“I know, and sorry,” I said. “For the record, I’m not a werekin—but I did take a shotgun blast in the chest the other day, and it didn’t faze me. I’m a magical tattoo artist. I can shield.”
“No shit,” Galacci said, curious and amazed. “You wanted me to shoot you?”
“No!” I said. “It would be a dick move to provoke you to shoot me in front of my daughter’s school just to test my shield. She’s going to have to come back here.”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “If you really could take a bullet—”
“Have,” I said. “Have taken a bullet. Twice. Both times to protect Cinnamon.”
Galacci swallowed. “Well, if you could take a bullet, the coolest thing in the world for a little kid would be to see your dad, or, uh, mom, pull a Superman in front of the school.”
“It didn’t impress her,” I said. “She’s a weretiger. Claims to soak up bullets, and given how rough she had it on the streets I take it she knows that from experience. But when I got shot in the chest, all it did was make her worry.”
“Well, ah, let’s … not make that worry worse,” he said, more quietly. “This is never an easy thing. You should be the one to explain to her what’s happening.”
Somehow the thought of explaining things to her filled me with a sudden, urgent fear—and I realized Galacci needed to be filled in too. “Deputy, she has a mouth on her,” I said. “Try not to be offended. We think it might be Tourette’s. Seriously.”
“Really? Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “Thanks for the heads up, I’ll—here she is. You’re up.”
The glass door slid open on Cinnamon and Fremont. “Mom,” Cinnamon said uncertainly, darting forward, then stopping to stare at Burnham and Galacci. “Mom, what’s going on?”
“Cinnamon,” I said, squatting down to look at her.
“Yeah,” she said, eyes wide, staring over my shoulder at the deputy.
“Cinnamon,” I said, and choked it off. Then I started to tear up. “Cinnamon, oh, damnit, Cinnamon, they’re taking you from me. I’m so sorry. They say it’s only temporary—”
“And you believes them?” she said, tugging at her collar, head snapping in her tic.
“Yes. No. I don’t know,” I said, “but, regardless—I’m going to fight to get you back.”
“I—I—believes you, Mom,” Cinnamon said, tearing up too. “Fuck! I believe you.”
“Oh, Cinnamon,” I said, hugging her. She grabbed me so fiercely my back cracked, but I didn’t care. I just hugged her back and cried. “I will get you back.”
“I knows—I know, Mom,” Cinnamon said, glancing back over her shoulder at Fremont, then looking at me. The tic twisted her face, but she kept it under control. “I know.”
She looked up, and I felt movement behind me. “It’s time,” Galacci said.
“This is Deputy Galacci,” I said.
“I gots that,” Cinnamon said, eyes flickering over him.
“And that’s Margaret Burnham. They’re with DFACS. They’re going to take care of you, until I can come back for you. OK?”
“OK,” Cinnamon said.
“Don’t kill them,” I said, “or you’re grounded.”
“Mom!” Cinnamon said, mouth quirking up at Burnham’s horrified reaction and Galacci’s suppressed smile. “I’ll—fuck!—I’ll be good.”
“Come on, now,” Galacci said, patting my shoulder. “You’re just making it harder.”
And so I stood, and handed Cinnamon over to Galacci, who wiped his face clean and took her with a flat, stony stare. I glared at Burnham, but she didn’t give me a second glance, just handed a card to me, told me to call her office, and bustled off to her own car.
And then Cinnamon was in the back of the squad car, staring at me. Abruptly Galacci looked back and said something, and Cinnamon looked forward at him. After a moment, she smiled—and then laughed, and waved at me. She put her hand against the window, huge clawed fingers spread out in a five-pointed star; and then with her other hand she made a thumbs-up towards me. “It’s going to be OK, Mom,” she mouthed.
And then the police car started up and took her away.
Punching Bag
I kicked and kicked and kicked the bag as hard as I could, and screamed.
