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dinged—”
    “Fast? The graffiti … moved? ” Saffron said.
    “Oh, come on,” I said. “You’ve seen my tattoos move, same principle—”
    “Oh, do I remember your tattoos moving,” Saffron said, first lascivious, then embarrassed in the very next moment. Cinnamon sneezed, and Saffron raised a gloved hand to her brow. “I’m sorry, that was inappropriate, given the circumstances and company.”
    “Yes, please, thank you,” I snapped. “If you would stop hitting on me every time I came over here I would be much more likely to come over here.”
    “Dakota,” Saffron said. “I thought we were going to be friends again—”
    “ Friends ,” I underlined. “Not girl friends.”
    “Dakota,” Saffron said reprovingly. “There’s no need to get snippy—”
    “I’m goin’ for a walk,” Cinnamon said, hopping up and leaping over the banister of the gazebo, tail fluidly slipping over the rail. She glared back at me. “The reason I said I hates this place is that you always fights when you comes here.”
    In the silence that followed, Saffron and I stared at each other uncomfortably.
    “Sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “I thought we’d stopped bringing up reminders of ‘us.’”
    “Sorry,” Saffron said, equally embarrassed. “You’ve recently bled. It’s, uh, agitating me—and can we please leave it at that? You were trying to tell me—”
    “About a magical attack,” I said. “A giant graffiti tag, all magical, all energized. Revenance was trapped in it. It was tearing him apart—”
    “Oh no ,” Saffron said, swallowing. “Did it—”
    “No,” I said. “But it had him effectively trapped. The police tried to rescue him, then I tried. We all failed. He held on as long as he could—”
    “But he wasn’t a daywalker,” she said soberly, putting her goggles back on.
    “No,” I said. Watching a vampire die was … horrible. I could still hear his screams. I cast about for anything else to talk about. “What I don’t get is how it worked . It held him there for hours. The mana should have dissipated, but it seemed like it was getting stronger. ”
    “Perhaps there was a hidden caster,” Saffron said, “feeding magic to it—”
    “There was a guy,” I said, describing the jerk with the hat and skateboard, gloating as Revy died. “But he was hundreds of feet away, and there was no magic flowing off him, like from a classical wizard. I can feel it, with these vines. The tag, on the other hand, was just bleeding mana. It was definitely a power source, or maybe plugged into a power source—”
    “Maybe,” she said thoughtfully, “it was feeding off Revy. ”
    “Can’t be,” I said. “Magic is derived from life force, and vampires aren’t alive—”
    Saffron hissed, quietly but with full fangs. “I’m shocked to hear that from you, Dakota,” she said, and with her eyes behind the goggles I couldn’t tell if she was really angry or just messing with me. “I had to devote a whole chapter in my thesis to debunking that myth.”
    “Well, send it to me,” I said gladly. “Prove me wrong.”
    “It is a bit technical,” she said smugly.
    “ I was a chemistry major,” I replied. “I can handle anything the soft sciences put out.”
    “Them’s fightin’ words,” Saffron said, turning her laptop towards her with a vicious smirk. “I’ll email it to you. Maybe you can send me comments.”
    “Sure,” I said. Then, again bringing the conversation back to Revy, “But even so … he may have been writhing, but he sure wasn’t dancing .”
    Saffron paused her search. “Who cares whether he was dancing? Just because he’s not an official skindancer doesn’t mean his writhing couldn’t generate magical power—”
    “Except that normal movements don’t obey skindancing rules,” I said, “so the random surges of magic they generate usually average out to a null effect.”
    “Could it have been … a magical capacitor?” Saffron said, resuming her typing.