Anthony Francis - Blood Rock

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.

“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.”

“Wasn’t ‘magical assault with intent to kill’ already a crime?” I said, cradling Cinnamon against me. She was crying. I hadn’t realized how much she liked Revy. “I’m sorry, baby-”

“I liked him,” Cinnamon said bitterly. “The fang was nice to me-”

I drew a breath. “Rand,” I said. “There was someone else on the scene, a short little prick with baggy pants, a skateboard, and a huge-ass hat-”

“I-I saw him too,” Cinnamon said suddenly. “When I went to get the pole. Sittin’ on a wall, watchin’ it all, grinning with some nasty ol’ silver grill on his teeth-”

“So?” McGough said, eyes sharp. “What do you think that had to do with this?”

“I saw him right when the wind picked up,” I said.

“I caught that too,” Gibbs said. “Just a glimpse, but I definitely saw the guy-and as soon as I looked, the wind snapped like a bitch and near ripped the tarp out of my hands.”

“Can’t be a coincidence,” I said. “He may have been magically enhancing the wind-”

“Oh, hell. Thanks, Frost. We’ll search the area,” McGough said, motioning to an officer. “First things first, though-this is a crime scene now. I need you to wait by your car-”

“I wasn’t done,” I snapped. “He was pretty far off. At first I thought he was trying to watch from a safe distance, but I surveyed the ley line crossings a few years back and one goes through the Cemetery right where he was standing. He could be a technical practitioner rather than a bloodline witch, which might affect his choice of escape routes-”