Frost Moon (36 page)

I just stared at him.

“When we got the lid, we also got some of his notes,” Philip said. “I’ve read them. From what I can tell… up until recently Mirabilus
was
just eliminating the competition. The tattoo harvesting is something new, just a silver lining, so to speak, that turned his hobby into profitable work he could do for someone else. The box was a
commission
.”

“So, if it wasn’t his…” I said, horrified.

“Then
who
was it made for?” Philip said, touching his hand to his ear, “Yes, this is Special Agent Davidson. Yes, I’m with Frost. No, she—there’s a problem with her
what?
“

“What is it?” I asked. Philip’s eyes had bugged and he was looking at me strangely.

“No, I don’t think she has a—yes, that was the—” His eyes narrowed and his face grew hard, stony. “We’ll be there right away.” He took his hand out of his ear and stood, motioning to me. “We gotta go. We’ll take a Shadowhawk—it’s faster.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, standing as well. “Where are we going?”

“Emory,” Philip said. “Cinnamon is dying.”

45. SILVER SHOCK

Cinnamon lay in the hospital bed, bedraggled and alone.

The rest of us recovered quickly. Buckhead healed on his own. Alex needed only minor patching. I ended up back in the hospital for one more day—mostly scrapes and bruises, but the real problem was my hands—the doctors said that if Transomnia had heated the pitch to boiling, my hands would have been scalded instantly, and the complications could have killed me. As it was, I escaped with minor burns, where goop had collected at the forks of my fingers.

Jinx was recovering as well. When Valentine opened her eyes, he dispersed the fungal opacity and let in far more light than her shrouded retinas were ready to handle—but not enough to cause damage. Her spooky geode eyes now have black snowflakes, letting her see a little. For now, she was stuck wearing darkened shades, but the doctors said that eventually, when her retinas finally adjusted, she might regain as much as ten percent of her vision. Who knew what that would do to her magic?

As for Cinnamon…

At first the doctors called it ‘hyperargyria’—silver shock—a kind of blood poisoning peculiar to shapechangers that can be caused by just trace amounts of silver in the blood. With her massive dose, she slipped into a coma, face ashen gray and gums blue, heart palpitating every time they laid her on her back. When we got to the hospital she was in the middle of a seizure, and they came damn near close to losing her.

But they didn’t. She survived the night, barely, and they called in specialists who knew how to handle silver shock—rolling her on her side to stop the shaking, clearing her blood of trace silver with something like dialysis, and feeding her intravenously to build up her strength.

But apparently silver poisoning
also
wreaks havoc on shapechangers’ immune systems. Not a week into her treatment, just one day after she came out of her coma, her fever shot back up and she started hallucinating. An opportunistic pneumonia had settled in her lungs, sending her back into the ICU; and when the doctors fought that off with one cocktail of drugs, she picked up another kind of blood poisoning, a flesh eating bacteria called MRSA—same brand that had attacked Valentine’s
projectia
—that they think she picked up from a bad IV administration. They moved her to a special ward of the hospital, and we all had to wipe our hands with sanitizer every time we left her room.

It took until damn near Thanksgiving for her to fight it off, but at long last, her fever broke and she finally started improving. I was there, every day, sometimes in the morning, sometimes on my break, sometimes in the evening—often, all three—talking with her, cheering her up, slipping her coffee or eclairs, bringing her teen magazines and audiobooks of Laurell Hamilton and gossip about the boys back at the werehouse.

So now it was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and everyone was out of town or off at parties—Philip back in Virginia, Savannah with her vampire clan, the werekin with their mundane families, the collegiates back in their hometowns, even the hospital priest was gone, helping out with a benefit for the homeless.

And so it was just up to me to show up at the hospital, seeing Cinnamon, lying there like a bedraggled cat, suddenly brought back to life when I walked in the door; and then suddenly we began talking and joking and laughing at all the were-mistakes in
Underworld: Evolution
as it played on the hospital TV.

