Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I became acutely aware that I was a normal human—as normal as you can get covered with two square meters of magically tattooed skin—amidst a whole crowd of supernatural creatures who fed on blood.

  And I’d stepped out with them onto a dark San Francisco street. Wasn’t there some horror movie rule about this? Even my so-called “bodyguard,” Nyissa, was one of them. The only humans here were Vickman and Schultze, and if the vamps did something, we were toast.

  I shook my head. These were my friends. My daughter was a were. I had chosen this life. Picking at it, my real fear was the Vampire Court of San Francisco, insinuating themselves into our evening, insisting they oversee us as we walked through their stronghold.

  We had made it through dinner, but . . . these vampires were an untested quantity.

  But nothing came of my fears. Lady Astryia and Saffron discussed their respective Vampire Consulates; Vickman muttered with the bulky bodyguard with the well-inked tats. The others were silent, and eventually Cinnamon and I relaxed enough to notice window displays.

  We paused in wonder at one closed shop, which displayed carved statues in dozens of materials. Several were of Chinese origin, carved from elephant tusks I hoped were collected before the ban. One was even carved from what was claimed to be a mammoth’s tusk.

  And then my eyes focused on one ornate dagger, carved in the shape of a tooth. I stared at it curiously. It wasn’t a dagger carved in the shape of a tooth—it was a tooth carved in the shape of a dagger. It was huge, jagged, dark, almost translucent—but clearly had once been alive. Yet it wasn’t from any animal I recognized. What was it from? A sabertooth? No. Too wide at the base. A T-Rex? No. Too elegant. I felt a shiver ripple through my tattoos. Was it a—

  “Oh my God,” I said, pressing against the glass. “Is that . . .”

  “Yes,” Lord Kitana said, leaning in next to me. I could see his reflection in the glass, eyes glowing slightly; vampires not having a reflection was a myth, but reflections did give their auras an eerie, distorted feeling that ran shivers up my spine. “Technically, it’s not a true tooth, but a papilla or ‘tonguehook,’ a fact which staggers the imagination, if one has any—”

  “My God,” I said, again shivering—this is real. I let my own tongue glide against the roof of my mouth, then run against my teeth, thinking of the size difference between those teeth and the papillae, the tiny feelers that coated the tongue. “That’s just a papilla? Unbelievable.”

  “Yes. I had the item appraised when considering it for my collection. It is genuine.”

  After some hunting, I finally found the tiny little tag at its base:

  FOSSILIZED DRAGON’S TOOTH DAGGER

  $350,000

  “That’s a steal,” I said.

  “It is indeed,” Lord Kitana said.

  “Those carvings aren’t contemporary,” I said.

  “No, they are not,” he replied. “My appraiser estimated them at ten thousand years.”

  “It isn’t fossilized, is it?”

  “No, it is not,” he replied. “Desiccated, though. There is no magic in it.”

  “Still . . . don’t they know what they have here?” I said. “It’s just in the window—”

  “No thief would dare take it from this shop—not when I am its patron.” Lord Kitana chuckled. It was a chilling sound. “No magician would buy it—desiccated dragonbone and dragonhorn can be acquired far more cheaply. No art collector would want it—they do not understand. And no museum would acquire it—they do not believe.”

  We leaned back from the glass.

  “You desire it?” Lord Kitana said.

  “Surprisingly . . . very much so,” I said. “There are only a handful of nonfossilized dragon relics in the world; the idea of an artwork made from my totem animal is . . . intoxicating.”

  “One day,” Lord Kitana said, smiling at me with something between genuine respect and infinite coldness, “perhaps, if you prove to be the crusader you claim to be, I shall gift it to you, Dakota Frost. If not . . . one day, perhaps, you shall receive it another way.”

  I swallowed.

  “Dakota,” Saffron said, concerned. “Isn’t . . . that Liquid up ahead?”

  “Damn it,” Vickman cursed. “This looks bad—”

  And then I saw it—a crowd milling outside the very same building that Jewel had described, all pointing and gawking at an ominous blue light in its window.

