Frost Moon (19 page)

“I’m
not going to give you shit,” Philip said, chuckling, smiling at me. “I completely understand your desire to be beside Dakota—”

“Not for the reasons you think,” Savannah said coldly. “She was under my protection. Kotie, I’m so sorry—”

“Don’t blame yourselves.
I
fucked up,” I said. I felt
so
ashamed. “I provoked him. It’s all my fault—”

“Do not talk like that,” Philip said calmly. “No one had the right to do this to you.”

I shook my head. “I-I know that,” I said, struggling for words. “I’d like to kick the little fucker’s teeth in. It’s just—earlier, at the werehouse—”

At which I trailed off. Davidson was a Fed, an X-Files-grade Fed with his own spooky black helicopter, and here I was spilling the guts on an Edgeworld werehouse. What was
wrong
with me—did they have me on some kind of painkillers?

“Werehouse?” Davidson said, arching an eyebrow. I kept looking out the window, and he asked, “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Kotie,” Savannah said. “Talk to us. What happened at the werehouse?”

I glared at her, but she was just scowling, red bangs and goggles hiding her eyes. But if she didn’t seem worried talking to Davidson.

“Transomnia was on guard,” I said, looking at Davidson briefly before staring back at Savannah. “He called you a dirty name, and I… I punched him in the face, knocked him down in front of Lord Buckhead. During the attack on me he said he was… punishing me.”

“You
decked
a
vampire
?” Davidson said, astonished.

“Transomnia,” Savannah said icily. “I’ll remember that.”

“Now, now,” Davidson cautioned. “Don’t go trying to be a vigilante—”

“I’ll do as I please,” Savannah replied. “I
am
a daywalker.”

Davidson scowled. “Daywalker or no, you don’t know what you’re getting into—”

“If you two are going to fight, could you do it outside?” I said.

Davidson raised his hands, and Savannah looked away, embarrassed.

“Look, I know you just came to,” Davidson said. “But I want to warn you. Doctors are going to appear and hover over you. The police will want to take a statement. We’ve got a police detail on you—all off-duty volunteers right now —”

“
Volunteer?”
Savannah asked, putting a hand on her hip. “She just had an attempt on her life, and you have to use volunteers?”

“Welcome to policing,” Philip said. “Many storm the gates, but few man the walls. We’re lucky Dakota has family on the force; it was easy to find volunteers—”

As if on cue the door opened, held by Horscht, one of the officers who had picked me up earlier. He winked at me, then stepped back to admit a group of doctors and nurses. There was an older man who looked like he might be in charge, but he deferred to an impossibly young doctor with a broad smile and parted black hair.

Davidson and Savannah stepped back to give the doctors room, but the youngish man looked at them sharply. “We need to speak to Miss Frost about her medical condition,” he said, clearly about to give my visitors their walking papers. “Are you with the family?”

“I’m here as her girlfriend,” Savannah said.

“I’m here on behalf of her father,” Davidson said, “and the police detail is my doing. If I’m not here, someone from the detail needs to be with her at all times.”

The doctor twitched a little, and I said, “Let them stay. I’m half out of it anyway. Someone with memory needs to be here.”

The doctor laughed. “Very well. Do you prefer Dakota or Miss Frost?”

“Dakota,” I said.

“Dakota, your leg has some of the most wonderful tattoos I’ve ever seen,” he said, smiling, sitting in the chair that Davidson had just been in, patting the bed in a friendly way that made me feel like he was touching my leg, without ever actually touching it. “I saw them when I was patching up your knee this morning. I’ve never seen colors so alive, so vibrant. Maybe I caught a whiff of the anesthetic, but it almost looked like one of them moved out of the way while I was working.”

“That would be the dragon,” I said. “He’s pretty mobile.”

The doctor raised an eyebrow, and looked briefly back at Savannah and Davidson.

“Miss Frost is a magical tattooist,” Davidson said. “Her tattoos
do
move.”

“Well, I’ll be,” the doctor said, turning back to me. “Dakota, my name is Doctor Blake. I’m an orthopedic surgeon. Doctor Hampton called me in to work on your knee because it was torn up inside. You may not remember everything that happened—”

“A vampire beat the shit out of me and kicked me in my knee when I was down.”

