Liquid Fire (51 page)

“Can’t take the heat?” Jewel smirked, hands whipping around her. As fast as she was, I could now see that she could make the patterns of flames in her magic move even faster. “And I’ve barely started cooking—”

“Hell with this,” Nyissa snarled, withdrawing a wand from her cloak. “
Extinguere!
”

I caught a glimpse of Jewel’s wide eyes, blotted out by the brilliance of a cold beam of ice blasting from Nyissa’s wand like a concentrated snow machine. Jewel’s firesticks guttered, but did not go out, and she performed a concentrated figure eight, shedding snow away.

Gasping and dumbfounded, I struggled to stand as a scene from Harry Potter played out before my eyes. I’d known Nyissa was a wizard before she became a vampire, but unconsciously, I’d assumed that since she wasn’t a powerful vampire, she hadn’t been a powerful wizard.

But she’d built a ward big enough to shield all of Blood Rock.

As Jewel adapted, so did Nyissa, turning the beam of ice first into a stream of chunky snowballs, then into a icy jet of water, then to surging waves of mana that caused the spin of her poi to wobble. Jewel yelped in pain as one of her poi singed her arm, and Nyissa smiled.

“What’s that you said?” Nyissa snarled, slowly arcing around Jewel, adjusting the focus of her strange shimmering beam of frost to cause the maximum disruption to Jewel’s shield. “You haven’t started cooking? Looks like a dish best served cold to me—”

“What’s that
you
said?” Jewel growled, slowly stepping back, planting her feet more carefully, hand movements growing more and more complex as she tried to prevent Nyissa from blotting out her fire or tangling up her chains. “The hell with this?”

And she split her morningstars apart, creating a simple shield before her with one spinning stick, and whipping the other straight behind her, shielding with her body a disc of flame she created in the air, a disc that sang with an eerie, resonant wail.

Nyissa blasted the shield with another torrent of ice, but it just bowed back, evaporating the white specks and blowing them away in a churn of steam and fog. Nyissa flicked her wand in a complicated motion, then watched as a tangle of magic rippled off the shield.

Nyissa raised her wand, staring at Jewel, considering; then she hissed, full fangs.

“A magic circle,” she said. “The simplest shield. Perfect defense. No offense.”

Nyissa motioned to me, and, gasping, I levered off the wall, joining her. Jewel just stared back at us from inside the bubble, smirking, the shield gleaming before her while the spinning ring sang behind her, shimmering and hypnotic.

“She’s really good at this,” I said, “but her fuel can’t last forever—”

“Dakota, fetch my poker from my luggage,” Nyissa said. “Now—”

“That’s right, go on,” Jewel said, twirling the ring behind her. “Fetch, Dakota.”

“What’s the ring for?” Nyissa said, leaning in with her wand. “You will tell me—”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Jewel said—and the front door exploded.

I turned, expecting fire ninjas—and saw Molokii and the Fireweavers instead.

Nyissa whirled, wand whipping out, but it was too late. Molokii’s blast hurled her body into the kitchen. The backwash of the impact knocked me off my feet again, leaving me dazed. In moments, two Fireweavers had seized my arms, and a third raised a stinking white cloth.

“Jewel,” I said, struggling, trying to gather my forces, “you don’t have to do this—”

———

“I’m sorry, Dakota,” Jewel said, waving to the guard with chloroform. “Put her out.”

55. High Priestess of Pele

Something foul and pungent was shoved under my nostrils, jolting me to awareness. My body bucked instinctively, struggling against something before I was even fully conscious. I was all too familiar with this scene. I’d been knocked out, I’d been captured—and I’d been bound.

“Welcome back, Skindancer,” Jewel said. “I’m sorry it came to this.”

I jerked fully awake. My arms were bound behind me, some kind of rope harness, and I was covered with some sticky, icky goo. I was kneeling on a towel, and a pair of fireweavers stepped forward to take my arms, not roughly, but almost kindly, helping me to my feet.

“The plan was
so simple,
” Jewel said, her voice echoing in my ears as the world spun around me. “Fake Molokii’s kidnapping, get my butch biker babe to ride to the rescue, then convince her she just
had
to perform her part of the spell to win his freedom.”

