Blood Rock (21 page)

She inclined her head gratefully. “Thank you, my Lady Frost.” She extended her hand to Cinnamon. “I promise I will treat your daughter well. As if she were my own.”

“You didn’t turn your daughter into a vampire, did you?”

Darkrose looked up in shock. “No!” she said. “That would be unthinkable—”

“I was messing with you. Sorry,” I said, squeezing Cinnamon’s shoulders. “So, Cin, feel like hanging with the gang while your Mom and her fang go neck in a back alley?”

“Don’t come back with no bite marks,” Cinnamon said, “just
k-i-s-s-i-n-g.”

“When did you become the mom?” I said, hands on my hips.

“When you started dating fangs,” she said, head snapping in her sneezy tic.

“All right,” I said, glancing at Calaphase, who seemed amused by the ‘fang’ comment. “Try not to get us into more trouble with her highness.”

So Calaphase and I were left there, on the corner of North Highland and Linwood, barred from our favorite restaurant. We stared at each other uncomfortably. “Sorry about the damn vampire comment,” I said. “And when she called you a fang—”

“You mean Cinnamon? Oh, she mouths off like that,” Calaphase said lightly—but my heart fell at the implication. “I’d love to say I don’t take things like that personally, but I’d also love to say that we vampires don’t deserve it, and that isn’t true. There’re reasons humans fear us, and werekin hate us—oh, screw it, let’s get some drinks. What about Vino’s?”

“Believe it or not, I was just there,” I said, “but Virginia Highland
is
one of the best walking neighborhoods in the city.”

“And it
is
a nice night,” Calaphase said, eyes resting on me calmly, slipping his hands into his pockets. “Stroll up to San Francisco Coffee? It’s right near to Beaver’s Books.”

“Does everyone but me love bookstores?” I said, sighing as my phone blooped at me. I pulled it out, saw a text message from a number I didn’t know, and set the phone to vibrate. “I think we’ve been to every one in the city looking for used audiobooks for Cinnamon.”

“So what will one more hurt?” Calaphase said. He poked his elbow out at me. “Come on, we can windowshop restaurants for our next date.”

I took his arm. “I thought this was our next date.”

“Technically our first, if the last one was an innocent dinner,” Calaphase said.

“Ouch,” I said. “I’m even more sorry about that than the vamp comment.”

“Then I’ll call this our second,” Calaphase said, “and hope there is another.”

“Hope springs eternal,” I said. “You know, you’re a very unusual vampire.”

“It’s like Saffron said the other night—I once thought becoming a vampire would be liberating,” Calaphase said. “Dark lords of the night, free of all restraint, on an endless orgy of sex, blood and violence. But vampirism turned out to be more addiction than superpower, and vampire culture is all prancing poseurs, petty politics and turf wars. So I never changed.”

“You sure about that?” I said, feeling his arm. He was lean, but his movements still had that immense strength of a vampire. If I let my hand flow with the sway of his elbow, he felt gentle; but when I got out of sync it felt like tugging on a building, or trying to stop a car. “Remember when we first met? You called me
morsel
.”

“I can put that mask on if you like,” he said, smiling, but not looking at me, “but I’m not on duty, impressing my employer by terrorizing trespassers. I’d rather just be myself.”

“I’d rather that too,” I said, and I wasn’t sure whether I was talking about him or me.

We strolled into San Francisco Coffee and in minutes were sitting down across from each other at a tiny striped wooden table—a vampire and a skindancer, wedged in with granola girls from the Little Five Points alternative district and trendy yuppies from the Virginia Highland walking district, without a one of them being the wiser. Well, that wasn’t entirely true; with my coat, deathhawk and tattoos
I
stand out more than a vampire. But you can’t tell a skindancer from their canvases unless you look closely.

I stared down at the beautiful leaf pattern the barista had woven into the surface of my mocha, then looked up at Calaphase, sipping a frosted slushy with a grimace. “Just like old times,” I said, raising my mug and taking a sip.

“Just like old times,” he responded, rubbing his forehead with two fingers. “Ow. Brain freeze.”

I don’t remember what we talked about; it didn’t matter later anyway. All I know is that halfway through our drinks, Calaphase got a buzz on his phone, frowned, and then stood to take it. I sipped my coffee, sighing, looking at a cute girl with a woven knit cap who was scoping my tattoos; maybe I had another customer.

