Liquid Fire (28 page)

Laughter rippled out of the intercom. “Yes, yes, send her back, Ms. Koch.”

Miss Koch released the button. “Follow me, dear,” she said, bustling toward the flip-top of the counter. “And I’m so sorry. He’s supposed to stop doing the thing—”

“Are
you
the new professor?” the Scottish girl asked, calculatingly.

I glanced back at her—cute, and what a delicious voice. But still . . . “God, I hope not.”

As we walked back through the hall on the left, that brief interaction made me start to wonder what I was doing with Jewel. I’m an irrepressible flirt; if a tasty man or woman crosses my path, I’ll give them a wink. But I rarely act on it. Why had Jewel been different?

We turned a corner, and the split-brain feel of the Department of Alchemy continued. On our left were normal professorial doors—some dark behind the glass, others lit, and one with a row of students waiting. On the right were classrooms hosting far less normal demonstrations: wafts of smoke, crackling electricity, flickering behind glass that left my tattoos tingling.

We passed a laboratory where students slaved over bubbling beakers that shot puffs of sparkling silver flame, and I wished Jewel was here to see it too. I sighed. What made me latch onto this stranger on a plane, knowing we’d go our separate ways by the end of the week? Maybe that was the appeal in the beginning.

But that’s as far as my self-examination got—we were there, at a second bend in the hall, standing before a door with a frosted glass window whose brighter light almost certainly indicated a corner office, and whose dark lettering indicated the turf of:

Professor A. NARAYAN DEVENGER

Department of Alchemy

Chair

Miss Koch knocked, but nothing happened; and while we waited, I examined the flyers on the message board next to his door: a film series, antinuclear protests, and an arrow pointing down at a large box, filled with
FREE(D) BOOKS.
Charming. I liked him already.

“Professor!” Miss Koch snapped. “This is enough. I know you’re in there!”

There was a rumble. A large shape loomed behind the glass. “Oh, all right,” called a voice, and the rounded shape sank downward. With another, deeper rumble, the shape receded from the glass, and the door slowly opened, all by itself, with no one behind it. “Come in.”

Miss Koch groaned. “At it again. He’s not tearing you away from anything, is he?”

“Oh, just my daughter, my date, my life,” I said, picking up a couple of books from the box. Someone had thrown away a perfectly good copy of Kohen and Egelston’s
Biogenic Manadynamics
. “Huh. What do you know, fifth edition. All I have is the fourth—”

Koch snapped her fingers in my face. “Don’t let the Professor addle you,” she said, checking her watch. “Legend has it people have grown old and died talking to him, so if I don’t see you in twenty-five minutes, I’m coming back with a crowbar—”

And then a shimmering light flickered against the glass. I squinted, feeling a slight flood of mana that made my skin tingle—but the sparkle caught Miss Koch full in the eyes. She stopped, tilted her head, then said pleasantly, “—and maybe a cup of nice tea.”

“I won’t let him ‘addle’ me,” I said, smiling. “And I’ll pass on the tea. Or the crowbar.”

“Crowbar?” She furrowed her brow, then scowled. “Neither the tea nor the crowbar will be for you,” Miss Koch growled through the door, having recovered both her composure
and
her ire. “Both will be for his head, and not in that order!” Then she stalked off.

I pursed my lips, slipping the slim copy of Gamut’s
Art of Graphomancy
on top of the fifth edition of K&E. Then I stepped through the door.

I entered a paradise of books and light. The two straight inner walls of the corner office were lined with books; the opposite wall arced outward, with a row of sofas below a curved arc of windows, nearly three-quarters of a circle. At the circle’s center, protected by the ramparts of a huge, paper-strewn L-shaped desk, and nearly hidden from view by a parapet of vertical flat panel monitors, sat Professor Narayan Devenger.

Narayan Devenger was a salt-and-pepper Santa in sandals, suspenders, and sport coat. His frayed black T-shirt was emblazoned with a symbol I didn’t recognize, an upside-down V in a circle. I couldn’t quite place him—his features were Caucasian, his skin swarthy. He was facing his fort of computer screens when I entered, but when I stepped through the threshold, he looked back through half-rimmed glasses at me, mouth breaking into a wide, cheerful, devilish grin.

As Devenger turned around, the wooden floorboards rumbled deeply beneath his Herman Miller chair. Beside me, just behind the door, I saw a stepladder on rollers piled with books on magical tattooing, all by authors I knew: Sumner and Navid, Wilsen and Grayson. Devenger had been checking up on me, right up to the moment I appeared at the door, and then he had turned the simple act of returning to his desk into a little faux-magical show.

Then I remembered how I got here. “My daughter—” I began hotly.

