Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  “I slept all day,” Nyissa said, tilting her head so her bangs shifted. “It is good to be up.”

  “Nyissa was our companion traveling in the coffin,” I said.

  “Oh, my God,” Jewel said. “You—you’re a vampire!”

  Nyissa smiled, oh-so-slowly baring her fangs. “Do not worry, pretty little thing,” she croaked, running her tongue over one canine. “I have already fed this evening.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, as Jewel’s eyes widened in fear. “Not on a person. Cow’s blood.”

  “I do not think,” Nyissa said, “that Asia de Cuba’s ‘special collection’ was cow’s blood.”

  “Oh my God!” Jewel said, backing up. “No, no offense ma’am, but—Dakota! You can’t put me in a room with a vampire!”

  “You can’t get away from it,” I said. “Your choices are weretigers or vampires.”

  “Regardless,” Nyissa said, “I do not think Vickman will approve of a stranger staying in the same room as Lady Darkrose and Lady Saffron.” She regarded Jewel coldly, twirling the poker in her hands. “Similarly . . . I do not approve of her staying with you and Cinnamon.”

  “Well,” I said. “Jewel, listen to me. I trust Nyissa with my life. Absolutely.”

  Jewel sagged, considering. Then she brightened. “Anyone Dakota trusts absolutely is someone I trust absolutely,” she said. “She saved my life, twice, you know that.”

  “She does that,” Nyissa said.

  “Sorry I treated you like an ‘other,’ ” Jewel said, and Nyissa and I glanced at each other, befuddled. Jewel explained, “That’s the excuse people use when they’re scared and want to lash out—their victims aren’t people like ‘us,’ they’re the ‘other.’ You deserved better.”

  I raised an eyebrow. I was starting to like this woman. Oh, who was I kidding—starting?

  “Thank you, Jewel Grace,” Nyissa said, glancing at me. Then she smiled an odd, knowing, and strangely sad smile. “I will turn down your bed and set up my chair. It’s been a while since I curled up with a good novel; this will be relaxing.”

  Jewel watched her go, then turned back to me, swallowing.

  I smiled at her. “You all right?”

  “Yes, but—Dakota, vampires!” she said, hand pressed to her breast. “My heart’s racing. I know what I said, and I want to be big about it but . . . vampires! Still . . . they’re people too, and I guess there isn’t a place much safer than with a vampire bodyguard.”

  “Well,” I said, and then stopped. She didn’t need a lecture on the limits of vampires or bodyguards, not after her experience. “Well, it’s our pleasure. Get some sleep, fireweaver.”

  “If I can,” she said. “I’m still rattled. How can you sleep after all that?”

  “No choice,” I said. “I’ve got to drive to Berkeley tomorrow morning for a talk.”

  “Trying to sell the Berkeley crowd on your little rules?” Jewel asked, eyebrow raised.

  ———

  “Not everything is about me, or magic,” I said. “This talk’s on math—by Cinnamon.”

  19. Higher Learning

  “Every splittable count,” Cinnamon blurted from the lectern, “is the sum of two lonelies.”

  Cinnamon stood on a short box behind a podium too tall, even given the box’s extra height, holding her twitching tail with both hands to keep it still as she faced an auditorium full of students, professors and cameras. If I wasn’t her mother, it would have been adorable.

  As it was, I seethed to see my daughter put on the spot like this. Her remote collaborator on the paper, Professor ZQ, had led me to believe this was an “informal presentation” to his research group at Berkeley—“oh, maybe a dozen people in a conference room.”

  But when we arrived, we found posters all over Berkeley’s campus, directing everyone to a talk by “C.S.F. Frost” on “Stalking Goldbach.” My baby almost leapt back into the car when she saw the talk would be in Sibley Auditorium, and I thought I’d have a heart attack.

  At Sibley, we found three hundred people squeezed into an auditorium meant for two hundred and fifty. The audience that could sit had comfy chairs; the rest crowded close around a stage that was little more than a semicircle of wood around a lectern, grievously exposed.

