Liquid Fire (57 page)

As the roiling blast of flame curled into the sky on wings of thunder, the shaggy head inclined downward slightly, a glowing eye seeming to stare straight at us as the two black dragon wings whirled back up into the air at what must have been close to the speed of sound.

Lightning crackled beneath those wings as they cut through the air. My hair stood on end, and green foxfire rippled over the cars as electrical discharge surged out over the landscape. I flinched, but no explosion came—then I gasped, staring up into the sky.

Pele had spread both of her wings wide, an enormous V reaching to the heavens. The inside was not rippled black stoneflesh, but a spectacular rainbow patterns, fractal and wonderful, that simultaneously recalled and shamed every butterfly I had ever seen.

Pele leapt into the sky, wings still spread, forelegs relaxed, hind legs thrusting in titanic earthquake jolts, a snaky tail uncoiling behind her gracefully as she sailed far up into the sky, a white-hot fluid trailing after her, droplets of dragon yolk spattering out over the devastation.

Then the downstroke of those beautiful butterfly wings came, smacking us to the ground with a hurricane force of wind and mana. My ears were squeezed, then popped. My tattoos flared, then went dark. Then Pele flew up into the night.

I stared up after that unbelievable creature, watching her wings beat, trailing twin spirals of magical color behind her as she ascended out of the atmosphere. Jewel had fallen with me, her head on my stomach, and gasped suddenly as Pele trumpeted one last triumph of fire.

———

Then Pele disappeared into the stars.

62. Aftermath

We all stood there, dumbfounded, before the awesome devastation of Haleakala Crater. What had been a vast, sloping valley dotted by cinder cones was now a giant chasm of fire and lava, collapsing in on itself, as roiling black smoke climbed up into the sky.

The collapse stopped just short of our wrecked cars. Not fifty feet behind where the Range Rover had spun about and the Jeep Cherokee had rammed it, the road simply dropped away, its asphalt jutting into the air over the edge of the chasm.

I shuddered. Had the accident happened seconds earlier, the giant sinkhole would have swallowed us whole. Even so . . . we barely survived. The cars were jackknifed together, gasoline seeping from the Cherokee’s tank and liquid fire seeping from the Rover’s trunk.

Abruptly, the Jeep Cherokee caught fire. We all watched as fire wreathed it, as the gas tank squibbed out in a half-hearted explosion, and then as the Jeep rolled backward toward the ledge, tipped back, slid off . . . and anticlimactically stopped five feet down, lights still on.

Cautiously, I hopped down and limped over to the Range Rover, which was half-impaled on a rock, going nowhere. The danger of electrical fire was over, the gas tank looked sound . . . but the back cargo area glowed . . . where something had splashed out all over it.

I cautiously limped closer. I wasn’t just shuddering now—I was shivering, my whole body erupting in aches and pains as the adrenaline left me, and my brain started to feel that perhaps we were safe. I wanted to go lie down . . . but not as much as I wanted to see that glowing liquid.

“Is . . . did it?” Yolanda asked, hobbling up next to me as I peered in. She looked almost as bruised as I felt after the climb. And my ears felt funny, like I’d been to a rock concert without earplugs, and when she spoke, the words seemed to come from far, far away. “Did we—?”

The back cargo area of the Range Rover was splashed with liquid fire. It flowed like milk and glowed like sunrise. Even recreated through the distorted echo of the infinity lens, the mystic power of the dragon created constellations of sparkles dancing over the interior of the Rover.

The back glass was etched in arcane patterns where the magical liquid spattered across it. At points, the hot droplets had penetrated all the way through the glass, running down both the outside and the inside, which was curling with acrid smoke from charred cargo area carpet.

Most of the liquid fire had splashed out of the cauldron, chewing its way through the car, leaking out onto the pavement, oozing into cracks in the asphalt, lost.

But in the dark heart of the cauldron . . . there remained a visible glow.

“Congratulations,” I said, grimacing. My throat was unexpectedly raw, and I was again having trouble breathing in the chill night air. “You have your liquid fire.”

