Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  Where Darkrose and Saffron were daywalkers, and covered themselves in layers and layers of clothes that helped them brave the day, Nyissa was not—and, as a working dominatrix on top of being a vampire, flaunted her body, wearing as little as she could get away with.

  Nyissa sashayed up to us, working it, her hips making her flared skirt sway, her body seeming to grind against the negative space between the two vertical stripes of cloth that covered her breasts. Your eyes naturally followed that great white expanse of flesh up from her navel, between her breasts, and then to her throat—where a horrible scar covered what should have been her voice box. I tore my eyes away and glanced at the little wizard, who was mesmerized—first staring openly like at a peep show, then mouth dropping in horror as Nyissa bared her considerable fangs: sharp canines twice as long as a human’s—and far more pointed.

  A slight hiss escaped Nyissa’s mouth; with her too-pale skin and too-violet hair, those silent bared fangs made her seem even more like a life-sized porcelain doll. She raised the poker until it was level with the scars, and the little wizard actually raised a hand as if to ward off a blow. Cruelly, she smiled, even more fearsome than bared fangs—and subtly, she released one hand from the poker and flicked it at me, American Sign Language for, is there a problem?

  “Not for us,” I said aloud—my ASL is still rusty. The little wizard was still staring—not that I blamed him; Nyissa was eye-catching even in this turn as Scarthroat Vampirella—but I snapped my fingers and said, “Hey! Eyes on me. What’s your name?”

  “Ferguson,” he said sharply.

  “Well, Ferguson,” I said, offering the tickets back to him, “I don’t know what you’ve done to piss off whoever sent you, but they must have known—should have known—we had two daywalkers in our party, and they should have told you.”

  “Shit,” Ferguson said, looking around wildly, trying to get a bead on Darkrose and Saffron without ever fully taking his eyes off Nyissa—quite a trick if he’d been able to pull it off, and quite amusing since he couldn’t. “Oh, shit shit shit—”

  “Regardless,” I said, “They should have known we can’t accept these tickets; you need twenty-four hours notice to ship a vampire encoffined, and we can’t leave Nyissa here without getting the permission of the Vampire Court of San Francisco. It would be a death sentence.”

  Ferguson hesitated, then snatched the tickets back. “Damn it,” he said bitterly.

  “What is this, amateur hour?” Vickman said. “If they knew all that—”

  “Maybe they didn’t,” Cinnamon said brightly. “Sounds like they hates vampires. But maybe they never gots to ship ’em anywhere. I means, what’s the postage? Maybe they—fahh!—wants to see if we’re easy to spook. Boo! Or maybe they did know and gave’m somethin’ to trip over.”

  “Trip over?” Vickman said. “You mean they wanted him to fail?”

  “Maybe,” Cinnamon said, shrugging, as Ferguson seemed to deflate. “S’like a bunt hunt. You sends a young were out hunting for ‘bunts’ in a place where humans’ll probl’y get ’em. At least Fergie had a chance. If he fails, good for who hates him; if he runs us off, even better.”

  “I don’t take it we can get the name of your employer, Mr. Ferguson?” I said.

  “Fuck no,” Ferguson said, clenching his teeth. “I don’t want to get killed.”

  “How charming. May I then?” I said. I took the tickets back from him, then wrote CALL ME—DAKOTA FROST on the envelope with my number underneath. “Please tell whoever doesn’t want us here that we’ve received their warning, and I want to speak to them.”

  Ferguson took it back, incredulous. “The Guild doesn’t want to talk to you—”

  “Your master doesn’t want the Guild talking to me,” I said. “But the Guild does. They invited me to the Northern California Practitioner’s Conclave tomorrow, to report on my work in the Magical Security Council of Atlanta. If your master is in the Guild . . . he’s probably invited.”

  Ferguson glared. “Frost, look,” he said. “He—they want you out of their territory.”

  “I don’t care what he wants,” I said, jamming my hands in the pockets of my vestcoat. “This is a free country, and I have the right to bring my daughter here and keep her safe. And as far as the wizards who are here . . . well, all I care about is keeping them safe. Tell them that.”

