Heart of a Dragon

by David Niall Wilson

  "Don't follow me," Manuel said. "Don't. Fucking. Follow. I'm going for a ride."

  "You should leave the jacket," Martinez said.

  Manuel spun and locked his gaze on the old man. He held the jacket very tightly in his hands, and his arms shook from the tension of that grip.

  "He was my brother, old man. This was his, and now it's mine. I will wear it in his honor, and when the time comes to take revenge – I will wrap it around the throat of the Escorpione bastard who killed him."

  Before anyone could say another word, Manuel swung the jacket over his shoulders and slipped it on. He ignored the blood. Without a word he spun and left the room. Jake went to the door after him, but before he could even get onto the sidewalk the powerful growl of Manuel's bike ripped through the night.

  With a squeal of rubber on pavement and a spray of gravel, the big chopper shot off down the street.

  "Let him go," Snake said, stepping out beside Jake. "His brother is dead. Our brother is dead. Let him mourn. He'll be back. Let's do the right thing and take care of Enrique."

  Jake nodded, and the two stepped back inside together. Martinez slipped past them to stand in the cool evening air. He stared off down the street after Manuel. His expression was troubled.

  "Be safe," he said.

  Then he turned and followed the others inside, closing the door on the night.

  ~ * ~

  Manuel gunned the old Harley and skidded around the corner of Forty-Second Street, barely catching traction before he slammed into the curb on the far side of the street. There was no traffic, and he shot off toward the entrance to the freeway. He didn't know where he was going, but he knew he had to get out of town, get to somewhere he could cut loose without fear of being pulled over. The wind whipped through his hair, and he wanted it harder and faster. He wanted it to blow the world away behind him and erase the events of the night.

  He turned onto the ramp without running into a cop and shot up the coast highway. He took the exit that led to the two-lane toward Lavender, and the mountains beyond. There were roads up there where he could be alone, where he and the bike and the road could mourn with one voice. He thought, maybe, if he reached the topmost peak of the mountain, up near the border of the sky, that he might catch a glimpse of his brother – of his spirit – his dragon.

  The jacket felt heavy and wrong. It fit poorly, and he frowned. He and Enrique had always worn one another's clothing. They were nearly the same size, built the same, hard to tell apart after Manuel had shaved his beard. They had been inseparable, but now that word made no sense. It had no truth behind it. They were separated, and despite the fact that he somehow felt the outline of the dragon through the leather on his back – a dragon he could have sworn shared his brother's soul, he had never felt so alone. There was an ache in his chest – not where his heart was broken, but where the blade had sliced the jacket. He gritted his teeth and ignored it.

  He flew down the highway and turned off on the mountain road, sliding up through shadows a little more slowly and then gunning the engine again. He raced upward, taking turns at crazy speeds and skidding into embankments.

  At some point, a shadow rose to cover the moon. He could still see the pavement – the headlight of his bike sliced easily through the darkness. He glanced up, and nearly slid off the side of the road. Something soared overhead, something long and sleek, serpentine and powerful. He saw a flicker of blue light along its length, and heard the rustle of huge, leathery wings.

  He roared around another corner. The road was narrow. The side of the mountain was steep, almost a cliff. He could not take his eyes off of the dragon. It was a dragon – it had to be a dragon. He drove straight at it, lifted his hand and reached out to it. He heard the impossibly loud scream as it called to him, and without hesitation, he launched the bike off into empty, open space.

  "Enrique!" he screamed. "Brother!"

  And then it was gone. Silvery clouds swam across the face of the moon, and he was falling, screaming, into tall trees and rocks. The bike struck first, bounced once, and flipped. Manuel's head slammed into the trunk of a tree. Branches broke and cut at his flesh, but he was already gone. He hit, finally, and slid for a very long time. The bike lay on its side, engine still idling. The headlight was smashed, but the taillight blinked through the shadows.

  The jacket slid up and over the back of his head where he lay, covering him like a shroud.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The call came early the next morning. It did not come to the clubhouse, or to Snake, but to Manuel's mother. The dragon had never married, and though he didn't live at home, that was the address he listed when anything official had to be signed. Elena Delgado answered on the fourth ring. She'd been expecting a call like this one most of her adult life – since her husband Paco had died, and the boys had both taken up with Snake and The Dragons. They were good boys, for the most part, but it was a dangerous life they led. The Barrio was a dangerous place.

  What Elena had not anticipated was getting two such calls in a single night. Snake had called, and then visited in person to tell her of Enrique's death. When she'd asked why Manuel had not come – where he had gone – Snake had shook his head. He didn't know. Men grieve in their own fashion, he said. Now Elena cradled the phone in her hand and brought it to her ear.

