Pacific Fire (29 page)

“You can tell us apart because I'm the clumsy one,” he said to his mother.

Laughter was a rare thing for Messalina Blackland Sigilo, but she actually laughed at this. “Isn't that a liability for a thief?”

It was a good-natured jibe, and some of the tension left her shoulders and jaw, and she looked even more like the mother he remembered.

“Sorry, Paul,” Daniel said.

Paul stood. “It didn't even touch me. But it's time Mother and I got to the hangar. Daniel, I'm so sorry we didn't have longer. And I truly wish I could have you there to witness this. But I'll have to keep you away until after the vitalization.”

Daniel righted his glass and poured himself the last drops from the bottle. “A quick toast first. For, I don't know—not success, because I still think this is a perverse idea and I don't want Otis Roth within a thousand miles of a weapon of mass destruction. But we have to toast. You pick something, Paul.”

“To reunions.” Paul lifted his glass of cabernet and Mother Cauldron's poison. “To the one we just had, and to a better one in the future.”

They all brought their glasses together. Daniel thought of stopping Paul from drinking. Was Paul his brother? Of course he was. And he was, without question, his mother's son. How could Daniel murder him, even to prevent him from becoming a monster?

Just short of touching his glass to his lips, Paul threw his wine in Daniel's face.

He turned to his mother. “Daniel was going to poison me,” he said simply.

Venom burning his face, Daniel fell.

 

EIGHTEEN

The magic smelled strong and delicious in the space beneath the hangar. Sam wanted to drink it into his cells. He wanted the magic to mine its way into his bones, to settle in his marrow and simmer. This was a good place for him.

He and Em and Moth crouched among the thick concrete pillars supporting the hangar floor. There was little room to maneuver, almost all the space crammed with machinery. Seawater roared through massive pipes, into copper onion-dome boilers. Hundreds of smaller tubes rose to the ceiling, like the pipes of a great, steaming organ.

Moth wiped away sweat. “So, the dragon's cooking above us, and we're in the oven?”

“I think so,” Sam whispered. “Argent's plans weren't specific about the dragon-vitalization machinery, but most osteomancy requires a heat source and a medium.”

“I don't like it,” Em said. “Where're all the cooks?”

It was a good question. The real osteomancy—precisely controlling the soup of magical essences around and inside the dragon—was likely happening upstairs. But there should at least be some engineers monitoring the machinery. Not to mention guards.

Moth removed one of the rukh eggs and a length of fuse wire from his bag. “I say we blow this shit up and burn the soufflé now, while we have a chance.”

“It's not that easy,” Em said. “If the soufflé's already made, then it's practically indestructible. We have to get closer to it so we can use the toxin.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I'm not sure, but that's what Cassandra Morales told us.”

“Cassie said that? Okay, then.” Moth seemed disappointed, but he wasn't going to argue with his old friend's counsel. “So, out of the oven, into the fire.”

They continued on ahead, deeper into the metal forest, looking for a route up to the hangar.

“Someone's here,” Em said.

Too late, Sam smelled bone.

In a flash, Moth snatched Em's bayonet from her hands and nudged the point against the small of her back. “Hands behind you,” he snarled.

Em clasped her hands behind her, and Sam followed suit. A man and a woman stepped out from behind one of the onion-dome boilers. The man wore a white lab coat and carried a clipboard. The woman wore armor of bone. Her helmet was fashioned from the upper jaw of some kind of reptile, its spiky teeth curving around her face. A large scapula formed a breastplate, and interlocking vertebrae ran down her arms and legs. She unsheathed her sword, brandishing a blade of yellow bone. Outfitted like this, she had to be
praesidentum,
one of Sister Tooth's elite troops.

Sam put the picture together: a technician and his security escort.

“Am I ever glad I ran into you,” Moth said. “I caught these two sneaking around. I think they're saboteurs.”

The
praesidentum
took in Sam and Em and looked Moth up and down, inscrutable behind the teeth of her faceguard.

“I usually don't see uniforms down here.”

“I know I'm not authorized,” Moth said, “but I saw them enter the ventilation tunnels and followed them in here.”

