Liquid Fire (39 page)

“So what should I be asking?” Jewel said, smiling.

“For a tattoo studio? Clean, and licensed, for starters,” I said, pointing at the Rogue Unicorn’s business license on the wall, and beneath the licenses the tattooists themselves needed to ink magic in Georgia. “And for a magical tattooist? Knows a magic circle and how to use it.”

“I’d think,” Jewel said, “that knowing the magic would be more important—”

“
Using
a magic tattoo,” I said, “is a lot like casting a spell. It needs mana, a well-formed intention, and some word or gesture as a trigger.
Inking
a magic tattoo, on the other hand, is just specialized tattooing. What you really want is for your inker to have a good graphomancer.”

“And you have a good graphomancer?” Jewel asked, mouth quirking in a wry smile. “Let me guess, the best?”

I smirked back. I didn’t just catch the dig; I caught that she’d gone from asking about tattooists in general to me in particular. “Absolutely,” I said. “Jinx.”

“The blind Goth girl?” Jewel said. “I knew she was a graphomancer, but
your
graphomancer? Vetting
artwork?
Really?
”

“She’s only partially blind,” I said, and sat down on our overstuffed couch, stretching my long arms out over its back. Jewel now had a choice—she could keep standing, she could sit in the chair . . . or she could sit next to me. “And she has the best software in the business.”

“Well . . . the best do use the best,” Jewel said, surveying the gallery again; then, giving me a quick glance over her shoulder and a glimpse of a wry smile, she clutched her frilly bag and sat down next to me. My arm fell on her shoulder. “Oh, she thinks she’s soooo smooooth.”

“Sometimes,” I said, giving her a brief squeeze.

Then she surprised me by leaning against me, head resting on my shoulder. I got a tingle when her warm curves pressed against me, and then another when her slightly damp copper ringlets spread out over the exposed skin of my arm.

“You are
so
arrogant,” Jewel said happily. “What tattoo should I get?”

I looked at the flash on the wall, started reflecting on the designs in my book. But what a tattooist has done in the past should never be the starting point of a design; the
client
is the starting point. So I thought of Jewel, what she liked . . . and what I could do.

“An octopus,” I said suddenly, and Jewel drew a breath. I ran my hand over her bag—the fringes of the floppy purse were really tentacles reaching out from an octopus design. “A firespinning octopus, whose limbs move when you move, juggling balls of flame.”

“Oh, Dakota,” Jewel said, hand going to her breast. “That would be
perfect
. Where?”

“I, ah,” I began, unexpectedly embarrassed. “I’d . . . I’d need to see, uh—”

“Would you need to see me naked?” Jewel asked, grinning at me.

I swallowed. “Only if you were certain you wanted it someplace you could hide.”

“Never,” she said, standing and twirling. “Or did you just need to see me turn around?”

“Yes, I—” I stammered . . . then stared at her, caught the sparkle in her eyes, the open invitation. I remembered her words about my power. “Take your top off,” I said, my voice now sure, more commanding. “Leave the bra, since you don’t want to hide the tattoo.”

Jewel swallowed, then unbuttoned her jacket, revealing that oh-so-interesting hemp rope bikini—and those flame designs on her back, not tattoos but something else, an inked scarification process I hadn’t seen. Inwardly I shuddered—cutting is
not
my thing.

“Like what you see?” Jewel said, finishing another pirouette.

I did. Jewel’s curves, as always, were awesome—rippled shoulders, strengthened by spinning; the soft roundness of her breasts, curving under the hemp; the graceful belly and hips beneath them. Delicious—but my options for the tattoo were limited. “Drop the pants.”

Jewel flushed, glancing around the waiting room at the door, at the reception desk, eyes widening like a frightened little doe. I stared at her, at that hemp bikini—it was shibari, rope bondage, as much a sign of BDSM as was my collar. Whose submissive was
she?

“Do it,” I said, voice growing slightly more commanding. Inside, I felt awkward. I might be forward, but I’m not actively butch, and I’ve never taken a dominant role in a relationship. Not once. But I wasn’t asking her to do anything I hadn’t asked of other clients. “I need to see.”

