In the morning, Olivia London walked into her coffee shop on Brass Tacks Lane, Third Chance, Argo, and saw a monster sitting at one of the tables.
It hadn't come in through the door - she knew that because she'd only just unlocked it. A trail of slime from the old fireplace, which existed as decoration thanks to central heating, told her that it had come down the chimney. It was shapeless and faceless, a gelatinous black blob the size of a man, shifting and oozing as it squatted in the chair like a fat toad. Occasionally a vaguely greenish bubble or sphere protruded from within the black mass, glittering from within, before being absorbed back into it. A smell that combined petroleum, rotten leaves and stagnant pond water filled the air.
The average human being would have taken one look at such a thing and immediately run screaming from the room. Such things did not belong at the tables of coffee shops. They belonged in the pages of old gothic novels, or lurking at the deep abyss of oceans, or in the corridors of temples waiting to swallow unsuspecting explorers.
Instead, Olivia London smiled.
"Morning, Shgshthx!" she said, cheerily. "You're early this morning!"
The blob rippled and made a horrible, wet noise akin to a cowpat being forced through a leaf-blower. It was the only noise it could make, lacking the vocal cords or other apparatuses to make any kind of speech. And yet Olivia understood it as
"Got up before the alarm?" Olivia nodded as she walked past the table. "I getcha. Can't stand that, myself. I just lie in and wait for it to go off!"
She found her way behind the counter and began flipping on every appliance that was there - the blender, the kettle, the sandwich toaster. There was a lot to do before the shop opened officially and she didn't exactly have the staff to fall back on to ensure everything was ready before the morning rush. Aside from the two other people she had on staff,, this had been a one-woman show for some years now - although some, knowing where the money to buy the place had come from, would disagree.
But as far as she cared, they could all rack off.
As she worked, she turned back to the black blob in the chair and shot it yet another cheery, winning smile.
"What'll you have this morning, Sghshthx?" she asked.
Shgshthx wobbled and squelched.
"Black, one sugar? Sure thing!"
---
In the afternoon, she was very busy.
It was only a small coffee shop, practically a micropub but without the beer. There was only so much space for everything and only two other baristas she was working with. So when the rush began - and, some days, it was a rush - then she had to practically run between appliances and tables to make sure everyone was getting their orders and everyone was satisfied. Thank goodness for Mindy and Albert, the only other two members of staff, who could shoulder at least some of that burdern.
It wasn't that her clientelle was all non-humans. Most of them weren't - they were just average people popping in for a bite to eat in the afternoon, or on their lunch breaks at work. But this particular coffee shop tended to attact a lot of the non-human or superhuman population of the suburb, so they were quite common even amongsty the regulars. At any point in the day, Olivia would see a robot snake woman, a man with a comically outsized sword and a sentient shade of blue rubbing shoulders with a family of four, or a perfectly normal young woman sat opposite a female goblin holding hands across the table.
But there were others, who passed outside and who never went in. Others who looked through the windows of the shop and glanced inside. And she saw them hesitate, saw the faces they would make as they quickly turned and walked away slightly faster.
And, on occasion, she would glance outside the window and see the notices hung up in the other shops.
And the reality of what she was doing would hit her even harder than usual.
---
In the evening, with Olivia the very last member of staff on duty, the vampire came in.
At least, he always claimed to be a vampire. Olivia wasn't sure, though. True, he only ever showed up in the evenings, just before the shop was due to close and as the sun was sinking. And his skin was oddly pale. But in every other respect, he looked like an older, balding man who'd thrown on a cheap Halloween costume for a laugh and forgot to take it off. Not helping the comparison was the badly-shaved widow's peak on his head, or the dark sunglasses that he didn't even take off indoors.
And he didn't... feel like a vampire, either. Her grandma, who'd been close friends with one in school, had told her what it had felt like to stand next to them. "Like looking a shark in the eyes," she'd said. "You're halfway between admiring and terrified. Just waiting for the moment when it whips around and sinks its teeth into you."