“You did the right thing. We'll take them to holding.”

She wasn't buying it, Sam realized.

Moth realized it, too.

“Duck,” he said. Sam and Em lowered their heads and Moth swung Em's bayonet into the
praesidentum
's faceguard. The skull helmet fractured into several pieces, and when Moth pulled back the bayonet for another blow, it was obviously unnecessary. The
praesidentum
lay on the floor. Her head was dented in.

Moth handed Em's bayonet back to her, the barrel clotted with blood and hair. He took the
praesidentum
's sword.

“Help us out, and you won't get hurt,” Sam said to the technician.

The technician turned his head and vomited. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Anything you want,” he said.

He led them up a ladder to the hangar above, a space large enough to generate its own weather. The walls and the closed hangar doors seemed very far away through a veil of haze. A concrete tank large enough to house a blue whale dominated the building, its walls latticed by a web of cables and pipes. A few small portholes allowed a view of cascading bubbles inside.

Technicians worked at banks of blinking lights and gauges and dials. A lot of the lights seemed to be red. The techs flipped switches, checked their instruments, flipped more switches. There was a lot of running around and tense conversation. Nobody took any notice of Sam and his crew.

Their hostage peered at the workstations from a distance, frowning.

“Something wrong?” Sam asked him.

“I can't tell from here, but … yes, I think so.”

“But the dragon's inside the tank?”

He nodded absently, looking like he wanted to run over to his colleagues and help them with whatever they were struggling with.

“How do we introduce something into the tank?” Sam pressed.

“Up there,” said the tech, pointing far above at a gridiron beam spanning the width of the tank. The beam supported a crane, from which hung a bucket the size of a trash dumpster.

“Lead on,” Em told him.

“There's no way you're getting up there,” the tech said. “I can't talk you past the guards.”

Moth took hold of the tech's right hand. He caressed the tech's pinky with his thumb.

“I'm going to break one finger every ten seconds unless you figure out a way to get us up there. That's a ruined hand in less than a minute.”

“Let him go,” Sam said.

“Don't worry, kid. I think he's going to find himself being very clever by the time I get to his fuck finger.”

“I said let him go.”

They locked eyes, and Sam counted his own heartbeats.

Moth released the tech. “You're the boss,” he said.

Some shouts came from the workstations, and a few of the technicians left their positions, running not just with urgency, but with panic. Sam was about to question his hostage again when a sharp horn blared.

“That's the evacuation alarm,” said the tech, more to himself than to Sam. “The controlling agent must have failed.”

Hangar doors began to open, slowly parting with low mechanical groans. Technicians sprinted for them.

Liquid magic spilled over the side of the tank, splashing and sizzling on the concrete floor.

“Tell me exactly what's happening,” Sam demanded of their hostage.

“The controlling agent … it's the essence of an osteomancer. Not just any osteomancer. There're maybe four or five in both Californias powerful enough. Maybe ours wasn't. Or maybe he got delayed…”

“Who? Who was the osteomancer supposed to be?”

“Paul Sigilo,” the technician said as people dashed past them—more technicians, laborers, even uniformed security and
praesidentum
.

Sigilo. Sam knew that name. Daniel's golem.

“Who is Paul Sigilo?” Em asked.

The tech's eyes fixed longingly on the hangar doors. “He's the son of Messalina Sigilo, the intelligence chief of the Northern Kingdom. Please, let me go. There's a chance I can get to one of the boats…”

Sam wasn't done with him. “What happens without the controlling agent?”

“The firedrake is unstable.”

“It'll explode?”

“That would be great,” Moth said with enthusiasm.

“It means the dragon will do whatever it does,” the tech said. “Maybe it'll dive to the bottom of the sea and sleep for a thousand years. Maybe it'll annihilate the island and the mainland. It's not our dragon anymore.”

A great shriek of moist, hot wind blasted through the hangar, reeking of molten rock cracking through ocean floor. Spider cracks appeared in the sides of the tank.

The tech shoved Sam away from him. “I'm leaving. Kill me if you want.”

Sam let him go.

