Pacific Fire

by Greg Van Eekhout

  He called Sam’s name. A weak, familiar voice answered, “Over here.”

  He found Moth lying in a pond of blood. His clothes were in shreds, his arms and legs lashed with deep lacerations. There was a hideous gash across his throat, a sodden mess of blood on his chest. Beside him lay a bone sword, red and wet halfway up the blade.

  Daniel knelt.

  “Hey, buddy.”

  “Ugh,” Moth said.

  “You okay?”

  “Five minutes.”

  Daniel could smell the hydra and eocorn essences working to repair him. Rent tissues regrew, almost fast enough to see. But that didn’t mean Moth wasn’t hurt, that he wasn’t in pain.

  Nearby lay a woman, facedown, surrounded by shards and pebbles of shattered bones.

  “Is that Sister Tooth?”

  “Used to be,” Moth rasped. “She ain’t going anywhere.”

  “The kids?”

  “On the bridge. Tried to buy them time.”

  “You did, buddy. You did great. Thank you.”

  Moth closed his eyes. “Five more minutes.”

  “I’m going to get Sam and Em and send them down to you. Can you do one more thing for me?”

  Moth moaned. “Do I need to write it down?”

  Even now, Moth could draw a smile from Daniel. “No. Just get them out of here safe.”

  Moth lifted his head and rolled over, raising himself on one elbow, then sagged back down. “What about you?”

  Daniel stood. “Don’t worry about me. Just take care of them.”

  Before Moth could stop him, he ran off toward the bridge.

  “Wait,” Moth shouted in a strained voice. “Five more minutes.”

  Moth had given Daniel his friendship and life, but Daniel couldn’t give him five minutes.

  Craning his neck, he spotted the small figures of Sam and the Emma near the ceiling. He almost wept with relief. For ten years, he’d had one goal—keep Sam from becoming plundered treasure. He couldn’t say he’d given Sam a good life. But he’d kept Sam alive. At least he’d done that.

  There was just one final task to perform, and then he’d be satisfied.

  He was only three rungs up the ladder when the firedrake awoke.

  * * *

  Sam and Em clasped hands to keep from falling off the bridge. Flaming cable insulation rained down from the ceiling. Below, the firedrake thrashed and bellowed in a storm of foaming ostoemantic solution. Chunks of metal flew apart as the last of the chains holding down the dragon’s neck shattered.

  “We didn’t kill it,” Sam said, rather unnecessarily.

  Em tugged his hand, trying to draw him back to the ladder. He looked at her, and knowing what he had to do now, he grew angry. He wished he could solve high school mysteries with her, and make love to her, and get through a breakfast without being hunted. He wished he could visit Fernando Bautista and tell him what his wife, and Mayra and Ana and Miguel’s mother, had died trying to prevent. He wished he could tell Daniel everything was okay. It didn’t even matter whether or not Daniel knew he’d been consuming Sam’s magic. Daniel had saved his life, and then he’d given Sam ten years of his own. He would give Daniel all his magic.

  But he could do none of these things.

  “Em, get to the floor.”

  “Not without you.”

  Sam didn’t say anything. Not that he didn’t want to tell her everything, but he couldn’t find his voice. He was scared.

  “Don’t,” Em said. “Don’t you dare.” She tightened her grip on him.

  “You don’t even know what I’m going to do.”

  “You’re going to do something that you’re afraid to tell me about, which means I’m not going to let you do it.”

  “I have to.” He heard the pleading in his own voice. Was he asking her to let him go? Or was he asking her to give him another option so he wouldn’t have to leap into the soup, let it dissolve him, break down his magic and life?

  “Don’t you dare!” she screamed.

  The dragon’s tail smashed into the side of the tank, and a section of the concrete wall collapsed. Osteomantic solution flooded out.

  “Believe me, I don’t want to,” Sam said. “You have another way?”

  She didn’t. There was no other way. She only pulled harder with both arms. He tried to plant himself on the twelve-inch-wide beam, but she was stronger than he was, and he couldn’t resist her without plunging both of them into the solution.

  “I have another way.”

