Daniel placed it under a spout at the bottom of the tank and turned the spigot, and whatever osteomantic medium the golem hadn’t already soaked up drained out. He waited until the last of it plinked into the bucket.
After unfastening some bolts, Daniel swung the front of the tank open. The golem’s body steamed in the cold air. It was Sam’s size, but seemed somehow younger, perhaps because its white skin had never been touched by sun, had never been cut or bruised. The body would never be so unharmed as it was in this moment, before its life had begun.
Daniel undid the straps holding the golem upright and maneuvered one of its arms under his shoulders.
“Maybe we should get Moth,” Em said. “I’m not going to be much help with my busted arm.”
“No, I can carry him.”
“You won’t prove anything by breaking your back.”
But Daniel ignored her and managed to hoist the golem into a fireman’s carry. After only three steps toward the table, he regretted not listening to Em. Yet he got the golem to the table, and he set the body down on its back without dropping it.
The golem lay there, chest rising and falling, eyes open, seeing but not comprehending.
Daniel took a moment to rest before getting out his knife. The blade was copper, a soft metal, but hardened by osteomancy. The cut would need to be deep.
He placed the point of the knife against the golem’s skin above its heart. With a breath, he drew an inch-long line down and in. The golem gasped but lay there while Daniel cut it. Blood welled up in the incision, gleaming in the fluorescent lights.
Daniel lifted the axis mundi bone and inserted it into the wound. One edge remained above the skin. Daniel pushed it in with the heel of his palm, drawing more blood that ran in strands down the golem’s white chest. He held his hand there, over the golem’s heart.
The golem breathed. Its heart beat. Its skin felt warm against Daniel’s hand. It blinked and swallowed and was by all indications alive. But would it ever be Sam?
Daniel wondered if there was something else he could do. Maybe he should slit his wrists open and bleed his own magic into Sam. Maybe it would give Sam the strength he needed to crawl out of the bone and into the golem’s body.
But it didn’t work that way. Daniel had brought Sam to the doorstep, and it was up to Sam to walk through the door.
Outside, tugs blew their horns, towing barges down the big canals. He could hear Em’s breathing, and his own. The fluorescents buzzed overhead.
It felt more like a death watch than waiting for a birth, and when Em came and held Daniel’s other hand, Daniel wondered if that was what it had become.
“You okay?”
It was barely a whisper, but the sound of Sam’s voice knocked the air out of Daniel as if he’d been punched.
Daniel leaned over him and brushed his damp hair away from his eyes.
“Yes, Sam. I’m fine.”
Sam blinked as though everything were bright, as if the world was new and everything in his vision a novel, unfamiliar sight. He raised himself halfway up and looked at the blankets, at the walls, at Daniel’s face.
“I’m naked,” he said. “I’m naked, and Em’s in the room.”
“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” Em said.
“That doesn’t make it better. It just means you can make comparisons.”
Daniel tucked the blankets around Sam and pulled them up to give him some cover.
Sam’s body gave off heat, and to Daniel, standing near it with Em, each of them holding one of Sam’s hands, it felt like nothing so much as warming himself by a campfire.
* * *
Dinner itself was just okay, overpriced salads of bitter artisanal lettuce at a Santa Monica bistro, but Sam finally got to do a thing he thought he’d never accomplish: get through a meal with Em without anyone trying to kill them. Afterward, they walked along the beach with their pants rolled up, letting white-foam surf chill their toes.
Sam was telling Em about Annabel Stokes.
“What I don’t get is, I’m what the Hierarch ate. And the Hierarch ate her. So why couldn’t she heal him? Or the part of him that was leftover in me? Why was he still such an evil bastard?”
“Is that what you’re wondering? Or is it really why you aren’t an evil bastard?”
“Can’t anyone just answer a question with an answer? Is that not allowed?”
“I don’t know, is it?”
A flock of shorebirds picked the sand with long beaks and fled from a breaker. Sam and Em fled with them, giggling. Sam had never heard Em giggle before. It was unsettling. And wonderful.
“Listen,” he said, “you’re a golem of the original Emma Walker. You and all the other Emmas must have thought this through. Haven’t you worked it out?”
“You’ve met my sisters. Do I seem much like them?”
“Not much.”
“And Cassandra ran into more Emmas when she was with Argent and Max up North. It didn’t sound like they were much like me.”
“No. They sounded like evil bastards. So, why? Why were they like that but you’re not? Why was the Hierarch like that and I’m not?”
Em held his arm and leaned into him. “Because we’re not what we eat. We’re what we do, and what we sacrifice, and what we love. And if we choose right more often than we choose wrong, we become who we want to be.”
“You mean if we choose right, and we have a lot of luck.”
