“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 maitre 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.”
“Touche,” 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.”
Land of the Skindancers
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.
