It had been a hundred lifetimes since anyone had called me by my real name. Today was no different. The clerk who rang up my katana called me Alicia. I hated that almost as much as I hated having to buy a katana in the first place.

“It’s Alaysha,” I said to the man around a sigh that seemed resolute even to my ears.

“Well, Alicia,” the clerk said. “You should take lessons if you’re going to buy this. It’s not a toy.”

He was hairy the way bald men were hairy, with cheek fuzz and throat hair on skin that moved like a snake’s belly when he talked.  Cigarette smoke and gun oil emanated from him in waves. He peered at my chin from beneath a furrowed brow.

He couldn’t keep the disgust from his expression as he eyed the remnants of the tattoos I’d had since I was two. Even in my time, they had been unusual: a band of black soot mixed with the ashes of my ancestors to form negative space symbols that had meaning in my mother’s tongue.

That language was one I’d never learned. The markings had always been a mystery to me. My aunt who had put them there told me they had power in themselves and they called to the magic in my very DNA.

“You know you’d be pretty without all that unprofessional ink on your face,” the shopkeeper said.

“Right.”

I tried not to sound cynical. I mean, I needed the sword. I longed for a broad sword or a long sword almost as much as I hated the name Alicia. But a katana was far more accessible, being the trendy thing and all.

I would make due with what I could. I had sat for hours in a cafe, picking at a bagel and lox while I waited for him to open so I could get it in and get out long before the streets filled with people.

I must have come off sincere because he cocked his head at me, encouraged.

“No, really,” he said as though his sudden insight might make my life easier to bear. I’d find a man to love me if I heeded his advice. I’d bear children. I’d fit in.

It was insulting.

I batted my eyelashes at him as though I hadn’t heard the exact same words from a thousand other men over my lifetime.

“Really?” I said. “Pretty enough to get a shag from a guns and weapons clerk living in the back apartment of his cheesy shop?”

His jaw went rigid. I supposed the adjective I’d used to describe his pride and joy might have been a bridge too far. Apparently, condescension from him was perfectly fine, but for me to feel put out over his misogyny was completely off limits.

Nowadays, tattoos were the norm and virgin skin, the oddity. I’d watched that evolution with interest over the centuries. But the kind of tattoo that marked my skin was not pretty, not even by these modern standards, not even in a city filled with freaks. A marking on the cheek, or the wrist, or even the inner arm? Those were trendy.

A rustic tapped-in ribbon of symbols stretching from ear to ear across the chin and jawline?

Freakish.

It was why I’d endured the laser removal for them over the last three years, sitting through the stink of my own flesh burning, swallowing down the nausea as tender nerves were sparked into life. The laser removal did what it could, but they would never completely go away. At best they were faded from matte black and uneven lines to a dark grey.

They  were sacred markings, but they tagged me as an outcast in this century as surely as they had in my own time.

My skin, my markings, my desire to have those symbols gone from life after dozens of centuries was none of anyone else’s business, let alone his.

He was just one more man in a world I hated. One I was tired of living in.

I almost would have liked to see his face at sight of the full black ribbon I’d worn for centuries instead of the now muted tones of the symbols I wore now. The one in the center, the one I knew represented water, was the darkest.

I gave a thought to pulling the blue contacts out of my eyes so he could see the milky white irises I’d learned to conceal a decade earlier. Maybe he’d love to see the full, freakish me. I suppose that sort of bitterness comes to a woman after several centuries of immortality.

I didn’t though. Humanity’s disdain and hatred fueled me the way food couldn’t but it wouldn’t do to tease the bears. Especially when I needed something from them.

“You’re sure this is original,” I said as I touched my index finger to the hilt.

He nodded. “Pre 1800. It’s not Shirasaya, but it’s old.”

I dug into my pocket. I’d stuffed a wad of cash in there earlier in the day. I knew I’d have enough. Maybe too much.

“How much do I owe you?”

“A katana isn’t a toy,” he continued, his gaze pinned the center of my chin. I could have felt the movement of his eyes as they traced it even if he hadn’t been so obvious.

“No matter how bad-ass you think you are with ink on your face,” he said. “It’s a dangerous weapon and not to be mishandled by a girl thinking she’ll look cool with it.”

I tried to smile at him and felt the grin freeze on my face.

“You mean I won’t be able to use it like Mishonne on Walking Dead?” I said sweetly and he glared at me, his disgust for my markings taking a backseat to that of my seeming ignorance of a weapon of such import.

“Honey, that’s a television show. Wielding a katana takes training and years and years of practice.”

He steepled his fingers on the display case, laying the pinkies along the glass toward me.

