Liquid Fire (37 page)

Afterward, we retired to the front porch . . . to enjoy the Atlanta summer.

On a typical night before Jewel’s arrival, I’d have practiced Taido or spinning in the front yard, while Cinnamon watched from behind the elaborate iron bars that made a “safety cage” out of half of the porch, struggling through her homework while I struggled through karate moves or dinged myself in the head with wood blocks. Then, on good nights, Cinnamon and I would curl up on the sofa together and work on her homework, or try to crack the code.

Now Jewel and I practiced together, her with glowy plastic LED balls, me with beans in stockings ($1.68 bulk at Whole Foods, $4.49 on sale at Target), spinning in the front yard while Cinnamon watched from her safety cage, cussing through an English assignment.

Jewel kept refusing to divulge the secrets of fire magic . . . but she
had
agreed to teach me the basics of fire
spinning
. Or perhaps “agree” was not the right word—after hearing more horror stories about me and my blocks of wood, she practically demanded it.

“Woow—
fahh
—wow,” Cinnamon said, lifting her head from her homework, staring at Jewel, who was whirling through move after complex move as I just kept hitting myself. Cinnamon sat up straight. “They stops in the
air
. How are you
doing
that?”

“Just practice,” Jewel said, whirling the LED balls around her in an elaborate flower, then seeming to make the poi stop, one above her head, the other at her feet. When she pulled them out of the pause, she brought them fluidly into a counter-rotating weave, her hands darting in and out of the intricate pattern the poi made in the air. It looked effortless, unless you were trying to do it yourself, in which case it looked impossible. “No magic, no liquid fire. Just practice.”

My
faux poi smacked me in the head again. I was having trouble “keeping my planes,” just holding the poi in a single plane in front, at the side, or behind. If they were going in the same direction, I could do it, but as soon as I tried to get them out of sync—on purpose, that is, yes, it’s a technique—my body wanted to start dancing, left and right, sway this way and that, my planes disintegrated, and, sure enough, I smacked myself on the head yet
again
.

“Thank God, no more blocks of wood for you,” Jewel said, giving me a crooked smile as she made making her glowing balls seem to freeze in the air again, then whipped them back into motion. “But don’t worry about hitting yourself. It’s OK. Even
I
hit myself—”

“Oh, I’d pay money to see that,” I said, shifting as my Dragon stirred on my back.

And then Jewel promptly klonked herself on the head.

I laughed, but that faded quickly as Jewel’s poi just tumbled down around her. Her eyes rarely followed her poi, but now she wasn’t even paying attention to them, just staring upward, upward at the top of my house . . . and yet somehow, straight into my eyes.

I whirled. Atop my house, thirty feet high, glowed the
projectia
of my Dragon.

“Get inside,” I said. Jewel didn’t move, so I reached out, grabbed her arm and pushed her toward the house.
Oh, God.
I’d done that without turning my head, seeing through the eyes of the Dragon as it looked down on us. We were linked. “Go to the safe room, both of you!”

Jewel bolted for the porch. Cinnamon reached out through the bars of the safety cage, lifted the were-safe latch, opened the gate, and pulled Jewel inside. Then they ran down the narrow stairs into the safe room Cinnamon used when she changed.

The Dragon sat atop the house, much as it had at Borders; only this time, it picked its perch with care, shifting its weight without cracking my roof. It stared down at me with glowing, sage eyes resting deep in its half-lion, half-lizard head; staring not just at me, but also at my new Dragon tattoo, which had frozen on my body, like a cat avoiding a larger challenger.

I stood transfixed, uncertain as to what to do.

“
The egg is hatching,
” the Dragon said. “
Beware.
”

With one flap of its wings, it lifted off the roof, then shimmered and evaporated.

I stood there, stunned for a moment. Then I cursed out loud.

“Oh, great!” I shouted. “Cryptic fucking phantom! Say what you mean!
‘BeewAAAare!’ ”
I said, wiggling my fingers. “Beware who, or what, for what reason? I inked you as an icon of wisdom, not a symbol of confusion! At least give me the fucking Ides of March!”

Like a gopher, Cinnamon poked her head over the rail of the porch. “What was that?”

“My Dragon, honey,” I said. “My old tattoo, just like we saw in Palo Alto.”

