storing up the trickle of magic put out by the living mold underneath for hours or days before releasing it all at once in a torrent of mana.
No wonder I hadn’t been able to shield against the graffiti.
It was like trying to stop a bullet with tissue paper.
Inside Arcturus’ basement studio, the phone began ringing, and I started to get up to answer it, just like I always had when I’d been his star pupil.
“Leave it to Zinaga,” Arcturus said, stopping me with a hand on my shoulder. “Why so quiet? Trying to use all your college maths to figure out how it beat you?”
“Yep,” I said. “Actually, I’ve pretty much nailed it.”
Arcturus sighed. “Cocky as ever. You keep thinking you understand magic, but calling it mana is no better than calling it qi and looking for chakra. Everyone tries to reduce magic to laws they can understand. But magic doesn’t obey the laws of nature. Magic is super natural.”
“Supernatural doesn’t mean anything,” I said, staring out at the patterns in the sand as the phone went silent. “It’s just a word we use for the ‘vitamins’ of nature, the parts you can’t assemble out of smaller pieces unless you’ve already got the material to work with.”
“By that definition radioactivity is magical, or damn near close to it,” Arcturus said, rubbing his hands together. When the roughly inked yin-yangs on his palms came apart, a glowing pattern spread between them, a cat’s cradle of light far more delicate than anything that sprung from the finer lines of my tattoos. “But you know better than that. Magic is more than just a rare spice. It’s the spice of life-living, breathing life forms.”
I stared at the dance of light between his fingers. I knew the graphomantic patterns that made the form possible, could gauge his intent, maybe even measure his mana, but there was more to it than that, something just beyond my reach, elusive and tantalizing.
Then the phone started ringing again.
“Let me shoo whomever’s on the phone,” I said, standing.
“Don’t,” Arcturus said firmly. “ Don’t answer it.”
I stared at him, as the phone kept ringing, and ringing, and ringing.
“Answer your own phone on your own time,” Arcturus said. “Leave my phone alone. No one has any business calling my phone. If I wanted to talk, I would call them.”
“That won’t work if everyone has your attitude,” I said, as the phone kept ringing.
“I am not everyone,” he said, ignoring the noise. “I am Arcturus. I’m a skindancing master. And I’m with my star pupil, trying to beat some sense into her.”
“That’s incredibly annoying,” I said, pointing at the ringing phone. “I need to concentrate. Let’s at least take it off the hook.”
“Learn to ignore it,” he said. “Would you stop and answer a cell phone during a fight?”
“We’re not in a fight,” I said. “And what if it was important-”
“It is never important,” he said.
“My daughter was kidnapped last year,” I snarled. “They called to tell me what to do. What if I hadn’t answered the phone? They might have-”
“They were not going to kill your daughter just because they couldn’t get you on the phone,” Arcturus said quietly. “They took her because they wanted something. Killing her wouldn’t get it from you. They will find another way to deliver the message.”
“How do you know that?” I said.
“Trust me,” he said, even more quietly. “I know.”
I just stared at him, as the phone rang, and rang, and rang. Arcturus was an aristocratic Chilean, educated at Cambridge, hiding out in the backwaters of rural Georgia in a cabin filled with pictures of a wife and daughter I had never met and he had never spoken of.
As usual, dumb old me never thought to ask why.
“Arcturus,” I said softly. “Who was on the phone the last time you picked it up?”
“What?” Arcturus said blankly. “What? No! Not kidnappers, if that’s what you’re asking. I have picked up the phone since then, Dakota. Last time for my brother, I think.” Then his face clouded. “But… yes, once it was. And the experience left me with an aversion.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged, turned away. “Waters long under,” he said, pulling out his sheaf of notes. “Back to the here and now. Back to the sound. On the other end of that phone, a person is looking for you, but they can only find you if you pick up. The sound is just an alarm. It can’t hurt you. It doesn’t oblige you. But it can distract you. Realize that, then learn to ignore it.”
“Ignore what?” I asked.
He smiled, picked out a diagram, put it in front of me. “And now something else to ignore: chakra, smakra, mana, qi,” he said, smoothing the paper out. “All pretty words for the flow of magic, for the loci where it collects in the body. To fight the tagger, you must master that power-not intellectually, but intuitively, as an instinctive reaction without thought.
“Your martial arts have done you well. You have maintained your skill at concentrating magic in your loci, maybe even improved it a little. Now you must learn how to concentrate more coordinated patterns of magic and use them to generate more complex spells on the fly.”
But I was staring at the diagram: it was the Pentacle of the Dance, a pentagram that showed how the five different kinds of magic used by skindancers related to each other. I’d seen it, drawn it a thousand times: walking the pentacle was a fundamental tool used to check the magic of flash to make sure the magical circuit worked as advertised.
But this one was different. Overlaid on the pentagram was a square, then a circle, then a naked, spreadeagled human figure: the Vitruvian man, the iconic figure drawn by Leonardo da Vinci five centuries before I was born. This Pentacle, Arcturus explained, showed how the human body itself was not just a source of magic, but a component in its logic.
“Oh, God,” I said, flashing on Revenance’s spread-eagled form, on Tully, suffering in the vines, even on Cally, broken body splayed out in a crude X as his life’s blood spilled out onto the tag. “It is skindancing. The tagger is using skindancing logic with graffiti magic.”
“Now how is he doing that, Frost?” Arcturus said. “There is no dancer-”
“The writhing of the victims. Hence the barbs, the sawing, the prolonged torture. ”
“Frost!” Arcturus said. “We went over that. Random movements wouldn’t sum-”
“It would if there’s a ratchet, like a self winding watch,” I said, staring into the Pentacle. “What if it’s not just a receiver, but a transmitter? It traps people, kills them, and beams the harvested magic elsewhere to power… something else. Do you have a map of Atlanta?”
Arcturus froze, then went out to the garage, yelling for Zinaga while I got the graffiti pictures. When he returned with the map, I tamped it down with the pitcher and M amp;M jar and used M amp;Ms to mark where graffiti had been found or where fires had been reported.
In moments the picture emerged. Our data was not complete, the diagram not perfect, but there were enough little bits of candy to see the beginnings of a great pentacle spread over the whole of the city of Atlanta, just like the Pentacle of the Dance on the Vitruvian Man.
“It’s a city-sized resonator,” I said. “No wonder the tags never seem to run out of mana. They aren’t just powering themselves-they’re powering each other. Mana building up in the mold capacitors all over the city gets beamed to the traps, which in turn use that power to torture more magic out of their victims. It’s a… a distributed necromantic network.”
Arcturus’ jaw clenched. “God damn it,” he said. “And it will be more than just mana-it will transmit the tortured intents of the dying victims back to the source. It’s not just a city-sized resonator. It’s a city-sized harvester of pain. That is foul.”
I thought about Transomnia, Nyissa, and their auras prickling against my magical tattoos. “It likes vampires because their auras extend beyond their body,” I said. “That triggers the magic and springs the trap. Shapeshifters can trigger it too, but anything alive could feed it.”
“Vampiric graffiti using skindancing magic,” Arcturus said. “Killing people as part of some far vaster spell… to do what? ”