Then
my
phone buzzed, and I looked up to see Calaphase staring at me. With a sudden flash of fear, I whipped out my phone and saw another text message, same number:
<>

And then a picture of a graffiti tag began slowly loading on my phone’s screen.

“We gotta go,” Calaphase said, closing his phone with a click and picking up his coffee without sitting down. “Saffron has ordered us back to Manuel’s Tavern.”

“Oh,
shit
,” I said, reluctantly closing my phone, swallowing the dregs of my cup, and standing. “Don’t tell me she’s taken away Cinnamon’s protection—”

“Nothing of the sort,” he said, swigging the rest of his with a grimace and motioning for us to go. “Emergency war council. We’ve got serious problems. Demophage, our new Lithuanian vampire, you met him the other night—”

“Curly,” I said, following Calaphase outside. “He got the sand. I liked him.”

“Yeah, well, he’s gone,” Calaphase said. “Demophage is training a new recruit, and when the putz didn’t show up at Revy’s service. Demophage decided to track him down, against my orders. Now he’s missed his shift and is not answering his phone.”

“Maybe he’s just … ” I began, then stopped.
Maybe
nothing; he was dead. “
Damnit!
”

Calaphase wanted to run, but I couldn’t. My knee was throbbing from too much recent activity. So, by the time we burst into Manuel Tavern’s dark wooden cave, both our phones were buzzing, and by the time we navigated the huge round tables until we found the one where Saffron held court, we found both Darkrose and Jinx with their cellphones out—while Saffron fumed. The table looked strangely empty without Revenance and his girlfriend.

“I’m sorry, we came as quickly as I could,” I said. Saffron and I glanced at each other, then we both looked away. “My knee’s been acting up since Transomnia’s attack.”

“Still?” Darkrose said, staring at me sharply. “I forget how fragile humans are.”

“Lady Saffron, what’s wrong?” Calaphase said, leaning over the table. “When I reported Demophage’s disappearance, you said you had more bad news.”

Saffron stared down at the table. When she spoke, she sounded shocked. “The Lady Scara, the Gentry’s enforcer, tells me two more vampires are missing. When I called Lord Delancaster to inform him, I got no response. Not from him, his servant, or even his chauffeur. Vickman just called from his house and confirmed—my master has disappeared. Whatever’s happening to vampires, it’s taken the Master of Georgia.”

Finally Saffron looked up at me, actually afraid. “We’re on our own now.”

The Harris Mural is a majestic piece of art dominating the atrium of Emory University’s Harris School of Magic. Three stories tall, its rippled surface is infused with magical pigment, breaking the surface into intricate polygonal shapes like a vast stained glass window. The mural’s supposed subject is Edmund Harris, the magician after whom the School of Magic and Harris Hall are named. His stylized figure stands to the left of the mural, holding a wand over a hat to his right. But it is the magic bursting forth from the wand that takes center stage.

From the wand, an explosion of light and color ripples across the mural, a thousand intricate overlapping patterns that change constantly from a starburst to snowflakes to spreading leaves to striking lightning. Every day, as the sun moves across the huge glass windows of the atrium, as students crisscross the three levels of catwalks in front of it, shifting light and shadow changes the pattern of mana building up in its network of magical capacitors, making the starburst flow like a slow-motion version of my tattoos.

I stared up at it, hands jammed in my pockets.
Someone
knew how the mural was made. At Saffron’s impromptu war council, we decided that I would investigate this thing, at least finding out how the graffiti worked, police approval or no. And the Harris Mural was our best lead on how magic writ upon a wall could work for as long as it had taken to kill Revenance.

My attempts to research it online Sunday hadn’t gotten me far, but it was only nine, Cinnamon was safely at school, and I had three full hours before I was expected at the Rogue Unicorn—not that my fellow tattooists cared. Winning the Valentine Challenge had brought more tattooing work into the parlor than we could handle, and it was actually easier for the rest of them to take advantage of that business when the famous Dakota Frost wasn’t there to hog all the inking. So … I had all the time in the world, and the whole library of the Harris School of Magic at my disposal. Time to crack this thing.

“Hey, Emorrhoid,” a familiar voice called down to me.

