“Yes, can I help you?” I asked the man, pasting on my best salesperson smile. He was frozen just inside the door, the much-abused bell still clanking above his head. His scowl dissolved and he blinked rapidly, looking around the shop in utter confusion, as though uncertain how his legs had carried him here.

“I was looking for, for some clothing,” he said hesitantly.

“Well of course, happy to help!” I replied, still smiling as if I was trying to keep my teeth from falling out. There was a lot of pretending going around today. If he was just looking for used clothing, then I was plain old Delphi Dunn and really had been chased by a robber last night. “What can I help you find?”

He seemed momentarily stunned, as though he hadn’t expected that someone would actually ask him what he wanted to find when he walked into a used clothing store asking for clothing.

“I’m looking for a, um, a winter jacket,” he said at last, looking around frantically. I suppressed a giggle at the obvious way in which his eyes lit up as he spied a rack of winter jackets along the left hand wall.

“Of course, what size are you, sir?” I asked, coming out from behind the counter and bustling over to the wall with complete pretend confidence. “You can feel free to try on all of our excellent selection, although it might go a bit more quickly if you let me know what size you would like.”

“Oh, any size,” he said, earning him an odd look from me. He immediately blushed, a pale pink that clashed with his scar. “I mean, I’m a men’s medium, if you have anything like that. If not, it doesn’t matter, I can go somewhere else. I’m sure you’re busy. Sorry to bother you.”

He was already edging back towards the door, reaching out for the handle, when I finished rummaging through the coats and held up one that was a dusty grey colour, potentially brown once, but now faded from one too many washings.

“Here you go sir, a men’s size medium, just like you asked. Why don’t you pop off that old jacket of yours and give this one a go?” Before he could protest, I walked up to him and yanked his other jacket off his unresisting shoulders, dropping it to the ground. It hit the floor with a solid clunk, making the man jump.

I eyed the discarded jacket, which no doubt contained a gun in one of its inside pockets, and tried not to show my amusement. If everyone was so easily disarmed, I would have no trouble taking over this city in the next month.

Allowing the man no time to refuse, I wrapped the new jacket around him and stuffed his arms into the sleeves. He looked quite dandy in the new jacket, and I was quick to tell him so. It fit perfectly, or close enough anyway. The sleeves were a few inches too short and the hem was quite ragged, but it was still looked fairly warm. It would suit him quite well, if he actually was in the market for a used coat (which I very much doubted).

“There you are, sir, what do you think of that?” I asked, turning my saleswoman smile on full power. He made choking sounds in his throat as I steered him over to a mirror to have a look at himself. “It looks quite nice on you! Would you like to buy it right now or come back for it later? Of course we have a wonderful sale going on right now - it’s quite a bargain, today only. You won’t get a coat of this quality for nearly as good a price any other time, so I hope you do buy it now. Of course I won’t force you into doing anything that you don’t want to do, just take your time and admire the coat, or wander around here more. You can take all morning if you want to.”

“I - I’ll take it!” he blurted out, after a few more moments of unintelligible sounds.

He seemed more interested in escaping the store than purchasing a coat, but I was happy to drum up some accidental business for Bea as long as I was here. I steered his unresisting form to the counter, took the money he offered and gave a few bills back, while the kid wrote the whole thing down in the book. The man stumbled out the door, only barely remembering to pick up his discarded jacket and concealed weapon from the floor on the way out.

