Authors: Anthony Francis
So we parked the Prius and hopped out into a row of shops that felt like a snippet of a walking neighborhood, like a micro-Virginia Highland on the other side of the road from R Thomas. We passed a Chinese restaurant and an art gallery before walking up onto a chic crowd of Buckheadites, milling around the front of Café Intermezzo.
“How late is this place open?” I asked.
“Two,” he said, taking me through heavy wood doors into a dark, loud, crowded empire of wood and glass. Classic posters and slogans extolling the glories of coffee adorned the walls, a slide show of what looked like ancient Greece was projected up into a high cranny, and
everywhere
people were crammed at tiny tables, consuming an astonishing variety of drinks.
“What?” Calaphase said, after the screech of the espresso machine ceased.
“A little loud, isn’t it?” I repeated.
“Two,” he said, handing a twenty to the maître d’, who winked and nodded. “I wouldn’t do that normally,” he said, a little embarrassed when he saw my eyebrow, “but Cheryl knows me. She’ll get us a table in the front window. It’s a little quieter, but it takes a few minutes.”
We stood by a rack of newspapers on dowels, like you might see in a library. “Right across the street from my favorite veggie burgers,” I said. “Why have I never been here?”
Then he handed me the menu—a thick, narrow booklet that was as comprehensive as a dictionary—and I knew. “Jeez!” I said, and Calaphase winced. “OK, the
normal
coffees aren’t much worse than Starbucks, but some of the liqueurs are like, fifty dollars.”
“Only if you get one that’s older than
I
am,” Calaphase said.
“I have dresses older than you are,” I said, flipping and flipping and flipping, trying to get to the back. “All right, I can see why poor dropout me has never been here, but how can you afford it on what the werehouse crew have been paying you?”
“Vampires have many sources of income,” Calaphase said, slightly uncomfortable.
“Such as what—oh my God.” In a reflection I saw what I was standing next to, and turned around to see two huge glass cases of elaborate cakes in front of the espresso machine. “You had to stuff me full of donuts before I came here, didn’t you?”
“Now you know how I suffer when
you
eat,” he said. “Come on, she’s got us a table.”
The front window wasn’t much quieter, but at least there we could hunch over the table and talk. I told him the long version of what had happened to Cinnamon, and Calaphase patted my hand. “Don’t worry,” he said, face clearly worried. “You’ll get her back. I’m sure of it.”
“Try not to sound so convinced,” I said, slurping my mocha just to see him squirm. Unexpectedly they had delivered it with a small glass of hazelnut liqueur, which I sniffed before offering it to him. “I don’t drink and drive. Not even a little.”
“Aren’t we here to drink?” he said, sipping, with pain, a tall blended drink. “
I’ll
drive.”
“Doesn’t that milkshake thing have like, a shot of vodka in it?”
“Something like it,” he said. “Look, you ordered it, and it
is
good. Please—”
“
Fine,
” I said, taking the hazelnut and taking a small sip. “Not bad. I’m still not drinking the whole thing, no matter what you say. Just my luck, they’ll pull me over and breathalyze me.”
“You’re sounding a little more like Dakota. Ready to get back in the saddle?”
I stared at him blankly—and then he pulled a manila folder out of his jacket. “You have pictures of the tags,” I said, leaning forward. “Gimme, gimme!”
These pictures were better than any I’d seen yet. The finest masterpiece, a complicated whirlpool design almost certainly made by the first tagger, was marred by whorls of black soot emanating from its center. The soot hadn’t destroyed it, but it obscured too much of the design to see it clearly, and I scowled … until I remembered that Calaphase had said the victim had burned. Then the soot began to look uncomfortably like a body, and I looked away.
“Both this guy and Revenance caught fire,” I said thoughtfully, “and I assumed it was the sun … but the werehouse burned too. Could burning be part of the life cycle of the tag?”
“I hope not,” Calaphase said. “That would be a disaster. There are a lot of tags.”
