Graves' Anatomy

by Jace Anderson & Adam Gierasch, Adam Gierasch

Genres: Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

Los Angeles tattoo artist Luna Graves’ world turns upside down after her estranged father dies and she discovers that it’s her destiny to be a doctor to monsters. When an ancient illness returns, it’s up to her to stop it. Can she hold on to the world and people she loves while leading a secret life among the creatures of the night? Check out this original and fun urban fantasy! 

Release date: November 17, 2020

Sample

Prologue

            As soon as the pale fingers closed around her wrist, twelve-year-old Luna Graves knew she shouldn’t have come down the alley alone.

According to her parents, she should never go down the alley alone, but the alley between Heliotrope and Edgemont in Hollywood was part of Luna’s kingdom. Every day she skateboarded home from Lockwood Elementary with her best friend Jess; every day when they reached the alley she split off and went the last block alone. She knew how to ollie over every crack, how to swerve past every trash can. Sure, sometimes she saw used IV needles — sometimes she saw junkies using those needles — but if Luna was anything, she was a tough East Hollywood kid. She knew how to handle herself.

            Today she had started down the alley like any other day, the skateboard’s wheels bumping against the cement. Old buildings — at least, old for Los Angeles—loomed on either side of her, their fire escapes rusted black skeletons against a clear blue sky. Maybe Luna felt an odd tingle in her stomach, but she dismissed it. She swerved around a tire and the skateboard shot out from under her, ricocheting off the back door of Khao Soi Thai restaurant and coming to rest by a dumpster across the alley. Luna bent down to pick it up, and that’s when the fingers closed around her wrist, pale and clammy as night crawlers.

            Luna jerked back, but the fingers held her tight. She looked to see who had grabbed her. The little tingle in her stomach lurched into her throat.

            A disheveled man of about thirty was lying behind the dumpster. Dirt and blood stained his clothes. His blonde hair clumped into three large mats. His skin was dry, but Luna could smell his sweat. And his eyes: at first glance they were as flat and black as a shark’s, though a second glance — and Luna did not want to take this second glance, but she didn’t have much of a choice — revealed that the man’s irises were such an ebony that blended in with his pupils.

            The man lifted his free hand, and a dull clank revealed the thick chain fastening the iron cuff around his wrist. Whoever this man was, he’d escaped from somewhere — and now he had Luna.

            The man swiped the index finger of his free hand across her forehead. Sniffed. A slow smile spread across his face. “You’re shadowborn.”

            Luna tried to yank her hand away again. She didn’t know what the man was talking about. “Leave me alone!”

            The man studied her with those flat eyes. “Even with these chains, I can snap you in two. Give me your wallet.”

            Luna didn’t doubt that he could hurt her. Underneath his stained clothes were a barrel chest and arms thick as tree branches. She pulled her Shrek coin purse out of her backpack and handed it to him, hands trembling.

            To her surprise, the man dumped out the wadded bills and change, ignoring them. Instead he focused on her school ID, his lips twisting into a wicked smile. “Little Luna Graves. You live at 1618 Angela Street.”

            “Yeah, and my dad –”
            “Shut up. Do what I say or I’ll visit 1618 Angela Street tonight. Hurt you and your parents and…” he paused, and then his awful grin grew wider. “Your dog. You have a dog, don’t you, Luna Graves?”

            Luna did have a dog, a pitbull mix named Marshmallow that she loved as much as anything in the world. The man had her full attention.

            “I will find out everything about you. I will be your shadow,” whispered the man. “Unless you do exactly what I say. Do you understand me?”

            Luna nodded.

            The man lifted his free hand again. The cuff slid down his wrist, revealing his skin underneath. It was red and raw, worn away by the metal. Luna couldn’t help but wince.

            “Do your duty, girl. Bring me a tool, something to cut through this. And I need medicine: you know what kind. Bring it to me or I’ll find you. And I’ll strip the skin right off that dog of yours.”