The first few kicks had started out all right—the Taido ma-washy-getty kick was close enough to an old Tae Kwon Do roundhouse that I’d picked it up pretty quickly. But Taido had all these stupid rules about how to throw kicks that I didn’t really get yet, and it was hard to remember to come back to the same position. I tried, really, but the more I kicked, the madder I got, and by the final three I’d lost all form and was just kicking, kicking, kicking.
“Jeez, Dakota,” Darren Briggs said, dropping what he was doing. He was the black belt in charge of Emory University’s Taido club. Today he’d traded out his normal blue instructor’s jacket for a uniform so old and worn the belt and clothes were both shades of grey, rather than the stiff white karate gi’s worn by the rest of the class. But the man in the uniform wasn’t old. He was young, clean-cut, with a spray of spiky hair he was constantly dying different colors; this week, it was purple and platinum white. “Are you drinking?”
“I have a water bottle,” I said, waving him off. “I’m hydrating.”
“No, I meant, have you been drinking?” he asked. “Like, alcohol. Your face … ”
I straightened and looked in the mirror. My face was flushed red, almost mottled, and I knew it was from more than from just working out. “No,” I said, disgusted, whacking the bag one more time and cursing as it caused a throbbing pain in my knee. “They took Cinnamon.”
“What?” he said. “Your daughter? Hey, wasn’t she supposed to come tonight?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to fall back to the long low stance Darren called choo-dan—but it just made my knee throb and I cursed. “Yes, damnit, damnit, damnit! YAAAA!”
And I kicked the bag again, this time so hard it popped off the chain and fell to the floor. No big feat—it was attached with a big carabineer up top and was always popping off. But as it fell, pain exploded, and I knelt on my other knee, cradling the wounded one. “Damnit.”
“Dakota,” Darren said, hunching down beside me. “You all right?”
“No,” I said. “And I know what you mean. No, my knee hurts.”
“Same one? Damnit, Dakota,” Darren said. “All right, take a break. You weren’t supposed to start back until you healed, but I cut you a break because you were doing so well. Clearly you’ve been overdoing it. So chill out tonight, and go see a doctor tomorrow.”
I hissed, and Darren pressed. “I mean it. Nobody’s been seriously injured in the whole history of the club and I don’t want to start with—”
“All right, all right,” I said, struggling back to my feet. “Ow.”
“Just … try to go easy,” Darren said. “Keep icing it after every practice. And on your own time—don’t laugh—do sem-ay-no-hokay, the new exercise I showed you tonight. You did really good for your first time. It’s pretty advanced stuff.”
“It felt natural,” I said, “but, man, it wore me out.”
“Sem-ay can give you a real workout, but it’s low impact,” he said. “Probably OK for your knee, but if it bugs you, focus on the breathing. Focus on the breathing if nothing else.”
“Does that really help?” I said.
“Sure does,” Darren said expansively. “Breathing isn’t just the source of your power—it’s the bridge between your conscious and your subconscious.”
I looked at him skeptically, but just then, Rary, the number two in the class and Darren’s off-again, on-again girlfriend, appeared with an icepack.
“No, seriously,” she said, putting the ice on my knee. “The diaphragm is the only muscle under joint control of the deliberative and autonomic nervous system. Controlling your breathing lets your conscious self signal your subconscious self in its own language.”
Both Darren and I were staring at her. “W
hat?” she said. “I am in med school.”
“Soooo … ” Darren said. “You going to join us at Manuel’s?”
“No,” I said. “I have to bail. I gotta get the last of my junk out of my apartment tonight.”
“You need help?” Rary said.
I shook my head. “I’m almost done,” I said. “And, look, Olsen is being a real pisser about Cinnamon. She almost called the cops on me, not just that night but when I went back for the first load. I really don’t want to involve you guys. I’d hate for her to call the cops on you.”
What I didn’t say is that I was scared my crazy life would bite these people. Maybe it was uncharitable, but I thought of them as mundanes: they couldn’t roll minds, lift cars or block bullets, and if their guts got ripped out they wouldn’t come crawling back to them.
So that’s how it was that I found myself alone in the apartment at ten-thirty that night, with about fifty thousand times more crap to box up than I remembered. I desperately hoped Mrs. Olsen wouldn’t hold me to the midnight deadline, but I started tossing things into boxes at random in the hope that I’d somehow get it all done.
