Liquid Fire (26 page)

Too bad I lost count of how many trillions upon trillions of them she said there were.

At dawn, I woke to find Cinnamon and Jewel already up and chatting in Jinx and Doug’s suite. The conversation grew hushed when I entered, and again, I felt my ears to see if they were burning. When Molokii got up, the six of us took a cab up to the Mission district.

There, we met the vampires for breakfast at the Pork Store—to a vampire, “vegetarian” meant “not blood.” Our fanged friends spent the night trying to dig up information and had come up empty-handed—whoever the fire ninjas were, they didn’t seem to be San Francisco locals.

After the vampires crashed, Cinnamon, Jewel, and I took a day tour of San Francisco with Molokii, Jinx, and Doug. We weren’t due at Stanford until the afternoon, so we went to the Palace of Fine Arts and got tickets for the noon show at the Cage.

The Palace of Fine Arts itself is a faux ruin curled around a glittering lagoon—columns and statues of warm brown stone rising through trees and reflected in gently rippling waters. As we strolled through the winding paths, Doug explained that the Palace had been built a century ago for some exhibition, but really, no one in the world cared what San Francisco’s most famous attraction
had
been. Everyone only cared what it was
now
—the home of the Drake Cage.

An unearthly squawk echoed throughout the columns, a prehistoric cross between the calls of a bird of prey and a great cat. Following quickly was another in a lower register, then another in a higher; then a dozen more, overlapping each other like a chorus from the
Land of the Lost
. Jinx whirled to Doug, squeezing his hand, her face bursting out in a great sunny smile.

Then we stepped forward in sight of the Drake Cage.

A mammoth faux-ancient rotunda ten stories high stood before us on eight massive columns. Vast scaffolds supported a mesh of invisibly fine netting, obscuring neither the huge Greek statues peering down at us, nor the gleaming eyes of the drakes perched upon them.

They came in all colors: glistening orange, sparkling purple, gleaming cyan. They came in all shapes: tiny, fluttering drakes no larger than butterflies; large, raptor-like drakes the size of eagles; and next to the center cage, a giraffe-tall long-necked drake, patterned scales gleaming green and blue. The giraffe drake fixed a huge jeweled eye straight on us, and my dragon tattoo shifted uncomfortably on my body—I got the disturbing impression it was a stare-off. Then the giraffe drake blinked, stretched that long neck—and once again let out that squawking, trumpeting cry that set off all the other drakes in a cacophonous chorus.

“They don’t eat each other?” I asked, bewildered at the variety in the cage.

“Mom,” Cinnamon said, as the rest of the drakes joined in the chorus. “We’re up.”

I blinked. Then I saw a keeper gesturing at the door of the Cage. “Oh! We’re up.”

“Yes, you are,” the khaki-garbed keeper said with a smile. “Enjoy the show.”

There are two stands of seats at the Drake Cage. For the less adventurous, there are risers between the columns of the rotunda. For the more adventurous, there is the feature that makes the Drake Cage a worldwide attraction—the dozen center seats in the Inner Cage.

We took our seats in the cramped, mesh-guarded arc at the center, and the khaki-garbed, Kevlar-gloved keeper locked us in. Then he chirped, and the giraffe-necked drake lowered its head, lifted him up and placed him on a kind of crow’s nest at the other side of the Cage.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Keeper said, voice amplified by a throat mic that left his hands free to scratch the neck of the giraffe drake as it dropped him off. “Boys and girls. Monsters and mortals. Welcome to the Drake Cage!”

And with that, the giraffe-necked drake lit up the Cage with a brief spurt of flame, a twisting, napalm-like threader that burned painfully bright.

“It’s like liquid fire,” I said, shielding my eyes.

“It’s not
real
liquid fire,” Jewel responded, jamming down her hat—a sparkly number shaped like an octopus whose curled-up tentacles made a scraggly brim. “A drake’s
magifouaille
may be better than any human fuel, but it still has nothing on the liquid fire of a real dragon.”

Next, the Keeper brought out an amazing sequence of drakes: small drakes and fat drakes, turtle drakes and cat drakes; drakes that flew and drakes that crawled—so many that I wondered how creatures that rare came in such grand variety.

“True dragons have been extinct for thousands of years,” the Keeper said, as an Orange-Throated Striking Drake flapped and squawked on his arm like a overgrown cross between an eagle, a gecko, and a fire-burping machine. “Likely hunted to death by early humans.”

