Blood Rock Read online

  “Congratulations, Tully,” I said. “You get to live to run another day.”

  “Thank you thank you thank you,” Tully said, trying to give me a hug, then grimacing as the gesture squeezed a new river of blood from his chest. “Aaah—I’m so sorry—”

  “Thank you, Dakota,” a voice said, and I looked up to see Calaphase staring down at me. The vamps and werekin were all standing over us, all looking down gratefully—except Gettyson, who just stood there, jaw clenched, before turning on his heel and stalking off.

  Tully kept sobbing. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I had no idea this would happen.”

  “There’s no way you could have known,” I said.

  “I means, it was just magical graffiti—”

  “Wait,” I said. “You already knew it was magical?”

  “You can’t miss it,” Calaphase said quietly. “These tags, they’re always moving—”

  “Wait wait,” I said, alarmed. “They? This has happened before?”

  “An attack, no, but the tags—yes,” Calaphase said, even more quietly. “We’ve seen tags like this for weeks, nothing this elaborate, usually just little ones, though they seem like they get bigger over time—or else the prick keeps coming back to flesh them out. Revy said he saw a huge one yesterday, though he never got to show me where. For all I know, this was it—”

  “No,” I said. “This thing loves vamps. If he’d gotten close to it, it would have caught him—and then how would he have ended up in the cemetery?” I asked. Then I recalled the odd sensation I’d felt in the graffiti’s grip … like it was pulling me inside. The conclusion sounded outlandish, but was just too damn obvious to ignore. “Unless … that’s where this one … led?”

  But before I could go any further, Tully began convulsing in my arms.

  “I gots—I gots to change,” he said, holding his bloody hands up, staring at them, at the gash in his chest. The graffiti had dug down to the bone, exposing white flashes of ribs, and I felt my stomach churn. “I can’t heal like this.”

  “Come on, cub,” Fischer said, squatting down beside us, taking Tully from my arms and picking him up. “I’ll carry you out to the clearing, to the light of the moon.”

  I got to my feet, groaning, covered in grime, dirt, blood and basil. More and more weres and vamps were gathering; the ones who had watched stood in awe, but the newcomers stared at me with cold, hungry eyes. Wonderful—I was covered in Tully-flavored barbecue sauce. Fortunately the curly-headed vamp guard was on crowd control, keeping both the weres and the vamps away from the tag.

  “She’s Lady Saffron’s troubleshooter,” he said to a new arrival, following with a glowing account of my recent duel with the graffiti. I half smiled. I wasn’t Saffron’s ‘troubleshooter,’ and it hadn’t been that easy. I turned to correct him—and got a bucket of water in the face.

  “Wash up, wash up,” Gettyson said, splashing the rest of me with cold, stinging liquid, then attacking me with a towel. “You gots to get Tully’s blood off you, get it off you.”

  I took the towel and began scrubbing gratefully. The fluid stank of ammonia and disinfectant and other things besides, and felt harsh against my hands. My eyes were watering from the initial splash, and my lips were actually tingling … surely he hadn’t just splashed wolfsbane extract in my face! But then, a thin purple haze began lifting off my top, chest and shorts—not smoke, but mana, from Tully’s moon-charged werekin blood—and the grateful magician in me won out over the worried chemist.

  Gettyson handed me a dry towel for my face and looked me over roughly, checking my chest, my hands, under my arms. He daubed a more concentrated form of the stinging substance on a cloth and began wiping scrapes on my legs, arms, finally my forehead.

  “That was from earlier,” I said.

  “But still,” he said, frowning, wiping it clean. “You feels like you’re cut anywhere?”

  “No, no,” I said, feeling myself up and down. “I’m good.”

  Gettyson seized my hand and inspected the knuckle. “That’s not from earlier,” he said, holding my hand firmly in the cloth and pouring the stinging fluid straight on the wound. “Keep watch on this. I don’t wants you turning wolf unless you wants to.”

  “Ow. Thanks,” I said, taking the bottle and cloth gratefully. He nodded, barely looking at me, his odd, slit-pupiled eyes angry and tight; not at me, but at a memory. I had a feeling he hadn’t ‘turned horse’ because he wanted to.

