Pacific Fire (6 page)

Sam ran back to Daniel and dropped to his side.

The spear shaft had fallen out of Daniel's back. With his knife, Sam sliced through Daniel's T-shirt and examined the wound. The only sign of the spear tip was charred skin around the puncture wound. It must have dissolved into Daniel's body, which was bad news, because it meant the entirety of whatever osteomancy it contained was now fully absorbed by Daniel's system.

Sam turned him over. His eyes were open and distant, as though he were staring at something beyond the sky.

“Daniel?”

No response.

“Daniel!” Sam slapped him across the face, hard enough to make his hand sting.

Nothing. His flesh looked like ash.

He pressed two fingers against his throat, certain he'd find a pulse, because he didn't know what to do if there wasn't any. Daniel's skin was dry and cool. There was no hint of a heartbeat.

They had protocols for what Sam was supposed to do if Daniel was killed. He was supposed to leave Daniel behind. Even in a burning house. Even in the middle of a crowded parking lot. Or in a gas station on a desolate highway. He was supposed to get as much distance from the threat as he could, whether that meant driving away in their car or carjacking a passing motorist. He was not supposed to look back.

There was a different protocol if Daniel died in a manner such that Sam had time to deal with his corpse. He was supposed to dine on him and add Daniel's magic to his own.

A grasshopper alighted on Daniel's ear, crawling with its sharp feet across the soft skin of his earlobe. There would be insects and crows, and they would make a meal of Daniel's corpse and be transformed by his magic into things more wondrous.

Sam took in a long, slow breath. When he released it, it came out as a sob.

He snatched the grasshopper off Daniel's ear and crushed it in his palm.

He would heal Daniel.

The Hierarch had eocorn and hydra in his blood, and that meant Sam did, too. The hydra was a polycephalic serpent with such potent regenerative magic that it could lose its head and regrow a new one. And the eocorn, a Pleistocene-era unicorn, was the very essence of renewal.

Sam held up his hand to his face and inhaled. He smelled the road, and he smelled the sour stink of his own panic. He knew there was more than that in him.

Any osteomancer could craft mixtures of bone. A good osteomancer could consume magic and use their body to increase the power of what they consumed. But a great osteomancer could find in themselves the barest trace of magic and bring it to the surface.

Sam imagined green, fungal scents. Mushrooms. Earth. An almost sickening, gelatinous flesh smell. Things that reminded him of starfish and salamanders and a basic, fundamental sense of life. Things that Daniel tried to teach him to dig out from his own cells.

“I am Daniel Blackland's student and the Hierarch's heir,” said Sam.

He pried out the largest blade of his pocketknife and drew it across his palm, letting it dig deep. Blood and pain welled up from the cut, and he let it fall into Daniel's parted lips.

Daniel's eyelids fluttered and opened.

He took a shallow breath.

His eyes closed again, like a fading light.

*   *   *

Sam had to drive twenty-five miles until he found another gas station with a phone. In the backseat, Daniel dangled from his shoulder harness. Every several seconds, he would take a ragged breath that sounded like radio static. An awful sound, but good, because it meant he was still alive.

Sam left him in the truck.

A pay phone was mounted on the wall next to a humming ice machine. Sam grabbed the receiver, smearing blood from his palm on the sun-heated plastic. He put it to his ear. Several jabs of the switch hook produced no dial tone.

He barged into the gas station's snack shop, jangling the tin bell tied to the door handle with string. Behind the counter, a bored-looking guy in his late teens slumped on a stool, sipping from a bottle of Mexican Coke. His name tag said
CHAS
.

“I need your phone.”

Chas peered at Sam through long bangs hanging over his eyes.

“There's a pay phone outside.”

“It's broken. This is an emergency.”

Chas regarded Sam. Then he regarded his Coke. Then he regarded the phone behind the counter.

“Is it long distance?”

Sam vaulted over the counter, sending Chas teetering back on his stool.

“I don't have a key to the safe, man, just what's in the drawer, seriously, just take it.”

