Liquid Fire (60 page)

“Only because you say we do. And I say we don’t, not even if you were the herald,” he said. “Not even if you managed to save Pele after I’d given up hope. You took an enormous risk, Frost. Millions of people could have died. We got lucky. Extremely lucky.”

I looked back at him. “Look me in the eye and tell me you wanted to save her.”

“I did not
want
to murder the god of my ancestors,” Daniel said evenly. “Nor did I have any intention of enslaving one. All I wanted to do was what I thought I had to in order to prevent a disaster—and to keep that little dictator from creating her own personal Godzilla!”

I looked him in the eyes. His lips pursed.

“All right, I admit it,” he said. “I wanted to take the opportunity to create more of the fuel I use to spin magic fire. But that was always secondary. If I
just
wanted fuel, Jewel would have given it freely. There would be some bowing and scraping involved—”

“And you’re a big enough man to do that?” I asked, and Daniel’s eyes tightened. The
text
of my message never mentioned an exchange . . . but the three glyphs at the center of the message
could
be read as
trade liquid fire
. “To let someone else control the source?”

Daniel thought a moment. “Yes, I am,” he said. “But . . . look, Frost. I
know
Jewel. You may have dated her, but you really don’t know her. Her head is full of bad wires. If she had enslaved Pele . . . she’d have used her to burn all the interlopers off the island.”

I sighed.

“That she would have,” I said quietly. “All right, Daniel. Let’s get to what we’re here for.”

“Your dagger, and your inks,” Daniel said. He stared at me. “I take it you know it’s not just
a
dagger. It’s a dragon’s tooth dagger, and can be used in the spell to crack a dragon’s egg—if you have liquid fire. Which I learned is in your firecap ink, thanks to Jewel—”

“You had to have a plant in Jewel’s camp,” I said, and Daniel smiled at me, curious. “You
had
to. You took my inks to keep them from Jewel, but only she knew about them. Only she, or someone she told—”

“Jewel is never careful,” Daniel said. “Always spilling the beans to Molokii in sign language when she thinks no one’s looking. But while it’s easy to hide signing from someone looking over your shoulder, it’s harder if your foe has a telephoto lens.”

“So, plain old-fashioned snooping. You found out what I let them say under my nose, to give them privacy,” I said, grimacing. “I need to learn to be more nosy. One surreptitious glance at the right time could have ended this months ago.”

“What’s the phrase?” Daniel said, leaning back against the rail. “Waters under?”

“Something like that,” I said. “We are on a bridge.”

“Look, if you know what that dagger can do . . . you have to know I can’t just give it to you.” I glanced at him a for moment, then he shrugged. “Ah . . . I guess we already know what you’d do if a dragon was hatching, don’t we, Frost?”

“Proof by demonstration,” I said. “My ink and dagger, Daniel.”

“You know what the dagger can do. You have to know what it’s worth. We have other magical weapons we could use, of course, but we won’t readily give them up. When you told me to give them to you, you had to know what I would consider proper payment.”

“It’s not payment,” I said, hands clasped on the rail. “You stole them.”

“We’re not thieves,” Daniel snapped. “Jewel needed liquid fire and mystical weapons to carry out her spell; I tried to keep her from getting any of that, for all the good it did me. When we saw the dagger
with
the inks, naturally we had to take both—”

“You know, the word we use for taking someone else’s property,” I said, “is stealing—”

“Fine, we stole it,” Daniel said. “Fair or not, did you come prepared to trade?”

“Yes,” I said, glancing over at him. “Yes, I did.”

———

“So you
do
have liquid fire,” Daniel said, eyes burning. “What if I just took it?”

66. Stewards of the Secret Flame

I tensed, not moving. Daniel was only a few feet away, in the so-called “kill zone” where you could theoretically deliver a blow before your opponent could retaliate. Not that I wasn’t prepared for that, but . . . now was the point where Daniel would show his true colors.

“That doesn’t sound like much of a trade,” I said cautiously.

