“I knew it. I just knew it. When does the moon come up?” Vladimir asked, whirling to look at Fremont’s wall clock. It showed 3:54 pm. “How long do you have?”
“An hour,” Cinnamon said, clenching her fists. “Fuck! Not even.”
“Is it really the full moon already?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you have another day?”
“I haven’t changed in three months,” she whispered. “I can’t hold no longer-”
“That’s not healthy,” Vladimir said, frowning at me. “Changing is part of who she is. You shouldn’t be trying to suppress her gift.”
“I didn’t tell her not to change,” I said angrily. “She was poisoned.”
“Silver nitrate?” he asked sharply. “What’s that called, hyper-argyle-something?”
“Hyperargyria,” I said, squatting so I could look Cinnamon in the eye. Her eyes were actually glowing, and her pupils had narrowed to vertical ovals. “It damn near killed her.”
“Damnit,” Vladimir said. He looked at Fremont, who was gasping like a fish, and then he came to join me, watching the fine growth of fur on Cinnamon’s face. “Cinnamon, honey,” he said loudly. “Cinnamon, can you hear me?”
“I don’t knows,” she said. “Speak up a bit.”
Vladimir nodded and drew a breath as if to yell, but I poked him and shook my head. “Oh!” he said. “That wasn’t nice. Cinnamon, do you need a safety cage?”
Cinnamon clenched her fists, staring at them, then nodded.
“We have one in the basement,” Vladimir said.
“No, we don’t,” Fremont said, horrified. “Marian Joyce was complaining it was cramped so… I’m having it replaced.”
“You’re WHAT?” Vladimir said, clearly angry.
“Classes don’t start until Friday,” Fremont said, eyes frozen on Cinnamon. “The new one is going in this weekend. I didn’t think-”
“No, you didn’t,” Vladimir snapped.
“How could I have known?” she cried. “The next full moon isn’t for, what, a week?”
“It isn’t legal to offer an extraordinary needs program to a werekin without a safety cage on site, full moon or no,” he said. “We’ll have to tell Cinnamon and Marion not to come in on Friday, and how will that go over with Miss Frost, much less the Joyces-”
“Stop fighting stop fighting stop fighting,” Cinnamon said softly, and Vladimir and Fremont both shut up. “For the love, keep quiet.”
We all froze. Cinnamon’s little fists were trembling, and I swallowed as a tiny bit of blood beaded in the clench of her hands. But her shaking subsided, her fur faded, and her whiskers slowly drew back in.
“Mom, take me home,” Cinnamon said. “We gots to go. Take me home please.”
“Of course, Cinnamon,” I said, putting my hand gently on her shoulder and handing her a wet wipe. I always carried them. Werekin blood, even a scratch, had to be cleaned up. I gave Fremont and Yonas an apologetic word and ushered Cinnamon out. In moments we were stepping through the doors onto the setting sun, and I sighed: this place was beautiful.
“Wait,” Vladimir wheezed, running (well, limping) up behind us. “Whoo. Ah, wait, please wait,” he said, holding up the folder. “I don’t want to hold you up, but, please. We would love to have Cinnamon as a student at the Clairmont Academy.”
“Doctor Vladimir, I’m Cinnamon’s guardian,” I said. Actually, we were still working through the adoption, but as far as the law was concerned I was still legally responsible for a werekin minor. “I don’t want to get sued, or, God forbid, go to jail if something happens-”
“I’m sure we can make adequate arrangements before classes start.”
“Oh, gimme that,” I said, taking the folder and handing it to Cinnamon, who cried with delight. “Cinnamon would love to be a student at the Clairmont Academy.”
“Thank you thank you thank you!” Cinnamon said. “We- ah! ” And then she raised a hand to her cheek, felt her whiskers, and said meekly. “We gots to go.”
We got in the car and drove off.
“Well, that went-are you OK?” I said. “Are you going to make it?”
“Just drive,” she said, leaning back in the seat, eyes closed, holding the folder tightly in her hands. “Just get me home.”
“Damnit, we still need to go by a pet store,” I said. Cinnamon snarled at the word ‘pet’, and I winced, but we still needed to go. I had planned a real safety room in the house we were buying, but the closing was on hold until the Valentine Foundation actually started coughing up the payments they owed me. We still didn’t have a cage at the apartment; we’d been planning to go get one this evening. “We’ve put this off too long-”
“Forget it,” Cinnamon said with a growl, leaping between the seats to land in the back, tail thwacking me in the face as she went. “Take me home. Lock me in the bathroom.”
“That’s too small,” I said.
“You wants me to tear up your bedsheets?” she said, a growl growing in her voice.
I glanced back: she was on all fours, eyes glowing, pupils oval and staring at something ahead of me. I turned-and slammed the brakes before I rammed the car stopped in front of me.