“How old are you? Twenty? It takes that long just to become a master.”

I eyed him patiently and lifted the sword from the glass counter as though I were terrified of it. Twenty might have been my age the day I’d met my god and became immortal. But twenty was light years away from an accurate age and centuries behind me.

“This little sword needs that much practice?” I said with a note of wonder.

I stepped away from the counter as I hefted it in both hands. “Like a year’s worth, do you think?”

He winced visibly. “Careful.”

His admonishment was sharp and sudden, and while he looked like he knew better than to reach for it, his fear of what I might do was battling his common sense. “It’s sharp.”

Sharp. As though I thought I was handling a butter knife.

I had aimed to lay it against my side respectfully until he glowered at me. I’d suffered much over the centuries, withstood the misogynistic generations of patriarchy after patriarchy swallowing whole the feminine strength, spent a millennium alone, but this last insult was too much.

Without thinking, I assumed the stance that my body and each bit of muscle and sinew knew like my lungs knew my breath. I cupped the blade from beneath, my thumbs running the length of the grip as I swung the sword blade up over my head and balanced it there.

Something sang in my skin at the feel of leather in my grip. I reveled in the way my biceps strained. An inaudible hum thrilled through my bones.

It had been years since I’d held a sword of any sort: katana, longsword, broadsword. I’d given them up a hundred years earlier. I’d sworn I’d never pick one up again. But the weight felt so good. I ached to close my eyes and disappear into memory.

“Listen,” the clerk said, blasting the stink of onions and garlic at me. “I’m not sure what you’re doing, but I don’t let just anyone handle the goods.”

I swept him with a glance that must have been filled with my entire hatred for the world. He didn’t just take one step back. He retreated.

“I’m not just anyone,” I said. “I’m buying this toy.”

“You know how much that thing costs?”

He inched back toward the counter, warily, maybe uncertain whether or not he should put his objections behind him and try to make a few bucks. Except his disdain was palpable. He’d sell me the thing, but he’d assume the whole while that I’d cut myself or kill someone with it.

And he wouldn’t be wrong.

But it was his air of superiority, that smug look on his ugly face that he was better, smarter, stronger than I was. That I was a girl. Just a ridiculously small girl who no doubt found herself enamored of a television show and a few cos-play conventions.

Those things bit into my psyche and took hold of my muscles. They acted without instruction, no doubt happy to feel a weapon in my hand again.

I didn’t think. I just acted. His face went white when I swung the sword.

I stopped its arc expertly just short of his throat, spun, and laid the flat of it on his opposite shoulder all before he could so much as lift one of those beetle brows in surprise.

I pulled it back to my side at a respectable forty five degrees as he let go a guttural sound of shock.

“Are you high?” he demanded when he’d gathered his wits back into a ball.

“Think I need more practice?” I said, ignoring his question. I was tired of him. I was tired period.

I dug around in my jeans pocket and pulled free the ball of money and dropped it onto the counter.

It was a thick mass of paper, so I assumed it was enough. I didn’t care to count it. It would have to be more than adequate judging from the large denominations that peeked through the wad, and I had no need of change.

He fisted it from the glass top and scooped it into a cash box as he trained his eye on me. Only when his money was safely away and I was halfway across the shop, did I hear him pressing numbers on his phone.

“What do you think about the volcano erupting this morning?” he said over his shoulder, maybe just a bit too amicably. “Or do you even watch news?”

I shrugged. “Don’t care.”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Most junkies don’t. All those people,” he said, almost too amicably. “Those homes. Thank God for those first responders. Doing the hard dirty work without notice. It’s a mess over there.”

“Those idiots shouldn’t have built so close to a volcano. Maybe they’d still be alive.”

His jaw slid sideways as he studied me, then sucked the back of his teeth in disgust.

I headed toward the door. I was pretty sure he was just trying to stall me while he phoned the police. Strange young women didn’t just swing weapons at innocent shopkeepers and leave like nothing happened.

Let him. I was dead anyway.

I exited his shop with a heavy sigh and let the sword hang by my side as I panned left and right, as I tried to make up my mind if I wanted to buy an a tepid chain made coffee or an espresso, strong and bold and biting. One last bolt of ambrosia.

The city seethed with people all around me. Regular people.

Savage ones, my mind whispered and I shivered involuntarily at the term that hadn’t spilled into my thoughts for a thousand years or more.

I was alone. I had been for what seemed an eternity, and I was tired of it. I was frozen in time in a world I loathed within a body that refused to age or wither.

But all that was going to change, magic be damned.

Because with any luck, I’d be dead by nightfall.