  “Aw, shit,” I said.

  Vickman and one of the human servants scoped out the crowd, inspected the window, then waved us forward. Liquid was embedded in the bottom floor of a narrow four-story building, like a brownstone; but a façade of sheer black marble had been added to the bottom floor, beneath a sign that read LIQUID: artworks -cocktails -dancing. But hovering just above the surface of plate window beneath that sign, crackling against—and cracking—the glass, glowed an intricate magical mark four feet in diameter, burning with a blue-white flame.

  Arcane symbols spun lazily in five concentric rings around a central mandala of Chinese design that looked, vaguely, like the abstract lines of a dragon. The spinning rings around it were suggestive of a magic circle or a light spell, but I’d never seen anything precisely like it.

  Apparently, the patrons and the staff hadn’t either—they were still pouring out into the street to inspect it from a cautious distance, or peeking at it nervously from the inside. As we approached, the blue flame began to flicker, then went out at once, leaving the glowing rings of red letters spinning within intricate circles of blue-white light—and the shift of light made the dragon design in the center mandala stand out even more prominently. Now that I saw it more closely, the Chinese design looked more like Chinese characters, woven together.

  “Aw, man,” Cinnamon said. “We just missed the show.”

  “Agreed,” Vickman said, turning from the bartender. “He says this happened minutes ago. They saw someone run up to the window with what looked like a torch or brazier, wave it around like he was doing some kind of performance, and then—blammo!”

  “Let me guess,” I said, trying to grok the design. “Gone before anyone got outside.”

  “Right first time,” Vickman said grimly. “All the bartender saw was a guy in a jacket and a flaming torch. Let me ask the crowd. Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen—”

  “Mom, you needs to take a picture,” Cinnamon said. “Before it fades.”

  I pulled out my smartphone and did so, but it wasn’t fading. After the flame went out, the design kept rotating, glowing, maintaining its speed and power. I leaned in—there was nothing beneath the design but glass, and it barely scratched the surface, almost like it was a decal.

  I wanted to touch it. I reached out toward the central dragon.

  “Don’t,” Vickman said, stepping up beside me. “You’ll be burned—”

  “No, if it was hot, the air would feel warm,” I said, letting my hand hover over it. “And it would already have started to dim as it cooled. Even its magic would begin to fade more quickly, given the logic of this design.” And again, I reached toward the glass.

  “Dakota, seriously,” Saffron said, stepping up on my other side. “You’re not going to touch it, are you? Remember Doctor Who and The Green Death?”

  I hesitated, a wry smile coming to my lips. In the reflection, I could just make out both of them, watching my hand over the surface of the glass. I felt almost no mana . . . but I had to touch it. I have to know what it is saying. “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

  “Mom!” Cinnamon said. “At least have a spell ready or somethin’.”

  “Always the smart one,” I said, my hand still hovering over the glass, an eerie, electric attraction. I closed my eyes, thought carefully, then undulated my hand in the air, building up a nul
l intent in my hand, backed by a mana charge in my arm—the magical equivalent of a diode. If I’d crafted the impromptu spell right, I’d get a sense of the spell’s intent with almost no mana behind it. “Spirit of fire . . . give me insight.”

  I pressed my hand through the symbol to the glass, and an electric shock rippled through my tattoos—harmless, but far more intense than I expected. Yet the glass was cool to the touch, and even though I could still feel the strangely sharp mana rippling through it, like a live circuit, there was nothing else to the magic—nothing in the glass, no decal on its surface. A light vapor brushed against my fingers as the circles rotated, and the magic slightly curdled in its wake, but that was it. It was a self-sustaining magical design with only a barest whiff of material substance, like a tattooist’s projectia. If it was designed to achieve a magical effect, I couldn’t grok it. The message was hidden from my sight. I could feel the glass cracking under its influence, more slowly now; the magic was fading slightly, but still powerful. This was bad.