Now Jewel poked her head up. Clearly, they hadn’t run down the stairs at all. “Is it gone?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry to scare you—I don’t think it was a threat, but yeah, it’s gone.”

“Why were you shouting?” Jewel said. “Did . . . did it have something to say to you?”

“Couldn’t you hear it? No?” I asked—then glared at her. I shifted, scratching over my shoulder as my new tattoo abruptly began moving on my back. “Damn it! Settle down, you itchy ink! But I’ll bet you know
exactly
what it had to say, don’t you, Fireweaver?”

Jewel bit her lip. “Hatchsign?”

I nodded grimly. “If that’s what you fireweavers call it,” I said. “I had to learn that from the vampires, Jewel. From the vampires! They made me look like an idiot.”

“I’m sorry,” Jewel said.

“And another thing,” I said. “The timing—I’m
not
fooled. You claimed you were trying to summon a dragon, and then
my
Dragon appears—where you and I have been together! Here, Palo Alto, even the Golden Gate Bridge when we were both there! Tell me that’s coincidence—”

“I’m sorry,” Jewel said. “I swore an oath! I can’t tell you!”

“
Fine,
” I said, pulling out my cell phone and thumbing through the contacts. This one I didn’t have on speed dial . . . but maybe that would have to change. “No wonder you’re afraid of me adding rules to magic. Yours are a straitjacket.”

“Who are you calling?” Jewel asked.

“Someone I should have called the moment we saw that tattoo at Borders,” I said. How the hell had my tattoo resurrected itself? It shouldn’t have lasted an hour, much less nine, no,
ten
months now! Surprisingly, the phone picked up on the third ring. “Hello, Zinaga, it’s Dakota.”

“Is that your old master?” Jewel asked.

“What? No!” I said; Zinaga, my former fellow apprentice, laughed on the line.

Then a gruff male voice came onto the phone. “What the hell do you want, Frost?”

———

“Hello, Arcturus,” I said grimly. “Time to throw myself at your feet again.”

39. The Tin-Pot Kingdom

Dozens of miles to the east of Atlanta, and maybe half that south of Stone Mountain, deep in a warren of sharp hills and deep valleys where few roads go and fewer phones get more than one bar, lies Blood Rock, Georgia—a tiny hamlet of rednecks and recluses living in the shadow of a stadium-sized boulder that runs red with Georgia clay each time it rains.

If you haven’t lived in the South—I mean, really
lived
in the
South
—you might think I’m picking on the residents by calling them rednecks. I’m not. They’ll tell you that themselves—or, as the owner of the Grist Mill Café once said, “You work for a living, in the sun on a car, or out in a field, you get a red neck too, you pasty city girl!”

But when I say recluse—well, this time, I mean it.

Blood Rock is
not
Atlanta—it’s the backwoods. They call Atlanta the City in the Forest because green trees seem to explode out of every square inch of ground we haven’t covered with concrete—but out near Stone Mountain, the trees grow taller, leaner.

Here, Sherman never marched; here, progress never bulldozed old growth to the ground. Off the main highways, the trees loom over the roads, long trunks rising sinuously like slender sentinels, and the rare houses stare at you through oddly paired windows, like eyes.

The last time I’d been here, I’d driven the windy roads to the top of Blood Rock proper, seeking an audience at the Stone Rose Sanctuary, the stronghold of Nyissa’s vampire clan, the House Beyond Sleep. But that was the new Blood Rock; today, I headed deep into Old Town.

Down two miles of menacing dirt roads, farther down a quarter mile of perilously bumpy driveway, and behind trees leaning ominously like crossed spears, hid the home of Arcturus, my former tattooing mentor. When my Prius rattled to a stop at the end of the drive, the house proper was still obscured by magnolias and pines. Only the front porch was visible, making Arcturus’s spacious split level seem smaller than it really was. Unimposing, but not quite innocuous; he deliberately let the grounds and façade run down, to give it that flavor of menace that implied it was possibly guarded by a redneck or recluse with a shotgun.

Arcturus, of course, was far more dangerous than either.