  Ferguson started to retort, then froze as Saffron’s hand tightened on his shoulder. “Tell them one more thing,” she said softly in his ear. “See the steel collar around the Lady Frost’s neck? And around the little girl’s neck? Her name’s Cinnamon, by the way. She’s not a pet.”

  Cinnamon tugged at her collar, and I pulled at mine as well—polished stainless steel, with a soft black rubber liner and an elaborate S engraved on the front. Mine was comfortably fitted to my neck. Cinnamon’s was far wider, so she could change.

  Saffron drew back slightly, at first I thought to make her look imperious; then I realized the angle would make it easier for her to bite. Saffron waited for Ferguson to nod, then said, “That’s the sign of the House of Saffron, the Vampire Queen of Atlanta. My sign.”

  And Saffron bared her cruel vampire fangs.

  “Oh, fuck me,” Ferguson said, flinching away from her, but Saffron held him firm.

  “If any harm befalls Dakota or Cinnamon, my wrath will be . . . awesome,” she said, oh-so-sweetly, turning up the Southern Belle accent at just the right point to convey ultimate menace. Her fangs were as long as Cinnamon’s. “Please deliver that along with Dakota’s message.”

  “Understood,” Ferguson said. He was shaking when she released him.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “What?” Ferguson said, still flinching away from Saffron.

  “They really should have told you,” I said. “They had to have known. I’m so sorry.”

  “What?” Ferguson said, backing away, slipping the envelope back into his vest. “What? Fuck you, lady, I-I’m loyal to—to the Guild! He—they would have told me if they’d known! And I can take care of myself!”

  And then he zipped his vest up and whirled, and in a blink of magic he was gone.

  My jaw dropped. It hadn’t been teleportation, exactly—of that I was certain, as I’d become a bit of an expert in that area—but it was a damn impressive combination of accelerated movement combined with some kind of perceptual effect. I squinted, trying to see the traces, then gave up and put my hand to my brow to dispel the sudden magically-induced headache.

  “Cool!” Cinnamon said, peering after him; then she, too, put her hand to her forehead and grimaced. “Ouchies—eggbeaters to the noggins—but super cool! Mr. Wizard meets Sonic the Hedgehog. Wind gots to whip him up though—ergo, them riding leathers.”

  “ ‘Ergo?’ ” Vickman asked, smiling. Even the grizzled ex-South African Defense Forces veteran was softening after half a year hanging around Cinnamon, and he reached to tousle her hair. “Since when does a street cat start dropping ‘ergo’ in polite conversation?”

  “Hey! No mocking the me,” Cinnamon said, trying to simultaneously swat at him while readjusting her headscarf. “Since my prof stopped asking me to solve problems, and started asking me to prove theorems.” She looked at me. “Well, Mom? Do we bails on San Fran?”

  I looked at her in shock . . . and then realized everyone was looking at me.

  “Ah, hell,” I said, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. I was the head of the Magical Security Council. I couldn’t lean on Vickman’s paranoia or defer to Saffron’s authority; ultimately, the decision was on me.

  “We cannot force harmony without a common purpose,” Darkrose warned. “The truce in Atlanta was reached after wizards and vampires fought the graffiti plague, together. Perhaps the Guild here is simply not ready to accept an emissary allied to their longtime foes—”

 
“It’s a faction,” I said. “Not the whole Guild—”

  “We could get a hotel at the airport,” Saffron said. “We already have rooms for Dakota and Cinnamon; maybe we can expand the reservation. We can call the Vampire Court with our apologies, and leave as soon as we can arrange transport for Nyissa—”

  “No,” I said firmly. “Look . . . thanks, both of you. Those are good options, but we won’t use them unless we have to. We stay. This is precisely the kind of infighting the Board has been successful at stopping in Atlanta. I’m sure we’ll have no trouble here either.”

  “Oh, you had to go jinx it, didn’t you?” Saffron murmured.

  “So,” I said, “should we hunker down in the hotel while you guys go to the Court?”

