Liquid Fire (4 page)

“Cool!” Cinnamon said, peering after him; then she, too, put her hand to her forehead and grimaced. “Ouchies—eggbeaters to the noggins—but super cool! Mr. Wizard meets Sonic the Hedgehog. Wind gots to whip him up though—ergo, them riding leathers.”

“ ‘Ergo?’ ” Vickman asked, smiling. Even the grizzled ex-South African Defense Forces veteran was softening after half a year hanging around Cinnamon, and he reached to tousle her hair. “Since when does a street cat start dropping ‘ergo’ in polite conversation?”

“Hey! No mocking the me,” Cinnamon said, trying to simultaneously swat at him while readjusting her headscarf. “Since my prof stopped asking me to solve problems, and started asking me to prove theorems.” She looked at me. “Well, Mom? Do we bails on San Fran?”

I looked at her in shock . . . and then realized everyone was looking at me.

“Ah, hell,” I said, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. I was the head of the Magical Security Council. I couldn’t lean on Vickman’s paranoia or defer to Saffron’s authority; ultimately, the decision was on me.

“We cannot force harmony without a common purpose,” Darkrose warned. “The truce in Atlanta was reached after wizards and vampires fought the graffiti plague, together. Perhaps the Guild here is simply not ready to accept an emissary allied to their longtime foes—”

“It’s a faction,” I said. “Not the whole Guild—”

“We could get a hotel at the airport,” Saffron said. “We already have rooms for Dakota and Cinnamon; maybe we can expand the reservation. We can call the Vampire Court with our apologies, and leave as soon as we can arrange transport for Nyissa—”

“No,” I said firmly. “Look . . . thanks, both of you. Those are good options, but we won’t use them unless we have to. We stay. This is precisely the kind of infighting the Board has been successful at stopping in Atlanta. I’m sure we’ll have no trouble here either.”

“Oh, you had to go jinx it, didn’t you?” Saffron murmured.

“So,” I said, “should we hunker down in the hotel while you guys go to the Court?”

“
No,
” Vickman said. “I don’t want you isolated in some place Fergie and his employer might know about—especially with your bodyguard here confined to her coffin in our hired car while the formalities are worked out in Court. Go to the club.”

“The club? Where Jewel’s performing? Neither of which we know anything about?”

“Ignorance is correctable,” Vickman said, pulling out his phone. “Give me the card.”

I extended the card, and Vickman took it, turned it over, and grunted. Then he flipped down his smartphone’s keyboard and thumbed rapidly. He pursed his lips, making the white bristles in his salt-and-pepper beard sparkle; then he handed the card back to me.

“Probably. The website checks out and it’s been advertised for months,” he said. Then Vickman smiled, and his eyes got mischievous, reminding me a bit of a bearded Crocodile Dundee, though I knew I was mixing up my ruins of empire. “And it sounds like fun.”

“You hits the Wayback that fast?” Cinnamon asked skeptically, sneezing.

“I have an app for it,” Vickman said, showing her the phone, and Cinnamon cooed appreciatively. He pulled it away before she could snatch it, but then he began showing her how the app worked. “Put together by one of the Van Helsings back at the office.”

I watched them natter on about scripts and Internet archives for a minute, then shook my head. When I adopted Cinnamon nine months ago, she had been almost illiterate, computer or otherwise. I had been a computer lab tech in college, so I showed her a few things. Now. . . .

“You ever feel stupid, listening to them?” I asked Saffron.

“No,” Saffron replied. She was a few signatures away from a Ph.D. in vampirology, but knew no more about computers than I did; our childhood friend Jinx had got that gene. Saffron said, “They do leave me feeling a bit ignorant. Fortunately, ignorance
is
correctable.”

“Only with great effort,” I said. “All right, can we have a verdict? Safe? Fun?”

“Safe,” Vickman said, closing his smartphone keyboard with a click. “Go to the club. It’s an unplanned diversion from our agenda, which means you and Cinnamon will be safer than we are—because no one will expect you to be there. Just . . . please be careful.”

“Definitely fun,” Cinnamon said, flipping the card over in her hands. She was smiling.

