Blood Rock Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Praise for Book One, Frost Moon

  Blood Rock

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Cinnamon and Frost

  Boiling Blood

  Isolation Protocol

  Sticky and Sweet

  Undying Lover

  Educational Experience

  Entrance Exam

  Fur and Rage

  Jasmine and Steel

  Calaphase

  A Thankless Job

  This Will Be a Bit Tricky

  Sweet and Sticky

  Magical Fallout

  Nuclear Wizardry

  Vampire for Dinner

  The Tagger’s Revenge

  Attack on the Werehouse

  Not In My Backyard

  A Frosty Family Dinner

  Vacationing in Coventry

  Cave Magic

  Keif and Drive

  DEE-FAX

  Punching Bag

  A Friend Helps You Move

  Land of the Skindancers

  A Taste for Vampires

  A Good First Impression

  Heading For Trouble

  The Vampire’s Lair

  Unavoidable Consequences

  Column of Hate

  Trick of Perspective

  Lockup

  A Likely Story

  An Unusual Stratagem

  A Problem Student

  Remedial Class

  This One Thing I Could Do

  Speak of the Devils

  Candlesticks Afire

  No Safe Haven

  Quantum Magic

  The Detective from Space

  Beard the Lion

  Deal with the Devil

  A Drop of Blood and a Quarter

  A Torrent of Red and Gold

  No Easy Answers

  The Hunt is On

  Playing Hooky

  Coffins Aflame

  Power, Fire and Ice

  A Life for a Life

  Return of the Vampire Queen

  Too Spooky to Pick Up a Phone

  Into the Maw of Madness

  The Truth Will Set You Free

  Tale of the Tagger

  Mano a Mano, Face to Face

  Vines of Fire

  Postmortem

  Storming the Fortress

  The Center Cannot Hold

  Dakota Rising

  The Hell Outta Dodge

  The Gift That Keeps On Giving

  Payoff

  Acknowledgements

  About Anthony Francis

  Blurb

  Dakota Frost is back,

  and new danger awaits her.

  Graffiti on a cemetery wall comes to life and kills one of the best-liked vampires in Atlanta’s Edgeworld while his friend, Dakota, watches helplessly. Dark and deadly magick is at work on the city’s walls, challenging even the power of Dakota’s extraordinary tattoos. With her adopted were-daughter, Cinnamon, by her side, Dakota—the Southeast’s most famous magickal tattoo artist and skindancer—must once again track down a supernatural killer who preys on his own kind.

  Book Two of the award-winning Skindancer series.

  Praise for Book One, Frost Moon

  Winner of The EPIC Award, Best Fantasy 2011

  “Frost Moon is a choice and fascinating pick that shouldn’t be overlooked for fantasy readers.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Dakota’s take no prisoners investigation provides readers with the vivid vision of Anthony Francis’ Atlanta Underground inside an exhilarating thriller.”

  —Harriet Klausner – Amazon.com top reviewer

  “Let me warn readers that they are going to be blown away. Frost Moon is one of a kind and pure genius. I devoured this book in one night…Definitely worth the loss of sleep because there was no way I was going to stop reading Frost Moon once I started.”

  —Book Lovers Inc.

  “A dark and gritty Urban Fantasy with rich characters, great hair-pin turns … and enough tension and danger to keep you on the edge of your seat madly flipping pages to find what happens.”

  —Sidhe Vicious Reviews

  “You got me Anthony Francis, you got me! Frost Moon is an exciting Urban Fantasy that starts off strong and keeps up the steam throughout. Anthony Francis has created an interesting take on the usual paranormal world incorporating magic and mysticism into a dangerous world where both humans and paranormals live side by side.”

  —Fiction Vixen

  “I am hard-pressed to adequately describe the latest book to be shifted in my direction for review. Thank you to the powers-that-be for the opportunity to be one of the first readers captivated by Dakota Frost and her magical tats. Addictive, sassy, sexy, funny, intense, brilliant…any and all of these adjectives describe not only the book itself but Anthony Francis’ tall, bi-sexual, tattoo- specialist heroine…Mr. Francis has delivered not only a sexy and spectacular heroine but given depth, emotion and memorable personalities to the many faces found in the supporting cast that give life to this paranormal tale.”

  —Bitten By Books

  Blood Rock

  by

  Anthony Francis

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Print ISBN 978-1-61194-013-8

  Epub ISBN 978-1-61194-036-7

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2011 by Anthony Francis

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits:

  Butterfly (manipulated) © Realrocking | Dreamstime.com

  Girl (manipulated) © Peter Kim | Dreamstime.com

  Thorn background (manipulated) © Unholyvault | Dreamstime.com

  Cinnamon Frontispiece and Butterfly / Rosevine © Anthony Francis

  :Mrb:01:

  Dedication

  To the Dragonwriters, who restarted my writing

  To the Write to the End group, who keep me writing

  To my beta readers and editors, who keep my writing honest

  Cinnamon and Frost

  “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I cursed, slamming the school doors open and stomping out into the cold January Atlanta air. Once outside, facing bare trees in a bleak parking lot under a graymetal sky, I regretted my words—because the example I was setting was the problem.

