Blood Rock s-2

by Anthony Francis

  Vladimir was telling them how important this part of the ‘competition’ was; then he stepped aside and let the students attack problems written on the board. Cinnamon cursed and stomped up to the board, cocked her head at it, then grabbed a whiteboard marker in her fist and began scrawling answers before the other students had even started. She drew rectangles and arcs littered with symbols, and I understood her answers even less than the question.

  “I thought this was a remedial class,” I murmured to Doug.

  “For math PhDs, maybe,” Doug said. “No wonder her assignments looked so hard.”

  Vladimir handed over the math club to one of the students and motioned us into his office. Unlike the spacious windowed affairs of the administrators, Vladimir’s office was apparently a converted storage closet-long, narrow, and surprisingly cozy.

  “Keep your voices down; never underestimate werekin hearing,” Vladimir said, sitting on the corner of a desk facing a wall covered with photos of forests and clippings of math articles. “Cinnamon doesn’t understand. She thinks that because she’s in the special class, it must mean she’s stupid. The truth is the opposite-she’s so smart she’s not used to really having to work.”

  I sighed. “Maybe this is too much too soon,” I said. “Maybe we need to track her back into a normal class, let her develop more stable peer relationships.”

  Vladimir raised an eyebrow at me. “Your mother was a teacher, I recall? Your intuitions are good, but she’s bored out of her gourd in normal classes and gets very disruptive. You see what she’s like when she’s interested. We need to push her, hard, just to keep her engaged.”

  “Well, maybe it’s the after-school tutoring,” I said. “Perhaps tutor her during hours-”

  “Actually, the math club is one of the few things she’s almost guaranteed to show for,” Vladimir said. “Every single day this week, in fact, even on days she ditched school entirely.”

  Doug was looking at some of Cinnamon’s homework. “I find myself agreeing with Dakota,” he said. “Doctor Vladimir, the physics of magic requires a lot of math, but I have to confess, speaking as her tutor, some of these assignments gave me a headache. I can see pushing her, but if you challenge her so hard she can never succeed, of course she’ll feel stupid.”

  He held up the paper. The answers Cinnamon had written were scrawled so badly it looked like she’d been writing with crayons. Half the numbers were upside down, backwards, even rotated, and the answers seemed wrong. I was no expert, but it looked like dyslexia.

  “Ah,” Vladimir said, taking the paper gently and staring at it like it was a treasure. “This was my ‘aha’ experience. You don’t take points off for a right answer just because it’s in nonstandard notation. Join me at the board, let’s see how she’s doing.”

  In the classroom, Cinnamon was staring at the last problem. She’d scrawled several numbers down-a three, a backwards five, what looked like an upside down seven, and the number eight in a box with an arrow beneath it pointing to the left.

  “Very good, Cinnamon,” he said. “But you can’t write it the way you came up with it.”

  “ Your way is square,” she said, eye flickering back at me, catlike. “ Uff! ”

  “My way people will recognize,” he said. “Now, the three is already right. What about the others? How do we write the bass-acwards? What’s the right way to write upsy-downs? And do you really want to put an eight in the box? What’s the smallest box you gots?”

  She scowled, then wrote -5 on the board, followed by 7i. After squinting at the eight, she wrote -v8 = -2v2. “Satisfied?” she said, head snapping aside in her sneezy tic. “Hah.”

  “Holy cow,” I said. “She came up with her own notation for imaginary numbers? ”

  “It gets better,” Vladimir said. “Cinnamon, show us the path of the swirling brickies.”

  “Sure,” she said, shrugging. She raised the marker, and then paused, her pupil nailing me out of the corner of her eye, triangular, so like the eye of the tiger I’d seen in the cage. “ Mom, for the love, don’t hover. Fuck! You makes me nervous.”

  I stepped back from the board. “Sorry.”

  Cinnamon drew a rectangle on the board, tall but not too narrow, like a squat door. Then she divided it in two with a line across its middle. That left a square on its top… and another door-shaped rectangle at bottom, same shape as its parent, but smaller and turned on its side. She divided the new door with a new line, making an even smaller square and smaller rectangle-and kept repeating it, smaller and smaller each time, a brick road curling in.

