We crossed the Quad to the Michael C. Carlos Museum, a white, blocky structure with high grids of windows and a keeplike main entrance flanked by two angled staircases that broke up the lines of the castle-shaped structure and made it look vaguely pyramidal.
“Quit being so mysterious, who are we here to see?” I asked, as I bought my ticket and followed Michael inside. “An expert on the magic of cave art?”
“Experts on cave magic,” Michael said, grinning. “They’d like that. Here we are.”
“Oh. My. God,” I said.
Standing in the hall before me was a giant mural of moving graffiti.
Keif and Drive
Freestanding in the exhibit hall, underneath a huge banner proclaiming MYSTIC MARKS OF THE URBAN JUNGLE, was an irregular chunk of brick wall, ten feet high and thirty long, covered with moving graffiti, a panorama of toy soldiers fighting a slow-motion war complete with cartoony explosions that actually said KABOOM as they dissipated.
“An exhibit of magic graffiti,” I said. “What a helpful coincidence.”
Of course, I didn’t believe this was any kind of coincidence. I’d never heard of magic graffiti before, and now, when it was spreading through the city, a whole exhibit popped up before me. For a moment I thought I’d found a lead; unfortunately, my elation faded as I scanned the artwork. I didn’t see anything familiar, not the colors, linework, or even the logic of the magic. This was magic graffiti, all right-but it almost certainly wasn’t done by the killer.
“Not our guys,” I murmured, then aloud, “Wow, Michael, I’m impressed!”
“I’m not done,” Michael said, motioning to me from around the wall. “Let me introduce you to my friends Keif and Drive.”
I guessed Keif was the short, hefty, Latino man in army fatigues posing for a photographer. His feet were planted wide, he held a pair of paintbrushes in folded arms, and beneath his Indian-headdress spray of dreadlocks he had a mischievous smile. Beside him stood Drive, a tall, gaunt African-American man in blue and black racing leathers, blond-dyed head turned away from the camera with a snooty, bored look. After the flash, both seemed to relax: Keif pulled his feet together and let the paintbrushes clatter together in one hand, and Drive thanked the photographer with an easy, friendly grin.
“Dakota Frost,” Keif said, nudging Drive. “Look, it’s Dakota Frost-”
“What?” Drive said. “Speak of the devil.”
“Keif, Drive, I’d like you to meet one of my oldest buddies from high school,” Michael said, beaming. “I think you know who she is.”
“Do we,” Keif said, pumping my hand. “You’re all over YouTube, Frost.”
“I go by Dakota,” I said, smiling, “and… YouTube?” I shook my head.
“Keif, told you that floating clock bit was faked,” Drive said, shaking his head. “I’m sure they jazzed it up for the cameras… ”
His voice trailed off as I stretched a long, tattooed arm between the two of them, rippling it up and down. My tattoos glowed to life, and my (remaining) trusty asp lifted off my skin in a shower of sparks, tongue flickering in the air.
“Holy shit,” Drive said.
“Oh, man,” the photographer said. “I gotta get a picture of that.”
“Oh, for the love,” I said, coiling up my arms, then stretching them out again, releasing my vines into the air with enough mana that they would show up. My skin stung, and the vines had a bit of asymmetry, but with concentration, I compensated. “If we have to… ”
So Keif and Drive posed again, with me standing between them, arms thrown wide to cast a net of glowing tattoo magic around them. Keif muttered, “You’re not going to get in trouble over this, are you? There’s not a secret tattoo magic rule-”
“I don’t answer to anyone,” I said, “except God and my clients.”
Afterwards, the four of us walked the exhibit together. Drive actually didn’t do much graffiti: he was a “defense contractor for the middle school industrial complex,” creating ironic assemblages like a Big Wheels with handlebar-mounted toy assault rifles or a red wagon filled with toy soldiers pouring out into a sandbox like it was the beaches of Normandy. These had inspired Keif, who used the images repeatedly in his graffiti. Once he’d tagged all over the city, but now he made installable pieces in the comfort of his warehouse studio in the West End.
We paused before one of the larger tags-”no, not a tag, a top-to-bottom piece, ” Keif corrected-life-size takeoffs of a GI-Joe and a Ken Doll kissing in a stylized closet. While I tried to suppress my smirk at their cartoony passion, Keif explained how the figures moved.
“It’s just graphomancy, geometric magic,” he said, pointing out the lines, the connections in the slow-moving figure. “Graffiti magic isn’t any different from tattoo magic, but since we’re largely self-taught the designs are usually primitive. That’s why I wanted to talk to you after seeing that YouTube clip. A fully functioning watchamazing. ”
“I’ll put you in touch with my graphomancer,” I said. “Designing magical marks and inking them are both sufficiently specialized skills that it usually takes two people.”
“I’m willing to learn,” Drive said.
“All right,” I said. “But I still don’t understand where they get the power. My tattoos are powered by the mana generated by my living body.”
“Well, most of them are just photomagic,” Keif said slowly.
“Photomagic doesn’t explain a tag under a tarp damn near tearing a vampire apart,” I said. “It doesn’t explain a tag at night nearly cutting a werewolf in half.”
“That is… difficult to explain,” Keif said, even more slowly.
“Look, Frost,” Drive said impatiently, “what Keif is not saying is there are a few tricks that can really jazz up graffiti magic that he thinks are his own trade secret.” Keif fumed, but said nothing. “Do you understand the yin and yang of magic?”
“I’ve heard the term,” I said, eyeing the cartoons of Ken and Joe move towards each other, then away. In the two circles of their heads you could imagine the yin and yang symbols intertwining. “Refresh my memory.”
“There’s the Vaiian thread, and the Niivan thread,” he said. “Day and night, light and dark, werewolves and vampires. The Vaiian thread is powered by life. That’s your basic tattoo magic, werekin transforms, almost all practical magic really. The Niivan thread is powered by decay. That’s your basic necromantic magic and the power behind vampires and zombies.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, keeping my face bland. I’d heard the Vaiian-Niivan theory of magic, but as far as I knew it was just New-Age nonsense. I really wanted to call bullshit, but I was asking for help from him and that wouldn’t be nice, so I just kept my mouth shut.
“But that shit’s like a circle, man, the circle of life, you know? Decay is life-the life process of worms and bacteria and fungi,” he said. I smiled skeptically, and he interpreted it as agreement. “You see. So that’s what we do-we use life, just not human life-”
“He’s trying to say, we tag walls that have mold,” Keif said, embarrassed. “You can cultivate it, but it takes forever to prep something that big.” He thumbed back at the brick wall dominating the center of the exhibit. “So back when I was still tagging walls in public-”
“Back when? You flaming liar,” Drive said, shaking his head. “Mister Art Crime here thinks there ain’t nuthin’ like the thrill of live taggin’ -”
“Shut up, man,” Keif muttered. “So anyway, back when I didn’t care about being arrested, I’d find pre-painted surfaces with mold busting out. If you grind in the right crystals with your chalk, the tags move as much under a streetlight as they do in broad daylight.”
“No shit,” I said. “You think that if you cultivated it you could use enough power to-”
But Keif was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No way-at least I couldn’t. This goes back to why I wanted to talk to you. I think to do more than we do we’d need to start using more sophisticated pigments-like the kind skindancers use.”
“You want my mixes,” I said, and Keif kind of got an ‘ aw shit, she’s going to turn me down’ look. “Sure, but you’ll want more than just pre-made mixes that are specialized for human skin. You need to pick the brains of an actual stonegrinder, the people who make our pigments.”
