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, starting 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.
Tully jerked back as the Streetscribe twitched and a silver sheen rippled up the web. Rumblings and light echoed through the cavern. Deep images seemed to move in the darkness beyond the surface of the walls. Then the walls glowed, brightened-and Zipperface exploded out of them and began sailing through the air on a skateboard propelled on a trail of fire.
“Oh jeez, oh jeez, that’s his self portrait!” Tully screamed. “His spirit was consumed by his avatar! His spirit is in his avatar! ”
Zipperface screamed along the outer edge of the wall, and I readied myself. Arcturus and I had gone over this. There was an immense amount of power in the master tag, more than we had ever anticipated, but it was all being channeled through one small mobile projectia.
So this was it: mano a mano, face to face, me versus Zipperface.
Could I cut Zipperface in half with my vines? Maybe, but he could burn them with fire. Use my Dragon’s fire against him? Zipperface had no real skin, the flames would dissipate. Use a hawk projection? He could use the baseball. Go hand to hand? He could use the bat.
None of my standard tricks would work-so I had prepared new ones. I shimmied, drew an arm over my back, and plucked a newly-inked feather from the wings of the Dragon. Then I laid it down on a newly-inked mark on my forearm, clenched my fist, and brought both to life.
Zipperface’s mouth peeled open into two glittering arcs of teeth. His ropy tongue snaked out as he hissed at me, and he pointed his bat at me and called me out. Then he looked down at his chest. Dead center, an arrow now protruded-though it had started life as the feather, before being shot out from the crossbow I had inked upon my arm.
Bits of down fluttered away from the wound, the slightest of glows shined through the hole, and then the arrow sank in and his shirt rippled closed over it. Zipperface looked up at me, his white eyes gleamed beneath his floppy hat, and he smiled. Then he leaned in, the skateboard banked, and he screamed down upon me, baseball bat cocked back to take off my head.
That mano-a-mano stuff? Two masters face off in an arena and fight for fifteen minutes? It only works in the movies, or when opponents are evenly matched. I knew I wasn’t an even match before I stepped up to the plate. So, I’d taken precautions-using his own tricks.
Suddenly white light burst from every seam of Zipperface’s design. All the mana pouring in from the tags all around us had finally activated the self-replicating pattern Arcturus and I had woven into the feather. With a sudden
