“This the real reason they used to kill vampires on sight. Not because we drink blood-but because we can enslave minds,” he said. “I never wanted to do that to you-but I had no one to turn to. My master is dead, Revenance is gone, Demophage is gone-but one of the best vampirologists in the world was one phone call away. Who else could have helped me?”
“No, no, you’re right,” I said, still rubbing my neck. “You did the right thing.”
“Thank you, Dakota,” he said, sitting down heavily on an ottoman on the side of the room. The hiss of an air conditioner starting up sounded in the distance, and Calaphase glanced up briefly before looking back at me. “Believe me, I am sorry. I had no intention-”
“I know, I know,” I said. “Unless you’re the world’s master at reverse psychology.”
“Most of my-” and Calaphase frowned “-my prey are shrinking violets, desperate for me to take the initiative. I didn’t expect you to be so, ah, forward. ”
I laughed, but the laugh quickly died. As disturbing as all this was, there was another question I had, based on a curious little choice of words Calaphase had used when talking to Saffron. I struggled for a moment, figuring out how to ask it, and then just gave up.
“What are you negotiating for me, Calaphase?” I asked simply.
Calaphase looked away. “For the Lady Saffron to take you back under her protection.”
“Fuck her,” I said. “She threw my collar away, just like she did our relationship.”
“You need her,” Calaphase said, cocking his head, then focusing on me. “Dakota, the Oakdale Clan-we’re punks. We’re a bunch of punks with a security service that’s little more than a protection racket. The Lady Saffron is the de facto mistress of the city.”
“You are not a punk,” I said. “And I thought Lord Delancaster was in charge of the city.”
“Only in his mind,” Calaphase said. “And on TV. No-one cares about him, holed away in his mansion. He has no more significance than the Queen of England. Saffron’s the one who attends the Atlanta City Council meetings, meets with the Mayor, brokers deals. Delancaster gave her power, and she’s used it. I do not want to be on her bad side. Neither should you.”
The hiss sounded again, closer. Now I could tell it was not an air conditioner. It was more like a snake; it was even followed by a sinister rattling. “Did you hear that?”
Calaphase sat up straighter. “Yes. What is that? I’ve heard it for the last few minutes.”
The rattle sounded again, followed by another sharp hiss, and I recognized it. “Oh my God,” I said. “It’s a spray can.”
I leapt out of bed, out of the room, and snagged my leather jeans, slipping them on like I’d been born in them. I hit the light for the hall and ran forward, grabbing my sportsbra, painfully wrenching it on, scooping up my top, and running towards my coat. At the end of the hall I looked back and saw Calaphase appear at the bedroom doorway.
“Calaphase!” I shouted, slipping on my top and vest so fast they seemed to flap around me. “The fuckers burned down the whole werehouse! We gotta go!”
Calaphase scooped up some clothing and sprinted down the hall towards me, long legs closing the distance seemingly instantly. Something tumbled over in the carport, and I flinched. Calaphase slipped on his shirt, then he held out his hand for me to stay back.
“ Fuck that,” I whispered. “They’re experts in anti-vampire magic. We do this together.”
Calaphase nodded, holding up his hand for silence. Then, slowly, we crept up the stairs side by side, rising until we could see the kitchen door.
Something stood between the door and my car.
At first I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Then the figure resolved to a huge, floppy hat, almost an upside-down pyramid of felt-the same dumpy Seussical hat I’d seen on the grinning spectator to Revenance’s death. Beneath it was a wide, olive face, shrouded in darkness-except for two glowing white eyes and a broad, evil grin that split the face open ear to ear with a jagged zipper of pebbly white teeth. A giant zipper tab hung from one ear, completing the effect.
“What the hell is that?” Calaphase said.
It was the tagger from Oakland Cemetery, but-”He’s not human,” I said.
“No matter,” Calaphase said, slipping his jacket back on. “I’m a vampire-”
“He’s not human, and he’s not moving,” I said, desperate to communicate something, but not sure what it was. “And he has to know you’re a vampire.”