A few moments of quiet followed his departure, broken only by the bell hanging from the door. The bell faded into silence, and without warning the kid burst out laughing. He rolled around on the countertop, tears in his eyes and snot dribbling down his face. I snatched the account book out of his way so he wouldn’t smudge the neat writing within, and stood well back from the counter.

~~~

“Did everything go well this morning? Any customers?”

We were sitting in Bea’s kitchen again with bowls of steaming soup, waiting for Malik and Peg before we started lunch. The kid perched on a stool at the end of the table, finally recovered from his bout of laughter, which he had refused to explain to me. I hoped Bea would be more informative.

“Just the one,” I said casually, fiddling with my spoon.

“That’s pretty good for a Wednesday morning,” Bea said. “Did they buy anything?”

There was a snort from the end of the table, and we both looked at the kid, who was shaking with silent laughter.

“What’s wrong with you?” Bea leaned across the table and moved his bowl out of harm’s way. Just in time too, as the kid thumped his elbows down on the table and put his head between his hands, overcome by hilarity.

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“She – she, just told him to buy a coat!” he said, between gasps. “He walked in and she made him buy something and then he left, just like that!”

“Who walked in?” Bea asked sharply, her eyes darting to me. I gave her a shrug and returned to my contemplation of my rapidly cooling bowl of soup.

The kid said a name, although it was difficult to distinguish through his guffaws. It sounded as though he said ‘knife’.

I tried to reconcile the name Knife with the image of the uncertain looking man who had come to the door, but had difficulty doing it. Bea sucked in a breath though, so he must have been more intimidating than he looked. Perhaps he just wasn’t used to people speaking so bluntly to him. That was the thing about a reputation. It could get you in trouble when you got used to having it and then met someone who had never heard of you before.

Bea’s piercing eyes turned to me now with something between horror and respect. “Is Billy telling the truth?”

“Well, I did have a customer,” I replied, frowning at the kid, Billy, who was making little hiccupping noises and ruining my calm storytelling. “A nice man came in looking for a winter jacket, so I showed him the selection, he bought one, and then left. That was all the excitement that happened while you were gone.”

“And what did the man look like?”

“Oh I don’t know, about medium height with brown hair, taller than me but not too tall. He had dark brown eyes as well I think, and he was wearing an old, worn-out jacket, which was of course why he must have been in the store in the first place, right? Oh, and he had a scar across his face. He must have had something very heavy in his pocket as well, because his old jacket clanked when I dropped it to the floor.”

Bea gaped at me, her mouth hanging open in a very excellent impersonation of a dying fish. “You just sold him a coat and he left?”

“Was that wrong?” I ask, allowing a worried frown to come across my face. After all, I did not want to upset the people who had been so kind to me. Take pity on me, I’m just a poor country girl who doesn’t know what you’re supposed to do in the big city.

Bea shook her head slowly, almost as if she were in a trance. She seemed unable to stop staring at me. “No, that was fine, just fine. I can’t believe it,” she muttered to herself, staring out the window with unfocused eyes, mind obviously whirling. I badly wanted to ask what was so special about this customer, but didn’t want to undermine my outward appearance of a slightly naïve country girl.

The back door slammed, and Bea jolted in her chair, bumping into the table and setting the soup sloshing over the sides of the bowls.

Peg stomped into the kitchen, doing a double take when she noticed me sitting on the other side of the table. “Where were you this morning? I could’ve used your help. You weren’t entirely useless yesterday.”

Bea shook her head a little and pointed discretely towards my bandaged hands.

Peg looked at them and raised her eyebrows. “What happened there?”

“She fell,” Billy said, snorting to show what he thought of my story.

“She fell,” Peg repeated.

“That’s what she told me,” Bea said, leading me to believe that maybe she hadn’t fallen for my story either. A tight knot of anxiety began to twist in my stomach. It looked like I would need to practice my lying. I wasn’t used to it not working, and now was not the time to be drawing attention to my lies.

“Yes, I fell, and scraped my hands on the ground,” I said, refusing to be swayed from my story. They might learn the truth eventually, but I needed to make certain they could be trusted first. If Bea continued to be so fidgety, they might not earn that trust at all. “I’ve just been minding the store this morning. Bea was very kind to let me do so since I couldn’t help the two of you with the boxes.”

“She kept an eye on the store?” Peg asked Bea, whipping her head around to look at her.

“Yes,” she replied, shrugging unconcernedly, although her hand shook as she tried to lift her spoon up to her mouth, splashing tiny spots of brown onto her pale blue blouse. “Billy was with her.”

There was a strained silence around the table. I shoved a spoonful of soup into my mouth to keep myself from bursting out with all of the questions I had. Patience, I reminded myself. I didn’t want to spook them by asking too many questions too soon, but they would reveal all of their secrets to Death’s Dancer in due time.

The atmosphere around the table was markedly different than it had been the night before. Whereas last night they had casually ignored my presence, today I kept catching Bea and Peg sneaking glances at me when they thought I was absorbed in eating. As far as I could tell, the only one who wasn’t sitting on the edge of his seat and darting wide-eyed glances at me was Billy, and that was only because he was too preoccupied with shovelling soup into his mouth.

I pretended not to notice, but I was sad to lose that friendly atmosphere that I had just begun to enjoy. Maybe once I shared my secret with them they would share theirs with me and we could progress to the comfortable companionship they all had with each other. Then again, maybe they would not take kindly to the fact that I was a supervillain who was going to take over the city. It was always difficult to tell how people were going to take news like that.

I made my excuses after lunch, and couldn’t help noticing they were quite relieved when I walked out the door.

Bea did make me promise to come back the next morning for some more work though, because, as she said: “I don’t want a nice girl like you wandering alone in the city.” I was fairly certain she just wanted to keep an eye on me after the stunt I had pulled that morning, selling a coat to a mysterious and intimidating stranger. I tried to smile, to remind myself that it didn’t matter the reason they invited me back as long as I could continue to return and sow the seeds of my villainous campaign. But I was glad to leave the oppressive silence of the store.

I headed towards my apartment building after I left, just in case they were watching me, but at the end of the street I made two quick right turns and walked back the other way, on the far side of the block. Glancing back over my shoulder to make certain no one from the store had followed me, I walked directly into a solid object smelling faintly of tobacco and dust. I whipped my head around, and found myself staring at a very familiar faded grey coat.

The man from the store, the so-called Knife, smiled down at me.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, setting his hands on my shoulders to steady me. “Are you alright?”

His hands were lead weights on my shoulders. Something about his smile created a cold lump of dread in my stomach. Before I could shake him off, strong hands grabbed me from behind. A sack was yanked over my head, the rough fabric cutting off my view of the world, and most of my air supply. The sack was filled with a thick, cloying scent that made me gag. It was a familiar odour...crap. Chloroform. I held my breath and struggled harder against my captors, doing everything I could to wriggle out of their grasp.

My hands were yanked behind my back, making the bandages scrape over my raw skin. I cried out in pain once, then shouted again, louder, trying to make someone notice that I was being abducted in the middle of the street. But the chloroform I had ingested was already making the world fuzzy.

Something heavy knocked me to the ground, and the world faded to black.