Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  “Me neither,” Jewel said. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to fight. Kumbaya, or whatever.”

  “Kumbaya, Lord,” I laughed. But my friends were all still worried; we needed to talk in confidence—because we didn’t really know Jewel yet. “Jewel, is there anything else we should know? No? OK. Jewel, we’ll do what we can to help, but my friends and I have some private business we need to discuss. Schultze can show you to your room.”

  “All right,” she said, standing abruptly. “I—I’m sorry if I was curt,” she said. “I really do want to thank all of you for saving my life and the lives of my friends. Clearly, the way you do things works for you. I just . . . want you to understand what I know, and take it seriously.”

  “We do, fireweaver,” I said, smiling. “Go on. I won’t be long.”

  When the door closed behind them, Jinx cocked her head. “How did I end up on the skeptical side of that conversation?” she asked. “I’m starting to sound like you and Doug. But . . . still . . .” She considered, then shook her head. “I’m having trouble seeing fire rings as delivery mechanisms for a curse.”

  “I agree,” Doug said. “Both tattoo and graffiti magic depend on proximity for effect.”

  “This is fire magic. Maybe it’s different,” I said, grimacing as the Dragon shifted. “And we’ve seen distance effects—those graffiti gateways. And werewolves—even deep underground, werewolves can feel the need to change, even if they can’t see the moon—”

  “That’s a ‘spell’ woven through someone’s DNA, triggered by an entire planetoid,” Doug said. “And those graffiti gateways required an enormously complex matrix to receive power—many layers. Fire magic is a cast spell—”

  “Only as complicated as a caster can think it,” Jinx said, holding her spirit cane up to her chin. “No, that’s not why I’m resisting it. My religion says hexes turn back on you threefold. My science, on the other hand, says hexes rarely work . . . but that doesn’t mean they’re impossible.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “And Jewel’s a fire magician, so sought after, people shipped her out from Hawaii, skilled enough to whip up a fifty-foot fire bubble under fire—and to maintain it while switching poi. We have to take her seriously.”

  “We do,” Vickman said, “but after all these attacks . . . I’m starting to get suspicious.”

  “You don’t think she had a hand in this?” I asked. “She was under attack—”

  “I know,” Vickman said, “but I feel like she’s holding out. I don’t trust her.”

  “You don’t trust anyone,” I said. “But you know me, trust but—”

  “Trust but verify,” Doug finished.

  ———

  “I was going to say,” I said, smiling grimly, “trust but verify, don’t trust but verify, who cares whether you trust or not—always verify. You never know where the truth is going to come from; sometimes it just reaches out and bites ya.”

  17. Memories of a Pockmarked Moon

  Pizza finally arrived—after the fight in the Square, I’d become famished. I tore open the box eagerly, then stopped. It was a simple pepperoni pizza—orange, pockmarked with red discs, delicious. But something felt weird. Not, wrong, exactly; oddly, it reminded me of home.

  But it was covered with meat, which I tried to avoid eating. I passed the box to Schultze and opened another one, looking for the mushroom one; but this was sausage. Again, looking at the orange disc, I got that weird feeling of home, and this time I nailed it—a memory from my literal home, Stratton, South Carolina, eating pizza with my mother while I read National Geographic, comparing the pie to a picture of a pockmarked moon taken by NASA.

  That left an unexpected pang. Dad’s distaste for my so-called “lifestyle”—by which he meant tattooing, not bisexualism—left us distant. Mom and I had stayed close. I missed her friendly smile, her slightly slurred voice. I stared at the pizza. I missed my mother—

  “Don’t hog it, Mom,” Cinnamon said, stealing a slice out from beneath me, breaking the spell. I smiled at her. Maybe my mother was gone, but I now had a chance to do for her what Mom had done for me. Then my little ravenous beast said, “So . . . what are we gonna do?”

  “Yeah, Frost,” Vickman said, gratefully chowing down on a slice, “whaff’s the plan?”

  “Me?” I said, finding the mushroom in the third box. “Why ask me?”