“Fold or raise?” Moth asked.

“Raise,” Em said.

“Raise,” Sam said. “Maybe it's not too late.”

“I hate democracy,” Moth said. He began to say something else, but screamed and stumbled.

Grimacing, he reached behind his back and pulled something from his shoulder blade: a knife. The blood-smeared blade was shaped like a griffin's tooth.

Behind him strode Sister Tooth, in a gleaming, black version of
praesidentum
armor. Her helmet, made from the skull of a minor dragon, was crowned by a ring of sharpened scales. Across her breastplate, a bandolier held an array of throwing knives. She gripped a talon-sword in her right hand and a dragon-scale shield on her left arm.

Sister Tooth was one of the old Hierarch's lieutenants, and she remained one of the great osteomancers of Los Angeles. She'd kept Sam constantly on the run, scurrying from motel room to motel room, robbing him of so many things. Daniel had taught Sam to fear her, and he did. And he wanted to test himself against her.

Moth smeared blood from his hand across his face like war paint. “Don't worry about what happens down here. I'll handle Lady Bicuspid. Get up on that bridge and slay that motherfucking dragon. Got me?”

Sister Tooth flung another knife. The blade penetrated deep into Moth's thigh. His scream became laughter, and he withdrew the knife and hurled it back. It clanged off her shield.

Sam searched his bones for dragon flame, and he began to feel the air in his lungs just beginning to warm when Sister Tooth surged forward and drove her blade into Moth's chest. His mouth stretched in a scream that became a gurgle of blood, and he dropped his own sword. Em took aim at the osteomancer and fired four shots at close range, the sounds hammering an echo in the hangar. Her bullets made tiny pits in Sister Tooth's armor. She barely seemed to register them.

Moth turned his head to Sam. Blood gushed from his mouth. He made eye contact with Sam and winked.

Still impaled on Sister Tooth's sword, he let out a great wail of agony and twisted his torso around, yanking the sword from Sister Tooth's hand. She reached to recover it, and he grabbed her wrist and snapped it like a broomstick.

Through her howl of pain, he collapsed to his knees, coughing out blood.

Sam rushed toward him, but Moth shot out his hand. “Go,” he rasped. “Go, or you're wasting my life.”

Sister Tooth reached for another of her knives. Tendrils of smoke snaked from her lips.

Em took Sam's hand, and they raced for the access stairway to the bridge.

 

NINETEEN

The poison stole its way into Daniel's body. It unlocked the windows and doors of his defenses, snuck through his blood vessels, probed his cells, tested his osteomancy.

The sensations were familiar: the gripping cold, and the tons of weight settling on his chest. The craving to sink beneath black waves. This is what dying of tsuchigumo felt like.

He was dimly aware of the world around him. There were shadowed forms hovering over him, and he thought of the men who leaned over his father's dying body, butchering him.

“Don't touch him, Mother,” someone said. “It works through contact as well as ingestion. Please come away.”

“Help him.” Her voice was paradoxically distant but cutting.

“I don't even know what it is. It has tsuchigumo shape-changing properties, but I'm not familiar with this variety. I'm sorry.”

The concerns of butchers.

“You can't let him die.”

Daniel pieced together where he was. The little dining room, with his mother and golem. He'd tried to kill Paul, but Paul had done him back.

Daniel tried to see. He couldn't tell if his eyes were open or not. A shadow hovered in front of him.

“I'm sorry, Daniel. I wanted to be your brother. I wish we had more time. I could have made you understand. We should have been brothers.”

Daniel lashed out and grabbed the shadow with both hands. He tried to pull it toward him. He would spit and bite and spread the poison. He would kill the dragon. His vision cleared a little, and he saw Paul's face.

Daniel hardened his hand with monocerus hide and punched Paul's monocerus-hardened face. Paul took the blow and returned it with the force of a car crash. There was no pain, just a sense of drifting through gauze, and Daniel knew he was very close to death. He exuded contact venom, but the venom couldn't get past Paul's hardened skin. Paul raked his hand across Daniel's face, and Daniel screamed, losing ribbons of flesh to Paul's fingers.