            Suddenly a second set of teeth—needle sharp and clustered together like row houses—popped through his gums, obscuring his normal teeth.  Luna swallowed a scream, pulling away from the man as hard as she could.

            “Your—your teeth–”

            Just as quickly, the man’s strange teeth receded into his gums. Luna blinked. Did I really just see that? How could he have a second set of teeth?!

            With that the man released her wrist. Luna leapt backwards, grabbed her skateboard and ran as fast as she could away from the man and the alley.

 

 

            When she returned – and it had never crossed her mind not to, because even at home, with Marshmallow tumbling over himself to greet her and her grandmother sleeping in front of the TV, Luna could feel those flat black eyes watching her – the man was even paler than before. His breath was shallow and rapid. When he saw Luna, his horrible smile seemed to swallow half of his face.

            “Good girl. Show me what you brought me.”

            Luna clunked down her backpack and pulled out the bolt cutters she’d found with her stepfather’s tools. The man placed his wrist on the ground, and she carefully positioned the cutting blades around the iron cuff. She pressed as hard as she could with both hands, succeeding only in making a slight mark on the iron. “Keep trying,” urged the man.

            Luna did, leaning all her weight on the bolt cutters. Finally the metal snapped, allowing the man enough room to wriggle out of the cuff.

            He grabbed the cutters from her, making quick work of the cuffs on his ankles. Despite his haggard appearance he was unnaturally strong, able to snap through the metal on the first try.

            As soon as he was free, Luna stepped back. The man looked almost hurt.  “I’ll keep my word,” he told her.  “No harm shall befall you.” Luna still looked confused, so he clarified. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

            Luna reached into her backpack and pulled out granola bars, bottled water and an apple. The man tore into the food, ravenous. “Were you in jail?” she asked, fascinated by the man as much as she was scared of him.

            The man ate half of the apple in one bite, not bothering to avoid the core. “Yes. A very secret one. I was there for a very long time.” He brushed his matted hair back and brushed dirt off his stained shirt. “Pardon my appearance.”

            Luna was too scared to ask why the man had been in jail. She pulled out antibiotic cream and reached to put it on his abraded skin. His eyes flashed anger. “What the hell is that?! I thought you were shadowborn!”

            “I don’t know what that means,” Luna protested, reaching into her backpack for the hydrogen peroxide and bandages she had brought. The man’s face lit up when he saw what was wedged behind them: a container of Morton’s Salt. Luna didn’t know why she had taken it. All she knew was that her stomach had tingled when she touched it, tingled in the same lurching way it had when the man grabbed her, and that was reason enough.

            The man stretched out his arms, exposing his raw wrists. “Someone has trained you after all!  Come on!”

            “The salt?” Luna exclaimed.

            She received a withering look in reply. She poured salt into her hands and, after another urgent look from the man, rubbed it on his reddened skin.

            A sizzling sound filled the air, but the man sighed with relief. Before Luna’s eyes his skin turned from red to pink to pale tan, the sores healing over. 

            Luna applied salt to his ankles with the same result. She looked at him in wonder. “What are you?”

            “I know what I am,” he replied. “But it seems you don’t know what you are.” He removed a small ornate padlock from the chains that had been around his feet. “You can call me Heath. Keep this, for someday you may need my help.”

 

Chapter One

            The ornate padlock dangled from Luna Graves’ neck, suspended by a silver ball chain. It was a beautiful piece, really, so she usually didn’t have to explain why she wore it. The truth was, Luna didn’t know why she had held onto it for the past dozen years, and she’d started wearing it to justify keeping it for so long. If anything it reminded her to listen when a little tingle rose up in her stomach, to pay attention to that little flinch of fear.

            Most people wouldn’t think of Luna as scared. Here she was in her element, the tattoo parlor, leaning over hulking Tony Ramirez with his three-quarter sleeves of horror movie creatures. But Luna knew it didn’t take courage to deal with Tony. Talk to him for two minutes and you’d realize that, behind the all-black clothing and hardcore punk T-shirts, he was just a sweet guy who liked make-believe monsters.

