"It's Nazi, Frost," he said. "I don't mean neo-Nazi or skinhead or anything. It's a genuine fucking World War Two buzz-bombs-andlost-arks Nazi tattoo design."

"Holy… crap," I said, staring at the image on the screen. Then, gingerly, I raised the scanner cover, hoping nothing would leap out and bite me. The photograph was very old, yellowing, and quite singed. Half the wording was gone, but a rescan at 600 dpi and a bit of fiddling would recover it. No amount of fiddling would bring back my forgotten high school language classes… but with what was left, I recognized the words as unmistakably German.

"Look, look, look," he said, wheedling. "Wulf s one of my best clients-"

"For how long?" I asked.

"The last six weeks-"

"Hell," I said, disgusted. "What have you gotten me into?"

"He says he needs the discipline, or he's going to lose it at the next full-"

"Next Sunday, I know," I said, staring at the tattoo, at the German words I could no longer read. "I don't know how I feel about inking some Nazi… occultism. If I was Jewish I'd probably throw this in your face."

"I wanted to chuck it at first," Spleen said, a bit bashfully. "But Wulf says he looked for years and couldn't find a better design. And he paid me a lot of money-"

"Slide," I said, standing, and Spleen moved so I could unlock the cabinet that held my supplies. I pulled out a long, plain wooden case and opened it slowly. The inside was divided into two long compartments, one holding a glass tube containing a fragment of a long spiral horn, and the other holding ten compartments for tattoo needles, six of them empty.

I held up the fragment and examined it. "Enough for the needles, I think-"