Liquid Fire (3 page)

2. Shoot the Messenger

Vickman cursed and shoved Darkrose back with one hand, Schultze closing ranks beside him so they shielded her with their bodies from the short, wiry man in the tough biker leathers who had seemingly popped
right into the middle of us
.

Time slowed down. Everything got quiet. The crowd receded, its people blurring, its noise fading, leaving this man at the center. I jerked back into a low karate stance, Cinnamon hissed, claws out, and Saffron . . . just stood there, amused, as if she was invulnerable.

“What the hell—” Vickman said. His voice echoed oddly, and he stiffened, clenching his teeth. Whatever weapons he had were no doubt in the baggage; whereas this guy could have come out off of the streets with an Uzi under his leather jacket. “How did you—”

“An area glamour,” I guessed, relaxing slightly, waving my arm through the air. I could feel the slightest tingle of magic, some sparkle of mana that reacted against my tattoos. “Mostly, a silence spell. Surprising how much people rely on sound to draw their attention, isn’t it?”

“Surprising,” said the wiry little man—five-six, maybe five-seven, his motorcycle jacket open, and his sandy hair tousled, like it had been blown back—“how much people don’t listen. Especially when told things like ‘Stay away, Dakota Frost.’ ”

“I beg your pardon,” Saffron said, scowling. “I believe we negotiated—”

“Quiet, Scarlett O’Hara,” the man said, eyes fixed on me. “This is wizarding business—”

“
Wizarding
business?” I said. “Like, Wizarding Guild? But I’m
working
with you!”

“You think you’re working with us?” The man’s lip curled. “Just because we assigned a babysitter to your crazy little Council? Nicholson’s barely a wizard, and he’s not
working
with you, he was supposed to keep
tabs
on you—and he sure as hell doesn’t speak for the Guild.”

“Dakota,” Saffron said, voice warning. “What haven’t you told me—”

“Nothing,” I said. “Hang on. When I first talked about this trip, there was some flak—”

“Now she remembers,” the man said. “You were
specifically banned
from the Bay—”

“We worked that out, first week! The Wizarding Guild even invited me to give a talk—”

“Before they found out you were bringing a
coven of vampires!
” the man said, raising his voice, not two feet from Saffron—and I suddenly realized,
he doesn’t know she is a vampire
. He couldn’t; as she glared, he ignored her, leaned in, and said to me, “Consider yourself
dis
invited.”

Something was amiss. The Guild had cleared my visit. Their leadership seemed to want to know more about the MSC—I was giving a talk at their request. Heck, I had a Guild wizard, Alex Nicholson, not only on my new Magical Security Council, but on speed dial.

And yet the guy in front of me who claimed to be with the Wizarding Guild had no clue I traveled with vampires that had no need of a coffin. Then I remembered how complicated vampire politics was with its secrets and factions—and suddenly, I got it.

“You’re not from
the
Wizarding Guild,” I said. “You’re from a
faction
within it.”

“The only faction you need worry about,” the wiry man said. He shot his hand toward the inside of his jacket, then stopped just short, a grin spreading across his face as Vickman convulsed. “May I? I have a present but I wouldn’t want to, you know, spook you.”

I caught a flash of white inside his biker jacket. While the wiry man’s attention was focused on Vickman, I shot my long arm out. The wizard jerked back like he’d been stung, but not fast enough, and my hand came back with a white envelope plucked from his map pocket.

“Fuck me!” he said, raising his fists in what looked like a karate stance—Tae Kwon Do or something Korean-derived.
Huh.
I was actually starting to recognize the subtleties of the different martial arts.
Interesting.

“I take it I’m to open this?” I asked. The envelope was hand addressed, simply to “Frost.” I passed my tattooed palm over it, but the yin-yang didn’t absorb any stray magic. “There’s no live magic on this, but if it’s filled with powdered anthrax or whatever, Vickman—shoot him.”

Vickman scowled, nodded, and put his hand inside his jacket, as if there really was a gun in there he’d managed to sneak past security. The wiry little man’s eyes bugged and he started to back up, but he found himself penned in between Cinnamon and Saffron.

Fists still raised, the little man made a shrugging move to back them off, and I expected Saffron to show her fangs—but
Cinnamon
reacted first, growling quiet but deep, staring up at him, chin set, never taking her eyes off him for an instant—like a cat in a challenge.

