“At the full moon,” Tully said with disgust, “when rich jerks comes out to play. The rest of the time, vamps prey on us lifers, for blood or money. There are plenty of bad vamps.”
“Including the Oakdale Clan?” I pressed. “Who decides who’s a bad vamp, Tully?”
“Fuck!” Cinnamon barked. “ Trans was a bad vamp.”
“Yes, baby, but not as bad as you might think, even given all the bad stuff he did,” I said, staring at the blackbook. My point was that the tags couldn’t tell good vamp from bad vamp, but I didn’t have time for that argument. “Why’d Streetscribe give you this, Tully?”
“I-I told you,” Tully said. “We- he wanted to set traps for… for bad vamps. So he gave me his blackbook… and told me to make copies.”
I looked up in horror. “And you gave it to… ”
“Other werekin. The kids, the lifers,” he said. “ We’re the ones the vamps hassle. But what does it matter? He didn’t teach anyone else how to make the masterpieces.”
“He didn’t have to,” I said. “The tags are part of a larger spell-a city sized resonator. If you throw up a tag of the right design at the right point, it will plug into the circuit, elaborate itself like the one the Gentry had, and, eventually, attack-just like yours did with you.”
“Oh, crap,” Tully said. “Oh, crap. He mentioned tags powered each other, but I thought… I thought you had to paint traps deliberately, thought you had to prime them to spring-”
“Well, clearly you thought wrong, or he deliberately misled you,” I said. “All you really need is a photocopy of his notes, and you can spray paint your very own murder machine. How many copies of that nuclear fucking weapon are floating around, Tully?”
He swallowed. “I-I gots no idea.”
We sat in silence. Then I flicked on Cinnamon’s iPod and shined it over the blackbook’s pages. Most was gobbledegook, but the few English scraps were chilling: Let the graffiti get the upper hand and I wish to become a 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.”