“Jesus!” I said, as the Prius squealed to a stop amidst a chorus of angry horns. Ahead, on Clairmont road, early evening traffic stretched off in an endless line of red taillights. I could see a distant blue flashing light, complete with a knot of rubberneckers. “Fuck! This is not fair-”
And then a low, gut churning growl rumbled through the Prius.
Swallowing, I carefully reached up and adjusted the rear-view mirror, and stared straight into the yellow eyes of a huge tiger. Cinnamon was snarling, nose wrinkled, eyes oval against the sun. The steel collar about her throat had become chokingly tight as her body swelled, and she tugged at it with a paw broad enough to claw my face off.
She seemed to fill the entire back seat with fur and rage. I’d never seen her like this: real tigers had nothing on the werekind. She was absolutely terrifying. But oddly, the threat of messy death was not the first thing on my mind.
That horrible paw raised again to tug at the collar, and I said sharply, “Cinnamon Frost! Stop messing with that, you’ll pull out a claw.”
She snarled, then roared at me, a fearsome sound that stung my ears and reverberated in my gut.
I blinked-I couldn’t not blink at that sound-but did not flinch. She reached to claw at the collar again, and I got worried. “Are you choking?”
The tiger’s eyes tightened, its nose wrinkled up, and I could see huge fangs in the rearview as she flinched back. But among all that, I saw the head twitch… in a clear no.
“Good,” I said. My right ear hurt, and the steering wheel creaked under my grip, but it stopped my hands from shaking. “We’ll get Saffron to fit you with a larger one. I don’t want you choking, but I don’t want some vamp tearing into you because you’re not wearing her collar.”
Cinnamon snarled again, striking the back of the seat with that paw so hard I felt the seat squeak. The car rocked under the blow; I understood her strength, but where was she getting the mass to shake a ton and a half of plastic and metal? The steering wheel grew damp under my death grip, but I didn’t turn, didn’t back down, didn’t give her any reason to strike.
“If I can find a p-” don’t say pet, don’t say pet “-a… store,” I said slowly, swallowing as her crackling snarl rippled through the car, “can you wait in the car until I purchase a cage?”
The tiger lowered her head, shaking it. A definite no.
“Great, wonderful,” I said. But I had an idea, and pulled out of the traffic to the left into a nearby driveway so we could turn around. “Don’t worry, Cinnamon,” I said, reaching up to put the gearshift into reverse; when I did so, my hand was trembling. “I know what to do.”
Only when my hand was calm did I flick the Prius in reverse, put my hand on its seat, and look over my shoulder to back up, coming face to face with Cinnamon’s tiger form. Her head was big enough to bite mine off, her body was twisted in rage, her claws were raking the seat-but her voice was mewling in terror, and the human in her eyes was wide and pleading.
“All right,” I said, backing out. “No choice. We go to the werehouse.”
Jasmine and Steel
The entrance to the Oakdale Werehouse was hidden away on one of South Atlanta Road’s tiny tributaries, a dumpy dirt road hooking off into the forest. Past the bend, almost hidden behind heaped jasmine vines, was a narrow gravel driveway. A NO TRESPASSING sign warned away humans; a triangle of magical runes scared off Edgeworlders.
And to stop the determined driving their Priuses, a simple chain hung over the drive.
I saw it almost too late and slammed on the brakes. The Prius noisily slid forward on the gravel, stopping just shy of dinging her nose on the chain.
Nervously, I glanced back, but Cinnamon did not stir beneath the white hospital blanket I’d thrown over her to hide her from prying eyes. Only the deep sound of her breathing betrayed any clues about exactly what made the lumps beneath its white folds.
I got out. The werewolf defenses were simple: anyone stupid enough to walk the drive would be isolated from their vehicle, easy pickings. But I had no intention of playing their game. I just stepped up to the chain, concentrated, and murmured: “Image of tooth: clear my path.”
The snake tattoo on my left wrist came to life, reared, and struck the chain. It parted with a sudden bang, slipping to the ground with a quiet rattle of its own. “Thanks, my trusty serpent,” I murmured, stroking the glowing phantom with my free hand as it merged back into my flesh.
Then I hopped back in, started her up, and shot us down the drive.
The sun was still up, barely, which meant we wouldn’t be dealing with the werehouse’s nighttime guardians, the vampires of the Oakdale Clan. This was not good news: I was on good terms with Oakdale, mostly through Revenance and his friend and maker, Calaphase.
Then it hit me. I was going to have to break the news to him once dark fell.
I was so distracted by the thought, I almost ran over one of the werehouse’s daytime guardians as he stepped in front of me to bar the road. He was an older man with a wild iron-grey beard. He played a good ol’ boy in a worn woodsman’s jacket, but beneath his black fedora, glinting eyes screamed werekin.
He cried something I couldn’t hear over the rattle of the road, thwacking his walking stick at me as if I was going to stop-then leapt nimbly aside when I didn’t, mouthing a curse as the Prius skidded to a stop beside him. He shoved bushes aside with his staff and squeezed over to my window, but I’d already rolled it down and didn’t give him a chance to tell us to ‘git.’