Sam lifted the receiver. “I'm not going to rob … Oh, whatever. Yeah, give me what's in the drawer.” Sam might need more cash on the road.

While Chas scrambled to gather up the contents of the cash drawer, Sam dialed a number.

From here, he could only see the top of Daniel's head in the truck.

“Do you want an envelope or a bag or what?” Chas said, showing Sam a meager stack of bills.

“You got a rubber band?”

Chas searched around a bucket of lollipops on the counter. “I got a paper clip. Is a paper clip okay?”

“Sure, fine.”

After seven rings, someone finally picked up the line.

“I want to order a pizza,” Sam said before the person on the other end could speak.

There was a long pause. Then, a woman's voice: “What's your address?”

That was not a question Sam ever expected to answer over the phone, to a stranger.

“I'm at a gas station about forty miles north of Thermal.”

“Toppings?”

That meant
Are you being pursued?

“Meatballs,” he said. “Sliced.”

Yes. But current pursuers dead.

“We can't deliver,” the woman said. “It'll have to be carry-out.”

“Okay. Where's your store?”

“You know I can't give you an address.”

“We've ordered pizza from you before.”

“No addresses over the phone. But if you can find us, there's a twenty-five percent discount. Plus double anchovies and chicken.”

Twenty-five percent. Double that, and it meant Sam would be looking for a place about fifty miles away. Anchovies meant look for a river. Around here, there was no such thing as flowing water, so he was probably looking for a dry gulch. And something to do with chicken.

“This is urgent. Can you please just tell me where you are?”

“Good-bye.” A click, and the phone went dead.

Sam put down the receiver.

“Oh, god,” Chas said. “You're going to keep me as a hostage.”

“What? No I'm not. Why do you think…?”

“Because that's what hostage-takers do. They make demands, and one of them is always a pizza.”

Sam plucked the wad of cash from his hand. “You're in luck, Chas. The pizza place doesn't do deliveries.”

*   *   *

An hour of driving with Faith's map as a guide brought Sam to a cracked-earth wash. Stacked boulders loomed over sparse scrub. He came to a granite slab with water-eroded hollows, forming the eye sockets and nasal cavity of a skull. Half a mile past that, he found a track cutting through fan palms and scrub oak. With only some darting roadrunners for company, he drove on until coming to a weathered rail fence, crowned in coiled razor wire.

Three low buildings on the other side of the fence stretched in parallel lines the length of a city block. The chicken farm was no longer in operation, but the smell of chicken shit and slaughter clung to the earth. The odor wasn't too strong, but thinking about its source made Sam uneasy. He didn't eat meat, and especially not eggs. The sight of a golden, gelatinous yolk made him think of his own origins, a little nub of a person suspended in an electrified flask deep within one of the Hierarch's workshops.

“You take me to the best places,” said Sam.

Daniel moaned softly and took a thin, wheezing breath.

“Hang on a little longer, Daniel. Okay?”

Daniel's head wobbled.

Tucked away from the chicken barns in a stand of piñyon pines was a sprawling log house. One of the trees had a tree house in the upper branches. A sniper's nest. Someone was probably up there now, looking at Sam through crosshairs.

Sam got out of the truck.

A copper bell mottled with green patina was bolted to one of the gateposts. He jiggled the string hanging from it, making some rude-sounding clangs.

A woman came down the path from the house and up to the gate.

“Who are you?” she said from the other side of the fence.

She was maybe in her early twenties. Sam took in her frank, gray eyes. Her long nose. The pale skin of her face and her prominent cheekbones.

Sam recognized her. Or thought he did. Like him, she was a golem, in her case grown from the cells of the osteomancer who developed the art of golem-making, Emmaline Walker. How many Emmas were running around in the world, Sam didn't know, but he and Daniel had stayed with Emmas in the past. They ran a sort of underground railroad with safe houses all across the kingdom, dedicated to helping as many other golems as they could.

“I'm the guy who ordered the pizza. I'm Sam.”

“And in the backseat?”

“It's Daniel.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“You brought his body?”

“He's still alive. He needs help. Hydra and eocorn and someone who knows how to use them.”

