“This may not work,” Gabriel said. “Go back to the tunnel. Steal a car and make it to the Pulgas Water Temple. There’ll be a plane waiting to take you back to Los Angeles.”
“I know the plan. It doesn’t involve leaving you here.” He looked at Gabriel with disgust. Then, “Come on,” he said, and he stepped out ahead of Gabriel, moving toward the dragon.
* * *
Cassandra found things almost peaceful closer to the dragon. The fires had reduced their fuel to ash and carbon sludge, and the sounds of the outer buildings burning seemed distant. Curled in on itself, the dragon was more like a geological formation than a living creature. Reflected flames wavered in its glossy scales. Its wings spread out across the ground, sheets of swirling iridescence. The wreckage of machinery lay scattered around it—shattered glass dials and gauges, pipes and pump works tangled like string, ruptured tanks and control panels with severed wires exposed. The dragon was at the center of it all, the focus of the project.
Cassandra spotted the figure she’d seen picking its way through the wreckage, approaching the dragon. In an ideal world, Cassandra could just stand back and watch the dragon lash out with a tongue of flame and burn the idiot to a crisp, and then that’d be one little extra worry off her plate. But Cassandra recognized Messalina Sigilo.
Sigilo positioned herself mere feet from the end of the dragon’s snout. Her hair blew back with its exhalations.
“It’s time to wake up, Paul. They’re coming for you.” Sigilo’s voice was soothing.
Paul? That was the name of Daniel’s golem. Messalina’s other son.
Daniel hoped to extract Sam’s essence from the dragon, but the dragon was Paul’s creation. How long had he labored over it? Months. Years. Maybe decades, knitting bones together, building armor plating, cell by cell. Cooking pyrogenic fuel. Investing his magic in the dragon. Investing himself. Maybe something of Sam’s consciousness was still in there, but the dragon was also Paul.
Sigilo began moving rubble around, searching for something. She tossed aside segments of broken pipe, burnt-out bits of electronics. Then she flashed a satisfied smile. With a grunt of effort, she unearthed a scratched and dented cylindrical metal tank.
“This gas contains your magical essence, Paul. Your own breath. It’ll strengthen you. It’ll make your magic more coherent. Breathe it in, deep into your lungs, and let it warm in your fires. It will help you assert control of the dragon. It will help you become the dragon, just like you wanted.”
Cassandra drew her gun. She loaded a round and lined up an easy, unobstructed shot. She didn’t know what Sigilo was up to, and she didn’t need to. All she needed to know was that Daniel’s mother was a poisonous vein running through her life. If not for her, Daniel would have never become Otis’s tool. Otis would have never had the opportunity to sell him to the Southern Hierarch. There would never have been a Pacific firedrake, and Sam would have never gone to Catalina Island to sabotage it. Without Sigilo, none of them would be here now.
Cassandra knew Sigilo wanted the dragon to inhale Paul’s breath. She knew she could not let that happen.
She took a breath and let her finger touch the trigger.
“Messalina. Take your hand away from that valve.”
Sigilo didn’t turn around. “Cassandra. I know what this looks like. I can explain.”
“It looks like if you don’t get your hand in the air, I’m going to put a bullet in the back of your head.”
“You don’t understand. What I’m trying to do—”
“I am going to shoot you. Take your hand off the valve.”
“I’m trying to help Daniel.”
Cassandra squeezed the trigger, and a bullet whizzed inches to the left of Messalina Sigilo’s head.
Sigilo flinched, but she kept her hand on the tank. She half-turned to face Cassandra.
“If you kill me, Daniel will never forgive you.”
“I can live with that.”
She wasn’t sure that was true. But, then, what other choice did she have? She would have to live with it.
She watched Sigilo’s hand. She watched her fingers grip the valve tighter. She watched her muscles tense as she began to turn it.
Cassandra squeezed the trigger again and ended the life of Daniel’s mother.
Messalina’s body fell. And her hand slipped away from the valve, resting in the dirt, fingers curled as if asking for someone to hold it.
