“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re not above whitewashing his tags if he’s taken prime wall space. You’re both targeting special surfaces for your largest tags, and he’s nailed all of the best ones first. And since you can’t ink magic directly over magic… you’re wiping his out.”
Keif let out his breath in a sharp hiss, but he didn’t deny it.
No one said anything. After a moment, Drive stood up. “A crossout is one thing, but an actual whitewash? What were you hoping to do, learn his tricks, wipe out all the evidence and take credit for them as your own? Man, that’s low,” he said, and stalked out of the room.
Keif glared up from his clenched hands. “Happy now, Nancy Drew?”
“I prefer Encyclopedia Brown,” I replied, “but if you’d just been up front about what you knew, then I wouldn’t have had to expose you.”
“Why the hell are you butting into this?” Keif said. “Why can’t you let it alone?”
“ You popped up when this started going down, and I had to know why,” I said. “And now I know-he’s a giant, and you’re standing on his shoulders, using his work as your canvas.”
“Who cares?” Keif said. “That’s how graffiti works. You don’t build your own damn buildings to mark, you mark what’s already there. Who cares if I’m doing it atop his shit?”
“I told you his shit killed one of my friends, right?” I said. “Did I tell you the total body count is nearing twenty, including two close friends, one of them more than close?”
Ranger went pale and put her Coke down. “Is that what went down last night?”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Almost got killed, but I made it. My.. . friend wasn’t so lucky.”
“Aw, shit, man, why are you doin’ this to me?” Keif said, staring up at no-one in particular. “This was a good gig-”
“You kill anybody?” I interjected.
“What? What? No!” Keif said, raising his hands. “My tags don’t have that kind of juice.”
“Then I don’t need to tell anyone anything,” I said. “I can keep this quiet, but I’ve got to know how the graffiti works. Looking at images has helped, but both me and my graphomancer are stumped. It crucifies vampires, tears up werewolves, and can catch buildings on fire even after you paint it over. It can create wide area effects, like wind. It can be triggered remotely-it’s powered from an external source. Tattoo magic can’t beat it. I need to know how to short-circuit it, before the tagger snaps his fingers and sets half Atlanta ablaze.”
Keif was silent for a second, eyes scanning the air.
“How many tags are there in the Candlesticks?” Ranger asked abruptly.
“I get it, I get it,” Keif said. “I’m thinking. To answer Dakota’s question, Streetscribe’s blackbook, his library of designs, is very complex. I don’t fully get it. But there are some base patterns that serve as conduits of power. Call them spreading throwups, doorway tags, and octopus roses. Those last ones are his real masterpieces, and they’re the most dangerous.”
“ Thank you,” I said. “But how do you use his magic if you don’t understand it?”
“I’m a leech,” Keif said bitterly. “Normally, you can’t write magic over complex magic unless you know it inside out. But remember you said you already knew whitewashing doesn’t destroy the magic? So I whitewash the underlying tag to lock it down, then lay down new circuits on the same lines to power my own designs.”
“Like magical induction,” I said.
“Yeah,” Keif said. “Though the rules aren’t so simple as electromagnetism. Even figuring out what parts of the design are the power elements is tricky. Unless you know graphomancy in and out, it’s hard to follow.”
“I know a witch who can help me out with that,” I said. “But you’ve worked with his designs enough to know how their power flows. Is there a way to short-circuit them?”
“ May be,” Keif said, eyes closing, head moving as if he were tracing circuits from memory. When he opened his eyes, he said, “Never thought about how to make his designs less effective, but I’m sure I could come up with-”
“That’s great,” Ranger said, an edge in her voice, “all this is fucking great, but, Keif-you never answered my question. How many tags are there in the Candlesticks, that you’ve painted over, that may catch on fire?”
Keif sighed. “About a dozen pieces, most painted over, by me or others.”
“Jeeezus,” Ranger said. “What triggers it? Are these just ticking time bombs?”
I thought about that a moment. “Maybe,” I said. “It isn’t quite clear yet. At first I thought they catch fire because they’re painted over, but today I learned that wasn’t true.”
I stared at Keif, hunched over, dreadlocks spreading out like a porcupine; at Ranger, frowning over her Coke, at Drive, lurking just outside the door, listening with a disgusted look on his face. This was about more than just unsightly graffiti. “Anybody die in those fires?”
Ranger nodded. “Seven in the first fatal one, then fifteen in the second.”
“ Twenty-two people? Jesus,” I said, leaning back in my chair. Count all the vamps and werekin who’d vanished or died, add in humans who died in suspicious fires, and you got a total body count of almost forty people. “Let’s assume the tag’s magic will be disrupted if painted over with a new tag, and diminished under a whitewash. Sound reasonable?”
“Sounds… reasonable,” Keif said. “It might depend on the original purpose of the tag. Maybe yours were stronger. Intended to kill. The Candlestick tags may just be routine shit.”
“All right. Then the right thing to do now is go to the new tag, photograph it, then figure out how to shut it down. If it works, we repeat the process here, first on any remaining whitewashed tags, then on your own. When they’re defused, we whitewash them.”
“I am not,” Keif said fiercely, “going to whitewash my own art -”
“You’ve got to, or you’ll go to jail. We can’t clean up the whole city by ourselves,” I said. “We can’t. We’ve got to tell the police. I can keep your name out of it, but my pull won’t help if your tags are plastered all over the city while you’re hanging at Michael C. Carlos.”
“Aw, shit,” Keif said, face strained. “Damnit, we shouldn’t have taken that show.”
“What? No,” Drive said, leaning against the doorframe. “ You gotta clean up your act.”
“Yeah,” Keif said, hunched over so far his dreads flopped forward. “I’ll think about it-”
“You’ll think about it?” Ranger said, standing, tossing her Coke in the sink. “I’m gonna get evicted or arrested or killed because your shit is burning up our home? Hell no. You’re not going to think about it-you gotta clean it up starting now!”
“Yeah, sure,” Keif said-and then glanced up in surprise to see all three of the rest of us standing. “You mean, like right now?”
“Like now now,” I said. “The tagger moves fast.”
Keif got to his feet. “All right,” he said. “All right. No time like the present, I guess.”
We followed Keif out. He wasn’t the healthiest of boys; he had a distinct penguin wobble and I started to worry he wouldn’t make it. “How far are we going? Should we take my car?”
“Nah, it’s not far, but I gotta run by the studio and pick up my paint,” Keif said, pointing at a door on the opposite side of the white canyon. “And I want to go pick up my camera.”
“Wait. Something’s different,” Ranger said.
I felt mana tingle around me. I whirled, inspecting the scattered pieces of graffiti. At first, I didn’t see anything different; there were some tags, but our tagger hadn’t shown up and sprayed a new masterpiece while I’d been drinking my Coke.
But then my eye caught movement, low and furtive along the warehouse wall. At first I thought it was a mouse or a bug, but then I caught it again, long, spindly, like the shadow of a hand. My eyes didn’t want to see it at first, but then I had a brainflash. This is what it felt like when other people tried to catch my tattoos moving. I tilted my head.