Pacific Fire

by Greg Van Eekhout

  What made Sam most bitter was knowing that Daniel was right to do so.

  Valerie came down from the mound and began picking her way across the field toward them.

  “Who’s your friend?” Daniel asked.

  “Her name’s Valerie. Met her at the grocery. Didn’t tell her anything she shouldn’t know.”

  “I have to fog her with lamassu.”

  “No, you don’t,” Sam whispered, sad and angry and a little desperate. “I said I didn’t tell her anything.”

  “I believe you. But I don’t want her to be able to tell anyone what kind of car we drove off in, or which direction we were headed. And the less she can say about you, the better.”

  The lamassu was an extinct winged lion from the Fertile Crescent. Its fossils carried psionic properties, and if Daniel exuded it from his pores and touched Valerie, her memories would become confused. She wouldn’t remember Daniel. She might not remember anything about this morning, or about Sam.

  All Daniel needed to do was touch her.

  Arriving at Sam’s side, she stood close, a maddeningly intimate distance, and took his hand. Her grip on him was cool and firm, and she directed a frank, challenging gaze at Daniel.

  No, there would not have been awkward passings in the hallway. She would have been a good friend. She would have been an ally.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Daniel said.

  “Valerie, meet my uncle,” Sam said, becoming an accessory to poison.

  Valerie let go of Sam’s hand and offered it to Daniel, and Sam said nothing when Daniel gripped her hand and shook it.

  THREE

  Sam watched sun-bleached houses and stunted palms blur past as Daniel sped through the town of Thermal in the stolen pickup. The truck belonged to Faith, the café owner. She’d given Daniel and Sam jobs and a good bargain on the trailer and had generally been kind and decent to them, and Daniel stole her truck because they needed a more reliable vehicle than their own limping junker. He’d left three thousand crowns in the café’s till from Gabriel Argent’s funds and insisted it was not theft, but merely an involuntary trade.

  This was Daniel, in his own way, acknowledging he’d done something awful. But not apologizing for it.

  And Sam saw it was necessary. This was definitely a bug-out situation—the visit from the water mage, the news about Otis and his collaborators and the patchwork dragon, and their intention to use Sam as the osteomantic engine to drive it. Obviously, they needed to flee their home on the Salton Sea, such as it was. Obviously, they needed a new truck. Obviously, Daniel had to wipe Valerie’s memories of Sam, before she acquired too many.

  But Sam was still furious with him. And he hated being angry at Daniel, because it always left him feeling teen-angsty and sullen.

  To keep himself from brooding, he went about the business of taking inventory of the truck’s glove compartment, standard operating procedure whenever they acquired a new vehicle.

  “Sunglasses. Pack of mints. Map of Imperial County. Fishing license. Tire gauge. Flashlight. Tampon. First-aid kit with nothing we don’t already have. Three dimes, a nickel, six pennies, a stray aspirin.”

  Daniel checked his mirrors for signs of anyone following them. He peered up to the sky for spying birds, which seemed paranoid to Sam until Daniel told him about the possibility of osteomantically altered crows.

  “We’ll mail Faith’s junk back to her first chance we get.”

  “And we’re going to mail her more money, right? A lot more?”

  “No. We’ll need the money.” Daniel’s tone didn’t invite question.

  “What for? Twenty-five thousand is a windfall.”

  Daniel checked his mirrors again. Another skyward glance. “Operating expenses and supplies.”

  It took Sam a few seconds to understand what Daniel meant. He wasn’t talking about gasoline and motor oil and cheap loaves of white bread from gas stations. He wasn’t talking about splurging on a motel with a working hot-water heater.

  “You’re taking a job from Gabriel Argent?” Sam’s heart pumped at the very thought. When he was younger, he’d begged Daniel for stories about his days as a thief, sneaking through osteomancers’ strongholds and stealing magic with his little band of accomplices. Daniel always growled disclaimers that these weren’t meant to be fun stories, that most of the time he’d been scared, and sometimes he’d gotten hurt, and sometimes he’d lost people he loved, and that he’d been tricked and manipulated into pulling these heists. But by the time he got to the end of the tales, he’d made them sound exciting and wonderful. They became Sam’s bedtime stories.