  A sudden howl rent the air, and Gettyson looked off. “Tully’s changed,” he said. “If he has, the other young ones will too. It’s like a trigger. You gets yourself out of here.”

  “We don’t have time for all this werekin bullshit,” I said. “A tag like that killed Revenance. This one nearly killed Tully, started to drag us both inside. I think the different graffiti is connected somehow. I need to see the others—”

  “In daylight,” Gettyson said. “After the full moon. The last thing we needs is you here covered with the scent of blood right when we gots a crowd of wolves changing.”

  And then a crackling growl rippled across the pavement. I looked up to see a monstrous bear lumbering past, larger than a horse, eyeing me sideways as he planted himself at the edge of the darkness: the Bear King, leader of the werehouse, in full animal form. A young, slender wolf came up and fawned before him, but the Bear King batted at it. The wolf whined, rolling on its back, exposing its white chest marred with a ragged stripe of bloody fur; and then it looked at me with Tully’s eyes. He was safe. The werehouse was a rough place, but they cared for the least of their own. And that meant, somewhere behind me in the werehouse, Cinnamon was safe too—at least while she struggled through her change.

  But a thousand glowing eyes still stared at me hungrily from the darkness.

  “On behalf of the werehouse, thank you,” the Bear King rumbled. “Now leave us.”

  Sweet and Sticky

  Less than a quarter hour later, but seemingly a million miles away, Calaphase scowled, eyes closed, brow furrowing in pain as he took the straw of the Frappuccino from his lips. I winced in sympathy. “Is even liquid food too hard on you?”

  “Yes—no,” he said, kneading his brow. “Drank too fast—brain freeze.”

  I laughed.

  The Starbucks in Vinings was in a quaint little converted house tucked into a cluster of similar shops off of Paces Ferry Road. Vinings was a full mile inside Atlanta’s northeast Perimeter, but the steep hills and dense forest made it feel like a cozy mountain outpost. The café’s outdoor patio was cradled in clusters of trees and bushes, and in that cradle we lounged beneath the warm light of a heating lamp—and while the vampire was trying his best to suck down the moral equivalent of a coffee Frostee in the beginning of January, I was drinking a hot chai latte and feeling it down to my toes, thank you very much.

  “Why did we come all the way up here?” I asked, grinning as he put the delicious sludge down. “There’s a Starbucks up South Atlanta Road, not a mile from the werehouse.”

  “Do you know where all the Starbucksen are in Atlanta?”

  “Not all of them,” I replied. “And you ducked my question. Why here?”

  “One,” Calaphase ticked off with his finger, “the cats here know me and blend the way I like, rather than just handing me a cup of crushed ice with coffee poured over it. And two … Vinings is inside the Perimeter. Safer for you.”

  “I wondered why you ran us down all those back roads,” I said. To mundanes, the Perimeter was Interstate 285, twin ribbons of asphalt that ringed Atlanta like a black eye. To Edgeworlders, it was a mammoth magic circle, protecting the residents within from the full chaos of the magical Edgeworld. Fae battles and demon possessions didn’t happen here.

  At least, they didn’t happen … much. The vampires saw to that. I tugged at my steel collar. It was the sign of Saffron’s protection, but it didn’t mean too much OTP—”Outside the Perimeter”—where the delicate truce established by civilized vampires broke down.<
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  Most humans never noticed, of course, but an Edgeworlder traveling outside the safe zones had to watch her back. There were rules, as old and ancient as those governing trolls under a bridge. First and foremost, you didn’t expose Edgeworlders without their permission.

  That, of course, hadn’t flown with Rand when I’d called in to report this new graffiti attack. He blew up at me when I refused to divulge our location, cussed me out, in language more suited to me than him. And then he hung up, on me! And rather than support me …

  “You can’t tell Rand where the werehouse is,” Calaphase said, with quiet authority. Calaphase and I had met most often at weekly meetings at Manuel’s Tavern, with Saffron and our mutual friend Jinx. My memory from Manuel’s was just gleaming blue eyes flashing across the table, but close up his hair was wiry gold, his skin like polished ivory. “You know the rules.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, still avoiding his eyes. “I won’t out an Edgeworlder. But that’s going to make things difficult. Someone’s got to analyze the crime scene, take pictures of the tag. Secrecy will make it harder to find the bastards that killed Revenance—”

  “Bastards?” Calaphase asked. “Plural?”

