underestimate vampire hearing. His brow furrowed, his thumb hovered over the button to kill it, but after a long pause he said, “Sorry, I have to take this.”
“What? Am I not here? Is this not important? Don’t you have voicemail?” Saffron said, looking legitimately astounded. “Am I really nothing to you two?”
“Yeah Gettyson, now isn’t the best-” Calaphase began, waving her off. “What? What? What the f-speak up, I can’t-Holy crap!”
It was hard to believe, but that pale stone face became paler, drained of all color. “Do we need help? Should I tell-” and he looked up at Saffron, then at me. “I’ve got them both right here. Yes, yes, no promises. Yes, I’ll hurry-I’m on my way.”
Calaphase closed the phone, and I asked, “What’s wrong?”
“We have to go,” he said. “The werehouse is on fire.”
The Tagger’s Revenge
We screeched round the corner down the old ironworks drive, debris rattling up a storm beneath the green loaner as it slid through loose gravel at every curve. Calaphase gripped the dash in fury, hunched forward, eyes intent, hands curled like the claws of a predator.
“Hurry,” was all he said.
But I was already stepping on it. Vines and bushes tore greedily at the Accord’s exterior. Then we were through, darting through chainlink and rumbling over concrete, speeding towards a vast pillar of glowing smoke looming over ruined buildings lit by yellow flame.
“And God moved over the desert in a pillar of flame, destroying everything in his wrath,” I said, eyes wide. “My daughter is in there! In a cage! ”
“Get as close as you can,” Calaphase ordered. “Then we do what we can. Everyone gets out. Stop here! I don’t want your car to catch on fire, we may need it to evacuate the wounded.”
I hit the brakes and we scrambled out. The rollup doors to the werehouse were open and Fischer burst out of the smoke, beard grimed with soot and eyes glowing with power. A young boy was in his arms, and an endless stream of animals swarmed out around him: mostly wolves, but also mountain lions, deer, even a horse-but no Cinnamon.
“Those are all the cages,” he shouted at Gettyson. “I checked the whole level!”
Gettyson nodded-he was in the throng, gesticulating, using the vampire guards and the unchanged elders to sort predators from prey. He caught sight of us and waved. “You two, take the side wing,” he shouted. “Get anyone out of there before the flames cuts them off!”
We ran round the right side of the building, opposite the wall where I’d saved Tully from the graffiti. Here was a long, low blockhouse, half buried in the ground, that had perhaps once been a storage area. It abutted the main building of the werehouse, where smoke was already billowing out an open door and jetting through cracks in the dark, sooty windowpanes.
“I’ll take the upper level doors, you the lower,” Calaphase said, vaulting up over the railing onto the next level and touching the first door with his hand. He cursed and jerked his hand back, then ran to the next door.
Stairs led to the lower level doors. They were all in a long low trench, sealed off by a chain link fence like a cage. The stairs stopped at a chain link grate with a simple padlock. I tried to bolt forward down the stairs, hoping to snap the padlock with one of my snakes, but was pushed back by a new wave of smoke from the door closest to the stairs.
“Help us!” a voice screamed, and I caught a glimpse of cat eyes and furred hands reaching through the links for help. Not Cinnamon, but for the grace of God-” Help us! ”
But the fire wouldn’t let me: wind goaded it on. Ugly, roiling yellow smoke boiled out of the door, breathing in and out like a living thing, surging every time I tried to get past. I tried crouching and slipping past, but the heat was so intense it staggered me, and when I tried to catch my breath the hot stale air and the tightness of my corset left me dizzied and coughing.
Well, fine. There’s more than one way to save a cat.
“ Spirit of fall,” I murmured. “ Extend my reach.”
A long vine uncoiled from my wrist and curled past the smoke, down the stairs, and I prepared myself, stretching my body, as best I could in the corset, to bring the snake to life. It began to crawl down the vine, and I willed it to slink down and snap the link on the chain And then the door screamed with rage and vomited forth a great blast of flame. The roiling fireball knocked me back, the flash of heat singing my skin even from dozens of feet away. And for a brief moment, the fire enveloped the snake on the curving vine.
Pain hit me like a live wire.
I screamed. The vine recoiled, trailing sparks through the air-sparks of flame, not mana, as heat destroyed the delicate pigments. The vine snapped back onto my skin and I jerked back uselessly, curling up into a little ball as white-hot pain burned into my flesh.
“Dakota!” Calaphase said, coming to my side. I tried to answer, but the corset was still crushing my diaphragm and I just gasped for breath. “Dakota!” he said. “Are you all right?”
I held up my hand. The snake itself was completely gone, the vine tattoo’s color had faded to a dull brown, and the skin around it was red and beginning to blister. The fire had burned me, burned me through the magic, even though my skin never touched the flame.
I caught my breath and looked at Calaphase helplessly. “I can’t help with this.”
“You know what? I can’t wade through fire either. So screw magic,” Calaphase said, punching my shoulder. “Get up, let’s help these people.”
He sprinted, no, shot down to the end of the low building with vampire speed. By the time I caught up with him, gasping, limping, my knee throbbing, he had torn the chain link fence away, and all I had to do was help lift the poor trapped werekids out of the dark hole.
“Where’s Cinnamon!” I asked the werecat. “Cin! Stray! Where is she?”
“Down by the weight room,” she said, coughing. “Lucky bitch was going on a hunt-”
“Show me,” I said.
We ran back around the werehouse, past the main entrance, jumping down onto the lower level, again curving around towards the same area where I’d fought the graffiti yesterday. When we got there, I paused, gasping again, looking up at the fire, at the tongues of flame now licking through the smoke-curling, artistic, like brushstrokes.
“Oh, hell,” I said. It wasn’t just fire.
“Come on, Dakota,” Calaphase said, beckoning from the corner. A great orange glow came from behind him, and I ran around him, bracing myself for the horror of the flames.
Rippling tongues of flame coiled up the wall that had held the tag, starting about ten feet off the ground. Above was all concrete, all concrete and yet it still burned; below, where the tag had been, was a huge expanse of cracked, sooty darkness that had once been white.
“Where would Cinnamon be?” I said, holding my side.
“Damnedest thing,” Gettyson said, staring up at the flames creeping up the cinder blocks. The fire reflected eerily off his odd eyes, like two slits of flame. “The damnedest thing.”
“Gettyson! Where would-what the hell,” I said, staring at the remaining wall. They’d gone back over it since the night of the assault on Tully. “You whitewashed it? All of it?”
“Of course,” Gettyson said, glaring. “It damn near killed Tully-”
“You fool! ” I shouted. “ This is a magic fire! How are we gonna fight it now, if we can’t see or even touch the magic mark that’s generating the flames?”
Gettyson stared at the wall, and then he saw it too. “Oh, shit-”
“Get anyone not needed to fight the fire and comb the woods,” I said, glaring across the parking lot at the dark green Oakdale forest. “Somewhere out there, the prick that killed Revy is fanning these flames, and we gotta stop him. Short skater dude, white or maybe Latino, baggy clothes, big-ass hat-and if he’s wearing the same shit- ass grin, kick his teeth in for me.”
