Blood Rock

by Francis, Anthony

  A6 was a deceptively long warehouse, easily five or six times as deep as it was wide, that someone had converted into multi-level lofts. The upper lofts were apartments and artists’ studios, Ranger explained; the bottom had been an art gallery.

  Now, however, the maze of white walls of the gallery was filled with sleeping bags and piles of cardboard boxes—a makeshift refugee camp for the evicted apartment dwellers who were the Candlestick Twenty. There were actually almost a hundred holdouts in the complex, but the only ones that the media cared about were the ones Ranger had taken in.

  The strange scratching noise proved to be a giant galumphing dog, which immediately started scrabbling around us on the cement floor trying to lick us to death. Waving us off, Ranger collared the slobbering menace and dragged it barking (playfully) back to her upstairs apartment while she barked (not playfully) into her cell phone. When she returned, snapping the phone shut, her face was red and her hands were shaking.

  “That call was another hundred bucks down the drain,” she said. “I hate lawyers.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “But you didn’t call me here for legal advice.”

  “No,” she admitted, drawing me behind a few makeshift walls into a kitchen near the front end of the gallery. While I leaned against the kitchen table, she pulled a few glasses out of the sink, rinsed them cursorily and poured a couple of Cokes.

  “Thanks,” I said, staring at the smudged glass skeptically.

  “All this started,” Ranger said, drinking from the glass as if the germs from the skanky sink wouldn’t kill her, “when we had a fire and the city did an inspection. But all this shit is thick World War II concrete. We never had fires until the graffiti showed up.”

  “Damnit,” I said. “That’s consistent. Can you show me the latest tags?”

  “I didn’t see this one, but I’ve called the guys who did—speak of the devils.”

  My eyebrows raised as Keif and Drive walked past the kitchen window. Moments later there was a knock on the outer door. “Hey Ranger,” Keif’s voice called. “Let us in!”

  “Speak of the devils, indeed,” I said.

  Candlesticks Afire

  The four of us sat down in the kitchen. Drive started going over a map of the facility while Keif and I stared at each other across the table, me with my arms folded, him scowling at me from beneath his crown of dreadlocks, hands clasped tightly on the table.

  It was entirely too suspicious that Keif and Drive hit it big just when magic graffiti began spreading over Atlanta, that their marks had showed up on the tagger’s playground, and that now here they were again. And while Drive was blathering on about the Vaiian significance of this and the Niivan significance of that and his theory that the tag placement itself was a kind of graphomancy, Keif was actively sweating under my gaze.

  You didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to put two and two together. Keif was involved, in which case he was probably the one that tagged the building that burned, and would never fess up. Or … something else was bothering him.

  “I’m not here to finger you guys, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said, eyes fixed straight on Keif, who glanced away guiltily. “I’m not a rat. I walk the Edge. Your secrets are safe with me. But I have to know everything, Keif. I need what you learned from the tagger.”

  Drive abruptly stopped and stared at Keif. After a moment, Keif sighed.

  “Look, we call ourselves writers, not taggers—but yeah, I know the guy,” Keif said. “Not personally, but from his pieces. Super technique, great caricaturist, but he switched up, doesn’t do figures or signature tags anymore. Back when he did, he did these fat-hat little devils and signed them Streetscribe, written with X-R-Y not S-C-R-I—”

  “That’s the guy,” I said. “Go on.”

  “He’s got himself a three man crew now, from the looks of it,” Keif said. “An apprentice and a toy—no, that’s harsh. The senior apprentice just copies, but he’s got real skill with a can. The junior apprentice is still real sloppy, lots of drips, but he’s got a flair for new designs.”

  “The two-and-a-half Siths theory again,” I said, and Keif grinned. “But what about you? What have you learned from him?”

  “Look, I’ve never met him, or any of his crew,” Keif said, smile fading. “Not that I’d know if I had. But … you asked what my secret was earlier. I use walls that have mold, just like the Streetscribe, but that’s not all of it. I’ve been biting his designs.”