“I’d tell Rand, but I think he’d have me arrested,” I said. “Calaphase … can you arrange to send an anonymous tip to the police for me? I mean, we can warn the Edgeworld, but the police are looking into this too and I’d hate for some poor officer to get crisped.”
Calaphase frowned. “If I can’t arrange it, Saffron certainly can.”
There were also pictures showing the art of the second tagger, mostly around the werehouse. Apparently Tully had been chronicling the graffiti for some time. There were a few candid pictures with tags in the background featuring werehouse regulars like Vic, a few werekin boys, and even Cinnamon, who had been caught swatting her claws at the camera.
“These are very good,” I said, studying that last picture closely. I loved my girl, and already missed her terribly. “What are you up to, Calaphase?”
“What do you mean?” he said, taken aback.
“You didn’t need to do all this just to get an early report to Saffron. She’s not going to come stake you in your sleep because you’re slow getting back to her.”
“Touché,” he said, raising his glass. “You caught me. I planned to ask you out again.”
I leaned back in my chair.
Damnit.
“I smelled something fishy with your late-night call.”
“I take it that’s a no, then?” Calaphase said, smiling.
“What are we doing right now?” I asked. “Having coffee that costs as much as a meal? If the kitchen was still open, you’d be selling me on their food, just to watch me eat.”
“That I would. I
love
watching you eat,” Calaphase said warmly, and I glanced away, embarrassed. He laughed, then got serious. “Care to try again? A real date, no drama?”
“Someplace inexpensive?” I said. “Not four thousand dollar drinks forty miles down the backwoods of Atlanta? Someplace we can go Dutch, like real twenty-first century humans?”
Calaphase laughed. “That sounds good to me.”
“OK,” I said. “It will have to be after the hearing, though. I’ll let you know.”
“I understand—you’ve got a
lot
going on,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready—but until then, throw me a bone on the pictures, something I can pass to Saffron.”
“There are three separate taggers,” I said, and Calaphase leaned back in his chair. “Call them two and a half Siths: a master, a journeyman, and an apprentice. My mystery benefactor in the police force has said as much, and these pictures confirm it. The master tagger is active in downtown Atlanta, and his tags are the most dangerous. No vampire should go near them. The other two look to be wankers, copycats. Only the one that nearly killed Tully was associated with an attack, and I think that’s only because he tried to whitewash it alone.”
“That’s not a bone,” he said. “That’s a labeled skeleton with a copy of Gray’s Anatomy.”
I shrugged and took one more sip, finding I’d finished the tiny little glass of the liqueur. “I do my best. Mind if I send these to my mysterious benefactor?”
“Please, go ahead. One more thing—if you do squeeze out some time, give me a little advance notice? One of my flunkies can take my shift and we can have the whole night together.” His face fell as soon as he said it. “I didn’t mean to imply—”
“I’m not made of glass, Calaphase,” I said, smiling.
But Calaphase
didn’t
smile. “Vampires are known for taking advantage of human … prey,” he said with distaste. “I do
not
want you to think I’m just out for your blood.”
“You know what I think, Calaphase?” I said, finishing the last swig of mocha.
Calaphase cocked his head at me. “No. What
do
you think, Dakota?”
“It’s going to take more than the threat of a bite to scare me away from you, vampire.”
Blood Rock, Georgia is a tiny little hamlet between Stone Mountain and Conyers.
Everyone
knows Stone Mountain: a mammoth single stone of granite, literally the size of a mountain, upon which some racist
idiot
carved a bunch of Confederate yahoos on horses, simultaneously the world’s largest rock carving and the largest instance of vandalism. And
almost
everyone knows Conyers, a charming little town desperately trying to forget that the Virgin Mary appeared in a cornfield there sometime in the 1980s.
No-one
knows Blood Rock, and Blood Rockers are happy to keep it that way. The stadium-sized knot of granite that dominates the town is dwarfed by Stone Mountain itself, dwarfed even by nearby Rock Chapel Mountain; but it is the treelined half-hill slumped over the boulder that really obscures it—and gave the Rock its name: with each rain, red Georgia clay bleeds out of the hillside, dripping down the rock in rivulets like red blood.
