Blood Rock
( Skindancer - 2 )
Anthony Francis
Blood Rock
Anthony Francis
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 catlike 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 wa
s 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.
The man moaned and raised his head-and with a shock I recognized him as our friend Revenance, a guard at the werehouse, Cinnamon’s former home. Revenance was a vampire of the Oakdale Clan-so what was he doing out in the day? I looked for the sun, relaxed a little at the cloud cover-and then something clicked in my mind, and I looked back in horror.
Revenance wasn’t crucified in the wires, but in the graffiti itself. Painted vines had erupted from the wall, fully dimensional, moving as if alive, curling around him, sprouting metal barbs, hooking into his flesh, drawing blood and pulling outward-pulling as we watched.
The graffiti was tearing him apart.
Boiling Blood
“Revenance is a vampire,” I said loudly, and the officers around me pricked up and listened-but made no move towards my friend, trapped in that nest of bloody wire and thorned vines. “He needs protection from the sun right now!”
“You know this guy?” one of them said uneasily. He stood his ground, but several of the other officers began backing further away. “I mean, is he really a-”
“Vampire,” I confirmed, and more officers backed off. Pathetic. OK, I once felt the same about vamps, but Revenance was the nicest vampire I knew. True, he looked like a biker-OK, he was a biker-but he acted like a perfect gentleman. I even got on well with his girlfriend; she was down to earth, with none of the nonsense of a typical vampire flunky. If any vampire deserved to be saved, he did. “Did you hear me? Get him out of there! Protect and serve, man-”
“We, uh, tried,” the officer began, starting forward, then halting. “But those vines are vicious! They damn near tore Lee apart when she tried to check on him.”
“Oh, crap,” I said, staring at the sky. The sun was beginning to break through the clouds.
“Oh jeez, jeez, that’s Revy! ” Cinnamon said, suddenly getting it. She took a step forward, and the vines seemed to twist, to bunch in anticipation of her approach, making Revy moan. “Wait, wait-one thing atta. If the sun pops out, just for a second, it’ll kill ’im!”
“Yeah,” I said, scowling. “We need something to shield against the sun.”
Cinnamon’s ears pricked up. “You gots tarps in the backs of your mobiles?”
“What?” McGough asked blankly.
“Tarps, covers, blankets, anything,” Cinnamon said, tugging at her collar and grimacing. “And poles. We makes a tent, keeps the sun off him long enough to get him free of that crap!”
The officers remained frozen, and then McGough spoke. “Rand,” he said calmly. “Could you have your boys check their cruisers for tarps, blankets-”
“I’ll get on it,” he said. “Dakota, deal with the vines.”
“Sure,” I said. Yeah, right-dump the magical problem in the lap of the magician. I know I’d gotten a reputation for fighting other magicians after taking on the serial killer that had kidnapped Cinnamon, but “ Deal with the vines?” Fuck. How was I gonna do that?
I stepped forward, and the graffiti tag convulsed. Revenance groaned, then opened cloudy eyes in a face cracked like burnt paper. I recoiled. Scattered ultraviolet had to be killing him.
And while I was noticing all that, a tendril of barbed wire snapped out like a whip, nailing me in the temple. Only a last second flinch saved my eye, and I threw myself back into a crouch, hands raised, tails of my vestcoat whapping out around me. I was actually a bit surprised at my own reaction, I guessed a product of my recent training. Apparently karate works.
“Girl’s got moves,” said a voice, and after a glance at the vines, I looked over to see a crewcutted black officer stepping up-Gibbs, one of Rand’s friends. “You OK, Dakota?”
“Yes,” I said, touching my temple, fingers coming back with blood. “Where’s Horscht?”
“Your kid has him running to the grounds shed,” Gibbs said. His clothes and face were scratched too, worse than the others, and one eye was darn near swollen shut. I had been lucky. “Looking for wood to prop up a tent around your fang there.”
“He’s not my ‘fang,’” I said, staring back at Revenance. The vamp writhed, and with shock I realized what I’d thought was stylish frosting in his hair was actually sunbleach, where the light had blasted the strands to pale brittleness. “But he is a friend.”
I glared at the graffiti, at the live, hungry vines erupting from the wall and twisting through the air. They seemed to swat at me just for looking at them; but I was not deterred. It was just graffiti. Just ink on a wall. Whatever magic had animated it would sl
owly fade away, unless it had some source of external power, which was not likely on a dead brick wall.
Grimly I wondered whether the graffiti was powered by Revenance himself; vampires had powerful auras. But vampiric life was endothermic, sucking energy out of its surroundings. That’s why their flesh was often cold; that’s why necromancers considered them dead.
So, as fearsome as this thing was, it should run down-but I had no such limits. I was the tattooed, and my magic marks were powered by the life in my beating heart.
Time to draw my weapons.
“Keep this safe for me,” I said, pulling off my vestcoat and handing it to Gibbs. Then, gritting my teeth against the brisk January air, I pulled off my turtleneck, exposing a torso covered in dozens of intricate tattoos.
I’ve thought about this outfit carefully. It’s sort of my new uniform since I seriously decided to use my magic tattoos, and not just wear them. Tattoo magic works best when skin is exposed to the air-but I’m not gonna get naked in front of a bad guy. So my leather “pants” are actually chaps, unzipping down the seams quickly to leave me in cutoff jean shorts, and under my shirt is a black sports bra. Even the boots have side zips-I want to be able to run if I gotta, but still be able to peel them if I need the braided snakes on my ankles.
“Whoa,” Gibbs said, holding the leather and snakeskin in his hands like he was looking at his favorite collection of porn. “Didn’t expect that, girl-”
“Don’t get too excited,” I said, grimacing. I’m a total weather lightweight-the mercury couldn’t be lower than fifty-five, but I already had goose bumps rippling down my arms. I hoped it wouldn’t interfere with the magic. “I only dance for the magic.”
I straightened, then let my body ripple. There was an art to tattoo magic: my old magical tattoo master had called it skindancing. I bailed on him early, so I didn’t know half the art-but with the little I did know, I could concentrate the lifeforce within my body, the living magic, the mana, hold it within like a growing flame-then let it out to make my tattoos come alive.
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