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  The man moaned and raised his head—and with a shock I recognized him as our friend Revenance, a guard at the werehouse, Cinnamon’s former home. Revenance was a vampire of the Oakdale Clan—so what was he doing out in the day? I looked for the sun, relaxed a little at the cloud cover—and then something clicked in my mind, and I looked back in horror.

  Revenance wasn’t crucified in the wires, but in the graffiti itself. Painted vines had erupted from the wall, fully dimensional, moving as if alive, curling around him, sprouting metal barbs, hooking into his flesh, drawing blood and pulling outward—pulling as we watched.

  —

  The graffiti was tearing him apart.

  Boiling Blood

  “Revenance is a vampire,” I said loudly, and the officers around me pricked up and listened—but made no move towards my friend, trapped in that nest of bloody wire and thorned vines. “He needs protection from the sun right now!”

  “You know this guy?” one of them said uneasily. He stood his ground, but several of the other officers began backing further away. “I mean, is he really a—”

  “Vampire,” I confirmed, and more officers backed off. Pathetic. OK, I once felt the same about vamps, but Revenance was the nicest vampire I knew. True, he looked like a biker—OK, he was a biker—but he acted like a perfect gentleman. I even got on well with his girlfriend; she was down to earth, with none of the nonsense of a typical vampire flunky. If any vampire deserved to be saved, he did. “Did you hear me? Get him out of there! Protect and serve, man—”

  “We, uh, tried,” the officer began, starting forward, then halting. “But those vines are vicious! They damn near tore Lee apart when she tried to check on him.”

  “Oh, crap,” I said, staring at the sky. The sun was beginning to break through the clouds.

  “Oh jeez, jeez, that’s Revy!” Cinnamon said, suddenly getting it. She took a step forward, and the vines seemed to twist, to bunch in anticipation of her approach, making Revy moan. “Wait, wait—one thing atta. If the sun pops out, just for a second, it’ll kill ’im!”

  “Yeah,” I said, scowling. “We need something to shield against the sun.”

  Cinnamon’s ears pricked up. “You gots tarps in the backs of your mobiles?”

  “What?” McGough asked blankly.

  “Tarps, covers, blankets, anything,” Cinnamon said, tugging at her collar and grimacing. “And poles. We makes a tent, keeps the sun off him long enough to get him free of that crap!”

  The officers remained frozen, and then McGough spoke. “Rand,” he said calmly. “Could you have your boys check their cruisers for tarps, blankets—”

  “I’ll get on it,” he said. “Dakota, deal with the vines.”

  “Sure,” I said. Yeah, right—dump the magical problem in the lap of the magician. I know I’d gotten a reputation for fighting other magicians after taking on the serial killer that had kidnapped Cinnamon, but “Deal with the vines?” Fuck. How was I gonna do that?

  I stepped forward, and the graffiti tag convulsed. Revenance groaned, then opened cloudy eyes in a face cracked like burnt paper. I recoiled. Scattered ultraviolet had to be killing him.

  And while I was noticing all that, a tendril of barbed wire snapped out like a whip, nailing me in the temple. Only a last second flinch saved my eye, and I threw myself back into a crouch, hands raised, tails of my vestcoat whapping out around me. I was actually a bit surprised at my own reaction, I guessed a product of my recent training. Apparently karate works.

  “Girl’s got moves,” said a voice, and after a glance at the vines, I looked over to see a crewcutted black officer stepping up—Gibbs, one of Rand’s friends. “You OK, Dakota?”

  “Yes,” I said, touching my temple, fingers coming back with blood. “Where’s Horscht?”

  “Your kid has him running to the grounds shed,” Gibbs said. His clothes and face were scratched too, worse than the others, and one eye was darn near swollen shut. I had been lucky. “Looking for wood to prop up a tent around your fang there.”

  “He’s not my ‘fang,’” I said, staring back at Revenance. The vamp writhed, and with shock I realized what I’d thought was stylish frosting in his hair was actually sunbleach, where the light had blasted the strands to pale brittleness. “But he is a friend.”