Jewel nodded her head, dropped her eyes—and pulled the drawstring on her harem pants, and they fluttered to the floor. She stood there, half covering herself, half not, embarrassed. I stood up and walked around her, looking at the designs on her legs. They disturbed me.

“I really wasn’t kidding about my need to see,” I said quietly, kneeling beside her. The flame design was elegant, but the ridges of flesh were almost certainly made by a cutting procedure and not a brand. “I had hoped to use the outside of a thigh, but . . . may I?”

“Oh, please,” Jewel said, eyes half closed, drawing a breath.

But as much as I wanted to touch her, that wasn’t what I was after. I held my hand carefully over the skin of her thighs, tracing the design, flexing my skin to generate mana and feeling the shimmering response from some pigment buried beneath the design.

“Tickles,” Jewel said, opening her eyes. “Oh, my God. You’re not even touching me.”

“These are magically active,” I said, standing, waving my hands over her thighs, her back, part of her forearms. I stared at the patterns, at first distracted by the curves of the canvas, then increasingly intrigued by their logic, the feel of their pigments. “Ah. Fire retardant?”

“Damn, you are good,” Jewel breathed, watching my hands move. “That’s exactly it.”

“Clever. But they’re fixed in place by the scars. They would interact badly with magical tattoos, which need to move. I’m afraid for the design I have in mind we’re limited to your upper chest, over your collarbones here . . . or I hate to recommend it, a tramp stamp.”

“Oh, she wants to stamp me,” Jewel said, smirking once again, finally coming out of her submissive haze. She glanced at the door to the walkway. “As delicious as this is, I’m worried about the dinging of that bell and shocked
o-mi-gods
. May I at least put my pants back on?”

I reached down and grabbed her harem pants, spreading them open. Jewel blinked at me, eyes doe-wide again; then she stepped into the pants delicately, first one foot, then the other. I stood, drawing the pants up her legs, then tying the drawstring about her waist.

“We do have a height difference,” she said; beneath that mass of copper hair, I could tell she was staring dead center on my chest level as I finished the knot. She looked up, those heavy ringlets falling back, the slightest whiff of patchouli drifting up. “So . . . what do you think?”

I reached in to my pocket and pulled out a sharpie. “I’m thinking . . . here—”

“As much as I want you to do that,” she said, seizing my hand with both of hers before the ink could touch her flesh, “it would knock my feet out from under me. On paper first?”

“All right,” I said, clasping my other hand over hers. Her hands were trembling, but her eyes held nothing but admiration. “On paper first, especially given your existing marks. I want to get the design vetted by Jinx anyway; she’s the engineer to my architect. Come into my office?”

The Rogue Unicorn shares the second story of the Make-A-Wish building with the Herbalist’s Attic, a magic supply shop. The stairs up are behind the building, so the “back” of the studio is streetside. That’s where I hold the primo spot—the corner office of the Rogue.

I bumped my computer on, tossed my lanky body into my comfy-chic Herman Miller chair in the crook of my L-shaped glass desk, and spun around, smiling up at Jewel, framed from behind by broad windows overlooking Little Five Points, Atlanta’s alternative culture mecca.

I was proud of my little throne room overlooking the Vortex restaurant and its cartoon skull; the view looked a heck of a lot better since, in a moment of fiscal foolishness after winning the Valentine Challenge, I sprang for some workmen to re-open the bricked-up side window.

But for once, Jewel had no eye for me, nor even for the colorful sights of L5P beyond. Her back was turned, but I could see, reflected in the glass cabinet atop my butcher’s block, her mouth hanging open as she stared into the tall display case.

At first, I thought my pretty little dragon junkie was staring at my gift from Lord Kitana—the dragon’s tooth dagger, on prominent display high in the case. I was about to give her the spiel when I realized her eyes were aimed lower, at a long glass tube . . . holding a white, spiral horn.

“Oh . . . my . . . God,” Jewel said. “Is that . . .”

“Oh, I’m just a big softie,” I said, standing up with a grin. I unlocked the cabinet, slipped on blue nitrile gloves (reusable, if you autoclave ’em) and reached for the latch with the side of my thumb. Jewel’s hand rose automatically, toward my precious magical supplies.

