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 watch—amazing.”
“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.”
Keif’s face broke out with a smile as I was talking. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Exactly. Someone who’s been doin’ this shit for years and knows what works and what don’t.”
“All right,” I said, nodding. Between Michael, Keif and Drive, I had learned enough at Emory today to know what I needed to do—without having to go back to the library. I had to go back to school—but not college, this time. “I’ll ask my old master. No promises.”
Keif’s eyes widened. “So you do have an old master,” he breathed. “I knew it, I knew it. There was no way you picked all this up starting from ground zero. What’s he like?”
“He’s no Obi-Wan Kenobi,” I said, “but he is an old-school master, back when ‘master’ meant skindancing, stonegrinding and graphomancy. He inks, he comes up with most of his own designs, and grinds his own pigments from mushrooms and bark he gathers from the woods.”
“Oh, yeah,” Keif said, punching Drive in the arm. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“He goes by Arcturus,” I said. “Not his real name. He’s real private and real prickly. He prefers personal referrals—so let me put a toe in the water before I introduce you.”
“Fair enough,” Drive said. “So, Keif, if she delivers, you gonna quid pro quo and let her see your blackbook, you damn mooch?”
Keif’s expression froze. “Yeah,” he said, uncertainly. “Sure.”
“Show it to my graphomancer,” I said. “She’s mostly blind, but she’ll get a real kick out of scans of your book. Half the designs I wear are hers—I’m sure she could do a lot for you.”
We talked further, confirming that graffiti magic was even less well documented than tattoo magic, at least in the public literature. I’d need someone like Keif and Drive to help crack this thing—and they needed someone like me, or at least like Arcturus, who could help them develop better pigments. So we exchanged numbers, pressed flesh, parted.
I returned to the Rogue Unicorn like a conquering hero, climbing the rickety steps of the Little Five Points tattoo shop to find three customers waiting for me. Two of them had looked me up on the strength of the YouTube clip leaked from Valentine’s show—and two got tattoos on the spot, which is a better than average batting average for magical tattooing. Some days, even the ‘best magical tattooist in the Southeast’ doesn’t convince anyone to get a tattoo.
Then I tried to repair the asp that had been burned when I tried to save the werecat from the fire. Now that the swelling was down, the damage to the skin itself didn’t look so bad, but a lot of magical pigment was denatured. I cleaned most of it using a skindancing trick—activating a vine and sweeping it over the damaged tattoo to cull out bad pigment. Each time I raised the vine out of the skin, a few more tiny flakes of soot disappeared into the air; each time I sank the vine back it moved through the skin more smoothly. Eventually I cleared enough space to ink a new asp, but it was coiled around a small, Italy-shaped lump of dark pigment I couldn’t lift or move.
I frowned at it. There were a few ways around this, the most straightforward being laser treatments to break up the ink. But that offended my skindancer’s soul. Another tack was to ink a temporary pattern over the burnt ink, allowing it to heal, then lifting it off magically. But if there was enough magic ink left in the burn, I could end up with an even larger curdled mark and no way to remove it. I fumed. I didn’t have enough experience with burns to know what to do.
So I broke down and called my old master, Arcturus. After what felt lik
e a hundred rings, I gave up and called Zinaga, the apprentice next in line after me at his studio. She picked up right away, but rather than putting me through to Arcturus, she called me a deserter and started to rant about how he was better off without me. After a bit, I cut her off and told her why I’d called.
First I described our problems with the graffiti, about its magic, about Keif and Drive and their quid-pro-quo requests. As I talked, she was quiet for a while, until, embarrassed, I told her about my burn. Then she cut me off and went to talk to him; after a few minutes, she returned.
“He says come out here this week,” Zinaga said. “He says ‘I mean it. Do not wait.’”
“Gotta love him,” I groused. The least he could have done is come to the phone. He had to be really pissed. Then it occurred to me that the first time I’d come to Blood Rock looking for the famed Arcturus, I’d been picked up, warned off, and dumped on the side of the highway in Conyers ten miles from my Vespa. “His pet sheriff isn’t going to give me shit, is he?”