“What?” I asked, dizzy and blinking. Torches and flame swam around me, illuminating the sweaty bodies of the fireweavers, bone and metal decorations, and a gleaming cauldron, but the real star was the scenery—a stark landscape of red and black rock, piled volcanic cinder, rising above us in a conical peak. Now we really were on the surface of Mars. “What—”

“We’d even bought dark robes and masks from Maxi’s for all the celebrants,” Jewel said, waving her arms, “but then
you
had to speed dial Philip before I could even say, ‘let’s not tell the police.’ I mean, seriously? Who calls in an
airship
in response to a ransom demand?”

“What,” I repeated, twisted in the arms of my guards, half struggling against them, half leaning on them. I looked left and right, disorientingly seeing the same spiky-haired fireweaver boy twice—my guards were twins. I looked down at the web of beige ropes crisscrossing the sticky black goo smeared over my body, and finally marshaled myself. “What the hell—”

“It’s liquid latex,” Jewel said, as I squirmed uncomfortably beneath the ropes. Actually, I have to admit the
ropes
weren’t uncomfortable—the coating of goop was. “Piled on thick, on top of all your tattoos. Sorry, Skindancer, but it was necessary to shut you down—and thanks for giving me the idea in your shop as you pulled on the gloves.”

I struggled, but the hemp quite artfully kept my arms pinned behind my back without putting too much pressure at any one point—
karada
, Jewel’s favorite fetish, the Japanese art of bondage that carefully used ropes to limit the motion of the joints.

The latex, on the other hand, clung to my body, stinging like it was magically active. Mercifully, they’d left me in shorts and a T-shirt, but they’d smeared the goop everywhere—including places where no one, not even Jewel, had the right to touch me without asking.

“You—
you
put this shit on me—”

Jewel nodded. “Of course. Underneath the latex is a layer of henna, inscribed in a way to short-circuit your designs. Only I know your tattoos well enough to do that. And besides”—she smirked—“I didn’t want anyone else groping that beautiful body.”

“You bitch!” I felt violated, even though we’d been intimate. “How
could
you?”

“Never underestimate a man’s ability to underestimate a woman,” Jewel said, with that wry smile I’d loved—until now. Before, I’d read it as inviting and delightful; now, I realized, it was just a scornful and vicious
smirk
. “Apparently that holds true for butch lesbians as well.”

I looked away. I’d love to say that I was angry with her, but survival instinct had already pushed me past that. There were half a dozen fireweavers around me, and we stood within concentric rings of torches. The crescent moon glinted off the hood of a Range Rover.

But it was the totem-guarded cauldron that worried me the most. It was squat, six-sided, with complex runes covering its silver panels. Beaded threads stretching from its six corners connected it to six feathered totem poles set with crystals and elaborate magical glyphs.

The spell wasn’t fully active yet, but the liquid fire in my eyes revealed faint traces. Lines of magic arced between totems, a gleaming bubble pulsed around the cauldron, and a cylinder of power rose from a casting point set before it—all sparkling with magic symbols.

This wasn’t Wicca or skindancing or even graffiti magic, all of which depended on a magical practitioner or a magical substrate to make it work. This was
technical
magic, a complex configuration of graphomantic lines designed to channel enormous power.

This was magic as a necromancer would have wrought it, trying to squeeze every last bit out of the surge of a death—but the fireweavers had power. They had a source of liquid fire, so either they were running out, or this spell required simply
staggering
amounts of mana.

My eyes traced the beaded threads hanging from the totems around the cauldron, out into the rings of torches. Soon, I saw the torches weren’t concentric rings—they were one spiral, the threads winding out from the cauldron, braiding together, in widening circles.

My eyes followed the spiral as it straightened out, snaking lazily up the reddish-grey, sloping conical hill. At first it was hard to see, given the distance and the nearer flames around us . . . but soon I was certain that the torches spiraled back around the crown of the summit.

I’d seen this in Devenger’s lab—an
infinity lens
, a figure eight made of two spirals, one bigger than the other, focusing magic from a source onto a target. Magic as Archimedes would have wrought—
give me a lever and a place to stand, and I can move the world
sort of shit.

