“This isn’t working,” Gettyson said, hands on his hips, watching another tentacle ripping out of a splash of paint just thrown by a were. “You hears me, Frost? This isn’t working.”
“It was worth a try,” I replied, thinking furiously. I’d warned him how dangerous the last tag was, and after a quick conference we’d decided to whitewash the rest of this one. But the graffiti tentacles were squirming out of the wet paint. “At least it’s slowing it down.”
“Slowing it down?” Gettyson said. His creepy wide pupils seemed made to deliver scorn. “This thing’s cutting him to pieces! You’re the magician-gimme a damn plan!”
“I’m working on it,” I snapped. What could I do? The splashed paint had cut the exposed area of the tag by half, but it wasn’t enough: the tag was struggling out of its Jackson Pollock coating, and the free parts were alive and vicious. My tattoos weren’t strong enough to hold this thing off. I glared at the tag, its geometry, at the pavement beneath it. Once again, I wished I’d finished my degree, rather than dropping out after I’d learned enough magic… to tattoo…
“Rock salt,” I said.
“What?” Gettyson said, blank.
“You got a kitchen?” I asked. “A real, human, fully-stocked kitchen? I need rock salt. And cane sugar, ginger, cinnamon-the-spice, basil. As much of all of that as you got. Any of your kids like crafts? I need chalk and glitter-and play sand, if you’ve got it-”
“What the hell are you planning?” Gettyson said.
“‘Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world,’” I said. “I’m going to build a magic circle, and use the tag’s own magic against it. Now move!”
As the remaining weres and vamps scattered across the grounds, I surveyed the ground in front of Tully carefully. The pavement was cracked, weedgrown, but basically whole, and there was just enough area for what I planned to do. I cocked my head: yes. Yes. I could do this. Then Tully cried out in pain, and I looked up at him. Then I was certain: I would do this.
Gettyson returned with bowls, cinnamon, and a big box of Kosher salt. “Will this do?”
“It’s a start,” I said, tasting the Kosher salt, then dumping it and the cinnamon into the bowl. “More cinnamon. This will work as a conductor, but the circle will need a magical capacitor. I’ll need basil and cane sugar if we don’t have sand-”
“I found sand,” the curly-haired vamp guard said, seeming to have popped out of nowhere with a sack over his shoulder and an oddly pleased grin on his oddly worn face. “ Liberated it from a nearby factory. I’m sure they won’t mind.”
“What kind is it, play sand?” I asked, tearing at the package. “Quartz granules? Good.”
In minutes the plan was taking shape, both in my head and reality. I sent Gettyson to get more bowls and started two mixes, one with Kosher salt, cinnamon and sand for the circle, and a second with the basil flakes and sugar. But we still were short ingredients, still had no chalk-and had long since run out of paint, while the graffiti was just getting stronger and stronger.
Tully screamed, pulled tight against the wall, barbed tentacles coiled diagonally around his chest, half metal octopus, half sadistic rosevine. If the whole thing had been exposed, it would have spreadeagled him and started tearing him apart; as it was the tentacles slid evilly, cutting across his chest, into his flesh, oozing blood.
I closed my eyes, then opened them again, trying to see past the anger and really look at the tag. I had thought it the same, but really, it was similar without being identicaclass="underline" same general logic, same layout, but different motifs. There was a central coiling mandala, but it was barbed wire octopus rather than a rose. The octopus’s feelers were woven with masonry, but this time stone columns rather than brick. There was a semicircle behind it, but this time a planet rather than a hillside. And the cityscape was replaced by a forest. Even the brushstrokes were different. The more I looked, the more certain I became: this tag was from the same series as the one that killed Revenance, but it wasn’t by the same hand.
The graffiti hadn’t been inked by one artist. The bastards had a whole crew.
Tully screamed again. The vines had started sawing into his flesh, dripping a diagonal curtain of blood. It was killing him slowly, almost sadistically; but it was still killing him. This was no time to dither; we had to get him out of that thing now.
I gritted my teeth, stripped off my vestcoat, and handed it without thinking to Calaphase’s curly-haired guard. When I pulled off my turtleneck, I could see he was glaring at me.
“What good do you expect a striptease will do?” he said, his deliberate emphasis now sounding like menace, his strange eyes slitted at the vest and shirt I’d dumped in his hands.
“I’m a skindancer,” I said, unzipping my chaps, and now, rather than being embarrassed, I relished the sudden raise of his bushy eyebrows. “I expect it will do a great deal of good.”
Just then there was a rushing of air and suddenly Calaphase and another guard popped out of the darkness, with four bags worth of groceries from Kroger.
“Honey, I’m home,” Calaphase said, smiling as he saw me undressing-and then his smile faded when he saw Tully. “Hell, it’s killing him-”
“I know, but damn, that was fast,” I said. “I didn’t think vampires could really fly.”
“We can run,” Calaphase said. “And I think we found almost everything you needed.”
“Great,” I said, pawing through the bags. Chalk, cinnamon, rock salt, more Kosher salt-and fresh basil -in January. I pulled out a twig and twirled it: perfect. “Let’s get cooking.”
“ I often cooked with cinnamon, basil, and salt, back when I was alive,” the curly-headed vamp said, watching me mix. “And those ingredients never did anything special but stew.”
“You’re as alive as I am,” I retorted, not looking up, “and iron filings won’t do anything special but rust-until you add a magnetic field. Then they line up like soldiers.”
“You expect me to believe basil is magnetic?” Curly asked.
“No,” I said, “but I expect to show it’s magically active-if you know how to unlock it.”
I finished the basil mix, said a small prayer over the bowl, picked it up, and then stepped up to the right side of the tag, where it was completely coated with paint. Against the dirty back wall of the werehouse, beneath the many splashes of color, thick cables writhed and bubbled. One had nearly torn itself free, but it did not strike; and so I got almost close enough to touch.
“I cannot wait to see,” the vamp guard said, “the magic of Julia Child.”
“Showing your age, Curly,” I said, scooping a fistful of coated basil sprigs. “Me, I prefer Alton Brown, but for this job, you need a little Emeril- BAM! ”
And I tossed the sprigs out through the air, where their coatings absorbed stray mana, discharging it into the leaves until they glittered like feathers of blue flame. They cascaded down the wall, some sticking, some falling, and collected on the pavement in an odd hexagonal pattern that clearly didn’t look random. Magical energy flickered across the pattern each time the tag stirred beneath the paint, and it began to get more sluggish. Even the tentacle that was tearing itself free started to go limp… and then sank back into the paint.
“You did it!” the vampire said, leaping forward to grab Tully.
“No!” I shouted, shooting my free hand forth in a sinuous motion. Mana rippled through my skin and one of my vines leapt off my skin like a green glowing whip, faster than even I’d expected. It caught the vampire on the chest and flung him back just as three barbed tentacles tore free from the wall and struck where he would have landed. The momentum rippled back along my glowing vine and near tore my arm out of its socket, knocking me forward, down to the pavement on my already throbbing knee. I cried out in pain-and looked up to see the three tentacles, right above my face, turning slowly towards me.