  “You’ff—excuse me. You’re in fucking charge,” Vickman said, wiping his mouth. “Your daughter, your trip, heck, your fucking Magical Security Council—”

  “Maybe I’m in charge, but that’s not the question,” I said. “You’re head of security. First, you tell me whether it’s safe to stay, then I figure out what we’re going to do. Is it safe to stay?”

  “She can be trained,” Vickman said. “All right. None of this is directed at us, but at Jewel, all after public performances. If she lays low, she should be safe, and so should we. On the other hand, if you lot are going throw yourselves on grenades the way you did tonight, I’m going to drag you all onto the nearest plane. I’m a bodyguard, not a hero.”

  “Agreed,” I said, finishing my slice and wiping my mouth with a napkin. “If there’s another emergency like that, of course we do what we can, but I have no intention of seeking it out. I’m going to get Jewel on a plane back to Hawaii if I can, and then . . .”

  “We can go,” Cinnamon said. She’d eaten three slices in the time it took me to eat one—but she suddenly became sullen, and didn’t raise her head to meet my gaze. “I told you—fuck—nothing but trouble. We should go. Before anyone gets hurt. I don’t needs that stupid award.”

  I looked at her in shock. She sounded so wounded. I didn’t want to just bail, not after we’d been through all this—but then Vickman drew a breath, and I glanced at him, expecting him to nod in agreement. He did look grim, but shook his head, mouthing stay.

  “Actually,” I said, “I think we should stay. The Warlock thinks we’ll meet more allies out here, and this just proves we need them. So, sorry, I have no easy out for your cold feet, Cinnamon. You’re still stuck having to collect your big prize.”

  Cinnamon looked up with a halfhearted grin. “Just when I thought I found an out—”

  “I promised you a better life,” I said, “but never an easy out.”

  Then we talked about Carnes. The similarity between the symbols he and his companions wore and the symbols in the fire ninja’s alleged curse magic was suggestive, but didn’t prove anything—and as threatening as Ferguson’s message at the airport had been, and as suspicious as the timing of the Oakland attack had seemed, Carnes himself had seemed to warm to us.

  Eventually, we decided the right thing to do was alert the Warlock and Varguson. Darkrose and Nyissa, our two oldest vampires and the most savvy with regards to vampire and wizard politics, came up with a carefully worded message that conveyed what we knew and asked for information without either leveling an accusation or admitting ignorance.

  “Regardless, this is a sticky situation,” I said. “In case things heat back up, we should get day-of tickets home, and a standing arrangement with the airlines to ship Nyissa’s coffin.”

  “Are there such things as day-of tickets?” Doug asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “But pay enough and we could charter a plane.”

  “Screw that. Call Carnes back,” Vickman said. “Maybe those tickets were changeable.”

  After everyone started heading back to their rooms, I cornered Vickman by the bar in Saffron’s suite. “I was expecting you to tell us to bail—”

  “You already decided not to bail,” Vickman said, surveying the well-stocked liquor selection, which must have cost the vampires a pretty penny. “And I’m backing you up. Like you said, we need allies, and fighting alongside the vampires tonight made us some big ones.”

  “Thank y
ou,” I said. “But . . . we were lucky that Daniel’s crew didn’t up their game. If they’d had Uzis or high-powered sniper rifles, I’d be dead. So would the fireweavers.”

  “One grenade could have done them all in before we got there,” Vickman said, pouring a Macallan. “That could mean they’re more amateur than they appear, that they lack the resources they obviously seemed to have . . . or they’re sending a targeted message.”

  “Or maybe there’s more to it than that,” I said. “They were specifically targeting Jewel, and she claims to be traveling the world, trying to summon a dragon—”

  “Jesus,” Vickman said, with a guilty glance at his employers. “Maybe that’s why they’re so pissed about her performances. Magic is based on intent, so no matter how pretty it looked—”

  “Jewel could have been doing anything out there,” I said.

  “Could be those giant magic mandalas are the same—trying to undo whatever she’s trying to do, good or bad,” Vickman said. “If you can’t stop the caster . . . stop the spell.”

