Lilith--Blood Ink

by Dana Fredsti

A-a-a-nd I need to stop overthinking.

  Cayden looked up from the script he was reading and nodded at me, a half-smile playing on his lips as if he knew what I’d been thinking.

  I gave a half-hearted wave in return and got in line behind a teenage boy with clothing so artfully distressed you could almost hear it whisper, “Please kill me,” and a thirty-something Suit in the middle of a Very Important Call.

  “I don’t care if he’s not available,” the Suit said loudly, “you make him available and you do it now, or the only job you’ll get in this town will be slinging lattes at Starbucks!”

  Wow, lacking basic survival skills. The barista doing the slinging in this particular Starbucks shot him a quick but heated glare. The odds were good the Suit would get a little something extra in his latte.

  When it was my turn, I pulled out my credit card to pay for my cappuccino and toasted Everything bagel with cream cheese, but the cute twenty-something cashier shook his head. “The gentleman there already paid,” he informed me, with a nod toward Cayden.

  I didn’t bother correcting his judgment of Cayden’s character, instead asking, “Out of curiosity, how did he pay when he didn’t know what I was going to order?”

  “He left more than enough money to cover whatever you got,” the barista replied.

  “O-kay… Do you want me to take him his change?”

  “Oh no. He said that whatever was left we should put in the tip jar.”

  Damn.

  There’s nothing I hate more than a rich asshole who doesn’t tip well, and Cayden Doran had to go and not fall into the stereotype. Didn’t he realize I didn’t want to like anything about him?

  “Well, that was nice,” I said stiffly.

  “I know, right?” He cast an adoring glance in Cayden’s direction. Couldn’t really blame him. Good-looking and generous was a heady combo—and the cashier obviously hadn’t met the self-centered jerk I’d encountered twice before.

  After a quick internal debate, I decided it would be less awkward to go say hello than to stand and wait for my order, knowing that Cayden was watching me. I walked over and set my portfolio on the table across from him.

  “Hey there,” I said. My tone had gone from stiff to paralyzed.

  “Miss Striga.” He stood up and held out a hand, very formal. I was pleasantly surprised that he didn’t try using an overly macho Kung-Fu grip to impress me with his strength.

  “How was traffic?”

  Really? Small talk?

  I shrugged. “Not bad. But then you probably had the same drive that I did, since you live up the road.”

  “I had a meeting in Santa Monica earlier this morning,” he said. “The kind of traffic made for audio books. The drive back on PCH, on the other hand, was made for fast cars with good traction.”

  “And speeding tickets.”

  “Haven’t gotten one yet,” he said, somehow managing to sound matter-of-fact instead of smug.

  The barista called my name. When I came back with my latte and bagel, I took a seat across from him. “Thanks for picking up the tab,” I said, not wanting to be ungrateful. Still, I couldn’t help adding, “Appreciated, but totally unnecessary.”

  “Hey, it’s the thing to do.” Cayden shrugged and flashed me that grin again, the one that combined dark humor with the promise of trouble. Dangerously attractive.

  Nope, no more bad boys.

  I decided to get down to business. “So, tell me about the job.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “What? No more small talk?”

  “We already covered traffic,” I said, smiling sweetly at him over my latte. “Besides, I thought we agreed neither of us likes to waste time.”

  “Fair enough. I see you brought your portfolio. Unnecessary, but appreciated.” He threw my own words back at me, hoisting me on my own snippy petard without breaking a sweat.

  Touché.

  “Let’s see it.” He held out a hand.

  “I thought it was unnecessary.”

  “Wouldn’t want you to feel like you wasted the effort.” His hand remained outstretched.

  I studied him for a moment. “You know,” I finally said, “I get the impression you think you know me a lot better than you do.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. I’ve seen some of your work. And you know how close-knit the stunt community is. People talk.”

  That they do.

  I handed him my portfolio case without another word. He unzipped it, putting it down in front of him after carefully moving his coffee and pastry out of the way—a fact I appreciated.

  Double dammit. I didn’t want to like anything about this man.

