Playing with Fire: A Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count)

by RJ Blain

  Fortunately for society at large, phoenixes disliked cities and guarded their precious feathers as though they were their first-born hatchlings. I’d only seen a feather outside of training once, and it had still been attached to the phoenix, who had agreed to come to the CDC auditorium for a demonstration in exchange for some undisclosed favor.

  A phoenix feather or two would come in really handy torching gorgon bile. Of course, the feather would likely torch the entire building in the process, but not even napalm could reach the same temperatures as a phoenix. If the CDC brought in the full bird, 120 Wall Street would be reduced to a big pile of ash within twenty minutes.

  I wondered how I’d compare to a phoenix if I let loose and went on a rampage. The thought tempted me, although the presence of the two cops ensured I only considered it for a moment. Still, who didn’t like the idea of going full-out pyromaniac for once in a lifetime?

  Instead of indulging, I sighed and gave both cops a sour look. “May-be step back more feet. To be safe.”

  Janet obeyed, dragging her pair of extinguishers with her. The cadet did not. Why was I not surprised? When I got out of the building, I’d give Chief Quinn a piece of my mind for allowing the NYPD to even have such a useless cadet in training. What were they doing at the academy? Twiddling their thumbs and scheming ways to add chaos to an already chaotic—and dangerous—job?

  “Meter set to fif-teen feet, Janet?” I asked around a mouthful of lanyards. A girl could hope, right? The meter was set to mass detection; that much I could tell from the screen icons. Maybe my luck would hold for once in my life.

  “Yes, ma’am. The CDC recommended the settings. I just did what I was told and confirmed everything with them.”

  “Good job. Purr-fect.” Fifteen feet would give me enough of a range to avoid general contamination and get a good feel for how much the bile had spread in the office. If the initial spatter radius was out twenty-feet, I expected some of the gorgon bile to have gotten on shoes or other materials and been spread around. The worst I’d seen was when one man had stepped into a puddle of it and tracked it thirty feet before it’d gotten through his socks and petrified him.

  Maybe I’d get lucky and no one had gone on a long hike with bile all over their feet. I doubted it, but at least I’d know before I stepped in any trace residue.

  I squeezed my way through the door and made it two steps before the meter shrieked an angry chorus of warnings, too shrill and piercing to indicate a simple gorgon bile contamination. Lowering my head, I set both devices down on the tiles, unsheathed a claw, and hooked the edge of the meter to flip it over so I could get a look at the back-lit display.

  The screen flashed red, indicating a critical contamination. I tapped the diagnostic button and waited for the result. While I expected gorgon bile, and likely the concentrated, A+ grade stuff no one ever wanted to deal with since it stuck to everything and took several rounds of neutralizer—or intense heat—to get rid of, I got something even worse.

  Gorgon dust.

  Why did I always end up with the gorgon dust cases? Why couldn’t it be bile? The meter confirmed the strongest source was at the fringe of its current detection range, but as I initiated a more thorough scan, it picked up a trace source within three feet of me.

  Crap.

  “Back!” I twisted around and blew a gout of flame at the hallway to drive home my point.

  Janet hightailed it to the elevators while Cadet Winfield stood around and gaped at me. How had I gotten the idiot cadet without real training? Why me?

  Maybe if he didn’t move or breathe, none of the dust would reach him. I returned to my work and glared at the meter, and hoping for a misreading, I tapped away at the device’s thick rubber buttons, grateful the CDC had rejected the idea of touch screens, which did not play well with hazmat suits or unicorn claws. I did a full reset of the device, a procedure that cost me three minutes, and I reset all the settings before running the test one more time.

  Nothing had changed. I still had multiple sources of gorgon dust nearby, and by the rulebooks, standing within three to five feet of a trace source classified as contaminated. I lifted my head and eyed the receptionist’s desk, which wasn’t close enough to be the nearest source of dust. The gray and brown granite floor tiles gleamed under the office’s lights, doing an excellent job of masking the presence of dust.

  I snorted and smoke trailed from my nose.

