Liquid Fire (18 page)

“Dakota, I’m glad to hear you’re interested,” she said—and then her mouth quirked up. “If you want to get started on firespinning, that’s great. But fire
magic
isn’t just firespinning. It can be quite dangerous. Some of the secrets aren’t for the uninitiated.”

“Secrets for the initiated?” I said, shaking my head. There was a reason magical tattooists had a newsletter—we progressed by sharing knowledge. “Are those secrets really that important? Your life could be at risk here. Other people are definitely putting their lives at risk—”

“Because I shared secrets,” Jewel said. “You heard Daniel back at Oakland. He was as upset about who was seeing my performances as he was about what I was doing. I’m in enough trouble already for doing the things I’m supposedly allowed to do—”

“You’re worried about being in trouble?” I asked. “
Seriously?
I thought you were on the vanguard here, what with being willing to die to put on a public performance—”

“Whoa!” Jewel said, raising her hands in a fluid wave that did not . . .
quite
dislodge her bathrobe, dang it. “Who said anything about dying? I was willing to get arrested to thumb my nose at ‘the man,’ that’s it. Before yesterday, no one had even threatened me, not seriously.”

“I thought Daniel and you had history—”

“We
started
on the same side,” Jewel said. She smirked at my roving eye, jerked her robe tight again—then put her fingers in scare quotes. “ ‘It’s a native Hawai`ian thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ Seriously, though, the Americans tried to kick us off our sacred land—”

“Wasn’t that a long time ago?” I said quietly.

“Yes, no, I mean, recently,” Jewel said, hands moving in a fluid corkscrew. “A dustup with Fish and Wildlife over a sacred site and a national park boundary. Daniel wanted to fight—I think that’s how he recruited the black pajama brigade—but I took it to court. And ‘won.’ ”

She’d again put her hands up in scare quotes, then shook her head.

“We might as well have let them keep it—by the time we won, they’d ruined it,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe Daniel was right. Now he’s bitter. He’s always talked a tough game, but I never thought he’d go through with actual violence—and it scares the hell out of me.”

“Fair enough. Being threatened . . . is pretty fucking scary the first time.” I frowned. “Look, Jewel . . . Daniel’s already hit you twice without achieving his objective, so he may try again. Vickman and I think you should hop on a plane back to Hawaii, as soon as you can.”

“You think I should turn tail and run,” she said.

“I think . . . you should consider it,” I said. “I mean, I’d fight for the right to tattoo, in theory—but in practice, you have to pick your battles. Is this battle worth your life? Daniel’s willing to fight over this, and I’m still not precisely sure what he’s fighting for.”

“It’s . . . complicated,” Jewel said.

“Can you uncomplicate it for me?” I asked, frustrated. “I’m not trying to put you to the third degree—you’ve been through a lot. But Daniel’s bad news. If we want to stop him, we need to know what he wants—and you’ve been really cagey. You claim that symbol is a curse—”

“It
is
a curse,” Jewel said defensively.

“OK, you think it’s a curse—but what if you’re wrong?” I asked, and her brow furrowed. “What if it’s a counterspell? You
also
told me you’re traveling the world trying to summon a dragon. That
is
the secret Daniel doesn’t want you performing in public, isn’t it? The spell that summons a dragon? I can see why that’s knowledge you’d
both
want to hide. And if that’s what you’re doing in your performances, Daniel will
never
stop trying to stop you—”

“I-was-
just
-making-art-with-fire,” Jewel said. “That’s my life. So I use magic—”

“Magic so resonant with my dragon tattoo that it almost activated it at the Crucible? That it almost burst off my back in Union Square?” I said. “Jewel, you’re either trying to summon a dragon . . . or your magic is specifically designed to get my personal attention.”

Jewel’s mouth quirked.

“I’d love to get your personal attention,” she said, almost immediately blushing, “but you’re being a bit arrogant. I designed those performance spells long before I met you, and . . . if,
if
I was summoning a dragon, I can’t see why it would activate a dragon tattoo—”

“And yet it did,” I said. “Twice. But the design of the spell is only half the magic—what it does is based on intent. So, if I was on your mind when you cast that spell at the Crucible, that might explain the mystery of why my dragon tattoo became so . . . intimate with its caress.”

I smiled wickedly at her, and the flush in her cheeks became like flame.
Called it.

“That . . . sure is a mystery,” she stammered, adjusting the bathrobe again. “But before I give away all our secrets, let me win the battle to show them in public first? I don’t really want to hide anything from you, Dakota . . . but I don’t want to turn the allies I have against me.”

I scowled, then nodded.

“You’re so cute when you pout,” Jewel said. “I love the shape of your mouth.”

“Ready to turn in yet?” Nyissa hissed,
right
over Jewel’s shoulder.

“Aaa!” Jewel said, jerking aside. She drew a breath, looking at that trim expanse of pearly white flesh between the dark blue stripes of Nyissa’s dress, then quailed as her eyes went up to that coldly perfect face floating in the rain of violet hair. “Ah . . . I . . .”

“I,” Nyissa croaked, inspecting the metal poker she carried as her personal intimidation accessory, “have been assigned as your guard, Jewel. We share a connected suite, and while you sleep, I will sit where I can see both doors to your room.” She stared straight at me, glaring without glaring; I could swear she was
jealous
. “I will make sure
everyone
stays safe.”

“Oh,” Jewel said, putting her hand to her throat. I have to admit, I’d been scared myself by that little pop-out-of-nowhere trick, and I’d
known
that Nyissa was in the connecting room because I’d asked her to stay there. Jewel said, “But . . . don’t you need to sleep?”

“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.”