“We did it,” Yolanda said, incredulous. “Princess . . . we did it!”

The fireweavers gathered. Jewel ran forward with a squeal . . . then stopped as she saw me turn toward her. At first, she said nothing. We just stared at each other, scowling and angry. Then, slowly, her face softened, looking me over, seeing my burns and cuts and bruises.

“Oh, Dakota, I’m . . . sorry,” she said. I glared—my inner pain was worse, and she looked away. But something worried her, and she asked, “Your dragon really is gone, isn’t it? You were the herald, and the dragon flying around was just hatchsign. I was right, wasn’t I?”

“You were right,” I said. “The spirit of the dragon was on my back.”

“If you are the herald, then . . .” she said, looking up. “Where is she going?”

I looked up after Pele, now just a tiny speck in the sky. She had nowhere to go on Earth; she had to be flying into space. How was that even possible? Using her dragon breath like a rocket booster? Using the solar wind, magnetic fields . . . pure magic?

And even then, where would she go? I racked my brains for knowledge of the solar system, and oddly flashed back on my
Close Encounters
moment with the pizza, but not eating pizza with Cinnamon and Vickman—the older memory of me and my mother.

Eating pizza and reading
National Geographic
 . . . and then I had it.

“Io,” I said. “Pele’s going to Io.”

“Eye . . . oh?” Jewel said.

“One of Jupiter’s moons.” I was certain not only that I was right, but also that Pele had told me. I’d felt homesick looking at that pie, not because I had great memories of mom and pizza . . . but because
Pele
was homesick for that image. “Looks like a great big pizza.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” I said. “Crust constantly flexing in Jupiter’s gravity, churning with inner heat, covered with sulfur pockmarked with volcanoes. It’s the only body in the solar system which approximates Earth’s early environment, the only place a dragon could call home—”

“Oh, quit showing off,” Jewel said, shaking her head. Then she looked up at me, and her face fell. Her breath caught in her throat. “Oh, God, I’ve—”

“You’ve stepped in it, decisively,” I said. “Give me your phone.”

“Why?”

“So I can call Philip,” I said.

Jewel’s lower lip trembled. Then she pulled out her phone.

“What are you doing?” Yolanda said, reaching for it. “Don’t—”

“Don’t interfere,” Jewel said sharply, jerking the phone back. “Dakota . . . don’t.”

“I have to,” I said. “I can walk up to the nearest ranger station while the lot of you run like hell, or you can give me your phone and take your medicine.”

“What . . . what do you think I should do?”

“Take your medicine,” I said.

“You’re such a hard woman, Dakota,” Jewel said.

“Oh, spare me,” I said, shaking my head. But she sounded sincere.

“Dakota,” she said, eyes tearing up. “Doesn’t what we had mean anything to you?”

Zi laughed roughly, but I kept my eyes on Jewel.

“Everything,” I said, “but you said it. It’s what we
had
. It’s what we had before I knew you were lying to me. Before you kidnapped me. Before you touched my stuff, smearing this awful crap all over me so you could use me in your scheme with no thought of all the hundreds or thousands of people who would have been killed so you could protect a virgin mountaintop. And I
like
virgin mountaintops, but tell me—don’t you think you did more damage?”

And I held my hand out toward the glowing crater, the torn-up mountainside, the massive chunks of debris still falling from the sky—and, far in the distance, the lights of the observatory, untouched, because as vast as Pele was, a shield volcano was larger.

“We didn’t even get the damn thing,” she muttered.

“Good, maybe nobody died.” I held out my hand. “Now give me your damn phone.”

“Don’t do it, Princess,” Zi said, stepping between us. “We need to—”

“Shut up and sit down,” I said, pointing to a shelf on the rock.

Zi turned on me. “You aren’t in charge, Frost. After the wreck you made—”

“All of you
sit the flying fuck down right the fuck now,
” I said, turning on him, pointing at the rock. He blanched, backing up, and I corralled the rest with my arms. “Or I swear to God I will beat the holy living shit out of each and every one of you, one by one or all at once.”

