Authors: Anthony Francis
“
How do you know so much about me?
” I asked.
A crackling growl rippled through the room—from my Dragon, still hovering above me. The tendrils at the tip of its jaw dipped into my view like a glowing moustache . . . and I started to see double, watching through the Dragon’s eyes as Devenger leaned back in his chair.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but that’s your own damn fault. You’re all over the Internets.”
I stared at him, then noticed his upraised hands. From his perspective, the Dragon had to be one quick lunge away from biting his head off. There was crackling my skin with magic to intimidate people, and then there was crossing the line into actual threats.
“Excuse me,” I said, withdrawing the dragon slowly back into my body. I rubbed my eyes as the double vision faded. “Technically, that was assault. Sorry.”
Devenger put his hands slowly on the arms of his chair and let out his breath. “Well,” he said, “that certainly wasn’t the worst reaction anyone’s had to either my little perceptual tricks or my Internet snooping, so shall we say we call ourselves even?”
“Hardly,” I said, “and I still want an explanation.”
“Magicians survive by being secretive,” Devenger said, folding his arms. “To Stanford, I’m just a professor—I don’t advertise my role in the Wizarding Guild. It’s not hard to figure out, but I never confirm anything in public, so it’s hard to push inquiry past speculation.
You,
on the other hand, can’t keep your mouth shut, so I can find out anything I want on Wikipedia, including pictures of your tattoos good enough to reverse-engineer their logic—”
“Wait,
Wikipedia?
” I said. “Last time I checked, it didn’t have anything on me more than a one-paragraph bio, scheduled for deletion for ‘not being notable’—”
Devenger’s salt-and-pepper eyebrows lifted. “And I thought you were web savvy. Don’t you review your footprint on the web? Don’t you set up Google alerts?”
“Maybe . . . I should start,” I said.
But Devenger had already turned to the screen, tapped out my name, and ten seconds later found a Wikipedia page on
Dakota Caroline Frost
, complete with that same old out-of-date picture everyone scarfed from the Rogue Unicorn website.
“Damn,” I said, leaning over his shoulder. The page kept scrolling down, and down, and down. “That’s me all right—all of me. Damn. Last time I looked, there wasn’t even a picture.”
“Compiled from police records, interviews, TV appearances, the Rogue Unicorn website—
everything
about you is here, down to a list of your tattoos,” Devenger said, scrolling down through the page. “Even ones you no longer have, like your original dragon tattoo—”
“Wait,” I said. “Scroll back up. There, my daughter’s name. Why is that a link?”
“Maybe she has a Wikipedia page too,” he said.
Something cold ran up my spine.
“Click on it,” I said quietly. He did so, and then a page titled
Cinnamon Frost
appeared, complete with a picture from
yesterday
, from
Berkeley
, of Cinnamon holding her tail amidst that clump of graduate students when I’d been
right there
. My eyes bugged as I read the text:
Cinnamon Stray Foundling Frost
is an
American
weretiger
,
prodigy
, and
mathematician
, best known for
her work on
Goldbach’s Conjecture
and her struggle with
Tourette’s Syndrome
. Frost first attracted the notice of the
mathematical community with a Note to
Ars Numerica
in
which—
“
Tell
me this damn thing doesn’t have her schedule on it,” I said.
“What?” Devenger said. “No, how would—”
He scowled, turned back to the screen, and clicked savagely on the page, throwing up link after link in new windows, muttering to himself, reading one page while five others loaded. Unsatisfied, he started hitting search engines until he turned up a blog called
Zetawatch
.
“Oh, hell,” he said, tilting a monitor toward me. “Look at this—‘Cinnamon Frost at the Battle of Union Square?’ ”
“Oh, hell, is right,” I said, leaning in. “That’s us, all right—”
“Look at these older ones,” Devenger said. “ ‘C.S.F. Frost wins Young Investigator Award?’ ‘C.S.F. Frost to appear at Berkeley’? ‘Cinnamon Frost to receive award at
Stanford?
