Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  “And you can feel it,” Arcturus said, and I did: the power flowed from the mushroom, tingled through my body—and made my dragon shiver. He said, “That’s the secret of your tattoo flying around, Dakota—dragon ink. It keeps our tattoos alive long after they leave living skin—”

  “Firecap ink . . . is essence of dragon,” I said. “Devenger was right about my source of liquid fire. And here I thought . . .” and I grimaced as I said it, as ridiculous as it sounded to me now, “I thought my tattoos were powered by the magic of my beating heart.”

  “They are . . . on your skin,” Zinaga said. “Off your skin, they’d disintegrate without a seed of high mystical complexity. This is the secret weapon of our clan—pigment choice. That’s why our designs are so long-lived. Dragon ink is best of all, a constant trickle of mana—”

  “My tattoos,” I said, “are powered by mystical nuclear reactions.”

  “Yes,” the Grinder said. “It is so. Are you afraid?”

  “Afraid,” I said, “and delighted. Inkable liquid fire . . . and you let me have it.”

  Arcturus smiled thinly. “We put more trust in you than you give us credit.”

  “All those questions about my tattooing setup,” I said. “From both you and Finch. I thought you wanted to know whether I knew how to prevent magical infections, but you were really asking questions designed to show whether I was sharing my inks—”

  “Which you do not,” Arcturus said. “What’s the phrase? Trust but verify?”

  “Without knowledge, firecap ink is just ink,” the Grinder said. “With knowledge . . . it is essence of dragon, a secret of our power. A secret to longer life. But only one secret. First, we entrust you with this; once you have taken this step, you will be ready to take another.”

  “You should have done this a long time ago,” Arcturus said. “She’s right. You do have catching up to do—and this is a matter of a sacred trust. When you eat this, you will be an initiate. On pain of death, you may speak to no one of what you have seen—”

  I held up my hand. “Hell to the no,” I said. “I understand the need to keep some things secret. But this system is too fragile. We’re not going to leave secrets like this to us four Lords of the Sith, waiting for some decappite out of the Da Vinci Code to erase this knowledge forever.”

  “We can’t trust anyone else with this knowledge,” Arcturus said.

  “More than you know,” I said. “In the olden days, maybe ink without knowledge was just ink, but nowadays, we understand the physics of pigment. Devenger got a good guess about what was in my tattoos just by looking at them. Give him a bottle of ink and a gas chromatograph—”

  “Goddess,” the Grinder said. “You must not tell him of this—”

  “I won’t betray your trust, but you must help me build something you will trust. This is important. This is precisely what I’ve been fighting. Thank God this had nothing to do with the fires, or the keeping of this secret could have left everyone in the city of Atlanta dead.”

  Arcturus frowned. He’d helped me crack that problem; even he saw that.

  “She is the next generation,” Zinaga said. “Heck, I might even do the same thing.”

  “What are you talking about, Dakota?” Arcturus asked. “Some kind of secret library—”

  “Decide later,” the Grinder said. “Eat now. It is time.”

  We looked at each other; then we raised the firecaps to our lips and ate.

  To call it an explosion behind my eyes makes it sound trite. Warmth passed my lips, heat flooded my mouth, then fire ignited my spirit. The taste was of mushrooms and cinnamon toast and just-singed marshmallows, the best smores ever dissolving into my mouth and soul.

  I filled with fire. Then I opened my eyes to a new world. Streamers of mana—of magic—were everywhere, ever-present and ineffable, climbing from the circle to the trees, from the rocks to the skies, each woven with their own song, each written in their own language.

  And us skindancers? We burned with magic. Our skins glowed, not just from the tattoos, but from the magic they left behind. I knew I had been getting more powerful, and now I knew why. Every time I released a tattoo, a little was left behind, leaving me a stronger foundation. Each time I re-inked, I introduced more dragon ink to my cells.

  The fire seemed to reach my core. I drew in a breath, seeming to feel the inner surface of my lungs for the very first time. Heat climbed up my spine, my brain filled with light—and magic began pouring out of my eyes in an unstoppable signal of my power.

