I stared at him. “If you had me drive an hour and a half out here to demand I grovel,” I said, “I’m leaving and not coming back.”
Arcturus stared back at me. “If you think you can do without me, fine. Go, then.”
I glared now. “Whatever has been discovered, can be rediscovered,” I said, standing. “I have scientists all over the country lined up to help me figure this out.”
Arcturus laughed.
“Real scientists, not closet wizards trying to lead everyone astray so they can keep magic for themselves,” I said, standing. “So they can set up tin-pot kingdoms in backwater nowhere—”
“Dakota, siddown,” Zinaga said.
“I told you, settle down,” Arcturus barked. “This is between master and student—”
“Ain’t I a master now?” Zinaga said coolly, and I raised an eyebrow.
Arcturus scowled. “Well,” he said, “well, technically yes, but she’s my student—”
“I thought she just fired you,” Zinaga said.
“She fired me?” Arcturus said.
“A teacher is hired by the student,” Zinaga said. “Don’tcha know that?”
“A master,” Arcturus said, practically underlining the word with a growl, “takes an apprentice. Don’t you know that?”
“Yeah, I sure do . . . because I am a master,” Zinaga said. “And didn’t you say it was high time I took on an apprentice?”
Arcturus’s face turned red as a beet. “Don’t!” he barked. “Don’t you dare—”
My eyes widened. “Now, now wait a minute,” I said. “I’m not agreeing to—”
“Both of you, get over yourselves,” Zinaga said, leaning back against the wall, shaking her head. “Every time you get together, you squabble like little kids. It’s embarrassing.”
Arcturus pointed at her. “Zinaga, this is my studio—”
“Oh, shut it, Arcturus,” Zinaga said. “I ain’t the fucking help. This may be your house, but it’s our studio. You remember that talk about partners . . . partner? Well, I won’t have my partner acting like a dick to our star . . . to one of the studio’s former students!”
Arcturus’s face became even more mottled, and he clenched his fists on the table—but he didn’t respond. As for me, I couldn’t get over what I’d just heard: Zinaga had walked straight up to the edge of calling me the studio’s star student—
“Wipe that smirk, Dakota,” Zinaga snapped. “You are such a total ass.”
I frowned to hide my smile. “Yes, yes I am. Sometimes it’s hard to shut off.”
“So,” Zinaga said, folding her arms over her chest, so that her tattoos gleamed. “We’re going to help you, Dakota, because it’s pretty damn interesting that a tattoo inked in this studio is still live nearly a year later, and the ‘studio’ oughta know how, right, Arcturus?”
“Yes, we need to know,” Arcturus said, “but she left, Zinaga. We can’t just—”
“Why not?” I asked. “If the studio is you and Zinaga, why can’t you just—”
“The ‘studio’ ain’t just ‘Arcturus and Zinaga,’ ” Zinaga said. “It’s a whole lot more.”
“Damn it, girl,” Arcturus said. “Partners or no, this . . . this is a sacred trust—”
“Arcturus,” Zinaga said. “Think about what this girl can do. It’s time.”
Arcturus scowled, looking at her, then at me. “All right,” he said. “All right. You’re right.” Then he glanced up at the calendar on the wall. “Damn it. We can’t do the formal ceremony for a few more days yet, but if you’re saying it, it is time.”
I drummed my fingers on my arms. “All right, I’ll bite. Time for what?”
———
“Time, skindancer,” Arcturus said, “to stop being an apprentice, and become an initiate.”
40. Fire on Jewel
“Who kicked your puppy?” Annesthesia asked.
I stared off into the distance. It was Thursday morning back at the Rogue Unicorn, the tattoo studio where I held court, and I was in a foul mood. After all that buildup, Arcturus had told me to come back to Blood Rock on the next new moon for my “initiation.”
I was incensed, but they ignored my pleas for urgency, broke out a six pack, and told me to chill, so there was nothing for little old designated-driver me to do but grit my teeth, say farewell to the drunks, and drive back to Candler Park to stew for seventy-two hours.