  “It has a power source,” I said, withdrawing my hand, watching, as I expected, the central dragon reform and the magic rings return to their orbits. I turned to look at the others. “The last time I saw something with a mysterious power source, nearly half of Atlanta burned.”

  “What is the intent of this design?” Lord Kitana asked.

  I cocked my head at it. “I . . . don’t know,” I admitted. “Magic isn’t always obvious.”

  “I—I don’t know either,” Cinnamon said. “I sees light magic, spinning magic, some fire—but I don’t know what they adds up to. What’s the dragon for? It looks like letterin’, but it doesn’t seem to be connected to the circuit. And what are those spinny symbols?”

  “I don’t recognize them,” I said. That was also bad; this thing could be a ticking time bomb, spinning down to some countdown embedded in those symbols that we couldn’t read . . . or could we? The more I looked, the more familiar the symbols became. “Wait a minute—”

  I struggled to remember where I had seen those symbols. They call to me in some deep, resonant way. Had I seen them in what I’d been reading? No. In the fireweaver’s performance art? Maybe. Then it hit me—I’d seen those symbols today. In, of all places, a tie.

  “Carnes,” I said, and explained to Saffron and the crew the mystical symbols I had seen woven through the garments of the Wizarding Guild. “And here I thought that ‘die on the streets of Oakland’ crap and the attack on Jewel was just coincidence.”

  And then an addled man with wiry red hair stumbled out of Liquid, eyes wild. All the patrons and staff seemed instantly to defer to him, or at least recognize him. “Oh my God,” he said, staring at the rotating symbol. “What the hell? What happened? What is that?”

  “A magical mark,” I said, jamming my fists in my pockets, cracking my neck to try to release some of the tension in my tattoos. “And who might you be?”

  “Monkton Teriano,” he said, puffing himself up. “I’m the artist. This is my opening, and I don’t appreciate you trying to horn in—”

  “We didn’t have anything to do with this, Mr. Teriano,” I said. “We’re friends of Jewel Grace. She asked us to meet her here.”

  “You just missed her,” Teriano said, turning, the hair flaring out over his head, making him look like a clown. He cocked his head at the symbol. “This is fire magic, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe. Could Jewel have done this on her way out? Like, an ad for your show—”

  “What? No!” Teriano said. “It’s cracking the glass! Jewel’s a firebrand, not a vandal!”

  “Aw, shit,” I said. “Daniel, or friends of his. Where’s Jewel? We have to warn her—”

  “They already left,” he said, alarmed. “They wanted to set up early—”

  ———

  “In Union Square,” I said. “In front of thousands of tourists.”

  14. The Battle of Union Square

  It had been ten years since I had set foot in Union Square. It was as I remembered it—a huge empty box, with a central column rising from a stepped performance space, surrounded by canyon walls of marble, brick and stone plastered with glowing corporate symbols: Macy’s and Nieman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s and Borders. Behind those neon logos were millions of square feet of shopping space, filled with shiny toys for those running the consumer rat race.

  Despite mentioning them to Saffron earlier, I had no interest in what was behind those façades. Most of what I wanted came from more specialized dealers. But that was not true of what had to be tens of thousands of tourists that visit the Square each day, who swarmed to those stores, each often the largest of its kind any individual consumer is likely to have seen. Even the stepped surface of the Square itself is built atop a parking garage, filled with thousands of cars, each with a convenient tank filled to the brim with explosive gasoline.

  It was atop this wide expanse that the battle began.

  Nyissa and Astryia ran point, almost flying through the streets with Cinnamon just behind. Kitana, Saffron, and Darkrose followed, their servants and bodyguards struggling to keep up. I don’t know how I kept up, but when we shot into the Square, I was not far behind them.

  From the flares of light, the sudden curdling of the crowd, and the spreading reactions, it was clear that there had just been a firespinning demonstration, just now spinning out of control. We ran across the street onto the Square proper, where a policeman was leaning against a giant statue of a heart, chatting up a girl—when he suddenly jerked, whirled, and drew his gun, running with us as we flew over the steps and saw the battle’s beginning.