  ———

  Arcturus, Zinaga and I stared at each other, eyes glowing with inner fire.

  47. Strike to the Heart

  I stared at the police cars around the Rogue Unicorn, dumbfounded. At first, I thought someone had robbed the Herbalist’s Attic; then I passed the Star Bar and saw the glowing magic circle crackling next to the Rogue’s brushed aluminum unicorn sign, and my heart pounded.

  The fire ninjas had attacked my tattoo shop.

  I’d stayed up all night in the Stonegrinder’s Grove celebrating my initiation—learning secrets, practicing initiate’s rites, setting up a play date for Cinnamon and Khouri. Exhausted, I’d crashed at Arcturus’s for a couple of hours before driving back to Atlanta and the Rogue.

  Of course, I’d left my cell off the whole time—because cell phones could be tracked. Earlier this year, higher-ups in the DEI forced Philip to roust Cinnamon’s werehouse because I hadn’t been paranoid enough to cover my tracks. Given what I just learned, the last thing I wanted to do was leave a trail deep into the mystical heart of Blood Rock.

  That left me incommunicado, and so when a policemen stopped traffic, I hurriedly beeped my phone on. I’d received over a dozen messages and texts—all since 6:17 a.m., and when I looked up, an ambulance was lumbering out of the Rogue’s driveway. Shit.

  The policeman waved the cars in front of me on. I dropped my phone and slid the Prius forward, flicking on my right turn signal. The policeman shook his head—then got a closer look and waved me in quickly. I’m a little past having to pull the “dad on the force” card now.

  The Prius bumped down the steep drive, I pulled my car in to the far end of the lot, and stepped out, surveying the crowd of policemen, looking for the officer in charge. My usual cronies—my “uncle” Andre Rand, my officer friends Horscht and Gibbs—were absent.

  But I had allies on site. Ordinary Atlanta police detectives dress sharp, but these men and women dressed sharper, like stylish extras in a noir movie: dark suits, dark gloves, and dark fedoras—the Black Hats, Atlanta’s Magical Crimes Investigation Squad.

  That meant my friend McGough was here, but he was nowhere in sight. I recognized some of the Hats, but only vaguely, by sight; they remained nameless to me, like . . . well, like extras in a movie. But soon, another dark-suited—but hatless—detective saw me.

  “Ma’am, are you one of the tattooists at this studio?” he asked crisply, eyes running over my bare, inked arms. I nodded, shaking his hand with my best bone-crushing big butch biker grip, but the big man didn’t bat an eyebrow. “Sergeant James Parsons, APD Commercial Robbery.”

  “Dakota Frost,” I said, “Chair of the Magical Security Council.”

  “Oh, this is your shop,” he said, now raising the eyebrow. He cocked his head at the huge spinning magical symbol on the side of the building. “Figures. Officers following up a burglary report found that magic mark. The Black Hats are on site, but they’ve not given the all clear—”

  “I’m more worried about who was the ambulance,” I said, shifting uncomfortably.

  “The witness slash victim who called it in,” Parsons said, flipping out a small notebook and checking it, though I had the feeling this detailed man in his crisp suit had that name stored away precisely between those graying temples. “Your shop neighbor, Miss We
ston—”

  “Maude?” Maude Weston ran the Herbalist’s Attic. “Oh no. Is she all right?”

  “Miss Weston is fine, ma’am,” Parsons said reassuringly. “There was a small scuffle, but she’s fine. She reports that she came in early this morning and I think she may have surprised the perpetrators by changing her schedule. We did try to contact you, ma’am—”

  “Please, Sergeant, it’s Dakota, or Miss Frost,” I said, laughing. I found myself liking this calm, straightforward, detail-oriented man. “Sorry, I had to turn my cell off. I was visiting my old master, Arcturus, and he hates them.”

  “Your old master, eh?” cracked another voice. “That’s a man I’d like to meet.”

  “Hey there, you old toad,” I said, turning around with a smile.