He smiled, a wry, boy-I’d-like-to-get-that-fucker smile if I’ve ever seen one. “Well, Dakota, when he did that he tore the ligament on the inside of your knee—what we call your MCL. It was on the edge of what we call a grade four tear, with some collateral damage, so I had to go in to your leg, do some minor arthroscopy—but it looks good. If we can keep you off the leg for a few days, we can have you up on crutches within a week. We’ve got to watch it, of course, but with some rest, ice, and therapy, I think you’ll regain full use of your knee.”

“Oh fuck,” I said. “How the hell am I going to pay for all this?”

“Don’t you have healthcare at the tattoo parlor?” Davidson said.

I lifted my head to look at him. “Are you kidding?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Savannah said. “You were under our protection. The Consulate will pay for everything.”

“The ‘Consulate?’” the doctor asked.

“The Vampire Consulate of Little Five Points,” Savannah said. “That collar of hers is a sign of our protection.” Her voice grew icy. “It
should
have been enough of a warning.”

“Well, I’ll be,” Doctor Blake said, smile a little more forced. “When she said vampire I thought she was just being metaphorical.”

“Doc,” I said. “About my hand—”

“Well, you had a
lot
of bruises and scrapes, which is common when some son-of-a-bitch kicks you when you’re down. And I won’t lie to you—you’re going to get some ugly looking facial swelling over the next few days. You’ll get even prettier than you are now.”

“Hard to believe,” Savannah said. I laughed, halfheartedly.

“But, on your hand, there were… cuts,” he said. “Do you remember what happened—”

I looked up, saw my fingers in the curved beak of the pruner, and his unsmiling face. “I can walk away from here with ALL your fingers and leave you with stumps. I’ll put them in the blender when I get home, one by one, and think of your stumps. You’ll never tattoo again.”

“He—he had some
pruning shears
,” I said, eyes tearing up, unable to catch my breath, feeling my heart race and a charge of adrenaline tingle up my spine and churn my gut. “He got my
fingers
in them. He got my fingers and he
squeezed—
“

“Lord have mercy,” Savannah said.

“He said he could take them any time,” I said. I didn’t bother to hide the tears leaking out of my eyes. “My fingers.
All
of them. That he’d leave me with
meat flippers
if I crossed him. That I’d never tattoo again—”

“The police will take a statement later, I think,” Davidson said, in his supremely calm voice, stepping forward to put his hand on the bed in a way that made me feel like he’d put his arm around my shoulders. “You don’t need to go into all the details now—”

“That’s right, Dakota,” the doctor said, reaching out to touch my bandaged hand. “I’ve heard enough. Your hand is fine. You
will
tattoo again. And you have good friends. They’re good people. I don’t think they’ll let anyone hurt you again.”

He squeezed my hand very gently, emphasizing it, as if to let me know everything would be all right. I winced a little, but I could feel my hand was still whole. The doc was all right. He was all right. But the effort to smile made my head hurt, and I reached up to rub my temple.

My Mohawk was gone.

My forehead, cheek and temple were bandages, scrapes and bruises, but beyond that there was no ‘hawk, just a ragged brush of hair. I tore my bandaged hand out of his grip and raised it to my head, groaning, afraid to touch it. It was almost completely shaved in front, and behind that only tufts of hair were left, like someone had weedwhacked the front of my head. Only the hair at the back of my head had been wholly spared. “Awwwww—”

“You were like that when I saw you,” Doctor Blake said, embarrassed. “But I think they did that in the emergency room when they were treating you. They needed to clean your wounds, but your head and face were covered with some kind of paint —”

With a tremendous
CRACK
the world went black, leaving me choking for oxygen through a sludge of white sticky goop. A splintered five-gallon paint barrel lay splattered around me, and my hands were covered in a thick layer of white paint. “Let’s see you use your marks now,” Transomnia said, eyes twin red coals.

“Oh,
God,”
I said, hands cradling my bruised, plucked head, hovering over it, afraid to leave it, afraid to touch it. “That bastard got me good, he got me good—”

Savannah came to my side, patting my hand, saying something soft and bracing.

“Leave me alone.” I said, eyes squeezed shut. God, what a horrible way to find out how vain I really was. Someone’s hand touched my shoulder, and I shook them off. “I don’t want anyone to see me like this. Just—please. Leave me alone.”

