Dragon Coast (6 page)

Daniel reached back to sense memories of a Colombian dragon, the sensation of wind whipping past smooth, scaled cheeks, the sight of mastodons stampeding in fright. Sam was a Pacific firedrake, and Daniel's fire wouldn't hurt him. But Daniel would burn these motherfuckers.

He vomited blue flames.

The flames fell short, the soldiers beyond his range. There was one thing to do about that. Without rope and harness, he edged himself to the ledge and began picking his way down.

Digging his fingers into loose earth, he rested one foot on a pancake-sized protrusion of rock. Pain exploded in his calf. Blood ran down his leg. A single gunshot. He held on, the gloved fingers of one hand gripping rock, the other squeezing the
axis mundi
bone.

More shots. One grazed his arm, and he squeezed the bone tighter. Another went through the back of his hand, and he screamed in agony and in frustration. He knew without looking. He could feel it. He could smell it.

The
axis mundi
bone was powder, shrieking away in the high-altitude wind.

Daniel's foot slipped off the rock and he fell. He glanced off a knuckle of stone with rib-cracking impact, slid down gravel, and came to rest with his feet toward the summit and his head hanging over thousands of feet of nothing. He couldn't breathe. Blood from his leg and arm and hand ran down the slope, pooling near his head.

He was supposed to be a mighty sorcerer, and he wasn't going to lose Sam again from a bullet and a fall.

But it wasn't just a bullet and a fall. It was a well-armed and -equipped squadron of quality fighters. It was three airships and lifting gear. It was osteomancy from creatures he didn't know. This wasn't Los Angeles. It had to be the Northern Kingdom.

He tried to move and slipped another inch down the slope. His head hung even farther over the abyss, and only by pressing the palm of his uninjured hand hard against the ground did he keep himself from going over. Helpless, he watched the three airships dip below the mountain, engines straining, carrying Sam away.

 

FIVE

Cassandra Morales dug a hole. It didn't have to be a deep hole, because down in this dry gully on the borders of Los Angeles and Riverside counties it didn't take much work to hide things. There wasn't a human settlement for twenty miles, just brown hills and dusty chaparral. Suburban enclaves with names like Quail Valley and Rainbow and Home Gardens had become ghost towns after Gabriel Argent decided bringing water out here was unsustainable and irresponsible, and once he shut off the spigots, the communities got handed back to coyotes and mountain lions.

Now, here, it was just her and Otis Roth.

“You remember the first words you ever said to me, Otis? I only remember them because you said the same exact thing to all the kids you took in. And you took in a lot of us. ‘I won't harm you. I won't beat you. I won't rape you. Neither will anyone else who works for me. I'm Otis Roth, and nobody will dare.' I guess some of us were comforted by that. In certain circumstances, it could sound kind of nice. But I heard it differently. I heard it more like, ‘I won't harm you unless I want to. Nobody else will harm you, because you belong to me. I'm Otis Roth, and I own you.'”

Her shovel bit into earth.

Otis had taken Cassandra in because her parents owed him money they couldn't pay back, and Cassandra was collateral. Her first night in his warehouse, in her bed with new, stiff sheets, she shoved her face into her pillow and cried as softly as she could. This was her life now. Her parents weren't picking her up tomorrow. She knew how much money they owed, and how much money they usually made on jobs, because she often pretended to be asleep while they talked money and schemes. They would never be able to pay off their debt unless they took on bigger and riskier jobs. They'd probably die trying.

She could run away, but then Otis would have them killed.

As it turned out, they managed to die without Otis's help, only a few months later. It wasn't even a big job, just a payroll robbery that turned into a shootout. The take wouldn't have even made a dent in their debt to Otis.

And it was Otis who came to tell her.

