Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  My faux poi smacked me in the head again. I was having trouble “keeping my planes,” just holding the poi in a single plane in front, at the side, or behind. If they were going in the same direction, I could do it, but as soon as I tried to get them out of sync—on purpose, that is, yes, it’s a technique—my body wanted to start dancing, left and right, sway this way and that, my planes disintegrated, and, sure enough, I smacked myself on the head yet again.

  “Thank God, no more blocks of wood for you,” Jewel said, giving me a crooked smile as she made making her glowing balls seem to freeze in the air again, then whipped them back into motion. “But don’t worry about hitting yourself. It’s OK. Even I hit myself—”

  “Oh, I’d pay money to see that,” I said, shifting as my Dragon stirred on my back.

  And then Jewel promptly klonked herself on the head.

  I laughed, but that faded quickly as Jewel’s poi just tumbled down around her. Her eyes rarely followed her poi, but now she wasn’t even paying attention to them, just staring upward, upward at the top of my house . . . and yet somehow, straight into my eyes.

  I whirled. Atop my house, thirty feet high, glowed the projectia of my Dragon.

  “Get inside,” I said. Jewel didn’t move, so I reached out, grabbed her arm and pushed her toward the house. Oh, God. I’d done that without turning my head, seeing through the eyes of the Dragon as it looked down on us. We were linked. “Go to the safe room, both of you!”

  Jewel bolted for the porch. Cinnamon reached out through the bars of the safety cage, lifted the were-safe latch, opened the gate, and pulled Jewel inside. Then they ran down the narrow stairs into the safe room Cinnamon used when she changed.

  The Dragon sat atop the house, much as it had at Borders; only this time, it picked its perch with care, shifting its weight without cracking my roof. It stared down at me with glowing, sage eyes resting deep in its half-lion, half-lizard head; staring not just at me, but also at my new Dragon tattoo, which had frozen on my body, like a cat avoiding a larger challenger.

  I stood transfixed, uncertain as to what to do.

  “The egg is hatching,” the Dragon said. “Beware.”

  With one flap of its wings, it lifted off the roof, then shimmered and evaporated.

  I stood there, stunned for a moment. Then I cursed out loud.

  “Oh, great!” I shouted. “Cryptic fucking phantom! Say what you mean! ‘BeewAAAare!’ ” I said, wiggling my fingers. “Beware who, or what, for what reason? I inked you as an icon of wisdom, not a symbol of confusion! At least give me the fucking Ides of March!”

  Like a gopher, Cinnamon poked her head over the rail of the porch. “What was that?”

  “My Dragon, honey,” I said. “My old tattoo, just like we saw in Palo Alto.”

  Now Jewel poked her head up. Clearly, they hadn’t run down the stairs at all. “Is it gone?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry to scare you—I don’t think it was a threat, but yeah, it’s gone.”

  “Why were you shouting?” Jewel said. “Did . . . did it have something to say to you?”

  “Couldn’t you hear it? No?” I asked—then glared at her. I shifted, scratching over my shoulder as my new tattoo abruptly began moving on my back. “Damn it! Settle down, you itchy ink! But I’ll bet you know exactly what it had to say, don’t you, Fireweaver?”

  Jewel bit her lip. “Hatchsign?”

  I nodded grimly. “If that’s what you fireweavers call it,” I said. “I had to learn that from the vampires, Jewel. From the vampires! They made me look like an idiot.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jewel said.

  “And another thing,” I said. “The timing—I’m not fooled. You claimed you were trying to summon a dragon, and then my Dragon appears—where you and I have been together! Here, Palo Alto, even the Golden Gate Bridge when we were both there! Tell me that’s coincidence—”

  “I’m sorry,” Jewel said. “I swore an oath! I can’t tell you!”

  “Fine,” I said, pulling out my cell phone and thumbing through the contacts. This one I didn’t have on speed dial . . . but maybe that would have to change. “No wonder you’re afraid of me adding rules to magic. Yours are a straitjacket.”

  “Who are you calling?” Jewel asked.