  I’d almost stormed off. Cinnamon decided to stay, on the very sensible grounds that the crowd at Stanford would likely be far larger. I couldn’t argue with that logic—this was supposed to be a practice talk. And so far . . . she was doing well.

  “Splittable and lonelies, that’s how I says it,” Cinnamon said, clutching her tail more tightly. Before she’d grabbed it, it had been switching back and forth so hard it made the light wood lectern look like a giant metronome. “But you might know it better if I translates it. Counts are one two three, whole numbers; splittable you can cut in two, the evens; and lonelies you can’t cut at all, the primes. So every even number is the sum of two primes—Goldbach’s Conjecture.”

  The audience stared in silence. From my post at the side door, I was convinced it was her appearance—with cat ears, fangs, a tail, and exotic tiger stripes, all jammed into a junior-punk fashion plate, Cinnamon was entertaining to look at, no matter what she was saying.

  But as Cinnamon stammered through her presentation on “cat’s cradle constructions,” I could see the audience slowly stop watching the talking tiger and start really listening to the mathematician. But that just made it worse—as it was her voice that was the real problem.

  At first, it was just her signature tic, her head flicking aside as she channeled an outburst into a rough blast of air that you could mistake for a sneeze. But the cruel truth of Tourette’s is that, the harder a victim fights the outbursts, the harder they become to control—and the disease is at its worst when a child passes through puberty into their early teens. And so, as the sneezy tics became rough cries and barks, interjected at odd points during her sentences, I questioned the wisdom of letting her give this talk, no matter how much Professor ZQ and her teacher Doctor Vladimir back at the Clairmont Academy and even Cinnamon wanted it to happen.

  “My cat’s cradles, they—eff!—generalizes the tilty slants, what I calls the—fucking—quaternions,” Cinnamon said. We both winced. When the tics turned to cussing, it was a bad sign, but she tried again. “The cradles generalizes the quaternions—you fucking eggheads—”

  That last one sent a ripple through the auditorium, and Cinnamon flinched, half at her words, half at the reaction. She froze there, hunched over, twisting her head away from the crowd—then blurted, “Fuck! Stop looking at me! Stop looking at me!”

  And then Cinnamon shimmered—and disappeared.

  The crowd gasped—and I cursed. I should have realized. We all want to disappear sometimes, but Cinnamon literally could—she wore tattoos by the Marquis, a master of two-dimensional magic, and she could evaporate into shimmery distortion, like the Predator.

  The lectern jerked, as if she’d bolted from it, and I threw wide my arms, to keep her from fleeing the room. But it turned out that she wasn’t running away—she was running to me. I gasped as she fell into my arms, thrilled and grateful at the level of trust she’d shown me.

  “Oh, God,” Cinnamon said, shimmering back to visibility in the circle of my embrace, head buried against my chest, hands bunched up on either side of her face, hiding it from the crowd. “Mom, I thinks of the worst thing to say, and then I gots to say it—”

  “It’s all right,” I said, cradling her, turning her away from the crowd; then I leaned down and kissed her forehead. “I can only imagine how hard this is on you, baby. No one should have to deal with this, but sometimes we gotta put up with stuff that we don’t want to.”

  “I don’t wants to go back over there,” Cinnamon said, crying. “Fuck! I don’t.”

  “No one’s going to mak
e you,” I said, disappointed that I’d let it get this far.

  “But you thinks I should, don’t you?” Her eyes were really wet now, she was snuffling, and I was really steamed. She said, “I means, fuck, Mom, it’s bad enough I talks—eff!—like a toilet, but I don’t wants to call them names! They hates me, I knows it—”

  I bit my lip; Cinnamon had interpreted my disappointment in myself as disappointment in her. I couldn’t let that stand . . . but then something mean quirked up in me, not evil precisely, but . . . heartless. I didn’t like this new thread in me. But I had to use this to help her.

  “They don’t hate you, Cinnamon,” I said quietly. “But I won’t be disappointed if you don’t finish your talk—and I certainly won’t make you. Still . . . won’t you be disappointed in yourself if you come all this way, and run away? And won’t you be proud if you finish?”