Philip said a few quiet words, and I let my face fall into my hands. After some time the door closed, and when I looked up, I was alone.

I fell back against the bed. I stared at the ceiling. And then, I cried.

23. NEVER AGAIN

“If I wanted to maim you for life, you’d be lying there wearing a bloody pair of meat flippers. And I can have you again. You’re my bitch, anytime I want—bitch. And next time I will get creative. So never cross me again. Ever. Ev-er.”

I lay there in the hospital bed, drifting in and out.

At first all I could think of was how close to death I’d come. Not just with Transomnia—with all the monsters I had just insulted, taunted or spurned. The Bear King. The Marquis. The ‘Lady’ Saffron. Even little Cinnamon could have torn my throat out.

What was scarier is that any one of them could have done far worse—made me a werewolf, or vampire, or God forbid, a vampire’s slave. Transomnia had proved that my tattoos and all the power I drew from them would not stop a determined opponent. I shuddered. He’d let me off relatively easily, when he could have raped and drained me and made me his mindless thrall. Compared to what he
could
have done, he’d been a cream puff.

And nothing he
had
done required any vampire powers. Sure, tossing the paint bucket had been quite a feat, but any big bruiser could have done it. But a big bruiser with a tire iron would have just left me dead or close to it. What was really scary about Transomnia was not his powers, or his strength, but his mind. His… creativity.

And then my fingers started tingling and I started thinking about his threat to creatively amputate them. At first it made me even more scared.
I didn’t dare cross him.
Then it made me mad.
How dare
he
cross
me? And then I got scared again. The loop continued until I drifted off into a haze of anger and fear, hearing Transomnia’s warning, “Never cross me again, ev-er,” play over and over in my mind like a broken record—until my mind itself put a stop to it.

“
Never
again,” I said firmly, sitting up in the bed. “Ev-er.”

Davidson was sitting in his usual seat, and lifted up.
“That
sounded promising.”

“What day is it?” I asked.

“Monday,” Davidson replied. “Around noon. Savannah’s crashed in the waiting area.”

“Of course,” I said. “Even she can’t burn the candle at both ends forever.”

“I thought vampires ‘died’ during the day,” Davidson said, holding his fingers up in scare quotes. “I never met a real daywalker before.”

“Fishing for information from the vampire’s girlfriend?” I asked. “Wrong pond. We split after she started drinking blood.”

“I was just asking,” Davidson said. “We don’t get a lot of vampires in the black helicopter division.”

“What does your division handle then? Aliens?”

“
Maybe
,” Davidson said. “Fishing for information from the man in black?”

“Touche,” I said.

“No, it’s not a problem, I’ve got my flashy thing right here,” he said, fishing in his coat pocket. “I can tell you anything you want and then just erase—oh, drat. Left my flashy thing in my other coat.”

“You can flash me anytime,” I said halfheartedly.

He laughed. “Sounds like our Dakota. You up for a few visitors?”

“Visitors?” I said, suddenly horrified, hands going to my head. Under my fingers my face felt worse than yesterday, and I was pained to feel the tender bald spot which had been the start of my deathhawk, much less the ragged tufts on my crown where they’d run out of paint-encrusted hair to whack off. Oh, no. Oh,
hell,
no. “You can’t let anyone in here with me looking like this!”

“Dakota,” Davidson said gently. “We haven’t been letting them in here at all. Until you woke up we didn’t know
anything
about your assailant other than ‘a guy in a black coat.’ Now we know his name and that he’s a vampire, but you were too distraught to give a statement. Not even Miss Winters knows what this Transomnia looks like, though she is checking. So for all I know he’s waiting to take another crack at you, sitting in that crowd—”

“Crowd?” I asked. “What crowd?”

“There are a lot of people here to see you, Dakota. A
lot
of people. You need to see them sometime,” Davidson said, in that oh-so-calm voice that let you know he’d back your play, but you’d be disappointed in yourself for not stepping up.

Finally I gave in. “Oh, all right. But not in here. Clean me up and take me to them.”

“I don’t think—” Davidson said, looking back at the hall. “You’ve just had knee surgery. You shouldn’t be walking—”

“Get me a fucking wheelchair, then,” I said. “Just don’t let anybody in here, not with me laying in bed looking like a… like a damn victim.”