’ Sounds like your daughter has got an Internet stalker—”
“It’s not so sinister,” I said, peering at the profile picture. “That blogger is one of the grad students who hosted Cinnamon at Berkeley. That doesn’t worry me.” Apparently, he’d been at Union Square, recognized Cinnamon, and had taken a picture. I pointed. “
That
does.”
The reason the blogger had been at Union Square? To see Jewel’s performance. He’d had a front row seat to the whole show, from Jewel’s setup to the police aftermath. The final picture of the blog? Jewel, Cinnamon, and me leaving with the police.
“I’m not certain what you mean,” Devenger said. “Are you saying someone monitoring these blogs would assume Jewel would be at a Cinnamon event? But why would the people attacking Jewel be looking for math blogs?”
“If they plastered a three story magical glyph atop Macy’s, they’re egotistical enough to want to know how it was received,” I said. “What if they’re web savvy? What if they’ve got a Google Alert? What if they’d already had seen me and Jewel together—”
“And now,” Devenger said, pointing at the page, “they have your
name.
”
———
“Put it all together,” I said, “and Cinnamon’s appearances become Jewel’s hit list.”
31. Putting Out the Illuminati
Our golf cart sped through the walkways of Stanford at pedestrian-scattering speed. Devenger had told me to go ahead, and I’d
started
to run, but fifty paces out, my knee, already abused from the Battle of Union Square and Taido practice, had me limping.
Then Devenger whizzed up in a golf cart, grabbed my arm, and pulled me onboard.
“They should be in Dinkenspiel Auditorium, correct?” Devenger asked.
“The bookstore,” I said. “Cinnamon wanted—”
“Damn it,” Devenger said, turning the wheel so hard the cart nearly flipped over, sending us careening down a side path. “The auditorium and bookstore are practically on top of each other. If these firespinning hooligans do even the most cursory casing, they’ll
find
them—”
Ahead, the path was blocked by a chain, and I started to ready an asp to bite it, but Devenger whipped out his laser pointer, reached around the windscreen and blasted the chain out of the way. Only then did I notice the cart’s starter switch was burnt out.
“You’re like the Doctor with that thing,” I said.
“Laser,” Devenger said, adjusting the focus of the device. “Who’d have sonic?”
He blasted another chain out of the way, the cart burst through the low-hanging branches of a magnolia tree, and we emerged into a wide lane leading toward a building with a sloping red tile roof and low gold walls that I recognized as the Stanford Bookstore.
Ahead of us was a familiar scene: screams, chaos, scattering pedestrians, a glowing bubble of flame, and dark-suited figures blasting away at Jewel’s diminishing shield. Only this time, Jewel was stuck—because the shield that protected her surrounded a pool and fountain.
And this time my daughter was
in
the bubble with Jewel—and a fire ninja.
Cinnamon’s outline rippled like a reflection on water, only standing up above the pool, rather than contained within it. She must have tried to turn invisible—but splashes at her feet gave her away, and the black-garbed fire ninja advanced upon her with a lit poi staff. My heart seized—weretigers were vulnerable to fire, and besides, her foe was more than twice her size. In lycanthropy studies, I’d learned that werekin in human form weren’t as strong as vampires. Where a vampire might have the strength of ten men, a werekin might be only as strong as two. But then my heart started again, because that equation apparently didn’t apply to lifer weres who couldn’t completely change back to human—for Cinnamon was now beating the shit out of the fire ninja.
Fully visible now, Cinnamon was using fists, not claws—she told me once she’d rather die than give someone lycanthropy—but even with her holding back, with each blow, the hulking man was buffeted around like a rag doll. The black-garbed figure was tough—he didn’t fall—but he was losing ground, the poi staff falling from his hands, fists swinging wide, flying back as Cinnamon kicked him in the belly. He bounced off the inside of Jewel’s bubble of flame and yelled, stumbling forward, pitching inside the rim of the fountain inside the shield.