Through tears, Cassandra saw Messalina’s victory and the cost of her own hesitation.
Messalina had opened the valve. Rich blue gas billowed from the tank, and with a great, powerful inhalation, the dragon drew it in.
* * *
The giant pursued Sam through the dragon’s brain, barreling through the jungle of electrified strands and vines. Sam struggled up thick struts and supports to the chamber’s ceiling. He made it up to a wider beam and chanced a look down. Blooms of osteomancy flared beneath the giant’s translucent skin.
Sam was high up now, the floor of the brain no longer in sight, nothing but thickets of brainworks below. He kept climbing, but he was exhausted and hurt. The world turned sideways and he lost his balance. Falling, he reached out a desperate hand and caught a strut. Long lines of pain bolted from his fingertips to his neck. He grasped the strut with his other hand, but too weak to pull himself up, he could only dangle there.
“Please stop fighting me, Sam. It hurts.” The Hierarch’s voice seemed to come from far away. “It’s hurting both of us. It’s hurting the firedrake. This doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, either you or me surviving. We’re both part of the dragon. We can both exist.”
Sam had an answer for him: fire.
He released a torrent of flame that fell on the giant like a blanket. The Hierarch screamed, and when the fire gutted out, Sam glimpsed exposed skull.
Weeping with effort, Sam pulled himself up and managed to swing a leg over the support strut. He shuffled along to the intersection of the strut and a vertical column, a little place where he could tuck himself and not fall.
His heart pumped watery blood, and he forced himself to keep his eyes open.
He heard a hissing sound, like air escaping a punctured hose. Maybe his life was leaking through his pores, and he’d deflate like a balloon. Such a dignified way to die. He coughed a weak laugh.
Sam made out blueish tendrils diffusing in the hazy air. They were most dense around the walls. Gas was coming in.
The Hierarch lifted his head and took in a long breath. “Oh, I recognize this taste. Is that … yes. Sebastian Blackland. Something of him, anyway. Or his son? That boy who took my heart. He breathes rich magic.”
Sam smelled something very close to Daniel’s essence, but not quite him. His golem-brother, maybe. Paul.
The gas flowed to the Hierarch, as if rushing to fill a vacuum, and he seemed to grow taller. His flesh thickened, grew opaque, his body becoming a more solid vessel for magic.
“I’m getting stronger, Sam. I shouldn’t give you another chance. You’re a parasite. An antigen. I’d be better off cleansing you from my system.”
Sam dug into his bones, desperately seeking more essence of dragon fire to vomit down on him. But he’d mined his sources of power too deeply.
The Hierarch’s fingers sparked and he casually raised a hand. Threads of electricity arced and struck Sam. White-hot nerves flared, and Sam screamed and clung to his perch. The pain would never end. Sam’s flesh and eyes would burst and spray his last magic in a messy stain.
The Hierarch released him. It had probably been only a few seconds, but Sam felt himself diluting. He coughed himself thin.
The hissing sound of gas stopped, and after the Hierarch took a few more breaths, the air cleared.
The Hierarch seemed surprised. Maybe alarmed.
“Didn’t get your fill?” Sam said, resting his cheek on one of the struts.
“I got enough.” He patted his chest with a fist, the sound like a kick drum. “I’m solid now. M
ore solid than you, which is all I need to be. The dragon is mine, Sam. Be a part of us, or I’ll have to eat you. I’ll keep you locked away, in the deepest, darkest part of myself. You’ll never see daylight again. You’ll never have another coherent thought.”
“Thinking’s overrated.”
The Hierarch sighed. “I’m sad that’s your choice.”
His lightning came without mercy and ripped Sam’s flesh to shreds.
Sam’s bones splintered.
His body came apart as his creator, the Hierarch, unmade him.
* * *
The dragon tossed its head back and roared.