On the porch he sat, squat as a fireplug, skin like weathered wood, hair like Einstein—Arturo Carlos Rodriguez de la Turin, AKA Master Skindancer Arcturus. Where my tats are an exercise in skill and restraint, his are bold, rough designs with the raw power of folk art. That isn’t just a difference in skill; I’m an artist, and ink to create beauty; Arcturus is an engineer, and inks to create power. The broad, thick lines of his tats can carry a lot of mana, and his designs have the magical logic to back up their brashness. As egotistical as I am about my art, I have no illusions—Arcturus has the harder nose, the willingness to ink something that doesn’t look pretty if it gets the job done—so he gets more done.

As I got out of the car, Arcturus stood, scowling; beside him, Zinaga, his apprentice, leaned back off the wall and prepared to face me. Her hands kept clenching and unclenching, and as she did so, little sparkles shimmered up through the elaborate white lines inked upon her dark olive skin. Zinaga was an expert in light magic, every bit my equal in her area of expertise—and because of her choice to specialize, a complete zero in Arcturus’s eyes. She hated the very air I breathed. I tried my best not to return it; she didn’t deserve the treatment she got.

“Arcturus,” I said, nodding to him. “Zinaga.”

“It pisses me off it takes a fucking catastrophe to get you back here,” Arcturus said.

I frowned. Surprisingly, that hurt. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have no excuse.”

“Typical, Frost,” Zinaga said, folding her arms, gleaming white lines rippling across her arms in a beautiful moiré pattern. She was skilled, artistic, athletic, and had great skin—all the makings of a good skindancer. “The studio hain’t got a revolving door.”

“I know,” I said. “But the Magical Security Council isn’t just a game, either.”

“So skindancing is a game?” she asked, spreading her arms. “Frost, this is an
art
—”

“Ease down,” Arcturus snapped. “Look at her ink. Clearly she cares about her art—”

“And she doesn’t?” I said. “Come off it. Give her some credit. She stayed, I went—”

Zinaga hissed, turned, and walked inside.

“Frost, show sense,” Arcturus said. “Being nice to her is worse than being a dick.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “Because I mean it, and if I keep it up, one day she’ll get it.”

Arcturus rubbed his face. “All right, I suppose I needed to hear that. I needed to go into this with no illusions that you’re actually here to learn something—”

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t be an ass. I know I’ve treated you like dirt, I know I should muddle through on my own, but I thought you might be interested that my masterwork has survived over half a year detached from my body. So . . . you wanna help me figure out how, or not?”

Arcturus stopped rubbing his face, drew his hands down, and finally smiled. “All right, Frost,” he said. “Come on in.”

I gave the whole story, everything I thought was possibly relevant: the five sightings of my masterwork in San Jose and the one in Atlanta, Jewel’s superstitions and the vampires’ theories, the strange link I seemed to have with the tattoo, the oddly suspicious timing of the sightings when Jewel and I were together—even the unexpected movement I was getting off my new dragon tattoo—and the weird vibes that I got whenever it became active.

“It’s,” I said, struggling for words, “almost like it’s . . .
talking
to me—”

“Dakota, I don’t want to disturb you, or insult you,” Arcturus said carefully, rubbing his hands together, “but there is a distinct possibility you’re talking to
yourself
. You yourself said that the tattoo gets energized when you’re enraged, or aroused—”

“Hey,” I said, my cheeks reddening. “I never said—”

“I can read between the lines,” Arcturus said. “But you also said that the tattoo quieted when you wanted it to. That sounds less like a separate personality rather than an extension of your own. That new tattoo of yours is . . . a complex design—”

“It’s fucking insane, is what it is,” Zinaga said, shaking her head at me in something between admiration and disgust. “I can’t believe you inked something that complex—I mean, I know you got the chops to ink it, Frost, I just think you were reckless to ink that nest—”

“I had the design extensively vetted,” I said evenly. “Not just by Jinx, but by the Marquis—and that’s after I double-checked all the Euler sums myself—”

“See what I was saying,” Zinaga said to Arcturus. “That’s more than ego—”

“Let it go.” Arcturus shook his head. “The point is, this new design may have unforeseen features. All tattoos absorb your mystical intent; they wouldn’t work otherwise. But this one is so complex . . . you might be getting intent echoes. Reflections of your own thoughts—”