Dragon Coast (33 page)

“I trust him,” he said.

“Then stop fighting it.”

It was decided, and they both knew it. But Sam still didn't want to give in to Daniel's magic.

“What about you, Annabel?”

“I have to stay here.”

“But how can you? You're part of me. If I leave, then you—”

“Don't be so full of yourself. You are not my entire universe. And if you are, well, I'm willing to risk death to prove I'm really alive.” She ran a hand across the control panel. “It's good this way. Someone's got to fly this thing.”

A dragon with healing magic at its core? It was too good to believe in.

“Now,” she said. “Do you want to jump, or shall I push?”

Clutching him tight, she pressed her body against his, and they kissed. Just when he was sure he should change his mind and remain with her in the Pacific firedrake, she pulled her hands free.

Sam became untethered, and everything he was—body, mind, magic—flew free.

 

TWENTY-NINE

Gabriel arrived at his office with an empty bag. After twenty minutes of sorting through his desk and shelves and files, the bag remained empty. It turned out there was nothing he wanted to keep. He was tempted to douse the whole place in gasoline and toss in a book of lit matches, but that would be pointless. He'd long ago outfitted all his facilities with quality fire-suppression systems.

Instead, he'd just walk away. One of his lieutenants would inherit a nice corner office with a view. Or maybe they'd seal the doors and leave the place in static perpetuity, like a pharaoh's tomb. Maybe Gabriel's office would serve as a cautionary tale of what happens to good bureaucrats when they try to promote themselves to rulers.

“How long are you going to mope?” Max said from the sofa. He'd been sitting there when Gabriel showed up and remained, silently drinking coffee.

Gabriel wore a patch over his right eye, and he had to turn his head nearly all the way around to see Max. He didn't like moving his head. It brought him nausea and fresh hammers of pain.

“Not much longer. I'm almost done here.”

“Does that mean you're going to stop moping, or you're just going to mope somewhere else?”

“Don't mock me, Max. You don't get to do that anymore.”

Max arched his eyebrows. “Why not?”

Gabriel zipped his still-empty bag shut and stuffed it in the wastepaper basket. “Because you shot me in the head.”

“With a rubber bullet,” Max said, apparently dismayed that Gabriel was even bringing this up.

“In the head, Max. I might have died.”

“But you didn't.” Indeed, Max had managed to drag an unconscious Gabriel to the waiting airplane at the Pulgas Water Temple south of San Francisco, and they were halfway home before Gabriel woke up with a concussion and blind in one eye.

“So, you're packing it all in, just because you're angry with me?”

Gabriel sat on the surface of his desk. It was exhausting to remain upright for longer than a few minutes. “I'm packing it in because you were right to shoot me. The water mage controls a lot of power. The minute he starts to think his job is more than delivering water to the realm, the minute he starts to think he should have his very own firedrake—”

“That's when he becomes another Hierarch,” Max said.

“Yes. And that's when it's time to pack it in.”

“So, you're not going to thank me?”

“No, I'm not going to thank you,” Gabriel said, careful not to raise his voice, because raising his voice made him dizzy. “You shot me.”

“With a rubber bullet.”

“In the head.”

“There are worse places to be shot, Gabriel. Anyway, here, I have something for you.” He got up and dropped a file folder on Gabriel's desk.

“What's this? Going-away present?”

“Status reports from when we were gone.”

Gabriel moved his hand away from the folder as if it were a venomous spider. “This no longer concerns me.”

“Okay,” Max said, opening the folder. The top page was a bullet-point list of priorities, and without realizing he was doing so, Gabriel started reading it.

There'd been a major reduction of water flow on the Ten Flumeway east of La Brea.

Electrical output at the Long Beach wave-generation facility was down 3 percent.

Someone had sabotaged the new dam under construction at Lake Castaic. The intelligence report indicated it was Mother Cauldron's work.

“You shot me, Max.”

“I'm sorry.”