She did some business on the other side of the gate with bolts and latches and swung the fence open.

“Drive up to the house,” she said.

Sam parked in the shade of some trees. Four women came out with a litter and took Daniel inside. They differed in age, hair color and style, sun exposure, musculature, and clothing, but otherwise resembled each other. Feeling helpless, he followed them inside.

Sam had never been in a nicer safe house. In fact, he'd never been in any kind of house this nice. The rugs gave a little squish when he walked on them. The log furniture was draped with blankets and throw pillows, and while the curtains were shut to prevent anyone on the outside from snooping or targeting, lamps cast a warm glow. This didn't feel like a temporary place. It felt like a home.

They took Daniel into a room and eased him onto a bed. A fifth Emma was already waiting there. This one had steel-gray hair and a keener face than the rest, softness hewn away by wear. She leaned over Daniel and pried open his eyelids to examine his pupils. She felt his pulse, smelled his breath.

“We were attacked by some kind of osteomantics,” Sam said, handing her one of the bone-tipped spears.

She smelled it and held it up to the light. Feeling Daniel's forehead with ropy, calloused hands, she told one of the other Emmas—the young one who'd met him at the gate—to go fetch her red box.

“I gave him some eocorn and hydra,” Sam said. “It seemed to help a little.”

“You fed him raw, I suppose? From your own body?” The corner of her mouth rose in a half smile. Every Emma Sam had met wore some version of that smile. There was always something superior about it.

“It's all I had. It's not like we go around carrying a pharmacy.”

“You and Daniel can't sneeze without spreading a cloud of osteomancy for miles. You especially, little Hierarch.”

Sam ignored the taunt.

“Can you help him?”

The Emma's expression grew kind, which scared Sam.

The Emma she'd sent out returned with the box, and the old Emma dug out several tiny glass vials full of oils and powders. She arrayed them on a tray, and then, from the box, took a stainless-steel syringe the size of a road flare.

“Let her work,” the younger Emma said, taking Sam by the arm.

“No, I'll stay with him.”

“Do that and you risk being poisoned yourself,” the old Emma said. “This room's sealed for fumes. You'll wait outside.”

The young Emma gently but insistently pulled Sam to the door. “She'll do everything she can.”

Reluctantly, Sam let himself be led away.

 

FOUR

The Venice Boardwalk was alive and festive on a warm Friday afternoon. Shoppers drifted in and out of the stalls, buying cheap sunglasses and gimmick T-shirts and bongs. Skateboarders slalomed around pedestrians. It was a day for getting henna tattoos on sun-browned legs and for dropping coins into buskers' guitar cases. Gabriel wished he could park himself at a café patio and order a fluffy iced drink and watch the sun set over the blue lifeguard towers. Instead, he and Max crossed the beach to a storm drain outlet exposed by the low tide.

Gabriel showed his identification to a group of LAPD officers milling around a yellow tape barrier. The cops stood up a little straighter and lifted the tape for him and Max to duck under. There were no cops on the other side of the tape, only Gabriel's Department of Water and Power people and a corpse.

Gabriel went to the senior DWP officer, a woman named Tate, who'd worked for him for almost a decade. She wasn't intimidated by him, but she was clearly perplexed that he was here.

“Our chief is a poor delegator,” Max volunteered by way of explanation.

“Any trouble from the police?” Gabriel asked Tate.

“A little territorial pissing, but we straightened it out.”

Homicide investigation wasn't part of Gabriel's portfolio, but this morning, a red light showed up on his mandala map, and a phone call revealed that lifeguards had found a corpse in the Venice Beach storm drain. Not in itself a completely unusual occurrence, but there were enough circumstances about this one that Gabriel decided to have a look, even if it put law enforcement's noses out of joint. After the Hierarch's fall, the LAPD reorganized themselves as an independent operation. Street-gang warfare and organized crime had declined, but only because the police supplanted them. And the cops weren't reckless enough to declare war on the Department of Water and Power.

Gabriel approached his workers, busy waving sand fleas away from the sheet-covered body. He knelt and peeled back the sheet himself.