“She—she can’t get all of us,” one of the twins said. “Not if we run—”

I whipped my arm out and shot a coiled vine straight at his chest. It hit him far harder than I meant to—almost like it was fueled by rage for being pinned up so long, though it was probably just an imbalance in the magic from the henna—and he fell back against the cliff.

“Any other takers?” I asked, drawing the vine back to me, then drawing a line in the gravel-covered road with it. “I took you all on and won
without magic
. I’ll take you all on again, with the same result. Anyone else want to try round two with a pissed-off dragon herald?”

Zi held up his hands. “No . . . herald.”

I looked at the phone. Jewel had left it off. Smart girl. I beeped it on, then waited for signal. At first, I thought we wouldn’t get any, but then, improbably, it picked up, two bars. I called Philip. I was a bit surprised I remembered his number.

“Special Agent Philip Davidson,” he said, voice straining over what sounded like a leaf blower. I knew what that sound was—one of the Shadowhawk stealth helicopters. Philip was already on his way. Then he continued, “Best magical investigator in the Northeast.”

“Stealing my line,” I said, laughing. Then I coughed. “Philip, good to hear your voice.”

“You too,” Philip said warmly. “I know where you are; what’s the situation?”

“I’ve secured the scene,” I said firmly, coughing again, staring over at the fireweavers. Jewel looked away from me, and I sighed raggedly. Then I looked over at the glowing back of the Range Rover. “But I may need your help securing some . . . Edgeworld assets.”

“Understood,” Philip said. “Say no more.”

I hung up the phone. Zi stared at me, eyes burning.

“You’re going to take it, aren’t you?” he said. “Take the liquid fire.”

“If you break into my house and fry an egg in my kitchen, it’s still your egg.”

Zi stared at me, baffled, and I sighed and sat down between Zi and Jewel.

“All of you are going to jail—for kidnapping, for vandalizing a national park, for reckless endangerment of human life,” I said, sweeping my hand over the destruction across the valley. “But something wonderful happened—a dragon was born, and liquid fire was made.”

“And you’re going to take it from us,” Jewel said.

“No,” I said. “We talked, we dated, we even made love, but you really do
not
know me, Jewel. I practice radical forgiveness. If it weren’t for all the people who probably died in this catastrophe, I’d just let you walk away—”

“We survived,” Jewel said. “And we were closest—”

“Tsunamis,” I said, and she fell silent. “You moved the earth, Jewel. This will rock the whole world. And you can’t tell me that you imagine no one was in this park. No camper, no ranger, no poor tourist lost on a late-night drive, no native driving to see relatives—”

“Oh,
God,
” Jewel said, putting her head in her hands.

“I can’t let you walk away,” I said, “but I can’t let that fall into the wrong hands.”

We stared at the trunk of the Range Rover, and the glowing light filtering out of it.

“The whole world would fight over that,” I said. “Not just fireweavers and wizards, but scientists and kings, all desperate for a chance at eternal life or just at a chance to perform a spell that comes along once every dozen generations.

“Heck, the whole world may fight over this crater,” I said, “after the U.S. Government begins strip-mining it for all the dragon yolk and dragon’s blood—”

“They won’t find anything,” Zi said bitterly. “It will all burn up—”

“You’re thinking old school, of what you could harvest before the Industrial Revolution and all its toys,” I said. “They’ll find
some
fraction of liquid fire left by the hatching, something people will fight over. Let them fight over it
here
. Let’s take the real prize off the table.”

“All right,” Jewel said. She stood up. “All right.” She looked out over the hillside, looked back at the back of the Range Rover, then back at me. “All right, Dakota. But there’s no need for everyone to bear the full brunt of this. I’m the princess. I’m the leader. It’s all on me.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, standing, stepping beside her. “Even if you plea bargain, your accomplices are not going to get off scot-free. It will help things if you take responsibility . . . but are you sure you don’t just want to lawyer up and let the courts work this out?”