My cell rang. “Dakota Frost,” I said, taping up a box with the phone in the crook of my shoulder. “Best magical tattooist in the Southeast—”
“You should have that on your answering machine,” Calaphase said over the line.
“I do,” I said, “you just catch me awake whenever you call.”
“My shift at the werehouse must be when you sleep,” Calaphase said.
“Your shift?” I said, laying down one more line of tape and tearing it off with the dispenser’s serrated edge. “You lead the Oakdale Clan. Don’t you have flunkies for that?”
“I lead by example,” Calaphase replied. “What are you doing?”
“Moving out,” I said. And I explained about Mrs. Bitch downstairs and her ultimatum.
“Charming,” Calaphase said. “Speaking of bitches, I have news from the Lady Saffron, delivered by the way of the Lady Darkrose.”
“A four-link chain,” I said, emptying a junk drawer wholesale into one of the smaller boxes. “Nicely insulated so that neither of us has to talk directly to someone who has talked to the other. Sounds good. Maybe this will keep things on an even keel.”
“Don’t count on it,” Calaphase said. “Her high-and-mightyness the Lady Scara—”
“Who?” I asked. “I can only keep track of so many ‘Lady S-something’ vampires.”
“She’s one of the Gentry,” Calaphase said. “Old, moneyed vampires who used to run the cities before the rise of the Consulates. There a few of them, the Lady Onyxa and the Lord Ian something and supposedly an ancient vamp too deformed by age to be seen in public.”
“Sounds charming,” I said. “And this Scara?”
“Their enforcer,” Calaphase said. “Scara’s informed the Lady Saffron that the Gentry officially considers the Consulate’s handling of this plague a failure—because they’ve found out one more of their vampires has been killed by graffiti, just like Revenance.”
“Oh no,” I said, my heart falling. “A new wave of killings … ”
“Maybe,” Calaphase said. “Scara had been hunting the vampire’s human servant, thinking he was responsible, but when she found him he was hiding out, scared shitless. He and his mistress were partying on New Year’s Eve when she was caught and killed by graffiti.”
“That’s even before Revenance,” I said. “Maybe the first vamp taken.”
“And just before Josephine,” Calaphase said. “And get this, same
night—”
“A homeless man was set on fire,” I said. “I’ve been reading the crime blotter too.”
“Sounded awfully suspicious,” Calaphase said. “We should compare notes.”
“Sure,” I said. “Hey, what happened to the human servant? Sounds like Scara treated him like a suspect, but since he’s not involved, I’ll want to hear that he was released unharmed.”
“Would you now?” Calaphase laughed, a bit nervously. “I’ll, uh, pass that along if I ever see the Lady Scara, not that I ever hope to.”
“Speaking of hope,” I said. “What about Demophage … ”
Calaphase fell silent. “Dakota … the vamp he was looking for … the weres found his body, not two days ago. Burned to death, just like Revenance, about four miles from the werehouse—near some very familiar looking graffiti.”
“Please don’t tell me—”
“They’d painted it over before they even talked to me,” Calaphase said, and my heart sank. “The weres that weren’t caught are really pissed, and Krishna still hasn’t made bail. But … they did listen to me, and took pictures. Just got them today.”
“Great!” I said. Pictures wouldn’t be as good as a live tag, but if they were good enough maybe we had a shot of tying the design to the behavior. “I mean, not that I’m happy he died or anything, but, maybe, finally, maybe we’ll be able to make some progress—”
“And,” Calaphase said, “if that sounds good, I’ve got an entirely new batch of pictures of suspected master tags taken by the Van Helsings, Darkrose Enterprises, and even some from Tully, all printed out in a folder ready for you to take a look at.”
I was speechless for a moment. “Oh, I love you.”
“Easiest way down a tattooist’s pants is to show her some flash,” Calaphase laughed.
“I’m not that easy,” I said.