I hate waiting. It wasn’t even eleven yet, so I didn’t have any customers to pick on; only Annesthesia, our coquettish receptionist, who could give better than she got. Finally, I lowered my copy of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology and smiled at her.
“Arcturus,” I said.
“That would be . . . the only person other than me who can take you down a peg?”
“Right the first time.”
Annesthesia smiled. “On that note,” she said. “You have a visitor. I’m letting her stew.”
“We’re not even open yet,” I said, “and even so, it’s not like you to let customers stew. Normally you springload them on me when I’m stepping out of the bathroom.”
“I didn’t say customer,” she said, “and you’re less of a wasbian than you let on.”
Now I smiled. “Jewel,” I said.
“Right first time,” she said, smiling. “I’ll show her right back.”
“No, let me see what she’s doing,” I said, and we both scurried down to the tattooing room—still dark, so we were almost invisible to our sole visitor in the waiting room: Jewel. She stood there, in harem pants and a leather top, staring at the Artists’ Wall, both hands behind her, holding a shapeless fringed purse over her shapely rump, her heavy copper ringlets shifting as she looked first at my picture and bio, then at the gallery of tattoos I had inked.
“Maybe I was wrong,” Annesthesia said. “You do have a customer.”
I felt my dragon tattoo shifting against my body, its tail slowly running over my belly, like I was rubbing my hand over my stomach. It wanted to slip lower, and my cheeks reddened. I now could see the wisdom in Arcturus’s idea that the Dragon was just mirroring my intent.
I stepped out, and Jewel turned with a slight yelp.
“Oh! Hey, Skindancer,” she said, putting her bracer-wrapped hand to her breast. She made even embarrassed reactions look graceful. “You startled me.”
“Hey, Fireweaver,” I said, smiling and giving her a hug. It felt so good to have her around again, especially with our “first meeting” barriers down and without fire coming down around our heads every other minute. “Did bad old Annesthesia make you wait?”
“I told her I didn’t mind,” she said. “I had planned to bum around this little alt-culture mecca you’ve got here, a surprise find in the Deep South—”
“Atlanta is not the Deep South.” My mouth quirked up; I was still mad at Arcturus, so I said, “You wanna see that, I’ll show you the town where I learned to tattoo.”
“I’ll pass on the dueling banjos, thanks,” Jewel said, flicking her hand, making me scowl. “Oh, you’re cute when you pout. Anyway, I strolled over when I thought it was time, but I was a few minutes early. Forgot my watch.”
“I can fix that for you,” I said. “Tattoo a working watch right on your wrist.”
Her jaw dropped. “You can’t seriously do that,” she said. “Oh my God. You can.”
“One of my more popular tattoos,” I said. “Call Alex Nicholson back in the Bay. He can vouch for it—he got my first one, and it’s been running for . . . what, eleven months now? The newer designs are better, though, calibrated to a solar day—”
“Wow,” she said. “That’s . . . that’s impressive, not what I wanted but—”
“So you were planning on getting a tattoo,” I said, smiling slo
wly.
Her face reddened. “Uh, I—not exactly planning. Thinking about it.”
I waved my hand about the shop. “Well, while you’re thinking, why don’t I give you a little tour, show you what we’ve got, tell you all the questions you ought to be asking of your magical tattooist and studio, and what answers you need to get, else you should run—”
“So what should I be asking?” Jewel said, smiling.
“For a tattoo studio? Clean, and licensed, for starters,” I said, pointing at the Rogue Unicorn’s business license on the wall, and beneath the licenses the tattooists themselves needed to ink magic in Georgia. “And for a magical tattooist? Knows a magic circle and how to use it.”
“I’d think,” Jewel said, “that knowing the magic would be more important—”
“Using a magic tattoo,” I said, “is a lot like casting a spell. It needs mana, a well-formed intention, and some word or gesture as a trigger. Inking a magic tattoo, on the other hand, is just specialized tattooing. What you really want is for your inker to have a good graphomancer.”