  “I’m not doing it for Argent,” Daniel said. “It’s just something that’s got to be done. For a lot of reasons.”

  The reasons were clear enough. The firedrake sounded scary and important. Deleting it from the world was fine with Sam.

  “You have a scheme?”

  “The start of one. I’ve got some old friends with an airplane, and I think I can get a nighttime flight to Catalina without paying them all of Argent’s money. And I’ll need some bone to destroy the firedrake.”

  “Okay, then. Where’s our first stop?”

  Daniel didn’t answer. And then it struck him. Sam wasn’t going to be a part of this. He wasn’t going with Daniel. He was going to be shunted off to hide somewhere while people did things and the world spun around and around. He was mad at himself for the few seconds in which he allowed himself to believe he could be alive.

  “I’m leaving you at one of the Emmas’ safe houses, and—”

  “No.”

  “—you’ll be safer with them than you are with me right now—”

  “No.”

  Daniel sighed. “Listen, I’m really not trying to be a jerk about this. I know you’re strong. I know what’s in your bones. And you’ve been training. Your skills are coming along. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. You’re on your way to becoming one of the most powerful osteomancers in the country. Which is no gift. I’d rather you be a regular kid. I’d rather you’d gotten to go to the prom with Valerie, and college, and did something nice and fulfilling with your life.”

  “You’d like me to be a nobody,” Sam said, loathing the whine in his voice.

  “I’m not going to keep you on the road forever. There’ll be a time when we can settle somewhere. Not LA, but maybe somewhere like Tahoe, someplace where the border gets kind of squiggly and nobody’s really in charge. I know it seems like forever. But if I engineer this right, I can reduce forever to weeks. I can wipe the biggest threats to you off the face of the earth. That’s Otis and the Los Angeles osteomancers. They think a firedrake is going to be their weapon. But what they’re building on Catalina is a bomb, and they’re sitting on it.”

  “And you’re going to do all this alone.” Without me, is what Sam meant.

  “I’ll bring a small team,” Daniel said. “Moth. Maybe Cassandra. Maybe Jo Alverado.”

  “Getting the old band back together.” Sam loathed himself even more. He was being a kid.

  “We need to fuel up,” Daniel said, ending the conversation. A gas station shimmered in the heat mirage a half mile down the road. Open or closed, they’d get gas, and if there was a store, they’d get some water and anything else they needed. Maybe they’d even leave some money, though Daniel might decide to keep every remaining cent for his grand dragon-slaying adventure.

  As they approached, Daniel opened the air vents and cracked his window to smell for magic. Sam did his part, taking note of anything along the roadside that seemed weird or out of place—motorcycle tracks leading behind a boulder, uprooted bushes placed together for cover. But the gas station was on a desolate stretch of highway cutting through sandy soil, peppered with knee-high creosote and rocks no larger than bowling balls. The gas station itself was just a stucco hut, a portico, and two pumps. Between the gas station and the tan ridge of cliffs paralleling the road was about two miles of nothing.

  “No stranger danger,�
�� Sam said.

  “Smells okay, too.”

  The tires crunched on gravel and onto tarmac as Daniel pulled up to one of the pumps. A heavy chain and padlock secured the building’s only door. Sam reached behind the seat for the bolt cutters in his bag.

  “I’ll do this,” Daniel said.

  Sometimes, when Daniel didn’t smell osteomancy and was certain there were no villainous types lurking about, Sam would be permitted to pick a lock or cut a chain or make a contribution beyond trying to find a clear radio station in the desert wasteland.

  “May I at least pump the gas?”

  “No. Leave the engine running and stay in the truck until I say otherwise.”

  “Holy shit, Daniel. At least let me take a leak.”

  Daniel grabbed the bolt cutters. “When I come back.”

  Sam wasted a string of profanity that used most of his vocabulary and all the parts of speech as Daniel went to break into the gas station and switch on the pumps.

  Sam was grown from the osteomantic cells of a man who’d stood at the top of a mountain with a sword and blasted U.S. bombers from the air. A man whose magic enabled him to rule a kingdom for almost an entire century. And yet Sam needed permission to take a leak?