  At the top of the ladder, stepping out onto the beam, was Daniel. How long since Sam had last seen him? An hour? Less? But he looked different. More weathered, with new scars.

  Another way, he’d said.

  He knew what Daniel meant. And he wouldn’t let Daniel do it.

  “Thanks,” Sam began. “Just … thanks. Thanks for rescuing me, that first time at the Hierarch’s castle. And all the other times.” The words were hard to find, and hard to speak, as if he had to gouge them out of steel. “I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”

  The dragon writhed and broke the last of the chains. Daniel came sprinting down the beam, mindless of how narrow it was.

  Em still held fast to Sam’s hand. She would not let him go.

  Sam knew all the osteomancy he possessed, and he needed it now, just a small bit, used with control. He summoned the kraken energy lodged in his vertebrae. It traveled up his spinal column, into his scapula and clavicle. It shot down the length of his humerus and radius, into his carpals and metacarpals, and, finally, through the bones of his index finger. The energy was powerful enough to kill a man. When he touched Em, he used only enough to sting. She didn’t release her hold on him, but her grip loosened enough for him to slip out.

  He spread his arms like wings and leaped off the beam.

  * * *

  Sam glanced off the dragon’s back and rolled into the solution. His clothes unraveled. His flesh and muscle sloughed away. In seconds, as he descended through the osteomantic medium, he was nothing but the rich brown bones of La Brea specimens, the deepest, purest magic Daniel had ever seen. Then Sam’s bones dissolved into grit, and he was gone.

  Emma grabbed Daniel and wrestled with him until he was firmly on the bridge.

  She stared blankly into open space, but her voice was firm. “You’re not going after him. We have to leave.”

  Sam was gone.

  And Moth was still on the hangar floor.

  The dragon expanded its wings, and the tank walls burst with the low, grinding moan and clatter of boulders tumbling in an avalanche. The last of the solution thundered out, sizzling as it washed over the hangar floor. Free, the dragon stretched its wings to their full width, more like liquid stained glass than the gelatinous membrane of a delicate sea creature. Banks of equipment tore away from the bolts holding them to the floor. Severed cables spat sparks, and fires broke out all over the hangar. The dragon gathered itself, coiling its tail. A razor-edged, jeweled mountain rose as it hunched its back. Angry at having been caged, the monster reared up on its hind legs, rising above the bridge. A terrific wind threatened to push Daniel and Em off their perch, and they clutched each other and screamed. Atop the towering neck, its sleek fuselage of a head aimed itself at Daniel. Its eyes were white-yellow suns, blinding.

  Squinting through tears, Daniel looked into those eyes. He searched for a sign of awareness, of intelligence, of Sam. He saw only the beautiful, horrific fury of a Pacific firedrake.

  Legends said the Pacific firedrake was the mount of gods. What an absurd lie. If there were gods, surely the firedrake was their king.

  The dragon shivered, armored plates clanking like steel slabs. Cracking the concrete floor, it shifted from foot to foot. It cocked its head from side to side, impossibly fast and birdlike for such a colossal creature.

  Strangely, to Daniel, it seemed unsure.

  “He’s finally going to fly,” Em whispered.

  As fast as they could manage, Daniel and Em sped down the le
ngth of the beam and scrambled down the ladder. The moment Daniel’s foot touched the hangar floor, the dragon surged forward. Its back ridge sliced though the beam, right where he and Em had stood. With groans of deformed metal and cracks of snapping cables and bolts, the bridge came down. Debris was still crashing to the floor as the firedrake cleared the hangar doors.

  Reflected stars lighting the dragon’s translucent wings, it glided out over the waves, and then, with three air-ripping wing beats, it took to the sky.

  Left behind in the wreckage of the hangar, Daniel could only watch it go.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Daniel, Moth, and Em washed up on the shores of Los Angeles in a leaking boat with a nearly empty gas tank.

  Em navigated them to the stone jetty at Venice Beach, and from there, they dragged themselves up the beach and caught a taxi. Morning rush-hour canal traffic crept along.

