Pacific Fire (12 page)

Sam hurt. His skin felt agonizingly raw, exposed to thin, frigid air. The sunlight sneaking through the top of the Abyss burned. He was no longer a creature of the surface world. He belonged deep down, in the crushing, molten realm of the king of the center of the world: the axis mundi dragon.

“Fall,” he said.

The creature was undone. Its stone fingers plummeted to the ground, tossing up plumes of earth. A leg caved in, and its entire body tilted. The great head slid off its shoulders, slowly at first, hampered by friction and teetering on a nodule of stone, then breaking free and crashing to earth.

A mournful groan shook the ground, sending up storms of birds and insects.

When the dust settled, there was no creature, only the aftermath of an avalanche. Whatever it was, Sam had reduced it to split rocks and gravel. He stood in the center of his handiwork, truly an osteomancer.

If only Daniel could see him now.

And then his sense of triumph dampened. What if Em was right? What if this moment couldn't have happened with Daniel present?

“Sam?”

Em's voice. It was barely more than a squeak.

She was among a scattering of stones, some the size of bowling balls, some merely pebbles. Her skin and clothes were coated in the light brown of desert earth. Tears traced muddy paths down her face.

She was disassembling a pile of rocks. At first, Sam didn't understand what she was doing. Then he saw a bloody, mangled hand emerging from the rubble.

“Help me,” Em croaked.

Together, they excavated Sofía. Her face looked as if it had been slapped with a bloody rag mop. Her nose was smashed flat. Scents of blood and stress hormones and the last tinges of adrenaline wafted from her body. Sam blocked those scents out. Sofía didn't need medicine, she needed magic. She needed him. Osteomancy meant forcing one's will over nature, and what mattered was not the patient, but the osteomancer.

Sam dug for odors of healing, of renewal. He reached for green smells, starfish and newts and regeneration. The sense memories broke through like a flood-shattered dam and surged from the deepest places and filled his hands.

He sliced his wrist open and bled into Sofia's open mouth, into her pores.

Em straddled Sofía's motionless form and started CPR.

Sam lost track of time. He bled until a gray film covered his vision, and everything grew distant, until Em dragged him away and he was too weak to stop her. She bandaged his wrist and made him sit in the sand.

“We lost her,” she said.

Impossible. He'd performed a great feat of magic. He'd found the power in his bones. He'd found the connection between his cells and the center of the earth. It was magic worthy of Daniel. Worthy of the Hierarch.

And yet there Sofía lay.

He'd lost her.

Fernando had lost his wife. Mayra and Ana and Miguel had lost their mother.

Sam had performed a great feat of magic and lost.

 

EIGHT

Daniel was a boy of twelve, sitting in the passenger seat of a stolen car while his mother drove down a ribbon of asphalt. The dusty farm fields of Central California stretched into the distance. In the east, the hint of the cold Sierra mountains loomed behind clouds.

He watched his mother drive in silence for a while, the muscles in her forearms tensing as she gripped the wheel. Her squinting stare made a circuit of the rearview mirror, driver's-side mirror, passenger-side mirror, view to the sides, view to the horizon. It never seemed to land on Daniel.

He wanted to put his head in her lap, like he used to do when he was small, and sleep away horrors. Only hours ago, the Hierarch's men stormed into the house he shared with his father and murdered him on the living room floor. They cut him apart with their long knives, and then the Hierarch himself arrived to eat him. He brought his own fork.

“How much longer?” Daniel asked.

A truck passed them, towing an open trailer of tomatoes, and she kept her hand on the gun between the seats until the truck was half a mile away.

“Just a few more hours,” she said.

“No, I mean until I see you again.”

“Oh. We won't see each other for another twenty years, Daniel.”

He understood he was sick and in pain and dreaming, and they passed the next several miles in silence.

“I still don't understand why you didn't take me with you to San Francisco.”

Now she did look at Daniel, and her face wasn't as he remembered it, but older. Time had hardened her features, made her jaw stronger, ground away the softness of her youth to leave truer stone behind.

“Otis told you why,” she said.

“But Otis lies.”