“I’ve got a werekin turning in the back,” I said, and then, when he opened his mouth to object, I amplified, “It’s Cinnamon-Stray. She needs your safety cage. Where do I take her?”
The man stared briefly, then cursed again, whipping out a cell phone. “Go to the upper loading dock,” he snapped, thumbing a button and jamming the phone into his ear. “Not the lower one. You can back right in. Chris? This is Fischer. We got two comin’ in, one for the safety cage and her handler. Yeah, it’s Stray and her bitch Frost.”
And then he glared down at me. “What are you waiting for? Go!”
I put her in gear and trundled down the rest of what they called a road. The smell was awful; there had to be a sewage treatment plant or something somewhere nearby, and I couldn’t imagine how the werekin stood it. I rolled up my window just as the road shot through the chain-link fence and ended in the cracked parking lot of the werehouse.
Once it had been an ironworks on the banks of the Chattahoochee, but a fire had taken half the complex, leaving graffiti-covered hulks. I rolled forward, trying to get my bearings; the last time I’d been here had been at night, on foot, approaching from the other end.
I was starting to feel lost when a youngish blond boy, little older than Cinnamon, ran out of one of the least bombed looking buildings. Even from a distance his eyes glittered green. He waved towards a roll-up entrance door, and I whipped the car around and backed it in.
The Prius slid backwards through the door into darkness, and the view through its backup monitor was not enough. Once again I threw my arm over the seat to guide myself. Through the car’s wide windows I saw the huge space swallowing us up, a giant box barely lit by dying light slipping in through stained skylights. Then we were in and stopped, and the boy ran through the door, hit the button and dropped the roll-up, and only then, as the light faded in its groaning descent, did I reach back and begin to pull aside the blanket to check on Cinnamon.
She was in human form again, sleeping in a little curled ball, tail coiled around her so she looked more like a housecat than a tiger, even with her tattooed stripes. For a moment, I marveled at her marks: the Marquis did artistic, masterly work, legal or no. But then I saw her new school clothes: shredded, practically destroyed, just like the upholstery and lining of the Prius’s cargo area. She had not been gentle. She would be crushed.
“Cinnamon,” I whispered. “Wake up. We’re here.”
She just moaned and shifted in her sleep.
I got out of the car and the blond boy stepped up beside me, fidgeting. He looked to be a werewolf, though it was hard to tell: he wasn’t as far gone as Cinnamon.
“Is that Str-is that Cin?” he asked, sniffing, peering into the car. “What gots to her? Is she all right?”
“Yes, it’s Cinnamon, and she changed early. I’m sure she’ll be all right,” I said, patting his shoulder. “Don’t worry-and you get points for not calling her Stray.”
I opened the trunk, thoughtlessly exposing Cinnamon’s curled form, and the boy’s green eyes widened, drinking her naked body in the way only a teenaged boy’s eyes can. “Whoa.”
“You just lost those points,” I snapped, pulling Mom’s death-blanket over her. Really, I was more angry with myself; what kind of mom was I to have exposed Cinnamon like that? Adopting a teen had left me missing a whole lifetime of mom reflexes I was just now learning.
“Tully!” a sharp voice said. “You preps the room. I’ll tend to the stray.”
Tully’s eyes widened again, fearful, and he darted off. I tucked Cinnamon into the blanket, picked her up, and turned to find myself facing a sharp-featured man with severe glasses and even more severely cut red hair. His clothes looked almost normal: a navy turtleneck and brown jacket, almost like a businessman. But his eyes were wrong, the pupils… off. Too wide, almost horizontal slits. He could pass for human. But just barely.
“Here,” the werekin said, reaching as if to take Cinnamon from me and scowling as I made no move. Instead I just straightened, looking down at him, and the werestag reassessed. “Krishna Gettyson, day captain for the werehouse.”
“Dakota Frost, Cinnamon’s mother,” I said, picking a hand out of the blanket and extending it to him awkwardly. “Thanks for taking us in. This was a real emergency.”
“You aren’t the stray’s mother,” Gettyson snapped. His eyes flicked sideways to the car. “And you gots no idea how to take care of a were.”
“Well, I’ll have to learn,” I said, meeting his eerie gaze. “And she goes by Cinnamon.”
He just frowned at me, then cried, “Tully! Where’s the wheelchair?”
“I can carry her,” I said. “She’s light as a feather.”
“You’re an outsider,” Gettyson said flatly. “You shouldn’t even be here, and I sure as hell don’t intends to let you into the dens.”
“I’ll carry her there myself and watch over her, or we’ll go elsewhere,” I said.
“I won’t let you,” Gettyson said.
“You think you can stop me? Mother. Cub. Do the math,” I said, and Gettyson tensed.
“Dakota,” purred a warm, masculine voice, smooth as silk. “How good to see you.”
