Blood Rock (56 page)

“Sure,” I said, giving it to her. “I thought the tagger attacked you for whitewashing his art, but that’s before I knew it was yours, and you his protégé. Would he have turned on you?”

“No,” Tully said. “The Painter understood I had to whitewash my own stuff. But he never warned me about the tags turning on me. And they never evolved like that before.”

“So,” I said, “you either gaffed the tag so it picked up something it shouldn’t have, which I seriously doubt would have worked, or the trap sprung on you because … it was
supposed
to?”

“No!” Tully said, uncomfortable. “He’d never do that … and if he had, he would never have told me. He had to know I’d never attack other werekin. He had to know!”

“But it had to attack a werekin,” Cinnamon said, lowering the book and staring off into the distance. “It
had
to. It needed a were. I
knew
it the instant Iadimus gave the counts, and the Streetscribe’s book backs me straight up. The deaths, they’re all towers of fours. It’s a diet.”

“What?”

“Carbs, protein and fiber,” she said, “only it wants weres, vamps, and humans. It needs them to balance the magic—mostly Niivan blood from vamps, a little Vaiian blood from weres—and lots of human suffering from burnt sacrifices washes it down, like fiber.”

I stared at her. “You learned about macronutrients in school?”

“We gots,
hah,
we gots a nutrition class,” she said proudly.

“So, tell me,” I said, “what’s this diet?”

“Counts, squares, cubes,” she said. “For each new were, it can eat its square of vamps, but it gots to wash it down with a cube of human deaths. Once it’s topped off, it stops, until a trap’s sprung again. Then it gets hungry, and eats until it balances out again.”

“Cinnamon, are you sure?” I said.

“Before it took Cally, thirty-nine people died, a tower of threes—three weres, three by three vamps, and three by three by three humans,” she said, showing me a sacred geometry construction in the blackbook. “After, it kept eating till it got a tower of fours—four weres, four by four vamps, and four by four by four humans—totals, that is, not skips forward.”

“The trap has to have a balance of fuel,” I rephrased slowly. “And each death of a were exponentially increases the requirements for other victims. So if it eats one more were—”

“It can take its square,” Cinnamon said. “Skip forward nine more, twenty-five vamps—”

“And a hundred and twenty-five humans total,” I said. “More if takes both of you—”

“Wait … why would it take
us?
” Tully said. “I don’t understands. He only hated vamps! Why would he want to hurt us? I—I don’t wants to go in there if he’s turned on—”

“In
there?
” I asked, following the involuntary jerk his head had made when talking. “
That
where you smell the most paint and blood?”

“Oh, God, oh
God
—”

“Oh, don’t worry, Tully,” I said. “The tagger doesn’t want to hurt you. He wants vampires. The occasional werekin is just a vitamin pill—
humans
are the green salad.”

“Mom,” Cinnamon said. “There are
thousands
of vamps in Atlanta.”

“And only a few dozen werekin have to die to clean them all out—along with tens of thousands of human deaths,” I said. “He’s building himself a werekin paradise enforced by magic graffiti, hungry for any vamps or humans that stray within the Perimeter.”

“God,” Tully said, sitting down, putting his hands over his ears. “That’s awful!”

“Welcome to the party, Tully,” I said bitterly.

“He never told me,” Tully said. “I swear, he never told me what they really did!”

“You should have figured out what they
really
were when Revy died, or at least when it attacked you,” I said. “If you’d just stepped up, maybe Cally … ”

And I stopped with that. Slinging blame wouldn’t help us now.

“Mom,” Cinnamon said. “We gots to stop this.”

“A-agreed,” Tully said. Then, more strongly, “And I wants to help.”

“You can
help
,” I said, “but only from a distance. If he kills you, hundreds will die.”

“But Mom,” Cinnamon said. “He’ll
kill you
.”

“No, and no buts,” I said. “I need your help, but I have to fight him myself.”

“I could turn invisible,” Cinnamon said, peering down the tunnel. “Scope it out—”

“No!” I said, pulling her back. “Your tattoos, they’re werekin magic. Activating them will put out an aura stronger than a vampire’s—and if this thing is as hungry for werekin as it is for vamps, that will set the tags off like a bear trap.”