  “Hey back at ya, you tattooed witch,” McGough responded. He was a short, tough little man with a trimmed goatee and slightly wilder hair, wrapped in a long duster two sizes too big for his frame and two shades too dark for Atlanta’s heat. “How the hell are ya?”

  I glanced up at the police tape, the officers pouring in and out of the Rogue Unicorn . . . and the crackling magical symbol twenty feet high, rotating on the south side of the building, clearly visible even in plain daylight. “I don’t know, you tell me.”

  “Ah, stupid question,” McGough said. “Well, what I can tell you is—”

  But then McGough ripped off his sunglasses and stared at me strangely.

  “Have you been bitten by a vampire?” he asked.

  “Not lately,” I laughed—or tried to laugh, though it was a bit forced. McGough damn well knew I’d been bitten by a vampire earlier that year—Calaphase, my lover, an hour or so before his death. At my tight expression, McGough cursed and shook his head.

  “Another foot in my mouth, sorry. Well, have you become a werekin, or . . .” McGough trailed off, staring at my eyes closely. I didn’t say anything, and after a moment, his mouth fell open. “Ah . . . Dakota Frost, Skindancer. You’re an initiate in the order now, aren’t you?”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Did you get that just from my eyes?”

  “From their aura,” he said, his own eyes tightening. “And you just confirmed it.”

  Cold facts clicked together in my brain—McGough now had enough information to track down Arcturus. He somehow knew I’d been initiated. Thanks to my big fat mouth, he knew I’d just been to Arcturus’s home. And even though I had turned my phone off while I was there, I hadn’t been smart enough to shut off my cell phone during the drive to his house. Hell, they could probably have tracked my movements with the GPS in my Prius.

  Knowing where I’d just been was enough to pinpoint where my initiation happened.

  Of course, Philip Davidson of the DEI knew where Arcturus was, by similar means—but unofficially, when he was helping me elude the police earlier this year. Now, the DEI hierarchy didn’t know everything Philip knew—but he kept warning me to be more careful.

  Thinking about what I had learned, and had let leak, made me nervous. Philip had earned my trust, and, so too had McGough—but McGough was a covert wizard from a competing order, with conflicting loyalties, who’d just guessed I had been initiated into a rival order’s secrets.

  Maybe Arcturus and the Grinder weren’t wrong to be paranoid.

  “Perhaps I did, perhaps I didn’t,” I said. “Can we discuss that later? Privately?”

  McGough’s voice lowered. “Sure,” he said curtly, then turned back to look at the Rogue.

  “Was there property taken, Detective?” Parsons said curtly.

  “Yes, sir,” McGough said. I realized that Parsons outranked him. McGough was huge in my world, the Head of the Magical Investigation Squad, but he was just a Detective. Commercial Robbery handled more crimes—and a Sergeant was a bigger fish. “I need more time, though.”

  “What’s the holdup?” Parsons said. “Are there or aren’t there rogue marks inside?”

  “It’s a magic tattooing shop, sir,” McGough said, and Parsons drew in a breath. “I’ve got the willies, but I don’t know what’s normal for their shop. With your permission, I’d like to do a walkthrough with Frost to verify what’s been taken. She’s quite the sensitive herself.”

  Parsons thought about that for all of two seconds. Then he nodded.

  “Miss Frost, I’ve heard good things about your participation in other investigations, especially after that graffiti scare,” he said, withdrawing a pair of latex gloves from an inner pocket and handing them to me. “Please make me willing to pass those good stories on.”

  I slipped them on. “You’re not coming?”

  “No. I’m not a magical investigator, and I wouldn’t know how not to screw a magical crime scene up,” he said, gesturing to the Rogue.

  I laughed again. “Well, I’m not really sure what I can do.”

  “You can sense whether or not something’s magicked,” McGough said sharply, “and know enough not to touch it. The Sergeant would be going in blind and uninformed.”

  Parsons took no offense, just nodded. “You all . . . do what you do, and I’ll control the scene until you give the all-clear. Don’t worry, I’m patient. I’m not paid by the hour.”

  I looked at the gloves. “I’m going to assemble my own evidence kit,” I said.