  I glared at the graffiti, at the live, hungry vines erupting from the wall and twisting through the air. They seemed to swat at me just for looking at them; but I was not deterred. It was just graffiti. Just ink on a wall. Whatever magic had animated it would slowly fade away, unless it had some source of external power, which was not likely on a dead brick wall.

  Grimly I wondered whether the graffiti was powered by Revenance himself; vampires had powerful auras. But vampiric life was endothermic, sucking energy out of its surroundings. That’s why their flesh was often cold; that’s why necromancers considered them dead.

  So, as fearsome as this thing was, it should run down—but I had no such limits. I was the tattooed, and my magic marks were powered by the life in my beating heart.

  Time to draw my weapons.

  “Keep this safe for me,” I said, pulling off my vestcoat and handing it to Gibbs. Then, gritting my teeth against the brisk January air, I pulled off my turtleneck, exposing a torso covered in dozens of intricate tattoos.

  I’ve thought about this outfit carefully. It’s sort of my new uniform since I seriously decided to use my magic tattoos, and not just wear them. Tattoo magic works best when skin is exposed to the air—but I’m not gonna get naked in front of a bad guy. So my leather “pants” are actually chaps, unzipping down the seams quickly to leave me in cutoff jean shorts, and under my shirt is a black sports bra. Even the boots have side zips—I want to be able to run if I gotta, but still be able to peel them if I need the braided snakes on my ankles.

  “Whoa,” Gibbs said, holding the leather and snakeskin in his hands like he was looking at his favorite collection of porn. “Didn’t expect that, girl—”

  “Don’t get too excited,” I said, grimacing. I’m a total weather lightweight—the mercury couldn’t be lower than fifty-five, but I already had goose bumps rippling down my arms. I hoped it wouldn’t interfere with the magic. “I only dance for the magic.”

  I straightened, then let my body ripple. There was an art to tattoo magic: my old magical tattoo master had called it skindancing. I bailed on him early, so I didn’t know half the art—but with the little I did know, I could concentrate the lifeforce within my body, the living magic, the mana, hold it within like a growing flame—then let it out to make my tattoos come alive.

  Tattooed jewels glowed, snakes slithered, butterflies fluttered—and then my vines curled out from my skin into a coiling thicket around me. My finest tattoo, the Dragon, was gone—I had released it to attack the serial killer that took Cinnamon—but with the dozens of tattoos I had left I had more than enough to make a glowing shield of living ink.

  “Holy—” Gibbs said, backing up, and in the corner of my eye I could see the other officers backing up further, even more afraid, faces lit green by the glow of my marks. I was getting better if you could see the glow of the vines even in the bright sun, and I smiled.

  Time to show that wall-painter what real magic was.

  “Spirit of fall,” I murmured. “Shield my path.”

  There is no “spirit of fall,” of course. I do admit there are intangible entities in the world, but I don’t believe in actual spirits, “of fall,” or of any other kind, and I could have used any words for my incantation. For tattoo magic, what really matters is the intent of the wearer—and powered by the intent behind my words, my tattooed vines unfurled into a glowing perimeter that would keep me safe as I rescued Revy.

  Or so I hoped. I stared into the churning knot of barbed wire and menacing vines, coiling over each other like a nest of snakes. How the heck did it work? I had never heard of magically animated graffiti. In theory the mana that powered it should have been draining away slowly, but it act
ually seemed like it was getting stronger. But how?

  I stared into the design, trying to grok it. For graffiti it was so … complicated, built layer upon layer upon layer. Revenance was embedded in a rosette of vines; coiling out from that were thick, stony tentacles, a grey brick octopus clutching at cartoon images of the trees and buildings around us. Colorful lettering in the exaggerated “wildstyle” font floated behind the octopus, and behind that was a fully painted backdrop of a grassy hill against a black sky. Almost like an afterthought, the base of the design sported two groups of curving, cracked tombstones, one on the left, one on the right, drawn to look like they erupted from the base of the wall.