  “No,” Vickman said. “I don’t want you isolated in some place Fergie and his employer might know about—especially with your bodyguard here confined to her coffin in our hired car while the formalities are worked out in Court. Go to the club.”

  “The club? Where Jewel’s performing? Neither of which we know anything about?”

  “Ignorance is correctable,” Vickman said, pulling out his phone. “Give me the card.”

  I extended the card, and Vickman took it, turned it over, and grunted. Then he flipped down his smartphone’s keyboard and thumbed rapidly. He pursed his lips, making the white bristles in his salt-and-pepper beard sparkle; then he handed the card back to me.

  “Probably. The website checks out and it’s been advertised for months,” he said. Then Vickman smiled, and his eyes got mischievous, reminding me a bit of a bearded Crocodile Dundee, though I knew I was mixing up my ruins of empire. “And it sounds like fun.”

  “You hits the Wayback that fast?” Cinnamon asked skeptically, sneezing.

  “I have an app for it,” Vickman said, showing her the phone, and Cinnamon cooed appreciatively. He pulled it away before she could snatch it, but then he began showing her how the app worked. “Put together by one of the Van Helsings back at the office.”

  I watched them natter on about scripts and Internet archives for a minute, then shook my head. When I adopted Cinnamon nine months ago, she had been almost illiterate, computer or otherwise. I had been a computer lab tech in college, so I showed her a few things. Now. . . .

  “You ever feel stupid, listening to them?” I asked Saffron.

  “No,” Saffron replied. She was a few signatures away from a Ph.D. in vampirology, but knew no more about computers than I did; our childhood friend Jinx had got that gene. Saffron said, “They do leave me feeling a bit ignorant. Fortunately, ignorance is correctable.”

  “Only with great effort,” I said. “All right, can we have a verdict? Safe? Fun?”

  “Safe,” Vickman said, closing his smartphone keyboard with a click. “Go to the club. It’s an unplanned diversion from our agenda, which means you and Cinnamon will be safer than we are—because no one will expect you to be there. Just . . . please be careful.”

  “Definitely fun,” Cinnamon said, flipping the card over in her hands. She was smiling.

  ———

  “Alright, Cinnamon,” I said, smiling back at her. “Ready for a girl’s night out?”

  3. Performance Art

  “The Crucible” turned out to be a fire arts center, housed in a huge warehouse space in grid-like streets near the portside of Oakland. The taxi driver missed it on the first pass, and we wormed our way back toward it through cute little row homes. The houses were nice, the streets were clean, and the cars . . . well, somewhat less so. It was an odd juxtaposition.

  Just as the last light was fading from the sky, the driver pulled up next to the ticket stand, a converted hot red train caboose sitting on the corner of the Crucible’s tiny parking lot. “You just pay for ride,” he said, pointing at the meter, which he had stopped when he passed the Crucible. “My mistake. You no pay for the loop around.”

  “No problem,” I said, digging in my wallet, thinking of the man’s olive skin, his wiry dark hair; he reminded me of someone. Then it hit me—he looked a lot like a vampire I’d known named Demophage. “By any chance, are you Romanian?”

  He leaned back at me, smiled. “Lithuanian,” he said. “Grandmother was Romanian.”

  “Close enough,” I said, passing over one-two-choke!-three twenties. “Keep the change.”

  Cinnamon and I hopped out, someone hopped in, and the cab sped off. At first, I’d been worried about taking my underage daughter to a “club,” but the Crucible seemed to be open to all ages. The parking lot was filled with a full spectrum of humanity—haughty socialites in evening wear, down-to-earth families with teenaged children, slackers in flannel and dreads, Goths and preppies, and even a few Edgeworlders mixed in with the mundanes.

  A young man with wolf ears caught my eye, reminding me of Cinnamon as I’d first seen her in the rough and tumble crowd at the werehouse. Cinnamon saw him too, swatting at him, but he howled at her, and she squealed and ducked behind me, just like she had at the werehouse.

  “Is he—” she asked, peeking around my arm as I laughed.

  “I dunno,” I said, smiling at the boy, who had laughed when Cinnamon had ducked behind me . . . and who looked about Cinnamon’s age. “Fantastic makeup if he’s a mundane, a pretty heavy change for the new moon if not. Can’t you smell him?”