“What are you doing, Jewel?” I said.

“You’ll see soon enough,” she said, smirk fading ever so slightly. “You know, at one point, I’d hoped to tell you directly, to let you in on the secret and bring you in, but you always were so damn sure of yourself. Not
once
did you ever show sympathy for our cause—”

“Damn it, make it easy on yourself,” I said, studying the totems. The largest held a silver disc, stamped with a crescent moon split by a dagger, over a burning house wrapped in a braided chain. “The
dragon
doesn’t need all this crap. Jewel,
talk
. You
know
me. I
will
figure it out.”

Jewel stared off into the distance. Then she sighed.

“Behind us is Pu’u o Maui,” Jewel said. “Largest cinder cone in Haleakala, one of the sacred places of the Order. And inside it, a dragon is hatching—the spirit of our people, made manifest. But you know all that, dragon herald. You can feel it. I can see it in your face—”

“You’re seeing what you
want
to see,” I said, scowling; but I did feel . . .
something
, some connection, some echo in my core, strangely interrupted, that made my skin crawl and my tattoos itch. Still . . . “But if it is the ‘spirit of your people made manifest’ why all this mumbo jumbo? You seem to be pretty well stocked with liquid fire,” I said. “Enough for performances—”

“No. That’s what we call faux fire,” Jewel said. “Even that’s too precious to use in its pure form. For performances, we use filtered white gas mixed with the tiniest drop of faux fire. Faux fire itself is regenerated, continuously, in braziers that burn gold—”

“Shh, Jewel,” Zi warned. “She doesn’t need to know our secrets.”

“Thanks, Zi, I wouldn’t have picked out that detail,” I said, smirking at him. “Burning gold in liquid fire to make more fire—a reverse philosopher’s stone. Neat—but it can’t possibly sustain itself forever. That’s why you wanted my firecap ink. That’s why you need
me
. You don’t have anything to trigger this spell with—”

“You don’t know anything,” Zi snapped.

“I know
you can’t escape the second law of thermodynamics:
a closed system always runs down,” I said. “No matter what tricks you use to stretch your supply, if you have no living source, no
input
, the magic
will
run out. And while you traveled the world trying to provoke a hatching,
Daniel
looked ahead at what you needed and gathered it all up to spike your plan.”

“You always were too smart for
anyone’s
good,” Jewel said. “Yes, you’re right. Over time, faux fire becomes useless for the ancient spells, worthless for the deeper magicks. I never quite understood what the keepers of the secret flame were yapping about.”

“Gold isn’t magical,” I said. “Burning gold in magic fire may yield magical byproducts, but they’ll be less magical than the source. It’s like fission—the radiation from decaying atoms may create radioactive byproducts, but always with less potential energy than the source.

“But a dragon’s heart is a living philosopher’s stone, transforming energy into enormous magical complexity, like fusing atoms with magic. From there, the magic will run downhill, becoming simpler and simpler. It’s entropy—the loss of order is . . .
inevitable
.

“It’s Nuclear Magic 101,” I said. “I hope you’re taking notes. There will be a test—”

Zi slugged me in the stomach, hard enough to stagger me. Thunder rippled from the caldera, the ground shook, and I stumbled as my dragon twisted against the henna. My guards grabbed for my arms as I fell, making me cry out as my arm twisted under the sudden strain.

“Enough,” Jewel said—but the other fireweavers looked approving. Behind her, Molokii signed something to another fireweaver, Yolanda, who walked off to a crèche of equipment near the Range Rover. Jewel said, “She’s tied up tight. You do not need to hit her.”

“Have you gone soft?” Zi glared at her, then me. He shook his head. “Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for this woman, not after all that scheming! I don’t care if she is the herald, we can’t just spill our secrets to her! Daniel’s right, you’re endangering the Order, princess—”

“I said,
enough,
” Jewel said, striking the ground with her foot—and, incredibly, the ground echoed it, shuddering under our feet. The fireweavers murmured, looking between Zi and Jewel. “And here, it’s not princess, it’s
priestess
. Unless you think Pele will come for you?”