———

“Alright, Cinnamon,” I said, smiling back at her. “Ready for a girl’s night out?”

3. Performance Art

“The Crucible” turned out to be a fire arts center, housed in a huge warehouse space in grid-like streets near the portside of Oakland. The taxi driver missed it on the first pass, and we wormed our way back toward it through cute little row homes. The houses were nice, the streets were clean, and the cars . . . well, somewhat less so. It was an odd juxtaposition.

Just as the last light was fading from the sky, the driver pulled up next to the ticket stand, a converted hot red train caboose sitting on the corner of the Crucible’s tiny parking lot. “You just pay for ride,” he said, pointing at the meter, which he had stopped when he passed the Crucible. “My mistake. You no pay for the loop around.”

“No problem,” I said, digging in my wallet, thinking of the man’s olive skin, his wiry dark hair; he reminded me of someone. Then it hit me—he looked a lot like a vampire I’d known named Demophage. “By any chance, are you Romanian?”

He leaned back at me, smiled. “Lithuanian,” he said. “Grandmother was Romanian.”

“Close enough,” I said, passing over one-two-
choke!
-three twenties. “Keep the change.”

Cinnamon and I hopped out, someone hopped in, and the cab sped off. At first, I’d been worried about taking my underage daughter to a “club,” but the Crucible seemed to be open to all ages. The parking lot was filled with a full spectrum of humanity—haughty socialites in evening wear, down-to-earth families with teenaged children, slackers in flannel and dreads, Goths and preppies, and even a few Edgeworlders mixed in with the mundanes.

A young man with wolf ears caught my eye, reminding me of Cinnamon as I’d first seen her in the rough and tumble crowd at the werehouse. Cinnamon saw him too, swatting at him, but he howled at her, and she squealed and ducked behind me, just like she had at the werehouse.

“Is he—” she asked, peeking around my arm as I laughed.

“I dunno,” I said, smiling at the boy, who had laughed when Cinnamon had ducked behind me . . . and who looked about Cinnamon’s age. “Fantastic makeup if he’s a mundane, a pretty heavy change for the new moon if not. Can’t you smell him?”

“Too many,” she said, as we lost him in the milling crowd. “And too far—”

“You like wolves, don’t you? You could go check him out, sniff his butt—”

“Mom!”

And then we found the line for walkups and patiently waited. I mean,
I
patiently waited. After we’d been waiting a while—approximately seventeen seconds—Cinnamon began doing her best Tigger impression, soon hopping even higher than I was tall, so vigorously that her appropriately-themed Tigger backpack bounced on its bungees.

“Are-we-there-yet, are-we-there-yet?” she was saying, and even though she sounded like she was being ironic, I was glad my tough little street cat could have a little childish fun.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I said, trying to guide her with my hands so she didn’t kill anyone in the line by bouncing on them. “You can see better than me—”

“I can take the next customer!” a blond-haired lady called, opening a new window. Cinnamon and I bolted forward, and the woman grinned as Cinnamon hopped down in front of her, one ear canted beneath her tilted headscarf. “Wow, that’s a wonderful costume.”

“It’s not a costume,” I said, rubbing Cinnamon’s shoulders, relishing the ticket taker’s surprised double take as Cinnamon flicked her ears. “One adult, one child—unless by, some chance, we’re on the guest list?”

“Uh, I dunno,” the woman said, glancing aside at something inside the caboose. “That would have been at will call—what’s the name?”

“Dakota Frost,” I said.

“I mean, the performer,” she said, taking a clipboard from someone.

“Jewel Grace,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, it was a long shot—”

“No, no, you’re on the list, a last-minute addition,” she said, flipping up the clipboard. Then she scowled and peered out past us into the line. “Where’s the rest of your party? She put you down for six spots.”

I raised an eyebrow—the same number of tickets Ferguson offered us; then I relaxed as I realized it was one slot for every member of our party Jewel had seen walking. Pretty darn observant—but almost certainly a coincidence
.

“They couldn’t make it,” I said. “Unavoidably detained—vampire politics.”

The woman’s eyes bugged, and Cinnamon sneezed. “Eff, Mom, be cool—”

“Sorry,” I said. “Forget I said the ‘v’ word.”

