Playing with Fire: A Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count)(32)

If the heat or the building collapse didn’t kill me, Quinn would. He’d hunt me down, cut off my horn, and take it as a trophy. At least I wouldn’t need another round in the glass coffin when I reversed to human. A round or two of napalm would cook the dust right out of me, assuming I didn’t get charred to a crisp.

A little experimentation with the meter confirmed my fears: the dust had made it into the reception. I located a brown splotch of drying fluid on the floor near the receptionist’s desk. On closer inspection, I found some other dark spatter marks. How had they gotten there?

I looked up.

A drop of liquid fell on my nose with a splat. Dark stains marked where something leaked in the ceiling. I tried to get a view of my own nose, which didn’t work very well. Drawing in a deep breath, I worked to make sense of the smells. The pungent odor of cleaners hung in the air along with the hint of gasoline. Gasoline? No, it wasn’t quite gasoline. It reminded me of napalm. Had they already started pumping the gel into the building? I hadn’t heard any of the warning sirens.

The authorities liked informing New Yorkers when they were about to put on a show.

Underneath all the other harsher smells, I couldn’t detect the earthy, mildewy scent of the gorgon dust. Whatever the fluid was, it masked the presence of the dust far too well.

The lights went out, and utter quiet descended on the building, so deep and still I shivered. A few breaths later, the blare of distant sirens accompanied a bone-deep thrum. The sound of emergency response vehicles drew a snort out of me. What were they hoping to prevent? A fire? With a little help from the CDC and the military, the police and fire department would have no problem shielding the building so the intense heat and cinders wouldn’t reach any of the neighboring structures.

I forced my attention back to the stained ceiling. What was that stuff? I really needed to practice using my nose as a unicorn if I survived. Short of tasting it, I had no way of identifying it. Whatever it was, the meter wasn’t picking it up.

One little taste couldn’t make my situation any worse, could it? I already had some of the gunk on my nose. With nothing to lose, I set the camera on the desk, eyed the brown stains, and dragged my tongue over the wood. If someone was recording and it got back to anyone I had deliberately eaten a dangerous substance, I’d be a dead woman walking, but I didn’t exactly have a lot to lose.

If I did survive, I’d enjoy the arguments. Learning how the fluid worked—or the culprit’s goal—might be important later.

I had been smelling gasoline. Why on Earth would anyone mix gorgon dust with gasoline, shove it into the ceiling of an office building, and leave it there? Why hadn’t it burst into flame when the initial bang happened?

Wait. Gasoline wouldn’t be sufficient to neutralize gorgon dust. If it burned, it’d get into the air ducts, spread through the entire building, and potentially affect every single person in the building. While gasoline and other accelerants were used in napalm, modern blends were designed to burn hotter and longer, reaching temperatures capable of destroying gorgon dust.

The possibilities stunned me into staring up at the stained ceiling tiles. Why hadn’t anyone reported the smell of gasoline? Had someone mistakenly—or deliberately—reported it as gorgon bile? Gorgon bile smelled far worse than gasoline. A single spark could have blown the whole thing up. Had the fluid been a little more effective at igniting, the dust would have potentially incubated in unwitting victims, priming the city for a petrification endemic. Had the meter not been set to do a bulk scan, I might not have clued in to the irregularities of the brown fluid. I would have breathed a bit of fire in the wrong place and lit the whole building up, sending gorgon dust into the air.

I had come within feet of petrifying both Janet and the cadet and possibly exposing the entire crowd gathered outside of the building, including Perky.

The thrum increased in volume, and the floor shivered beneath my hooves. Everyone in hearing range, probably for several miles, would know something big was about to happen. According to protocol, the tone would continue for five minutes.

In the following silence, aided with magic, the bomb techs would pump thousands of gallons of napalm into the top story of the building. The thick, gelatinous fluid would ooze its way to the ground floor while bomb techs in hazmat gear would set the charges and prepare to detonate them to ignite the napalm.

A minute following the final check of the explosives, an inferno would rip through the building and incinerate everything inside.

I suspected I’d gain a few minutes due to the sheer amount of napalm required to coat all thirty-four stories of 120 Wall Street and bake it to a crisp. Then again, if they hunted down a replicator or two, they could turn water or gas tankers into napalm in a few minutes without breaking a sweat.

Until they started flooding the building, I’d make the most of my time to find out just how much gorgon dust lurked in the ceiling. With luck, the camera was sending its recording to someone—like Officer Janet Downing—who might make sure the data got to the right people. I’d also hope Chief Quinn wasn’t the right person.

He’d take my pretty fur coat as a trophy along with my horn. Then he’d give my skinned corpse to Professor Yale for study. My future really wasn’t looking all that bright.

Or maybe it was looking too bright.

Sighing, I reared and stabbed my horn into the ceiling, slicing the tile open. In retrospect, I should have known that stabbing a horn capable of cutting metal into a space I couldn’t see wouldn’t work out well for me. The crack of glass gave me a split-second warning before a flood of fluid dumped onto my head.