  He stepped out of the truck just as Daniel placed the parrot-beak blades of the bolt cutters around the lock hasp. Then Daniel paused. He sniffed the air, and his eyes widened. “Get back in the truck,” he shouted, just as the gas station windows burst outward.

  Glass fragments struck the gas pumps and the truck with the sounds of pebbles and marbles. Through the broken windows scrabbled three people, thin as sticks, dressed in clothes that fit like loose bags. Their flesh was dust-gray, hair like broom bristles, and they converged on Daniel.

  If it had been Sam in Daniel’s place, he might have swung the bolt cutters as a weapon. He might have lashed out with a kick or tried to run away. Daniel was not physically impressive. He was shorter than Sam, and scrawny, and sometimes Sam forgot he was magnificent. As the people or things or whatever they were surrounded him, Daniel stood still, relaxed, his shoulders slumped, a slight belly pushing out his T-shirt. Sam could sense the power building in him, bristling off his skin as he reached into sense memories for the magic his father fed him. There was a blinding flash of white light and a thunderclap so loud it punched Sam in the heart.

  While the thunder rolled over the sky into the far distance, the three attackers lay sprawled on their backs, bloody and charred. Smoke rose from the melting rubber soles of their boots. The air stank of brine and dark mud and ozone and crackling osteomancy: kraken storm.

  “In the truck,” Daniel said, leaping over the bodies.

  Sam ducked back into the truck. He shut his own door and reached across the seat to open Daniel’s.

  Daniel made it several steps before pitching forward and falling on his face. A slender shaft jutted from his back, dead center between the shoulder blades. Two more gray men came out of the dark store through the shattered window. They barely took notice of Daniel’s motionless form and came for Sam. Each carried a speargun.

  Daniel’s instructions were explicit on what to do if Sam were threatened and Daniel incapacitated or dead: Escape is your first priority. He was supposed to run away, even if it meant leaving Daniel behind.

  Sam slid into the driver’s seat. He threw the truck into gear and slammed the gas pedal to the floor. The pickup launched forward with a scream of tires. When he reached the end of the tarmac, he jerked the wheel left and yanked the hand brake. Rear tires kicking gravel, the truck did a 180-degree spin—a perfect bootleg turn, just as Daniel taught him.

  There was barely a truck-width’s distance between the gas pumps and Daniel’s motionless body. The two gray men obligingly stood in the middle. Screaming and trying to keep his head below the dashboard to avoid getting shot with a spear, Sam threaded the needle. The thud of the truck’s front end struck the gray men with a sound both sickening and satisfying.

  One of the men went flying. He landed a few dozen feet away, resting on his knees with his face on the ground, ass pointing in the air. The other was on the pickup’s hood, his head making a bowl-shaped dent in the windshield.

  If you can’t escape, reduce the enemy’s ability to do damage.

  Sam hurried out of the pickup. Before attending to the gray men, or even to Daniel, he collected the two spearguns and tossed them in the truck bed. Then he went around to the front of the truck. He grabbed the man sprawled over the hood and threw him to the ground. He was lighter than Sam expected, as if his bones were made of balsa wood. He landed with his head cocked aside, his ear touching his shoulder. Sam was pretty sure he was dead, because it would take a lot of magic to keep him alive with an obviously broken neck.

  Before approaching the other gray man, Sam took a calming breath, hoping to bring kraken energy to his own hands. It was hard enough for him during his lessons with Daniel, when he had time, and with Daniel’s patient coaching. He gave up and retrieved one of the spearguns.

  The spear tip was a glossy black corkscrew with an iridescent sheen. Not a bone Sam recognized by sight or smell.

  Creeping up to the man, speargun raised, he curled his finger around the trigger. He aimed the spear at the man’s ass.

  “Tell me who and why or you’re getting a spear enema.”

  Sam liked that line. It was a good line. It was the kind of thing Daniel would say, and Sam liked that his voice didn’t quaver when he delivered it, even though he felt as if he might collapse into shakes at any moment. And it turned out to be a wasted line. He was just as dead as the other.

  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.