Pacific Fire (11 page)

“We crashed,” she said groggily, looking at Sam as if in a state of mild surprise. “Where's Fernando? Is he okay?”

“Fernando's back home. You're hurt.”

“I'm fine. Get out. We might be leaking fuel.”

“Wait for help,” Sam said. He jumped to the ground and came around the front of the plane to meet her on her side. A black object was flattened against the windshield. It looked about the size of a cat, and it had wings.

“Help Sofía,” he called out to Em.

The plane had landed on her belly, pitched forward, the nose settled into a ditch dug by the propeller. Sam climbed the engine cowling and crawled up to the windshield. He smelled iron and shit and the scents of pursuit and of hunger and single-minded intent. These were the smells of an osteomantic hound.

He put his fingers into sticky fur and pried the creature away from the shards of cockpit glass impaling it. Its pinched, apple-doll human face was the dark brown of tobacco spit, of bones soaked in La Brea tar for ten thousand years.

This was a person. It had once been a man or a woman or a boy or a girl, and whatever kind of life it led—an unpleasant one, probably a horrific one—got canceled out when someone decided it was needed for some monstrous service. Sam set it down gently on the engine cowling.

He looked around for Argent's pouch, but the documents were lost, probably blown out of the plane hundreds of feet in the air. All the plans and diagrams of the Catalina facility, gone.

He climbed down to join Em on the ground, and they half pulled and half carried Sofía away from the wreck.

“Good enough,” Sofía said, laboring. “Good enough. Let me sit.”

Em got a pack of gauze from her first-aid kit and put pressure on Sofía's bleeding forehead.

“You're bleeding, too,” Sam observed.

Em wiped blood off her face with her sleeve and waved him off.

“If I'm not crying, I'm okay.”

“Check me for signs of a concussion,” Sofía said. “Is my speech slurred?”

It wasn't.

She continued to give Em directions until Em threatened to set bones that weren't yet broken if she kept trying to be in charge.

Sofía relented. “We were in a straight dive. I had no control. How did we end up on our belly?”

“You must have done something at the last minute,” Sam said. It sounded reasonable.

“We were on
fire
.”

“Maybe the airstream put it out.”

“No. It didn't. What happened?”

“We struck a bat. I found one splattered on the windshield. Maybe another hit the prop.”

Sofía shook her head, then let out a soft, queasy moan. “That's impossible. We were at 2,100 feet when we got hit. Bats don't fly that high.”

“Trust me,” Sam said. “It was a bat.”

Em shined her penlight into Sofía's eyes. “Bats. So what does that mean?”

Sam looked up at the night sky. “It means someone was looking for me in the air.”

“I guess it's lucky I killed it with my beautiful airplane,” Sofía said mournfully.

*   *   *

The San Andreas Abyss was a fissure in the earth where the Pacific and the North American seismic plates met in combat. It snaked northwest from the Salton Sea to the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles before continuing north, beyond the borders of the Southern Californian realm. The Hierarchs of the Southern and Northern kingdoms both conducted osteomantic experiments on it, trying to control it, to bend it to their will, to use it as a weapon. In doing so, they'd ripped it wider and carved it deeper, and gouged a laceration in the earth almost as deep as the Grand Canyon.

The place was feared. It was said to be redolent with osteomantic essences.

Sam and Em and Sofía spent the night shivering and cowering in a nest of boulders. At first light, Em returned to the plane to see if she could bring the radio back to life, but it was too badly damaged by the crash. There was no emergency beacon to summon help, because if Sofía ever crashed during a job, the last thing she'd ever want was to let people know where she was.

In a different set of circumstances, they might have remained here a day to rest Sofía, who was suffering headaches and nausea and sometimes seemed confused. But Sam didn't like the way the earth around them rumbled. Grains of sand popped from the ground like droplets in a freshly poured glass of soda pop. Larger rocks cascaded down the canyon walls. Sam had been through earthquakes before, but these tremors felt different.

“Let's get moving,” he said. “Maybe we can find somewhere to climb out.”