“Well, what then?” Tully said. “Just barge straight in?”

“Right—same plan as before, for real this time,” I said, slipping off my ruined bomber jacket. “We go in,
fast
, examine the tag, figure out how to kill it, and you two step as far back as you can while I disable it. If the tagger shows up, or the tag goes wild—run. Don’t try to save me, don’t try to fight him—just run. And
don’t
run in the same direction.”

“No!” Tully hissed quietly. “I gots to stick with her, protect her.”

“Fucking
coward,
” Cinnamon blurted, scowling and looking away. But Tully just shoved at her, almost playfully, and she swatted at him. “You wants
me
to protect
you
, little wolf—”

“Shush!” I said. “More than our lives are at stake here. Werekin are the sacrifice he needs to activate his magic. If, God forbid, he gets one of you, the other will most likely escape, and over a hundred vamps and humans get to live a few more hours.”

“A hundred and two,” Cinnamon said.

“For the love,” I said. “Just … move in with me, and fall back quick. Ready? Let’s go.”

We ran out into a vast, domed grotto whose crumbling stonework walls were laid thick with intricate graffiti, like centuries of glowing Technicolor cobwebs. The floor was half water, half land, a snaking pool and cracked paving stones making a yin-yang, complete with a little island and a tiny pool to make the dots of contrasting color in the black-and-white design.

Beyond the snaking pool was a hillock of debris that looked like a tumbled down gazebo … and beyond that, was the largest master tag I’d ever seen, with swollen cracked tombstones the size of MARTA buses, a giant wheat-covered hill the size of a circus tent, and a slowly spinning whorl painted like a galaxy, glaring down upon us like a giant all seeing eye.

“All right,” I said, planting myself in a ready stance. “Tell me where to go.”

“I’m looking, I’m looking,” Tully said, turning round and round.

“Something’s not right,” Cinnamon said.

“The magic feels different,” I said. “Guard yourselves.”

But nothing prepared us for what happened next: nothing. I put my hands up in a Tae Kwon Do stance, then shifted to Taido. Cinnamon and Tully crouched behind me, making a defensive triangle. We waited—still nothing.

“Maybe we gots the wrong place,” Tully said at last.

“Maybe,” I said, relaxing slightly. “Maybe I screwed up.”

“The logic’s right,” Cinnamon said. “That’s
the
master tag. But … ”

I squinted at the far walls. Tully shifted. I heard Cinnamon swallow.

“
Hahh—
what’s the sticky stuff on the walls?” Cinnamon said. “It’s giving off light.”

“What’s the brown?” Tully said. “That’s not paint—oh,
fuck
… ”

Stains of dried blood seeped from filigreed marks running the entire circumference of the hall. A white sticky substance, like cobwebs but thicker, coated the walls beneath it, glowing like moonlight, gathering itself up into bulbous masses like a frozen froth of boiling water.

“Blood rocks, indeed,” I said.

“Why do I knows what that shit is?” Tully said. “I can’t put a name to it.”

“You’ve lived around it for most of your life,” I said, turning round and round to follow the foul growth around the rim of the hall. “I’ve dated it, twice. We’ve seen it almost every day. It was standing all around you in the room, cackling, threatening to end our lives.”

“It’s the Niivan fungus,” Cinnamon said. “It’s what gives vampires their life.”

“Their
powers
… and thirst,” I corrected. “So … it’s literally a vampire tag.”

“Not just vamps. It uses Vaiian organelles too,” Cinnamon said. At our baffled looks, she explained, “The stuff in werekin blood that makes it magic. You learns about it in school.”

“Go, Clairmont Academy,” I muttered. “Apparently
I
need to go back to school.”

“Vamp blood carries pain, human blood is fuel, but werekin blood builds the furnace—and the furnace is about done,” Cinnamon said, pointing. Up from the dried blood, green roots climbed the dome like sick ivy. “Six werekin will complete the design. Then it won’t need us anymore. Just humans and vamps, which it eats up to kill more humans and vamps.”

My eyes widened. Four werekin had been killed already. I needed to get one of the two of them out of here. If the tag took them both it would complete the construction.

Then my eyes traced down from where she was pointing.

