About two hours later, I had arrived at an older part of town. Old, abandoned storefronts dotted either side of the street between shitty cash loan places and pawn shops. My destination was a tiny little shop sandwiched between two unused buildings. It was slightly recessed in the ground, with three little concrete steps leading down to the glass door, which had the name displayed in simple font: "Marrick's Sundries and Things." I descended the stairs and pushed on the door, only to find it locked. I grumbled and pushed my face against the glass, looking at a sun-faded "Soree! Were closed!!!" sign I had drawn when I was five.

With a sigh, I pulled out my keys and unlocked the door. A little bell rang out to announce my entrance as I stepped in and then re-locked the door behind me. I pressed my back against the door and then slid down until I was sitting and looked out over my adoptive father's shop.

It always smelled faintly of a musty sort of odor loosely covered up with lemon Febreeze and the ever-lingering scent of sage. In the darkness, the rows of cluttered shelves appeared as chaotic shapes, lit only by the soft light spilling out through the half-closed door in the back of the shop. To my right, I could make out the shape of the register sitting on top of the glass counter. A bunch of random books had been left out, opened and randomly laid atop each other. A little paper sat on top of the register, and though I couldn’t read what it said in the dark, I knew it was yet another sign I’d scribbled in crayon as a kid. “No 100s!!!!!!”

I hugged myself and let out a deep breath, shakier than I thought it was going to be. My skin was crawling and I couldn’t get the image of my blind date out of my head. My stomach turned over as I was forced to replay the events in my head. When I closed my eyes, it wasn’t even him I was seeing. It was my first -- and only, really -- boyfriend. It was like I was back in his room; like I was fifteen all over again. Tears stung my eyes and I grabbed at my head, clutching my hair so tightly I thought I might have torn it out. I swore I could hear him breathing over me and running his hand across my cheek.

“Tabi Cat?” Marrick’s voice called out from the back of the shop.

Marrick Merlin was a tall man whose ethnicity was vague, to say the least. He looked like he could have natively been from any number of places in the Middle East, just close enough to any one of them that you’d be sure you were right if you guessed. His hair was dyed blond, though it could have been natural, I guess, since I’d never seen it in its natural color. He always wore loud hawaiian shirts, khaki board shorts, and flip flops. No matter the time of year. It always made him look like he was just about to take a vacation.

I gave a quiet and shuddery, “Hey.”

I rubbed the tears from my eyes, trying to hide my state from him before he got close enough to notice what was going on.

He crouched down on his haunches in front of me. I could barely make out his face in the darkness, but I felt his hand brush my hair back behind my ears. I flinched. “Yer bleedin’.”

“Just fought a vampire,” I took another shaky breath.

“Dressed a little fancy fer that, ain’t you?” He traced the blood from my scratch around my cheek in a complex pattern I could only guess was a rune.

“It was supposed to be a date.”

He placed his palm against my cheek. There was comfort in feeling the roughness of his hand there, especially when it joined with the warmth of the blood rune knitting my flesh back together.

“He enthrall ya?”

I didn’t say anything, but my face burned in shame. He gently pulled the both of us to our feet.

“I just baked cupcakes.” He rubbed my back as he walked me to the back room of the shop.

I sniffled and smiled. The back room was well-lit. Each and every wall was actually a bookshelf, and it was filled to the brim with books. So many of them that the shelves were starting to buckle under the weight. There were two of those huge, plastic foldable tables right in the middle of the room, and to the left was a staircase that led upward to the second floor. The tables had a single pot of coffee on them, and a huge pan of cupcakes, sat atop a towel to keep the pan from melting the table.

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I sat in front of the cupcake pan and Marrick sat across from me. He took a sip from his coffee and watched me pick at one of the pink-frosted desserts. The cupcake was still too hot to do anything other than hold, but I was thankful for it all the same.

“So what’s eatin’ ya?”

I stared at my cupcake. “I fucked up and let some guy enthrall me.”

He was quiet for a little bit, but it didn’t look like he was buying it.

“That’s all. I promise.”

He set his coffee down slowly. “It’s Tobias, ain’t it?”

