Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  “What?” Jewel said. “Are you serious? They canceled the whole conference? Why?”

  “Security,” I said, looking at Vickman, who nodded. I said, “I don’t blame them.”

  I looked back at Cinnamon, and I wanted to kick myself. She was shrinking into her seat. I shouldn’t have said I didn’t blame them; I shouldn’t have let her see the text. I should have stood up and walked off and took the call . . . and she would have heard it anyway.

  “I was so close,” she said, one hand scooping up her tail. “It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair. I did something, I did something real nice, and someone who didn’t know me liked it so much they wanted to give me an award, and we came all the way out here . . . for nothing.”

  “Not for nothing,” I said, patting her knee. “You’ll still get the award—”

  “It’s like . . . it’s not real,” Cinnamon hissed. “Talkin’ to that herd at Berkeley was scary, and I thought they hated me, and I so so wanted to run—but they were, like, real, real people, people that talked to me. Now they’ll put the trophy in the mail, and it will feel . . . fake.”

  I stared at her. I understood precisely what she meant. I had nothing to say.

  “You know what I think?” Jewel said, leaning in on us, putting her hand atop mine on Cinnamon’s knee. “When life deals you a setback, all the cards seem to turn up disaster, and you feel there’s no hope, you know what time it is? Time for a really decadent dessert.”

  I laughed despite myself. After a moment, Cinnamon did too.

  “However, as much as I’d like to sample those decadent-looking beignets,” Jewel said, “I recommend we take a walk to get some coffee, for devious therapeutic reasons of my own—and besides, I need to walk this dinner off. I don’t want to be any more roly-poly.”

  “I like roly-poly,” I said.

  “Good to know,” she said, smiling.

  I smiled and raised my hand for the check.

  Schultze took point with the vampires behind him, a spearhead leading us out into the street with our more vulnerable friends behind. As Vickman and I took the rear, I glanced into the bar. Ferguson raised his glass, smiling but wincing, and Vickman gave him a salute.

  Our entourage strolled out into downtown Palo Alto, a chic walking neighborhood in the heart of Silicon Valley that oddly reminded me of downtown Stratton, South Carolina—a long, pleasant two-lane, with street parking and trees lit up with strings of white lights, surrounded by a pleasant mix of mom-and-pop restaurants and stores dotted with the occasional Walgreens, Starbucks or Cheesecake Factory. The pedestrians were slightly different—slightly hipper, slightly more diverse, with slightly more homeless lurking about—but, still, it wouldn’t have surprised me to turn the corner and find myself on the intersection of Pine and Stratton.

  Perhaps all walking neighborhoods were a bit alike, no matter where they were.

  As we walked, Vickman and I talked about the “mission.” We still had meetings for the Magical Security Council, and Alex had asked me back to the Valentine Foundation to shoot some “pickup shots,” but, with Cinnamon’s award ceremony canceled, I just felt like getting her out of here. Vickman agreed, but before I broke down, Jewel turned and pointed toward a flashing marquee. “There it is,” she said. “The Borders of Palo Alto.”

  “Coffee . . . in a bookstore?” I said. “And a chain bookstore to boot! We’re on the other side of the country, in a unique place filled with little gems, and you’re going to drag me to a chain bookstore with a chain coffeehouse—”

  “Oh, quit your whining, you’ll love it,” Jewel said. “It’s made from an old theater.”

  The Borders of Palo Alto was made from an old-style movie theater, but that didn’t tell me what to expect: a long courtyard, open to the sky except for thin netting overhead, between stucco walls and Spanish-style roofs of charming century-old buildings. Round metal tables were filled with coffee drinkers and laptop campers and more of the homeless; the more I encountered them, the more disturbed I was about the Bay Area—not that Atlanta didn’t have homeless. At the end of the courtyard, we passed through glass doors and a small café that occupied what must have been the ticket booth, then hooked right into a bright, golden two-level bookstore dominated by media below and books above on what must have been the balcony.

  “Wo-o-o-owww,” Cinnamon said.

