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 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 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