“It sounds like you haven’t thought this through,” he said. “If I took it from you—”

“How?” I asked, staring out over the water. “If you make this a confrontation, I’ll throw you over the side—or just push you out into traffic. I may not have the spirit of a dragon on my back anymore, but I have an enormous magical arsenal and I’m an expert martial artist.”

Daniel stiffened. “What if I told you the cute couple with the camera—”

“—and the schoolgirls are your plants, ready to pull a gun out of the fake baby stroller?” I said, smirking. “What if I told you I’m willing to jump and pull you with me? I can make a pretty decent parachute out of these vines. You, on the other hand, will hit the water like cement.”

“You’re far from home,” he said, “and this is a dangerous town—”

“Do you know how I got that dagger? One of the vampire lords of San Francisco gave it to me for services rendered,” I said, turning toward him, pushing off the rail so I towered over him. “That service was defending Jewel from you.”

“Maybe so,” Daniel said, “but the vamps can’t come out in the day.”

“But the fae can,” the girl with the lollipop said. The “Japanese” schoolgirls, now clearly just young Hawaiian college students, backed up rapidly from the little fae called Sidhain as she flicked her hair, the glamour coming off, her locks turning white—and her eyes glittering blue.

“Jesus,” Daniel said, backing up. “We don’t want trouble with the fae—”

I extended my hand. “Then please give me my dagger and inks.”

“There’s still the matter of trade,” Daniel said stubbornly.

“No, there’s not,” I said. “They’re mine, and I want them back. You may have a claim against Jewel, but that’s a completely different conversation. I want each of us to walk away from this conversation with what each of us is owed. Now, please, give them to me.”

Daniel hesitated, then pulled out a long, narrow case.

“These inks are the signature of your clan . . . so you are their rightful custodian.”

I took the case carefully, feeling no mana, getting no signs that it was booby-trapped. Inside, my dragon’s tooth dagger rested on blue velvet, with my bottles of ink on either side in small compartments. Sidhain peered in, nodded, then smiled. I closed the case.

“You had a fancy box made?” I asked.

“Consider it icing on the olive branch,” Daniel said. “Satisfied?”

“For now,” I said, smiling wryly. “I understand that Jewel has been deposed.”

“I—” Daniel began, a bit off-put. “Jewel has been . . . removed from office,” Daniel said, uneasily staring at the fae girl. “She’s no longer the leader of the Order, not while she’s in jail and unable to fulfill her ceremonial responsibilities. We’ve appointed a regent—”

“And that regent is you?” I said.

“Yes,” Daniel said. “Not that I wanted it, not that you’d believe it—”

“So you, Fire Prince Daniel Hill, would be the rightful custodian of this.”

I withdrew a tiny steel cylinder from my other jacket pocket. I unscrewed its tiny steel top and slowly lifted it, exposing an inner glass cylinder glowing with golden light. Both Daniel and Sidhain gasped. Then I closed the cylinder and slipped it back inside my coat.

“Jesus, Frost! You did have it on you,” Daniel said angrily. He stepped up to me, but spoke quietly, urgently. “Frost, you can’t go waltzing around with that shit! What if you got mugged? Hit by a car? What if I was a bad guy and had tried to take it from you?”

“You’re not a bad guy, then?” I asked. “Now you know . . . you won’t try?”

Daniel glanced at Sidhain, then shook his head. “Not even if you didn’t have her. We’re not thieves or muggers. After Jewel went kazoo, I recruited every fireweaver I could to fight her. You know what we called ourselves? The Fire Safety Squad. We’re not the bad guys here—”

“And you say that, with a straight face, after you attacked Union Square?”

“Damn it, Frost, you know what we were trying to stop!” Daniel said. “What do you think would have happened if Jewel had called down hatchsign in Union Square, instead of it being bottled up on your back? Everything we’ve done was for the greater good—”

“So you’re claiming that, all along, you were just trying to stop the bad guys?” I asked. I had already figured as much when Jewel showed her true colors at Haleakala, but I wanted to hear it from him. “So your black pajama squad . . . is actually a police organization?”