  “You see that balcony?” Jewel said, leaning down next to Cinnamon, who was staring about, starry-eyed. Jewel said, “According to my very reliable sources, it has the best math section in the Peninsula, right next to the largest audiobook section on the West Coast.”

  Cinnamon squealed and bounded off, and I laughed. I grabbed a maple mocha and headed out to the courtyard with Jewel, where we sat with a great view of the climbing Spanish architecture rising above us. I took a sip, smiling at Jewel; she just smiled back at me.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Mission accomplished—what’s wrong?”

  Jewel’s face had fallen. She frowned, pursing her lips, stirring her steaming hot beverage, then asked, “I hate to ask, but . . . any progress on decoding those messages?”

  I took another sip, considering. Part of me still suspected Jewel was holding out, but if she knew what was in the codes, why was she asking me? And if Daniel really was talking to Jewel on the street with fire . . . would she have blithely walked into a trap at Stanford?

  “Cinnamon hasn’t made any progress,” I said. “And no news from Philip neither.”

  “Funny you mentioned Cinnamon first,” Jewel said.

  “She is my daughter—what?”

  Jewel put her swizzle stick in her mouth and drew it out slowly. “You know, Cinnamon really is amazing,” she said, “but do you really think your until-recently practically-illiterate daughter has a better shot at cracking the code than the National Security Agency?”

  “Actually,” I said, “Philip has both the NSA and the DEI trying to crack it. They’ve got a friendly wager—the DEI thinks they can crack it in a dozen messages, the NSA, ten. Cinnamon thinks we can do it in six if those symbols are, as she thinks, just coded English letters—”

  “So Cinnamon’s going to beat two sets of spooks to the punch,” Jewel said.

  “I never said that,” I said. “She’s just learning cryptography. You can’t expect—”

  “But you do,” Jewel said. “For answers, you think of her first, because you’re expecting she’ll beat them. If she knew cryptography, you’d fully expect she’d have already beat the DEI and the NSA to the punch. You really think she’s that good.”

  I stared blankly at Jewel. I realized I really did think that.

  “I mean, maybe she is,” Jewel said, taking a sip and wincing at the coffee’s heat. “Phoo. It’s possible. I’m that good, at what I do. They fly me across oceans to perform with spinny fire things. But I’m an adult. You can hold me to that standard—”

  “They flew her across a continent,” I said, “to win a math prize—”

  “You flew her across a continent,” Jewel said. “Even if Cinnamon solves this problem, there’ll come a day she can’t live up to that . . . that expectation. Cut her some slack, OK? Don’t hinge your adult plans on the performance of a young child. Let her have a childhood.”

  “I—yes,” I said. “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “Well,” Jewel said, dipping her swizzle stick and licking it. “OK, then.”

  “So, Jewel Anne Grasslin,” I said. “Adult plans. What are you going to do now?”

  “Get on a plane,” Jewel said determinedly, “go back to Hawai`i—and hole up. And not even on my home island of Maui—I’m going to a different one, smaller, where we’ve got a little Kanaka Maoli community. Where I learned fireweaving, in fact.”

  “Where you got your liquid fire, I’ll bet,” I said.

  “Not you to
o,” Jewel said sharply. “Let me guess, you’d love to get some—”

  “Jewel, I and my daughter have been caught in the crosshairs for you—three times,” I said, and Jewel frowned, looking a bit guilty. I said, “If Devenger’s right, Daniel’s beef with you is over liquid fire, but I don’t know if he’s right because you aren’t telling me anything—”

  “Dakota!” Jewel said, raising her hands. “I’ll tell you what I told Daniel: Yes, I have a supply, and no, I can’t give any to you.” I opened my mouth to object, but she said, “I know, I know, you’d love some, given the dragon tats that you ink, but—”

  “But I’m not asking for any, because I don’t use it,” I said, and Jewel raised her eyebrow. “Devenger thinks our stonegrinders must have a secret source they add to our pigments, but I’d never heard of the damn stuff before today. Why do people keep so many damn secrets?”

  “Power,” Jewel said. “Knowledge is power; knowledge of a secret is more powerful. Knowledge of a dangerous secret . . . why, that’s the best power of all. Especially if you’re self-righteous, convinced you have to keep the secret, convinced the world will burn if you give it up, that motivation will burn within you like a fire. It becomes . . . empowering.”