A stern pale man stepped out of the darkness. A long-tailed coat clung to his trim form, and a glittering chain dangled from the pocket of his vest, but the overall effect was high style, not old fashioned. His once-frosted locks were now wavy and styled, but against his ivory-pale skin, his blond hair looked almost brown, and his blue eyes almost seemed to glow.
Or perhaps they did glow. He was Calaphase the vampire, head of the Oakdale Clan, my second-best ally in the werehouse… and Revenance’s best friend.
“Gettyson,” Calaphase said, smiling icily. Clearly the status of the Oakdale Clan had risen with the werekin. Last time I’d been here, Calaphase had been walking on thin ice, but now there was an edge in his voice as he warned the werestag off. “I’m sure we can bend the rules for Dakota-”
“That’s a bad idea,” Gettyson said. “Every time we brings in an outsider-”
“You said the same about me,” Calaphase said. “But haven’t we proven our worth?”
As he talked, I realized this is how things started first time I met him. Calaphase had shielded me from his fellow vampire Transomnia, ultimately kicking him out of the clan. For his shame, Transomnia had beaten me and nearly murdered Cinnamon. Not again.
“No,” I said. “Wait, Cally. I screwed up. Gettyson, I came here for help and then turned into an ass.” Oddly, Gettyson’s nostrils flared at ‘ass.’ How had that offended him? “I’m sorry. I just get protective about Cinnamon. Not too long ago, someone tried to kill her.”
Gettyson just stood there, jaw clenched, and then I realized what pile I might have just stepped in: perhaps he wasn’t a werestag. So I decided to risk one step further. “And if you’re a were-donkey or something, sorry about the ‘ass’ comment. I didn’t know.”
“Werehorse,” Gettyson said curtly. “There’s no such things as were-donkeys.”
My mouth opened to correct him: from what I’d learned in school, you could make a werekin out of anything with a genome. Then I shut my mouth-there was no point in getting into an argument with him about his beliefs.
“My apologies,” I managed finally. “I’ve never met a… a werehorse.”
Gettyson’s nostrils flared, but he nodded as Tully pushed up a wheelchair, stopping just out of reach of Gettyson’s arm. “Apology accepted,” Gettyson said, in a tone that clearly indicated that it wasn’t accepted. “But no exceptions, and no outsiders in the dens.”
I didn’t even have to think through it: I knew what waking up here alone would do to Cinnamon. “Then we go somewhere else,” I said. “Cinnamon has abandonment issues. I have to be there when she wakes up, or she’ll think I’m trying to get rid of her-”
“Bull,” Gettyson said. “She knows you wants her in your entourage.”
“She is wanted, but she’s not in my ‘entourage’,” I said.
Gettyson reached in and grabbed Cinnamon’s hand, showing me the butterfly that I’d transferred to her skin the very first time I met her. “So why did you mark her?”
“Maybe the Marquis ‘marked’ her when he took her in because all he wanted a canvas,” I said, “but I don’t do things that way. First, it was a free gift, no strings attached, and second, I’d have never transferred it if I’d known she was so young. Tattooing minors is illegal.”
“Illegal?” Gettyson laughed, looking at me incredulously. He turned away, shaking his head. “Illegal. Of all the crazy-all right, all right. Set her down.”
“I can carry her,” I repeated quietly. “She’s light as a feather.”
Calaphase smiled again. “Give it up, Gettyson,” he said gently. “She’s the only person I know more obstinate than you, you old were-mule.”
Gettyson just stared at me with those eerie eyes, as if he expected me to crack. His gaze drifted up and down, at Cinnamon, then my face, then my feet, then my face again.
“She’s not getting any heavier from you looking at her,” I said.
Gettyson snorted. “You can take her in, stay till she wakes. But that’s it,” he said firmly. “The moon will be damn near full before it sets. You gots to be gone before it gets too close.”
I sighed. He wasn’t just determined to be an ass, he had a point. “Fair enough.”
Gettyson nodded and led us towards the back of the werehouse, into the stack of offices and labs that had been converted into living space. There was no need of worry, they were just rooms and hallways, dirty, poorly lit-and covered with graffiti.
I paused, staring at the dark, spray painted marks. Some of the lettering looked familiar, but they had little of the artistry and none of the movement of the tag that had killed Revenance. I shook my head, and descended the stairs into the depths of the werehouse dens.
Beneath a dim bulb in a damp hallway was a wall of bars with a steel mesh door, locked with a deadbolt. Immediately I could see that it would keep in an animal with just paws, but a human could put his hand through the bars and let himself out. Gettyson opened the lock with a snap and took us in to a small cell with a cot and chair. It was surprisingly cozy.
I laid Cinnamon down on the bed gently and arranged the blanket over her.
“If you have any clothes for her-”
“I’ll get some,” Gettyson said. “You needs to get a room like this.”
“We’re having it built,” I said, patting Cinnamon’s head. “In the new house.”