  I stopped, swung back, and reached one lanky arm out to stop the door from closing. Moments later, my daughter stepped out of the darkness, eyes blinking, whiskers twitching, holding her tiger’s tail in her hands before her like a portable lifeline.

  The two of us looked as different as can be: me, a six-foot two woman in a long leather vestcoat, wearing my hair in a purple-and-black deathhawk that lengthens into feathers of hair curling around my neck, and her, a five-foot-nothing teenager in a pleated school skirt, taming her wild orange hair with a blue granola-girl headscarf that poorly hid her c
atlike ears.

  “It’s OK,” I lied gently, putting my hand on Cinnamon’s shoulder; though we both knew it was very not OK. “We’ll find a school that will take you.”

  She hissed. That school had been the top of her list—until Cinnamon cussed the principal out in the middle of the interview. And this was after she’d promised to be on her best behavior. I was starting to worry something was wrong with her, and not just her being a weretiger.

  Not that there’s anything wrong with being a weretiger; if anything, lycanthropy was the least of my worries taking an abused, illiterate streetcat into my home. This adoption was turning out to be a lot more than I bargained for—and we were little over a month into it.

  I had learned, however, to put my foot down. “Cinnamon. What you said—”

  “I’m sor—” she began, then snapped her head aside violently in a kind of a sneeze, pulling at the collar around her neck. “Who cares? School stinks. They all stinks.”

  I felt my collar in sympathy: I didn’t like mine either. OK, so I lied again: we didn’t look as different as can be. First, we both had silver collars around our necks, a kind of fangs-off sign provided by the Vampire Queen of Little Five Points; and second, we were both tattooed.

  Cinnamon’s tiger stripes were beautiful, eye-catching … and forced upon her by her last guardian. She’d hide them if she could, but they come all the way up to her cheeks and down to the backs of her palms, and our attempts at covering them with makeup were a disaster.

  My elaborate vines are even more eye-catching, a tribal rainbow beginning at my temples and cascading over my whole body in braids of flowers and jewels and butterflies. Today I was in a turtleneck, but normally I make no effort to hide them. I want people to see them move.

  Unless you know what to look for, it’s subtle: out of the corner of your eye, a leaf flutters, a butterfly flaps, a gem sparkles—it’s like magic. And that sparks the conversation: Actually, they are magic, all inked here in Atlanta by yours truly—

  “Dakota Frost,” I said, as my phone picked up, “Best magical tattooist in the Southeast.”

  “Dakota.” The voice was deep, male and familiar.

  “Hey, Uncle Andy,” I said. When I had been a kid, Sergeant Andre Rand had been my father’s partner on the Stratton police force—so close to the family I’d called him “Uncle Andy” though he was nothing of the sort. Now that I was an adult, Detective Andre Rand was my guardian angel in the Atlanta Police Department. “And before you ask, I did call Dad—”

  “This isn’t about that,” Rand interrupted. “It’s—look, where are you now?”

  “Out school shopping with Cinnamon.”

  “Not what you’re doing,” Rand snapped. “Where, I mean geographically—”

  “Downtown,” I said, now worried. Rand was normally polite and uber-smooth, but now he was curt and very stressed—and that scared the hell out of me.

  “What’s goin on?” Cinnamon said suddenly, staring at me—never underestimate a werekin’s hearing. “Who died?”

  Immediately when she said it, I felt she was right. Something catches in a person’s voice when they report a death. Pay attention, in those few awful times in your life when someone gets the call: you can tell from the grief in their voice, from the crumpling of their faces.

  “Andy,” I said. “What’s wrong? Is someone hurt?”

  “How quickly can you get over to Oakland Cemetery?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Whatever you do, hurry,” he said. “Just—hurry.”

  We hopped into the blue bomb and headed to the Cemetery. Actually, the ‘bomb’ was a very nice new Prius I’d picked up last year after besting the magician Christopher Valentine in a tattooing contest. His Foundation had yet to pay up a dime, so I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep it—but it sure beat riding Cinnamon around on the back seat of my Vespa scooter.

  Oakland Cemetery was a time capsule. All around us were gentrified warehouses and decaying apartments, but the Cemetery was protected from downtown’s churn by low brick ramparts lining Memorial and Boulevard. Within those long red lines stood sparse trees, from which the winter chill had long since stripped the leaves, leaving branches stretched to the cloudy sky like the claws of dying things pleading to Heaven.

  When we hooked around to the entrance, we found an officer guarding the driveway. As we pulled up to the striped sawhorse they’d thrown up to block the drive, I steeled myself for a runaround. My dad was on the force, Rand was a friend, heck, I was even sort of dating a Fed—but somehow being six-foot-two with tattoos-and-deathhawk just never mixed well with cops.

  But the officer’s eyes lit up when he saw us. He didn’t even check for ID—he just pulled the sawhorse out of the way and waved us forward. This was bad—they’d closed off the whole cemetery, and it was huge. I rolled down my window and asked, “Which way—”

  “You’re Frost, right? Straight back,” he said, eyes wild. “Straight back! And hurry!”