They discussed the idea of fashioning a litter from the wreck, but Sofía was adamant that she could walk. Slowly, painfully, they trudged miles west, where eventually the canyon walls would be lower. Strata in the vertical faces twisted like layers in a swirl cake. Only a narrow seam of blue sky was visible between the walls.

After an hour, they forced Sofía to sit on a rock. She was white as newsprint and shivering.

Em took Sam aside, out of the pilot's earshot.

“She's really not doing well. She needs a doctor.” Em unfolded her map on the shaded ground. “This is just an estimate, but I figure we're about here.” She touched a spot that put them around forty miles outside Desert Hot Springs. “Not exactly a bustling metropolis,” she said, “but they might have a clinic.”

Sam puffed out air. “That'd be a long walk even if we were all healthy. And I don't like the smell of this place.”

Em refolded the map. “What are you smelling?”

“I don't know … something deep. Like, something climbing up through pressure zones. Something that's not happy to be awake.”

“Something unhappy is not a smell.”

“I mean … not a
smell
smell. An osteomantic impression.”

Em cocked her head and regarded him clinically. “I didn't think you had that kind of nose.”

“I don't. But, well, that's what I'm smelling now.”

He began to walk back to Sofía, but Em put a hand on his arm to stop him.

“What happened to you during the crash?”

“Same as you. I was in the plane. We all fell down.”

“I was watching you, Sam.” She made it sound like an accusation. “There were flames outside.”

“Yeah. Something caught on fire. So?”

“There were flames inside, too. Faint, more like a glow. They were coming off you.”

Sam didn't quite remember it that way. But he remembered feeling like he was flying, even as the plane dropped. He remembered feeling something in his bones, a heat hotter than fire, but one that didn't burn.

“Maybe I did have something to do with the flames,” he admitted. For some reason, he felt sheepish about it, as if she'd caught him naked. “For a few seconds there, it felt like I was doing something. I don't know what, but like I was powerful and doing something. Never felt that way before.”

“Daniel's osteomancy is very deep, isn't it?”

The abrupt change of subject left Sam momentarily confused. “Yes,” he said, recovering.

“He doesn't just work magic from freshly consumed bone, but also magic deep in his system, from things he ate long ago?”

“That's right.”

“And it's not only the magic he deliberately consumes, is it? He can draw up osteomantic essences from the ground, and from the air. It's like osmosis with him.”

“His father brought him up to do that. So?”

She hesitated, her face grave, as if she were breaking some bad news to him. “Sam, you should be one of the most powerful osteomancers on earth. Maybe stronger than Daniel. But you never really have been.”

Sam didn't like where she was going.

“Did it ever occur to you,” she continued, drawing it out slowly, as if she was still deciding whether or not to say what was on her mind, “that Daniel's been draining your magic?”

“No,” he said. “It never has.”

Which was a lie.

Daniel kept telling him how stuffed with osteomantic power he should be. He was grown from the Hierarch's cells. So why wasn't he as strong as the Hierarch? Why wasn't he as strong as Daniel? And why was Daniel able to retain so much osteomancy when he'd eaten so little magic since leaving Los Angeles?

Daniel was a sponge. He'd told Sam so himself. When fighting the Hierarch, he'd drawn magic from the air the people of Los Angeles exhaled, and from the water vapor, and from the earth.

What if he'd been drawing magic from Sam?

Sam didn't want to believe it. But now that the thought was out in the open, he knew he'd never be free of it.

“That's bullshit,” he said.

The ground shivered. A dim moan rose up from great depths.

*   *   *

Sofía seemed to gain some strength as their long march in the Abyss wore on. It took more and more work to convince her to rest, and she asked Em for her shotgun back. Sam hung behind, indulging himself in angst and worry.

The canyon walls were still oppressively high. With the ground's every jerk and shudder, he felt as if he'd stepped on a squeaky board and drawn attention.

Em kept up a steady conversation with Sofía, maybe to pass the time, but more likely to see how she was dealing with the effects of her head injury.

“He was a foot soldier in the Alejandro's operation,” Sofía was saying. “Not high up. He never even met the man himself. But it was steady work, tax free.”

