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“Guillermo, hurry up! You are moving so slowly. We only have one hour before the agora closes, and then we can no longer barter for wares!”
Guillermo rolled his eyes as he picked up speed to keep pace with Nandor as he strode across the parking lot, cloak flowing behind him.
“It’s called Sephora, Master.”
“That is what I said, yes.”
Guillermo let out a quiet huff of frustration as Nandor started moving unnaturally quickly toward the store.
“Wait, Master, you can’t…you can’t just float, there are people around!”
As usual, Nandor paid no heed to his familiar. Not for the first time that evening, Guillermo regretted ever mentioning the cosmetics store to his master.
Nandor was currently in the middle of his now quarterly binge of The Twilight Saga , and had wanted to “sparkle like Edward, Guillermo!” This had led to a pretty harrowing non-body safe glitter to the eye incident that had left Nandor more than a little shaken. “The sparkles, they have betrayed me! What did I do to deserve such a fate? ”
In an effort to shut, er, cheer Nandor up, Guillermo had suggested that they purchase some body safe glitter instead. Nandor instantly brightened at the idea, and had been hassling Guillermo to take him to the store ever since. That night, the moment the lid of Nandor’s coffin was lifted, he was once more complaining that they hadn’t made the trip yet. Guillermo, against his better judgment, finally gave in.
So here they were, Nandor striding through the automatic doors, blinking in the harsh light of the store.
Luckily, it seemed like most of the workers were busy preparing the store for closing, so there was no one at the front to greet them.
Nandor quickly snatched up a basket and started down the aisles. Guillermo was done keeping pace, and went off to gaze longingly at skincare products he could only ever dream of affording. He was unfairly compensated at his job, to say the least.
“Guillermo!” Nandor’s voice traveled a little too well across the cavernous store.
“Coming, Master!” It slipped out before Guillermo could think about it, and two shoppers in college hoodies swivelled their heads in his direction.
Oh god, these kids are gonna think that this is a sex thing. They’re going to record me when I turn my back and post it on TikTok. “Hey guys, come to Sephora with us. First we picked up refills of our favourite products, and then we witnessed kink in front of the cleansing wipes.”
Guillermo gave them what he hoped was a reassuring smile.
From the looks on their faces, he wasn’t convinced it landed.
“Guillermo…Guillermo!”
“Coming!” Oh, god.
Guillermo found Nandor scrutinising a tub of something or other.
“What’s up, Master?”
“Guillermo, tell me, how did they fit an entire large and intoxicated mammal into this very small container?”
“What, Master?”
“Apparently this…Lala Retro Whipped Cream is in fact made out of a drunk elephant.”
“Master, that’s just the name of the brand.”
“But that is false advertising!”
“Master, don’t…don’t open it like that! It’s going to go everywhere!”
Guillermo swivelled his head round, checking to make sure that no employees were there to witness his boss three fingers deep in the sample container.
What would he even say?
“Hi there, apologies. It’s not an unsupervised eleven-year-old messing up your displays, it is in fact a seven hundred and something year-old vampire who has made the late in unlife career pivot from pillaging villages to pillaging moisturisers. ”
“Come here, Master,” Guillermo found the tissue station, holding Nandor by the wrist as he removed the cream from his hand.
“I smell like baobab.”
“That’s nice, Master.”
“The label says I now have a pH level of five point two.”
“Firstly, that’s definitely not how that works. And, secondly, no you don’t. You’re dead, Master.”
“Hey! That is not very nice!”
“You’ve been dead for nearly eight hundred years!”
“Still, it is not polite to remind somebody of such a sensitive fact.”
“Sorry, Master.”
“I accept your apology so long as you take us to the glitter that I am able to insert into my eyeballs.”
“Master, no. It’s safe for you to put on your face, but you still can’t shove a bunch of glitter in your eyes!”
“You are no fun, Guillermo.”
Nandor stalked off once more. Guillermo had to take a few deep, steadying breaths before finding the strength to follow him again.
“Guillermo, if I purchased a balm for my lips for twenty-four United States American dollars, I would not want to be told when I can or cannot use it.”
Guillermo’s brow furrowed. “I don’t think anyone’s saying that, Master.”
“But, look! This little tube says that I may only apply my Iced Coffee Lip Butter Balm in the season of summer, on the last day of the working week. What is this, some kind of ritual? If I were to purchase this caffeinated gel and I used it, say, on a Wednesday in March, would something very bad happen? Is it cursed?” He lowered his voice, eyes scanning his surroundings rapidly. “Is it…witches?”
