"There's blood on this. Like, rightthere. I'm pointing at it." Lucy sighed, and rubbed her fingers across the blue satin in her hands. "Blood," she said again, pointing at a spot just next to the right shoulder's seamline. The stain was a few shades darker than her own skin and stood out against the fabric just as well "You cannot rent something, return it stained with blood, and expect to get your deposit back."

Karina Smith -a local girl Lucy was half sure she'd babysat for maybe five or six years ago- had the nerve to look affronted."It's not blood. It's red wine."

God, she hated teenagers. "And you're a sophomore in high school, so why would you think that's going to get you into any less trouble?" The Mystic Falls PD was apparently still turning a blind eye towards what was a rampant teenage drinking problem. Not her concern, but she couldn't help rolling her eyes. "This is probably a fifty dollar dry cleaning so how are we doing this, Karina?"

Credit card it looked like. Lucy sighed as Karina stepped to the side and pulled out her cell phone to call her parents.

Honestly, Lucy Edgecomb just wanted to go back to school. For a college she had to pay over forty grand a year to attend, Sweet Briar sure did send her back home to her parents a lot. No, it wasn't mandatory to leave campus over breaks, but her parents liked having her home and they were fronting most of that forty thousand a year, so what was a girl to do?

The parental preferred option generally won out and dutifully, Lucy went on home to West Bumblefu- sorry, MysticFalls- where the family had lived since before the turn of the century (not by choice, Lucy was fond of telling anyone who brought it up) and owned a costume and vintage rental boutique that had been in the family for nearly as long.

Edgecomb Ensembles made a pretty penny for being a costume store in a town of just under twenty thousand in the middle of Virginia. Combine a town steeped in ridiculous traditions and located in what Lucy called 'the Civil War Belt' of Virginia, and you had a disturbing plethora of costuming needs to meet.

"Emphasis on disturbing." The staining at the shoulder wasn't as bad when she looked at it again, but there was no mistaking that it was blood. Nothing else dried like that, rusty in color and making the fabric slightly stiffer than it was meant to be. Almost as though it would crack if she folded it over in half. When she brought it into the small back room to take a damp paper towel and an old mixture her mother had taught her to test, her suspicions were confirmed.

Lucy was scowling by the time she hung it next to five other blood stained dresses that had been returned that week. "What the hell was going on at that dance?" It was a purely rhetorical question that Lucy was sure she already knew the answer to, but she couldn't help feeling that it warranted a vocal complaint.

She was double majoring in Art History and Theatre with a concentration historic textiles. That kind of thing just happened when you grew up in a costume shop that, by virtue of location, specialized in the late 19th century. Lucy knew blood stain fabric when she saw it and she probably could have gotten it out of the five dresses herself with a bit of elbow grease, but with the weird (and inconvenient) timing of the Sockhop Dance costume returns overlapping with the start of Founders Day season she didn't have time to scrub blood out of fifty year old dresses without ruining them.

"And I passed up a Williamsburg internship for this..." she muttered, reaching for the sponge, a small bottle of detergent, and the family grimoire on the shelf above the sink. Tools no Edgecomb woman ever went without. "Five unused dry cleaning bills and I've got books for two Spring classes." Fair? Not entirely, no, but Lucy figured that anyone who'd grown up in Mystic Falls had lost, dropped, or simply never developed a moral code or two over the years.

Besides, maybe a lost deposit and a dry cleaning bill would teach a teenager (or five) to keep their necks out of the reach of vampires' mouths or –more importantly and simply- to stop making oddly intense eye contact with strangers. As far as Lucy was concerned, either one would work.