But this guy just felt like a normal, older man when you stood near him. Nothing shark-like about him at all. And that always made Olivia wonder.
Either way, she smiled genially as he shuffled in.
"The usual, sir?" she asked. She didn't know his name - he'd never given it at any point in the time she knew him.
"The usual," he replied, with a smile that seemed oddly crooked on his face.
He'd come at this particular time often enough - almost like clockwork - that she knew what he meant by that. It was the same every time - a caramel latte with a dash extra caramel. Nothing fancy, nothing unusual. Something anyone would order, vampire or otherwise. Olivia put it together in a flash and brought it round to him, where he was sat slightly hunched over.
"Just on my way to the night shift," he explained as she set the mug down. "Bobby would have come in, but he's laid up with grave fever, poor bastard."
Olivia quirked an eyebrow. "Grave fever?"
"Awful stuff." The man picked up the latte and took a sip. "It's bad enough for any undead to get it, but for a vampire, it's a nightmare. You end up stuck in your coffin, barely able to breathe, wishing you could come back to life so you could die again."
"...is Bobby the one who-?" Olivia began.
"Was stuck on welfare for half a year? Yeah." The man took another sip. "He needs this job bad, after everything he's been through. He's damn lucky it's a Friday - dunno what management would say if it had been on a Monday. He's on thin ice with them already."
Olivia, looking back on this event later, would never remember what it was she was going to ask next. Maybe it was wherever if Bobby - whoever that was - was also an undead. Or perhaps it would have been about what sort of job either of them did, or why it required shift workers.
Because, instead, she shrieked as one of the windows of the shop door exploded.
It had been the window bearing the name of the shop - LONDON'S - on the front in steampunk style font. It had been quite a nice window, all told. Not exactly ostentatious, but distinctive. Something you could see as you walked down the street. And it was disintegrating in a waterfall of glass shards that clinked and scattered across the pavement outside and the tiled floor inside. The hot Australian wind swept through and smothered the cool, air-conditioned atmosphere of the shop.
The man blinked, and looked down at his mug. Except there wasn't a mug there anymore - the missile had hit his mug too, and now he was only holding a broken handle, looking like the least enthusiastic letter 'C' in the children's alphabet book. The table in front of him was a mess of broken glass, but there was more besides. Fragments of crockery. A spreading puddle of still-steaming liquid, the froth rapidly bubbling away to nothing.
And, in the middle of it all, half a brick.
Olivia looked at it, and immediately wished she hadn't, because the word SCUM was scrawled crudely over it. She knew what that meant. And only now did her brain recall that, as the tinkling of the broken window died away, the sound of footsteps rapidly retreating had briefly reached her hearing before dying off.
"I'm... I'm sorry, sir," she said, slowly. "Third time in as many months." She reached down to sweep the broken glass and china away, then thought better of it when she saw her bare hands. The wince-inducing memory of the last time she'd tried fought for space with the shame that sat, heavy as a rock, in her head.
"It's probably one of the Dutton lads," she went on. "Their grandad was in Faust, and he got inside their heads with all his nasty rhetoric. They don't like that I serve superhumans. In fact, most people around here don't like it, it makes them think of-"
She realised that she wasn't getting a reply, and looked up.
The man was rising from his seat. And Olivia sensed it. Something imperceptible had changed, something far more than the shift in mood that his tall, tense posture implied. He'd stopped being a badly-dressed, middle-aged cosplay and had turned into something darker. Something older. Something that worse human shape because it was convenient, but had now decided that the convenience was outweighed by the need to spill blood.
When he next spoke, his voice was the low, grating growl of stone tombs being opened.
"I've got this," he said.
"I really don't think-" Olivia began to say. But then the man was gone, and there was a faint smell in the air - a mixture of burnt ash and grave earth. And she could have sworn that the faint swirls of a dark smoke lingered in the air where he had been standing.
She stood there for a while, turning all of this information in her head. In the near distance, somewhere down the street, somebody screamed.
And then, sighing heavily, she went to the telephone.
Third time in as many months... Kobber Season was definitely rolling around again.
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