Blood Rock (19 page)

“I’m sorry this is so small,” I said, reaching towards her. She struck at the wire with an odd, fluttering snarl and I jerked my hand back; but when she left the paw on the wire, flexing it, I reached in and stroked the back of her paw—then swallowed. Her claws had to be over four inches long.
Jesus.
They felt hard and cruel under my fingers; but the monster paw seemed to relax under my touch. “It was the largest they had, and you’re … bigger than I remembered.”

Cinnamon blinked at me slowly, then yawned and withdrew her paw.

Trembling, I stood and stepped back from the cage. “Get some sleep if you can,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to get ready for school on Friday.”

Cinnamon just stared at me, and after a minute I turned and walked away.

What the hell had I gotten myself into?

I made busy work for myself around the apartment—turning on lights in other rooms, putting Cinnamon’s rags in the washer, taking off my own worn clothes, putting my vestcoat in the hamper for the drycleaners. When I unlaced the corset, I saw the hole Philip had poked at. It went clean through the front, though I had no wound in my belly.

Half of me felt lucky to be alive; the other half just felt pissed. I had no idea how the expensive handmade garment could be repaired, and I didn’t have the coin to drop on a new one, not between Cinnamon’s tuition and the payments on the blue bomb. The Valentine Foundation welshing was really messing me up. I should never have bought that car before seeing the first cent of my winnings. Now,
everything
was harder.

I dumped the corset in the hamper and went to the kitchen. I laid down canned food for the cats, wondering where they were; probably somewhere in the apartment, tucked up into frozen little balls, more scared of Cinnamon than I was.

I had no idea what to feed
her
in this state. Perhaps I should run to the store and get … what? Raw meat?
Hell.
I threw away the pet food can reflexively and glared into my separated bins. There weren’t enough recyclables to warrant the drive. Stupid City of Atlanta, all they picked up was trash. At least that was full; taking it out gave me some semblance of normalcy.

I stomped down the stairs towards the trash can and stopped halfway down. “Hello, Mrs. Olsen,” I said, feeling rather than hearing her presence beside me.

“Hello, Dakota,” Mrs. Olsen said. Her long hair only
looked
grey against the soft folds of her long purple sweater. She had cultivated a spinsterly appearance after her husband had been killed in Iraq, but she had a son not much older than Cinnamon on his first tour over there. She smiled, her cherubic face dimpling as she lifted a wastebasket filled with papers, aluminum cans, and an old phone book. I strongly suspected she’d left it by her own back door and waited to take it out so she’d have an excuse to talk to me. “You know you can call me Donna.”

I watched her dump enough recyclables to finish off my own separated loads and shook my head. “All right, Donna,” I said, marching down the stairs. “I’ve just always felt odd calling you anything other than Mrs. Olsen. I guess it was the way I was raised..”

“Now, Dakota,” Donna preened, as I dumped off my own trash. “You’ve been here too many years for last names—and to think you’ll be gone soon. I will miss you.”

“I did want to talk to you about that. Did you get my message—”

“I’ve got the nicest young couple ready to move into your flat,” she said, leaning forward and letting her voice drop to a whisper. “Lesbians, if you can believe that.”

“Imagine that,” I said, smiling.

“I’m really glad to help them,” she said, gesturing with the garbage basket. “They even offered to paint my flat rather than pay a security deposit.”

“But I’m willing to bet you’ll just let them skip it,” I said. Donna had done the same for me, a few years ago, when I’d been hard up and needed to find a place after splitting with Saffron. “Did you get my message? Can they push their move date back—”

A piercing screech erupted from the top of the stairs, followed by a loud crash. Donna’s head jerked up suddenly at the horrible yowling alarm that wailed out of my flat and the weird, freakish chirping that followed. “Oh my God, I think something’s killing your cats … ”

And before I could stop her, she dropped the wastebasket and bolted up the stairs.

“No, wait,” I said, following her. I reached for her sweater, but my fingers closed on the air as Donna really put on speed, bursting the door open and turning on the light. She froze in there, then jerked back so I almost ran over her.

Cinnamon remained in her bowed-out cage, but awake, alert, snarling, as two of my cats yowled back at her. Little black-and-white Xanadu stood not three feet away, spotted back arched so high it looked like someone was pulling up on her belly with an invisible coat hanger; big old raccoonish Rafael was crouched down by the kitchen door, curled up as tight as he could get, with food bowls and recycling hampers tumbled every which way around him. Cinnamon snarled again, then saw me and, eyes wide, struck the cage with her paw in a sudden plea, emitting the freakish chirp we’d heard below—like a monster bird crying for its mother.

