Raven Mortis's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

Raven typed and deleted the same ad three times. A social post would sink in an hour. She had no mailing list, no radio budget, no time to build either. She needed someone who already had a crowd pointed at her kind of weird. She locked the shop and walked to the coffee place two blocks over, the one wrapped in vines and climbing green, because she thought better with something hot in her hand. Jade Rivera was already at a corner table, laptop open, headphones around her neck. Raven knew her the way everyone in town knew her: the tattoo artist with the podcast, the one whose waitlist ran nine months. They had traded nods at shows for years and never much more. Jade looked up, clocked the pink neon dust still on Raven's sleeves, and pointed at the chair across from her. "You're the haunted weed girl," Jade said. "Saw the window. Didn't go in." "That's the problem." Raven sat and laid it out. Six days. A shop that looked like a dare. No way to tell the town it was open for business, not just for photos. She slid her phone across the table with the ad draft on it. Jade read it once. "It's boring. Your shop isn't." "Then help me." Jade tapped her laptop. "I record Thursday. Ninety thousand listeners. Come on. Bring something they can hold." Raven thought about the counter, the jars, the axolotl. None of that traveled. "Giveaway," she said. "Rolling papers. Custom pack. Green skull, purple teeth, the whole nightmare. First hundred through the door on opening day get one free." "Better." Jade pulled a napkin over and sketched fast. A grid of coupons, dripping. "And this. Print it ugly. Staple it on every pole from the tattoo shop to the college. My apprentices can hang them tomorrow morning. People rip coupons. They don't rip flyers." Raven stared at the napkin. It was already the poster. "Why help me," Raven said. Jade didn't look up. "Three of my clients are gone. Same tattoo. I've been talking about it on the show for a month and it's eating me. I want to talk about something that isn't a missing person for one episode. You're it." Raven didn't push. "Thursday." "Thursday. Wear the shop on you." Raven walked back with the napkin folded in her pocket. She stopped at the print place before it closed and ordered two hundred bloody coupon posters for pickup at seven a.m. She called the paper supplier from the sidewalk and put a rush on a hundred custom packs, green ink, purple ink, overnight freight, credit card groaning. By the time she unlocked her shop the sun was down and her phone was buzzing. Jade had already posted a teaser. Fourteen hundred likes. A comment at the top asked when opening day was. Raven had reach. Now she had to survive Thursday's interview without saying anything stupid on tape to ninety thousand strangers.