  I stared at her. She was pretty, and charming . . . but I loved how she thought.

  “What’s your empowering secret, Jewel?” I asked, sipping my mocha, and she shrugged. Jewel was holding something back; I needed to lean on her for information, to be smart, to be careful . . . or, hell, I could just put all my cards on the table. “What’s hidden in those codes?”

  Jewel bit off an angry retort, then sighed. “Dakota, I’m in the crosshairs too—and you’re the first outsider who’s stood by me. I need you to believe that if I knew, I’d tell you. But other than knowing they’re some kind of threat, I don’t know what’s in the codes—”

  “Then let’s figure it out together,” I said. “Daniel’s not going to waste effort on a three story sign saying ‘I hate you.’ And if he cares about wasting liquid fire, he’s sure not going to use it in a giant PSA saying ‘please don’t use liquid fire in performances, we need it to live forever—’ ”

  “Oh, feh,” Jewel said. “Who wants to live forever, really? Life is fire. The candle that burns twice as long burns half as bright. Everyone dies. Even the Earth is gonna die. Use it up, burn it out, enjoy it while you’ve got it. Everything else is wasted potential.”

  “And that’s the conflict, isn’t it?” I asked, leaning back, kicking my feet up onto the seat of a chair. “You use more liquid fire in a performance than Daniel probably uses in months. You even dip your defensive poi in it, and this with your supplies running out—”

  “Hey,” Jewel said. “No one said our supplies are running out—”

  “You just did, by denying it so quickly,” I said, staring up through the mesh over the courtyard into the blackness of the night. “You’re using up the liquid fire because you believe in using it, while Daniel wants to use it for . . . a longevity spell, perhaps.”

  “Maybe, but . . . yuk,” Jewel said, shuddering. “Daniel’s clan does have this wizened old gnome they all look up to. They call her ‘the Firebrand,’ but she’s more like a dried-up old nut. I know, I know, I’d be happy to look like anything at three hundred years—but you wither because you’re basically cursing yourself for centuries straight. Even if you use the spell once, it’s like you’re stuck in time. Have you seen what that does to people?”

  “I have seen that,” I said slowly, closing my eyes—the Warlock, the Commissioner, and Devenger, all stuck in the early seventies. Why then? Had they discovered a supply of liquid fire in 1970? Or was there a simpler explanation? The sixties was when the American counterculture got bored with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and started to turn to magic, so it was just possible that the ageless wizards minted in the late sixties or early seventies were the first generation of them that wanted to go public. I couldn’t say. “I’ve seen it three times this trip, in fact.”

  “This is why I tell you you can’t put magic in a box,” Jewel said. “There’s nothing in those spells that would tell you they’ll stunt your fashion sense, and yet they do. Your whole emotional and spiritual growth gets retarded, not just your aging. Magic is a whole—”

  “I know, I know,” I said, putting my hands over my face. I tried to get perspective. My mind drifted over Palo Alto, first hovering over Nola’s folk-art courtyard, then sailing up over the trees, before coming to rest over the mesh-covered alley to Borders as my friends gathered around us at the table. “You can’t reduce magic to its parts without missing the big—”

  “Dakota,” Jewel hissed, her hand closing on my wrist. “You gotta see this.”

  My eyes opened in shock—but the third-party image of myself and my friends in the courtyard didn’t go away—if anything it got stronger, fighting in sudden double vision with the image coming from my own eyes up through the mesh of the courtyard—where my own Dragon, my original masterwork, perched atop the rooftop of Borders in full glowing Technicolor life.

  The double vision abruptly ended as the Dragon flinched and snapped its head, as if stung by the feedback from my own visual cortex. It roared, a full-voiced throaty trumpet worthy of the Tyrannosaurus of Jurassic Park, and chairs and tables around us suddenly rattled and overturned as patrons heard it, saw it, then screamed and stumbled away.

  “That’s . . .” Saffron said. “Dakota, that’s—”

  “That’s my Dragon,” I said. “My first masterpiece.”

