Frost Moon (26 page)

Valentine filmed his challenges, so an entire crowd was crammed into the Rogue Unicorn’s larger tattooing room. Valentine was in a wheelchair, attended by a nervous-looking, nurse-for-hire type. There were two cameramen and a pair of associated busybodies. And, inside the magic circle that prevented stray
mana
from infiltrating the design, were my tools, my chair, Alex and me—and a stool with a box containing extra paraphernalia I would use later.

We had started early Friday morning at the ungodly hour of nine, as I had lied and told them it could take up to six hours—even before I knew an hour would be eaten just getting Valentine’s wheelchair up the stairs. When you got over the intricacy of the linework, however, the watch was bone-simple to ink and
I
would be done in three hours, maybe even two.

I’d stayed up late through the night mixing pigments, performing the rituals to purify them, and generally setting up. In that regard, the watch was simple: it used only seven pigments. Some of the magical tattoos I’ve done have used upwards of fifty.

So… pigments are simple, if a bit repetitive. The hardest part? Preparing the needles. Normal tattoos are done with little needles soldered to the end of a bar that goes into the tattooing machine. Magical tattoos require something a bit… different. Something that will soak up magic and release it on cue, not
poison
it like iron does. There are crystals that will work and even some new plastic composites from Japan, but the best material is unicorn horn— preferably free-shed, gathered, if not by virgins, by someone wearing blessed rubber gloves. Yes, Virginia, unicorns do exist. But that’s a story for another day.

Making the horn into needles takes many of the same tools that a modelmaker needs—magnifying glass and tweezers, files and sandpaper—and I did my needlework myself, which accounted for at least half of the quality of my work. It had taken two and a half hours to chip all the fragments I needed and file them into all the filigreed ‘points’ needed to ink the design—a one point, a triangular three, a curved five, and even a comblike seven for some of the larger outlines. You can’t solder the finished points: you have to glue them into a throwaway prong and clamp them. I tried reusable clamps once and it was a total wash—running them through the autoclave loosened the clamp, so the horn came loose in the client’s skin and he nearly ended up with a magical infection. Trust me—you
don’t
want one of those.

With the needles in the autoclave, the next step is the flash— printed on transfer paper so it can be copied to the skin. With an ordinary tattoo, a stencil and eyeballing it are enough, but for a magical design, you have to be more careful; Jinx had given me a list of resonant points, and once I began working on Alex’s skin I’d be pulling out a ruler and calipers to make sure the design was right. It can be tricky work—skin does shift and stretch, after all—and it would be a bit trickier since the design was reversed.

But now I had my ink and my needles and my flash and my subjects. All was in readiness—all that remained was to make sure that everyone understood this was
my
stage and my chair, and that inking a magic tattoo was
not
a stunt.

“I still don’t see why
we
had to come to
you”
Alex said, fidgeting in my tattooing chair. “Why couldn’t you have brought your equipment to the hospital?”

“First, I need a sterile environment,” I said, wiping down his hand. He jumped a little when I did it: I’ve had a lot of men in this chair and I know the signs when they’re stalling for time. “You understand
sterile
, right? Hospitals are dirty. That’s how the old man got a staph infection—”

“Luck of the draw.
All
hospitals,” Valentine said from his wheelchair, “put patients at risk for staph infections. They’re filled with diseased people in a confined space constantly being exposed to each other’s air, blood and fluids. Emory is one of the finest. Cleaner than most.”

“See?” Alex said, still squirming a little. “We could have made arrangements—”

“If James Randi can go on national television on a
gurney
when he was on
morphine,”
Valentine said, nostrils flaring, “I can survive a few hours in a wheelchair on Tylenol-3.”

“So, first, a few ground rules,” I said to the lead cameraman. “Hey you, behind the lens.”

“I’m
the director,” a second man said imperiously, stepping forward.

“No,
I’m
the director in here,” I snapped, holding my eyes on him. “I’m putting a permanent magical mark on a human body, which I take very seriously whether you get it or not. I’ll try to make it easy on you to get a good shot, but when I’m working, the camera works around
me
and not the other way around. If I say slide, you slide. Savvy?”

He held up his hands. “We got it.”