“The border crossing was too dangerous. And I wasn't sure my friends in the Northern Kingdom were still my friends. I knew you'd be safer with him.”

“But you took my brother.”

“As a decoy. If our enemies thought I'd left Los Angeles with you, they wouldn't look for you as hard in LA. Doesn't that make sense?”

Daniel didn't have to think about it, because he'd already spent twenty years thinking about it. “Yes,” he said. “My brother … my golem … he died. He was shot at the border. He died in a strawberry field.”

He watched the way her throat moved when she swallowed, and when she spoke again, he heard a roughness that most people would have missed. Messalina Sigilo was good at hiding her emotions from most people, but not Daniel.

“He didn't die,” she said. “I saved him. I helped make him great.”

“Why didn't you save me?”

She didn't answer, and he put his head in her lap. She took her hand off the gun and ran her fingers through his hair, and he closed his eyes and awoke.

He was in a strange place with a familiar face looking down on him.

He tried to speak, but his throat and mouth produced only a sound like air leaking from a hose.

He needed to know if Sam was okay.

“Sam brought you to our safe house outside Thermal after you were poisoned with tsuchigumo toxins. Which, of course, meant we had to discontinue that safe house. We're in the Funeral Mountains now. You've been here for two days, mostly perspiring all over our sheets. I did a pretty good job knitting you back up, and your own osteomantic defenses helped, but you're not recovered yet. A few more days, I think.”

He brought her face into focus. She was silver haired, with the gray eyes and long, graceful nose of an Emma. This one was the doctor, the leader of the Mojave cell.

He tried to sit up, but the old Emma gently pushed him back down, and he didn't have the strength to resist her. She smelled his breath and hair and took his hands and smelled his fingernails. His hands seemed far off, like things that belonged to someone else.

“You almost didn't make it this time,” the Emma said. “But there's always tomorrow.”

Daniel licked his lips. They felt like fish scales.

“Where's Sam?”

She hesitated, just a beat, long enough for Daniel to nurture a sense of dread.

“Where's Sam?” he said again.

“Gone to slay a dragon.”

Daniel propped himself up on his elbows and saw dark spots. He took a breath and closed his eyes until the spots cleared, then swung his aching legs over the side of the bed and put his feet down on the hardwood floor. The floor was deliciously warm. Lying down and resting his cheek against it would feel great, he imagined.

“You really are in no shape for this,” Emma said.

“Better shape than Sam. If he makes it to Catalina, they'll vivisect him.” He shot her an accusing glare. “Dammit, Emma, Otis is running Catalina. You know how badly he wants Sam. How could you let him go?”

“We did try to keep him. We locked away the documents you got from Gabriel Argent and posted guards at the motorpool and gate. But he had an accomplice. One of our own. The good news is at least he's not alone.”

Daniel forced himself upright. He felt like he was standing on the ceiling and about to come crashing down. Emma put a steadying hand on his shoulder. After a moment, his gravity normalized. He found his clothes neatly folded on a chest of drawers.

“Who's with him? Someone experienced?”

“She goes by Em.”

“Em. I've met her, right? She's only…”

“She's eighteen now.”

“Sam ran off with a girl. Great. Guess I have to give the kid points for style.” He stepped into his blue jeans.

“Em is a girl who is personally responsible for the liberation of three captive golems and has participated in the liberation of at least a dozen more. She's had sniper training, experience with munitions, and has been shot three times. I don't know why she went with Sam, but it's lucky for him she did.”

“I need a car,” Daniel said. “And gas. And food and supplies.”

“You'll have it. We know how to outfit a mission.”

“Will I have your help? A team of Emmas would—”

“As I told Sam, your firedrake is outside our interests.”

“Even though one of your own is with Sam?”

“Even so,” the Emma said.

Daniel expected nothing different from her. As a network, the Emmas were brave, principled, generous, and self-sacrificing. The Emma he'd known best had sacrificed her life for him. But they were single-minded in their purpose, and that was something Daniel could understand.

He buttoned up his old chambray shirt. It comforted him and made him feel a tiny bit stronger, like cotton armor. “Where's my jacket?”