  I considered whether the tombstones could be the graffiti’s power source … perhaps by necromancy? No, they were dry of blood. Earth magic from the hill image? No, I would have felt it if this was a ley-line crossing, and that also ruled out the idea that the octopus tentacles were drawing power from the nearby buildings. So how did it work?

  Surely not … graphomancy, or something like tattoo magic? I stared past the weaving vines, into the letters, trying to see past the tag’s art and through to its logic. It was difficult: the wildstyle letters were distorted, overlapping, intertwining, and I could barely pick out a single letter. But every stroke was amazing work, and there was a glittering texture to the pigments, almost like the magic inks used in tattoos. Perhaps a variant of tattoo ink, reformulated to let the magic work on rock? But the designs of tattoo magic only work because skin is a canvas infused with living magic. Where was the graffiti getting the mana?

  And then Revenance moaned, the blackened tongue in the dark hole of his mouth looking like he’d been left to die in Death Valley. No one does that to my friends.

  “All right,” I whispered. “Your vines versus my vines. Let’s go.”

  I stepped forward, letting my vines curl out, green and glowing. The barbed tentacles twisted towards me, and now I could see that they were a braid of wire, roses and chains. They slapped against my thicket of magic, initially just questing, then with increasing rage. I shimmied forward, then whirled and drew my glowing green blanket in. The hooked braids pounced—just as I threw my arms out and let the vines explode outward, tearing the barbs to pieces.

  Colorful, bitter powder puffed through the air as the braids flew apart, a residue of the materials used in this tag. The thin layer of oil chalk was weaker than the ink woven into living flesh that made my tattoos. But there was a hell of a lot to the tag, and it kept getting stronger, two more tombstone images erupting as a dozen more tentacles hungrily pounced on me.

  Instinctively I crouched back, hands raised in a guard as the braided vines whipped around me, shoving me roughly through my shield. How was I going to get Revenance out if I couldn’t even reach him? Then I noticed what my crouch and guard had done. I’d fallen back into a Taido karate middle stance, and it hit me: karate was a kind of a dance.

  I dropped into a low stance my instructor called jodan, legs a low coiled crouch, one fist jutting forward to guard me, the other pointing straight backwards at the sky, the karate version of thumbing your nose. Immediately my legs began to throb: I wasn’t strong enough to use the stance yet, but it was stable, damn it, and coiled in a way I could use for my magic.

  I began writhing again, making my tattoos shimmer; working with the stance; and then, just like in class, I raised my fist to protect my face, shot the back hand and leg forward together and moved, planting myself five feet forward in the mirror image of the same stance.

  The thing flailed at me like an animated octopus; but with every step I poured more power into my marks, pushing in closer, closer; my vines pushing its vines back. I didn’t feel the cold anymore: I was sweating. My bum knee began pulsing with pain, but I ignored it.

  The pressure was intense; my boots ground against the gravel as I punched forward, step by step, shoving myself to the heart of the barbed wire rose. Twenty, ten, five—then the wires parted, I stretched my arm out, my fingers brushed Revy’s coat—

  Then the rose reared back and struck me square on the chest, hurling me thirty feet backwards onto the street. It would have knocked me on my ass, but as I saw my feet flying into the air, something inside me clicked, and I coiled my back and turned the impact into a roll that flipped me clear over, tumbled me roughly back into a crouch—then back to standing.

  I mean, holy shit. Karate really works.

  But the end effect was that I was back where I started, knee throbbing, arms scraped, back covered in gravel, watching Revenance screaming in pain as the tag coiled back inward. Sure, I was standing, but it felt like I had been knocked flat on my ass.

  “If you’re so damn strong,” I muttered, glaring at the tag, “why haven’t you killed him yet? What the hell are you waiting for?”

  “Good try, Dakota,” Rand said, handing off a tarp to Gibbs. Behind him other officers were running up with blankets, tarps, ropes, and poles. “We’ve got enough to cover him, but we need something tall to … what the hell?”

  I turned to see Cinnamon and Horscht running up with a … a portable basketball goal? Where had they gotten that? Big beefy Horscht struggled to keep his grip on the backboard while little old Cinnamon easily carried the concrete-filled tire that was its base, and when he slipped, she kept going, backing towards the rosette of wires before I could speak.