“Luck,” Em said. “Yeah. We need shitloads of luck.”
Sam covered her hand with his own. His hand, grown from one of his hairs, from a body created by the Hierarch, generated from his own flesh.
Sam had a hand. And a body. He was still alive, here in the cooling night air, here with Em.
No, Sam was not what he ate.
He was friends, and magic, and luck.
* * *
Daniel had no photographs of himself with his mother, but he had an empty picture frame that used to contain one. He still remembered the photo. He was about five, on the saddle of a red bike with silver tassels flying back from white handlebar grips. The picture was a little blurry because he was pedaling with a fury. His mother was jogging along, not touching him or the bike, but her hand hovering near the sissy bar to catch him in case he teetered over. They were both grinning like lunatics.
Otis made him get rid of the picture when he was fifteen. It was too dangerous to keep evidence of Daniel’s connection to his mother and father. Daniel hated Otis for making him do it, but he understood the wisdom in it, so he burned it in the gas jet of his osteomancer’s torch.
He kept the empty frame.
He held it before him now and looked through it at the last house he’d lived in with his parents before they separated. His dad’s salary at the Hierarch’s Ministry of Osteomancy netted a two-story white colonial in the hills of Westwood. For some reason, Daniel had expected to find it gone. Maybe just a charred foundation on a hard-baked lot. But it looked exactly as he remembered it, shaded by maple trees and nestled in a cozy blanket of ivy.
His mother was dead.
Cassandra told him what she’d done as soon as he joined her and Moth on the other side of San Francisco Bay. Maybe she figured if he killed her on the spot, then she wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of hauling her ass all the way back home to Los Angeles.
Daniel didn’t kill her. He didn’t do anything to her. He didn’t speak to her. The job wasn’t finished yet.
But now Sam was alive, and all his crew were accounted for, and Jo Alverado had restored his face so he didn’t have to see Paul in the mirror every time he shaved.
There was nothing left to be done.
“Can I help you?”
A man came out of the house and down the porch steps, glaring at Daniel from across the lawn. He had the build and the iron-gray buzz cut of a football coach, and if he decided he wanted to pummel Daniel, Daniel figured he might just let him. He didn’t have the stomach for electrocuting anyone today
.
“I used to live here.”
“Must have been a long time ago.”
“It was. I was just a little kid then.”
The man’s demeanor softened. “Do things look much different?”
“No. They pretty much look exactly the same.” It seemed like an impossibility, but it was true.
“Would you like to come in? Have a look around? We’ve done some remodeling in the kitchen and bathrooms, but we haven’t changed things all that much.”
Daniel thought about it. It might be good to wander the old rooms and halls. There used to be a piano in the big living room, and elite osteomancers and their families would come over for Victory Day parties. There was a backyard pool and a barbecue pit. Maybe Daniel would find something there to fill the empty picture frame.
“That’s kind of you,” Daniel said. “But I should go home.”
* * *
The party was Em’s idea, and she had to shame Daniel into coming. Moth threatened him with physical harm unless he showed up. The venue was Cassandra’s house.
Daniel arrived with a bottle of tequila in a paper bag, and four bars of really good chocolate for Em. It wasn’t from San Francisco, but she forgave him for that.
He found things in full swing. It was a small gathering—just Sam and Em and Jo and Moth and Cassandra—but it was loud, with Moth generating the boisterousness of a soccer team celebrating a World Cup victory.
“Jerk face!” Moth hollered, bear-hugging Daniel and carrying him from the threshold to the middle of the living room. “You’re late. I was about to go looking for you with my party fist.”
Daniel handed him the bottle. “This is booze. Drink this and calm down.”
“I will,” Moth bellowed. “I will drink this and calm down.”
Sitting on the couch, protectively close to Sam, Em laughed, not at Moth, but at Daniel’s wince.
“She’s in the kitchen,” Sam said. He alone knew how uncomfortable Daniel was coming here. Sam was the only one Daniel had told about Cassandra killing his mother.
“Right,” Daniel said, steeling himself. It was only eight steps to the kitchen, but it was a long eight steps.
Cassandra was pulling a tray of tamales from the oven. Her shoulders stiffened when Daniel entered.
She set the tray down on the stovetop and turned around.
Over the years, Daniel had seen almost every kind of expression on her face when she looked at him. Anger. Exasperation. Hurt. Love. This was the first time he’d seen fear. She knew he wouldn’t harm her physically, but there were worse kinds of harm.
“I didn’t plan a speech,” he said. “Because you know how it is. You can map out a job to every last detail, but in the end, things always go to shit and you just have to improvise.”
“Well, I did plan a speech. Do you want to hear it?”
“No.”
“Okay.” She prodded some tamales with a spatula.