  “That’s the golden spiral, ” Doug said, leaning forward suddenly.

  “Isn’t it pretty?” Cinnamon said, drawing an arc curling in through each square that looked like the turns of a nautilus shell. “The brickies goes rounds and rounds, and the path swirls through them, all the way downs-”

  “I know this,” I said. “No wonder it looked like a door-that’s the golden ratio. Artists use it to make their compositions look pleasing. It goes all the way back to the Greeks-”

  “And as far as I can tell,” Vladimir said, “she reinvented it herself. Cinnamon, do you mind if I show your mother some of your notes?”

  “Sure, I guesses,” she said, shrugging. “They’re stupid. Why would you want to?”

  Vladimir took the three of us back into his office. After some digging, he found a folder, filled with page after page of photocopies of painfully scrawled notes in Cinnamon’s hand. “Her answers looked wrong, but consistently wrong,” he said, pointing out flipped and tilted numbers in her notes. “She was writing backwards for minus and upside down for imaginary-”

  “Doc,” Cinnamon said, “you makes me look bad.”

  “No, Cinnamon, this is amazing, ” I said, taking the folder and paging through her notes, which went from painfully scrawled to largely incomprehensible as she incorporated more and more traditional math. “We’ve got to jump on this right away if she really is this smart.”

  “Fuck,” Cinnamon said. “You just wants to give me more work!”

  “Cinnamon,” I said, touching her shoulder. “I know schoolwork sucks. I hated it too. But even when I fell in love with tattooing, I had to work at it, hard. I don’t recognize half of this, but, if I’m reading these equations right… you must enjoy the heck out of math.”

  She grinned despite herself, and so did I.

  “I’m so glad you’re enjoying math, but I have to be straight with you, Cinnamon. The Dean called us all down here because you’ve been skipping your other classes,” I said. Her ears folded back, and she looked away. “We’ve talked it over, and they’ve agreed not to kick you out, for now, but you’re going to have to do your part. You’re going to have to show up-”

  She hissed, twisting her head, pulling at her collar. “The other classes suck. ”

  “I wish I could tell you that it gets better, but it doesn’t,” I said. “And I know it seems like math is easy to you now, Cinnamon, but it’s going to get harder, too, and you need to learn to deal with it now. You’re going to have to learn to work at things. It doesn’t matter what you want to do, Cinnamon. If you want it… you’ll have to… work at it… ”

  I trailed off, staring at the notes. Then I stood up. I was wrong. I did recognize this.

  “Mom?” Cinnamon asked uncertainly.

  “What’s this?” I asked, pointing at a diagram showing a rectangle-and a pentagram.

  “It’s nothing,” she said defensively. “I was just looking for more paths of the brickies.”

  “The golden ratio shows up in many figures,” Vladimir said sharply. He looked as defensive as Cinnamon. “ Including the pentagram. There’s nothing demonic about it.”

  “I never said that there was,” I said, showing the folder to Doug. “Look familiar?”

  “Yeah,” he said, taking the sheets. “This a lot like graphomancy. In fact, this set of golden rectangles is very similar to what’s used by the tagger.”

  �
��And this shows a one-to-one mapping to a pentagram,” I said. “Nothing demonic, but there’s a reason white magic uses circles and black magic uses pentagrams. In graphomancy, a circle is a shield to keep things out, whereas a pentagram is a receiver to draw things in.”

  “Meaning?” Vladimir asked, still looking a bit defensive.

  “Cinnamon has figured out,” I said, “how a pentagram maps onto a pattern of golden section rectangles. And our friend the graffiti tagger uses similar patterns in his magic. I’m guessing that’s how his graffiti gets so much power. It’s built like a magical receiver.”

  “Uh… can I get a photocopy of this?” Doug said, turning the sheet back and forth. “I’m working on a similar problem with Dakota and this… this might help me.”