I relaxed a little. The cats had just padded in to get their food, then everyone freaked. No one had hurt anyone; it was just another period of adjustment. Something else to get used to.

But not, apparently, just for us.

“Oh my God,” Donna cried. “You have a tiger—”

“She’s not a tiger—” I said, but Donna kept babbling.

“—brought it into my
house
,” Donna said. “A pet
tiger!
”

At the word
pet
Cinnamon’s head jerked up and she growled, making Donna press back against me. I raised my hand. “Down, Cinnamon,” I said sharply. “You’re not helping.”

“Cinnamon … ” Donna said, turning to me, eyes wide in horror.

“She
is
a tiger, but she’s
not
a pet,” I said. “This is my
daughter
, and
she’s a—”

“A were-
tiger
,” Donna said, shrinking back against the wall. “I’ve heard of such things, but … werewolves are bad enough, but were-
tigers
… ”

“There’s nothing to fear,” I said, turning off the overhead. “You’ve met Cinnamon.”

“Yes, yes, yes, I
have,
” Donna said, fear becoming
anger
. “And you had her standing not three feet from me showing her off like she was a normal human being.”

“She
is
a normal human being,” I said, realizing as I said it how ridiculous it sounded with Animal Planet near bursting out of a cage before us. “With a condition. She gets furry—”

“This may be all very funny to you,” Donna said, straightening up, adjusting her sweater, but still plastered against the wall as far from Cinnamon as she could manage. “But it’s not funny to me! Not funny at all! Lycanthropy is a
disease
. It’s
contagious!
I want you out of here—”

“But we’re not ready. In fact, we need to extend our lease,” I said, rubbing my brow. I knew where this was going. “I told you in voicemail, our closing date was pushed back.”

“I don’t
care
what happened to you,” Donna said. “You bring this thing here into my home, this thing that could infect me, and expect me to shelter you? I want you out!”

I exhaled sharply. “
Fine
,” I said. “We’ll be out Monday, like we agreed.”

“No,” Donna said, drawing herself up. “I want you out now, now, now!”

“Donna,” I said. “We have a lease—”

“I don’t care!” she said, voice growing more shrill. “I won’t have this diseased thing in a home that I own for one more instant! You get her out of here or I call the police!”

“Donna—”

“Get out! Get out!
Get out!
” she screamed. “I’ll not have a
monster
under my roof!”

“Mom,” Cinnamon said softly in the passenger seat. “Why did you fold?”

The last few days had been a blur. Finding a hotel. Smuggling Cinnamon inside. Turning the tiger back into the schoolgirl; losing the schoolgirl within the school walls, if only for the day. And dealing with the awful, awful mess left by the werehouse fire.

And then it was a sunny Saturday and we were back in the blue bomb, shooting up I-85 towards Stratton, South Carolina. I got a tingle when we passed through the Perimeter—the more tattoos I had, the more aware I was of the giant magic circle buried beneath Atlanta’s encircling highways—but no dragons swooped out of the sky to scoop us up, dang it, and soon, we were driving beneath happy puffy clouds dotting a bright blue sky over a rolling forested Interstate.

Unfortunately, these happy clouds did not extend to the interior of the car.

“I means,” Cinnamon said, “it was our place. She had no
right
—”

“No, no she didn’t,” I said, “but you were changed, and snarling, and I was afraid she’d call the cops and they’d haul you off, cage and all, to the Atlanta City Jail. Or the Zoo.”

“Mom!” Cinnamon said, half outraged, half giggling. Then her giggle faded. “The Academy sucks. They’re putting me in the stupid class.”

“What?” I asked. “Why would they do that? They know you’re behind. They should have held you back a grade, not stuffed you in a
remedial
class.”

“Not remedial,” she said, and I was impressed that she didn’t ask what that meant. “Tutoring, for math. Three days a week, after school.”

“Okay,” I said, pulling off at the Commerce exit. “Okay. That’s not so bad.”

“Why are we stopping?” Cinnamon said. “Isn’t Stratton eighty-four more miles?”

“Hey, she can subtract. Sure you need tutoring?” I said, and she swatted at me. “But Commerce
is
our stop. It’s as far south as Dad will go, and as far north as
I
will go—”

“Your demilitarized zone,” Cinnamon said, with a sudden smile.

“Yeah,” I said, grinning. “Our DMZ. I like that.”