  “Someone I should have called the moment we saw that tattoo at Borders,” I said. How the hell had my tattoo resurrected itself? It shouldn’t have lasted an hour, much less nine, no, ten months now! Surprisingly, the phone picked up on the third ring. “Hello, Zinaga, it’s Dakota.”

  “Is that your old master?” Jewel asked.

  “What? No!” I said; Zinaga, my former fellow apprentice, laughed on the line.

  Then a gruff male voice came onto the phone. “What the hell do you want, Frost?”

  ———

  “Hello, Arcturus,” I said grimly. “Time to throw myself at your feet again.”

  39. The Tin-Pot Kingdom

  Dozens of miles to the east of Atlanta, and maybe half that south of Stone Mountain, deep in a warren of sharp hills and deep valleys where few roads go and fewer phones get more than one bar, lies Blood Rock, Georgia—a tiny hamlet of rednecks and recluses living in the shadow of a stadium-sized boulder that runs red with Georgia clay each time it rains.

  If you haven’t lived in the South—I mean, really lived in the South—you might think I’m picking on the residents by calling them rednecks. I’m not. They’ll tell you that themselves—or, as the owner of the Grist Mill Café once said, “You work for a living, in the sun on a car, or out in a field, you get a red neck too, you pasty city girl!”

  But when I say recluse—well, this time, I mean it.

  Blood Rock is not Atlanta—it’s the backwoods. They call Atlanta the City in the Forest because green trees seem to explode out of every square inch of ground we haven’t covered with concrete—but out near Stone Mountain, the trees grow taller, leaner.

  Here, Sherman never marched; here, progress never bulldozed old growth to the ground. Off the main highways, the trees loom over the roads, long trunks rising sinuously like slender sentinels, and the rare houses stare at you through oddly paired windows, like eyes.

  The last time I’d been here, I’d driven the windy roads to the top of Blood Rock proper, seeking an audience at the Stone Rose Sanctuary, the stronghold of Nyissa’s vampire clan, the House Beyond Sleep. But that was the new Blood Rock; today, I headed deep into Old Town.

  Down two miles of menacing dirt roads, farther down a quarter mile of perilously bumpy driveway, and behind trees leaning ominously like crossed spears, hid the home of Arcturus, my former tattooing mentor. When my Prius rattled to a stop at the end of the drive, the house proper was still obscured by magnolias and pines. Only the front porch was visible, making Arcturus’s spacious split level seem smaller than it really was. Unimposing, but not quite innocuous; he deliberately let the grounds and façade run down, to give it that flavor of menace that implied it was possibly guarded by a redneck or recluse with a shotgun.

  Arcturus, of course, was far more dangerous than either.

  On the porch he sat, squat as a fireplug, skin like weathered wood, hair like Einstein—Arturo Carlos Rodriguez de la Turin, AKA Master Skindancer Arcturus. Where my tats are an exercise in skill and restraint, his are bold, rough designs with the raw power of folk art. That isn’t just a difference in skill; I’m an artist, and ink to create beauty; Arcturus is an engineer, and inks to create power. The broad, thick lines of his tats can carry a lot of mana, and his designs have the magical logic to back up their brashness. As egotistical as I am about my art, I have no illusions—Arcturus has the harder nose, the willingness to ink something that doesn’t look pretty if it gets the job done—so he gets more done.

  As I got out of the car, Arcturus stood, scowling; beside him, Zinaga,
his apprentice, leaned back off the wall and prepared to face me. Her hands kept clenching and unclenching, and as she did so, little sparkles shimmered up through the elaborate white lines inked upon her dark olive skin. Zinaga was an expert in light magic, every bit my equal in her area of expertise—and because of her choice to specialize, a complete zero in Arcturus’s eyes. She hated the very air I breathed. I tried my best not to return it; she didn’t deserve the treatment she got.

  “Arcturus,” I said, nodding to him. “Zinaga.”

  “It pisses me off it takes a fucking catastrophe to get you back here,” Arcturus said.

  I frowned. Surprisingly, that hurt. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have no excuse.”