  As he flipped through the various photographs of me in action, I tore off a piece of overly toasted bagel, smeared some cream cheese on it with a wobbly plastic knife, and took a bite, following it up with more latte. I found myself strangely comfortable, a stark contrast to the level of irritation and dislike I’d felt during our encounter at Ocean’s End.

  When he finally finished perusing my portfolio, he zipped it shut and handed it back to me with a satisfied nod. “It appears you’re everything I heard you were. You’ve done some acting as well, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Unfortunately, the film didn’t get finished.” I figured he knew what film I was referring to if he knew so damned much about me.

  “I saw some footage.” An irritating little half-smile played on his mouth.

  I wanted to ask him how he’d seen the footage, where it was, how I could get some of it for my demo reel. Even Faustina hadn’t been able to manage that. Instead I took a deep breath and waited for him to follow up on that statement.

  Contrary bastard that he was, Cayden cocked his head to one side and said, “You were trained by Sean Katz.”

  Fine. I nodded. “Since I was seven.”

  “I can assume you’re comfortable working with supernaturals.”

  “Absolutely,” I assured him. “Some of my best friends are supes.” I wasn’t even being facetious.

  “Good. Our cast and crew is a mixed bag, but most of them are supes, and those that aren’t don’t have a problem with it.”

  “What about you?” The words popped unbidden out of my mouth before I could stop them. My face flushed red with embarrassment at the faux-pas.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t work on Wonder Woman,” Cayden said blandly, changing the subject as if my last question never happened. “I would’ve thought you’d be a natural for all the sword-fighting and wirework in that.”

  “I took a bad fall,” I answered, both grateful and annoyed at the easy out Cayden had offered me. “It put me out of commission for a good six months. I like to think I would’ve made the cut for that movie, but I was in physical therapy learning how to walk again.” The back of my neck itched. I absent-mindedly scratched it, a fingernail snagging on my necklace chain.

  “That’s right. I remember reading about that when it happened.” His eyes were on me, appraising me. “Give me an honest answer here. Do you think you’re back up to speed?”

  I chose my words carefully. “Yes. The only reservations I have right now are with high falls or wirework, depending on what kind of heights we’re talking. Still working on getting back into the swing of things.”

  He nodded, and seemed to be deep in thought. I didn’t regret being honest. I’d either get the job or I wouldn’t. What surprised me is how much I suddenly hoped I would.

  “There are a couple of falls,” he finally said, “two to three stories, tops. Do you think you can handle that?”

  “We’re talking thirty to forty feet?”

  “If that.”

  My turn to mull things over. I could now easily take falls off the tower at the Ranch from forty feet with no problem, not even counting the sixty-footer I’d taken over the weekend. I’d since repeated it, albeit without the pissed-off adrenaline that Jada had supplied. The backs of my legs had crawled and things had churned in my stomach, but I’d been able to let go and do the f
all without clutching onto the tower like a kid afraid to step off a high dive for the first time.

  I took a deep breath. “Yeah, I can handle that.” Wonder of wonders, I wasn’t bullshitting either.

  He nodded as if I’d answered a very important question. “So. The job. We’re filming in New Orleans. It’s a fast-paced action period piece about voodoo.”

  Seriously?

  “A fast-paced action period piece about voodoo?” I repeated. I couldn’t help it.

  “If Snyder can turn Batman versus Superman into a film with the pace of an unambitious glacier, and moodier than an emo teenager…” He shrugged. “Well, then we can make Marie Laveau an action hero.”

  “Is her mother’s name Martha?”

  Cayden laughed, showing his teeth. He had a lot, all of them very white. Then he reached down by his chair, pulled out a script, and slapped it down on the table in front of me. The title did indeed read Voodoo Wars. I did not snort or roll my eyes, both of which could be construed as rude and inappropriate—although totally justified—responses, especially since the “written by” was followed by two names, one of them Cayden’s, the other someone named Devon Manus—a line of text below informing me it was the property of Berserker Productions. Instead I put on my best “I am very serious about this job” face and asked, “Not to be rude, but since when does a screenwriter get a say in hiring the crew?” I smeared more cream cheese on my Everything-but-fresh bagel.