  “I’d prefer you call us first, but if that isn’t practical,” McGough said, raising the yellow tape so we could step under it, “you want gloves, booties, and baggies for evidence. Get yourself a Moleskine or voice recorder, and a point-and-shoot, though I know some good DSLRs—”

  Inside the yellow tape, we followed a second taped line that wove through the lot and up the stairs. Officers with cameras and rulers photographed a trail of half-formed footprints left in ink, and I grimaced at the thought of the magic lost. Criminologists with baggies and tweezers extracted dark fibers from a twisted nail on the wooded stairs. Dark-suited men from McGough’s unit roved the upper landing with digital dowsing rods that recorded video, angle, and distance.

  A Black Hat waved his hand over the doorframe of Maude’s shop, nodding significantly as we approached. McGough waved a wand plugged into a voltmeter over it, making the device yowl. I held my hand over it too, immediately feeling the mana—and its magical affinity.

  “Fire magic,” I said quietly. A ripple shuddered through my tattoos, a resonance echoing off the Dragon, some of the vines—anything, in fact, using firecap ink. I grimaced, shrugging my shoulders to settle the Dragon. “Using some quite expensive fuel, I’d guess.”

  McGough’s eyes bugged, as did the Hat’s. I grimaced. I had a long way to go if I was going to learn to keep secrets. But McGough and the Hat seemed to understand. We all looked at each other, silently, then the officer nodded . . . and McGough and I went in to the Rogue.

  As I rose up the steps, my first thought was that someone must be playing with a black light. Then I realized I could see more than I had before—traces of magic, woven in the stairs, curling out of the Herbalist’s Attic, climbing out of my own shop in faint tribal waves.

  I wasn’t just feeling magic anymore. I was seeing it.

  But once inside, the Rogue Unicorn wasn’t as damaged as I expected. The front office wasn’t trashed; the tattooing room was barely touched. At first, I was elated; then my heart fell as I saw more Black Hats farther in, following the taped line.

  I knelt, waving my hand over the ink-stained footsteps; feeling a tingle, I cursed, rose, and went deeper into the Rogue, following the ink-stained footprints back along the taped line, following it to, at least in my mind, the heart of the studio—my office.

  Inside, I stared at my shattered magical supply cabinet. On it, I could see tiny flecks of magic pigment, formerly invisible to my eyes. From it, wafts of magical effects oozed out like a slow-moving rainbow. Brightest of all was one central spo
t that burned like fire.

  The place where I’d kept my firecap ink.

  ———

  I had always known my inks were valuable; but until today I really had no idea.

  48. The MSC on the Case

  The fire ninjas now had a new source of liquid fire.

  I needed help. I had to tell McGough. I looked at the door of my office, wondering if I should close it. No, I didn’t know if they were done dusting for prints. Finally, I motioned McGough into the office and over to the front window, as far forward as we could get.

  “Guys, give us a minute,” McGough ordered, and a couple of technicians got up and walked out, tapping other Black Hats and officers on the way out. In moments, we were alone. Of course, my office could be bugged, but I had to get this party started. McGough said. “OK, spill it.”

  “I have reason to believe a magical component of enormous value was taken—”

  “They left your unicorn horn,” McGough said. “Tossed it looking through the case. Ended up under the desk. I had the boys bag it, but it may have been, ah, violated.” He studied my face, then pointed at the cabinet. “So I take it you mean what was on this stand.”

  “No,” I said, feeling a pang. “That was just a dragon’s tooth dagger.”

  “Jesus,” McGough said. “That has to be worth a quarter million dollars—”

  “Three hundred and fifty thousand,” I said. “Ignore it. They took it as a diversion. Seriously. That dagger sat for seventeen years in a shop window in San Francisco. Anyone could have taken it at any time. I think the shopkeeper was hoping it would walk for the insurance loss.”

  “And you’re shrugging that off,” McGough said grimly. “What did they get?”

  “A supply of liquid fire,” I said, mouth suddenly dry. “I didn’t even know I had it.”