  “Typical, Frost,” Zinaga said, folding her arms, gleaming white lines rippling across her arms in a beautiful moiré pattern. She was skilled, artistic, athletic, and had great skin—all the makings of a good skindancer. “The studio hain’t got a revolving door.”

  “I know,” I said. “But the Magical Security Council isn’t just a game, either.”

  “So skindancing is a game?” she asked, spreading her arms. “Frost, this is an art—”

  “Ease down,” Arcturus snapped. “Look at her ink. Clearly she cares about her art—”

  “And she doesn’t?” I said. “Come off it. Give her some credit. She stayed, I went—”

  Zinaga hissed, turned, and walked inside.

  “Frost, show sense,” Arcturus said. “Being nice to her is worse than being a dick.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “Because I mean it, and if I keep it up, one day she’ll get it.”

  Arcturus rubbed his face. “All right, I suppose I needed to hear that. I needed to go into this with no illusions that you’re actually here to learn something—”

  “Hey,” I said. “Don’t be an ass. I know I’ve treated you like dirt, I know I should muddle through on my own, but I thought you might be interested that my masterwork has survived over half a year detached from my body. So . . . you wanna help me figure out how, or not?”

  Arcturus stopped rubbing his face, drew his hands down, and finally smiled. “All right, Frost,” he said. “Come on in.”

  I gave the whole story, everything I thought was possibly relevant: the five sightings of my masterwork in San Jose and the one in Atlanta, Jewel’s superstitions and the vampires’ theories, the strange link I seemed to have with the tattoo, the oddly suspicious timing of the sightings when Jewel and I were together—even the unexpected movement I was getting off my new dragon tattoo—and the weird vibes that I got whenever it became active.

  “It’s,” I said, struggling for words, “almost like it’s . . . talking to me—”

  “Dakota, I don’t want to disturb you, or insult you,” Arcturus said carefully, rubbing his hands together, “but there is a distinct possibility you’re talking to yourself. You yourself said that the tattoo gets energized when you’re enraged, or aroused—”

  “Hey,” I said, my cheeks reddening. “I never said—”

  “I can read between the lines,” Arcturus said. “But you also said that the tattoo quieted when you wanted it to. That sounds less like a separate personality rather than an extension of your own. That new tattoo of yours is . . . a complex design—”

  “It’s fucking insane, is what it is,” Zinaga said, shaking her head at me in something between admiration and disgust. “I can’t believe you inked something that complex—I mean, I know you got the chops to ink it, Frost, I just think you were reckless to ink that nest—”

  “I had the design extensively vetted,” I said evenly. “Not just by Jinx, but by the Marquis—and that’s after I double-checked all the Euler sums myself—”

  “See what I was saying,” Zinaga said to Arcturus. “That’s more than ego—”

  “Let it go.” Arcturus shook his head. “The point is, this new design may have unforeseen features. All tattoos absorb your mystical intent; they wouldn’t work otherwise. But this one is so complex . . . you might be getting intent echoes. Reflections of your own thoughts—”

  “Damn it,” I said. “I . . . I can see that’s possible.”

  “The alternatives are all worse,” Arcturus said. “It’s your own design, so I think we can rule out a control charm, and it’s hermetic, so we can rule out external intents. That leaves the idea that your tattoo picked up a stray spirit. You inked it encircled?”

  I gave Arcturus my best withering look.

  “Fine, fine,” Arcturus said. “Are you certain that—what’s wrong?”

  “I . . . did activate it once, before it was fully complete,” I admitted.

  “Jesus!” Arcturus said. “You activated an incomplete tattoo—”

  “Not intentionally,” I said. “I was being attacked by vampires right after having my vines forcibly stripped from my body. I tried to activate them, I ended up activating it . . . and it was still in four components. The feedback damn near tore me to pieces—”

  “But even then, it wouldn’t have picked up a stray intent,” Arcturus said. “You’re a careful inker, Frost. Each of the components was piecewise hermetic, right? So—”

  “Think that leaves the notion you’re talkin’ to yourself,” Zinaga snarked.