  “Partly because I’m also the stunt coordinator and second unit director,” he replied. “I’m also one of the executive producers.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah, indeed,” he agreed. “Director’s a buddy of mine. We co-wrote the script. We’ve been looking to work together on a project for a few years and…”

  Cayden’s voice faded into the background. The sky seemed to darken as if a sudden storm full of ominous clouds had moved in from the ocean. The sky was cloudless, though. Just… gloomy, like someone slipped a filter over the sun. A reddish tint glazed the horizon and things suddenly grew very quiet. The air felt uncomfortably still, like riding in a car with the vents closed on a hot day. The back of my neck itched even more, like someone had slapped a patch of poison ivy there.

  Shit.

  This had happened to me twice before—once at the Ranch and once on the street in Venice Beach. Both times I’d had the sense of time almost standing still—and of being in mortal danger. This was no different. White-knuckled, I clutched the flimsy plastic knife.

  “Am I boring you?” I looked up to find Cayden staring at me, one eyebrow raised.

  I shook my head, my skin buzzing with electricity, the amulet around my neck suddenly tingling against my skin. “Something—”

  Someone screamed.

  I twisted around in my chair just as a teenage boy in board shorts stumbled through the front doors, gasping for breath. Skin the deep tan of a dedicated surfer. Bare arms, legs and torso oozing blood from multiple lacerations, as if he’d lost an argument with a rose bush, the terrified expression on his face completely at odds with the beautiful sunny day. A look like this one belonged in the shadows.

  He swayed back and forth before collapsing to his knees. I leaped to my feet, knocking the chair over backwards in my hurry to reach him. It spoke unflattering volumes about the clientele in Starbucks that most of the people backed away, as if they were afraid of getting blood on their clothes. Only one other person joined me as I ran over to the injured boy.

  Cayden.

  Mentally adding a tick to the “pros” column of taking a job on Voodoo Wars—stunt coordinator not afraid of blood—I knelt by the kid’s side, gingerly putting an arm around his shoulders to prevent him from falling face forward onto the floor. Slowly I eased him back against the wall into a half-sitting/half-lying position.

  “Someone call 9-1-1,” I said harshly.

  A rail-thin blonde in expensive designer yoga-wear took out her phone. “What’s the number?” she asked in a no-nonsense tone.

  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. She wasn’t.

  “9-1-1,” I snapped, then turned back to the kid. “Can you talk?”

  He coughed in reply and a thin spray of blood misted out. Not good.

  Cayden grabbed a bottle of water from the open cooler against the wall, twisted off the lid, and handed it to me. I held it up to the boy’s mouth. “Here,” I said gently.

  He took a sip, and then another, stark terror in his pale-blue eyes.

  “It’s coming,” he said, coughing again. Drops of blood clung to his lower lip.

  “What’s coming?”

  Even as I asked the question, the back of my neck started itching again, practically buzzing.

  “We were surfing,” the kid replied weakly, “me and Robin. There was a ton of seaweed today, all over the fucking place.” He drank more water, then continued. “Robin wiped out, went straight into a kelp bed. At first I thought she was tangled. She started yelling for help. And then I saw the kelp move, wrap around her arms and her head, and pull her down. I saw blood… I thought maybe it was a shark, y’know? I tried to ride in, get help. But… it followed me. Seaweed on the skeg…”

  What the hell did that mean?

  “Oh God…” He struggled to sit up, rolling his eyes like a panicked horse. “I saw it coming out of the water!”

  Cayden crouched down next to me, putting a hand on the kid’s shoulder to keep him in place. The contact seemed to calm him.

  “What was it?” Cayden asked.

  The kid shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Fresh screams from outside the Starbucks told me that we’d know soon enough.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I ran to the front door. People stood in the parking lot, shouting and pointing toward the Pacific Coast Highway in front of the marketplace. Two cars heading north slammed on their brakes to avoid hitting a nasty pile-up on the highway directly in front of the main entrance. At least a half-dozen vehicles were involved, locked together as steam hissed out from under crumpled hoods.