“No,” Zinaga said, disgusted. “You really think we’d treat family that way? Now get out here before he changes his mind—or before those burns ruin your ink.”
After she hung up, I checked my email again for any new pictures from my mysterious text-message benefactor. Over the past few days, someone in the APD, probably McGough, had used an out-of-state number to send me pictures of tags from all over the city. Pieces like the one that hit Revy were everywhere, but the ones that hit Tully were focused in Oakdale. And there was a third, cruder set, in Oakdale and Cabbagetown.
The pictures told me a lot about the taggers—I guessed three: a master, a journeyman, and an apprentice or copycat—but not about their magic. I needed to see a master tag moving to figure out how it worked. Still, I emailed Jinx the images and printed copies for Arcturus, who couldn’t tell an email address from a fax machine. One of us would figure something out.
I pulled up into the dropoff lane of the Clairmont Academy to pick up Cinnamon—and hit my brakes so hard the car behind me almost slammed into me. There was a Fulton County Sheriff’s car pulled up on the curb, lights flashing. Oh, God no.
I jerked the Prius over into a visitor’s space and hopped out, running up on Catherine Fremont, who was arguing loudly with a blond police officer and a darkhaired, ponytailed woman. “I’m sorry,” she said angrily, “I’m not authorized to do that—”
“Ma’am,” the officer said, leaning back his head, “I don’t think you understand—”
“I do understand and don’t you ma’am me,” she snapped—and then her eyes caught me and her face relaxed in relief. “Oh, thank God. Miss Frost, we have a situation.”
“Miss Frost?” the darkhaired woman said, checking her clipboard, shrugging a couple times to adjust a faux-fur-lined jeans jacket. “Dakota Frost?”
“Yes,” I said, and the woman smiled. She had a pleasant face, open and expressive, with pencil-thin eyebrows that made her look far younger than she was. “What’s going on?”
“I’m Margaret Burnham of DEE-FAX, the Department of Family and Children Services,” she said, eyes flickering over the tattoos on my temples before returning to her clipboard. “Are you currently in custody of a child named ‘Stray Foundling?’”
“Yes, she is in my custody,” I said, “but she goes by Cinnamon Frost.”
—
“Whatever,” Burnham said. “We’re here to take Stray into emergency custody.”
DEE-FAX
“You’re what?” I exploded.
“Ma’am,” the officer said, stepping forward, his hand raised. “Please calm down.”
“What the hell is this, Officer—” and I broke off for a second, eyes scanning him till I found his badge “—Galacci?”
“Deputy Galacci,” he corrected, body held firm and forbidding, blue eyes distant and stony. “Ma’am, this is a court-ordered action.”
“On what basis?” I asked. The expression on his stony, hard-muscled face didn’t change, and I transferred my glare to Burnham. “For what possible reason?”
“Housing her in unsafe conditions,” Burnham said, checking her clipboard.
“What?” I said. “Since when is an apartment in Candler Park unsafe?”
“According to this,” Burnham said, glaring, “Stray’s living in Oakdale.”
“She goes by Cinnamon,” I said, “and Oakdale is where I adopted her from.”
“The address is a condemned factory,” Burnham said.
“It was a werehouse,” I said.
“It burned down.”
“That was arson!”
“I have no info on that,” Burnham said, “but according to the police report, the second police report she appeared in in as many days, I might add, Stray was living there as recently as two weeks ago, on the day the police went to shut it down as an unlicensed werekin housing facility—and it burned down around them.”
It took me a few moments to gather my composure. “Cinnamon was not living in the werehouse,” I said at last. “That’s simply where they interviewed her after the arson.”
“But why was she even there?” Burnham said. “In a condemned factory. In Oakdale!”
“She’s a werekin,” I said. “She was having a bad change. I took her back to the people who I adopted her from because I thought they could help!”
“Why?” Burnham said, eyes flashing with disapproval. “Didn’t you have a safety cage?”