Max hit a button on the wall, and the doors to Gabriel's private elevator opened. Together, they descended to the subbasement, where Gabriel climbed the ladder to his throne, a chair of moderate comfort poised before a sprawling array of switches and wheels. He reached out and opened a valve, and then another, and before long he found himself watching over the realm's water.

Below, standing at the foot of his throne, Max watched over the realm's water mage.

*   *   *

Daniel headed for the storage facility in San Pedro as soon as his boots hit Los Angeles. He rolled up the door and discovered a scene of violence. Bullet casings and fragments of cracked ruhk egg littered the floor. Scorch marks marred the walls.

“Em?”

When there was no answer, he called her name louder: “Em!”

“Back here.” Her voice sounded weak from behind her sandbag barrier.

Daniel squeezed through a gap in the sandbags. Em sat on the folding camp chair in front of the crate, her rifle resting across her lap. Lines of encrusted blood striped her face. One of her eyes was swollen shut. Her left arm was in a sling. She gripped a pistol in her right hand.

The crate containing Sam's golem-body looked as pristine as when Daniel left it in Em's care.

“Did you get the bone?” she said.

“You need a hospital.”

“I need to know if you got the bone.”

Daniel set down his heavy bag, reached in with both hands, and lifted the bone. “Right here.”

Em closed her good eye. “Great,” she said.

He knelt before her and got out a jar of eocorn paste. “Looks like you had company. Who came for him?”

“Who didn't?” she said. “But nobody stayed very long.”

“Of course they didn't. Not with you here.” Gently, he dabbed her swollen eyelid with the paste.

She let out a long breath and smiled lazily. “That's warm. I like it. How'd the job go?”

He thought of Gabriel Argent, shot by Max.

He thought of Ethelinda.

“We got it done,” he said. “Everyone did what they had to do.”

The rest fell to Daniel.

He set up a folding table, little more than a cot, and fussed with a blanket to pad the metal framing. Em handed him a crowbar, and Daniel went to work on the crate. The nails came out with small cracks and squeaks, like extracted teeth. Inside the crate stood a steel tank, about the size of a large water heater. It bothered Daniel that the steel was dull, with lumpy welds like scars. He wished for everything to be clean and precise and sterile. But when was life ever really like that?

He could barely make out the golem's face through a small square of cloudy glass.

“How does this work?” Em asked him.

“Messily. Is there a bucket?”

“Here,” Em said, passing him a yellow plastic pail.

Daniel placed it under a spout at the bottom of the tank and turned the spigot, and whatever osteomantic medium the golem hadn't already soaked up drained out. He waited until the last of it plinked into the bucket.

After unfastening some bolts, Daniel swung the front of the tank open. The golem's body steamed in the cold air. It was Sam's size, but seemed somehow younger, perhaps because its white skin had never been touched by sun, had never been cut or bruised. The body would never be so unharmed as it was in this moment, before its life had begun.

Daniel undid the straps holding the golem upright and maneuvered one of its arms under his shoulders.

“Maybe we should get Moth,” Em said. “I'm not going to be much help with my busted arm.”

“No, I can carry him.”

“You won't prove anything by breaking your back.”

But Daniel ignored her and managed to hoist the golem into a fireman's carry. After only three steps toward the table, he regretted not listening to Em. Yet he got the golem to the table, and he set the body down on its back without dropping it.

The golem lay there, chest rising and falling, eyes open, seeing but not comprehending.

Daniel took a moment to rest before getting out his knife. The blade was copper, a soft metal, but hardened by osteomancy. The cut would need to be deep.

He placed the point of the knife against the golem's skin above its heart. With a breath, he drew an inch-long line down and in. The golem gasped but lay there while Daniel cut it. Blood welled up in the incision, gleaming in the fluorescent lights.

Daniel lifted the
axis mundi
bone and inserted it into the wound. One edge remained above the skin. Daniel pushed it in with the heel of his palm, drawing more blood that ran in strands down the golem's white chest. He held his hand there, over the golem's heart.

The golem breathed. Its heart beat. Its skin felt warm against Daniel's hand. It blinked and swallowed and was by all indications alive. But would it ever be Sam?