  I rose to my feet, staring up at it, staring up at my own tattoo brought to life, thirty feet high, glowing like neon but solid as a fist, its thick Imperial talons cracking and crumpling the ridge of the roof that was its perch, broken tile sliding down the roof and into the netting.

  Mesmerized, I stared at the glittering coils, the sparkling blue eyes—and realized I’d seen the tattoo like this before, when I killed Christopher Valentine with magic. He’d shut down my other tattoos with pitch and tied me to an altar, so I’d been forced to detach the Dragon to fight him off; but instead of returning to me once it saved my life, it had consumed him, growing opaque, glowing with power, rearing with pride—then bursting through the roof.

  I nodded at the Dragon in respect, and the Dragon glanced down at me in the briefest acknowledgement—then the vast magical beast trumpeted, launched itself, and again flew away, disappearing into the night sky with three huge beats of its powerful wings.

  A huge chunk of masonry cracked loose and tumbled down into the mesh. One by one, the strands snapped, and we all leapt back as a piece of stone, stucco and Spanish tile the size of a mailbox smashed the table in front of us and then shattered on the floor.

  “What . . . the fuck?” Cinnamon said, staring up at the sky.

  “Holy shit,” Vickman said, staring at the dented table.

  “Holy shit,” Jewel repeated, staring up at the sky, though I got the feeling she meant it in entirely different way than Vickman had. “And . . . what the fuck?”

  What had just happened?

  That had been my Dragon. I thought of that tattoo. Of all the time I spent tattooing it; of the tattooing talk I was supposed to give in Burlingame. Of the colors of the tattoo; of the colors of Castro Street which we were supposed to visit on Saturday. Of the magic fire the Dragon could breathe; of all the fire magic we’d seen over this crazy week. Of the horrific circumstances under which I’d detached it, saving myself from Valentine’s knife . . . and of all of this week’s chaos, and the unknown horrors it might promise. That chaos had robbed Cinnamon of her award, had forced Jewel to flee, and had woken my new tattoo to a weird kind of life—but my mission, the mission to secure the funds for Cinnamon’s future, had been accomplished.

  I thought of all of that . . . for all of five seconds.

  Then I revisit
ed my command decision.

  ———

  “Screw the Bay,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

  34. The Player of Games

  In under two and a half hours, we were on a plane, flying out of the San Francisco Bay Area. We were back in Atlanta by morning—and then things slowed down considerably. There were no more assaults by crazy fire ninjas, no more mysterious messages writ in fire on the streets, no nighttime visits of improbably detached tattoos grown impossibly stronger.

  But we were not out of the woods. Not by a long shot.

  We still had to face the music.

  “So, Dakota Frost,” the lich rasped, “your mission to San Francisco was a failure.”

  Like a vulture, the lich loomed forward, dead white skin of his skull gripped by dark rivulets of black hair, white pinpricks gleaming in the black sockets of his eyes. His lips parted in a piranha smile, his cold bony fingers reached out . . . and he drew his queen across the chessboard in one decisive motion. Then the sparks in his eyes shifted up to me.

  “You failed, as I said you would, but even more spectacularly—home three days early, with your tail between your legs, with nothing to show for your expensive boondoggle,” the vampire said. “Your move, Dakota Frost.”

  I swallowed. The “lich” was Sir Leopold, the leader of the Vampire Gentry of Atlanta. Saffron might be the most physically powerful vampire in the city; her master, Lord Delancaster, held the highest public rank. But Sir Leopold, the dark vulture with white skin standing in an Victorian suit like a failed reanimation of Professor Moriarty, held the keys to the kingdom.

  I blinked at the chessboard, trying to think. I hadn’t expected to be playing this game. When we’d arrived at the lich’s mansion to give our report, the sun had barely set, but the bony old creature was already waiting for us; I hadn’t known he was that resistant to the sun. Even now, the warm glow of twilight still leaked in through the open windows of the study, forcing Nyissa, my ostensible “bodyguard” to remain bundled up in her dark traveling cloak, huddled in a chair as far from the light as possible while I had to stand before the lich.