“She’s fine,” Devenger said, holding up his hands. His face might have been European, his skin Indian, but his voice was pure Midwestern. “No doubt deep in the bookstore by now. I have Carnes’s errand boy on loan, shadowing them. You have my word as a wizard—”

“Ha,” I said.

“My word as a wizard,” he said firmly, “they will come to no harm—”

“Really?” I snapped. “You ‘addle’ them too?”

“No,” Devenger said, so sincerely I started to believe him. “You are described as a skilled magician, highly cantankerous, and a fiercely protective mother. I anticipated your response, and spared your daughter and your squeeze from my little exercise in . . . escheromancy.”

He smiled, whether at the magic or the pun I couldn’t tell. I stared back—then my mouth quirked up, wanting to smile. Maybe he was putting the whammy on me, but my skin felt no tingle of magic. Perhaps Devenger’s happiness was just naturally infectious.

Finally I gave in, smiled, and said, “Still, that was a dirty old trick.”

“A whole sequence of them,” Professor Devenger said, chuckling.

“Mind if I keep these?” I asked, indicating the books in my hand.

“That’s why they’re freed,” he said, still chuckling. There was a reason this fat, happy,
charismatic
man was a chair of a department. “And I’m sorry for luring you in like that, but I’d heard you’d had trouble being tailed by the DEI and I wanted to talk in private. Besides, this is
Stanford
. The campus is practically built for it. Forgive an old man his little tricks.”

“Old man?” I said. Professor Devenger looked at me curiously; I gauged him coolly in return. There was more pepper than salt in his beard, and his tan skin was a smooth canvas, but he was the perfect caricature of a old-school computer wizard—beard, belly, sandals—even down to the upside-down V symbol on his shirt, which I now saw as an AND sign.

No, not a caricature. Devenger wasn’t a portrayal of an old-school computer wizard—he was a
snapshot
of one. And while Devenger’s name might be on his door, he was definitely
the
Professor—and
the
Professor,
the
Warlock, and
the
Commissioner
all
looked like castaways from
That ’70s Show.
And, now that I felt for it, Devenger gave off the same magical vibe.

Three men—three powerful
wizards
—all primarily known by simple, revealing titles, all enduring, “legendary” figures in whatever organization they were a part of, all giving off, when I felt for it, the same whiff of old magic . . . and all curiously frozen in time.

Had they done something to increase their power . . . or extend their lives?

“Enjoying your stay in San Francisco? Having productive meetings?” Devenger asked, glancing at his computer.
Huh—
he’d basically hidden his face, switched to small talk and asked who I’d met with. Maybe he’d guessed I’d guessed the truth. “Seen any interesting sights?

“Actually, three of them: the Professor, the Commissioner, and the Warlock,” I said, and Devenger tensed. I said, “You’re not the first wizards I’ve seen who extended their lives—and not the first to fuck with me. I mean, what gives? Does immortality erode the social graces?”

“What an interesting question, Ms. Frost,” Devenger said, tilting his head. “I’d expect that someone with forever to practice a skill would get better at it—”

“You don’t expect, you know,” I said. “With the Warlock or the Commish, I dismissed it as a quirk. Seeing all three of you in the space of as many days, I started to suspect something. But the moment you ducked your head under your coat and changed the subject—”

“Yes, yes,” Devenger said, waving his hands and turning back to me, looking both irritated and embarrassed. “You’ve made your point and it isn’t really that deep a secret anyway. By the way, don’t call the Commish the Commish. He
really
hates that.”

I blinked. “Fair enough. Now . . . my question stands. What gives? Why the hassle?”

“Nothing ‘gives,’ ” Devenger said, eyes tightening slightly, picking over my tattoos, lingering on my left arm. “Yes, there are spells to extend life, but I’m sure it’s merely coincidence that a few old wizards who know them have ‘hassled’ you—”

“For a wise old wizard,” I said, “you need a lot of work on your poker face.”

“Asperger’s,” he said, embarrassed, though he had zero, zip trace of the mannerisms I’d expect from someone on the autism spectrum. “A hundred and twenty years wears off the burrs, but it’s still work to control the nuances—or to see them. What did
you
see in
my
face?”

“You checked out my tattoos,” I responded.

He sighed. “Which made you target of the Archmage, according to Carnes.” He shook his head, his eyes still focused on my arms, now zeroing in on my upper left shoulder. “Entirely understandable. I don’t think you even know what you have there, do you?”

“My masterwork, reloaded?” He kept staring at my arm, and I looked at it closely. There, the varied elements of the Dragon were most visible. You could see her claw, a bit of her tail, even a trailing spark of fire—but no special logic. “I mean, it’s a magic tattoo—”

“Yes, yes, of course, that’s what a skindancer would see. A wizard—an
alchemist
—sees something else.” Devenger’s eyes glinted behind his glasses. “Evidence . . . of liquid fire.”