  “Aha!” Drive said. At my baffled look, Drive explained. “Keif means he’s been reverse-engineering the Streetscribe’s pieces. You sly dog, I’ve been wondering where you’ve been getting some of your better circuits.”

  Keif looked away. I stared at him. He was still acting like he had something to hide, but for the life of me I couldn’t see why he’d want to hide studying the tags. Or maybe it wasn’t something wrong from his perspective—the Streetscribe was a killer, after all.

  “So why is that a secret?” I said. “You afraid copying his art will piss him off?”

  “Copying?” Drive said. “Circuits are one thing, but don’t tell me you’re a cribber—”

  “I’m not cribbing his art,” Keif insisted, staring at the table. “I’m not! I’m biting his designs—a lot of other magical writers are too—but I am not ripping off his art! I want to make a name for myself. I can’t do that if I’m spending my time throwing up his pieces. Streetscribe and I are both representational artists—artists!—with our own styles. I do-not-crib!”

  I stared at him. Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he wasn’t a cribber. Maybe he was as artistic as he claimed. But he still looked embarrassed—and he’d just admitted that he and the Streetscribe were competing for the same walls. I decided to toss a line out and see if he bit.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’re not above whitewashing his tags if he’s taken prime wall space. You’re both targeting special surfaces for your largest tags, and he’s nailed all of the best ones first. And since you can’t ink magic directly over magic … you’re wiping his out.”

  Keif let out his breath in a sharp hiss, but he didn’t deny it.

  No one said anything. After a moment, Drive stood up. “A crossout is one thing, but an actual whitewash? What were you hoping to do, learn his tricks, wipe out all the evidence and take credit for them as your own? Man, that’s low,” he said, and stalked out of the room.

  Keif glared up from his clenched hands. “Happy now, Nancy Drew?”

  “I prefer Encyclopedia Brown,” I replied, “but if you’d just been up front about what you knew, then I wouldn’t have had to expose you.”

  “Why the hell are you butting into this?” Keif said. “Why can’t you let it alone?”

  “You popped up when this started going down, and I had to know why,” I said. “And now I know—he’s a giant, and you’re standing on his shoulders, using his work as your canvas.”

  “Who cares?” Keif said. “That’s how graffiti works. You don’t build your own damn buildings to mark, you mark what’s already there. Who cares if I’m doing it atop his shit?”

  “I told you his shit killed one of my friends, right?” I said. “Did I tell you the total body count is nearing twenty, including two close friends, one of them more than close?”

  Ranger went pale and put her Coke down. “Is that what went down last night?”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “Almost got killed, but I made it. My … friend wasn’t so lucky.”

  “Aw, shit, man, why are you doin’ this to me?” Keif said, staring up at no-one in particular. “This was a good gig—”

  “You kill anybody?” I interjected.

  “What? What? No!” Keif said, raising his hands. “My tags don’t have that kind of juice.”

  “Then I don’t need to tell anyone anything,” I said. “I can keep this quiet, but I’ve got to know how the graffiti works. Looking at images has helped, but both me and my graphomancer are stumped. It crucifies vampire
s, tears up werewolves, and can catch buildings on fire even after you paint it over. It can create wide area effects, like wind. It can be triggered remotely—it’s powered from an external source. Tattoo magic can’t beat it. I need to know how to short-circuit it, before the tagger snaps his fingers and sets half Atlanta ablaze.”

  Keif was silent for a second, eyes scanning the air.

  “How many tags are there in the Candlesticks?” Ranger asked abruptly.

  “I get it, I get it,” Keif said. “I’m thinking. To answer Dakota’s question, Streetscribe’s blackbook, his library of designs, is very complex. I don’t fully get it. But there are some base patterns that serve as conduits of power. Call them spreading throwups, doorway tags, and octopus roses. Those last ones are his real masterpieces, and they’re the most dangerous.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But how do you use his magic if you don’t understand it?”