Daniel wondered if there was something else he could do. Maybe he should slit his wrists open and bleed his own magic into Sam. Maybe it would give Sam the strength he needed to crawl out of the bone and into the golem's body.

But it didn't work that way. Daniel had brought Sam to the doorstep, and it was up to Sam to walk through the door.

Outside, tugs blew their horns, towing barges down the big canals. He could hear Em's breathing, and his own. The fluorescents buzzed overhead.

It felt more like a death watch than waiting for a birth, and when Em came and held Daniel's other hand, Daniel wondered if that was what it had become.

“You okay?”

It was barely a whisper, but the sound of Sam's voice knocked the air out of Daniel as if he'd been punched.

Daniel leaned over him and brushed his damp hair away from his eyes.

“Yes, Sam. I'm fine.”

Sam blinked as though everything were bright, as if the world was new and everything in his vision a novel, unfamiliar sight. He raised himself halfway up and looked at the blankets, at the walls, at Daniel's face.

“I'm naked,” he said. “I'm naked, and Em's in the room.”

“It's nothing I haven't seen before,” Em said.

“That doesn't make it better. It just means you can make comparisons.”

Daniel tucked the blankets around Sam and pulled them up to give him some cover.

Sam's body gave off heat, and to Daniel, standing near it with Em, each of them holding one of Sam's hands, it felt like nothing so much as warming himself by a campfire.

*   *   *

Dinner itself was just okay, overpriced salads of bitter artisanal lettuce at a Santa Monica bistro, but Sam finally got to do a thing he thought he'd never accomplish: get through a meal with Em without anyone trying to kill them. Afterward, they walked along the beach with their pants rolled up, letting white-foam surf chill their toes.

Sam was telling Em about Annabel Stokes.

“What I don't get is, I'm what the Hierarch ate. And the Hierarch ate her. So why couldn't she heal him? Or the part of him that was leftover in me? Why was he still such an evil bastard?”

“Is that what you're wondering? Or is it really why
you
aren't an evil bastard?”

“Can't anyone just answer a question with an answer? Is that not allowed?”

“I don't know, is it?”

A flock of shorebirds picked the sand with long beaks and fled from a breaker. Sam and Em fled with them, giggling. Sam had never heard Em giggle before. It was unsettling. And wonderful.

“Listen,” he said, “you're a golem of the original Emma Walker. You and all the other Emmas must have thought this through. Haven't you worked it out?”

“You've met my sisters. Do I seem much like them?”

“Not much.”

“And Cassandra ran into more Emmas when she was with Argent and Max up North. It didn't sound like they were much like me.”

“No. They sounded like evil bastards. So, why? Why were they like that but you're not? Why was the Hierarch like that and I'm not?”

Em held his arm and leaned into him. “Because we're not what we eat. We're what we do, and what we sacrifice, and what we love. And if we choose right more often than we choose wrong, we become who we want to be.”

“You mean if we choose right, and we have a lot of luck.”

“Luck,” Em said. “Yeah. We need shitloads of luck.”

Sam covered her hand with his own. His hand, grown from one of his hairs, from a body created by the Hierarch, generated from his own flesh.

Sam had a hand. And a body. He was still alive, here in the cooling night air, here with Em.

No, Sam was not what he ate.

He was friends, and magic, and luck.

*   *   *

Daniel had no photographs of himself with his mother, but he had an empty picture frame that used to contain one. He still remembered the photo. He was about five, on the saddle of a red bike with silver tassels flying back from white handlebar grips. The picture was a little blurry because he was pedaling with a fury. His mother was jogging along, not touching him or the bike, but her hand hovering near the sissy bar to catch him in case he teetered over. They were both grinning like lunatics.

Otis made him get rid of the picture when he was fifteen. It was too dangerous to keep evidence of Daniel's connection to his mother and father. Daniel hated Otis for making him do it, but he understood the wisdom in it, so he burned it in the gas jet of his osteomancer's torch.