            Monsters. Luna didn’t believe in them – of course she didn’t. Over the years she’d pushed the memory of that strange man Heath down into the recesses of her mind and scrubbed it clean of those elements that didn’t make sense. If the needle-sharp teeth entered her consciousness – a fleeting thought as she sketched one of Tony’s new designs, maybe, or a half-formed nightmare – she dismissed them. Her scared twelve-year-old mind had seen things that weren’t there. End of story.

            Luna’s arms told a different tale: like Tony’s, they were covered with deliberately macabre designs. A Lovecraftian being, all tentacles and scales in bright colors of emerald green, purple and burnt orange, was splashed across Luna’s right shoulder. One long tentacle snaked all the way down her arm to encircle her wrist, where a needle-toothed, looming vampire peered out from a rocky precipice. Bats circled a harvest moon on her elbow, and a rugged scaly creature emerged from a lake on her forearm. The theme continued on her left arm, where two bristling hellhounds bounded down her tricep, nearly colliding with the ghoulish hag with backwards feet on her lower arm. 

            The designs were beautiful, haunting, each one a Luna original…and each one taken from her nightmares. Creatures had started peppering Luna’s dreams after her encounter with the strange man in the alley. She’d wake up panting with fear, her eyes probing the darkness, seeing flashes of monstrous faces at her window. Her parents would tell her they were just dreams, but they didn’t feel like Luna’s other ones. She felt that she could reach out and touch these creatures. Drawing them was the only thing that allowed her to go back to sleep: it was as if getting them on paper got them out of her head, if only temporarily. Getting them on paper also transformed them from terrifying to beautiful: under the influence of her pens, paints and pastels the monsters that tormented her during the night became as spectacular as strutting peacocks.

            “Ow!” Tony whimpered. Luna flipped her hair — naturally a dark brown but currently dyed black with streaks of aqua blue that set off her pale green eyes — over her shoulder. She was dressed for work in old overalls and a tank top that showcased her ink-splashed tawny arms; just a bit of lipstick and mascara adorned her face. “Deep breaths in and out,” she instructed, adjusting the position of the tattoo gun. “Focus on your breathing, not the pain.” Tony was her last appointment of the day. It had been a busy Saturday at Tattoo du Monde, and Luna had spent most of the day inking standard flash on bewildered tourists. (Tattoo du Monde was located on Hollywood Boulevard just west of Highland, flanked by not one but two smoke shops, and as such was frequented by tourists confused as to why Jennifer Lawrence and Ryan Gosling weren’t getting pizza across the street.) Working on Tony was a treat – it was the first original design she’d done all day – even if he loathed needles just a little less than he loved tattoos.

            Tattoos had been Luna’s calling since she got her first ink at sixteen, much to her mother Ramona’s chagrin. She and her best friend Jess ventured east into trendy Silverlake, exploring dusty record shops and secondhand clothing stores, when Luna spotted Mizayaki Tattoo, its windows filled with colorful custom flash. Even though the art was beautiful, Luna already knew that she wanted to use one of her own drawings as the basis for her tattoo. She flipped open her notebook open to a detailed drawing of an orange demon. “I want this.”

            For the next hour she gritted her teeth, listening to the steady buzz of the tattoo gun and regretting every extra stroke she’d put in her drawing. The demon had been a frequent visitor to Luna’s dreamscapes, but it took her three weeks to realize that once the devilish imp resided on her body it no longer visited her at night. After the hellhounds took up residence on her right arm, they disappeared from her dreams as well. The logical part of Luna’s brain knew there couldn’t be a correlation between the two and that there had to be another explanation for her newly uninterrupted nights of sleep…but deep down she believed that by permanently fixing the horrific creatures on her body she’d pulled them out of her dreams. In the space of eighteen months her body became host to her most frequent tormentors and Luna slept better that she had since she was a little girl.