“I don’t care,” he snarled, crouching, preparing to spring. “I’ll tear his throat-”
“He knows you’re a vampire,” I said, “and he’s sprayed the door. ”
At that Calaphase finally froze, seeing the slight lines of paint sprayed on the glass-lines that looked like spray paint, but slowly shifted and moved, sinuous, hungry.
“Oh, fuck,” Calaphase said, and Zippermouth reached up and pulled the zipper tab across its face, the metal tabs I had thought were teeth splitting wide open in zigzag, hissing grin, a long snakelike tongue sliding out of his mouth. “Oh, fuck me! What is that?”
“Tell me you didn’t brick up the back door,” I whispered.
Calaphase began backing down the stairs, and I mirrored him. We turned to face each other, only for a second, then ran. Calaphase flew past the red flickering light flooding out of the bedroom and cut to the left, hurling himself at the outer door and splintering it off its hinges before I could even begin to say ‘wait, let’s see what we’re getting into’.
No need to wait, though. Fast on his heels, I found out immediately.
Technicolor tentacles of graffiti wire whipped out around us, catching us like a net and jerking us aside like horizontal bungees. We screamed, both of us, the big bad vampire and his skindancer squeeze, as thorns erupted and dug into our flesh as we swung through the air.
For the briefest moment, I saw the whole side of Calaphase’s house, a long low rectangle of red brick and white trim covered with a massive, elaborate graffiti tag, a tortured whirlpool of vines and chains and tentacles swirling towards a point just left of center.
Then the tentacles pulled us into the maelstrom-and we fell inside the tag.
Column of Hate
Our screams swept away on the whirlwind. Blinding waves of color assaulted my eyes. Burning torrents of magic twisted me up like a towel. An orange and black horizon flipped around us. Then a vast octopus of graffiti exploded outwards and swallowed us up.
It spit us out into empty space. A black glittering sheet rushed forward and hit us like a wall of concrete. Pain exploded in my cheek, my shoulder, my hip, my knee, and I registered a delayed whack-whack as Calaphase fell to the pavement beside me.
Don’t pass out. Don’t give up. Don’t let them win.
I opened my eyes. We were in absolutely the worst section of Atlanta I had ever seen, a cityscape so decrepit it bordered on the surreal. We stood in the twisted remnants of a concrete playground, hemmed in by tottering chainlink fences. Beyond the fences, hulks of building staggered up, forming a canyon of ruins. Deeper within the canyon, the pavement stepped down, a ravine of garbage piled up between a decayed tenement and a crumbling parking deck. The sea of garbage and rusted cars rippled out away from us across the broken pavement, seeming to crash in waves against a giant wall, a huge slab of cinderblocks that towered over us like a cliff at the dead end of the canyon.
Briefly I wondered whether this playground was a real place, whether we’d fallen into some tag-induced hallucination. But surely that was impossible; no-one could ink a whole world… could they? And the grit against my cheek didn’t feel like phantom dirt: it was real.
Then my eyes registered what was written on the cinderblock wall.
I staggered to my feet, staring up at the cliff in absolute horror. Spray painted at the upper edge of the huge wall of cinderblocks was a block letter logo: THOUGHT CRIME LORD. And beneath the logo, bleeding out over every surface, infinite layers of graffiti.
&nbs
p; Every graffiti artist and style I’d seen across Atlanta were represented: bare white lines, repeated stencils, finely shaded oilchalk. How had they done this, cover a wall six stories high? Climbing on scaffolds? Hanging from ropes? On jetpacks? Both toys and masters sprayed here, leaving simple tags and extensive pieces, stretched-taffy letters and elegantly shaded portraits. Even Keif and Drive were represented by a few tall, narrow tags depicting cartoon rabbits in army fatigues. But the tags, pieces and masterpieces of all the artists-save one-looked slightly old, worn by weather and time, as if all the artists-save one-had given up on this playground and yielded it to its new overlord: the graffiti killer.
The designs of the journeyman and the apprentice were absent; this place was the exclusive canvas of the master. All of the familiar signs were here: the vines, the chains, the barbed wire; but he had not stopped there, experimenting with new motifs that I hadn’t seen elsewhere: ships crewed by hostile hip-hop frogs; herds of blood-dripped sheep with sparkling eyes; a vast writhing worm wrapped around the arc of a swinging pendulum-figures tortured and amazing. But across the cliff I recognized a familiar design: the skyline of Atlanta, a grassy dome of a hill, and a coiling rose hovering between two sets of tombstones.
