Penn Avenue and parked across the street.

Four men climbed out.

The one in front had a split lip and a paint-stained cuff.

He strolled across the street with his thumbs in his belt and looked at my door.

"Terrible thing," he said. "Vandals."

"You did it," I said.

I didn't raise my voice.

"There's red paint on your sleeve."

He glanced at his cuff, and then at the people watching.

"Lady, I don't know what you mean."

"Then you won't mind if I call the police and let them look at it," I said.

"Or the baker can tell them about the truck."

He moved toward me, close enough to smell his aftershave.

"Humans shouldn't wander into places they don't belong," he said, low. "Last warning, florist."

"This is my shop," I said, without moving. "I pay rent on it."

"The lease is up next week, and I'm renewing it for twenty years."

"And you've come to the wrong street to scare a woman."

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