Gabriel stepped into the rubble field, Max right behind him. All that was left of the dragon’s hangar was a low fence of broken wall with bent fingers of rebar poking from shattered concrete. Fires still raged all around, except for near the dragon, where the fuel was already expended. Gabriel had hoped to get to the dragon sooner, while it was still being tranquilized or whatever its keepers were doing to prevent it from rampaging. Though the dragon had been quiet for several moments, it was no less spectacular, no less threatening. It was like a capped volcano. He knew when the cork blew, it was going to be terrifying.
But why dwell on the negative? At least the dragon was still here. It hadn’t flown off to raze a city and incinerate thousands more people. Wasn’t that swell?
He reached into his bag and withdrew a shoe-box-sized casket. Kneeling in the dirt, he thumbed open the clasps and lifted the lid. The glass tubes were still unbroken, the tuning forks still seated properly in their sockets, the hammer mechanisms in place and unbent.
He heard Max’s footsteps behind him.
“Is that the thing you’re going to use to kill the dragon?”
“No,” Gabriel said.
The flask of memory water was nestled in a recess in the casket’s padded foam lining. Gabriel lifted it from the casket.
Max looked from the flask to Gabriel. “What are you doing?”
Gabriel didn’t want to answer.
“Gabriel,” Max said. “I’ve done a lot of things for you. You owe me. Tell me what you’re doing.”
“You’re not going to like it.”
Max looked so tired. “Tell me.”
Gabriel did owe Max. He owed Max for saving his life countless times. For being the one person in the world he could tell his secrets to. For being his only friend.
“Okay,” Gabriel said. “All the hundreds of tons of current coursing through the canals, all the aqueducts and mains and sewer flows, all the pipes to all the bathtubs and kitchen sinks, all forming a circuit of great power … The flask contains memory water from the deepest well at the very center of my mandala. And the memory it holds is the voice of the axis mundi, the dragon at the center of the earth. It’s a beast even stronger than the Pacific firedrake.”
“Simpler explanation, please,” said Max.
“Our cells are water, Max. I’m water. You’re water. The dragon is water. I drink the memory water, and I can dominate the dragon.”
“Dominate it. You mean kill it.”
“No. I mean control it.”
Max closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he looked scared. “You want to control it, so you can send it into a volcano or fly it into a mountain. To kill it.”
“No, Max. Just control it.”
He unsealed the flask.
“Gabriel.”
The dragon raised its wings. Piles of debris slid off its hide and crashed to the ground.
“Gabriel,” Max said again, as Gabriel lifted the flask.
Max’s gun was leveled at his head.
Anybody but Gabriel might have expected this. The previous chief water mage of the Southern Kingdom had died when Max shot him in the head. Assassins were people you used, not people you kept near. Not people you loved. But Gabriel had never thought of Max as an assassin.
“I thought you were my friend,” Gabriel said. His voice sounded mournful and afraid and pathetic to his own ears. He couldn’t know how it sounded to Max.
“I am your friend, Gabriel. If I wasn’t, I’d have shot you from behind. But I am your friend, and I have been for a long time now. I’m trying to make sure you don’t become a monster.”
“I guess putting me down for my own sake could be an act of friendship if you tilt your head and squint the right way.”
“I wouldn’t really be doing it for your sake, Gabriel. In the end, I guess this isn’t really about friendship after all.”
“No? What then?”
“It’s about accountability.”
Gabriel had to laugh a little at that. He could see Max’s point.
“Put the flask down, Gabriel.”
The dragon lifted itself on its legs. It pawed the ground, excavating trenches through cement and earth. It moved its tail, slowly as a sleepy cat, and the great mass of armor and spikes knocked over a pile of rubble.
“And who’s going to be accountable for that?” Gabriel said, pointing at the dragon.
“The dragon’s not my concern, Gabriel. It’s a monster, and it’s magic I can never begin to understand. But I’m accountable for you, and I won’t let you become something even worse.” Max thumbed back the hammer. His grip was firm, the barrel of the gun steady, as if time had stopped. “Please, Gabriel, put down the flask. Please.”
Max’s voice cracked.