“I didn’t say you were. Still, Darkrose wanted a report to give to Saffron,” Calaphase said. “Can I bring these by and get your official opinion? Darkrose isn’t a daywalker, so I need to tell her tonight. Otherwise I have to pass the message to Saffron herself, and she’ll—”
“I know, I know,” I said, looking around me and tossing the rest of the pile around me into a box. “But can it wait a few hours? I’m not done moving out, and I promised Mrs. Bitch downstairs that I’d be out of here by midnight tonight.”
“Need a hand?” Calaphase said.
“I—thanks, but no thanks. I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said. “Mrs. B—Mrs. Olsen is on a hair trigger. She wanted to call the police on me over Cinnamon.”
“I’m just,” Calaphase said, “a cleancut young man come by to help a friend move.”
“Oh, damnit,” I said finally. What could it hurt? “Sure.”
A Friend Helps You Move
Twenty minutes to midnight. No time, no help—and no more boxes. I had only one left, which was rapidly filling as I found bric-a-brac and knick-knacks and odds-and-ends in every nook and cranny of the apartment. I swear, the things were breeding.
And then there was a knock at the door, and I looked up to see Calaphase, holding a box of Krispy Kreme donuts which he opened with a flourish, row upon row of glazed delight.
“Oh, I love you,” I said, hopping off the floor and snatching up an original style. It was hot and soft in my hands and seemed to dissolve in my mouth with a grand flash behind my eyes. “Oh. Oh. These are better than sex. Not really, but they’re better than sex.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” he said, laughing.
“Mmm. Mmmmm. Wht?” I said, munching, scanning the box. There were already four missing out of the dozen. “Didn’t you have some?”
“No, I gave three to Mrs. Olsen,” he said. At my shocked look, he laughed again, a warm sound that left me as tingly as the donuts. “Call it a peace offering. I explained that I was supposed to help you, but was late. You’ll have all the time you need.”
“Thank you, Calaphase,” I said, taking another donut. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“Finish up,” he said, handing me the box. “I’ll take loads to your car. Can you beep it?”
With a vampire carting boxes and me cleaning up, we finished up quick. I filled the last box, taped it up, and then helped carry down the final load. So many boxes. Even with the seats folded down in the back, they barely fit in the Prius, and I couldn’t see out my rearview mirror. Thank God
for the backup monitor—and thank God I didn’t need to make a second trip.
After the car was packed, I took one last trip up the stairs to the place I’d called home for … hell, at least five years. As I climbed the steps, I saw Mrs. Olsen’s light was now on, no doubt from Calaphase’s visit, but I tried to ignore it. This was hard enough already.
At the door, I sighed. My mat, my curtains, the little stand beside the door were all gone; it already felt like a completely different place. I went in, finding empty rooms, feeling the place even more empty than when I’d moved in. Then, it held promise: now, it held nothing.
The storage unit closed at seven, so we dropped off the load at my hotel. Hands full, I slipped the little card in the slot, saw green, and kicked the door open, dumping the boxes next to the air conditioner. Calaphase, with three boxes in his arms, stopped at the door.
At first I thought he was staring with amusement at my Vespa, parked in front of the hotel window at the management’s request to free up a space in their tiny lot. Then he seemed to gather himself, cleared his throat, and looked straight at me. “May I come in?”
I hesitated—just a second—wondering if that pause was a vampire thing or simple courtesy. “Sure,” I said, moving a chair out of the way to make more room.
He waltzed around me silently, murmuring, “Wouldn’t want to wake—oh.” He stood there, holding the column, staring at the two, tiny, made beds. “Where’s Cinnamon? Out running with the werekin, or dare I hope, a sleepover with new friends from school?”
“She’s not here,” I said sharply, heading back to the car.
We got the rest of it unloaded, and then I came in and sat down on the bed. My hands were shaking. I could feel my face, hot, could see Calaphase standing by the door, feel the concern in his gaze, even though I couldn’t see his eyes.
After a moment, I explained the situation to him, as briefly as I could without pissing myself off again. Of course, that didn’t work so well. Just as I was getting really wound up, Calaphase made a motion, and I looked up to see him gesturing to the door.
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