“Fine,” Gettyson said. “When… Cinnamon wakes, it would help me if you’d vacate. She knows how to let herself out, but the other residents won’t take too well if they finds you in here.”
“I’m all right, Mom,” Cinnamon said weakly, and I looked down to see her reach up and squeeze my hand. “It just had been so long. I’ll be all right. Someday, when I’m old enough to wrestle the beast myself, I won’t need these stupid rooms anyways.”
“You had me worried back there,” I said, tousling her hair.
“Afraid I was going to slit your throat?”
“No, afraid you’d step on your iPod,” I said, holding it out to her. “Safe and sound.”
Cinnamon took it from me, holding it to her chest like a teddy bear. “Safe and sound.”
It killed me to ask, but… ”Are you sure you’ll be safe with it if you turn?”
“It’s ‘change’,” Cinnamon said, pointing with one long finger at a cubbyhole beside the bed, “and there’s a change safe. Easy to drop in, hard to paw out.”
“All right,” I said. Clearly they’d thought this through better than I had. But still, it was terrible to think of my baby all alone here. “You know what? Fuck this. I’m going to stay-”
“No, Mom,” Cinnamon said. “Gettyson’s right. The others-they won’t like it.”
I smiled. “So scratch me, we’ll fix that right up.”
“Mommm!” Cinnamon said, sitting up in the bed. Immediately she winced and lay back down slowly, gingerly, like she was an old woman. “Don’t even joke-ow. Ow. Owsies. Don’t even joke about it. Lycanthropy sucks, I can tell you that.”
“Muscle spasms?” I guessed, helping her sink back into the bed and pulling the covers back up. “Want me to see if Gettyson has any aspirin?”
She cocked her head, ears flicking. “Ibuprofen’s better. He’s gettin’ it.”
I leaned back slowly. “Never underestimate a werekin’s hearing,” I murmured.
“Mom, ’s OK,” Cinnamon said, very softly. She was fading fast. “This was my room, this time of the month. Sometimes I just hangs here. You go. You do what you gots to. For Revy.”
I had been trying to forget my next unpleasant task. “I will,” I said, squeezing her hand. “You be safe, sweet-” But she was already snoring.
And she was right. I was putting it off. It was time to break the news to Calaphase.
Time to tell a vampire I’d failed to save his best friend.
Calaphase
I looked up to see Calaphase standing by the door, smiling closemouthed. “Gettyson’s right,” he said. “Cinnamon knows how to let herself out, but the other weres won’t want you back in the den unsupervised, and neither I nor Gettyson can hang here all night with you.”
I stared at the trim, rakish vampire, far upgraded from the goth-punk I’d first met. I avoided his eyes, and not just because he was a vampire: he reminded me of my failure.
“Right,” I said. I frowned. Calaphase had turned out quite decent for a vampire, but I didn’t know how he was going to take this. “Calaphase, can we take a little walk? There’s something I need to talk to you about-about Revenance.”
Calaphase’s eyes widened and his nostrils flared, but he kept his voice quiet. “Not here. Outside,” he whispered. Then he shook his head and hissed, exposing his fangs. “ Damnit. ”
I squeezed Cinnamon’s hand one more time and left.
Tully met us as we were leaving the cages. “Sir?” Tully said nervously.
“What is it?” Calaphase said, not pausing as he tromped up the stairs. “I’m busy.”
“They hit us again,” Tully said, backing up as Calaphase advanced. The young werewolf looked scared and really unhappy. “Right under my nose. I wants to tell Gettyson but-”
“I’ll tell him,” Calaphase said crisply. “Go clean it up.”
“Don’t you wants to see it?” Tully asked. “They hit us really good, I mean, pieced us-”
“No, I don’t want to see it,” Calaphase snarled, and Tully flinched. “I’m done with that. Buff it over. I’ll tell Gettyson you’re doing it. Maybe it will save you a beating.”
“Yes, sir,” Tully said, deflated.
“What was that about?” I asked, a bit nervously. I was dreading this conversation, and wanted to talk about anything else. “What does ‘pieced’ “Vandalism,” Calaphase said sharply. “You’d think no werekin would be fool enough to do it, and no human skilled enough. But they’ve hit us again and again.”
“You’re worried about vandalism?” I asked. “ Here? ”
Calaphase glared back at me, a blue glint in his eyes that was more than just anger: it was his vampire aura, bleeding out into the air. “You think this place should look more shitty?”
“No,” I said, ashamed. I was definitely dreading this conversation now.
We emerged into the barren cavern of the werehouse. The last time I was here, it had been filled to the rafters with drums and fires and sweaty werekin and presided over by the monstrous lord of the werehouse, the Bear King. Lord Buckhead, the ageless fae sprit behind the wild revelry of Atlanta’s eponymous party district, had stood as my guardian when, before the hungry eyes of the crowd, I dueled another tattooist for the right to ink a werewolf. And a young stray werecat girl followed me home… and had rarely left my side since.
