Anthony Francis - Frost Moon

"But… but…" I said, now really stalling for time. Wait-his image had gone to the hospital. "But the doctors examined you! They did bloodwork, took X-rays-"

"I could say that I'm just that good," Mirabilus said, "but why lie to you, Dakota? You're in the club. I did a simple switcheroo: I let the projectia get shot, then took its place in the ambulance. A pair of stab wounds, a little more magic, and, voila, a simulated gunshot. Didn't you hear when the X-rays came back? 'Miraculously', the bullet missed bone. It didn't hurt the illusion that those damn clods infected me with a very real bug."

And that was it. I was out of options. I looked around desperately. My friends were laid out around me like ninepins, and Transomnia was at the entrance Buck had blasted, nailing sheets of plywood over it to hide the interior of the Masquerade from the street. Maybe Doug knew where we were, if Jinx had told him-but supposedly he couldn't tell the police without Mirabilus knowing. We were fucked.

"Oh, please feel free to ask me something else," Mirabilus said, checking his watch. "I've lugged this altar across five continents. I've had many, many women on its surface. And I know stalling for time. But it's useless. The full moon is hours off yet, and I'm not yet peaked enough to sample your goods-"

I cringed on the platform, pressing my forehead to my bound hands. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. The creepy old geezer was going to rape me before stripping the skin from my body. I was fucked. Or was about to be. Oh, God And I looked aside for any help, saw Jinx and Cinnamon hanging from a hook, saw Alex and Buck laid unmoving-and then I saw that Wulf still breathed.

"Look. I… I know you want my tattoos, and maybe Cinnamon's too, if you decide not to turn her," I said. Mirabilus said nothing, so I cautiously continued. "And I know how you feel about the magicians. I won't get in the way of you eliminating your rivals-"

"Won't?" Mirabilus said curiously, putting his hand on my buttocks. "Or can't?"

I cringed again, but continued. "But you don't need to let Wulf die." I cried. "His marks are too old to harvest. He's not a magician at all. He doesn't even know what you've done to him. He served you well, even if he didn't know it. How could he possibly be a threat?"

"Wulfgang? That old Nazi bastard?" Valentine laughed. "He's no threat at all. In fact he was my favorite stalking horse-all I needed to do was plant a suggestion about a 'cure' for his 'curse', and steer him towards my target. Normally he'd dig up one or two practitioners, but this time he struck gold, I have to say. At last, he's helped me draw out my true rival."

I looked over at Buck. I'd drawn him into this. "Oh no. Not Buck-"

"Oh, no, not him, my dear. And not Alex or Jinx either. They're all just wankers," Valentine said. "Even Buckhead, prize that he is, is in the end a pathetic old fool, a fading wannabe-god who never learned anything. None of them, not a one, know the Art."

He shrugged off his cloak, exposing a barrel chest covered in intricate tattoos. ^

"My true rival, my dear, is you."

"Tattooing is the only true magical art," Mirabilus said, spreading his arms wide, showing off a hundred, a thousand detailed tattoos, each a hyperintricate knot of runes and sigils I would have been proud to have inked-had they not been woven throughout with scars and brands and symbols of pain and death. "Tarot readings, onmyoji mystics, hexes-all nonsense. Ley lines, sacrifices, potions- mere dabbling. Only necromancers come close to the true nature of magic; their every spell is powered by the spilt blood of a living thing. But do they recognize the source of their power? No-they let all that magic bleed out into the air, catching only a whiff to make some dead thing dance like a marionette."

"Only the Art truly understands the true source of all magic: life." He shrugged his shoulders, and his tattoos seemed to glow to life, coming off his body in a haze of psychedelic color. "All the inks and powders and designs and rituals are just a way of focusing the power that is life. Understand that, and you can do anything."

"From the olden days, the Hebrews tried to stamp us out," he said, raising his voice. "They knew what we could do and murdered us, overturned our stones, defiled our altars. We had to go underground, practice our rites in secret-"

"Baal," I said. "You're literally a priest of Baal-" "Close enough," Mirabilus said, bowing slightly. "You know enough to recognize the words, but have forgotten what they mean. Should I… introduce you to the rites of Ba'alat Gebal before I take my prize?"

Something about his tone made my skin crawl-fuck that. "I knew I saw something Middle Eastern in your skin tone," I said. "You're a descendant of priests of Baal who escaped persecution by pretending to be Jews. You threw me off with that 'Christopher Saint Valentine's Day' stage name, but I'm sure of it now-what did your family do, switch to pretending to be Christian once the Jews were the ones being persecuted?"

Mirabilus was silent for a moment, then laughed bitterly. "Wrong, but close enough-the Inheritance of Byblos has taken many guises over the millennia. You know, the rites of Ba'lat would make this easier on you. Call it professional courtesy for a fellow priest-"

"Fuck that" I said, this time aloud. "I'm no priest of Baal or of anything else. I don't believe in any of that hocus pocus-but I was brought up a Christian and if I have to choose I'll go out with Jesus. Fuck Baal."

"Now, now," Mirabilus said, "you'll make me change the order-"

"If you were planning to rape me after ripping open my back," I said, "I'd prefer you switched the order." Though I couldn't imagine any order of those things that I'd prefer.

"I will kill you tonight," Mirabilus said icily, pulling out the dagger and drawing it over the skin of his arm without a flinch. The dagger's pommel began to glow red. "I will link my life with yours with the Art of Ink and Life, drain your power and add it to my own. It will be done now as in centuries past by the Children of the Ba'alat of Gebal."

I swallowed, clenching my hands tightly. I could feel the mana building in my hands, but underneath the stinging pitch it had nowhere to go and the skin of my hands got hotter and hotter until it felt like it was burning fire.

"Oh, please, Dakota, build up the mana in the vessels on your hands until they burst," he said, laughing-and something tickled the back of my mind. "It will only make my job easier, the flow faster. I will kill you, tonight, and then Buckhead, and Jinx, and then Alex-a pity for him, he had such potential."

But I was ignoring him now, concentrating. Build up the mana in the vessels of your hands until they burst. What was wrong about how he said that?

"Sorry I'm late," Transomnia said, hopping up to the podium nimbly and tossing down a hammer with a kind of glee. "Anything left for me, old man?"

And then it hit me. He'd hadn't said the vessels in your hands, but on your hands.

"You can have all the blood," Mirabilus said, grinning. "I just want the skin."

Vessel was an old skindancer word for magical capacitor. He didn't mean my blood vessels-he was talking about the magical marks on my palms and knuckles. The word was old, falling out of use in the 1800's, used now only by faux-ancients like Wiccans… and true ancients like Mirabilus. If I was right about his use of such an old word, Mirabilus had extended his life a century or more with his lifedraining tricks-and maybe, just maybe, he was like the Marquis, trapped in a prescientific view that saw magical tattoos as mystical lenses, projecting mana from living bodies into the air through their two-dimensional designs.

In that view, my hands were the biggest threat: with their flexible skin, they were my quickest source of power, whereas any other skindancing movement would be slower, giving him more than enough time to stab me in the back. With my hands coated with goo, all that power could do was burn out my skin, like black paper thrown over a light bulb.