“Try the coat closet,” Emma said. “What's your plan?”

Daniel shrugged on his jacket. “My plan is hoping all the things I'm scared of haven't happened yet.”

*   *   *

He entered the ranger station, fairly certain the cabin's half-collapsed roof would elect to finish itself off when he was under a beam. Small things scurried in a wet mulch of pine needles and fallen shingles, and the odors of shit and piss and mildew contributed to the sense that the entire house-sized structure was a dark, humid forest.

He went over to a peeling desk. Ministry of Wilderness brochures and various papers formed a sodden pile amid more pine needles and splintered shingles. The Ministry was one of many institutions in the Hierarchy that faded into unfunded deaths after Daniel killed the Hierarch. He supposed the world was a better place without the bastard old wizard, but not as good as it ought to be.

He brushed mouse droppings aside with a wad of decomposing paper and picked up the receiver of the desk phone without much optimism. The Emmas didn't have phone service in their new safe house yet, but they said they'd restored the phone line here. It seemed impossible that anything in the ranger station could withstand decay and rodent teeth for more than a few days. But, to his surprise, he got a dial tone. He punched a number and listened to rings, and was surprised for a second time when someone picked up.

“Hello?” said a male voice. It was Fernando Bautista.

“This is Daniel. You know me. We've worked together.”

“Is this a secure line?”

If the Emmas had set it up, it was a very secure line. Probably.

“Can't be sure. I'm looking for my boy.”

“He's not here.”

That meant Sam wasn't there at present, but had been. Otherwise, Fernando would have said that he hadn't seen him.

“Any word on when he might return?”

“No word.”

This didn't sound good.

“None?” Daniel said, to make sure he wasn't misunderstanding him, or that they'd got their phone protocol mixed up.

“No word,” Fernando repeated.

This was bad. That meant that not only had his wife not returned from the flight, but that he'd gotten no word from her that she'd delivered her cargo and was on her way back. Daniel's mind ran through all the implications of her silence, and none finished in happy conclusion.

“I need to take off,” Daniel said. “Any tips?”

He wanted to fly out and trace the route Sofía would have taken and search for wreckage. If he found none, he'd continue to Catalina in hopes of heading Sam off.

“Goddamnit, Blackland, if I could get my hands on another plane you think I'd help you get a flight? Maybe everything's fine but she can't communicate for some reason. Maybe she made her destination and got into trouble. Maybe she's lost somewhere out there. If I could get another plane, I'd be in the air right now looking for her.”

Even on a reasonably secure line, it wasn't like Fernando to completely disregard protocol. Bautista was a careful man, rational and measured. But Daniel knew how much he loved his family. In the background, he could make out children's voices.

“I'll find them,” Daniel said.

He set down the receiver, already feeling like he'd just made a broken promise.

He picked up the phone again and dialed the downtown Los Angeles headquarters of the Department of Water and Power. It only rang once before someone picked up. If he'd called the Ministry of Osteomancy or Labor or Justice, he would have been shocked at the quick response. But Gabriel Argent was a monster of efficiency.

“Department of Water and Power, how may I direct your call?”

“What a spectacularly good question,” Daniel said.

Hi, this is the regicidal maniac Daniel Blackland, and I'd like to speak to the realm's chief water mage regarding the location of the Hierarch's golem, whom I misplaced on my way to sabotage the weapons project of LA's most dangerous powers. Can you connect me, please?

He hung up.

The cabin was equipped with a kitchenette. There were probably raccoons in the cupboards and possums in the stove, but the sink was clear of standing water. Daniel had an idea. He opened the faucet. At first there was nothing but a choked hiss, but after a few seconds, a stuttering trickle of brown water coughed out. It gradually gained strength, if not clarity. From the osteomancy kit the Emmas lent him to replace the one Sam absconded with, he took out the torch, bone crucible, and copper needle. He pierced the pad of his index finger deep enough to bring water to his eyes and let three fat ruby drops plunk into the crucible. Dialing the torch to burn indigo, he heated his blood until it darkened to match the flame. He tipped the crucible and let his blood slide down the sink, heavy as mercury. He packed away the kit and let the water run.