Now, robbed of its heat and light, it just looked… decrepit. In the perverse gloom of the few shafts of twilight leaking in, even the huge metal throne of the Bear King lost its charm and looked like a pile of old Cadillac parts. Only the upper decks of the living quarters seemed the same: as before, they were filled with cold, inhuman eyes… staring, and waiting. I swallowed. Cinnamon could easily have been among those hungry eyes. Gettyson was checking a clipboard when he saw me, then jerked his hand, out! Not wanting to look back at those hungry eyes, I hurried to keep up with Calaphase. The vampire checked his pocket watch, then kicked the door open savagely, flinging it open onto the twilight with a tortured squeal of rusty hinges.
As I followed, Gettyson called after me. “Frost, I-go on, get it done, cub,” he said, idly cuffing Tully behind the ear as the boy walked past with a can of house paint. “I wants the whole thing wiped. Anyways, Frost, you did good bringing her here. We’ll take good care of her.”
“I’m sure you will,” I said, exchanging a sympathetic glance with Tully before following Calaphase out. Like the other werekin, his eyes were still hungry, but when not shrouded by fear and darkness, that glance looked less like hunger for flesh and more like longing for a normal life. I’d seen that look before. “But I’ll be back to be certain.”
The door screamed shut in a sudden gust of wind, and I was alone with a vampire underneath the darkening sky. Calaphase didn’t seem to notice the sudden cold; he just kept walking, heels cracking against the pavement as he led us away from the werehouse, out onto a tongue of concrete that jutted out over the lower level of the parking lot like a pier. I followed the vampire uncomfortably, not sure whether I was really scared of being alone with him at night, or just filled with willies over having once again to be bearer of the bad news.
“Tell me,” Calaphase said, staring into the distance, silhouetted against orange twilight.
I told him about Revy’s death-as many details as I thought he could bear.
“That’s… horrible,” Calaphase said at last, still staring into the distance.
“Yes, it was,” I said.
“Revy was my first, you know,” Calaphase said. “The first vampire I ever made. This is like… like losing a child. No, this is worse; a child can’t do for you what Revy did for me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said flatly. I sympathized, though I didn’t approve “I’ve never killed anyone, you know that?” Calaphase said, turning back to me, grim. “Never. Not even my master. Revy did that. He freed me. He made it possible for me, for the whole Oakdale Clan, to be something different. Even this shit job, guarding this dump… Revenance made it possible. Werekin normally hate vamps, but at least here, Revenance changed that. He really cared about them, especially the cubs. I owed him everything. ”
He snarled and kicked a tire brake lying on the end of the dock; the rotted rubber triangle flew out over the parking lot and disappeared into the darkness.
I stared at him in shock. I never expected to scratch a vampire lord and find so many layers underneath. I’d never asked about the relationship Revenance had with Calaphase, and now I found it was most important relationship in his life.
And Revenance himself? I’d thought of him as just a second banana in a vampire gang-but to hear Calaphase tell it, Revenance had been a man of insight, protector of the werehouse’s feral children, perhaps even a protector of Cinnamon.
I was taking people for granted a lot lately. When did I become such an insensitive bitch?
I stepped up beside him, cautiously, deliberately grinding my boots against the pavement so my touch would not be a surprise. “Hey,” I said, rubbing the arm of his jacket. Unlike Saffron, his flesh was cold. “That’s OK. There’s nothing you could have done-”
And then an awful scream rent the air.
“Oh hell,” Calaphase said, whirling. “Not again.”
We leapt down from the concrete pier, my knee immediately throbbing with pain. Calaphase ran like the wind, me, somewhat less so; but I managed to keep him in sight as he curled round the lower side of the werehouse’s main building and then stopped.
“Help, help, it gots me,” someone screamed-familiar-the boy Tully ?
I wheezed and skidded round the corner and stopped next to Calaphase in shock.
Paint cans-whitewash-were spilled about; half of it had already gone to cover a huge graffiti tag on the wall. But beneath the white paint something thick squirmed and bubbled-and where the paint ended, coiling tentacles twisted into the air, pulling hard at Tully, who was pinned on the wall by a massive band of graffiti about his chest.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get you out,” Calaphase was saying, picking up a long handled paint roller and holding it out to Tully like a lifeline. The boy grabbed for it, but a coiling tentacle reached out and snapped the handle in two- and then reached for Calaphase.
I jerked him back just as a dozen tentacles whipped out and snatched through the space where he’d been standing. Unbalanced, Calaphase tumbled backward into the mud with a curse, eyes glowing. “Fuck!” he said. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Dakota-”
But I’d already turned my back on him. “You know what’s wrong,” I said, eyes running over the curving lines, the tombstones, the grassy hillside, the familiar wildstyle letters. They ‘pieced’ us -a ‘piece’-oh, I am such an idiot. “You know exactly what is wrong.”
Behind me, Calaphase scrambled to his feet, but I held out my hand sharply to bar his path. He cursed, but didn’t try to pass me. “We’ve got to get him out of there.”