            She’d gotten all of her ink done at Mizayaki Tattoo and, two days after her eighteenth birthday, she approached the owner with her portfolio and her Los Angeles health certification and asked for an apprenticeship. He grumbled. Every week, every day, he got emails and Facebook requests from wannabe tattoo artists who thought tattooing was a quick way to riches or an easy way to live an alterna-life without rules. Worse still were the “scratchers,” self-taught tattoo “artists” who had ordered a tattoo kit online and considered themselves pro. He turned her down.

            If Luna was anything, she was determined. She stayed late at the shop every day to sweep up. One of the artists taught her how to make needles, and she practiced until her fingers bled. She disassembled and reassembled the tattoo machines, scrubbed the bathrooms until they gleamed. At this point she was on a full ride scholarship to the Otis School of Art and Design, taking the bus out to Marina del Rey for anatomy drawing classes and creating her own course of study on the history of body art. Soon Mizayaki Tattoo had to admit that it did in fact have an apprentice — but it was still another year before Luna was allowed to work on a client, and that first client was Jess.

            Three years later her apprenticeship was done. She’d be welcome back at Mizayaki Tattoo as a full-fledged artists once she’d worked elsewhere for at least five years. Luna soon landed a job at Tattoo du Monde. Her initial excitement soon dimmed as she realized Hollywood Boulevard clientele were less interested in unique pieces of art than in the same old, same old: skulls and roses, barbed wire and tribal tattoos. Still, Luna considered tattooing an almost sacred act: someone was entrusting you to alter their body, and in the two years she’d worked at Tattoo du Monde she’d never forgotten that. 

            After finishing up Tony’s latest tattoo — a classic Wolfman on his right shoulder — and cleaning up her station, Luna arrived home to find her boyfriend Devin standing in the living room with a hammer, contemplating the bare walls as if they contained the secrets to the universe. Luna grinned: in the two years she and Dev had been dating she’d never known him to make a fast decision, and hanging pictures in their new place was proving to be no exception. They had merged their two apartments into one the day before, and their new living space was still in disarray. Dev ran a hand through his short dreads and pushed his black-framed glasses up on his nose. Stubble dotted his brown cheeks, and his plaid shirt topped a scruffy pair of chinos. “I can’t bring myself to put a nail in anything.”

            “Then let’s eat — I got basturma,” Luna announced, setting down a bag of food on a still-packed box.

            They sat on the floor and ate near the picture window. It overlooked stretch of Cahuenga Boulevard that, after decades as home to moribund copy shops and dive bars, had suddenly become hip. She and Devin had debated moving into neighborhoods all over Los Angeles, from Montrose to Culver City to downtown. Luna loved the city: its vibrancy, its sprawl, its quirky history. It was, she liked to tell people, a horrible place to visit but a great place to live. Los Angeles required devotion, a willingness to explore mini-malls and far-flung neighborhoods for its hidden gems. The vintage clothing sales where you could get a 60s dress for a dollar — numbing Szechuan crispy chicken — the hidden garden in Griffith Park — you had to search to find these, and Luna was an avid searcher. In the end, though, her heart remained with East Hollywood. It always felt like home.

            What really got Luna about this apartment was the view from their third story window. It gave her a perfect perspective on the vacant storefront across the street. Inside were high ceilings with windows that let in the afternoon sunlight. Her dream was to someday snag the space herself and open her own tattoo studio, one that specialized in custom work instead of the standard flash that the Tattoo du Monde tourist crowd preferred.   

            Devin’s coffee brown eyes followed her gaze to the “For Lease” sign. “I came up with a logo for you today.”

            “You did?!” Devin was a graphic designer and comic book artist. Luna scooted across the floor to sit next to him as he opened his notebook.

            “Ink, Inc.” read the logo in a retro yet modern-feeling font. One of Luna’s impish creatures loomed over the words, colored in brilliant purples and greens.