  “The tag had the same motifs as the one that killed Revenance,” I said, “but not the same style. They were inked by two different people. This isn’t one tagger. It’s a crew.”

  Calaphase stared off into the distance, thinking. “This is bad,” he said. “Revenance dead. Two more vamps missing, plus Josephine. And now this attack. Look, talk to your pet cop—”

  “Andre Rand is not a pet,” I said. “He’s like an uncle. I can’t believe he hung up on me.”

  “I can’t either, Dakota, but call him back,” Calaphase said, again with quiet authority. “We’ve got to investigate this, but we can’t lead cops to the werehouse. Rand will have to work through you. Get him on board and ask him what evidence you need to collect.”

  “I’m not a crime scene investigator, Cally—”

  “Then learn what you need to do,” Calaphase repeated. “Get a copy of Criminology for Dummies if you have to. When you come for Cinnamon on Thursday, you can take pictures—”

  “Wait, what about Thursday,” I said. “I’m coming back tomorrow.”

  “No, Dakota,” Calaphase said, staring off into the distance with the same quiet finality. I glared at him, about to speak, but he abruptly looked over, his blue clear eyes meeting mine. I quickly looked away at the table, and he sighed. “I’m not going to put the whammy on you. You can look at me. Please. Look at my face, if not my eyes.”

  Reluctantly I looked up, not quite directly meeting his gaze. It was a pity that he was a vampire, that his eyes could project his aura and work on my will. Otherwise I would have enjoyed gazing into them, two gems of blue sky embedded in a statue of dark cruelty.

  “The werehouse is a private haven for a private affliction,” he said gravely. “No police, no outsiders—and especially no fresh meat on the full moon.” His eyes sparkled. “Unless you’re planning on providing a one-time catering service for Wednesday night’s hunt.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “When you put it that way—what time on Thursday?”

  “Right at six—the moon will just be coming up, but the sun will just have gone down, so I can protect you,” Calaphase said, taking a sip of his Frappuccino. He got the same pained expression, and this time I was certain it wasn’t a brain freeze.

  “What gave you the idea to eat human food?”

  “Not a what,” Calaphase said, eyes still closed, now just as clearly savoring the taste. “A who. You, Dakota.” His eyes opened, catching the shock in my glance before I looked away, and he laughed. “This is the Saffron diet. You told her to try human food.”

  “I did?” I asked … and then I remembered. “I did. When she was thinking about becoming a vampire, she told me she’d have to give up human food—”

  “And you said, ‘Why? Aren’t you going to even fucking try it?’” Calaphase responded, miming my diction uncannily. “And so she did. Every vampire tries eating rare steak and pukes it up. Saffron analyzed vampire digestion, started off with sugar water, and built up from there.”

  “So … if it’s so bad, why torture yourself? Are you going vegetarian—”

  “Hell, no,” Calaphase said. “I love the taste of blood. But … Saffron’s a daywalker, Dakota. She can stand in the sun and not catch fire. And she thinks a diet of human food—ahem, a diet of food humans eat—has a lot to do with that.”

  “Did Revenance follow the Sav—uh, ‘Saffron’ diet?” I asked, pleased and horrified: pleased that vampires were cutting back on blood, and horrified that it might loose these predatory superhumans onto the daylit world. “He lasted a long time under a cloudy sky.”

  “So it did work,” Calaphase said. “Revy always was bolder than me. Since I started the diet, I’ve felt less oppressed by the daystar, but I’ve not been brave enough to face it.”

  “Don’t be in too much of a hurry,” I said quietly. “He survived the clouds … but direct sunlight killed him.” That unpleasant reminder hung there between us, and Calaphase took a sip of his beverage, again staring off into the distance. Eventually I filled the gap. “So … where are you on the Saffron diet?”

  “I could show you. Canoe is my current favorite restaurant in the area,” Calaphase said. “You’d like it. I should take you there.”

