“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.”
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