            “I love it,” she told Devin as she cuddled up next to him. “It’s perfect.” Dev’s arms, like the rest of him, were wiry but surprisingly strong. There was no place she felt safer than in them — and even though they’d been together a couple of years, Luna still felt butterflies in her stomach when she kissed him. She rested her head on Devin’s shoulder and suddenly the weight of the day came crashing down on her. Moving, working, unpacking: she was exhausted. She let her eyes drift closed.

 

 

            The storefront medical clinic on Alvarado Street screamed “low-rent.” The rest of the medical-pharmaceutical-industrial complex might be getting ever more corporate and polished; here the sign offering immunizations was made at Kinko’s. The welcome mat was from Home Depot. If you paid attention to the hand-lettered “CLOSED” sign — and most people didn’t — you’d see that it hung in the window at most times. Just as it was doing now.

            A fine layer of dust covered the reception desk. The lobby chairs hadn’t supported anyone’s body weight for years. By all appearances the Graves Medical Clinic was deserted.

            But one floor below, in the basement, there existed a duplicate of the upstairs layout: lobby, exam rooms, and labs. This was where the real business of the Graves Medical Clinic happened, where Dr. Frederick Graves worked. At 76, Frederick had a sharp mind, thin frame and white hair that long ago gave up the battle against static cling. As he entered the lobby he took off his bifocals, scratching his liver-spotted scalp with the tip of one glasses arm. “Anyone left?”

            His trusted nurse Minx sighed from where she sat at the reception desk. “David’s in room two, and he’s being a real bitch.” Dressed in baggy scrubs, with makeup-free alabaster skin and long red hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, Minx nonetheless had an aura of glamour about her. And while “nurse” might be her title, it barely encompassed her role – she was Frederick’s confidante and co-ringmaster of the sideshow that was the Graves Medical Clinic.  

            Frederick grunted, taking the file that Minx offered but not bothering to glance at it. He knew it was best to come into the exam room face first, his eyes going to the patient instead of boring into a file. To do otherwise was to invite catastrophe.

            He opened the door to Exam Room Two. Darkness greeted him, utter and complete.

            “Light bothering you, David?  Close your eyes.” His fingers went to the switch on his old-fashioned doctor’s headlamp, the one he’d found at the swap meet in Pico Union twenty-six years before. The light worked better than any otoscope he’d ever seen.

            Snick. The switch. A beam of light cut across the room, and —

            BAM! Some thing shot through the illuminated area. Frederick had time to register dusty clothes, muted yellow green skin. Hard clicks sounded against the tile floor instead of footsteps.

            Frederick whirled, turning to follow the thing’s movement. But when the beam of light came to rest on the far wall, nothing was there.

            A low hiss sounded from the dark.

            “Minx! Get me 10 mg of propofol now!” Frederick shouted.

            He reached up and gripped his headlamp. Tilting and adjusting it, sending the beam over the exam room. There was the door — the blood pressure machine — the intercom —

            WHAP! A long, thin tail whipped out from the shadows. Hit the headlamp bulb, shattering it. Glass sprinkled to the ground.

            Darkness descended over the room. Frederick cursed under his breath. He could turn on the lights, sure, but that would only agitate David, and —

            Grrr. The sound was right behind him.

            Frederick turned, the shattered glass crunching under his feet. Eyes still adjusting to the dimness. Coming face to face with a huge mouth stretching open, the blocky, plaque-encrusted teeth reflecting the low light. Strings of drool stretched between the leathery lips, and a thick tongue slithered out of the mouth.

            Before Frederick had a chance to react, the thing lunged forward. Frederick ducked, and the creature hit the wall over his head. Plaster fell to the floor.

            Frederick dove for the exam room door and darted through it. He slammed the door behind him, gasping, and threw his full weight against it. It shook as David battered against it.

            Minx rushed forward. Her hands moved fast, locking three bolts to keep the door in place. Then she turned her attention to the doctor. “Frederick!”

            His eyes were bloodshot, his Einstein-like hair even messier than normal, and his clothes were splattered with a milky green goo…which was smoking. Bloody scratches criss-crossed his liver-spotted skin. But worst of all was the way he was clutching his left arm, his whole body stiffening.