“You tried to lay it on me gently,” Cassandra said, wiping sweat off the back of her neck. She'd probably dug her hole deep enough, but she didn't want animals undoing her work, so she kept tossing up shovelfuls of dirt. “And I think I took it pretty well, considering. No hysterics. No tantrums. There were some of your guys waiting outside my room in case I flipped out and attacked you. But all I did was ask if you were going to set me free now that my parents were dead. I didn't want revenge. I wanted my mom and dad back. But you know me, always the realist. I wasn't going to get what I wanted. So I was willing to settle for my freedom. And you told me, just seconds after I learned my parents were shot up and their bodies being hauled to the city furnaces, that the terms of the contract meant I would remain in your care until the debt was paid or my eighteenth birthday. I think that's when I started crying. But not too much. Remember what you said to comfort me? I'll never forget your kindness. You said, ‘Be patient, Cassandra. It's just until you're eighteen. And you're almost fourteen now.'”

Cassandra was not patient. She was industrious. True to his word, Otis gave her an education. Not in subjects like history and algebra, but his henchminions tutored her in marksmanship and nose-breaking and pickpocketing and, eventually, safecracking. She was a good pupil.

Otis had his own reasons for giving her skills—there was no point in using someone if she wasn't useful. She had her own reasons for accepting his tutelage. Once she turned eighteen, she'd need to make her own way in the world.

A bee landed on the taped-tight bundle of plastic sheeting on the edge of her hole. She shooed it away and kept digging.

Along with marketable skills, she'd also found a bit of higher purpose in Otis's warehouse. Some of the other little thieves Otis took in weren't as self-sufficient as she was. They'd eat sugar three meals a day if you'd let them, or they'd get stupid and try to filch little nuggets of the osteomancy Otis trafficked. They needed a big sister, and Cassandra accepted that as her job. Without anyone to take care of her, she found she was good at taking care of others.

There was one boy in particular who needed her more than most. He was a dark and quiet kid who never spoke at communal dinners up at the big kitchen table. The rumor was that he was the son of some big, high-level osteomancer who worked with the Hierarch himself and grew so powerful that the Hierarch had him killed. In the more sensational version of the story, the Hierarch dined on the boy's father.

As Cassandra later found out, the stories were true.

“That was Daniel, of course. And what a weird, damaged kid. But you know what? He was also sweet. And it turned out we had the same way of dealing with not having anyone to take care of us. We took care of the ones who needed it most. Me and Daniel, and then Moth, and Punch. We took care of each other. We became a little family. And you liked that, Otis. You encouraged it. You teamed us up on jobs, and you made sure we had skills or magic that complemented each other, and we became a really tight crew of thieves. You made an awful lot of money with us.”

Standing shoulder-deep in the hole, she threw her shovel over the top and lifted herself out. It was now a couple of hours past noon, and she'd still have to hike about a mile back to her car, and then a few more hours to the park-and-ride, and depending on traffic, more hours navigating the L.A. canals back home.

“I don't hate you, Otis. And I'm not scared of you. You're not my boogeyman. And as far as my business concerns go, I don't even see you as a rival. In fact, I'm grateful to you. That's how big of a person I am. I can set the immensely shitty things you've done aside and see the things you gave me. You gave me skills, a family, and a purpose. I take care of my own. I do things for my friends that they can't do for themselves. Or won't do, because they're too decent. Daniel should have killed you years ago. You sold him to the Hierarch. You're the reason he lost Sam. If you'd done that to me, I would have killed you without hesitation. But that's Daniel. Anyway. Hey, you remember what you gave my parents when they handed me over to you?”

She picked up her shovel and slid the blade under the plastic-wrapped bundle. With some care, she leveraged Otis's body into the grave.

“You gave them a receipt.”

She threw in the first of many shovelfuls of dirt.

 

SIX

Sam journeyed to the firedrake's belly. He crawled on his hands and knees through moist tunnels and followed twisting passages and descended ladders made of bony ridges embedded in red tissue. He'd never studied dragon anatomy, much less dragon architecture, so all he had for guidance was intuition. But he knew the belly was important.

Trying to control the dragon from the cockpit was useless. All the levers and wheels and knobs and valves did nothing. He couldn't land the dragon, or crash it, or get it to stop burning things, and if this kept up, the death toll would reach into the tens of thousands.