“
Not
likely,” Jewel muttered. “Scientists, thinking they have all the answers—”

“True dragons were one of an entire family of creatures, with a ‘family resemblance,’ like cats or apes,” he said. “Drakes, in contrast, are magical echoes of true dragons mixed with other animals—just like werekin are magical echoes of animals mixed with each other.”

I glanced at Cinnamon, but she didn’t flinch.

“Like lycanthropes,” the Keeper continued, “drakes are mundane creatures with magical infections. Like lycanthropes, there are drakes for every family of creatures in the world, and like lycanthropes, they breed true. But unlike the precursor of lycanthropes, which granted its offspring shapechanging abilities, the precursor drake granted flight—and fire.”

The Keeper released the gecko-like Orange-Throated Striking Drake, which flapped up and away in the cage, seemingly glad to get away from the staring eye of the Long-Necked Giraffe Drake, which once again belched a long tongue of fire.

“Thank you,” the Keeper said, as the performance concluded and the giraffe drake lowered him to the ground. “Please visit the museum on your way out, and consider a donation which will help the Drake Cage continue its educational mission.”

I stood to leave, but froze as standing brought me eye to eye with the giraffe drake as its neck lifted back up. It stared at me curiously, definitely. My tattoo shifted. I swallowed. What prevented the drake from launching a burst of flame into the inner cage?

“Mom,” Cinnamon said, tugging at me. “We gots to clear the cage now.”

I blinked. Then I saw the Keeper gesturing at the door of the Cage.

“Oh, right,” I said, stepping to follow Jewel and promptly bumping my head on the low door of the Cage. Jewel tried to stifle a laugh, and I laughed too, rubbing my head and shagging my deathhawk back to life before I let Cinnamon drag me to the Drakatorium.

The Drakatorium was a large curved building nestled around the Drake Cage proper. Within, there were more live drakes, drawn from populations that could not coexist in the Cage; dioramas of drakes in their natural habitats; and, finally, a series of exhibits on true dragons.

Dominating this last room was a huge facsimile of a red dragon, its wings as broad as the building was wide and its neck as high as the ceiling was tall. But this was a facsimile, not based on any real fossil—there just wasn’t enough left of a “true dragon” skeleton to reconstruct.

We didn’t even know whether “dragon” fossils were true dragons or just dragon-touched dinosaurs—the so-called Saurian Drake Hypothesis. Regardless, ancient dragon corpses burned themselves up with magical fire, and it’s hard to reconstruct
anything
from charred fragments.

Looking at the statue, my dragon tattoo shifted on my body.
This isn’t true.
I didn’t like how reactive my tattoo had become, how much it seemed to be feeding intentions back to me as much as receiving them. But I agreed—this knockoff was far too Tolkien for my taste.

I wandered out into the gift shop, and Jewel followed.

“Forget Smaug out there. Look,” she said excitedly, pointing to an LCD monitor showing over and over again a short news clip of a glowing, cartoony image of a dragon perched atop the Golden Gate bridge. “I
told
you you summoned a dragon!”

“That’s just their logo,” I said, pointing at a line of T-shirts, which had a similar but not identical image of a drake atop the Golden Gate. “And it’s obviously a special effect—”

“How can you tell?” Jewel challenged, leaning in. “It looks like magic—”

“It just
looks
animated,” I said, pointing. The giant image atop the Golden Gate had a distinct drawn outline, like a Disney cartoon. Except . . . “That’s not a physical object, it’s a piece of art they composited in. It looks like a giant neon version of one of . . . one of my tattoos—”

“Oh!” Jewel said, nonplussed. “So it does.”

“That
is
a knockoff of my original Dragon tattoo,” I said, shifting uncomfortably. Was my new Dragon jealous of the old one? “Close enough I could sue for copyright infringement. Jeez, come on. This is a
scientific
exhibit. Can’t they do better than ripping me off?”

“Oh, don’t go all scowly on me,” Jewel said, her own irritation fading slightly. She stepped in front of me, taking my hands, pursing her lips into something halfway between a smile and a frown. “ ‘Penny for your,’ as Cinnamon might say?”

