Liquid Fire Read Online Free Page A

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