  “Too many,” she said, as we lost him in the milling crowd. “And too far—”

  “You like wolves, don’t you? You could go check him out, sniff his butt—”

  “Mom!”

  And then we found the line for walkups and patiently waited. I mean, I patiently waited. After we’d been waiting a while—approximately seventeen seconds—Cinnamon began doing her best Tigger impression, soon hopping even higher than I was tall, so vigorously that her appropriately-themed Tigger backpack bounced on its bungees.

  “Are-we-there-yet, are-we-there-yet?” she was saying, and even though she sounded like she was being ironic, I was glad my tough little street cat could have a little childish fun.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” I said, trying to guide her with my hands so she didn’t kill anyone in the line by bouncing on them. “You can see better than me—”

  “I can take the next customer!” a blond-haired lady called, opening a new window. Cinnamon and I bolted forward, and the woman grinned as Cinnamon hopped down in front of her, one ear canted beneath her tilted headscarf. “Wow, that’s a wonderful costume.”

  “It’s not a costume,” I said, rubbing Cinnamon’s shoulders, relishing the ticket taker’s surprised double take as Cinnamon flicked her ears. “One adult, one child—unless by, some chance, we’re on the guest list?”

  “Uh, I dunno,” the woman said, glancing aside at something inside the caboose. “That would have been at will call—what’s the name?”

  “Dakota Frost,” I said.

  “I mean, the performer,” she said, taking a clipboard from someone.

  “Jewel Grace,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, it was a long shot—”

  “No, no, you’re on the list, a last-minute addition,” she said, flipping up the clipboard. Then she scowled and peered out past us into the line. “Where’s the rest of your party? She put you down for six spots.”

  I raised an eyebrow—the same number of tickets Ferguson offered us; then I relaxed as I realized it was one slot for every member of our party Jewel had seen walking. Pretty darn observant—but almost certainly a coincidence.

  “They couldn’t make it,” I said. “Unavoidably detained—vampire politics.”

  The woman’s eyes bugged, and Cinnamon sneezed. “Eff, Mom, be cool—”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Forget I said the ‘v’ word.”

  “Not likely, but . . . OK,” she said, handing over two tickets nervously. “Enjoy the show. Jewel’s an amazing performe
r, but I guess you know that, if you’re a fan—”

  “Nope,” I said. “Just met her on the plane flight out this afternoon.”

  “Well,” the woman said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “you must have made quite the impression. She used up all her slots—and put you right in front. I can take the next customer!”

  “Interesting,” I muttered, looking at the tickets.

  “Granola and Mohawk,” Cinnamon muttered. “At least she’s not a vamp.”

  I squeezed her shoulders again, and then we merged with the press of people walking through the huge sliding doors of the Crucible. It was larger than I’d expected from the outside, with an actual two-story building in the middle of its cavernous warehouse floor. There were welders and glassworkers and fire sculptors doing all kinds of demonstrations, and placards and catalogs and posters detailing an enormous variety of classes.

  I’d never seen anything like it.

  Cinnamon apparently hadn’t either; her head kept whipping back and forth, and I got exhausted trying to follow her as she darted from exhibit to exhibit. But just when my mind was about to pigeonhole her as a cat chasing shiny things, I noticed what was attracting her attention—not the artwork, but the description of the classes. She’d look at the cat’s-cradle made of neon or the flower made of fire—and then stop and lean in to read the placards, muttering and dropping f-bombs as she tried to “read the letters before they swims away.” Just one more reminder that the little street cat I’d adopted was, unexpectedly, an insatiable learning machine.

  “None of ’em are one-days while we’re here,” Cinnamon said, stopping in front of a poster for the firespinning classes. After squinting at the schedule, she leaned back and pointed at a long-exposure picture of a girl weaving a huge flower of fire with poi—flaming balls on the end of a chain. “I wants to learn to do that. That looks amazing.”

  “It’s more amazing live,” I said. “Maybe Alex could show you while we’re here.”