I looked up and saw Michael Bell grinning at me from the second-story catwalk. In high school he’d helped me through English, in college I’d helped him through Calculus. Now we were both dropouts, after a fashion. But where I’d bailed before I got my degree, Michael had gotten as far as law school before skipping the bar, buying a used UNIX workstation and diving into the world of computers. Five hardworking years later, prematurely grey but with a still-dark goatee and sparkling blue eyes, he was Director of Computing at the Harris School of Magic.

“Emorrhoid? Not anymore,” I said. “You can get those cured, you know.”

“You can take the Emorrhoid out of Emory but you can’t … ” he said, and grinned more broadly. “Glad I caught you. I’ve got some leads. The café? I skipped breakfast.”

“Does no-one just
talk
anymore?” I muttered—I never skip breakfast, not if I can help it.

We found a small table beneath the rear windows of the Harris School, kicked back beneath a panorama of pine trees swaying beyond the glass, and caught up. Michael had gotten a bit of a paunch since college, but he carried it well: his sparkling eyes were sharp, his smiling mouth firm, and he was never afraid to call bullshit where he saw it.

“Look, these Valentine Foundation guys have got to be pissing you off,” he said. I’d dumped a load of woe about the house I was supposed to be in by now, and he’d whipped out his lawyerly training. “But try to avoid an actual lawsuit. It hurts to say this and probably to hear it, but you’re much better off settling, rather than risking a countersuit and having the Valentine Foundation come shopping in your house to recoup their court costs.”

“If they don’t pay up,” I said, sipping some water, “I won’t have a house to shop in.”

“Get a lawyer,” Michael said, extending a business card. “Warren Moore. He was a few years ahead of me in law school, and he’s now with Ellis and Lee. He doesn’t do this kind of work, but he’ll find you someone on staff that’s specialized in cases like this.”

I stared at the business card. It was finely embossed and looked more expensive than my cell phone, with an address in Buckhead, the high-rent district in north central Atlanta named after our very own fae lord. “Can I even
afford
Ellis and Lee?”

“No,
but,
they’ll work on spec,” he said. “It will cost you, but only if you win.”

“Thanks,” I said, slipping the card into my vest. “They don’t do adoptions, do they?”

“Sure, but—adoptions?” Michael said. “
You?
Seriously thinking about it?”

“Seriously doing it,” I said. “You saw Cinnamon this Christmas, remember?”

“I think so,” he said, staring far away, then smiling. “Yeah, yeah. The little girl with the tiger stripes that could turn her invisible. That was awesome. I never asked you about her.”

I explained, twenty-five words or less, and finished with, “So her guardians don’t object, I’ve basically already adopted her. I just have to make it official.”

“Well, DEE-FAX isn’t involved, thank God,” he said, eyes still scanning the air, “so it sounds like you’ll need to do a third-party adoption. You
will
need a lawyer.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “That I
could
find out online, unlike anything else I’ve looked into recently.”

“Speaking of which,” Michael said, with that same smirk he had back in the day when we pored over textbooks together, “I
did
find out who did the Harris Mural—one of Williamson’s students, now a prof in Canada. But it uses pretty simple photoreactive magic, and I doubt learning how to imbue gel plaster will help you take a layer of graffiti off your house.”

“It’s not on my house,” I said. “And removing it once we find it isn’t the problem. I’m trying to figure out how it keeps killing people, so we can make it stop.”

“Killing people? You’re shitting me. Was someone actually
killed
by
graffiti?
”

“Yeah,” I said, and told him a short version of the whole story.

“Holy
crap
,” he said, staring off into the distance. You could almost see vampires and werewolves dancing behind his eyes. Then his mouth quirked up and he pulled out a smartphone with a tiny little keyboard. “Fortunately, Google knows everything.”

“This I’ve got to see,” I said, finishing my water.

“It wasn’t me,” he said, typing furiously with two thumbs. “I mentioned graffiti magic, and Williamson dug up these two guys, and we’ve been talking. Let me dig up their schedule and—hey, hey,
hey!
We’re in luck, they’re opening today. I thought it was next week.”

“Who’s opening what?” I asked, befuddled.

“Let me show you,” Michael said. “Up for a little walk across the campus?”

We crossed the Quad to the Michael C. Carlos Museum, a white, blocky structure with high grids of windows and a keeplike main entrance flanked by two angled staircases that broke up the lines of the castle-shaped structure and made it look vaguely pyramidal.