“If we can,” I said. “That tag is just like the one that killed Revenance.”
A Thankless Job
“No vampires,” I said, shoving yet another of Calaphase’s guards back behind the line I’d drawn in the pavement. “It seems to like you guys. Talk to me, Calaphase. You said again.”
“We heard a scream last night,” Calaphase said, staring at Tully, pinned within the tag. “Sounded like Josephine, a panther who ran with one of our transients. I sent Revy into the Underground to check on her-”
“The Underground?” I asked. It was a series of ancient tunnels honeycombing the central part of Atlanta, but I had no idea it stretched almost all the way out here, nearly to the Perimeter. “There are entrances to the Underground in Oakdale?”
“Oh, yes,” Calaphase said. “Don’t try to find the ones out here, the werekin use them as escape routes and they’re… protective of that territory. Revy went into the Underground, but never came back. I thought he was waiting for dark, until you showed up with the news.”
I tried to remember whether there was an entrance to the Underground near Oakland Cemetery. Then I noticed the sharp, questioning glance of a vampire guard, a striking man with a thundercloud of dark curly hair rising over his bushy eyebrows, and I explained, “Revenance died in a tag just like this one on the other side of town.”
“Something like that killed Revenance?” the guard said, in a reedy, deliberate European accent which was hard to place. He returned his piercing gaze to the squealing tag and the crowd of werekin who were splashing paint on it-no longer just whitewashing it, but covering it with as many colors as they could find. “Really, killed by that scrawl -”
“Yes, really,” I snapped, “and I won’t have any more of you dead on my watch!”
Calaphase stood, scowling behind the line, as more of his crew firmed up around him. “Some guardians we are,” he said bitterly, hands jammed in his pockets. “Can’t even protect our clients from a can of paint. Think we could get a pole, lever him out of there?”
I glared at the serrated band of graffiti on Tully’s chest. “It might cut him in two.”
“ Jesus! ” Fischer shouted, leaping back as part of the tag ripped out from beneath the paint and snatched at him. His hat came off as he danced back out of reach, and the barbed tentacle sliced it in half. Fischer kept going, stumbling back over the line without ever fully losing his balance. An ugly scar was torn in his woodsman’s jacket, top to bottom, and he stared at it, then me, his wide eyes even more shocking against his worn, seasoned face.
“This isn’t working,” Gettyson said, hands on his hips, watching another tentacle ripping out of a splash of paint just thrown by a were. “You hears me, Frost? This isn’t working.”
“It was worth a try,” I replied, thinking furiously. I’d warned him how dangerous the last tag was, and after a quick conference we’d decided to whitewash the rest of this one. But the graffiti tentacles were squirming out of the wet paint. “At least it’s slowing it down.”
“Slowing it down?” Gettyson said. His creepy wide pupils seemed made to deliver scorn. “This thing’s cutting him to pieces! You’re the magician-gimme a damn plan!”
“I’m working on it,” I snapped. What could I do? The splashed paint had cut the exposed area of the tag by half, but it wasn’t enough: the tag was struggling out of its Jackson Pollock coating, and the free parts were alive and vicious. My tattoos weren’t strong enough to hold this thing off. I glared at the tag, its geometry, at the pavement beneath it. Once again, I wished I’d finished my degree, rather than dropping out after I’d learned enough magic… to tattoo…
“Rock salt,” I said.
“What?” Gettyson said, blank.
“You got a kitchen?” I asked. “A real, human, fully-stocked kitchen? I need rock salt. And cane sugar, ginger, cinnamon-the-spice, basil. As much of all of that as you got. Any of your kids like crafts? I need chalk and glitter-and play sand, if you’ve got it-”
“What the hell are you planning?” Gettyson said.
“‘Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world,’” I said. “I’m going to build a magic circle, and use the tag’s own magic against it. Now move!”
As the remaining weres and vamps scattered across the grounds, I surveyed the ground in front of Tully carefully. The pavement was cracked, weedgrown, but basically whole, and there was just enough area for what I planned to do. I cocked my head: yes. Yes. I could do this. Then Tully cried out in pain, and I looked up at him. Then I was certain: I would do this.
Gettyson returned with bowls, cinnamon, and a big box of Kosher salt. “Will this do?”
“It’s a start,” I said, tasting the Kosher salt, then dumping it and the cinnamon into the bowl. “More cinnamon. This will work as a conductor, but the circle will need a magical capacitor. I’ll need basil and cane sugar if we don’t have sand-”
“I found sand,” the curly-haired vamp guard said, seeming to have popped out of nowhere with a sack over his shoulder and an oddly pleased grin on his oddly worn face. “ Liberated it from a nearby factory. I’m sure they won’t mind.”
“What kind is it, play sand?” I asked, tearing at the package. “Quartz granules? Good.”