  They were a conspicuous group. Em still wore her combat gear and looked straight ahead in a stone-faced mask that couldn’t conceal her grief. Moth slumped in a heap, exhausted, his wounds healing but his torn clothes scabbed with blood. Daniel stared out the window and searched the sky for outspread wings.

  “Where are we going?” he asked Moth. It must have been Moth or Em who gave the driver directions. Daniel hadn’t been paying attention.

  “West Hollywood.”

  That meant Cassie’s place.

  “She must have left town by now.”

  “She’s still family,” Moth said.

  They arrived at the little pink house on the tree-lined canal, and Daniel watched the cab’s wake fade into ripples. He thought of running after it and getting back in, and telling the driver to go until the canal’s end, and then Daniel would pick a direction and walk away from Los Angeles, all the way to the end of the earth.

  He’d just repeat what he’d done for the last ten years, only without dragging anyone with him.

  But there was a little unfinished business to take care of first.

  “Wake up, Blackland.”

  Em stood on the porch, waiting for something.

  “What?”

  “I picked the mechanical lock, but you’re still an osteomancer, right?”

  Of course. Cassie would have employed sphinx locks.

  He got out his jar of sphinx oil and rubbed it over the keyhole with the sponge stopper. A crackling dry-grass voice asked the riddle: “What is the word for ‘secret’?”

  Despite everything, he smiled. Cassie had sealed up her house with a riddle she knew he could solve.

  He answered with his mother’s name. “Sigilo.”

  She’d left the house furnished and decorated with folk-art chickens and Día de los Muertos art, and every lamp and rug and picture on the wall was a thing Daniel had never seen. Here was the person he knew as well as he knew himself, and here was the life she’d led without him.

  “There’s a note,” Em said, picking up an envelope from the table in the little dining nook. It wasn’t addressed to anyone, but she handed it to Daniel as a matter of course.

  Daniel read it to himself first, then aloud. “The fridge is stocked. Help yourself.”

  Moth limped to the kitchen. He came back several seconds later, dejected. “There’s just food in there. That’s all it said?”

  “There’s an address for a Chinese restaurant.”

  And now Moth grinned, a beam of light from a grimy face. “Restaurant code. I love it. When do we go to find her?”

  “I’m going to leave her alone,” Daniel said.

  “What?”

  “You were right to keep me away from her, Moth. I do this too much, gathering a little crew together, leading them on stupid missions that always go to shit. I’m sorry I did it to you again. And you, too, Em.”

  Em barely afforded him a glance. “There’s a Pacific firedrake. I tried to destroy it, because someone had to. It’s like I told Sam—it’s not about you.”

  Moth looked at Daniel, sad and helpless, waiting for Daniel to give him a direction. He always needed a flame to fly into.

  “What’s next, then?”

  “You two should go home,” Daniel said. “Moth, go back to Crumville and your business and your partner. Em, go back to your sisters. Thank you for helping me. Thank you for helping Sam. With luck, the dragon will take to the ocean and sleep at the bottom for a hundred years. But I wouldn’t count on luck. So get away from the cities. Especially Los Angeles. Nothing good ever happens here.”

  He went out to the backyard and found a garden shed. This would be the “fridge” in Cassie’s note. There were good conventional locks, and another sphinx lock. This time, the riddle was “What is the osteomancer’s greatest flaw?”

  “Self-pity,” he said, and the door opened for him.

  “Thanks, Cass.”

  He half expected to find a duct-taped Otis inside the shed, alive or dead. Instead, he found weapons and magic and enough gear and equipment to launch a one-man war. He wasn’t sure what Cassie intended him to do with it. There was no one left he cared to fight.

  He returned to the house.

  Gabriel Argent was sitting at the kitchen table.

  “He knocked,” Moth said. “I figured we should let him in. Left his hound on the steps.” Em stood next to Argent, gripping a chef’s knife.

  Daniel dragged back a chair and sat. “Gabriel. Has it never occurred to you to hide from me?”

  “Water doesn’t hide,” said Gabriel. “It flows inevitably to its destination. In my case, that’s you. I have a feeling that one day I’m going to find myself with your foot on my neck, with lightning in your teeth and fire in your hands.”