In moments we were pulling into Denny’s parking lot, a bright houselike building outside the Tanger Outlet center. Once this was a dark, boxy Shoney’s, Dad’s favorite stop for food on family road trips; now, years later, we still met here out of inertia. I parked, slammed the door, and put my hand on Cinnamon’s shoulder, steeling myself for the inevitable.

Dad stood peering at an AJC newspaper dispenser, trying to “see what they’re up to down here these days.” He was a big, beefy, kindly man, ex-linebacker, balding, with a light fringe of blond-grey hair trimmed close, graying a little only around his ears. His brown sweater and white shirt were old-school but high-quality, the colors rich, the whites pure and luminous.

He saw me, straightened, and threw on a smile which quickly faded.

“H-hey, Kotie,” Dad said, face to face for the first time in three years. His eyes flickered over me, almost wincing at my deathhawk and tattoos; then they flickered to Cinnamon, wary. He swallowed, started forward, extending his hand. “I-it’s great to see you again.”

“Hey, Dad,” I said quietly, trying to hide my disappointment. I already knew what was about to happen; we wouldn’t even get to shake hands first. “It’s good to see you too—”

And then it happened: the grey-haired, drawn-faced, beige-jacketed man who had been trailing Dad stepped between us, forcing his face into a smile.

“Dakota Frost,” he said, taking one hand off his floppy Bible and extending it towards us. “I’m Doctor Price Isaacson. I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased to meet you too, Doctor Isaacson,” I said, taking his hand and letting him pump mine. Vacant-eyed, pushy, and on a mission: just how Dad liked his pastors. “And what congregation do you preach for, Doctor?”

“Stratton Independent Baptist,” he said, eyes brightening. “I’m glad to see you show interest in the preaching of the Word, but who do we have here?”

Isaacson half-squatted, looking at Cinnamon and extending his hand with a bright foolish smile like he was talking to a five-year-old. She did not extend her hand, but twitched and pressed back against me, letting out a sharp exhale of breath before she finally spoke.

“My name is Cinnamon Frost,” she said, staring down at his hand.

Doctor Isaacson stood and leaned back with something like approval. “Don’t trust strangers,” he said. “But Richard didn’t tell me you had a child.”

“Cinnamon is adopted,” I said. “Just recently, in fact.”

“Well, well, that’s great,” Dad said, stepping forward nervously. “I didn’t know you’d, you’d be bringing her with you. Hey, ah, let’s eat.”

I really don’t remember what food I liked at Shoney’s as a child, and I don’t remember what I ate at Denny’s that day either. As always, there was so much else to talk about. As a child, Mom, Dad and I had always really opened up at Shoney’s, and now, after all this time, I was desperate to tell Dad how glad I was to see him, to ask about what was going on in Stratton, to find out about his consulting work, to hear about Mom’s side of the family—or to tell Dad about Cinnamon. But it seemed like we never really got into that. Instead, almost immediately—

“So, Kotie,” Dad said. “When are you going to stop tattooing and get a real job?”

“I make fifty thousand dollars a year tattooing, Dad,” I said, “and my hours are my own.”

“Kotie, tattooing is the Devil’s work,” Dad began. “The Bible says—”

“You eat non-Kosher meat, Dad,” I said. “You shave your beard. You wear mixed-weave fabrics. All prohibited by the part of the O.T. you’re quoting—Leviticus 19. Go down that path, you’ll have to close your bank accounts and quit coaching Stratton Police softball on Sundays.”

“He
said
you were a Bible Bowl champion,” Isaacson said. “But even if we aren’t going that far, there are a lot of reasons to give up tattooing. A lot of people regret them later.”

“I don’t do jinxes,” I said. “No personal names, obscene images or religious symbols.”

Isaacson raised an eyebrow, glancing at my hands: a row of religious icons was on each knuckle: a Christian cross, a Star of David, an Islamic crescent, even a yin-yang.

“I take responsibility for inking myself,” I said, flashing the larger yin-yang on my palm, “but I won’t put a permanent slogan on a living person who may later have a change of heart.”

“That’s wise—even if you change your mind, you can’t easily take ink back,” Isaacson said. “Did you know it can take up to a dozen laser treatments to remove a tattoo?”

“Or you can use magical ink, and peel them off with one wave of mana,” I said.

Isaacson’s eyes tightened a little bit at the word ‘magical,’ but he forged ahead. “But most people leave them in, and if you do, the ink can cause cancers—”