  The graffiti surged and pounced, but Cinnamon leapt up with werekin speed, kicking off the edge of the weighted tire so the goal flipped upright into the barbs. The graffiti caught the metal pole and shoved back against it; but the goal stayed upright, weighted by its base.

  “Hah!” Cinnamon said, head snapping in her funny sneeze as the graffiti battered against it, more weakly now. “That’s not alive. It’s got nothing to trigger on now. Now we makes a tent—makes an X with the poles, so we can run a top pole from the goal to the wall—”

  “Pretty damn smart,” Rand said, waving to his men.

  “That’s my girl,” I replied, taking the other end of the tarp from him.

  We crossed two poles against the backboard, making a rough triangle in front of the tag, which had given up whacking at the goal and had curled back around Revenance. Two officers climbed the wall and fed another pole up over the top. The vines snapped at it halfheartedly, but they were near the end of their reach, and the improvised framework was holding—for now.

  “Dakota, give me a hand with this,” Gibbs said, trying to unroll the tarp and getting himself tangled in it. “The wind is a bitch—”

  No single tarp was large enough to cover Revenance, but we patched together a piece as big as a sail by joining eyelets and tie straps, slid it up over the back of the wall, over the tag, so it draped down over the top pole to make the sides of the tent. The tag still snapped at it, but lethargically now, and we started to nail it down, three to a side, fighting the wind.

  But then the sun burst forth and Revenance screamed as light reflected off cars burned him with a thousand pinpricks. “More tarps!” Cinnamon said. “We covers the front—”

  But the sun wasn’t our only problem. The wind actually started whistling, then singing, eerie cries timed with vicious surges that tore at our tent. I grabbed my end of a tarp and stood on it, looking around for a stake, a rock, anything to nail it down—and then I saw him.

  He was far away, halfway across the cemetery, a dark figure leaning against a tombstone, hand extended towards us as if he were controlling the wind. He was small, no larger than a kid, and dressed the part down to baggy pants and a skateboard, but even from this distance I was struck by his horribly oversized cap, a cross between Cat-in-the-Hat and the Mad Hatter. It hid his eyes—but not his gleeful, vicious, satisfied grin.

  “There’s a guy creating the wind!” I shouted—and the tarp tore from my grasp. “Fuck!”

  “What?” Gibbs said, trying to look, but the corner of the tarp I’d lost snapped at his eyes. “Fuck! Frost, help me!” he said, flinching, nearly losing his corner too
as the wind tore at it.

  I lunged for the end I’d lost, pinning it down so Horscht could stake it. Drifts of dust surged over the hill under the wind, whipping past us in seconds like stampeding ghosts. There was no way this was natural. A terrific gust tore away a corner, letting sunlight shine on the pooled blood at Revy’s feet. It steamed and began boiling away where the light touched it.

  I snagged a flapping edge of the tarp, cursing, but the wind roared, dragging me and two officers aside, exposing Revy completely. His pooled blood had already boiled away to a black crust of ugly tar, but under the full light of the sun, it began to smoke—and burn.

  “God damn it,” Rand said, coming to help us. “What the hell—”

  “There’s a guy manipulating the wind!” I shouted, trying to point. “We gotta stop him!”

  “Dakota?” Revenance said suddenly, raising his head, his eyes staring straight at me without seeing. “Dakota! Are you there? Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, Revy,” I said. “Hang on, we’ll find a way—”

  “It’s already got me,” Revenance said, twisting in agony as vines drained his flesh and flames licked his feet. “Don’t let it get you or Cinnamon! You gotta take out that skateboarding fuck, but to stop him, you gotta find the Streetscribe. But whatever you do—don’t awaken it!”

  —

  Then the wind tore the tarp away, and his body burst into flames.

  Isolation Protocol

  “Nobody fucking touch nothing,” McGough said, as we all stood in shock, watching firemen back away from the blackened corpse. Revy’s death had taken only a moment, but it had taken an eternity to put those tenacious fires out. “This just became a crime scene.”