“Hey,” I said, and she withdrew her hand. “No touching. Many of those are clan inks; I’m not supposed to even let the other tattooists use them. And
that
is the real deal. Not just naturally shed, but vestal gathered—and I know you too well to think you’re a virgin.”

“Oh, really?” Jewel said, pressing a hand to her breast. “I’ve never been with a guy.”

I stared at her for a moment, stunned speechless.

“You did
not
just say that,” I said. “For the record, lesbian sex is not sloppy seconds. It
counts
, both in practice, and for the purposes of magical virginity—”

“Of course lesbian sex ‘counts.’ I didn’t mean—” Jewel began, then shook her head. “But if there’s no, uh, penetration,
real
penetration, then I don’t understand why it
,
uh, ‘counts’ as sex for the purposes of
magical
virginity—”

“Oh, what kind of lesbian magician are you?” I asked, opening the cabinet, carefully withdrawing the engraved glass tube with its long horn, holding it up at her eye level. “But, for the record . . . you lose
magical
virginity through interpenetrating auras.”

Her eyes went even wider as she inspected the long, gleaming, spiral horn. This one was recently shed, just weeks old, and looked unreal—a shimmering spiral, translucent and gossamer, glittering silver threads woven through it picking up so much light it looked like it was glowing.

Of course, with horn this new, maybe it was.

I pulled out the needle case the horn had been resting on—a narrow mahogany box that held the remnants of my last horn and the needles I’d made from it. I set the case on my glass desk, and gently put the horn cylinder on it. Then I closed the shades and killed the lights.

The horn gleamed in the dark, an icicle of light, sparkling as echoes of sunlight rippled through the slow threads woven through the horn. It was so beautiful, even I gasped, but Jewel was no longer looking—her head had been turned by the magical pigments in my case.

In the magic light of the horn, the glass case glowed to life, shimmering colors shifting from vial to vial as slow echoes of magically filtered sunlight resonated with first one kind of pigment, then another, a dozen principal colors and thirty mix-in pigments: prismatic gold, newts-eye green, firecap red, butterfly blue, dandelion yellow, coals-eye black. In the slow kaleidoscope of the unicorn horn, the case became a Technicolor display of fireflies.

I stood behind Jewel, one hand on her shoulder. Eventually, Jewel turned her head.

“Magic tattooing is a little more . . . complicated than fire magic, isn’t it?”

I shrugged. Between banging my head, stumbling through forms of power, and watching all Jewel could do, magic fire seemed complicated enough. But Jewel swallowed, turned away—then saw the horn, and clapped her beautiful, delicate hands to her face with a squeal of glee.

“Oh my God!” she said. “Oh my God! It’s glowing! It’s really glowing!”

“That it is,” I said, leaning over her as she leaned over it. It sat in rings of etched glass that protected it from stray mana and, well, “spirits,” if you believe in such things. After seeing that dragon, I was less of a skeptic. “I’ll make the needles for your tattoo from it.”

“Does . . . does every tattoo use a brand new needle? For health or something?”

“Every time,” I said. “For health reasons, of course, but for the art too, and most of all for the magic. You don’t want some scratcher muddling your hide with a worn-out needle filled with stray mana traces it picked up from half a dozen other pigments.”

Jewel leaned closer to the horn, still not touching it. “You don’t like scratchers, do you?”

“I love my work,” I said, standing, oddly irritated. I sat down on the edge of the butcher’s block, the cabinet to my back. “No, that’s not it. I care about the people getting tattoos. They’re permanent marks. Every time you pick up the needle, you have to give it your A game.”

Jewel turned around. She stared up at me, an unreadable expression on her face. Then she turned around, carefully picked up the edges of the mahogany box without touching the horn atop it, and turned around, proffering it to me. I took it and locked it back in the cabinet.

When the cabinet clicked, her arms wrapped around me. She squeezed me, just for an instant, then spun me round, laced one hand in my deathhawk, and pulled me down to her.

———

Her wet lips touched mine, I smelled patchouli, and my mind dissolved into bliss.