  “What are you doing?” Cadet Winfield demanded.

  “Do you want to die?”

  “You—”

  The crack of metal against a hard surface startled me into turning my head towards the hallway. Janet had her billy club out and smacked it against the wall. “That is enough, Cadet Winfield. If you interfere with her work, I will follow protocol to the letter. That involves my gun and your kneecap, followed by a pair of handcuffs and your immediate suspension from the academy. At the scene of a contamination, the certified CDC specialists are the law, and she’s working for the public’s safety. You are, at most, an observer and assistant.”

  Maybe I’d let Perky ride in a cruiser and give Janet a lift wherever she wanted to go. I liked when the cops backed me, even if she was twisting the regulations just a tiny bit. Then again, she wasn’t, not really—she just didn’t know I had a gorgon dust disaster on my hands, er, hooves.

  The cop and cadet engaged in a stare off, and I left them to their silent battle while I went to work getting a better feel for the situation. A glass wall separated me from the purported contaminated room, and dark brown fluid streaked the window. If the meter wasn’t shrilling its dire warnings over gorgon dust, I would have believed it to be bile. An initial reading of gorgon dust plus a reset reading and full scan showing the same result, without any evidence of bile in the area, meant the liquid was likely the dust.

  What was the brown gunk? It looked like bile. It looked like every other gorgon bile sample I’d ever seen, so much so if I’d been going in with visuals only, I might have begun clean up without bothering to do a secondary scan. Then again, I always ran the meter just in case there was something else with the bile.

  Why me? Why again? Had someone mixed the dust in with a fluid designed to mimic bile? Was the bile-like substance some prank gone disastrously wrong and the dust was from something else? No matter how it had happened, I was stuck. At my range to the contamination, I couldn’t leave. By the book, I was contaminated. If the dust was in the fluid, when it dried, the entire building would also be contaminated.

  Hundreds upon hundreds of people—maybe even thousands—worked in the building. Anxiety prickled its way through me. With such a heavily ventilated building and no way of knowing if the dust had gotten into the air ducts, I couldn’t afford to request help, either.

  I had no choice. “Cadet.”

  “What?”

  “Walk back-wards. Slow-lee. Don’t dee-sturb air. Go ell-ee-vay-tur. Leave, to ground floor. Dee-mand meter. Call for glass coffins. You will need. You not con-tam-ee-nated, you would be stone, but you may carry res-ee-due.”

  “What?”

  “Officer Down-ning?”

  “I heard you.” The woman remained near the elevators, straightened, and lifted her chin. “How can I help?”

  If I got us all out of this alive, I would not only take her on a ride, I would find the best bar around so we could drink ourselves into a stupor. She seemed like the type of person I’d like to take to a bar and get exceptionally drunk with. “This not bile. Is dust. Gor-gon dust. Re-cep-shun con-tam-ee-nated. Leave. Sor-ree. I stay. In con-tam-ee-nated area. Hallway seem safe. For now.” While I could try to burn it, I couldn’t afford to take any risks, not with so many people in danger. The list of people qualified to demand a napalming was limited to upper officers in the police, upper management of the CDC, and people with top-level certification at the contamination site, like me. I lifted my head and forced my tongue to do my bidding. “I condemn this building and request napalm. Entire structure. All ducts, al
l ventilation systems. You call dispatch.”

  Glass coffins protected humanity, and while there were ones designed for centaurs, they were few and far between and shaped specifically for them. I wouldn’t fit.

  I would stay. There was no other choice.

  Cadet Winfield’s eyes bulged, and he crept backwards.

  Considering I could stand in fire and like it, maybe I’d survive. I’d even had C4 detonated while strapped to me. It had tickled. What was an entire building being torched with a full load of napalm compared to that? I watched the idiot cadet and decided to pull rank. All things considered, I couldn’t allow a loose cannon to put the public at risk. “Officer Down-ning, if he try to leave without scan or ree-fuse glass coffin, you shoot, put him in anyway. Risk to public.”

  “He won’t, not on my watch,” she promised.