My eyebrows raised. The Commissioner had used those words.
Jewel
used those words.

Devenger smiled. “For a player,” he said, “you need work on your poker face.”

“I’ve heard ‘liquid fire’ too much recently. I take it it’s not just a metaphor.”

“No,” he said, staring at me, considering. “And while it is a liquid, it’s not just fire.”

———

Then he stood. “Come, Ms. Frost,” he said. “Let me show you the fountain of youth.”

29. The Fountain of Youth

We stood in the precise opposite corner of Ligotti Hall from Devenger’s office, on the bottom floor of the windowless tower that was the first thing I’d really noticed when Devenger’s escheromancy had worn off. The way my skin was tingling, I doubted that was coincidence.

This room was the same size as Devenger’s office, but where Devenger’s chair sat at the center of an arc of bright windows, here, a hollow glass tube stood at the center of an arc of dark sound baffles. Above us, two floors had been cut away, leaving a narrow catwalk around the tube, which must have been three stories tall. Barely visible at top was the glowing bulb of a spinning whirligig, ringed with metal sheets—a mana generator.

I knew about mana generators. Georgia Tech had one of the largest in the country, sitting atop the largest magical circle in the country, engraved in a massive single-cut slab of marble that was as wide as the floor of the whole tower in which we now stood.

But the Stanford Department of Alchemy had something different.

The hollow glass tube that dominated the room did not stand in a magic circle. Instead, it rested in a disc of polished marble raised to knee height, engraved with two connected spirals in an asymmetric figure eight. Lazy lines looped out from the base of the larger tube, then tightly wound around a second tube with a rounded top, like a man-sized bell jar. Suspended within this second glass tube was a stack of metal rings, almost tall as a person, and pulsing with power.

Written on the glass, in plain letters, were the words MANA FOUNTAIN.

I stared in fascination at the stack of gleaming rings, which had a vaguely Coke-bottle outline, with a second, rounded bulge near the very top. Near the bottom, at the center of a bulge where the rings grew larger, hovered an amber sphere of glowing liquid. Near the top, in the rounded bulge of the rings that were set provocatively at eye level, hovered . . . nothing.

“Still calibrating?” Devenger asked, his hand falling on the shoulder of a young Korean technician wearing spiky hair, black gloves, and a nose ring—fetching, even though I couldn’t tell if he or she was male or female. “Run me one, would you?”

The technician nodded, and Devenger stepped back to the wall, beyond the edge of an auxiliary magic circle painted onto the floor. The outline of my dragon tattoo seemed to raise up on my skin as the bulb above began to glow with power, and I quickly stepped outside the magic circle before the gathering mana brought the damn thing to life. The tingling faded, leaving only a tickling at the back of my mind that drew my eyes to that empty space in the rings.

“I’ll wager you’ve realized why San Francisco’s vampires wanted you out here—feeling Atlanta out for territory and power,” Devenger said, handing me a dark pair of glasses. Actually, I hadn’t realized that, though I’d been unconsciously on guard against it during our meeting with the Vampire Court. “And from Carnes, I learned the fae told you outright—they’re hungry for a visit from a small-G god, and wanted to exploit your connection to the Lord of the Hunt.”

“Of course,” I said, as the machine’s whine increased.
I’m so naïve.
In my universe, you don’t need an ulterior motive to meet someone when you’re facing a mutual catastrophe. I forget everyone else lives in a universe where people won’t get up to help you with the lifeboats for fear that they’ll lose their seat on the deck chairs of the
Titanic
. “And the werekin?”

“The werekindred? Well, they’re always desperate for allies who treat them like people rather than animals—and
you
adopted one,” Devenger said, sliding on his glasses. He chuckled. “I think they’re your best friends forever. But you must have wondered about the wizards.”

“Yes,” I said, slipping on my glasses too. “So . . . what
do
the wizards want?”

“Access,” Devenger said, as the machine whine hit a fever pitch, “to liquid fire.”

The magical capacitor discharged with a bang. Violet lightning shot down the glass collector tube and slammed into the marble. Magic rippled out across it, crackling through the figure-eight in its surface, getting brighter as it wound its way around the second tube. The first discharge hit like a dull blow, but as mana converged on the second tube, I felt an electric tingle as energy concentrated at the base of the giant bell jar, then discharged again.

Even through two layers of magic circles, I flinched from the cattle-prod jolt as mana leapt up into the bell jar, striking the hovering sphere of liquid, knocking a single gleaming droplet up into the shaft. The glittering point of light shot up through the narrow neck of the coke bottle, setting off colored flares of light as it passed each stacked ring, getting brighter and brighter but slower and slower, until it came to a stop at eye level, hovering dead center at the top bulge, blazing like a miniature sparkler shimmering through each color of the rainbow.