Liquid Fire

Praise for Book One,
Frost Moon

Winner of the EPIC Award:
Best Fantasy 2011

“
Frost Moon
is a choice and fascinating pick that shouldn’t be overlooked for fantasy readers.”

—
Midwest Book Review

“Let me warn readers that they are going to be blown away.
Frost Moon
is one of a kind and pure genius. I devoured this book in one night. . . . Definitely worth the loss of sleep because there was no way I was going to stop reading
Frost Moon
once I started.”

—
Book Lovers Inc.

“A dark and gritty Urban Fantasy with rich characters, great hairpin turns . . . and enough tension and danger to keep you on the edge of your seat madly flipping pages to find what happens.”

—
Sidhe Vicious Reviews

“I am hard-pressed to adequately describe the latest book to be shifted in my direction for review. Thank you to the powers-that-be for the opportunity to be one of the first readers captivated by Dakota Frost and her magical tats. Addictive, sassy, sexy, funny, intense, brilliant . . . any and all of these adjectives describe not only the book itself but Anthony Francis’s tall, bi-sexual, tattoo-specialist heroine . . . Mr. Francis has delivered not only a sexy and spectacular heroine, but given depth, emotion and memorable personalities to the many faces found in the supporting cast that give life to this paranormal tale.”

—
Bitten By Books

Books by Anthony Francis
from Bell Bridge Books

Skindancer Series

Frost Moon

Blood Rock

Liquid Fire

Spectral Iron
(coming 2016)

Stranded
(novella in the
Stranded
anthology)

Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine
(coming 2015)

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

Bell Bridge Books
PO BOX 300921
Memphis, TN 38130
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-645-1
Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-626-0

Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

Copyright © 2015 Anthony Francis

Published in the United States of America.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.
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Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo/Art credits:
Hand/Skull (manipulated) © Maksim Shmeljov |
Dreamstime.com
Woman (manipulated) © Dreamerve |
Dreamstime.com
Woman (manipulated) © Peter Kim |
Dreamstime.com
Background (manipulated) © Unholyvault |
Dreamstime.com

:Mflo:01:

Dedication

To the people of Greenville, who gave me life.

To the people of Atlanta, who trained my mind and body.

To the people of the Bay, who welcomed me as a kindred spirit.

Jewel Grace

1. Fire is Life

“Fire is life,” said Jewel Grace. “That’s why I want to summon a dragon.”

“Do . . . what?” I said, staring at the cute granola chick in the aisle seat beside me as if she were a crazy person. The gypsy-chic Bohemian had caught my eye from the start of our flight out to San Francisco: wry, curvy, curly-haired—and, from the way she surreptitiously checked out not just my tattoos and my Mohawk, but my breasts, a probable lesbian—but for the first two hours, I’d no time for flirting. I’d been preoccupied comforting my newly adopted weretiger daughter on her very first airplane ride. After Cinnamon finally fell asleep, Jewel and I started talking, and she’d seemed sane, until now; but who knew what bad wires lay beneath that mass of copper curls? “I’m sorry, I thought you just said—”

“Fire is my life,” said Jewel, stretching out lithe arms, making her intricate leather and chainmail bracers jingle—and making my eyes follow the deft movements of her delicate hands. “I’m a professional fire magician, and I’m traveling the world, trying to summon a dragon.”

Jewel caught me looking and smirked—but then her eyes flicked to my bare, tattooed arms, gazing with delicious indecency at my masterwork: a vast tribal dragon, my totem animal, a glorious, colorful, intricate tattoo covering half my body.

Roused by her attention, the Dragon stirred to life, sliding over my skin like magic.

No, not just
like
magic; my tattoos
are
magic.

My name is Dakota Frost, and I’m a Skindancer, a magical tattoo artist. My skin is a living canvas, covered from my shaved temples to my slender toes in a network of magical marks, powered by my beating heart, that project my intentions onto the world when I dance.

Which makes a cramped middle airline seat the worst possible place for six-foot-two me to lose control of a tattoo. The Dragon is a re-inked version of my masterpiece, but it never set right since I was forced to use it in a magical duel before the re-inking was completed.

As I squirmed,
it
squirmed, empowered by the flex of my living canvas. My control was never the best—I quit my Skindancing training after learning to tattoo—and being crammed into an airplane seat made it tricky to keep my unexpectedly animated Dragon from squirming free.

As it slid over me, I became acutely aware that the beige tube around us was shooting through the air at seven hundred miles an hour, that beneath the dark blue carpet lay six miles of down . . . and that in that duel, I’d destroyed a reception hall with the half-finished design.

The last thing I needed was for the full Dragon to bust out at thirty thousand feet.