Outside Jewel’s shield, things were going much worse. Figures screamed, stumbling and afire—the fire ninjas weren’t being gentle this time. I recognized a prone figure in a leather jacket as Ferguson, lying flat in a spray of cinders next to a cowering security guard behind a bench.
But that was it—no cops, no vampires, no security guards, no other help. With fewer bystanders to disperse, and fewer defenders to resist, the fire ninjas were already turning from the crowd to focus on Jewel’s shield.
“Use your Dragon,” Devenger urged. “Build on her spell—”
“They’ve seen that trick,” I said, shimmying my arms. “But I have an idea.”
“Take the right, then,” Devenger said, rising out of his seat, leaning, one hand on the wheel. I rose as well, intuiting what he was going to do. “And cover your head!”
He gunned it, and we leapt out—and rolled. The pavement struck me with a slap I didn’t expect, and I felt the bright sting of road rash, heard the scuff as my jacket scraped the ground.
Damn it
, I was going to have to have one commissioned from a leathercrafter, at triple the price. But half of Taido is tumbling, and I followed the first forward roll with a second shoulder roll, coming up at a forty-five degree angle and whipping my arm out at the rightmost ninja to fling a tattoo just as the golf cart barreled into the fire ninja in the middle.
Screaming, the ninja was hurled into Jewel’s shield, which popped when the cart and ninja slammed into it. Jewel’s shield dissipated in prismatic fireworks, but the cart had done its job—focusing the attention of the ninjas on Devenger . . . and me.
My dragon tattoo surged for release.
Let me at them!
But I didn’t want to just yet; the fire ninjas might have prepared counters for the spells they’d seen me use. Amazingly, my Dragon
got
that, like an intelligent thing, releasing its power into my vines, making them glow.
The one to the right snarled, whipping a bolt of fire at me. I deflected it with a coil of an extended vine, but as I’d expected, his fire was now more tenacious, more grabby, like they’d tuned their spells to work against me. As I flicked the fire off the vine with difficulty, the fire ninja pointed at me, raising his hand with a swagger, calling me out.
I’ll get you.
Well, fine.
I’d
already gotten
him
.
The fire ninja jerked wildly as the asp I’d flung out at the start made contact with his leg and slid up his pants. He jerked harder, trying to kick it off; I was nowhere near as gentle as I had been the last time I’d sicced one of these on someone. He took a hesitant step toward me, raising his fire sword; then he doubled over and collapsed, as if kicked in the gut.
But it wasn’t his gut I’d told the snake to bite down hard on.
I glanced over. Three fire ninjas—the singed one who’d been hit by the truck, the wet, bulky guy who’d been pummeled by Cinnamon, and one I assumed came from the left—were all ganging up on Devenger. They needed the advantage; he was not fast, but he was graceful, using some combination of Tai Chi and Aikido, throwing blows off with style and sending more than one of the ninjas sprawling. No doubt, three-on-one, they would eventually have taken him; but I strode over to them, hauled the big one off Devenger, and belted him smack in the mask.
Ow!
I damn near broke a knuckle, and his mask didn’t crack like the one Cinnamon hit at Union Square, but I knocked it sideways, making the ninja wave his hands in the air. Frantically, he tried to reseat the mask—and I punched him as hard as I could in the stomach. When his hands went for his midsection, I twisted his mask so I was sure he couldn’t see.
I looked up in time to see Devenger’s elbow
CRACK
into the jaw of another ninja; then he swirled like a matador and the remaining ninja spun off. I stepped in to assist, then flinched as Devenger’s whole front lit up with a bright yellow glow.
Devenger flung himself backward as a gout of flame seared the space in which he’d been standing. He whipped out his laser pen as I extruded my vines, as mana hungry as I could make them, trying to deflect the next ball of flame hurled by the fourth fire ninja. I couldn’t stop the blast, but I did tilt it up a little, and Devenger flattened himself to the ground as the roiling ball of flame sailed over him, close enough to singe eyebrows.