“And you have a good graphomancer?” Jewel asked, mouth quirking in a wry smile. “Let me guess, the best?”
I smirked back. I didn’t just catch the dig; I caught that she’d gone from asking about tattooists in general to me in particular. “Absolutely,” I said. “Jinx.”
“The blind Goth girl?” Jewel said. “I knew she was a graphomancer, but your graphomancer? Vetting artwork? Really?”
“She’s only partially blind,” I said, and sat down on our overstuffed couch, stretching my long arms out over its back. Jewel now had a choice—she could keep standing, she could sit in the chair . . . or she could sit next to me. “And she has the best software in the business.”
“Well . . . the best do use the best,” Jewel said, surveying the gallery again; then, giving me a quick glance over her shoulder and a glimpse of a wry smile, she clutched her frilly bag and sat down next to me. My arm fell on her shoulder. “Oh, she thinks she’s soooo smooooth.”
“Sometimes,” I said, giving her a brief squeeze.
Then she surprised me by leaning against me, head resting on my shoulder. I got a tingle when her warm curves pressed against me, and then another when her slightly damp copper ringlets spread out over the exposed skin of my arm.
“You are so arrogant,” Jewel said happily. “What tattoo should I get?”
I looked at the flash on the wall, started reflecting on the designs in my book. But what a tattooist has done in the past should never be the starting point of a design; the client is the starting point. So I thought of Jewel, what she liked . . . and what I could do.
“An octopus,” I said suddenly, and Jewel drew a breath. I ran my hand over her bag—the fringes of the floppy purse were really tentacles reaching out from an octopus design. “A firespinning octopus, whose limbs move when you move, juggling balls of flame.”
“Oh, Dakota,” Jewel said, hand going to her breast. “That would be perfect. Where?”
“I, ah,” I began, unexpectedly embarrassed. “I’d . . . I’d need to see, uh—”
“Would you need to see me naked?” Jewel asked, grinning at me.
I swallowed. “Only if you were certain you wanted it someplace you could hide.”
“Never,” she said, standing and twirling. “Or did you just need to see me turn around?”
“Yes, I—” I stammered . . . then stared at her, caught the sparkle in her eyes, the open invitation. I remembered her words about my power. “Take your top off,” I said, my voice now sure, more commanding. “Leave the bra, since you don’t want to hide the tattoo.”
Jewel swallowed, then unbuttoned her jacket, revealing that oh-so-interesting hemp rope bikini—and those flame designs on her back, not tattoos but something else, an inked scarification process I hadn’t seen. Inwardly I shuddered—cutting is not my thing.
“Like what you see?” Jewel said, finishing another pirouette.
I did. Jewel’s curves, as always, were awesome—rippled shoulders, strengthened by spinning; the soft roundness of her breasts, curving under the hemp; the graceful belly and hips beneath them. Delicious—but my options for the tattoo were limited. “Drop the pants.”
Jewel flushed, glancing around the waiting room at the door, at the reception desk, eyes widening like a frightened little doe. I stared at her, at that hemp bikini—it was shibari, rope bondage, as much a sign of BDSM as was my collar. Whose submissive was she?
“Do it,” I said, voice growing slightly more commanding. Inside, I felt awkward. I might be forward, but I’m not actively butch, and I’ve never taken a dominant role in a relationship. Not once. But I wasn’t asking her to do anything I hadn’t asked of other clients. “I need to see.”
Jewel nodded her head, dropped her eyes—and pulled the drawstring on her harem pants, and they fluttered to the floor. She stood there, half covering herself, half not, embarrassed. I stood up and walked around her, looking at the designs on her legs. They disturbed me.
“I really wasn’t kidding about my need to see,” I said quietly, kneeling beside her. The flame design was elegant, but the ridges of flesh were almost certainly made by a cutting procedure and not a brand. “I had hoped to use the outside of a thigh, but . . . may I?”
“Oh, please,” Jewel said, eyes half closed, drawing a breath.