  The door opened, and Jack Palmotti gestured to us. He’d gotten a call a few minutes earlier and had walked out to take it. “Miss Frost,” he said, “Can I see you outside?”

  “Wait here, honey,” I said, and followed Palmotti out into the hall. “What is it now?”

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” he said, “but that was Margaret Burnham. She called to let me know about some developments in the case, and it slipped out that you were here, trying to do the right thing by Cinnamon,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” I said. “Technically, I’m not in custody of Cinnamon, but the court order doesn’t say I can’t be in the same-tell me there’s not a new court order.”

  “There wasn’t until just now,” Palmotti said. “When you were arrested, it was apparently all over the news. The prosecutor saw it, and asked the judge to issue a restraining order.”

  “They’ve barred you from seeing Cinnamon at all until the case is resolved.”

  This One Thing I Could Do

  Calaphase was gone… and I couldn’t see Cinnamon.

  That left me in a daze. I sat numbly through my lawyer’s briefings, answering their questions when asked. It seemed to go on forever, and by the time Doug came to rescue me and dropped me off in front of Calaphase’s house to get my car, it was a quarter past noon.

  I’d hoped the police would be done with the crime scene by the time that we got there, but instead I found a swarm of them still there, examining the house, the tags, the graffiti-and my Prius sitting smack dab in the middle of the carport of a man who didn’t own a car.

  Before we could pull up, the siren of a fire truck drove Doug to the side of the road, far short of the house. As it sped past, I leaned back in the seat. I was tempted to come back later, but there was always the chance they might tow my car. Finally I hopped out, shooed Doug off, and trudged towards the house to try to get them to release the blue bomb to me.

  The fire truck stopped right in front of the house, and I could now see smoke curling up from behind it. Great. The tag on Calaphase’s house had caught fire too. Hopefully they’d caught it in time to save the house, but so much for the hope I could take a look at it.

  And, similarly, so much for the hope I could quickly get my car. Before two words were out of my mouth, I was stopped, questioned, and detained. By now, I was learning how this worked: these cops hadn’t been at the scene of Calaphase’s death, and had to do their jobs based on what was right in front of them.

  So I gritted my teeth… and cooperated.

  At first it didn’t seem to help. At this crime scene I had no allies. Rand was nowhere in sight, and Philip didn’t magically come to my aid. But I had reported Calaphase’s death, and that was in the system. So eventually Lucia Bonn, the detective in charge, got the story from downtown. But that just turned the questioning from suspect to witness.

  “Thank you, Miss Frost,” Bonn said, reviewing the statement form-they were becoming depressingly familiar. “I don’t need to impound your car,” Bonn said at last. “You can go-and for what it’s worth… I’m sorry about your friend.”

  I thanked her, trudged back to the blue bomb and stared at it sadly. The tagger had keyed it, fucker, and then I noticed he’d defaced it with a few stripes-apparently Calaphase and I had interrupted him vandalizing my car when we came to the door.

  My eyes tightened as I realized that the cops had not noticed the graffiti on it-they were not as elaborate as the tag, and from the right angle could have been mistaken for streaks of paint. I thought about just going, but then I tromped back and told Bonn what I’d found.

  “Oh, damnit,” Bonn said, rubbing her forehead. “Insult to-Jack, go take a look. Thanks, Miss Frost. You are the most cooperative so-called murder suspect I’ve ever seen.”

  Great, my fiendish plan was working. Yay me.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide,” I said heavily, feeling my neck. Beneath the bandage, the bite from Calaphase was starting to itch again. “Anyway, if you, or more likely somebody in the DA’s office, really wanted to railroad me, well, you’re the cops, you can do it, whether I cooperate or not. Trust me on that.”

  Lucia Bonn suddenly looked very sad. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re right. We can.”

  “Not that I’m accusing you of anything,” I said quickly. “You’re just doing your job, tracking down the guy who killed my… uh, boyfriend. I can’t control how you do it. The only thing I’ve got control over is myself, and I don’t see why I should make your job harder.”