“Dragons were the most magnificent creature to have lived in human history,” I said, pulling my hands back and adjusting my vestcoat so it rode on my shoulders more comfortably, “and humans killed them so good we can’t even reconstruct them properly—”

“Now you’re getting how
I
feel,” Jewel said, quickly becoming steamed again, jamming down her hat again. “Walking through all this faux-Tolkien,
Reign of Fire
shit, with things that aren’t even
half
-dragons stuffed in cages—”

“Would you rather have visited the zoo?” I asked. “Even more animals in cages—”

“Feeling a bit caged myself,” Jewel said, glancing around. “Let’s get out into the sun.”

In the fresh air, I started to feel better, but we couldn’t escape cages, not with the Drake Cage looming over us. I made some snarky comment about the huge latticework built around the columns—but, according to Jewel, the latticework had been built
before
it became a cage.

“They had to build it, just to keep what was left of the Palace of Fine Arts standing,” Jewel said. “It was falling to pieces. The Palace was built for the Panama-Pacific Exhibition almost a century ago. It was never meant to last as long as it did.”

“A metaphor for our modern world,” I said, still feeling the nasty aftertaste in my mood from seeing the misleading dragon “reconstructions.” “A façade of planned obsolescence decaying under its own weight, desperately shored up by stopgap measures.”

Jewel looked at me sharply. “You know,
you
called
me
Granola Girl—”

“Takes one to know one,” I said, a faint smile appearing on my face. Then I felt it fade. “Not that I know you, really, Jewel. I mean, I know I like you, and that you spin fire, but I really don’t know anything else about you, other than people want you scared, quiet, or dead.”

She shrugged. “Born and bred in the surf,” she said, “but never took to it.”

“What got you into firespinning?” I asked.

“I’ve always loved fire,” Jewel said, looking up into the sky. “Fireworks and bonfires, matches and burnt fingers. When I got older, I started spinning fire batons in luaus, but after I woke up about native culture I . . . turned to poi, then fire magic—and never looked back.”

“Cool,” I said.

“Hot,
I
like to say,” she replied. “Your turn. Who are
you
, Dakota Frost?”

“What?” I said. “Oh! I . . . well, born and bred in the buckle of the Bible belt—”

“But it didn’t take,” she said.

“Oh, yes it did,” I said. “Eighth grade Bible Bowl champion. But when I got into high school, I got into science, and that knocked the edge off—I was raised ‘if it isn’t all true then none of it’s true’ and, well, you know.”

“I do,” she said. “But how did that turn into tattooing?”

“Ah,” I said. “Science again. When I got into college, I got into chemistry—and into a great deal of trouble, quite the hell-raiser. On a road trip to Savannah-the-city, much to the consternation of Savannah-my-friend, I was flirting with this sailor, and he—”

“
He?
” she asked.

“He,” I responded. “He had a tattoo that moved. And
I didn’t know how it worked.
”

That last bit came out more forceful than I intended, and Jewel’s brow furrowed a little.

“I had two thirds of a degree in Chemistry with a minor in Physics,” I said, “he had a tattoo that moved—and I didn’t know
how
it worked. And I
had
to know. I transferred to the Harris School of Magic the next week. Within two semesters, I’d learned everything they could teach me, so I hunted down owners of magical tattoos, then their inkers, found a backwoods skindancer to apprentice to . . .” I spread my tattooed arms. “And the rest is history.”

“And that’s how Dakota Frost became a skindancer,” Jewel said.

“No,” I said. “That came later. Once I learned how . . . I just wanted to tattoo.”

“But,” Jewel said, “isn’t skindancing . . . magical tattooing?”

“No,” I said. “Magical tattooing is fire poi making. Skindancing is firespinning.”

“Ah,” she said. “But back to this ‘he’ business. Were you not out yet?”

“What a forward question,” I said. “But as it turns out, I’d already dated girls . . . but I’ve never stopped dating guys. I’m not straight or gay . . . I’m just Dakota.”

Jewel’s mouth quirked up. “Oh, that’s very clever. I
like
that. I hope it catches on.” At my blank look, she clarified, “I’m sorry, I thought you meant, bisexual, like, North
and
South?”

I laughed. “No, I am bisexual, but I meant, I won’t be categorized. I’m just Dakota.”

“So . . . you’re saying you’re a force of nature?” Jewel asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m saying . . . I like who I like, Jewel Grace.”

“
I
think you’re a force of nature, Dakota Frost,” she said, her eyes flashing hot at me. “Where
was
that sailor’s tattoo?”

———

I smiled wickedly. It had been on his bicep, but it was more fun to let her wonder.