“No, Mom,” Cinnamon said, shaking her head. “I’d never paint anything that hurt-”
“I know you would have never hurt Revenance,” I said. “You hiss and swat like a cat, but inside you’re just a little old softie. I don’t think you meant for any of this to happen-but as far as doing graffiti, come on. I bet you were tagging walls before I ever met you.”
“But Mom,” she said. “You don’t understands. I didn’t do it-”
“She’s right,” Tully said, looking at me with a cocky I-can-get-away-with-it look, aimed straight at good old me, the big square-the big square who, unbeknownst to him, got away with all he did and more back in college. “She didn’t do it. Neither did I. Sure, I’m a writer, but I didn’t have anything to do with this shit, and you can’t prove-”
“Oh, come on! ‘They hit us really good? ’ ‘Don’t you want to see it? ’ And ‘Right under my nose?’- that nose? Give me a break!” I said. “I admit, after the tag turned on you I crossed you off my list, but what did I find today on the outside of your little hideout? A werekin ward rune written with the tagger’s logic, slowly rewriting itself into one of the tagger’s traps.”
“So that’s why it turned on me,” Tully said-and realized I’d nailed him. “Oh, crap!”
“And as for you, young lady,” I said, turning to Cinnamon. “You want me to look at your drawings, but don’t want me to recognize them scrawled over the walls? You want me to check your homework, but not recognize your number system woven into the tags? I didn’t want to believe it, but Doug used your notes to pick apart the tag’s design-and you run with Tully.”
“Oh crap,” Cinnamon said. Her ears folded and drooped, she hunched up, and her tail wrapped around her. “Oh crap oh crap oh crap! Mom-I-I-I’m sorry! ”
And there we had it. All the admissions I needed to hear.
“S’alright,” I said, sitting on a shelf in the alcove. “Really, it’s all right. Come here.”
Fearfully, Cinnamon sat down in the other corner of the alcove. Tully remained standing, defiant, putting his hand on her shoulder. She jerked away and muttered something, and he sighed and went to sit down in the other corner, sullen. I looked at her expectantly.
“We-we were just having fun,” Cinnamon said. “All the other werekin were doing it. Not just the kids. The werekin have been bombing the werehouse since its earliest days. Gettyson taught me my first marks, the symbols we uses to stake out territory.”
“I’ve seen them, before I even met you, on the very first day I went to the werehouse,” I said. “Magical runes. The most they’ll do, though, is glow, or give you a mild shock if you stray where you’re not supposed to be. How did you get into writing? Tully?”
“Not just me,” Tully said defensively. “A lot of the cubs are writers from wayback, at first simple stuff, names and warnings. But after we saw the living marks, we started copying them. I was the best. I learned how to do them right. At least, I thought I did… ”
“Until it turned on you,” I said. “Whatever this thing is, not only did it try to kill you, it killed Cinnamon’s old guardian and my boyfriend. It’s fair to say it’s completely out of control. I’m not blaming you. There’s no way you could have known it would lead to this. But I need to know how it started, who’s behind it-and how it works, so I can fight it.”
“All right,” Tully said. “All right. She doesn’t know. I just thought… it would be fun, you know, something to do on our runs. We made it a game, to run out into the city and spread the coolest looking lifemarks as far as we could-”
“Oh, hell,” I said.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Tully said. “We didn’t mean to hurt anyone! It was just a big old adventure. And after it started, it was too late to fess up. You heard the vamps-they wanted to kill us. No one will believe we didn’t know what this shit could do!”
“You’re right, they won’t,” I said. “But I know you couldn’t have known copying his designs would make them stronger, or that one tag could receive information from another and elaborate itself. Later, we can have the lecture about not copying magic you don’t understand.”
“ I’m not a cribber! ” Tully snarled furiously, his eyes glowing. “And I do too understands, though I got way more than ever I bargained for-”
“This is complicated magic,” I said. “You can’t grok it without training.”
“I had training,” Tully said defiantly. He dug into his pants and pulled out a battered pocket notebook. My eyes bugged. “I got it straight from the source.”
“I’m the Streetscribe’s apprentice,” Tully said, “and he gave me his blackbook.”
Tale of the Tagger
I took the blackbook in my hands like it was the Holy Grail. It was a small, battered old black Moleskine with the tagger’s XRYBE road sign scratched into its cover. Inside, I could see hundreds of tiny drawings, precise as a graphomancer’s, annotated in an immensely tiny Portuguese script. As I flipped through it, Tully spoke.
“Streetscribe came from Sao Paulo,” Tully said. “Tall, lean, good runner. He’s a were, but I never found out what kind-I thinks a leopard, but he kept to himself when he changed. He wrote as Streetscribe, but face-to-face, he called himself the Painter of Night.”
“The anti-Kinkade,” I said. Tully stared at me blankly. “No one appreciates me. Go on.”
“Painter wasn’t born in Sao Paulo,” Tully said. “He came from some hick town hacked out of the rain forest near the border of Peru. But his family came from the rain forest itself.”
“A displaced tribe,” I said grimly. “Pushed out by logging. ”
“If only,” Tully said. “A displaced pack. Hunted down by vampires. ”
I stared at Tully, suddenly aware of the cold water soaking through my boots.
“Painter was in school in Sao Paulo when the fangs attacked his town,” he said. “Wiped out his whole family. He tracked them back to Acre, trashed some of them, but got pretty trashed in return. That convinced him to never tangle with fangs. So he started lookin’ for a weapon.”
“His family was really old-school-old weres, with old magic and old gods,” Tully said. “Painter had learned some of the old ways, so he wandered out into the rain forest, across the border, looking for his family temple. He found it, or somethin’ like it-”
“Oh, Jesus, ” I said.
“-and holed up in the tunnels below. He found some cave paintings, or somethin’, and figured out how they worked with schoolin’ he’d picked up in Sao Paulo. Eventually, he cracked their code, and learned some dark magics to use against the fangs.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “So this wacko found an equivalent of Atlanta’s Underground, not underneath Sao Paulo but under some lost Mayan… no, Incan temple, maybe, deep in uncharted forests between Brazil and Peru, where we’re still finding uncontacted tribes to this day?”
“Yeah, I guesses,” Tully said.
“So, in the deepest heart of the rain forest, under an ancient temple built by an unknown culture, the Streetscribe found even older secret places he thought might be related to his family gods, and started reverse-engineering random magics until he made something really nasty?”
Tully nodded, swallowing.
“And why are we dealing with this here,” I asked, “rather than reading in the comfort of own homes about how Sao Paulo was wiped off the face of the Earth by an explosion of magic so horrible that the faithful rightfully interpreted it as the wrath of God?”
“He tried, ” Tully said, and swallowed again. “Painter went back to Sao Paulo, began writing again, this time as Streetscribe. But he was too bold, and soon the police were after him-and then the vamps. So Streetscribe fled north-and kept going.”
“And now he’s here,” I said quietly. “His new home.”
“Still fighting the vamps,” Tully said. “Sounded like a good idea. You gots to trigger the traps, see, and until… until he took Revy, I thought he’d just use them against bad vamps.”
“Bad vamps?” I asked. “I thought werekin used vampires as their protectors. ”