The same type of tag that had killed Revenance.
The vast tag seemed to shiver, a wave of wind rippling over the grassy dome, and I seized Calaphase by the arm, pulling him to his feet. “We have to go. We have to get shelter. We have to get you shelter. That entire thing is a vampire trap!”
Calaphase’s head snapped quickly from side to side, sizing up the canyon around us. “The opening faces the rising sun,” he said. “Think, Dakota! The trap is almost fifty yards away. How do you think he planned to get me into it?”
Good point. The master tag was too far away-probably. Surely it couldn’t grab us all the way out here? I tensed, eyes seeking movement. Then I felt a prickling, goose bumps rising on my flesh-but it wasn’t goose bumps. It was a flood of mana-but not from the master tag.
“Behind us!” I said, and we dove under the uncoiling whip of a serrated wire that trailed drops of glowing blood as it snapped through the air. Sure enough, there was another tag, a sprawled octopus snapping hungrily on the wall of a decayed tenement looming behind us.
On the cliff, the master tag’s vines were now uncoiling, and we dodged back from them too, edging backwards, away from the tags, until we butted against the chainlink fence barring us from the parking deck’s dark, twisted innards. Light flared from within, flashes in darkness, illuminating moving shapes which bore no resemblance to anything human.
“I think the tagger means for us to go to the tag,” I said, “rather than it come to us.”
“What do we do?” Calaphase said. “Run the gantlet?”
I swallowed. The tagger’s playground was a box canyon of buildings. The black pavement stretched away from us, between the expanding rings of the master tag on the cliff and the waving wires of the coiled design on the tenement that had brought us here. Some of the twisted remnants of the swings and jungle gyms had tags on them, almost certainly traps. At the other end of the weed-strewn lot, forming the only opening in the box canyon, was a painted wooden fence, filled with hundreds of marks by the tagger.
Only then did I notice that the tagger was breaking the unwritten rules of the Atlanta graffiti scene: he had painted over the marks of other taggers. In my research, I’d found other taggers had immense contempt for paintovers and whitewashes; no one with any skill did them. I scanned the lot rapidly. The more I looked, the more I saw his tags almost desperately trying to plaster over his competition. The better the original, the harder the tagger tried to outdo it.
And through it all, woven through every design, was a quirky spray of wildstyle letters that I now recognized as the artist’s actual ‘tag’, his signature: the word XRYBE over a stylized road snaking into the distance. At first I didn’t get it, but then I saw older variants, the same road with all the letters above it still spelled out, still wildstyle, so I had trouble parsing it: S-T-R-E-E, then T, the X was actually a jammed-together S-C… and then I got it.
“ Streetscribe,” I breathed. The name Revenance had warned us about. It was everywhere. “ Someone is crying for recognition.”
“Dakota!”
“What? No, no, we can’t risk it,” I said, glancing around. “The playground equipment is tagged. The far wall is tagged. This whole place is one big trap.”
“Can we go back through the tag that sent us?” Calaphase asked.
I glanced up at it. It was weakening, spinning down, though it wasn’t clear that it was actually going to shut off. “No,” I said. “I think it needs to recharge-and besides, do you have any idea how to work that thing? Because I sure don’t-not yet, anyway.”
He glanced around. “We can climb the fence there, try the parking deck-”
“He’ll have tagged the cars,” I said-and then a solution hit me. “He’ll have tagged everywhere he could-so let’s go where he can’t.”
There was a narrow gap between the parking lot and the tenement. I ran to the corner of the chainlink fence and peered through, seeing a long parking lot and a ruined carousel covered by old graffiti. The fence was strong, the chainlink newer, and rings of razorwire guarded its top twenty feet above-and it held no surface for the tagger. Little tags lurked at its base, squealing sausage monsters like blind piglets, but they were too simple to pose real danger. I paid them no mind, spinning round over them as I built up mana and cried: “Striking serpent, open a door!”