The little man’s face went ashen. “Now wait a minute,” he said, looking around for help—but everyone was still ignoring us, passing our zone of silence in quiet blurs. And if he popped the bubble and cried for help, the TSA would be all over him, too. “Don’t you—”

“You’re the one who materialized in the middle of a crowd of Edgeworlders,” I said, cautiously cracking the envelope open. “If you wanted to play this nice, you should have waited for us with a sign that said ‘Frost’ rather than playing stupid wizard tricks.”

The man cursed, but relaxed slightly as I pulled out . . . tickets, back to Atlanta. I thumbed through them . . . and found one for almost every member of our party, right down to my daughter: FROST, CINNAMON. Only Nyissa was left out. Disturbing.

“So,” he said, folding his arms, not looking at Cinnamon, even though she could take his throat out. “Now you know the score. We told you not to come. You came anyway. So we’re giving you an out. Take the tickets, put a leash on your pet tiger—”

“Oh, you did not just say that,” I said, as Cinnamon’s growl deepened.

“—leave your vamps in their coffins, and fly with them back to your little hick hellhole!”

At “vamps,” Saffron chuckled, glancing at Darkrose, and the little man raised an eyebrow, not getting it. I was looking over the tickets; there was indeed a shipping ticket for one coffin, but apparently he didn’t know that—or hadn’t been told that. Even more disturbing.

“You’ve been misinformed,” I said. “First, my
daughter
doesn’t wear a leash. Second, Atlanta is very advanced—its metro is larger than San Francisco and San Jose combined. And third, most of the vampires in our party don’t travel in coffins. Only our . . . enforcer.”

Saffron dropped her hand on the little man’s shoulder, baring her fangs, and a second later, Cinnamon did likewise, half a snarl, half a grin. The man tensed in fear, glancing back and forth between them—and then I heard a pair of clicks behind me, and turned.

Startled travelers were backing up as the latches on the coffin at the loading area opened on their own. Slowly, the lid lifted, lifted by a porcelain-pale arm; then
she
rose, a shag of violet hair over pure white skin, a slender body wrapped in stripes of dark cloth—with a long metal poker carried in her hands, like a riding crop. The Lady Nyissa. My “bodyguard.”

Technically, I was Nyissa’s vampire “client,” gaining her protection in exchange for an act of submission. Saffron, my former girlfriend, had demanded I wear this actual submissive’s collar, like,
in public
, to receive her protection . . . and yet had rarely delivered. Nyissa, on the other hand, my former enemy, had only asked for a drop of blood and a quarter . . . and had guarded me
in person
in a vampire court, nearly costing her life.

Where Darkrose and Saffron were daywalkers, and covered themselves in layers and layers of clothes that helped them brave the day, Nyissa was not—and, as a working dominatrix on top of being a vampire, flaunted her body, wearing as little as she could get away with.

Nyissa sashayed up to us, working it, her hips making her flared skirt sway, her body seeming to grind against the negative space between the two vertical stripes of cloth that covered her breasts. Your eyes naturally followed that great white expanse of flesh up from her navel, between her breasts, and then to her throat—where a horrible scar covered what should have been her voice box. I tore my eyes away and glanced at the little wizard, who was mesmerized—first staring openly like at a peep show, then mouth dropping in horror as Nyissa bared her considerable fangs: sharp canines twice as long as a human’s—and far more pointed.

A slight hiss escaped Nyissa’s mouth; with her too-pale skin and too-violet hair, those silent bared fangs made her seem even more like a life-sized porcelain doll. She raised the poker until it was level with the scars, and the little wizard actually raised a hand as if to ward off a blow. Cruelly, she smiled, even more fearsome than bared fangs—and subtly, she released one hand from the poker and flicked it at me, American Sign Language for,
is there a problem?

“Not for us,” I said aloud—my ASL is still rusty. The little wizard was still staring—not that I blamed him; Nyissa was eye-catching even in this turn as Scarthroat Vampirella—but I snapped my fingers and said, “Hey! Eyes on me. What’s your name?”

“Ferguson,” he said sharply.

“Well, Ferguson,” I said, offering the tickets back to him, “I don’t know what you’ve done to piss off whoever sent you, but they must have known—
should
have known—we had two daywalkers in our party, and they should have told you.”