  I blinked. “Did … you just ask me out?”

  Calaphase blinked as well. “No, I was just thanking you for—” he began … and then stopped. Then he looked me straight in the eyes, blue gems gleaming in that handsome statue, and said, with quiet confidence, “Yes, I did. Would you like to go to Canoe, Dakota?”

  My heart leapt into my throat and I felt my face flush. Oh. My. God. I had just attracted the attention of a vampire, one who probably chased his steaks with O Positive. Very bad news. I don’t like vampires. I certainly don’t date vampires. And why was I thinking of dating, when I was dating Philip Davidson … Philip, who was off in Virginia, and who was never here?

  “I don’t give blood,” I blurted.

  “Never on a first date,” Calaphase said with a smile. Then the smile faded. “I’m serious. Never on a first date. It means as much to me as sex.”

  “Then how do you live?” I said, brow furrowing. I don’t trust vampires because I was trained as a chemist. Vampires were powerful and fast—so something had to be powering those hyperactive metabolisms. If blood was no richer in calories than a good Frappuccino it would take something like a gallon a day to feed them—and a human can’t safely donate more than a pint of blood every few months. “I mean, the amount of human blood—”

  “Cow’s blood, actually,” Calaphase said, a bit embarrassed. “Kosher butchers have been selling it to vampires, both above and below the table, for hundreds of years.”

  I blinked.

  “I can show you where I buy it,” he said, sipping his Frappuccino.

  “I think I’d prefer Canoe for our first, uh, date,” I replied, with a nervous little laugh.

  “Call it a dinner in thanks for your service if it makes you more comfortable. Besides, the Lady Saffron doesn’t share well with other clans,” Calaphase said. “Still … is that a yes?”

  We were just staring at each other now. I was afraid to breathe. Did Calaphase breathe? Saffron would say, if he eats, he breathes, but I wasn’t sure; come to think of it, vampires were magic. Could his metabolism involve magic? Would our date?

  “Are you free tomorrow night?” I said suddenly.

  “Yes,” he said. “No—damnit, yes. I will have to return to the werehouse, but I can take a break around dinnertime. I’ll meet you at the restaurant. You’ll feel safer.”

  “I’ll feel safer or you’ll feel safer?” I asked, tugging the ring on my collar. “I know I’m safe around a vampire, unless you want a ‘Lady Saffron’ garlic enema. Don’t trust yourself?”

  “Oh, I trust myself
completely,” Calaphase said, staring straight at me. “No matter how good the dish looks, I know the stew tastes better if you let it simmer.”

  Calaphase’s phone rang, more werehouse business, and while he spoke I excused myself with a nervous wave, hopped in the blue bomb and fled out into the dark. My brain was buzzing: finish the paperwork for the Clairmont Academy, buy Cinnamon’s books, get the Prius fixed up, find a good lawyer to handle the adoption and the Valentine Foundation’s missing payments, and, oh, yeah, track down a graffiti killer. There were a thousand things to do.

  But mostly my brain was buzzing with the obvious: I was having dinner with a vampire. Oh, man. How did that happen? And why was I so jazzed about it? My palms were almost as damp on the wheel as they had been when Cinnamon had been ready to rip my head off.

  I tried to force myself to relax.

  So I was having dinner with a vampire. What’s the worst that could happen?

  Magical Fallout

  “You want me to what?” I said, bringing the Prius to a screeching stop.

  “Stop what you’re doing and stay out of this,” Rand ordered through my Bluetooth headset. I’d called him back, just as Calaphase had asked … but bringing him back on board was proving to be difficult. Rand wasn’t going down without a fight. “This investigation is getting hairy. Having a loose cannon is going to complicate things.”

  “But I’ve already started,” I said, and I had. I’d not yet found anything on magical graffiti, but I had found a little on magical pigments and a lot about regular graffiti. Now that I was primed for it, I was seeing graffiti everywhere—on walls, on street signs, even on the street itself. It was hard not to get lost in the raw folk beauty of graffiti, but already I was starting to notice patterns, possibly crews, and even the occasional magic mark, and was convinced we could catch this guy. “In fact, it’s hard to see how I could