My newly-inked asp tattoo reared to life and struck the fence once, twice, three times. Chainlinks popped with ringing cracks, then squealed away as Calaphase tore into the opened links with his hands, peeling the fence away in layers.
Then a horrible wail drifted from the far end of the lot.
“Keep pulling,” I said, turning around. “Use your strength on the fence, and I’ll use my magic to watch our backs.”
Calaphase cursed and pulled at the fence. I could hear it tearing-but that noise was drowned out as the tags over the far end of the fence rippled with a massive wave of mana I could feel all the way back here, seventy yards away. There was no movement and almost no light; there was no way that could have been built up from the mana in old rotten boards.
So much for the mold theory.
Zipperface slid out of the tag, rolling out in style on a skateboard. Over his shoulder he carried a baseball bat; around his waist were strapped a set of spray cans like Batman’s utility belt. His face was barely visible beneath his vast floppy hat, but even from this distance, the steel tabs of his jagged mouth glinted, a vicious grille spreading beneath glowing white eyes.
Then the eyes narrowed. The mouth frowned. And then that wide olive face peeled back open as Zipperface screamed in rage, a long, ropy tongue snapping out as Calaphase tore the second layer of the fence away. I tensed, not sure what form the attack take or how I might defend against it; but defend us I would.
Then Zipperface raised his arms, and a long low line spread across the base of the wooden fence behind him, a sparkling sliver-like light peeking underneath a door. I recoiled as the line lit up into a rainbow wall of graffiti flames.
Oh, hell. Fire. Defend us, I wouldn’t.
“Dakota,” Calaphase said, jerking at my shoulder. “Dakota, we gotta go.”
Zipperface threw down his arms, and the fire shot out along the edges of the canyon, screaming towards us on both sides. The graffiti wasn’t just reaching for us: it was spreading, cracking out over the pavement in jagged blocks, turning it into a sea of lava.
We turned and ran, slipping through the clinging wire of the fence, darting through the chasm between the tenement and the garage, putting on a burst of speed as the lines of fire met behind us and exploded through the gap in a blast of flame and mana.
We ran down the sidewalk, full tilt, Calaphase almost flying, dragging me behind him as I poured my all into it, ignoring the explosion
of pain in my knee. But as fast as we ran, the fire ran faster, sliding along the foundation of the tenement, rippling up its side in waves of flame. The running tongue of fire shot past us towards the end of the lot, impacting a low brick fence, boiling up in a torrent of flame that cracked the pavement and cut us off.
Driven sideways by groping tendrils of fire, we dodged out across the asphalt, leaping over glowing red cracks in the pavement shooting out beneath us, aiming for a squat cinderblock building next to the carousel as yet untouched by the tags. Calaphase threw his shoulder at the door and knocked it off its hinges, dragged me inside, and slammed it shut behind us.
The flames roared behind us, trying to batter the door open. Calaphase wedged the bottom of the door shut with a dented metal pot the size of a tub, and I slid a broom handle through holes in the wooden slats around the top of the frame.
Desperately we looked around the blockhouse. Despite the musty darkness of our little prison I could see it had once been a kitchen, the back room of a hot dog stand or burger joint. There were no other doors or exits; the next best bet was a barricade of rotten wooden planks nailed over the broken remnants of what had probably been the front serving window.
I peered through the slats and could see the edge of the carousel, a black strip of pavement, and then a blissfully green tab of grass, wet by a sputtering sprinkler. I tugged at the boards, but they were stronger than I expected. Calaphase reached to help, but recoiled as the flickering light of magic fire rippled past the edge of the slats.
But the flames did not immediately tear inside; they retreated. We relaxed, but only for a moment. Then light began to creep in through cracks in the base of the cinderblocks all around us. Calaphase cursed and began looking around, tearing the place up looking for a fire extinguisher.
I whipped out my cell phone and dialed 911. It started ringing, but before anyone picked up, flames surged against the blockhouse walls: we didn’t have much time. Through the cracks in the door and in the window we could see the fire rising up around us, cooler now but more elaborate, lazy licks of graffiti flames climbing the walls of the shop around us. Coiled wires and vines and roses were now visible in the flames, along with other motifs that I didn’t recognize. The graffiti was tackling this building too.
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