vampiric life was endothermic, sucking energy out of its surroundings. That’s why their flesh was often cold; that’s why necromancers considered them dead.
So, as fearsome as this thing was, it should run down-but I had no such limits. I was the tattooed, and my magic marks were powered by the life in my beating heart.
Time to draw my weapons.
“Keep this safe for me,” I said, pulling off my vestcoat and handing it to Gibbs. Then, gritting my teeth against the brisk January air, I pulled off my turtleneck, exposing a torso covered in dozens of intricate tattoos.
I’ve thought about this outfit carefully. It’s sort of my new uniform since I seriously decided to use my magic tattoos, and not just wear them. Tattoo magic works best when skin is exposed to the air-but I’m not gonna get naked in front of a bad guy. So my leather “pants” are actually chaps, unzipping down the seams quickly to leave me in cutoff jean shorts, and under my shirt is a black sports bra. Even the boots have side zips-I want to be able to run if I gotta, but still be able to peel them if I need the braided snakes on my ankles.
“Whoa,” Gibbs said, holding the leather and snakeskin in his hands like he was looking at his favorite collection of porn. “Didn’t expect that, girl-”
“Don’t get too excited,” I said, grimacing. I’m a total weather lightweight-the mercury couldn’t be lower than fifty-five, but I already had goose bumps rippling down my arms. I hoped it wouldn’t interfere with the magic. “I only dance for the magic.”
I straightened, then let my body ripple. There was an art to tattoo magic: my old magical tattoo master had called it skindancing. I bailed on him early, so I didn’t know half the art-but with the little I did know, I could concentrate the lifeforce within my body, the living magic, the mana, hold it within like a growing flame-then let it out to make my tattoos come alive.
Tattooed jewels glowed, snakes slithered, butterflies fluttered-and then my vines curled out from my skin into a coiling thicket around me. My finest tattoo, the Dragon, was gone-I had released it to attack the serial killer that took Cinnamon-but with the dozens of tattoos I had left I had more than enough to make a glowing shield of living ink.
“Holy-” Gibbs said, backing up, and in the corner of my eye I could see the other officers backing up further, even more afraid, faces lit green by the glow of my marks. I was getting better if you could see the glow of the vines even in the bright sun, and I smiled.
Time to show that wall-painter what real magic was.
“Spirit of fall,” I murmured. “Shield my path.”
There is no “spirit of fall,” of course. I do admit there are intangible entities in the world, but I don’t believe in actual spirits, “of fall,” or of any other kind, and I could have used any words for my incantation. For tattoo magic, what really matters is the intent of the wearer-and powered by the intent behind my words, my tattooed vines unfurled into a glowing perimeter that would keep me safe as I rescued Revy.
Or so I hoped. I stared into the churning knot of barbed wire and menacing vines, coiling over each other like a nest of snakes. How the heck did it work? I had never heard of magically animated graffiti. In theory the mana that powered it should have been draining away slowly, but it actually seemed like it was getting stronger. But how?
I stared into the design, trying to grok it. For graffiti it was so… complicated, built layer upon layer upon layer. Revenance was embedded in a rosette of vines; coiling out from that were thick, stony tentacles, a grey brick octopus clutching at cartoon images of the trees and buildings around us. Colorful lettering in the exaggerated “wildstyle” font floated behind the octopus, and behind that was a fully painted backdrop of a grassy hill against a black sky. Almost like an afterthought, the base of the design sported two groups of curving, cracked tombstones, one on the left, one on the right, drawn to look like they erupted from the base of the wall.
I considered whether the tombstones could be the graffiti’s power source… perhaps by necromancy? No, they were dry of blood. Earth magic from the hill image? No, I would have felt it if this was a ley-line crossing, and that also ruled out the idea that the octopus tentacles were drawing power from the nearby buildings. So how did it work?
Surely not… graphomancy, or something like tattoo magic? I stared past the weaving vines, into the letters, trying to see past the tag’s art and through to its logic. It was difficult: the wildstyle letters were distorted, overlapping, intertwining, and I could barely pick out a single letter. But every stroke was amazing work, and there was a glittering texture to the pigments, almost like the magic inks used in tattoos. Perhaps a variant of tattoo ink, reformulated to let the magic work on rock? But the designs of tattoo magic only work because skin is a canvas infused with living magic. Where was the graffiti getting the mana?
And then Revenance moaned, the blackened tongue in the dark hole of his mouth looking like he’d been left to die in Death Valley. No one does that to my friends.
“All right,” I whispered. “Your vines versus my vines. Let’s go.”
I stepped forward, letting my vines curl out, green and glowing. The barbed tentacles twisted towards me, and now I could see that they were a braid of wire, roses and chains. They slapped against my thicket of magic, initially just questing, then with increasing rage. I shimmied forward, then whirled and drew my glowing green blanket in. The hooked braids pounced-just as I threw my arms out and let the vines explode outward, tearing the barbs to pieces.
Colorful, bitter powder puffed through the air as the braids flew apart, a residue of the materials used in this tag. The thin layer of oil chalk was weaker than the ink woven into living flesh that made my tattoos. But there was a hell of a lot to the tag, and it kept getting stronger, two more tombstone images erupting as a dozen more tentacles hungrily pounced on me.
Instinctively I crouched back, hands raised in a guard as the braided vines whipped around me, shoving me roughly through my shield. How was I going to get Revenance out if I couldn’t even reach him? Then I noticed what my crouch and guard had done. I’d fallen back into a Taido karate middle stance, and it hit me: karate was a kind of a dance.
I dropped into a low stance my instructor called jodan, legs a low coiled crouch, one fist jutting forward to guard me, the other pointing straight backwards at the sky, the karate version of thumbing your nose. Immediately my legs began to throb: I wasn’t strong enough to use the stance yet, but it was stable, damn it, and coiled in a way I could use for my magic.
I began writhing again, making my tattoos shimmer; working with the stance; and then, just like in class, I raised my fist to protect my face, shot the back hand and leg forward together and moved, planting myself five feet forward in the mirror image of the same stance.
The thing flailed at me like an animated octopus; but with every step I poured more power into my marks, pushing in closer, closer; my vines pushing its vines back. I didn’t feel the cold anymore: I was sweating. My bum knee began pulsing with pain, but I ignored it.
The pressure was intense; my boots ground against the gravel as I punched forward, step by step, shoving myself to the heart of the barbed wire rose. Twenty, ten, five-then the wires parted, I stretched my arm out, my fingers brushed Revy’s coat Then the rose reared back and struck me square on the chest, hurling me thirty feet backwards onto the street. It would have knocked me on my ass, but as I saw my feet flying into the air, something inside me clicked, and I coiled my back and turned the impact into a roll that flipped me clear over, tumbled me roughly back into a crouch-then back to standing.
I mean, holy shit. Karate really works.
But the end effect was that I was back where I started, knee throbbing, arms scraped, back covered in gravel, watching Revenance screaming in pain as the tag coiled back inward. Sure, I was standing, but it felt like I had been knocked flat on my ass.
“If you’re so damn strong,” I muttered, glaring at the tag, “why haven’t you killed him yet? What the hell are you waiting for?”
“Good try, Dakota,” Rand said, handing off a tarp to Gibbs. Behind him other officers were running up with blankets, tarps, ropes, and poles. “We’ve got enough to cover him, but we need something tall to. .. what the hell?”
I turned to see Cinnamon and Horscht running up with a… a portable basketball goal? Where had they gotten that? Big beefy Horscht struggled to keep his grip on the backboard while little old Cinnamon easily carried the concrete-filled tire that was its base, and when he slipped, she kept going, backing towards the rosette of wires before I could speak.