  I nodded. “Maybe I should go squeeze Jewel for some more information.”

  “Uh-huh,” Vickman said flatly, folding his arms. “You have fun doing that.”

  I thought of several witty retorts, then realized how that had sounded.

  Vickman smiled as my face reddened. “Have fun tonight, skindancer.”

  ———

  I shut my mouth, nodded, and wished him good-night.

  18. Sleeping with Others

  Why was I nervous, in a hall well-lit and securely guarded? Why was I worried, after I’d changed out of my ripped shirt and jacket? Why did I have butterflies . . . as my hand hesitated over a simple hotel room door?

  After three knocks, Jewel appeared, hair dripping wet, wrapped in a fuzzy Cathedral Hill bathrobe. “Sorry,” she said. “I never got to clean up after the performance—”

  “No problem, Granola Girl,” I said, smiling, though the butterflies did flips.

  “I think I preferred fireweaver,” Jewel said, smiling back. She hesitated, as if wondering whether to invite me in, then pulled her bathrobe a bit tighter. “Dakota . . . I can’t thank you enough. I don’t even know how to tell you how impressive your magic is to a fireweaver—”

  “You’re no slouch yourself,” I said. “Creating a shield in the middle of a performance?”

  “All fireweaver spells are designed to flow between each other,” she said, passing one hand over the other delicately. “Ordinary firespinning has spectacular moves, but they dead-end, magically. A fireweaver strings their moves together smoothly, one to the other—”

  “Sounds like Taido,” I said, thinking. “Smoothly moving from offense to defense.”

  “What?” she asked, leaning on the doorjamb, biting her lip.

  “One of the principles of my martial art, fireweaver,” I said, rubbing my neck. “Ah, you know, skindancing has a lot of forms we use to generate power, but not all of them ‘plug’ into each other that easily. I’d love to learn more about how fireweaving works—”

  “Well, skindancer,” Jewel said, shifting against the doorjamb, dexterous hands tightening her bathrobe sash, “it’s complicated. There are seven hundred twenty ways to make the basic moves, and they’re like the alphabet—you have to learn the letters before you can spell—”

  “I’m willing to learn,” I said, trying to keep my eyes on hers. “Seriously, I’m not sure anyone else here understood what you did. You switched poi in the middle of a spell and still kept up your shield. That would be like me keeping up a shield while I swapped out a tattoo—”

  “Dakota, I’m glad to hear you’re interested,” she said—and then her mouth quirked up. “If you want to get started on firespinning, that’s great. But fire magic isn’t just firespinning. It can be quite dangerous. Some of the secrets aren’t for the uninitiated.”

  “Secrets for the initiated?” I said, shaking my head. There was a reason magical tattooists had a newsletter—we progressed by sharing knowledge. “Are those secrets really that important? Your life could be at risk here. Other people are definitely putting their lives at risk—”

  “Because I shared secrets,” Jewel said. “You heard Daniel back at Oakland. He was as upset about who was seeing my performances as he was about what I was doing. I’m in enough trouble already for doing the things I’m supposedly allowed to do—”

  “You’re worried about being in trouble?” I asked. “Seriously? I thought you were on the vanguard here, what with being willing to die to put on a public performance—”

  “Whoa!” Jewel said, raising her hands in a fluid wave that did not . . . quite dislodge her bathrobe, dang it. “Who said anything about dying? I was willing to get arrested to thumb my nose at ‘the man,’ that’s it. Before yesterday, no one had even threatened me, not seriously.”

  “I thought Daniel and you had history—”

  “We started on the same side,” Jewel said. She smirked at my roving eye, jerked her robe tight again—then put her fingers in scare quotes. “ ‘It’s a native Hawai`ian thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ Seriously, though, the Americans tried to kick us off our sacred land—”

  “Wasn’t that a long time ago?” I said quietly.

