Blood Rock s-2

by Anthony Francis

  “Painter was in school in Sao Paulo when the fangs attacked his town,” he said. “Wiped out his whole family. He tracked them back to Acre, trashed some of them, but got pretty trashed in return. That convinced him to never tangle with fangs. So he started lookin’ for a weapon.”

  “His family was really old-school-old weres, with old magic and old gods,” Tully said. “Painter had learned some of the old ways, so he wandered out into the rain forest, across the border, looking for his family temple. He found it, or somethin’ like it-”

  “Oh, Jesus, ” I said.

  “-and holed up in the tunnels below. He found some cave paintings, or somethin’, and figured out how they worked with schoolin’ he’d picked up in Sao Paulo. Eventually, he cracked their code, and learned some dark magics to use against the fangs.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said. “So this wacko found an equivalent of Atlanta’s Underground, not underneath Sao Paulo but under some lost Mayan… no, Incan temple, maybe, deep in uncharted forests between Brazil and Peru, where we’re still finding uncontacted tribes to this day?”

  “Yeah, I guesses,” Tully said.

  “So, in the deepest heart of the rain forest, under an ancient temple built by an unknown culture, the Streetscribe found even older secret places he thought might be related to his family gods, and started reverse-engineering random magics until he made something really nasty?”

  Tully nodded, swallowing.

  “And why are we dealing with this here,” I asked, “rather than reading in the comfort of own homes about how Sao Paulo was wiped off the face of the Earth by an explosion of magic so horrible that the faithful rightfully interpreted it as the wrath of God?”

  “He tried, ” Tully said, and swallowed again. “Painter went back to Sao Paulo, began writing again, this time as Streetscribe. But he was too bold, and soon the police were after him-and then the vamps. So Streetscribe fled north-and kept going.”

  “And now he’s here,” I said quietly. “His new home.”

  “Still fighting the vamps,” Tully said. “Sounded like a good idea. You gots to trigger the traps, see, and until… until he took Revy, I thought he’d just use them against bad vamps.”

  “Bad vamps?” I asked. “I thought werekin used vampires as their protectors. ”

  “At the full moon,” Tully said with disgust, “when rich jerks comes out to play. The rest of the time, vamps prey on us lifers, for blood or money. There are plenty of bad vamps.”

  “Including the Oakdale Clan?” I pressed. “Who decides who’s a bad vamp, Tully?”

  “Fuck!” Cinnamon barked. “ Trans was a bad vamp.”

  “Yes, baby, but not as bad as you might think, even given all the bad stuff he did,” I said, staring at the blackbook. My point was that the tags couldn’t tell good vamp from bad vamp, but I didn’t have time for that argument. “Why’d Streetscribe give you this, Tully?”

  “I-I told you,” Tully said. “We- he wanted to set traps for… for bad vamps. So he gave me his blackbook… and told me to make copies.”

  I looked up in horror. “And you gave it to… ”

  “Other werekin. The kids, the lifers,” he said. “ We’re the ones the vamps hassle. But what does it matter? He didn’t teach anyone else how to make the masterpieces.”

  “He didn’t have to,” I said. “The tags are part of a larger spell-a city sized resonator. If you throw up a tag of the right design at the right point, it will plug into the circuit, elaborate itself like the one the Gentry had, and, eventually, attack-just like yours did with you.”

  “Oh, crap,” Tully said. “Oh, crap. He mentioned tags powered each other, but I thought… I thought you had to paint traps deliberately, thought you had to prime them to spring-”

  “Well, clearly you thought wrong, or he deliberately misled you,” I said. “All you really need is a photocopy of his notes, and you can spray paint your very own murder machine. How many copies of that nuclear fucking weapon are floating around, Tully?”

  He swallowed. “I-I gots no idea.”

  We sat in silence. Then I flicked on Cinnamon’s iPod and shined it over the blackbook’s pages. Most was gobbledegook, but the few English scraps were chilling: Let the graffiti get the upper hand and I wish to become a living scream so all the world can feel my rage.

  The magic was clearer, but still elusive. I concentrated. Whatever the Streetscribe had copied, it wasn’t precisely Incan, and was even less recognizable now that he’d regurgitated it. It was hard to get a firm grip… on what he was trying to do…

  “Blood rocks,” I said, with sudden inspiration. I turned to Tully, who stared at me, baffled. “He was at school in Sao Paolo? Like, at college? Like, a chemist? ”

  Tully nodded.

  “Blood on rock. The arsons are unintentional, or at least a side effect. The flames are a desiccant,” I said. All this time, the answer was in me-three years of chemistry at the best university in the Southeast. I flipped through the blackbook, which made more sense with each page. “They evaporate all the remaining blood, make sure it’s harvested. The vapors get sucked back through the magic door, and the particulates are blown away… resetting the tag.”

  Cinnamon and Tully just stared at me.

  “The Streetscribe’s more than a magician. He’s an engineer. Everything in these tags has two purposes,” I said. “The background is transmitter and receiver. The whorl is trap and transport. The flames clear the tag of its victim, and prepare it for… for what?”

  “For the next victim?” Tully said.

  “For the next part of the spell,” Cinnamon said.

  “To receive the magical intent of whatever spell the harvested blood is fueling,” I said, flipping through the pages. “More vampire traps? But these spells, they’re not just for vampires. There are glyphs for weres and humans too. It attacked you, Tully. But why? ”

  “Can I?” Cinnamon asked, holding her hand out for the book.

  “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 protege. 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 ke
pt 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 pillhumans 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.”

  Mano a Mano, Face to Face

  “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, st
arting 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.