“I don’t know what to say. I can’t say thank you for killing my mother.”
“No. I don’t suppose anyone could.”
“But Cassandra?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s a pretty fucked-up world, isn’t it?”
She put down the spatula, and they embraced in front of the stove, where the food she’d prepared to celebrate the recovery of the Hierarch’s golem and Daniel’s son gave off delicious aromas.
Later, Daniel stood out on the lawn, watching the reflected moon dance in the canal waters. Laughter leaked from the house, mostly Moth’s, but also Sam’s and Em’s and Jo’s, and even Cassandra’s. His boat bumped against the curb of the canal.
“Hey.” Sam came out of the house and joined Daniel. “Moth is making margaritas. You better claim one before they’re gone.”
Daniel tried to inspect Sam without revealing he was doing so. The new golem body was still thin and pale, and Sam moved in it uncertainly, as if he were walking on ice.
“How are you feeling?”
“Everything feels weird,” Sam said. “Then again, everything is weird, so I guess that’s to be expected. So stop looking at me like I’m a bomb about to go off. I’m okay.”
“Okay.” There was a fresh burst of laughter from the house. “You should go back inside. I’ll be there in a bit.”
“Yeah? Then why’s your suitcase in the trunk of your boat?”
“How’d you know it’s back there?”
Sam shook his head, as if Daniel should have known better. Which he should have. “Cassandra lifted your keys and snuck out to check.”
Daniel dug into his jacket pocket.
“They’re there,” Sam said. “She snuck them back, of course.”
“Of course.”
“So, where are you going?”
“Don’t know.”
Daniel had run away from his father’s house when the Hierarch came to feed on magic. He’d run away with Sam to keep him from hungry osteomancers. Those had been the right decisions. And it was the right decision now, not to escape anything, but to lure away anyone who would come after him. To keep the Northern Hierarch and Cynara away from his friends. To make sure when she was grown, Ethelinda wouldn’t seek revenge on the people Daniel loved.
“I have an idea for you, Daniel.” Sam held out his hand for the keys. “Leave tomorrow if you want. But tonight, stay here. Stay here, not as the mastermind of a criminal band. Not directing things. Not leading us all into dark places. Just stay here. Enjoy some light and laughter. Have some margaritas.”
Sam kept his hand out. Daniel gave him the keys, and Sam retrieved Daniel’s suitcase from the trunk.
As they went back to the house, a trace of light streaked across the sky.
Sam saw it, too.
“I’ve spotted a lot of those the last few nights,” he said. “I’ve decided it’s Annabel Stokes.”
Daniel smiled. “A firedrake powered by healing magic. That’s magic too good to believe in.”
“Maybe,” said Sam, holding the front door open for him. “But if it’s true? Then what a world this could be.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go first to my wife and best friend, Lisa Will, for making my life possible and fun. And a great heaping pile of thanks to the team at Tor Books, an incomplete roster of which includes Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Miriam Weinberg, Patty Garcia, Leah Withers, Theresa DeLucci, Irene Gallo, and so many other people who did the thousands of things it takes to turn a manuscript into a book that you can find on store bookshelves.
Thank you, booksellers of all types, for practicing your profession with love and dedication to books and reading. And particular thanks to Mysterious Galaxy, my home store.
I’m grateful to Cliff Nielsen for his wonderful cover art, and to Caitlin Blasdell for her expert agenting.
Thanks to Joe Skilton and Terry Tyson, real magicians who generously gave me advice on sleight of hand. If I got things wrong, it’s my fault, not theirs.
I owe a lot of gratitude to bloggers, reviewers, fellow authors, and folks on social media for showing interest in my work. The encouragement is very much appreciated. So, too, is the support I receive from so many awesome friends, including Deb Coates, Sarah Prineas, and Jenn Reese. And a special thanks to Elise Matthiesen, who sent me a pendant with a piece of stegodon bone.
And finally, a shout out to my officemates Dozer and Amelia. I love them, but they are a little bit horrible. They are dogs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GREG VAN EEKHOUT is the author of California Bones, Pacific Fire, and several other novels, including Norse Code and two middle-grade SF novels, Kid vs. Squid and The Boy at the End of the World (a finalist for the Andre Norton Award). He lives in San Diego, California. You can sign up for email updates here.
OTHER BOOKS BY GREG VAN EEKHOUT
Norse Code
Kid vs. Squid
The Boy at the End of the World
California Bones
Pacific Fire
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Greg van Eekhout
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DRAGON COAST
Copyright © 2015 by Greg van Eekhout
All rights reserved.
Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Cover art by Cliff Nielsen
Cover design by Peter Lutjen
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Van Eekhout, Greg.
Dragon coast / Greg van Eekhout.—First edition.
Dragon Coast Page 26