“Shit,” Ferguson said, looking around wildly, trying to get a bead on Darkrose and Saffron without ever fully taking his eyes off Nyissa—quite a trick if he’d been able to pull it off, and quite amusing since he couldn’t. “Oh, shit shit
shit
—”

“Regardless,” I said, “They should have known we can’t accept these tickets; you need twenty-four hours notice to ship a vampire encoffined, and we can’t leave Nyissa here without getting the permission of the Vampire Court of San Francisco. It would be a death sentence.”

Ferguson hesitated, then snatched the tickets back. “Damn it,” he said bitterly.

“What is this, amateur hour?” Vickman said. “If they knew all that—”

“Maybe they didn’t,” Cinnamon said brightly. “Sounds like they hates vampires. But maybe they never gots to ship ’em anywhere. I means, what’s the postage? Maybe they—
fahh!
—wants to see if we’re easy to spook. Boo! Or maybe they
did
know and gave’m somethin’ to trip over.”

“Trip over?” Vickman said. “You mean they
wanted
him to fail?”

“Maybe,” Cinnamon said, shrugging, as Ferguson seemed to deflate. “S’like a bunt hunt. You sends a young were out hunting for ‘bunts’ in a place where humans’ll probl’y get ’em. At least Fergie had a chance. If he fails, good for who hates him; if he runs us off, even better.”

“I don’t take it we can get the name of your employer, Mr. Ferguson?” I said.

“Fuck no,” Ferguson said, clenching his teeth. “I don’t want to get killed.”

“How charming. May I then?” I said. I took the tickets back from him, then wrote CALL ME—DAKOTA FROST on the envelope with my number underneath. “Please tell whoever doesn’t want us here that we’ve received their warning, and I want to speak to them.”

Ferguson took it back, incredulous. “The Guild doesn’t want to talk to you—”

“Your
master
doesn’t want the Guild talking to
me,
” I said. “But the Guild does. They invited me to the Northern California Practitioner’s Conclave tomorrow, to report on my work in the Magical Security Council of Atlanta. If your master is in the Guild . . . he’s probably invited.”

Ferguson glared. “Frost, look,” he said. “He—they want you out of their territory.”

“I don’t care what
he
wants,” I said, jamming my hands in the pockets of my vestcoat. “This is a free country, and I have the right to bring my daughter here and keep her safe. And as far as the wizards who are here . . . well, all I care about is keeping them safe. Tell them that.”

Ferguson started to retort, then froze as Saffron’s hand tightened on his shoulder. “Tell them one more thing,” she said softly in his ear. “See the steel collar around the Lady Frost’s neck? And around the little girl’s neck? Her name’s Cinnamon, by the way. She’s not a pet.”

Cinnamon tugged at her collar, and I pulled at mine as well—polished stainless steel, with a soft black rubber liner and an elaborate S engraved on the front. Mine was comfortably fitted to my neck. Cinnamon’s was far wider, so she could change.

Saffron drew back slightly, at first I thought to make her look imperious; then I realized the angle would make it easier for her to bite. Saffron waited for Ferguson to nod, then said, “That’s the sign of the House of Saffron, the Vampire Queen of Atlanta.
My
sign.”

And Saffron bared her cruel vampire fangs.

“Oh,
fuck me,
” Ferguson said, flinching away from her, but Saffron held him firm.

“If any harm befalls Dakota or Cinnamon, my wrath will be . . . awesome,” she said, oh-so-sweetly, turning up the Southern Belle accent at just the right point to convey ultimate menace. Her fangs were as long as Cinnamon’s. “Please deliver that along with Dakota’s message.”

“Understood,” Ferguson said. He was shaking when she released him.

“Sorry,” I said.

“What?” Ferguson said, still flinching away from Saffron.

“They really should have told you,” I said. “They had to have known. I’m so sorry.”

“What?” Ferguson said, backing away, slipping the envelope back into his vest. “What? Fuck you, lady, I-I’m loyal to—to the Guild! He—they would have told me if they’d known! And I can take care of myself!”

And then he zipped his vest up and whirled, and in a blink of magic he was gone.

My jaw dropped. It hadn’t been teleportation, exactly—of that I was certain, as I’d become a bit of an expert in that area—but it was a damn impressive combination of accelerated movement combined with some kind of perceptual effect. I squinted, trying to see the traces, then gave up and put my hand to my brow to dispel the sudden magically-induced headache.