“I’m having one built in our new house,” I said angrily, “but it wasn’t ready yet.”
“Well you should have had it built in your old one before you tried to adopt a werekin,” Burnham said, oddly smug. “If you had followed the
rules—”
“Hey!” I said, feeling my nostrils flare. “You have no idea who you’re talking to about following the rules—”
“Ma’am, look, you’re not helping,” Deputy Galacci said firmly. “Please calm down. Getting angry at us is not going to change anything.”
“That’s right,” Burnham said. “This police report is a clear indication of neglect.”
“Oh, yeah, this is neglect,” Deputy Galacci said, cocking his thumb back at the Academy. “Paying for her upscale private school. Look, Miss Frost, it’s clear you do care for Stray—”
“She goes,” Catherine Fremont said icily, “by Cinnamon.”
“Cute,” Galacci said. “The point is, I’m sure that the court will recognize what you’re trying to do here and straighten this all out, but I can’t ignore a court order.”
I closed my eyes and rubbed between my eyebrows with one hand. All I kept seeing was that DEI agent that had practically wanted to shoot Cinnamon on sight. It wasn’t helping.
“Look, Deputy Galacci,” I said, “I know you’re just doing your job, but I’m too damn paranoid to let you just waltz up and take her. Cinnamon was kidnapped last year, poisoned, almost killed, and I don’t know you from Adam Twelve.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Galacci said—and then the corner of his mouth quirked up. “But Adam would mean a two-man patrol. And it’s LAPD jargon. We don’t use it in Georgia.”
I glared at him. “Regardless, if I don’t see some paperwork I’m going to call the police and let the APD sort this out. Am I making myself clear?”
“Yes, ma’am, and I encourage you to contact the police, or at least DFACS,” Galacci said. “But in the meantime we still have to take her.”
I folded my arms. “Over my dead body.”
Galacci looked at me, hard, jaw set. He put his hand on his pistol. “Ma’am—”
“Don’t do it,” I said. I concentrated my intent and let my shield blossom, concentrated mana, a millimeter beneath the surface of my skin, and let out my breath to activate it. “Phooo. My dad’s a cop, my uncle’s a cop, I’ve dated a cop, so I don’t want to hurt you, but until I see paperwork for this alleged court order, you’re just a man with a gun threatening my daughter.”
His eyes tightened at me a
nd he twitched a little, but he didn’t move. He was angry, but behind the anger he was actually curious, eyes looking me over, trying to see what angle I had that made me so unafraid of his badge, his gun.
“I know, I know, you think I’m a street lawyer and want to take me to jail on general principles just to ‘show me’ and my big mouth,” I said. “I’m sorry to bust your nuts like this. But I did this dance with the DEI last week, and all they needed to do to make me play nice is show me a warrant. You did have a warrant or order or some kind of paperwork in hand before you decided to waltz up and take a werekin from her mother, right?”
“Right,” Galacci said. “Burnham, show her your papers so we can get on with it.”
Burnham jerked, then came forward with a clipboard. I took it. “Thank you,” I said, glancing it over. Depressingly official ‘authorization to accept child for short-term emergency care,’ and it all looked in order. Crap. “All seems in order. Now how hard was that?”
“Not hard at all,” Galacci said, relaxing. “I’m sorry to put on such a hard nose, Miss Frost. If the order exists, it has to be carried out, whether the paper’s on me or not. But even when we do, many of the parents I have to deal with are not reasonable in your situation.”
“How could they be?” I said. “Either they’re asses, or their kids are being taken unjustly.”
“Not unjustly,” Burnham said. “but I’ll give you overcautiously. Miss Fremont, please.”
As Catherine left, Galacci spoke to me in a low voice. “Was she really kidnapped?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, swallowing. Fremont leaving to go get Cinnamon was tearing me up, but I tried not to let it show. “And poisoned, to get to me. She almost died.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said, even more quietly, “but you shouldn’t talk to cops about putting them down. Technically that’s assault on a police officer. Less technically, it could get you shot, which could kill you even if you are a werekin.”
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