“Not likely, but . . . OK,” she said, handing over two tickets nervously. “Enjoy the show. Jewel’s an amazing performer, but I guess you know that, if you’re a fan—”

“Nope,” I said. “Just met her on the plane flight out this afternoon.”

“Well,” the woman said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “you must have made quite the impression. She used up all her slots—and put you right in front. I can take the next customer!”

“Interesting,” I muttered, looking at the tickets.

“Granola and Mohawk,” Cinnamon muttered. “At least she’s not a vamp.”

I squeezed her shoulders again, and then we merged with the press of people walking through the huge sliding doors of the Crucible. It was larger than I’d expected from the outside, with an actual two-story building in the middle of its cavernous warehouse floor. There were welders and glassworkers and fire sculptors doing all kinds of demonstrations, and placards and catalogs and posters detailing an enormous variety of classes.

I’d never seen anything like it.

Cinnamon apparently hadn’t either; her head kept whipping back and forth, and I got exhausted trying to follow her as she darted from exhibit to exhibit. But just when my mind was about to pigeonhole her as a cat chasing shiny things, I noticed what was attracting her attention—not the artwork, but the description of the classes. She’d look at the cat’s-cradle made of neon or the flower made of fire—and then stop and lean in to read the placards, muttering and dropping f-bombs as she tried to “read the letters before they swims away.” Just one more reminder that the little street cat I’d adopted was, unexpectedly, an insatiable learning machine.

“None of ’em are one-days while we’re here,” Cinnamon said, stopping in front of a poster for the firespinning classes. After squinting at the schedule, she leaned back and pointed at a long-exposure picture of a girl weaving a huge flower of fire with poi—flaming balls on the end of a chain. “I wants to learn to do that. That looks
amazing
.”

“It’s
more
amazing live,” I said. “Maybe Alex could show you while we’re here.”

“Alex spins fire?” Cinnamon asked. “For real?”

“For real,” I said. Alex was more than my contact in the Wizarding Guild—he was a practicing, if covert fire magician, which had to be a hell of a dance for the host of a skeptical TV show. “He can lift himself right off the ground if the wind is right—”

“Alex spins
magic
fire?” Cinnamon asked, eyes wide. “And can
fly
?”

“Yes, but let’s say he floats with style,” I said. “Heck, for all I know he’s here tonight, if not as a performer, maybe in the audience—”

But before I could whip out my smartphone to ask him, an announcer called out that the performance would begin in fifteen minutes, and Cinnamon practically dragged me to our seats, afraid someone would take them from us.

In front of the two story interior building was a row of bleachers opposite a stage framed on either end by welded metal pillars. Between the stage and the bleachers were three rows of floor seating with an excellent view of the stage. I checked our stubs and blinked.

The ticket lady hadn’t lied—we were right up front, the best seats in the house.

I was glad Cinnamon wasn’t stuck behind someone taller, but as I seated myself, I heard a snort of disgust and turned to see a short elderly lady behind me, wrapped in some expensive fur that almost certainly wasn’t fake, scowling up at me and my Mohawk.

To be nice, I offered her one of the four empty seats beside us, but the woman shook her head, holding herself so stiffly her whole body seemed to pivot. I looked over at Cinnamon, and she shrugged. With a grin at the scowling lady and her morbid fashion statement, I switched seats with Cinnamon so as not to be rude—and just as we got settled, the show started.

Twin gouts of fire roared out of either side of the stage, tearing the air with sharp, spitting sounds, like the hisses of hidden dragons. The audience jerked back from the unexpected flash of heat and flare of light—and then the lights fell, leaving us in darkness.

Something creaked. A drumbeat started. The trumpets of fire again flared, striking the welded iron pillars bracketing the stage. Delicate blue-white flames climbed their ornate sides. The pillars squealed, started to turn—and began throwing off drops of burning liquid.

Cinnamon squealed in delight, and I laughed. The pillars were well designed—they spun just fast enough to throw the flaming drops off, but slow enough that the fiery spray of the fuel fell in wide catch-basins at the bottom of each pillar without hitting the audience.