  “Yes,” Daniel said.

  “The only question is, will it be in five years or in five minutes?”

  “That is definitely a question you should be considering.”

  “Well. Before you make out your schedule, I wanted to show you something.” Gabriel removed a photograph from his coat pocket and laid it on the table. “This was taken from one of my dam inspection planes.”

  He slid it across to Daniel.

  With lightning already sparking in his teeth, Daniel picked it up.

  * * *

  The fires were out but the cinders remained hot. Yesterday, this had been a truck stop with a gas station and convenience store. Today it was blackened rubble, burned-out shells of cars, heat-blistered concrete and slag. Daniel picked through the wreckage.

  “Where’ve you been?” he said to the footsteps crunching behind him.

  “Taco shop.”

  “Moth get hungry?”

  “No,” Em said. “Well, yeah, of course he did. We got you carne asada to go. But I found a guy who was here when this happened.”

  She’d been back to see her sisters since leaving Cassie’s little pink house in West Hollywood. They’d gotten her cleaned up and fed her and given her a soft bed with fresh white linens, but she didn’t look like she’d slept much in the past two weeks. None of them had. Daniel had just returned from the Bautistas’ farm, and speaking to Fernando Bautista and his children had been enough to deny him sleep for a few years.

  “What did this guy in the taco shop say?” he asked Em.

  “He said fire rained down from the sky. People actually went outside to look, if you can believe that.”

  “I can. People are always people.”

  “Their lookie-loo tendencies probably saved a lot of lives. The rain got heavier, and things started to catch fire. The convenience store was the first to go. Some people gassing up drove away, other people ran for the road. Then there was a scream. The guy said if the sky itself could scream, that’s what it would sound like. After that, a flood of fire, and then the gas tanks blew, and then … Here we are.”

  Daniel hadn’t found any bodies in the wreckage, but that didn’t mean there weren’t ghosts here. A firedrake’s breath could exceed 7,200 degrees Fahrenheit. People vaporized at that temperature.

  “If you count the Enamel Tabernacle, and O
tis’s warehouses, and the San Gabriel Grand Terminal…” Em said.

  “And now here in Mecca, where that hound tracked you. The firedrake is moving north.”

  And if that’s where the firedrake was going, Daniel would go there, too, as surely as if he were an iron filing drawn to a magnet. North, where a different Hierarch reigned. North, where his mother was grieving her murdered son.

  Moth came up with a white paper bag clutched in his paw. It smelled of roast pork. “What’s next on our itinerary?”

  Daniel looked at the photo Argent had given him. It was grainy, taken with a telephoto lens, and overexposed against the daylit sky: a thin S-shape, like a serpent, with the smudged suggestion of wings. It was labeled with the map coordinates where Argent’s pilot had taken the photo, and the letters PF.

  Pacific Firedrake.

  Daniel scratched some of the charred dirt at his feet and smelled beneath his fingernails. He got out a pen and crossed out the PF.

  In its place, he wrote Sam.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and always, profound thanks to my wife, Lisa Will, for all the things, big and little. Thanks also to my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, his assistant Miriam Weinberg, Patty Garcia, Leah Withers, Theresa DeLucci, Irene Gallo, Bethany Reis, and the entire team of professionals at Tor Books for art direction, design, copyediting, proofreading, sales, marketing, promotion, publicity, and all the many, many things that transformed my manuscript into a book and helped get it into your hands. Thanks as well to my agent, Caitlin Blasdell, for representing my interests so well.

  I owe a great deal to the fine folks at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore, in particular Patrick Heffernan and Maryelizabeth Hart, for their constant support and championing of my work.

  Thanks to Fred Kiesche for submarine neepery, and to Chad Collier for airplane neepery. People are really nice to me.

  And a very big thank-you to Deb Coates and Jenn Reese, for friendship, camaraderie, and cheerleading. And an especially big thanks to Sarah Prineas, who sent me an e-mail refuting my claim that I’d just written the worst book ever. In the end, I found some of her arguments at least worth considering.