“Same goes for you, old man,” I said to Valentine. “This isn’t a stage magic trick you get to expose. You pull some James Randi shit and leap up to start sprinkling Styrofoam chips on me when I’m working, I tattoo you a new working asshole in the middle of your forehead.”

Valentine blinked, then his brow furrowed. “Sure, but we’ll have to test—”

“The test is that the tattoo will move when it’s
done,”
I said. “Normal tattoos don’t do that, do they? They’re just pigment plaques in the dermis. How
could
a tattoo move?”

Valentine’s mouth just hung open. “Uh… “

“I have never done this particular design before, so as an extra bit of insurance, we’re going to do this in two stages,” I said. “First, I will ink it on myself and make sure it works—”

“Didn’t you have a graphomancer review it?” Valentine asked.

“Did I leap up on stage in the middle of
your
performance at the Masquerade?” I said, smiling at him. “Give me an allowance for theatrics here. To win this challenge, I need to make it
absolutely clear
that the tattoo works by
magic,
and since Alex is not a skindancer, I’m going to tattoo it on myself
first
and show you. Then, and only then, I’ll put the design on Alex.”

“Then why’d you wipe down my hand?” Alex asked.

“You’re pretty, and I wanted to touch your warm skin.” I watched him squirm. “Do I need an another excuse? But seriously, don’t go rubbing your hand in mud or anything. It was just convenient for me to pre-prep you; the reasons will become clear later.”

Valentine leaned forward. “Isn’t it unusual for a tattooist to… tattoo themselves?”

“Very unusual,” I said, “for normal tattoo artists. For magical inkers, it’s practically required. Magical marks can go bad, and when they go bad they can actually
kill
you or mess you up for life. In the old days, inkers sometimes did that to each other deliberately, leaving their magical competition jinxed. Historically, there’s not a lot of trust between magical inkers.”

“Charming,” Alex said.

“That
was the old school,
this
is the new one,” I said, pouring encircling mix into my hand. “I do my work with ethical pride, employing expert graphomancers, and with state licenses, at least in Georgia, California and New York. You have nothing to worry about.”

“What is that?” Valentine said, staring suspiciously at the sparkling dust.

“A mix of kosher salt, quartz granules, cinnamon and ginger,” I said, “with a little plain old glitter thrown in for visibility. Nothing special—unless you happen to believe in magic.”

I said a little prayer over my cupped hands. Someone like Jinx would probably go in with a bunch of Wiccan nonsense about protection from this and invocation of that. I don’t believe in all of that stuff. There
are
spiritual forces of evil in this world, just waiting to take residence in anything even remotely magical, and the ‘circle’— a blessed ring of crystals layered over a flat plane, preferably of living earth but in this case a disc of cut granite set into the floor—did help to keep them out. But you didn’t need elaborate rituals: you just needed to look within, to whatever spiritual force you believed in, and call on it, letting your own aura blossom forth and charge the crystals to life.

My prayer finished, I poured the mix into the circle around us, murmuring. As the circle closed, I could feel our auras mingle with the mana built up in the pigments as a tingling rippled through my tattoos, something I’d never felt when I was unmarked. Some lucky people could feel mana anyway—Alex squirmed in his chair, the nurse looked at us eagerly, and the director with antsy concern. Valentine and the cameraman remained unmoved.

“We’re now encircled. This ring will help repel any stray magic or ‘evil spirits’,” I said, putting my hands up in scare quotes. “Or whatever. Regardless, this is a part of the procedure.
No
one crosses this line.
Not for any reason.
Clear?”

When they nodded assent, I began wiping off my left wrist with alcohol, then soap. “Stage two in inking a magical mark is imprinting the design.” I picked up the acetate sheet of the flash. A thin stick of blessed pitch rubbed across the design had made it sticky, so all I had to do was press it carefully to my wrist, where Cinnamon’s butterfly had once lived, rub it a few times, and then peel it off. “If this was an ordinary tattoo, I could just start inking it. But I’ll check the tattoo out against the instructions of the graphomancer to make sure I got the design right.”

I pulled out the ruler and calipers and had gotten halfway through the list of resonant points when someone finally noticed the obvious.

“The design is backwards,” Alex said.

