“I’ll- fuck! -I’ll be good.”
“Come on, now,” Galacci said, patting my shoulder. “You’re just making it harder.”
And so I stood, and handed Cinnamon over to Galacci, who wiped his face clean and took her with a flat, stony stare. I glared at Burnham, but she didn’t give me a second glance, just handed a card to me, told me to call her office, and bustled off to her own car.
And then Cinnamon was in the back of the squad car, staring at me. Abruptly Galacci looked back and said something, and Cinnamon looked forward at him. After a moment, she smiled-and then laughed, and waved at me. She put her hand against the window, huge clawed fingers spread out in a five-pointed star; and then with her other hand she made a thumbs-up towards me. “It’s going to be OK, Mom,” she mouthed.
And then the police car started up and took her away.
Punching Bag
I kicked and kicked and kicked the bag as hard as I could, and screamed.
The first few kicks had started out all right-the Taido ma-washy-getty kick was close enough to an old Tae Kwon Do roundhouse that I’d picked it up pretty quickly. But Taido had all these stupid rules about how to throw kicks that I didn’t really get yet, and it was hard to remember to come back to the same position. I tried, really, but the more I kicked, the madder I got, and by the final three I’d lost all form and was just kicking, kicking, kicking.
“Jeez, Dakota,” Darren Briggs said, dropping what he was doing. He was the black belt in charge of Emory University’s Taido club. Today he’d traded out his normal blue instructor’s jacket for a uniform so old and worn the belt and clothes were both shades of grey, rather than the stiff white karate gi’s worn by the rest of the class. But the man in the uniform wasn’t old. He was young, clean-cut, with a spray of spiky hair he was constantly dying different colors; this week, it was purple and platinum white. “Are you drinking?”
“I have a water bottle,” I said, waving him off. “I’m hydrating.”
“No, I meant, have you been drinking?” he asked. “Like, alcohol. Your face… ”
I straightened and looked in the mirror. My face was flushed red, almost mottled, and I knew it was from more than from just working out. “No,” I said, disgusted, whacking the bag one more time and cursing as it caused a throbbing pain in my knee. “They took Cinnamon.”
“What?” he said. “Your daughter? Hey, wasn’t she supposed to come tonight?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to fall back to the long low stance Darren called choo-dan -but it just made my knee throb and I cursed. “Yes, damnit, damnit, damnit! YAAAA!”
And I kicked the bag again, this time so hard it popped off the chain and fell to the floor. No big feat-it was attached with a big carabineer up top and was always popping off. But as it fell, pain exploded, and I knelt on my other knee, cradling the wounded one. “Damnit.”
“Dakota,” Darren said, hunching down beside me. “You all right?”
“No,” I said. “And I know what you mean. No, my knee hurts.”
“Same one? Damnit, Dakota,” Darren said. “All right, take a break. You weren’t supposed to start back until you healed, but I cut you a break because you were doing so well. Clearly you’ve been overdoing it. So chill out tonight, and go see a doctor tomorrow.”
I hissed, and Darren pressed. “I mean it. Nobody’s been seriously injured in the whole history of the club and I don’t want to start with-”
“All right, all right,” I said, struggling back to my feet. “Ow.”
“Just… try to go easy,” Darren said. “Keep icing it after every practice. And on your own time-don’t laugh-do sem-ay-no-hokay, the new exercise I showed you tonight. You did really good for your first time. It’s pretty advanced stuff.”
“It felt natural,” I said, “but, man, it wore me out.”
“ Sem-ay can give you a real workout, but it’s low impact,” he said. “Probably OK for your knee, but if it bugs you, focus on the breathing. Focus on the breathing if nothing else.”
“Does that really help?” I said.
“Sure does,” Darren said expansively. “Breathing isn’t just the source of your power-it’s the bridge between your conscious and your subconscious.”
I looked at him skeptically, but just then, Rary, the number two in the class and Darren’s off-again, on-again girlfriend, appeared with an icepack.
“No, seriously,” she said, putting the ice on my knee. “The diaphragm is the only muscle under joint control of the deliberative and autonomic nervous system. Controlling your breathing lets your conscious self signal your subconscious self in its own language.”
Both Darren and I were staring at her. “What?” she said. “I am in med school.”
“Soooo… ” Darren said. “You going to join us at Manuel’s?”
“No,” I said. “I have to bail. I gotta get the last of my junk out of my apartment tonight.”
“You need help?” Rary said.
I shook my head. “I’m almost done,” I said. “And, look, Olsen is being a real pisser about Cinnamon. She almost called the cops on me, not just that night but when I went back for the first load. I really don’t want to involve you guys. I’d hate for her to call the cops on you.”
What I didn’t say is that I was scared my crazy life would bite these people. Maybe it was uncharitable, but I thought of them as mundanes: they couldn’t roll minds, lift cars or block bullets, and if their guts got ripped out they wouldn’t come crawling back to them.
So that’s how it was that I found myself alone in the apartment at ten-thirty that night, with about fifty thousand times more crap to box up than I remembered. I desperately hoped Mrs. Olsen wouldn’t hold me to the midnight deadline, but I started tossing things into boxes at random in the hope that I’d somehow get it all done.
My cell rang. “Dakota Frost,” I said, taping up a box with the phone in the crook of my shoulder. “Best magical tattooist in the Southeast-”
“You should have that on your answering machine,” Calaphase said over the line.
“I do,” I said, “you just catch me awake whenever you call.”
“My shift at the werehouse must be when you sleep,” Calaphase said.
“Your shift?” I said, laying down one more line of tape and tearing it off with the dispenser’s serrated edge. “You lead the Oakdale Clan. Don’t you have flunkies for that?”
“I lead by example,” Calaphase replied. “What are you doing?”
“Moving out,” I said. And I explained about Mrs. Bitch downstairs and her ultimatum.
“Charming,” Calaphase said. “Speaking of bitches, I have news from the Lady Saffron, delivered by the way of the Lady Darkrose.”
“A four-link chain,” I said, emptying a junk drawer wholesale into one of the smaller boxes. “Nicely insulated so that neither of us has to talk directly to someone who has talked to the other. Sounds good. Maybe this will keep things on an even keel.”
“Don’t count on it,” Calaphase said. “Her high-and-mightyness the Lady Scara-”
“Who?” I asked. “I can only keep track of so many ‘Lady S-something’ vampires.”
“She’s one of the Gentry,” Calaphase said. “Old, moneyed vampires who used to run the cities before the rise of the Consulates. There a few of them, the Lady Onyxa and the Lord Ian something and supposedly an ancient vamp too deformed by age to be seen in public.”
“Sounds charming,” I said. “And this Scara?”
“Their enforcer,” Calaphase said. “Scara’s informed the Lady Saffron that the Gentry officially considers the Consulate’s handling of this plague a failure-because they’ve found out one more of their vampires has been killed by graffiti, just like Revenance.”
“Oh no,” I said, my heart falling. “A new wave of killings… ”
“Maybe,” Calaphase said. “Scara had been hunting the vampire’s human servant, thinking he was responsible, but when she found him he was hiding out, scared shitless. He and his mistress were partying on New Year’s Eve