“No, I—” Daniel began, then shook his head. “In a way . . . I guess it is.”

“Maybe we aren’t so different after all,” I said. “Look, I can’t just hand a canister of liquid fire over to you on a bridge like we’re in a bad spy movie. You know what I’d do with it, by demonstration, but I don’t know you. We have to build up trust before that happens.”

“Before it happens?” Daniel said, looking at me strangely. “You mean—”

“I mean, ultimately . . . I want the Fireweavers’ Order to have the liquid fire.”

“We want it,” Daniel said immediately, “but . . . why even think of giving it to us?”

“Because it’s yours—Jewel’s, really. Forget for a moment her crazy Hawaiian nativist methods—she knew Pele was hatching, and she knew that could be a world-changing disaster. Everything she did was designed to prevent a dragon’s death—or a human catastrophe.”

“She should have just let me crack that egg and harvest it,” Daniel said.

“Maybe,” I said, “and maybe she was a nut-job wannabe dictator—but her plan worked. A dragon was saved. Human life was preserved. And we got a fresh supply of liquid fire. It’s the product of her spell, and she deserves it—”

“She deserves,” Daniel said hotly, “to go to jail—”

“And she’s there now,” I said. “And her faction of the Order has a lot to answer for. But unless we do something, the government will step up and confiscate the liquid fire—and I’d rather a bunch of Edgeworlders get it than let the government use it for godknowswhat.”

Daniel grimaced.

“You don’t know the trouble you’re in,” I said. “The whole magical world knows your Order performed that spell. And the ones who understand the spell will realize that when Pele hatched, you almost certainly had to make, or harvest, liquid fire from it—”

“You have to know that, if we do get any, we’ll never give it up,” Daniel said.

“There’s not knowing trouble, and then there’s asking for trouble,” I said. “A whole host of people will come for it. Yes, it’s yours, and you shouldn’t have to give up your stuff to a robber, but in the end you just want to spin fire. But they don’t want to die.

“I’ve met a lot of ancient wizards over the last few months,” I said. “A lot of them are really wise, or sweet, or just plain quirky. But I know how nasty they can get. There’s every chance the wizard that tried to murder me wanted the firecap ink in my tattoos.”

“I’ve heard of the spell,” Daniel said tightly. “A wizard doesn’t even need the ink to give himself a jolt of stolen youth. He just needs to find someone infused with liquid fire, find the right time or place, then be willing to make them bleed . . . when in close contact with them.”

I drew a breath. There was a reason that creepy old rapist had done what he’d done to me. A way to use that death and pain to give himself new life. No wonder Valentine had crossed the country raping magically tattooed women—it was his personal Fountain of Youth.

“This,” I said, “could get really crazy. We’ve got to reach out to the wizards, to negotiate with them. You may need to give up some fire, but you’ll get something in return. And we’ve got to preserve some true fire for the future. There are things worth more than spinning fire.”

“Is there enough to go around?” Daniel said. “What was that, a milliliter—”

“We got more than a milliliter,” I said. “A lot more.”

“Jesus,” he said. “And it’s yours to keep—”

“Did I need it before?” I said, patting my coat. “I have my own source.”

“Firecap ink is just an echo of the real thing,” Daniel said.

“It’s impressive enough. For the Dragon’s Noose to activate just from me walking into it, firecap ink’s got to be around Fermat level six magic. Of course, from all the things created from the droplets that fell from Pele . . . I’m guessing the real thing’s Fermat number is far higher.”

Daniel’s eyes flashed. “Where do you have the rest?”

“With the Ark of the Covenant,” I said.

Daniel looked confused. Then he laughed.

“The DEI has it,” he said. “Oh, Frost, you idiot—”

“They would have taken it anyway,” I snapped. “But my DEI contact agreed to seize the liquid fire on my personal authority. I’ve never known how much to trust them, but this is their chance to prove themselves to us. Let’s see whether they hold their part of the bargain—”