floor was empty, the VJ was putting up his discs, and even the bar was starting to thin out. I was so stressed I debated downing a Jager, but it was just too late and I had to drive.
The streets glistened blackly as I steered the Vespa back to Candler Park, and hidden shapes flitted among the bony fingers of the trees. The moon had long since set, but I could feel it out there, looming, itching for fullness, an hour closer to midnight each day.
When I parked my Vespa underneath the stairs and lurched up to my flat, I could feel a presence behind me, every step of the way. Wulf, stalking me? The yowling of my cats and the mechanics of setting down some canned food on the kitchen floor did nothing to dispel my mood.
In the end I lay in bed, alone, staring at the ceiling.
Someone out there wanted the skin off my back.
And I just might be doing a tattoo for him.
5. TRUST BUT VERIFY
In the morning light I felt better. The timing of Wulfs request was creepy, coming right on the heels of Rand’s warning, but I didn’t think a tattoo killer stalking a victim would arrange a meeting with a witness present. In fact, I had no reason to believe that the killer was after me personally, other than Rand’s mothering; if he’d had even a whiff of evidence that I was the target, Rand would have put me in overprotective custody faster than I could blink.
My clients were another thing: scattered all over Georgia, with some of the best magical tattoos in the Southeast on their bodies, and without relatives on the police force who cared enough to track them down and warn them. I needed to figure out how to get the word to them—in my discreet line of work, clients didn’t often share their email addresses or cell numbers—but there was some time before the full moon. First things first—Spleen.
The little rat had extracted a thousand promises from me to meet him “the very next day,” to go over the contract for Wulf’s tattoo, and I’d agreed—though he’d have gotten the same effect just by showing up for my shift at the Rogue Unicorn.
One of the glories of being a tattoo artist, other than having God’s finest canvas at your disposal, is that I rarely need to get up before ten. Like most high-end shops, the Rogue doesn’t open its doors to the public until noon, though I and the other artists are usually there by eleven for consultations and prepwork.
So despite yesterday’s excitement I was able to sleep in, stroll to the Flying Biscuit cafe—after the breakfast crowds had died down, but before the towering, eponymous biscuits had lost their fresh-baked, morning fluffiness—and still putter in by ten-thirty to meet Spleen.
As I buzzed off of McLendon onto Moreland, I smiled. Little Five Points is the true heart of Atlanta. Forget the bigger Five Points, forget Buckhead, forget Midtown—it’s only in Little Five Points, in that vortex of alternative culture whirling through the colorful pile of eclectic shops at the crux of Euclid, Moreland and McLendon, that Atlanta truly lets itself be Atlanta.
The main square is a parade of dudes hanging out with yuppies, homeless people harassing executives, hot young gay men and cute old lesbian couples, consignment shops for New Age crystals and recycled old duds, bookstores and bondage shops, teahouses and tattoo parlors, protesters crying, “No blood for oil!” and vendors crying, “Get some hot pizza!”
Glorious.
If you look closer, you can see more—pale, gothy boys whose high collars hide the bites on their necks, tough butch chicks trying to disguise that bit of wolf in their eyes, and New-Agey grandmothers pretending not to be as hale and hearty as their potions made them. Plus a whole carnival of firedancers and piercers, taggers and tattooers brimming over with magic and trying to hide nothing at all. In the Southeast, Little Five Points was the center of the Edgeworld, a brand new subculture rejecting the secrecy of magical tradition and defying centuries of religious oppression, dragging magic kicking and screaming into the light.
Even more glorious.
The Rogue Unicorn wasn’t the largest tattoo shop in Little Five Points, but it was the best—and one of only two licensed to ink magic. Catty-corner from the giant skull that marked the Vortex Bar and Grill, the Rogue occupied most of the top of a converted Victorian whose sprawling bottom floor housed the quite decent Make