  “Fine, I’m talking to myself. A magical circuit could create weird perceptual effects. But we’re avoiding the big mystery—how is my original masterwork still active ten months after it detached from my body? It actually looked stronger. In fact, it looked solid—”

  “I’ll give you another mystery,” Arcturus said, avoiding Zinaga’s glance. “A student walks out on her master, then waltzes back in almost nine months later expecting him to solve her problems for her. You always want to cut down the easy road to get the quick answers—”

  “Damn it, Arcturus,” I said, glancing at Zinaga, who now refused to look at me or Arcturus. “You think you got an explanation, spill it. I don’t have time to play games here. People’s lives have been threatened, may still be at stake—”

  “You don’t know that there’s any connection between the threats on this Jewel character and the appearance of your original masterwork,” Arcturus said. “It could just be coinci—”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence!” I snapped. “Not when dealing with magic or mystery or threats or anything else smelling of danger. Someone is out there. Bad people are out there. But they’re not going tell you their targets, their plans, or their methods—they’re going to keep all that hidden. But they’re always after something, and that they can’t hide. When you glimpse the enemy sniffing around, you don’t sweep it under the rug. You go on high fucking alert!”

  Arcturus frowned. “You’ll never see it coming,” he said. “Trust me—”

  “You never—” I began, and stopped. Arcturus had lost his family to a kidnapping. He never spoke of it. When he said “you’ll never see it coming,” he meant he hadn’t seen it coming. Somehow, I doubted that—but I wasn’t going to use that against him.

  “You and I,” I said, “are going to have to differ on this, because the few times I’ve had to deal with ‘someone’ out there who meant me harm, weird shit started happening long before the bad guys ever reared their ugly heads—”

  Arcturus’s mouth slowly opened, his eyes staring into the distance.

  “And weird shit is definitely happening now. Magical signs that keep glowing without a power source are one of them. Tattoos that survive long after they should have dissipated are another. They’re similar enough that it makes me mighty damn suspicious—what?”

  Arcturus’s eyes had snapped back to me when I’d drawn the connection between the dragon signs and the appearance of my original Dragon—a connection I hadn’t made until I’d spoken it, right then. But he quickly shook his head and tried to brush the connection off.


  “Fire magic and tattoo magic are powered in completely different ways,” Arcturus said. “Linear discharges versus planar connectors. There can’t be a connection—”

  Zinaga hissed. “Damn it, Arcturus—”

  “Settle yourself down,” Arcturus said. “This is between her and me—”

  “I-am-not-stupid,” I said. “I know there’s a connection you don’t want to tell me—”

  “You don’t know a damn thing,” Arcturus said. “You think you know so much, but you still quit before you learned to tell shit from sand. If you’re so smart, why do you need that blind witch or that mangy half-wolf to do your designs—”

  “I have independent graphomancers review my designs because that’s the law,” I said. “And I know the flow of mana is essentially the same, no matter how it is collected. I took five semesters of magic before I came out here, Arcturus. I’m not an idiot, and I’m not blind—”

  “What you’re not,” Arcturus said, “is part of this studio. You left. Twice.”

  “So?” I said. “I had to leave sometime, Arcturus. The chick must leave the nest—”

  “Don’t lecture me with fortune cookies, Frost,” Arcturus said. “You’re not the master.”

  “What does that matter? I’m dealing with a real problem here,” I said, staring at Zinaga. She was even more independent-minded than I was; no wonder Arcturus was treating her like dirt. “Is the only way someone can have a relationship with you is worshipping at your feet?”

  “No, I’m asking for a basic level of respect,” Arcturus said, voice rising. “You can’t learn anything unless you show your teachers a basic level of respect—”

  “In grade school,” I said. “Maybe even high school. But by our age, you’re supposed to be sharing knowledge amongst adults. You’re supposed to learn that attitude in college because professors can be wrong, and in life you will be penalized if you take their word for gospel!”

  Arcturus leaned back. “You and I will have to differ,” he said icily. “I was educated in an older school, and I demand to receive the same level of respect I gave my teachers.”