  “Yes, no, I mean, recently,” Jewel said, hands moving in a fluid corkscrew. “A dustup with Fish and Wildlife over a sacred site and a national park boundary. Daniel wanted to fight—I think that’s how he recruited the black pajama brigade—but I took it to court. And ‘won.’ ”

  She’d again put her hands up in scare quotes, then shook her head.

  “We might as well have let them keep it—by the time we won, they’d ruined it,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe Daniel was right. Now he’s bitter. He’s always talked a tough game, but I never thought he’d go through with actual violence—and it scares the hell out of me.”

  “Fair enough. Being threatened . . . is pretty fucking scary the first time.” I frowned. “Look, Jewel . . . Daniel’s already hit you twice without achieving his objective, so he may try again. Vickman and I think you should hop on a plane back to Hawaii, as soon as you can.”

  “You think I should turn tail and run,” she said.

  “I think . . . you should consider it,” I said. “I mean, I’d fight for the right to tattoo, in theory—but in practice, you have to pick your battles. Is this battle worth your life? Daniel’s willing to fight over this, and I’m still not precisely sure what he’s fighting for.”

  “It’s . . . complicated,” Jewel said.

  “Can you uncomplicate it for me?” I asked, frustrated. “I’m not trying to put you to the third degree—you’ve been through a lot. But Daniel’s bad news. If we want to stop him, we need to know what he wants—and you’ve been really cagey. You claim that symbol is a curse—”

  “It is a curse,” Jewel said defensively.

  “OK, you think it’s a curse—but what if you’re wrong?” I asked, and her brow furrowed. “What if it’s a counterspell? You also told me you’re traveling the world trying to summon a dragon. That is the secret Daniel doesn’t want you performing in public, isn’t it? The spell that summons a dragon? I can see why that’s knowledge you’d both want to hide. And if that’s what you’re doing in your performances, Daniel will never stop trying to stop you—”

  “I-was-just-making-art-with-fire,” Jewel said. “That’s my life. So I use magic—”

  “Magic so resonant with my dragon tattoo that it almost activated it at the Crucible? That it almost burst off my back in Union Square?” I said. “Jewel, you’re either trying to summon a dragon . . . or your magic is specifically designed to get my personal attention.”

  Jewel’s mouth quirked.

  “I’d love to get your personal attention,” she said, almost immediately blushing, “but you�
�re being a bit arrogant. I designed those performance spells long before I met you, and . . . if, if I was summoning a dragon, I can’t see why it would activate a dragon tattoo—”

  “And yet it did,” I said. “Twice. But the design of the spell is only half the magic—what it does is based on intent. So, if I was on your mind when you cast that spell at the Crucible, that might explain the mystery of why my dragon tattoo became so . . . intimate with its caress.”

  I smiled wickedly at her, and the flush in her cheeks became like flame. Called it.

  “That . . . sure is a mystery,” she stammered, adjusting the bathrobe again. “But before I give away all our secrets, let me win the battle to show them in public first? I don’t really want to hide anything from you, Dakota . . . but I don’t want to turn the allies I have against me.”

  I scowled, then nodded.

  “You’re so cute when you pout,” Jewel said. “I love the shape of your mouth.”

  “Ready to turn in yet?” Nyissa hissed, right over Jewel’s shoulder.

  “Aaa!” Jewel said, jerking aside. She drew a breath, looking at that trim expanse of pearly white flesh between the dark blue stripes of Nyissa’s dress, then quailed as her eyes went up to that coldly perfect face floating in the rain of violet hair. “Ah . . . I . . .”

  “I,” Nyissa croaked, inspecting the metal poker she carried as her personal intimidation accessory, “have been assigned as your guard, Jewel. We share a connected suite, and while you sleep, I will sit where I can see both doors to your room.” She stared straight at me, glaring without glaring; I could swear she was jealous. “I will make sure everyone stays safe.”

  “Oh,” Jewel said, putting her hand to her throat. I have to admit, I’d been scared myself by that little pop-out-of-nowhere trick, and I’d known that Nyissa was in the connecting room because I’d asked her to stay there. Jewel said, “But . . . don’t you need to sleep?”