  “Miss Frost, take my advice,” Bonn said, taking my arm and speaking quietly, but firmly. “Talk to your lawyers, and take their advice. Because no cop cares how nice you are. We all just want to catch the bad guy and move the fuck on.”

  It took an hour for the crime scene technicians to get back to the car, and then another hour to take all the pics and samples they wanted. While they worked, I took a walk down the pretty little suburban street, but then realized this was his neighborhood. We would have taken walks here. First, at night, then, maybe, someday, by day. I couldn’t take it; I trudged back, plopped down on the sidelines, and tried hard not to pick at, or think of, my itchy neck.

  Or think of my daughter, trapped in foster care, unable to see me.

  It was well after one when they re- released the blue bomb to me. Without even time to stop for a snack I spent the next three hours at Ellis and Lee, where my lawyers worked me over on everything from Valentine to Cinnamon to Calaphase. Finally I trudged back to the Rogue Unicorn and steeled myself for the fallout of my stunt on the steps of the jail.

  But there was none; Kring/L was supportive as always, and none of the staff gave me grief. They all knew what I’d been through. In fact, Annesthesia pulled me aside and confided that we’d gotten a few customers who wanted graffiti-based tattoos, and that she’d been turning them away. I thanked her-and not just because I didn’t like the look of graffiti art on human flesh. Instead, at this point, I was raw enough about Calaphase that I was afraid that on the spot I’d do something I might regret.

  Then, my day got even better. A cute, pigtailed college student came in looking for a ‘Frost bite.’ I smiled and told her she’d have to settle for a tattoo.

  I love tattooing. I love talking to the clients, picking out the design, fitting it to the skin, feeling the smoothness of the canvas before I make the first mark. Even the prepwork-setting up the tattoo gun, the needles, the flash-has a pleasant rhythm to it, busy enough to make me forget things for a while. And when we get into the studio, just me, my tools and my client inside the protective barrier-well, they don’t call it a magic circle for nothing.

  She chose a simple design, a butterfly atop a long-stemmed rose. Butterflower #4 was one of Jinx’s best designs, with simple, potent magical lines easily customizable for body shape and skin color. She wanted it in a “safe” place, someplace where it would look good in a bathing suit but hidden under normal clothes. I knew the type: I had been the type, long ago, before I got addicted to tattoos. So I gave her her first “bite” curling over her shoulder blade, so she could try out her rebellious streak before committing to changing her life.

  The wa
rm vibration of the gun rippled up through my hand, and I imagined the sharp, scratchy pleasure of the needle on the other end. I frequently wiped away the ink and blood so I had a clear view of my canvas, but as I drew the gun closer to the more sensitive skin near the ridges of her bone, I put the cloth down briefly and put my hand on her other shoulder to calm her, talking more loudly to keep her attention as I went over more sensitive skin.

  Magical ink is trickier than mundane tattooing; you have less ability to recover from your mistakes, and have to learn how to really focus to get it right the first time. But Butterflower #4 was a small, simple mark, as magical marks go, taking little more than an hour, and after it was done I ran a little mana through it to make sure it worked.

  The girl cried in delight when the butterfly stirred, then cooed as its wings lifted up into the air, throwing off little fairy sparkles of mana when, against my instruction, she touched it gingerly with her finger. No harm was done, though, so I coaxed it back into her skin so it could bond properly, bandaged it up to keep it safe from prying fingers, and sent her on her way with a stern but friendly warning-one more satisfied customer.

  As I cleaned up, I felt good. At least there was this one thing I could do. Then I remembered Helen’s warning about the suitability of my profession, and I cursed. There was a good shot they were going to take this from me too, either because of the murder case or the custody case-that is, assuming there was anything I could do to get Cinnamon back at all.

  “You have a call,” Annesthesia said, as I stepped out of the front inking room.

  I checked the clock. “Almost nine,” I said. “A bit late for Rogue business.”

  “She called twice while you were tattooing,” Annesthesia said, “but I didn’t want to interrupt you. It was only on the third call that she actually said it was urgent.”