  Cinnamon bit her lip, just like I did—then accidentally drew blood. She laughed, wiping her chin with the back of her tufted hand. I pulled out a handkerchief and wiped her hand down, planning to wash it later; it wasn’t good to have werekin blood floating around.

  “OK, Mom,” Cinnamon said, staring back at the lectern, at the glimpse of the patient but increasingly restless crowd. Then she grabbed her switching tail and pulled it up in front of her, like a snaky teddy bear. “Fuck, I means—I means, I can do this.”

  And then she went back out there . . . and finished her talk.

  Cinnamon cussed again. More than once; I lost count. But she let go of her tail, the podium once again became a werekin metronome, and she lost herself explaining her home-grown theory of numbers—how her “splittables” were even numbers, but her “lonelies” weren’t quite primes, and how her “tilty slants” were something new entirely. Then she pulled out her ball of string and showed off her cat’s cradle figures, revealing how she’d discovered that her numbered tangles of string mapped onto combinations of primes.

  Then she got to that line which had prompted Vladimir to call up Professor ZQ. “So the cradle mappin’ is why I wants to know whether the twisty snake folds over itself forever—findin’ the zeroes of the Riemann Zeta is—faah—the key to cracking the Goldbach Conjecture. I—uh, that’s it. That’s what they gots me workin’ on now. Thanks, I guess.”

  And then? Thunderous applause and a standing ovation. I thought Cinnamon might wilt—but no, she clearly enjoyed it. The chair of the number theory group said “we only have time for five questions,” but Cinnamon replied, “do six, it’s a pretty perfect little number,” and the crowd inexplicably went wild again. When the questions—far more than six—ground to halt, Cinnamon was mobbed by graduate students, and I watched from a distance with Zlatko Quaeschning, AKA Professor ZQ, a cheery, white-haired German with a walrus moustache who hovered like he was also a proud parent.

  “Pleased to meet you, Professor,” I said, scowling as he shook my hand absently. “When we spoke on the phone, you said this would be a small presentation in a conference room, but when I arrived, I find a packed auditorium—”

  “We can thank the number theory club,” Professor ZQ said, in a thick but surprisingly understandable accent. “When I shared CSF’s draft paper with my research group, it spread over like wildfire, first across the department, then on the Internet—”

  “You what?” I said, stunned. “It what?”

  “Went viral,” Professor ZQ said. He caught my glare. “Mrs. Frost, with something this radical, you have to vet it. Simply stunning work for an amateur. CSF’s cradles open entire new avenues of attack. I’m so grateful that Doctor Vladimir shared it with me.”

  “It’s Miss Frost,” I said coldly, “and I’m not grateful you put my—” and here I lowered my voice, even though Cinnamon was fifty feet away and talking “—my Tourette’s-challenged daughter in front of a room filled with three hundred people with no warning!”

  Professor ZQ opened his mouth. “Ah,” he said. “Well, Ms. Frost, all of us at Berkeley are adults, and adult language is no barrier. I’m sure most of the people in that hall realized what was going on minutes into CSF’s talk. Tourette’s is an awful disease, especially in the young.”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes it is.”

  “One of my graduate students still drops f-bombs from time to time . . . though that might just be a side effect of grad school,” Professor ZQ said. “Though that’s a bit unusual for coprolalia to persist that long. I suppose CSF was a real terror in her teens—”

  “Cinnamon is just getting into her teens,” I said. “Just how old do you think she is?”

  Professor ZQ stared at me, then whirled and looked at Cinnamon.

  “When Vlad nominated her for the Young Investigator award, I knew she had to be under twenty-five,” Professor ZQ stammered. “Of course, we worked with her, but given her level, I just . . . assumed she was already in college, that she was near finishing, say twenty-one—”

  “She wishes,” I said. “Lower.”

  “But those lines around her eyes . . . nineteen?” he said, turning to look at me, looking me up and down. “With a hovering mother? No. But she knows so much math . . . seventeen? No? Younger? And she’s so small. Ms. Frost, please don’t tell me she’s fifteen—”

  “She hasn’t even turned fourteen yet,” I said. “At least, we don’t think she has.”