  “I like you, Janet.” I did, too. It took real courage to face a leave-someone-behind situation with dignity. “Tell Officer Purr-keens to call Pro-fess-ur Yale to pro-vide sec-un-dare-ee auth-or-is-zay-shun for nay-palm.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Go. Quick.”

  The cops fled into the elevator.

  When I was certain they were gone, I began hunting for the dust. Picking up the fish-eye camera in my mouth, I began the tedious process of pushing the meter around on the floor in search of the source. Why had I gotten qualified for dangerous material handling? Stupid me. I’d be inside the building when they started flooding napalm in through the top floor, probably pumping all sorts of magic into the gel to ensure it covered every possible surface in the structure.

  Even if I survived the fire, if the floors didn’t collapse, I’d be astonished. Starting tomorrow, the government would begin planning the rebuilding of the site while a lot of stunned bankers tried to figure out what they’d do without their office space.

  If the heat or the building collapse didn’t kill me, Quinn would. He’d hunt me down, cut off my horn, and take it as a trophy. At least I wouldn’t need another round in the glass coffin when I reversed to human. A round or two of napalm would cook the dust right out of me, assuming I didn’t get charred to a crisp.

  A little experimentation with the meter confirmed my fears: the dust had made it into the reception. I located a brown splotch of drying fluid on the floor near the receptionist’s desk. On closer inspection, I found some other dark spatter marks. How had they gotten there?

  I looked up.

  A drop of liquid fell on my nose with a splat. Dark stains marked where something leaked in the ceiling. I tried to get a view of my own nose, which didn’t work very well. Drawing in a deep breath, I worked to make sense of the smells. The pungent odor of cleaners hung in the air along with the hint of gasoline. Gasoline? No, it wasn’t quite gasoline. It reminded me of napalm. Had they already started pumping the gel into the building? I hadn’t heard any of the warning sirens.

  The authorities liked informing New Yorkers when they were about to put on a show.

  Underneath all the other harsher smells, I couldn’t detect the earthy, mildewy scent of the gorgon dust. Whatever the fluid was, it masked the presence of the dust far too well.

  The lights went out, and utter quiet descended on the building, so deep and still I shivered. A few breaths later, the blare of distant sirens accompanied a bone-deep thrum. The sound of emergency response vehicles drew a snort out of me. What were they hoping to prevent? A fire? With a little help from the CDC and the military, the police and fire department would have no problem shielding the building so the intense heat and cinders wouldn’t reach any of the neighboring structures.

  I forced my attention back to the stained ceiling. What was that stuff? I really needed to practice using my nose as a unicorn if I survived. Short of tasting it, I had no way of identifying it. Whatever it was, the meter wasn’t picking it up.

  One little taste couldn’t make my situation any worse, could it? I already had some of the gunk on my nose. With nothing to lose, I set the camera on the desk, eyed the brown stains, and dragged my tongue over the wood. If someone was recording and it got back to anyone I had deliberately eaten a dangerous substance, I’d be a dead woman walking, but I didn’t exactly have a lot to lose.

  If I did survive, I’d enjoy the arguments. Learning how the fluid worked—or the culprit’s goal—might be important later.

  I had been smelling gasoline. Why on Earth would anyone mix gorgon dust with gasoline, shove it into the ceiling of an office building, and leave it there? Why hadn’t it burst into flame when the initial bang happened?

  Wait. Gasoline wouldn’t be sufficient to neutralize gorgon dust. If it burned, it’d get into the air ducts, spread through the entire building, and potentially affect every single person in the building. While gasoline and other accelerants were used in napalm, modern blends were designed to burn hotter and longer, reaching temperatures capable of destroying gorgon dust.

  The possibilities stunned me into staring up at the stained ceiling tiles. Why hadn’t anyone reported the smell of gasoline? Had someone mistakenly—or deliberately—reported it as gorgon bile? Gorgon bile smelled far worse than gasoline. A single spark could have blown the whole thing up. Had the fluid been a little more effective at igniting, the dust would have potentially incubated in unwitting victims, priming the city for a petrification endemic. Had the meter not been set to do a bulk scan, I might not have clued in to the irregularities of the brown fluid. I would have breathed a bit of fire in the wrong place and lit the whole building up, sending gorgon dust into the air.