  Closest to the marketplace, the front bumper of a red Prius was buried into the driver’s side of a silver RAV4. The prognosis looked bad for both drivers. They must have both braked to avoid an obstacle in the road and the RAV4 had spun sideways, the Prius barreling into it. Something greenish-brown clung to the undercarriage of the RAV4, maybe a tumbleweed or something.

  Then I noticed the stuff moving, writhing up and around the dented metal of the cars.

  The passenger door of a Mercedes opened and a woman tumbled out onto the asphalt, falling heavily to her knees. Almost immediately, tendrils of the greenish-brown mass shot out and wrapped around her thighs and torso. It looked like a giant pile of seaweed, all strands and ribbons and pods. She screamed, trying to tear it off, but even as she peeled the thick slimy ribbons away from her waist, another one slapped down next to it. Blood seeped out from her skin between large flat, furry fronds, only to vanish. Gobbets of flesh dropped on the road as the woman seemed to shrink before my eyes.

  My amulet burned with cold fire against my skin.

  Well, hell.

  It seemed my wait to meet another demonic relative might be over.

  More screams emanated from the other cars involved in the smashup as the thing sent exploratory strands into the interiors. I could see the people trapped inside, trying to open crumpled doors, hammering on automatic windows that would not open. In the blink of an eye, the people were obscured by a seething mass of greenish brown, their screams muted but still audible.

  Even as I took a step forward, strong fingers wrapped around my elbow and jerked me back. Cayden again. Before I could snap at him, he tapped my right hand and said, “If you’re going to fight it, you need a weapon. A better one than that.”

  I still clutched the knife from Starbucks, cream cheese smeared on the black plastic. Amulet or not, I just couldn’t see myself tackling vicious, carnivorous ambulatory seaweed with a plastic utensil.

&n
bsp; “Car,” I said.

  Cayden and I had the same idea pretty much simultaneously. He took off at a lope to a silver Porsche 911 Turbo even as I dashed to my Saturn, flung open the driver’s side door, and popped the trunk release. Rooting around, I found a heavy-duty L-type lug wrench and pulled it, not bothering to shut the trunk before taking off at a run for the highway.

  I skidded to a halt, however, as I realized the screams in the cars had stopped. My heart sank because it was too late to help any of those people. Even as I watched, the mass of tendrils and ribbons pulled away from the cars, coalescing into something that looked like the lovechild of a pile of seaweed and a Chinese dragon—slender and sinuous, covered with glistening scales. The undulating tendrils grew out of long stalks, semi-translucent pods hanging off them like pieces of fruit. Some of the pods were small, and others the size of golf balls. Red liquid sloshed around inside, made darker by the translucent exterior. It had brought pieces of its meal with it—some recognizable as body parts, and others unidentifiable lumps of bloody meat. Several frond-like appendages were wrapped around a shapely female calf, which ended in ragged flesh and bone at the knee.

  The pods near the chunks of flesh expanded like balloons on a helium machine. Elsewhere pods deflated, the blood inside disappearing as if sucked by a straw into the main body of the creature. The stalks near that pod seemed to rejuvenate, growing thicker and darker as they fed on the blood.

  Was this one of my ancestral relatives coming to call, or was it something entirely different? Oh, this is just fucked up.

  The seaweed dragon started toward us, slithering and undulating its way across the Pacific Coast Highway, leaving bits of its victims strewn in its wake. People at the edge of the lot stared as it drew closer, transfixed by the sight as it neared the curb. I couldn’t entirely blame them—this was one crazy-ass monster—but they needed to get the hell away from ground zero.

  Why the hell aren’t they running?

  “Move closer,” a pushy male voice insisted.

  Oh, no fucking way, I thought.

  “No fucking way, Ron,” another man said. “It’s—”

  “Just do it,” Ron snapped. “Don’t be such a pussy, Kyle.”