  “You think, meaning you don’t know, meaning she’s adopted, orphaned—and spent time on the streets, out of the system,” Professor ZQ said. “A thirteen-year-old genius, struggling with Tourette’s . . . and I walked her into a complete ambush. Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t know,” I said. The man was clearly very smart and sensitive; he wouldn’t have let this happen, or would have at least given us a heads up, had he fully known Cinnamon’s situation. “Sorry. Maybe my strong words should be for Vlad—”

  “Not his fault. He said she was young and I never pressed,” Professor ZQ snapped, but his eye acquired a twinkle. “So, Ms. Frost, your daughter’s done amazing work, but I’ll defer my pitch to have CSF . . . to have Cinnamon apply to Berkeley’s doctoral mathematics program.”

  “Doctoral program?” I said, laughing. “Let’s not get the cart ahead of the horse. She looks older than she is because she came off some hard streets. I just got her into school six months ago. Let’s let her finish middle school, at least, before we start talking PhD—”

  “Middle school?” Professor ZQ said, eyes bulging. “And here I was thinking she’d skip-graded up into high school. I’m sorry, Ms. Frost, but I take back my ‘advanced for an amateur’ comment. To progress that far in six months is great progress even for a genius.”

  “Yeah, we know that,” I said. I turned to watch Cinnamon chatting brightly amidst the graduate students, showing off another of her cat’s cradles. They clearly loved her, from the top of her cat ears to the tips of her tail. It was such a good sign. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

  “But surely, Ms. Frost, given the level of work she’s doing—”

  “Nine months ago, she was functionally illiterate. She is a learning machine, and has made huge strides, but . . . she learns what she wants to in order to solve the problems she’s interested in.” I scowled. “I still catch her doing assignments in crayon.”

  “So what?” Professor ZQ said, a twinkle in his eye. “That’s probably more fun.”

  “Ha! Maybe so,” I said, “but . . . she’s still learning how to be a student. And struggling with severe dyslexia on top of the Tourette’s. And dealing with being a werekin who can’t quite transform all the way back to human. And recovering from . . . well, frankly, child abuse.”

  Professor ZQ’s eyes had widened at the word “werekin,” but when I hit “child abuse,” his face grew tender. “Oh, my,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

  “Let’s not take her childhood away just yet,” I said. “She jus
t got started on it.”

  “Hey, Mom!” Cinnamon said, bouncing up to me. “Can I borrow your phone?”

  “Don’t you have one of your own?” I asked, patting her on the head.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, spinning around, bending back and looking at me upside down, “but I needs the pictures you took last night of the fire circles. I wants to ask the grads a question about how the magic worked.”

  “All right, all right,” I said, pulling my phone out and unlocking it. “One scratch and—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, scooping it up in her long, bony claws. “More dings on yours than on mine. Back in a bit once we’ve cracked the case.”

  “I hope you mean the investigation and not the plastic shell,” I said, but she was already bouncing back into the crowd, showing my phone off. I wasn’t sure whether the students were more impressed by the pictures, or the phone.

  Professor ZQ said. “You saw some stage magic last night?”

  “No,” I said. “Cinnamon’s working with us to help analyze the magic used in that nasty business last night in Union Square.”

  “The terrorist incident?” the Professor said. “But what . . . how was magic involved in that? I heard it was explosives and a couple of dragon-themed fireworks—”

  “Fire magic,” I said, shaking my head. “Including two very interesting fire circles.”

  “You mean, literal magic,” the Professor said, clucking. “Surely you’re not serious—”

  “Did you not see Cinnamon disappear just now?” I asked. I know that the human eye doesn’t like to see magic—the changes slip between movements of the eye—but he had to have seen that. “That was literally magic.”

  “That was an amazing trick,” ZQ said, “but we shouldn’t call anything ‘magic.’ Ms. Frost, you may not be trained as a scientist, but you seem like a rational person, so—