“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 cafe’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.
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-”
“Bastard s?” 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.”