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 cafe. 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.”
“He told you to fuck me? How sweet of him,” I said. There was little love lost between us. Zinaga had become Arcturus’ ‘new’ apprentice right around the time I’d started to realize I wasn’t learning how to ink magic tattoos just so I could live the rest of my life in Blood Rock, tattooing backwoods mechanics trapped in the 1950s. The transition had been… awkward. “But it’s a little late-I’m dating boys now. An official was bian.”
“You know what I meant, Kotie,” Zinaga said, uncomfortable and embarrassed. I suddenly realized she was a lesbian, or at least curious-and we’d worked together for six months and I’d never noticed. Some agent of change I was. “He says you’re ‘in Coventry,’ and when I asked what that means, he said to not even bother to call him. He’s really upset.”
“So am I,” I said. “I got kicked out of my apartment, DFACS took my daughter, and I spent the whole afternoon talking to lawyers I can’t afford.”
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer lady,” Zinaga said brightly, cocking her head, her hand on her hip. “You know, you should stick to one excuse. It sounds more believable.”
“That’s why I left out all the murders,” I said evenly, “or maybe they just weren’t material to my being late, whereas my legal woes are.”
“Oh, the murders weren’t material,” Zinaga jeered. “You’re spinning and spinning further. Are your highly- educated lawyers rubbing off on you?”
It was the same-old, same-old. I don’t know exactly what I’d done to made Zinaga get off about my education: after all, she had a degree in communications and I was a dropout. But this wasn’t funny anymore. And I was actually feeling a bit bad about my defective gaydar.
So I just stared at her. Her smile cracked a little bit.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. “And I shouldn’t have brought up my friends who died. It was just last week and I’m still pretty raw about it. Now, I spent the last two and half hours in traffic trying to get here, but since Arcturus doesn’t answer his phone, I couldn’t call him and tell him that. And since you wouldn’t answer the phone either-”
“Sorry about that,” Zinaga said, embarrassed. “And sorry about your friend. What-”
“Two and a half hours,” I repeated.
She cocked her head. “You gotta go pee.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, leaning against the car and crossing my legs for effect. “And in the Grist Mill Cafe, you have to buy something or Dennis-”
“No dumpink vithout eatink,” she said, exaggerating the cafe owner’s German accent. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll tell Arcturus you’re paying the bathroom tax.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking at her coveralls. “Did they pass a law banning tattoos?”
Zinaga looked at me in alarm. “No, why? Shit, have you heard something?”
“No, it’s just everyone’s covered up, even you,” I said. Zinaga specialized in light marks, so she could tattoo amazing marks on her dark skin that stood out like white glowing lines when she filled them with mana-but today you could just see a little silver scrollwork crawling up her neck. “I was hoping to see your masterwork-I never saw it finished.”
“You’ve been gone from Blood Rock too long, Dakota. It gets cold after dark,” she said, pulling her sleeve down. True enough, but in this context it felt like a lie. It wasn’t cold enough to cover up, so why was she doing it? Surely… she hadn’t ruined a tattoo so badly she felt she had to hide it? “I’m surprised you’re still here in that stupid vest-hey, what happened to your masterwork? Where’s the Dragon?”
My eyes narrowed. Interesting the way she deflected my question about her tattoos back onto me and my masterwork. She had been experimental; maybe she had ruined her tattoos, trying out some new design that had a bad interaction.
Finally I realized she was waiting for an answer and said, “I had to use it.”
“Use it?” she said. “You mean you detached it? Why? ”
I used it to defeat a serial killer who, blah, blah, blah. “It’s a long story,” I said.
She shook her head. “I’ll go tell Arcturus you’re here. You can tell him about the Dragon-I don’t want to get an earful about the sanctity of your mastermark when I haven’t even done anything. He still goes off on you from