My breath caught in my throat. I felt a lump growing there that felt like it was going to burst out. Even hearing his name was like a punch to the gut. I was immediately taken back eight years. I felt like it was still happening. Like I was still huddled up in that blanket and watching Marrick stand over his body, Tobias’ blood dripping from his knuckles.

“It’s always Tobias,” I whispered. “It’s fucking always him.”

Marrick moved around the table to quietly pull me into a hug, and I couldn’t hold anything back any longer. I started sobbing into his arms. My words barely came out over my choked cries. “Eight fucking years and I can’t get rid of him. It was just a vampire, why am I thinking about him? I’m so fucking pathetic.”

He rubbed my back and held me while I cried, resting his chin on my head. “You ain’t pathetic, Tabi Cat.”

I wanted to argue the point with him, but it was too difficult to get out words through my tears. I felt helpless and pathetic and worst of all, weak. I thought I was ready to move on with my life, but one tiny thing happens and I was taken all the way back to Tobias. I hated him. I hated how even so many years after what happened he still had a hold on me. And to make matters worse, this was going to kill Ammy. She’d been so happy to help me out, to set me up, and it blew up like it did. She was going to hate herself.

I don’t know how long I cried for, but by the time I had calmed down, Marrick had replaced the cupcake in my hand and it wasn’t piping hot anymore.

“Now eat. Awright?”

I sniffled and rubbed at my eyes and ate the little treat. Marrick never was much of a cook -- “too much like potions,” he’d always say -- but the one thing he made was cupcakes, and he made the hell out of them. There was nothing quite like a Marrick cupcake. Many people had guessed he used magic to elevate them, but I knew that couldn’t be the secret ingredient – after all, unlike everyone else, I couldn’t so much as feel magic. The extra tastiness must have been something else.

We sat in silence for a few minutes while I ate my cupcake, and longer still as I worked through a second. He ran his hand through my hair the whole time. It was weirdly soothing, and reminded me of when I was little. He'd hold me when I was too scared or upset and tell me everything would be okay.

By the time I'd finished that second cupcake, he gave me another hug.

"Feelin’ any better?"

I nodded. "Yeah. I think so. Sorry for keeping you up." I stood up to toss the little cupcake cups into the small trash can set up in the corner.

"Y'should get some sleep," he said as he stood up.

"I'm gonna read a little first, if that's okay?"

My dad shook his head and headed up the staircase. "It's your library too, Tabi Cat."

I didn't know why I asked for permission to read. I probably used the library twice as often as Dad. Something about the musty scent of old tomes and studying by the firelight really helped me focus. I was sure it would take my mind fully off everything.

The books on the shelves were of varying quality. Some were hand-bound first editions, some Dad's own research. Nearly every little bit of humanity's collective magical knowledge was contained on those old shelves bent by the weight of the books.

That night, to calm my nerves, I decided to take another stab at Kellen's Theory of Magic – an attempt to group all the various schools of magic into one unified theory. It was more or less an accepted truth, but nobody has been able to provide proof of the theory in the intervening centuries. It was my dream to be the first to proof it, and had been since I was a teenager. I got distracted, however, when I noticed a stack of papers nearby and wound up reading someone’s essay Runology. It looked like a college student’s work, which meant somebody at one of the magic schools must’ve sent dad a copy of their thesis for review. I couldn’t preform magic at all, due to a very unique disability I had, but I was voracious for magical knowledge. Runes, specifically, were my area of expertise. Dad had told me on several occasions that I knew more about runes than mages centuries older than myself, so I felt like I was qualified enough to read through this student’s thesis paper. It was a pretty dense paper, and by the time I’d made it to the end, Dad was coming down the stairs. He frowned at me. His presence meant it must’ve been time to open the store, which was 7 AM.

Fuck. I’d been up for 19 hours.

I cut off any lecture he might have had brewing with a tactful, “Sorry can’t talk, gotta get home,” and slipped my shoes on – making sure to snap off the unbroken heel to keep myself steady – and dashed out of the building. Dad didn’t have to say anything for me to know I really needed to get to bed, but as I did not know how to drive, I was forced to pick either public transit or walking. I figured waiting for the bus would only end in me sleeping at the bus stop, so walking home it was. It would be an hour-and-a-half walk, which was certainly a lot, but it meant I could stop by my favorite cafe on the way.