  “This is bad,” Cinnamon said, head craning back to look at the officer. “Rand’s sweet on ya, but we never gets special treatments from the piggies.”

  “Don’t call them piggies,” I said, speeding down the tiny road.

  “Why?” she asked, flicking an ear at me. “You knows they can’t hear us.”

  “Really? So you knows that none of them are weres?” I asked, miming her broken diction. “You knows for sures?”

  Her face fell. “No, I don’t.”

  We bumped down a worn asphalt road through a canyon of winterbare trees, elaborate Victorian markers, and rows upon rows of Confederate graves. The road sank down, the graves grew smaller, more sad, and we rolled to a halt in a forest of headstones at the bottom of the hill between the Jewish section and Potter’s field.

  What seemed like a thousand flashing lights waited for us: police cars, an ambulance, even a fire truck, surrounding a crowd of uniforms, paramedics and firemen gathered at the end of the road in front of the low brick wall that ringed the cemetery. Striding out of them was a well-dressed black man, sharp as a model and sexy as a movie star: Detective Andre Rand.

  I opened the door, my boots crunched on gravel, and my vestcoat swished as I stepped out of the car, fhwapping behind me in the wind as I slammed the door shut. The officers stared. Their eyes narrowed. My normal getup was conspicuously out of place in this land of grey tombs and black uniforms. I’d been more comfortable talking to the buttoned-down principal of the school we’d just visited; now I just wanted to go and change.

  “Hi, Rand,” I said, forced cheerful, putting my hand on Cinnamon’s shoulder as she materialized beside me. “What you gots—ahem. What do you have for me?”

  At my grammatical slip Rand glanced down at Cinnamon briefly, trying to smile. His neck was covered with in a stylish turtleneck, not unlike mine, but the rest of him was in one of his GQ suits that never seemed to get dirty no matter what he’d gone through. Today, however … his suit was torn. There was blood on the back of his hand. And not even Cinnamon could spark a smile in him. Rand was off his game. Rand was never off his game.

  He glanced up, frowning. “Dakota, thanks for rushing. We really need you but … this is bad. Really bad. Cinnamon can wait in—”

  “I can takes whatever you gots,” Cinnamon said indignantly.

  “And I’d rather not let her out of my sight,” I said quietly.

  Rand’s eyes tightened. He knew why I never let her out of my sight: just before I took her in, a serial killer had kidnapped her to get to me. It wasn’t that I never let her out of my sight … … but whenever things got sketchy, I’d pick bringing her over leaving her every time.

  “I understand, Dakota,” he said, turning back to the knot of first responders. “Let me show you what we’re dealing with.”

  “Sure thing,” I muttered. “No one thinks to ask me whether I can take it.”

  Rand just kept walking. “McGough, this is Dakota Frost.”

  “You didn’t
mention she was a civvie,” said a small, wiry, wizardly man in a Columbo trench. Like Rand, his coat was torn, his hands bloodied, but where Rand was thrown off his game, McGough’s movements were still crisp, his eyes sharp. A few nicks and cuts? Bah. Didn’t even slow him down. “Bad idea, having a civilian on a crime scene—”

  “She was practically raised on the force,” Rand said, “and I think she can help.”

  “Well let’s hope somebody can, we’re outta options,” McGough said, sizing me up. “So you’re Rand’s fabled Edgeworld expert. Jeez, you’re tall.”

  My mouth quirked up. ‘Edgeworld’ was slang for the magical counterculture. Unlike most practitioners throughout history, who’d kept magic secret, or most normal people today, who tried to pretend it wasn’t there, Edgeworlders practiced magic openly—something which did not endear us to either group.

  “What gave me away?” I said. “And it’s Edgeworlder, not ‘Edgeworld expert’—”

  “Ah, she knows the lingo. Good, but it’s still a bad idea,” McGough said, frowning. He glanced down at Cinnamon, and his frown deepened. “And on the note of bad ideas, you really want to bring a minor along?” Rand and I just looked at him, and Cinnamon raised a clawed hand and mimed a swat. “Fine, fine,” he said. “When the Department of Family and Child Services comes calling, don’t come crying to me.” He waded back into the officers.

  “All right, boys and girls,” McGough said, voice crackling with authority, making the officers jump. He was barely taller than Cinnamon, but his presence dominated the scene. “Move aside and let’s see if Rand’s pet witch can figure out how to handle this.”

  Before I could even try to correct the ‘pet witch’ crack, the officers—all nervous, most worried, many scratched up like they’d been in a fight with a cat—parted so I could see the outer wall. My breath caught, and it took me a moment to realize what I was seeing.

  The brick wall was sprayed with graffiti, a huge flock of exaggerated letters exploding out of a coiling nest of elaborately thorned vines. The graffiti “tag” was amazing work. Even I had to admire the roses woven into the vines—they’re a specialty of mine—but the artwork was just a backdrop. Dead in the center of the tag, a person was crucified in a web of twisted and rusted barbed wire, half-standing, half-sprawling in a splash of his own blood.