In minutes the plan was taking shape, both in my head and reality. I sent Gettyson to get more bowls and started two mixes, one with Kosher salt, cinnamon and sand for the circle, and a second with the basil flakes and sugar. But we still were short ingredients, still had no chalk-and had long since run out of paint, while the graffiti was just getting stronger and stronger.
Tully screamed, pulled tight against the wall, barbed tentacles coiled diagonally around his chest, half metal octopus, half sadistic rosevine. If the whole thing had been exposed, it would have spreadeagled him and started tearing him apart; as it was the tentacles slid evilly, cutting across his chest, into his flesh, oozing blood.
I closed my eyes, then opened them again, trying to see past the anger and really look at the tag. I had thought it the same, but really, it was similar without being identical: same general logic, same layout, but different motifs. There was a central coiling mandala, but it was barbed wire octopus rather than a rose. The octopus’s feelers were woven with masonry, but this time stone columns rather than brick. There was a semicircle behind it, but this time a planet rather than a hillside. And the cityscape was replaced by a forest. Even the brushstrokes were different. The more I looked, the more certain I became: this tag was from the same series as the one that killed Revenance, but it wasn’t by the same hand.
The graffiti hadn’t been inked by one artist. The bastards had a whole crew.
Tully screamed again. The vines had started sawing into his flesh, dripping a diagonal curtain of blood. It was killing him slowly, almost sadistically; but it was still killing him. This was no time to dither; we had to get him out of that thing now.
I gritted my teeth, stripped off my vestcoat, and handed it without thinking to Calaphase’s curly-haired guard. When I pulled off my turtleneck, I could see he was glaring at me.
“What good do you expect a striptease will do?” he said, his deliberate emphasis now sounding like menace, his strange eyes slitted at the vest and shirt I’d dumped in his hands.
“I’m a skindancer,” I said, unzipping my chaps, and now, rather than being embarrassed, I relished the sudden raise of his bushy eyebrows. “I expect it will do a great deal of good.”
Just then there was a rushing of air and suddenly Calaphase and another guard popped out of the darkness, with four bags worth of groceries from Kroger.
“Honey, I’m home,” Calaphase said, smiling as he saw me undressing-and then his smile faded when he saw Tully. “Hell, it’s killing him-”
“I know, but damn, that was fast,” I said. “I didn’t think vampires could really fly.”
“We can run,” Calaphase said. “And I think we found almost everything you needed.”
“Great,” I said, pawing through the bags. Chalk, cinnamon, rock salt, more Kosher salt-and fresh basil -in January. I pulled out a twig and twirled it: perfect. “Let’s get cooking.”
“ I often cooked with cinnamon, basil, and salt, back when I was alive,” the curly-headed vamp said, watching me mix. “And those ingredients never did anything special but stew.”
“You’re as alive as I am,” I retorted, not looking up, “and iron filings won’t do anything special but rust-until you add a magnetic field. Then they line up like soldiers.”
“You expect me to believe basil is magnetic?” Curly asked.
“No,” I said, “but I expect to show it’s magically active-if you know how to unlock it.”
I finished the basil mix, said a small prayer over the bowl, picked it up, and then stepped up to the right side of the tag, where it was completely coated with paint. Against the dirty back wall of the werehouse, beneath the many splashes of color, thick cables writhed and bubbled. One had nearly torn itself free, but it did not strike; and so I got almost close enough to touch.
“I cannot wait to see,” the vamp guard said, “the magic of Julia Child.”
“Showing your age, Curly,” I said, scooping a fistful of coated basil sprigs. “Me, I prefer Alton Brown, but for this job, you need a little Emeril- BAM! ”
And I tossed the sprigs out through the air, where their coatings absorbed stray mana, discharging it into the leaves until they glittered like feathers of blue flame. They cascaded down the wall, some sticking, some falling, and collected on the pavement in an odd hexagonal pattern that clearly didn’t look random. Magical energy flickered across the pattern each time the tag stirred beneath the paint, and it began to get more sluggish. Even the tentacle that was tearing itself free started to go limp… and then sank back into the paint.
“You did it!” the vampire said, leaping forward to grab Tully.
“No!” I shouted, shooting my free hand forth in a sinuous motion. Mana rippled through my skin and one of my vines leapt off my skin like a green glowing whip, faster than even I’d expected. It caught the vampire on the chest and flung him back just as three barbed tentacles tore free from the wall and struck where he would have landed. The momentum rippled back along my glowing vine and near tore my arm out of its socket, knocking me forward, down to the pavement on my already throbbing knee. I cried out in pain-and looked up to see the three tentacles, right above my face, turning slowly towards me.
I hurled the rest of the bowl at them and scrambled back. The tentacles cracked to the pavement where I had lain, batting the remaining bowl aside with a KHWANGG, scattering basil everywhere. The herbs lit up like blue flame, as before, but without the protective barrier of paint diffusing the flow of mana between them and the tag, the basil sprigs turned to real flames.
In seconds, my magic mix disintegrated in a cloud of sparks.