“No, Master, it’s not witches. Like with Drunk Elephant, Summer Fridays is just the name of the brand.”
“Well then, it is a very stupid name. It should be called Any Season Any Day, or All The Time, or Whenever You Like, We Don’t Actually Give a Shit.”
“Well, we can send an email to their marketing team when we get home. I think the glitter’s over here…”
By the time Guillermo turned back to Nandor, the vampire had disappeared. Again.
Guillermo wove his way through the shelves to no avail, before hearing voices coming from one corner of the store.
“Woah, your skin is, like, super cold.”
“Thank you.”
“There you are Ma-, uh, Nandor. What are you doing over here?”
“I am getting my foundation matched.”
“But, you don’t wear foundation…”
“Well, maybe I wanted to start.”
“Okay, sure. But, you know, we’re in a bit of a rush, and the store’s closing soon, and you can do that stuff online now…”
“Guillermo, you are being very rude! Stephanie here is kindly helping me to understand my undertone! I am a neutral, by the way. If you even care.”
Nandor preened, holding up a mirror to his face that reflected back nothing but the tired familiar at his side. “That’s great. That’s…that’s really great.”
“I will purchase that last one you showed me, Stephanie. You are right, it does smooth out my pores. You have such a skilled eye, I sincerely hope that you are not, in fact, a witch.”
Stephanie blinked twice. “Um, thank you.” From what he’s seen online, Guillermo is quietly confident that this isn’t even close to being the strangest thing that Stephanie has witnessed at her job.
Nandor gave her a happy little nod and hopped down from the makeup chair, turning to Guillermo.
“Glitter time is upon us.”
It’s not not ominous.
They found their way to the body glitter and Nandor grabbed a fistful of different colors and types. Guillermo tried not to visibly wince at what he knew would be an eye-watering total if they were to actually pay, especially with Nandor’s new high-end foundation added into the mix. He tilted his head to the side. Was that also a tube of lip balm peeking out from the bottom of the basket?
Guillermo guided them quickly to the register. Luckily, there was no line ahead or behind them, and only a lone cashier. It was the ideal circumstance for a hypnosis attempt – you don’t have to hypnotise any witnesses. And then hypnotise any witnesses to the hypnosis of the witnesses. Safe to say, Guillermo once spent a very long time waiting to exit a Chuck E. Cheese.
Nandor wiggled his fingers in front of the employee’s face. Guillermo tried his very best not to laugh at this - his master had a flair for the dramatic that bordered on cartoonish sometimes.
“You will put our items into the bag and give us our purchases for free. And you will give us many, many of those little samples of perfume.”
With that, they left the store and made their way back across the floodlit parking lot.
“I am going to smell so wonderfully fragrant, Guillermo. Not that I do not already. But now with my forty-five mini Gucci Flora perfumes I will smell like a pop sensation. I will get to smell like Hannah Montana.”
“Okay, mild creepiness of that statement aside, you do know that Hannah Montana isn’t real, right? It’s Miley Cyrus who’s the face of the perfume, and she played Miley Stewart whose pop star alter ego was Ha–”
Guillermo could no longer see in front of him because something small and plastic was obscuring his vision.
“This is a small token of my gratitude to you for bringing me here tonight. Emphasis on small, because it is not such a big thing that you have done, given that all you had to do was drive me twenty minutes in your car. But still, I am a teeny tiny bit grateful.”
“Thank you, Master.” Guillermo took the object in his hands. It was the lip balm that he had spotted at the bottom of the basket earlier.
“You know, I don’t usually wear makeup…”
“It is sheer. It is also minty. If I remember correctly, that is quite a refreshing scent and flavour combination. I think that it will help make your eyes nice and shiny, like–”
“Like Robert Pattinson in Twilight. Thank you, Master. That’s…very sweet.”
“Yes, it is sweet. Sweet Mint to be exact.” Nandor pointed down at the name of the product.
“I really appreciate it. Let’s, uh, let’s get home and maybe we can watch Breaking Dawn – Part 1 ?”
“I am going to start applying my new glitters in the car! Be careful when you turn or I think that I will be getting all of these little pieces of microplastics stuck into the crevices of your vehicle.”
Guillermo let out his deepest sigh of the night. It wasn’t easy, being a familiar.
He glanced down at the lip balm in his hands, smiling fondly. It had its perks, though.
Sometimes.