  “I’m a leech,” Keif said bitterly. “Normally, you can’t write magic over complex magic unless you know it inside out. But remember you said you already knew whitewashing doesn’t destroy the magic? So I whitewash the underlying tag to lock it down, then lay down new circuits on the same lines to power my own designs.”

  “Like magical induction,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Keif said. “Though the rules aren’t so simple as electromagnetism. Even figuring out what parts of the design are the power elements is tricky. Unless you know graphomancy in and out, it’s hard to follow.”

  “I know a witch who can help me out with that,” I said. “But you’ve worked with his designs enough to know how their power flows. Is there a way to short-circuit them?”

  “Maybe,” Keif said, eyes closing, head moving as if he were tracing circuits from memory. When he opened his eyes, he said, “Never thought about how to make his designs less effective, but I’m sure I could come up with—”

  “That’s great,” Ranger said, an edge in her voice, “all this is fucking great, but, Keif—you never answered my question. How many tags are there in the Candlesticks, that you’ve painted over, that may catch on fire?”

  Keif sighed. “About a dozen pieces, most painted over, by me or others.”

  “Jeeezus,” Ranger said. “What triggers it? Are these just ticking time bombs?”

  I thought about that a moment. “Maybe,” I said. “It isn’t quite clear yet. At first I thought they catch fire because they’re painted over, but today I learned that wasn’t true.”

  I stared at Keif, hunched over, dreadlocks spreading out like a porcupine; at Ranger, frowning over her Coke, at Drive, lurking just outside the door, listening with a disgusted look on his face. This was about more than just unsightly graffiti. “Anybody die in those fires?”

  Ranger nodded. “Seven in the first fatal one, then fifteen in the second.”

  “Twenty-two people? Jesus,” I said, leaning back in my chair. Count all the vamps and werekin who’d vanished or died, add in humans who died in suspicious fires, and you got a total body count of almost forty people. “Let’s assume the tag’s magic will be disrupted if painted over with a new tag, and diminished under a whitewash. Sound reasonable?”

  “Sounds … reasonable,” Keif said. “It might depend on the original purpose of the tag. Maybe yours were stronger. Intended to kill. The Candlestick tags may just be routine shit.”

  “All right. Then the right thing to do now is go to the new tag, photograph it, then figure out how to shut it down. If it works, we repeat the process here, first on any remaining whitewashed tags, then on your own. When they’re defused, we whitewash them.”

  “I am not,” Keif said fiercely, “going to whitewash my own art—”

  “You’ve got to, or you’ll go to jail. We can’t clean up the whole city by ourselves,” I said. “We can’t. We’ve got to tell the police. I can keep your name out of it, but my pull won’t help if your tags are plastered all over the city while you’re hanging at Michael C. Carlos.”

  “Aw, shit,” Keif said, face strained. “Damnit, we shouldn’t have taken that show.”

  “What? No,” Drive said, leaning against the doorframe. “You gotta clean up your act.”

  “Yeah,” Keif said, hunched over so far his dreads flopped forward. “I’ll think about it—”

  “You’ll think about it?” Ranger said, standing, tossing her Coke in the sink. “I’m gonna get evicted or arrested or killed because your shit is burning up our home? Hell no. You’re not going to think about it—you gotta clean it up starting now!”

  “Yeah, sure,” Keif said—and then glanced up in surprise to see all three of the rest of us standing. “You mean, like right now?”

  “Like now now,” I said. “The tagger moves fast.”

  Keif got to his feet. “All right,” he said. “All right. No time like the present, I guess.”

  We followed Keif out. He wasn’t the healthiest of boys; he had a distinct penguin wobble and I started to worry he wouldn’t make it. “How far are we going? Should we take my car?”

  “Nah, it’s not far, but I gotta run by the studio and pick up my paint,” Keif said, pointing at a door on the opposite side of the white canyon. “And I want to go pick up my camera.”

  “Wait. Something’s different,” Ranger said.

  I felt mana tingle around me. I whirled, inspecting the scattered pieces of graffiti. At first, I didn’t see anything different; there were some tags, but our tagger hadn’t shown up and sprayed a new masterpiece while I’d been drinking my Coke.