But it was more than just metaphorical blood. I got a tingle as I passed the ENTERING BLOOD ROCK sign. Blood Rock was protected by a magic circle, but there was no literal circle like that buried under Atlanta’s perimeter. Blood Rock’s barrier was projective, the magic of a sanctuary stone powered by ley lines and resonating off the Rock itself.
Rubbed into the Sanctuary Stone was a drop of blood from every magician that practiced in Blood Rock, even me. That blood magic enabled a powerful protective spell, protecting us from enemy magicians and alerting the Stonegrinder Clan, the keepers of the Stone, if any of us came to harm.
Arcturus didn’t need that protection, of course; he was a fearsome magician. He chose Blood Rock for a more prosaic reason, the same reason I chose Atlanta: magic circles made it harder for stray spirits to invade magic tattoos while they were being inked.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, Blood Rock’s sanctuary stone also kept out the future. In five years, it had barely changed: no new subdivisions, no big box stores, not even a Starbucks. The two lone fast food joints, a McDonalds and a Captain D’s, hadn’t been updated in decades. Only deep, winterbare forests, narrow, winding roads, and ancient, decaying homes infested with carpenter bees. Tilting sheds and folk art livened the roads … but wooden fences, high hedges, and NO TRESPASSING signs were just as common.
But as I drew into the tiny town center, I started noticing slight—and subtly ominous—differences. Red Christmas lights still hung from the trees on Old Main like rows of fireflies, but the normal foot traffic was absent. Typically, even in January, you’d see a few Blood Rockers milling about in shortsleeves or wifebeaters, showing off an astounding range of tattoos, but today even the gas station attendant was bundled up behind new bulletproof glass.
Something had happened here, and I didn’t like it. One of the usually stationary police cars was actually patrolling, Blood Rock’s New Age Gifte Shoppe was closed for renovations, and atop the Rock itself at last I saw a gash in the hillside and the roofs of new homes.
The police car slid by, smooth as a shark, and I caught the friendly eye of Sheriff Steyn through its window, nodding at me in greeting. I wasn’t fooled. Steyn was dangerous precisely because he wasn’t a big-hat, big-belly parody of a small town sheriff complete with Cool Hand Luke mirrorshades. Steyn was handsome, charming, and completely unpredictable. With Steyn, you never saw it coming until it hit you—a fact I knew from experience.
I nodded back and he smiled and drove on. Apparently, today I’d passed. Whatever had happened was not serious enough for him to run me out of town as he had on my first visit, too many years ago. So I pulled into the gravel lot of the Grist Mill Motel, an ancient brown wooden structure at the base of the hill, distinguished by its still-working water wheel and Blood Rock’s best and only coffee shop. The radio kept me company on my drive down memory lane.
“—and I-20 is
finally
clearing up, but High Pass Road is still blocked by that broken tractor. And that’s it for traffic this Tuesday evening. Coming up in two minutes at seven PM: Radio Flea Market with Jan Smits, helping you get your stuff to someone who wants it. Then at eight, a replay of Fresh Air. You’re listening to Blood Rock Radio, WBRK 850AM.”
The Prius crunched to a stop, and I sighed, staring up at the deck and the wide glowing glass of the café. Somewhere up there sat Arcturus, my old skindancing master, waiting to chew me out. Why did I feel like I was walking into another meeting with my dad?
“He ain’t in there,” Zinaga said, rising from her seat on the steps as I got out of the car. Half Jamaican, half Korean, with a layered Jennifer Anniston shag that went well with her dark olive skin, she had been Arcturus’ ‘new’ apprentice for years now. Zinaga had beautiful tattoos, but today she was uncharacteristically bundled up. She’d wrapped her muscular arms in white longjohns and slipped on denim coveralls whose straps wanted to snap trying to hold in her bust—cute as ever, and she wasn’t even trying. “You kept him waiting over an hour,” she said, folding her arms. “He told me, fuck you.”