And it was only then that I noticed she was wearing on her wrist one of those snap-on hospital nametags, just like I wore when I was a patient, not a month ago. And for some reason, I noticed, really noticed the name on it: Cinnamon Frost. Dimly I remembered the doctors telling me the DEI officers had to guess at her name, and had just assumed that Cinnamon was my daughter. I had laughed, saying that no mother would just have left her daughter alone with the medics, but I didn’t really object. And then, as I looked at the bracelet, I realized in the whole month that I’d been there I had
never
objected or corrected them—nor had she.

And around this point I realized: I’d decided to adopt Cinnamon.

“So, Cinnamon,” I said, reaching out to pat her tufted little hand. “I was thinking, you know, about you not having a mom.”

“What of it?” she said, suddenly sullen.

“Well, I don’t have a daughter.”

Cinnamon looked up at me in shock. Her eyes grew all shiny and large, though it was difficult for me to see it with all the water building in mine. Then she reached over and grabbed me and pulled me too her and held on tight, claws pricking me gently through my shirt.

“Mom?” She said the word so gently, it was like magic. And then she bawled. “Oh, Mom. Oh, my
Mooooom.”

“It’s okay, Cinnamon,” I said, patting her head. “I’m so glad I found you.”

Yeah, yeah, I know: sappy as hell. Wake the fuck up. When people talk in real life, they don’t make up all sorts of flowery phrases to say what they feel; they say the first thing that comes to mind and then sit there holding each other, glad to be alive.

And we did just sit there, for a long long time, her hugging me hard enough to squeeze the air from my lungs, me cradling her and stroking her soft, feline ears and cooing softly. Finally she said, “How is this going to work?”

“I don’t know, Cinnamon,” I said. “You’re a bit big for me to tell you to clean your room.”

“Oh, Mom,” she sobbed. “Give me a room, and you can tell me to clean it anytime.”

46. PAYOFF

The Valentine Foundation is going to pay out. I’m not joking. It’s a big scandal. There are half a dozen investigations ongoing, but apparently Mirabilus was playing his cards
very
close to his chest, because the Foundation appears
completely
legit. In fact their board was
mortified
to find out that Valentine had been killing potential prizewinners. The money may be tied up for years in court until the investigations around Mirabilus are settled, but the hands of Alex’s wristwatch tattoo are still turning, counting out one day for each turn of the Earth beneath the stars—and so they’re going to pay out.

Even better, I didn’t win just by default—there’s a clause in the contract which stipulates that if one party in the challenge fails to even attempt the feat, the result is decided not by default, but by a panel of experts. They lined up a half dozen of them, but not one of them could explain through trickery or science how it I made a tattoo watch actually rotate. That only left magic as an explanation.

Footage of me putting the watch on Alex even made it into the promos for the next season of the Valentine Foundation’s cable show—and so business at the shop has been booming. I’ve even managed to turn the loss of my tattoos into a benefit: I held public inkings for the butterfly and the snake, and plan to do the hawk next month. The Dragon, on the other hand, my masterwork… will take more time.

Cinnamon is going to be more than I can handle. She’s
officially
taken over my storage room for her bedroom and
unofficially
taken over the rest of my flat besides. I’m sure there will be a thousand forms and pieces of paperwork we’re going to need to sign to make this official, but I can deal with that. What I’m really dreading is the next step: she can barely read, so I’m planning to enroll her in school.

If you thought cats would scratch you if you put them in the shower, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Send iodine this Christmas.

Savannah and Darkrose have been hunting for Transomnia. We think the little shit’s left town. At this point I’d be inclined to let him go—without him, Cinnamon and I would be dead. Of course, without him I’d have all my natural teeth, but I’ve worked up a payment plan to do some tats for my dentist in case the money from the challenge gets tied up in red tape.

I’m still wearing Saffron’s collar. I hate it, Darkrose offered to remove it, but Savannah overruled her. I think she’s right—I almost died even
with
her protection—but I’d feel a lot more comfortable about it if I didn’t know she was enjoying it.

The Masquerade will remain open, for now. The publicity was good for it—as was the death of Mirabilus. It turns out
he
was behind the land deal that had closed the Masquerade—one of a half-dozen other shady land deals uncovered when Jack Conway finally tracked down the mysterious server failures at APD. Mirabilus, or one of his pawns, had hacked the entire City Hall East network, enabling him to intercept 911 calls, create fake land-use permits, change the A/C settings and God knows what else. Until it’s sorted out, the Masquerade stays open. Hooray.