  But then my eye caught movement, low and furtive along the warehouse wall. At first I thought it was a mouse or a bug, but then I caught it again, long, spindly, like the shadow of a hand. My eyes didn’t want to see it at first, but then I had a brainflash. This is what it felt like when other people tried to catch my tattoos moving. I tilted my head.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Keif said. “There’s a spreading throwup along the wall!”

  A long line of black graffiti slithered along the base of the wall: spidery black shapes, boiling up in waves, a scribbled animation of a swift river running just beneath the edge, only surging up when the dark channel below could no longer contain it.

  I started backing up. I saw at once why Keif called it a spreading throwup—simple, fast to ink, and self-replicating—but it wasn’t just mold-powered graffiti. Maybe that factored into it, but there was no way that long, narrow rivulet of hate could generate that much power from that little surface area. This had to be a magical receiver: somewhere, folded up in that nasty scribble, something like Cinnamon’s pattern of golden rectangles was receiving power.

  “Everyone stay away from the walls,” I said. The graffiti was backing up at each of the doors, bunching up in a squiggle with oddly precise curves and angles before spilling up and around the doorframe or curving around the sill. “We need to move back, take cover—”

  “Oh my God,” Ranger screamed. “What the hell is that?”

  I looked up, and saw Zipperface stepping out at the other end of the canyon. Even from this distance I couldn’t see how I’d ever mistaken him for human: head too wide, arms too thick, legs too short. He was a walking caricature of a man, grinning and evil.

  We faced each other briefly; then he raised his glowing, misproportioned arms and graffiti exploded up the walls. Long thin lines leapt up, curving arcs slid through them, the graffiti wove into itself, creating a grid, then a moiré pattern—then filigreed flames.

  Zipperface stood there at the center of a spiderweb of graffiti—then he ripped open those metal teeth and belched out a spray of flame which rippled out through the spiderweb, caught along the walls and began screaming towards us, turning the alley into a canyon of fire.

  “We’re totally exposed here,” I said, backpedaling towards the door. “Everyone, back inside, let’s go out the back way—”

  “Don’t!” Ranger said, tackling me just as I got to the door. We rolled aside just as the flames screeched around us and coiled ar
ound the door in a tongue of flame. She grabbed me around the waist and lifted with surprising strength, half pushing, half dragging me away from the entrance and around my car. “There is no back way out!”

  “But all the squatters … ” I said, horrified, as the flames roiled around the door, licking out at my car, trying to reach around it to get us. “They’re trapped, we have to get them out.”

  “This used to be an arms warehouse,” Ranger cried. “The walls are a foot thick. There’s no way out but the front. Going back in is suicide—oh, Christ, my dog’s in there too—”

  “Jesus,” I said. I looked around, ran to A6’s window planter, picked up a pot and hurled it through it through the plate glass window. “Fire! Fire! Everyone out! EVERYONE OUT!”

  Ranger grabbed my hand and pulled, jerking me back from the window as fire leapt from the door to the window frame. A window to our left smashed open, a metal towel rack complete with toiletries flying out and scattering on the ground. A naked man, damp with shower water and hair still filled with suds, leapt through and tripped, bright arterial blood spraying out from his leg where the glass cut it. Keif was screaming, holding his hands to his face, a horrible flickering light beaming through his fingers and the seams of his clothes while Drive whapped him with his motorcycle jacket, trying to put it out. The door to A6 opened, and there were screams inside as the fire leapt inside the unit. And then the fire wrapped around my car.

  My Prius exploded in a yellow ball of flame, a loud clap hammering my ears an instant after the hot wash of heat stung my face. A yellow fireball roiled up into black smoke, there was the vicious sparkle of evil magic, then the battery caught, fire and magic, blasting the hatch out, slamming into the opposite wall in a blue-white bolt of magic that was half fire, half lightning.

  We were knocked back off our feet as broken glass fell from shattered windows up and down the alley. After a dazed moment, Ranger hauled me to my feet and yelled something.