Beyond the gazebo, where the vampiric growth was thickest and most intricate, mingling with streamers of werekin roots, the material …
detached
from the wall. The growth became a glittering spiderweb of green and white, dancing through the air, converging behind the gazebo on a point we could not see. Cinnamon swallowed, and Tully shifted. They’d seen it too.

We looked at each other. Then, wordlessly, we edged around the wreck of the gazebo.

Someone had made their home there—and long abandoned it. Boxes and bags and bones were scattered about, along with food wrappers and fungus and foulness. The smell was ghastly. There was a large safety cage—grimy, rusted, and all bowed out as if battered from within. Beyond it, we saw broken art tables, plywood canvases, paint cans—and a slumped figure.

“Painter?” Tully asked, starting forward. “Painter? Are you all right … ”

I held him back. “He’s gone,” I said.

The Streetscribe lay sprawled in a chair before an eight by four piece of plywood, paint can still held in one hand. The beginnings of a new design covered the board before him, grids and whorls of black lines, a variant of the tag traps, more elegant, more deadly.

But something had gone wrong: sticky strands had erupted from the board and enmeshed him, thickening into black, rotted ropes that converged into his mouth, nose and eyes. Out through the back of his head, the strands exploded, spraying forth in a delicate spiderweb.

I followed the spiderweb up, up, a thousand tiny lines that grew into a fantastic array like the rigging of a ship, white ropes and sails coated with a green Sargasso slime. The magic had used his brain as a camera obscura, projecting the design across the upper surface of the hall.

“There’s your answer, Tully,” I said quietly. “Whatever discretion the Streetscribe had, it’s gone. All that’s left are his designs, working as intended without restraint.”

“Oh, God,” Cinnamon said. “He’s still breathin’.”

“Jesus,” I said. I couldn’t hear anything, but after a moment I saw his chest move. The man was half-rotted—
maggots
were crawling on him—and he still breathed. “Werekin healing, or vampiric reconstruction? Some side effect of the tag?”

“It’s keeping him alive,” Cinnamon said. “I knows it—”

“The hell with this,” Tully said, pulling his switchblade from his bag.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m gonna cut him out of that shit,” Tully said. “He’s a were. Maybe he’ll heal—”

“It’s in his brain, Tully!”

“I—I don’t cares,” Tully said, nervously stepping forward. “I
owes
him … ”

I’d love to say I said
Don’t!
or
Hey!
or
Maybe we should think this through.
But I wasn’t on top of my game, and I didn’t. In fact, all that I could really clearly think of was that putting the Streetscribe out of his misery was probably a good thing.

Then Tully’s hand touched the web, and we found out how wrong that was.

Tully jerked back as the Streetscribe twitched and a silver sheen rippled up the web. Rumblings and light echoed through the cavern. Deep images seemed to move in the darkness beyond the surface of the walls. Then the walls glowed, brightened—and Zipperface exploded out of them and began sailing through the air on a skateboard propelled on a trail of fire.

“Oh jeez, oh jeez, that’s his self portrait!” Tully screamed. “His spirit was consumed by his avatar!
His spirit is in his avatar!
”

Zipperface screamed along the outer edge of the wall, and I readied myself. Arcturus and I had gone over this. There was an
immense
amount of power in the master tag, more than we had ever anticipated, but it was all being channeled through one small mobile projectia.

So this was it: mano a mano, face to face, me versus Zipperface.

Could I cut Zipperface in half with my vines? Maybe, but he could burn them with fire. Use my Dragon’s fire against him? Zipperface had no real skin, the flames would dissipate. Use a hawk projection? He could use the baseball. Go hand to hand? He could use the bat.

None of my standard tricks would work—so I had prepared new ones. I shimmied, drew an arm over my back, and plucked a newly-inked feather from the wings of the Dragon. Then I laid it down on a newly-inked mark on my forearm, clenched my fist, and brought both to life.

Zipperface’s mouth peeled open into two glittering arcs of teeth. His ropy tongue snaked out as he hissed at me, and he pointed his bat at me and called me out. Then he looked down at his chest. Dead center, an arrow now protruded—though it had started life as the feather, before being shot out from the crossbow I had inked upon my arm.