I’ve made one call to Stratton, South Carolina, to make peace with my Dad. He was pleased to hear from me. I had expected him to give me shit about my tattoos, about never calling; but he had heard through the grapevine all the things that had happened, and just cried and told me again and again how happy he was that I was alive. Apparently he isn’t
that
happy—he still won’t get in a car and drive a hundred and fifty miles to Atlanta, to see me. I didn’t tell him about Cinnamon yet. It didn’t seem like the time to mention his new granddaughter, a weretiger.

Philip is gone, most of the time. He’s on some kind of circuit over the Southeast. I never found out what the stealth shape was, that night outside the Masquerade—he just said, “Well, we can’t always get the Shadowhawks where we need them quickly enough, it’s not like we can haul them on the back of a flatbed.” He’s similarly tightlipped about who might have given Mirabilus the box as a commission. But when he
is
in town, once every month or so, I buy him coffee, and he takes me out to the gun range for target practice. We aren’t calling it
dating
yet, but here’s hoping we’ll start.

Isn’t all that
great
? Doesn’t it sound so
wonderful?
Happy, happy, joy, joy.

But the truth is I still wake up almost every night, sometimes screaming, sometimes crying, always holding my right hand in my left, massaging my first two fingers, reassuring myself they’re still there. Sometimes it’s Transomnia in my dreams, red eyes gleaming as he snips my fingers off one by one; sometimes it’s Mirabilus, blue chips of ice glinting as he strips the skin off my back; and sometimes, I just plain wake up screaming.

When I do, Cinnamon comes and curls up in the bed beside me to comfort me; but just as often she wakes up bawling, holding herself, shivering, and I have to comfort
her.
And that’s when the worst feeling sets in: that I could have
done
something, that I could have
stopped
the trouble earlier. That I could have kept Cinnamon out of it. That I could have seen the trap Transomnia was in and helped him escape sooner. That I could have kept Wulf out of that damn body bag.

No, I’m not going to become a police officer, or a bounty hunter, or a detective, or anything like that. I like tattooing, and I’m not going to give it up.

But I
have
started karate, three times a week. Darren is amazing. He’s working with my physical therapist to help design a program to get me up and running as fast as possible. In the meantime, I get to see him run up a wall at the end of every class.

And, in addition to the karate, I have two other new weekly appointments—one with Jinx to school me in graphomancy and help me master the power in my tattoos, and one with Canon Grace, to help me decide what I
should
do with my powers.

I will not hide. I will not run. I will
not
live in fear.

Because I’m not just a tattooist.

I’m Dakota Frost, and I’m a skindancer.

Coming Next

Excerpt

From the outside, my baby blue Prius looks as normal as can be: a streamlined bubble of a car with an aerodynamic rear-hitch bike rack, humming along on a hybrid gas/electric engine. She couldn’t scream ‘liberal soccer mom’ louder if she was a Volvo plastered with NPR stickers. Peer inside, however, and you see something completely different.

In the driver’s seat, yours truly: a six-foot-two woman with a purple-and-black Mohawk, short in front,
a la
Grace Jones, but lengthening in back until it becomes a long tail curling around my neck. Striking, yes, but what really draws your eyes are my tattoos.

A rainbow of tribal daggers curls under the perimeter of my Mohawk, starting at my temples, cascading down my neck, rippling out over my arms, and exploding in colorful braids of vines and jewels and butterflies. Beautiful, yes, but that’s not why you can’t look away—its because, out of the corner of your eye, you saw my tattoos move—there, they did it again! You swear, that leaf fluttered, that gem sparkled. It’s like magic!

Why, yes, they did move, and yes, they are magic. Thanks for noticing. All inked at the Rogue Unicorn by yours truly, Dakota Frost, best magical tattooist in the Southeast.

Beside me sits a five-nothing teenaged girl, listening to a podcast on her iPod. Normally she’s dressed in a vest and Capri pants, but today she’s in a shockingly conservative schoolgirl’s outfit that clashes with her orange hair and elaborate tiger-striped tattoos.