“Buh,” Jewel said, staring slack-mouthed as the tail of my dragon slid over my shoulder. She rubbed her eyes—then held her hand over her face, peering between two fingers. “Oh. My. God. I just said
summon a dragon
—and your tattoo came to life!”

I sighed. I take back what I said: the last thing I needed was to be sitting next to a crazy magician—the kind of woo-woo who just might decide she needed
my
Dragon to summon
her
dragon. It wouldn’t have been the first time that a crazy tried to harvest my canvas.

I know calling that “crazy” sounds a little harsh from someone with a living magic tattoo crawling over her skin—but there’s magic, and then there’s ridiculous. There’s a reason they call me the Skeptical Witch—I don’t swallow the lore of the magical world whole.

“Sorry, Miss Grace,” I said, pouring on my best Southern charm—which, frankly, isn’t much, because between a dad on the Force and a mom teaching Special Ed, I ended up closer to military brat than Southern belle. “You didn’t summon a dragon—it’s just a magic tattoo.”

“Oh, boo,” she said, leaning, peering at my skin. “But I’d never say
just
magic—”

“Fair enough,” I said, “but still . . . dragons went extinct before the dinosaurs.”

“Oh, I know,” Jewel said, eyes sparkling at me.

“Even the images of dragons we have are a muddle,” I said, finding it hard not to smile back. “Our movie-friendly wings and scaly image is largely from Tolkien, and our myths are a bad jumble of folktales and distorted recollections of the creatures called drakes—”

“Oh, I know,” she said again, her own smile growing.

“And drakes,” I said, “nothing against them, but they’re not really—”

“Oh, I know,” Jewel said. “Though . . . I do want to see the Drake Cage while I’m here.”

That stopped me for a moment. Drakes
are
some of the world’s most magical creatures, granted fire and flight by the magical residue of dragons the same way my daughter was granted shapeshifting by the magical residue of . . . well, whatever the werekin precursor was.

Drakes might not be true dragons, but they were spectacular.

“Me too. Missed it on my last trip; my former girlfriend and I were . . . preoccupied,” I said, proud I’d smoothly slipped in two little bits of information about my dating availability. I lifted my shoulder slightly. “Still . . . this is as close to a dragon as you’re likely to get.”

Jewel blinked, then smiled. “Oh, don’t say that,” she said, reaching out to gently touch the Dragon as it rippled over my skin. I felt a quiet thrill at the unexpected contact, then an electric charge as the tip of the tail accelerated under her fingers, sliding out of sight.

“I was going to say ‘don’t do that,’ ” I said, “but I think she likes you.”

Jewel looked at me, mouth quirking up into a pleasant wry smile. Her eyes flicked to my arm, tracing the elaborate tattoos that were slowly shifting back into position—green tribal vines shimmering, red roses rippling in bloom, and sparkling in the design, tiny purple jewels.

“Good,” she said, turning forward, smile struggling to grow broader, even as she flushed slightly with—was that embarrassment?
How cute!
Then she said, “Not to diss the spirit of your dragon, but when someone says a
thing
likes something, they normally mean
they
like—”

“
Yapping fuckers,
” barked my daughter—loud enough to make Jewel blanch. I gave Jewel a faint smile and turned to comfort Cinnamon, who was leaning against the window, holding her own tail, muttering, “Oh, when do—
fahh!
—when do we
lands?
”

I sighed and smiled, watching my beautiful daughter, my beautiful weretiger daughter, my beautiful, adopted, lycanthropic Tourette’s-challenged brainiac teenager suffering through the last stages of an airplane flight, holding her own tail like a stuffed animal.

“It’s all right, baby,” I said, scratching her blue bandana; she shuddered, gripping her tail tighter, her head snapping a little in her sneezy Tourette’s tic; I was
so
glad that I hadn’t let her take this trip alone. “The captain announced the landing while you were asleep.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said. “I didn’t mean—
fah!
—to mess up your flirting.”

I smiled, a little embarrassed myself now.

Cinnamon and I have the same last name, the same silver collars, and similar magical tattoos, but there the similarities end. I’m a smart aleck; she has Tourette’s. I’m tall, leggy, and Mohawked; my adopted daughter is short, wiry, and crams her orange hair under a blue bandana. I dress edgy to stand out; Cinnamon dresses like a schoolgirl to make people overlook her twitching cat ears and flicking banded tail. I chose my intricate tattoos to achieve a whole library of magical effects; Cinnamon’s bold tiger tattoos were imposed on her by a backwoods graphomancer to grant partial invisibility—which, paradoxically, makes her stand out more, since when she’s
not
invisible, her tiger stripes cover her face.