  In the center of the Square blossomed an orange bubble of flame, fifty feet wide and growing wider, sending tourists fleeing as it expanded over the wide gray expanse of concrete covering the parking garage itself. Then the giant fiery soap bubble bowed under the pressure of a stream of rainbow fire that shot up the steps of the Square from the street below, impacting the shield in a screeching, squealing shower of incandescent sparks.

  Inside the bubble, Jewel whirled a firestaff, desperately trying to maintain the shield as her companion firespinners were stumbling back, regrouping, some trying to regain their footing, others screaming in pain from obvious burns as the safety crew tried to put them out. Then the rainbow stream stopped, just for a moment, and I saw dark-suited figures on the street, dressed like ninjas, each whirling a different weapon tipped with magical flame.

  In my frozen moment of assessment, the vampires all had moved. They didn’t need me to tell them what to do; they just moved. I still had trouble wrapping my head around the idea that the vampires were the force of law and order on the magical Edgeworld, but here was the proof—six vampires from four continents and two clans acted as one to defend humans from magic.

  Varguson and Kitana darted out into the crowds. Astryia and Nyissa flanked the bubble, trying to force the fire ninjas back. Darkrose looped further around, running far faster, trying to come at the fire ninjas from behind. And seemingly from nowhere, Saffron leapt through the air, sailing over the bubble and down upon the ninjas—but then Union Square lit up like Fourth-of-July fireworks as the ninjas fought back with fireballs and fireblasts and artful streams of flame.

  Crackling bangs ripped the air. Screams followed. Flares of light assaulted my eyes. Running shapes created chaos. Amidst the colorful sparks, smells like gunpowder and gasoline and burnt hair stung my nostrils. Terrified for my friends, I ran toward the firefight—even vampires are vulnerable to fire. But before I could do anything to help, my tattoos seemed to squirm to life all on their own, struggling for release, making me stumble and nearly fall.

  I caught myself on one hand, struggling to bring my magic under control, watching helplessly as Darkrose herself stumbled back and Nyissa dodged a fire bolt. Amidst the crowds and chaos, I couldn’t find Lady Astryia or Saffron—and where was Cinnamon?
Shit, shit, shit! Frantically, I staggered to my feet, looking around wildly for my daughter, first spotting Lord Kitana, drawing his namesake sword, then finding Vickman, shouting to the other human servants; finally, I caught sight of Lord Varguson standing stock-still, hand out, chanting, tourists fleeing past him in two running, oddly coordinated streams. But where is Cinnamon?

  I whirled and flinched as a gout of fire roared toward me. Before I had even begun to dodge, a shimmering blur tackled me, slamming into my waist and hauling me to the pavement as the flames blistered over our heads. As we tumbled to a stop against the glittering tiles, the blur resolved into Cinnamon—my little genius, who had disappeared from my sight because she’d very sensibly used her tattoos to turn invisible when the fight started.

  “Mom, get down,” Cinnamon yelled, a yellow glow flaring across her now-visible face, and we dove behind the tables of a café just as the tongue of fire swept back. We rolled aside as the streamer of flame knocked the tables over and made the chairs clank around wildly on the end of the chain running through their bases. A table slammed into the concrete an inch from my face, and I hunched behind it, clenching and unclenching my hands to try to build up power.

  “There it is again! What the fuck is that lizard smell?” Cinnamon said, sniffing; then she ducked as another fireball shot over our heads. When it had passed, I started to edge up over the table, and she pulled me back. “Mom, what are you doing? You can’t fight all of them!”

  “I can sure try,” I said, peeking carefully over the table to get a better look.

  Now Jewel’s firespinners were fighting back, but the fire ninjas were holding their own. I saw one of the dark-garbed figures holding off both Lady Astryia and Nyissa with a firestaff, and another keeping Darkrose and Saffron at bay with looping trails blazing off his fire poi—lazy arcs of rippling fire that were whipping around the square like snakes, flopping out into the crowd, even reaching where we crouched, as it had seconds before in the café.