But as much as I wanted to touch her, that wasn’t what I was after. I held my hand carefully over the skin of her thighs, tracing the design, flexing my skin to generate mana and feeling the shimmering response from some pigment buried beneath the design.
“Tickles,” Jewel said, opening her eyes. “Oh, my God. You’re not even touching me.”
“These are magically active,” I said, standing, waving my hands over her thighs, her back, part of her forearms. I stared at the patterns, at first distracted by the curves of the canvas, then increasingly intrigued by their logic, the feel of their pigments. “Ah. Fire retardant?”
“Damn, you are good,” Jewel breathed, watching my hands move. “That’s exactly it.”
“Clever. But they’re fixed in place by the scars. They would interact badly with magical tattoos, which need to move. I’m afraid for the design I have in mind we’re limited to your upper chest, over your collarbones here . . . or I hate to recommend it, a tramp stamp.”
“Oh, she wants to stamp me,” Jewel said, smirking once again, finally coming out of her submissive haze. She glanced at the door to the walkway. “As delicious as this is, I’m worried about the dinging of that bell and shocked o-mi-gods. May I at least put my pants back on?”
I reached down and grabbed her harem pants, spreading them open. Jewel blinked at me, eyes doe-wide again; then she stepped into the pants delicately, first one foot, then the other. I stood, drawing the pants up her legs, then tying the drawstring about her waist.
“We do have a height difference,” she said; beneath that mass of copper hair, I could tell she was staring dead center on my chest level as I finished the knot. She looked up, those heavy ringlets falling back, the slightest whiff of patchouli drifting up. “So . . . what do you think?”
I reached in to my pocket and pulled out a sharpie. “I’m thinking . . . here—”
“As much as I want you to do that,” she said, seizing my hand with both of hers before the ink could touch her flesh, “it would knock my feet out from under me. On paper first?”
“All right,” I said, clasping my other hand over hers. Her hands were trembling, but her eyes held nothing but admiration. “On paper first, especially given your existing marks. I want to get the design vetted by Jinx anyway; she’s the engineer to my architect. Come into my office?”
The Rogue Unicorn shares the second story of the Make-A-Wish building with the Herbalist’s Attic, a magic supply shop. The
stairs up are behind the building, so the “back” of the studio is streetside. That’s where I hold the primo spot—the corner office of the Rogue.
I bumped my computer on, tossed my lanky body into my comfy-chic Herman Miller chair in the crook of my L-shaped glass desk, and spun around, smiling up at Jewel, framed from behind by broad windows overlooking Little Five Points, Atlanta’s alternative culture mecca.
I was proud of my little throne room overlooking the Vortex restaurant and its cartoon skull; the view looked a heck of a lot better since, in a moment of fiscal foolishness after winning the Valentine Challenge, I sprang for some workmen to re-open the bricked-up side window.
But for once, Jewel had no eye for me, nor even for the colorful sights of L5P beyond. Her back was turned, but I could see, reflected in the glass cabinet atop my butcher’s block, her mouth hanging open as she stared into the tall display case.
At first, I thought my pretty little dragon junkie was staring at my gift from Lord Kitana—the dragon’s tooth dagger, on prominent display high in the case. I was about to give her the spiel when I realized her eyes were aimed lower, at a long glass tube . . . holding a white, spiral horn.
“Oh . . . my . . . God,” Jewel said. “Is that . . .”
“Oh, I’m just a big softie,” I said, standing up with a grin. I unlocked the cabinet, slipped on blue nitrile gloves (reusable, if you autoclave ’em) and reached for the latch with the side of my thumb. Jewel’s hand rose automatically, toward my precious magical supplies.
“Hey,” I said, and she withdrew her hand. “No touching. Many of those are clan inks; I’m not supposed to even let the other tattooists use them. And that is the real deal. Not just naturally shed, but vestal gathered—and I know you too well to think you’re a virgin.”
“Oh, really?” Jewel said, pressing a hand to her breast. “I’ve never been with a guy.”
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