  I had come within feet of petrifying both Janet and the cadet and possibly exposing the entire crowd gathered outside of the building, including Perky.

  The thrum increased in volume, and the floor shivered beneath my hooves. Everyone in hearing range, probably for several miles, would know something big was about to happen. According to protocol, the tone would continue for five minutes.

  In the following silence, aided with magic, the bomb techs would pump thousands of gallons of napalm into the top story of the building. The thick, gelatinous fluid would ooze its way to the ground floor while bomb techs in hazmat gear would set the charges and prepare to detonate them to ignite the napalm.

  A minute following the final check of the explosives, an inferno would rip through the building and incinerate everything inside.

  I suspected I’d gain a few minutes due to the sheer amount of napalm required to coat all thirty-four stories of 120 Wall Street and bake it to a crisp. Then again, if they hunted down a replicator or two, they could turn water or gas tankers into napalm in a few minutes without breaking a sweat.

  Until they started flooding the building, I’d make the most of my time to find out just how much gorgon dust lurked in the ceiling. With luck, the camera was sending its recording to someone—like Officer Janet Downing—who might make sure the data got to the right people. I’d also hope Chief Quinn wasn’t the right person.

  He’d take my pretty fur coat as a trophy along with my horn. Then he’d give my skinned corpse to Professor Yale for study. My future really wasn’t looking all that bright.

  Or maybe it was looking too bright.

  Sighing, I reared and stabbed my horn into the ceiling, slicing the tile open. In retrospect, I should have known that stabbing a horn capable of cutting metal into a space I couldn’t see wouldn’t work out well for me. The crack of glass gave me a split-second warning before a flood of fluid dumped onto my head.

  I blinked and dropped the camera out of my mouth. It disappeared into the goopy puddle surrounding me. If I got out of this situation somehow, I decided I would quietly accept my scolding as I deserved every last minute of it.

  Chapter Eight

  Glass containers filled with dust-infused gasoline lurked overhead, and I had two choices: I could waste time trying to pull down tiles, or I could take a bath in the brown fluid and make it easier for the napalm to do its job. Since the gas wasn’t doing anything to me as far as I c
ould tell, I decided to take the brute force route. Grateful I could see in the darkness with a little help from the meter’s glowing screen, I bucked, slashed with my horn, and tore down every last tile in my effort to spread a swath of toxic destruction around me.

  Among the broken glass shards were a network of tangled wires. When I finished making sure all the containers in the reception were broken, I took the time to inspect the setup. Picking up the camera in the off-chance it still worked, I reared and balanced on my hind hooves, craning my neck for a better look into the trashed ceiling.

  More of the glass drums hung in the adjacent office space.

  Dropping down to all fours, I dealt with the glass wall in the most direct fashion possible: I charged it, lowered my head, and plowed through it horn first. I punched my way into the next room and dropped my hindquarters to avoid crashing into one of the statues. A gaping hole in the ceiling marked where the drums had burst. At least four broken containers hung from the support beams normally hidden behind the tiles. A tangle of wires hung down.

  Someone hadn’t installed the explosives correctly; blasting caps affixed to wedges of C4 waited for detonation.

  Yummy, yummy C4.

  After setting the camera down out of the way, I dodged petrified victims, braced my front hooves on one of the drenched desks, lifted my head, and stretched to reach the tasty treat. I snatched the wires in my teeth and yanked. The tangle of cords and explosives separated from the glass drums. Backing up, I kept tugging until the C4, cables, and blasting caps pulled free from the containers.

  Something banged in the ceiling, and a cascade of brown fluid splashed to the floor. With a few more yanks, I had fifty feet of bundled wires and balls of explosives. Lowering my head, I stepped on the wires to keep them in place and hunted down every last scrap of explosive, savoring its sharp flavor and the heat it birthed in my belly.