Em had asked how she met Fernando.

“I was a pilot for the Department of Water and Power. This was before Gabriel Argent, back when William Mulholland was running it. Mostly I just took up DWP engineers for inspections. Dams, aqueducts, the mandala, that kind of thing. One day I'm on the airstrip in Santa Monica, about to fly solo to Pyramid Lake, when I see a bunch of clowns in commando gear raiding the airport. They're throwing grenades and shooting things up and all that sort of crap. The Alejandro was making a strike against the chief water mage, and how stupid is that, right? So, there I am, in my plane, and I figure my best bet is to buzz off and get in the air and ignore all the bullshit on the ground and just make my pickup in Pyramid Lake. Save my life, earn my paycheck.”

“Makes sense,” Em said.

“So I'm revving up, and then there's this guy standing a couple yards in front of my nose. He's all dressed up, helmet, goggles, body armor, and a gun bigger than he is, aimed right at my head. I figure, screw this idiot, I'm going to push my propeller at him and put him in the wood chipper. But just before I release the brake, he pulls down his goggles. He's got a baby face, and a ridiculous mustache, and his eyes … He's looking at me like I'm the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. I swear, it was just like that. And he puts his gun on the ground. And he walks over to my passenger side and knocks on the door. Shave and a haircut.”

Sofía shook her head and laughed, a little sunlight in the valley.

“And I let him in. He says it was love at first sight. I say it was love at first year and a half. But, anyway, I haven't been able to get rid of him since.”

Sam had heard enough to knock him out of his sullen funk. He jogged a few steps to catch up to Em and Sofía, and something below cracked like a redwood tree snapping in two. The ground jolted hard and threw him into the sand.

Fissures snaked up the canyon walls, dislodging huge slabs of rock that crashed down like bombs. Loose dirt boiled up through new scars in the earth. Sam struggled to his feet, blinded and choked by billowing clouds of dust. Blunt pillars of stone emerged from the earth, wide as oil barrels, orange as ingots in a furnace. Sam only glimpsed them before they were lost behind the dust, but they looked like colossal fingers, digging their way from a grave. The fingers broke though entirely in an explosion of dirt and rocks and uprooted creosote. An entire hand rose on a treelike wrist, soaring ten feet in the air. The fingers closed with the sound of stone grating against stone.

“Run,” Sam coughed.

Sam and Em and Sofía lurched and stumbled over the shaking, shifting terrain. Tremendous booms sounded behind them, maybe just boulders impacting the ground, but too much like the footfalls of some enormous creature.

Despite knowing better, Sam turned and looked behind him.

Swirling grit abraded his eyes, but through his tears, he saw towers of boulders and clots of earth, entwined in plant roots, and a skin of rock that crackled and steamed, and magmatic crust cooling in air. At the summit of the formation was a great potato-shaped lump of stone the size of a garden shed, with asymmetrical fissures where eyes might have been. It was only a glimpse before it faded behind the storming dust, but Sam knew what he'd seen.

He dropped to one knee and pawed through his duffel for Daniel's osteomancy kit. Inside, he found the bone of the dead osteomancer Dolores Shenandoah. It was bitter as charcoal and crumbled easily between his teeth. He chased it with vials of oils and pinches of acrid powder, not even bothering to look at or smell what he was consuming. He was dimly aware of Em and Sofía calling his name, but he didn't turn around. He stood and faced the thing from the abyss, even as its thundering footsteps came closer.

The magic he'd eaten wouldn't be enough. He would have to combine it with the magic that lived submerged in his bones, that he'd never truly been able to draw out. But now, he better, because Daniel wasn't around to fight his battles for him.

And neither was Daniel here to drain his magic.

He reached for sense memories, the smells and tastes and tactile sensations of the magic he knew was in him, deep in his cells and raging fresh from the magic he'd just eaten. But he felt no ancient energies flowing through his blood, no lightning crackling over his hands.

He should run.

Time slowed, shifting from biological to geological pace, and everything blurred with motion. Every stone and swirl of dust and sound blended into a high-pitched buzz, as if the world were constructed of hummingbirds.