“You mean, ‘mirror reversed,’” I said. The director leaned in with a handheld camera; he was assisting the other cameramen by providing candid shots, and I lifted my hand so both his camera and Alex could see more clearly.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Won’t that affect—”

“Yes and no,” I said, measuring the distance across the design. “Normally I wouldn’t reverse it, but in this case it is necessary.”

“But when you start to tattoo it—”

“Do
you
ink magic, Alex?”

“Uh… no,” he said. “But if this works I’d like to learn.”

“Good,” I said, grinning, making a small correction according to the instructions in Jinx’s list. “But until then you’re going to have to take my word that I need to reverse it.”

I stuck a palette knife into some Vaseline and rubbed it on my wrist, then rubbed it onto my hands. “This will make the machine work more smoothly,” I said. I checked over my pigments, the needles, the design, my skin. I inserted the tube holding the seven needle into the tattoo gun and started the machine. It began buzzing. I was ready. “And now, I begin.”

I touched the needle gently to my skin, the first sharp prick erased almost immediately by the thrumming vibration of the needle puncturing my skin, forty times a second. The hot, spreading warmth and vibration were sensual, almost sexy, and the noise faded into the background as I began chatting.

“First I’ll do the outline,” I said, curling the needle deftly round my hand. “On an ordinary tattoo, I’d do the outline, take a short break, and then fill in the linework. For a magical tat, I’ll stop when the major outline is done and check my resonant points. A magical tattoo is like a circuit, though it obeys different rules; you have to get all the components right or it won’t work. A stray line or too much pigment would be like a short circuit or a bad resistor—”

“What does it feel like?” Alex asked, leaning down over my hand. He was supposed to provide color commentary while I worked, but inking myself had thrown him.

“Feels hot,” I said, grinning, my eyes never leaving my hand. “Nowhere near as hot as your firespinning at the Masquerade, though.”

I reached the end of an arc and lifted the needle. Alex’s eyes sparkled back at me. “Fire is life,” he said, “and I love life. It shows in my spinning.”

“In other things, too, I bet,” I said, setting the gun in its stand briefly, wiping the blood off my wrist, then picking up the gun and returning my eyes to my work. “I’d have sworn that you weren’t just spinning—it looked like fire magic. What would the old man say?”

“He knows what I do,” Alex said. “Thinks it can all be done with chemicals. In fact he says he’d have challenged me already, except he’s afraid he’d set his hair on fire.”

“Ah, no big loss, that?” I said, reaching the end of another arc and winking at Valentine.

“You kids,” Valentine said, waving his hand feebly.

“But seriously,” Alex said, as I started again. “How does it feel on your skin—”

“Kinda scratchy. It’s intense, but a manageable intense. I’ve had worse paper cuts and less intense orgasms.” I finished an arc and looked up at him. “Of course, that depends on who’s giving me the orgasm.”

Alex leaned back with a slightly nervous laugh.

More quickly than I thought, the five main magical components of the watch were inked. I set the gun down, wiped off the blood again, and checked the measurements with my calipers. For good measure I sensed the mark with my fingers; everything was right on the money.

“Everything looks good,” I said, slipping the tube out of the machine and discarding the needle in a magical hazards vat. “That’s the major outline of the watch. Now I’m going to fill in the rest of the magical circuit. I have marks to make with three more needles and seven total inks—I’ll end up with sixteen different combinations, so this will take a while.”

“Isn’t seven by three twenty one?” Valentine asked weakly.

“Obviously she won’t use
every
combination,” Alex said.

“Right enough, and don’t be a jerk,” I said, grinning. “That’s my job.”

But Valentine didn’t respond, and I looked up to see him leaning back in the wheelchair, eyes closed. I cracked, “Hey old man, aren’t you going to even watch me kicking your ass?”

He flapped his hand even more feebly, with a very noticeable tremor. “Wake me when you do something interesting.”

The nurse looked at me, anguished, and Alex and I exchanged a nervous glance. Time to get this fucking thing over with.

The rest of the inking went even faster than I expected. I love working my own skin. It’s the finest canvas I’ve ever decorated. It’s smooth and soft and holds ink well and heals crisply, with little blurring of the designs. Even better, it’s internally smooth—when the designs move, or when I pull little stunts like I did when I transferred my butterfly to Cinnamon, there’s no excess pigment left in the skin.