So, Sam decided to give up on piloting the dragon. But maybe he could sabotage it before it hurt someone else he cared about, or even a total stranger. Sabotage was just breaking things with purpose. Sam knew how to break things.

His boots squelched on the soft floor of a down-sloping passage. Like the other parts of the dragon he'd explored, it was littered with bones and fragments of bones. He picked up a triangular shard that came to a terribly sharp point. A strange urge took hold of him, and he scraped his name into the side of the tunnel. Ancient cave paintings, prison-wall scrawls, graffiti on the sides of buses, and names gouged in the internal tissues of monsters: Sam was now part of a very old tradition of defacing surfaces for reasons that were hard to articulate. He understood the human need to communicate, but communication required an audience.

“Well, I just tagged a dragon,” he said. And then he regretted opening his mouth. He hadn't spoken out loud in a long time, and his own voice unsettled him. It sounded like that of a stranger he ought to know, or a person familiar to him who ought to be a stranger.

He continued his descent, marking his way with more slashes in the dragon's tissues. He didn't want to get lost inside here.

The sound of pumping blood grew stronger, humming behind the tissue walls. The scent of pyrogenic fuel grew stronger.

It was also getting hotter, the air cooking his skin, his eyes, his gums. Sweat rained down his face and the back of his neck. He felt like soup. Osteomancers should strive not to sweat, bleed, or weep. Osteomancers liked to keep their magic essences contained inside their bodies until needed. Daniel taught him this when Sam was seven years old and they were camping in the Inyo Forest, on the run from a leech gang. Sam had tripped on a sapling and cut his knee open. He bit his lip to cry silently, and Daniel told him how an osteomancer was a vessel of precious magic, and that the vessel had to remain whole, and even then Sam could tell that Daniel himself thought this was a ridiculous thing to say to a child with a bleeding knee.

Sam sponged his face with his sleeve and kept going.

He arrived at a vast chamber where the walls bent inward and soared to a pink ceiling some fifty feet high. A gigantic fleshy sack hung from tubes the color of raw beef.

There was a smell here. Old, deep osteomancy, like refined bone simmering for days on the back burner, breaking down into pure, rich magic. Lights wavered like flames behind the translucent skin of the bag. This must be the source of the dragon's flames.

He craned his neck to peer into the murky air above. The fuel likely passed through the tubes, and from there to the lungs, then to the air pipe, and out the mouth. So, what if Sam climbed the bag and severed the tubes?

They were the width of wine barrels, so he'd need to craft a good saw.

Not to mention climbing gear.

Some climbing skills might be useful as well.

He walked around the sack, pushing through searing heat. If he cut through the tubes or the sack, the fuel might gush out, but not without burning or drowning him or maybe both.

He missed Em. She was pretty good at things like climbing and running around. She had all those commando and saboteur skills that Sam found sexy.

She was also good with ideas. And she could make Sam feel like the fate of the world didn't rest solely on his narrow shoulders. He wished they'd had more than just a few days together. He'd never even gotten to kiss her.

“Who the hell are you?” A girl jumped out at him as he rounded the curve of the bag. Rosy-cheeked, she wore a high-necked white blouse and a plaid skirt, with a matching ribbon in her curly black hair. She gripped a femur of some creature like a ball bat, and the way she was holding it made Sam think she was very close to tee-balling his head.

Sam gathered his composure. He didn't know what was going on, who or what this girl was, what kind of threat she presented, but instead of fear, his overwhelming emotion was one of relief.

He wasn't alone.

“Hi. My name's Sam,” he said.

“Sam. Well, you scared the hell out of me, Sam. You must be the one banging around upstairs.” She didn't lower her club.

“How long have you been … here?” he asked.

“Let's get out of the fire belly before we talk. It's hotter than the devil's crotch in here.”

Sam was only too happy to. She made him lead the way back out to the passageway, far enough from the chamber until the heat was more bearable.

She considered him a moment, then lowered her club.

“Annabel Stokes,” she said, wiping her hand on her skirt and offering it for a shake.

The feel of her calloused palm startled him.

It felt real. It felt like a hand.