Gabriel considered returning the flask to its case, and shutting the lid, and closing the clasps. And if he did, it wouldn’t be because Max held a gun to his head. It wouldn’t be because he feared dying. It would be because Gabriel knew how broken he’d be if he was forced to kill Max, so he knew how broken Max would be by having to pull the trigger. How could he make Max suffer like that?
Scents billowed around him. Burning. Smoke. Power. Love. Awe.
Gabriel was chief water mage of the Southern realm. Becoming great at it was a mistake, but one he could no longer correct. There was no one else but him.
He touched the flask to his lips.
He heard the gunshot, and there was an explosion of pain in his head. His cheek was in the dirt, where he lay. His face was wet with his own blood.
Max turned him over. Gabriel saw his eyes. Water fell from them.
* * *
Daniel arrived with Moth on Treasure Island to a scene that filled him with despair. The dragon was awake and enormous, looming over a field of wreckage and flame. Daniel had seen, handled, and eaten countless bones, but he had never witnessed the majesty of such magic. Could anything of Sam be left in such a creature? And if there was, how could Daniel be strong enough to draw him out?
He spotted Max and Gabriel Argent in the distance. Argent was on his knees, and the hound had a gun trained on him.
He didn’t see Cassandra anywhere, and this scared him almost as much as the sight of the dragon.
“Looks like things went sour with Argent and Max,” Moth said. “Should we do anything about that?”
Of all the great powers Daniel had come across, Gabriel was far from the worst. He could have been a despot. He could have been a Hierarch. Whoever controlled the water could control California, but Gabriel seemed more genuinely interested in making sure the crops got irrigated, the traffic moved, and people didn’t die of thirst. They weren’t friends, but they weren’t enemies, either, and sometimes, in a world of Otises and Cormorants, that was enough for Daniel.
He didn’t want to see Gabriel die. But he wanted to see Sam die even less.
Hard choices. Gabriel would’ve been the first to understand.
“They’re going to have to sort it out between themselves,” he said. “Sam comes first.”
They worked their way through the rubble toward the remains of a long rectangular building, an old remnant of the fairgrounds, where the dragon loomed.
A figure came away from the building. Daniel recognized her gait right away.
“Cassie.” He and Moth rushed toward her.
“I’m fine,” she sa
id with impatience when they reached her. But from the pained look in her eyes, Daniel could tell she was not fine.
“What is it?” he asked her.
She closed her eyes and took a breath, gathering herself, and Daniel prepared himself to hear the worst news.
“Is it Sam?”
“No,” she said.
“What, then?”
“It can wait. Do what you came to do and take care of your boy.”
Cassandra took Moth by the arm. “There’s a tunnel. It goes under the bay and comes out in North Beach. Let’s go.”
Moth pulled his arm away. “Bullshit, I’m staying with Daniel.”
“Daniel’s mom is coming up the tunnel. We’re going to deal with her so Daniel can take care of Sam.”
Daniel and Cassandra exchanged a quick conversation of silent expressions.
Daniel’s mom was not coming up the tunnel. Cassandra was lying to Moth, and she was doing it to help Daniel. The next few moments were going to be a time of flame and magic, and Daniel had enough to do without worrying about immolating his friends. He needed space to work, and Cassandra was going to make sure he had it.
But there was something else she wasn’t telling Daniel. When he was about to question her, she shook her head no.
“Not something you need to know now,” she said. “It can wait.”
Moth jabbed a giant finger in Daniel’s chest. “If you get killed, I’m going to punch you so hard I’ll actually feel it in my knuckles.”
“You do and I’ll kick you so hard I’ll get a compound leg fracture. Go.”
“We’ll be on the other side of the bay,” Cassandra said. “Promise us you’ll be there, too.”
“I’ll try,” Daniel said. “That’s the best I can give you.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Do better.”
With great relief, Daniel watched his friends scramble off to a direction most resembling safety.
From his pocket, he withdrew the axis mundi bone. He used his knife to cut a groove all the way around it, and in the groove he wound the strand of Sam’s hair he’d saved.
This was the very last bit of Sam he had left. The other hair was in Los Angeles with Issac Slough, the golem maker. So much depended upon fragile strands.
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