  When the message had been delivered, she didn't hang up the phone. She let it drop from her hand, and she turned away. Tears unfocused the world, and she stumbled back, not really going anywhere, just unwilling to stand still and let reality grip her heart. She had to go somewhere, to do something.

  Elena grabbed her jacket, and her purse. It was still dark out, and she knew that she couldn't' drive in her current state. She closed and locked her door, leaving the phone beeping it's off-the-hook busy signal to an empty home, and turned away. It was about a mile to The Dragons clubhouse. She pulled her jacket about her more tightly, bowed her head, and began walking.

  ~ * ~

  It was not easy getting the police to release Enrique's jacket. Manuel had worn it when he died, and it was now stained with the blood of two men – two brothers – both dead. The death's had to be explained. In the end, Elena's grief, and the tragic loss of two brothers in the prime of their lives softened even official hearts. Snake was allowed to carry off the jacket and a few other personal effects in an old cardboard box. Elena walked at his side, her back bent. She was silent, for the most part, and he left her to her grief.

  At the clubhouse he found the others milling about on the street, awaiting his return. When they saw him walk into site, Elena at his side, they stood in ranks, three deep, on either side of the walk leading up to the door. Snake paid no attention to them at all.

  He carried the box past them, looking neither right nor left, and entered the clubhouse. Once inside, he placed the box on a chair and pulled out the jacket. It was tattered now, torn where the blade has sliced through, scraped from crazed fall down the mountain. Snake turned it, held it up, and stared at the ice blue dragon.

  There was no expression on his face. He studied the image carefully, as if imprinting it in his memory. The rest of the Dragons slowly trickled in behind him. None of them spoke. There was nothing that they could have said. Three of their number had now died in a very short span of time – more than they'd lost at one time since their formation.

  Snake turned back to the box of Manuel's belongings. He reached in, and this time he pulled out a long, thin knife. With this in one hand, and the jacket in the other, he crossed the room toward an empty wall beside the fireplace. As he moved, he picked up speed, until at the last moment, he brought the jacket up, slammed the knife forward, and buried it through the leather into the plaster and wood beyond.

  The impact was loud and it echoed through the room. Some of the Dragons took a step back. Others only flinched. Snake stood and stared at the dragon on the leather, now glaring back at him from the wall – trapped there. He turned, and he scanned the others. His eyes bla
zed with anger and pain.

  "No one will touch that," he said. "Not now, not ever. I will personally kill the first who does. I have not liked these fancy painted dragons from the beginning. We have colors – they have always been enough. Martinez warned Manuel not to wear the dragon, and he took it anyway. He took it, and it took him in return. We have lost two brothers. It is time for this to be finished. Do you understand? Am I clear on this? That jacket will hang there until eternity comes for us all, and if it does not – it will not be the dragon on the jacket that you should fear. It will be me."

  He stood in silence for what seemed a long time. When no one responded, he spoke again.

  "Get the word out," he said. "Send notice to every chapter, every brother and sister you can reach. We will meet tonight, and we will decide what is to be done. Los Escorpiones have started this, and we need to find a way to end it. If that old witch Anya Cabrera is behind this – she will pay as well. We must stand, and we must fight. We cannot go on having our numbers whittled down a few at a time, cowering in the shadows."

  They all stood very still, in case he wasn't finished.

  "Go!" he said. "And someone send for Martinez."

  Snake turned and left the room, and the others dispersed like mist, running for phones and bikes. Engines started and revved. In only a matter of moments, the clubhouse was as silent as a tomb. On the wall, impaled by the wickedly sharp, silvery blade, Enrique's dragon held court over the emptiness. It was just past noon.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Donovan bent over the keyboard of his computer, and Amethyst sat on the wooden arm of his chair, leaning on his shoulder and scanning the screen. The program he had open was the viewer he used to browse the documents he'd archived. He'd been working on the project so long that, when he's started, he'd needed a huge mainframe computer. As machines grew faster and programs grew more efficient, his system had evolved as well.

  Now he had a small room off of the library, concealed behind several movable shelves, where arrays of water-cooled hard drives and blade servers maintained terabytes of data. He'd been scanning, recording, indexing and studying the manuscripts in his collection for decades, and unlike many of his peers, he embraced technology and all that it offered rather than denying it. One shelf in his den held stacks of recent technical publications and volumes on database design and administration. He liked to tell visitors that computer logic, programming, and magic weren't so far removed from one another.

  Programming wasn't really much different than ritual magic. There were exact sequences of numbers and precise patterns of syntax and data required for each operation. Taking a manuscript, converting it to tiny pixels on the screen, and then recording it on an array of data drives that could reproduce it in multiple formats, and even recover it if it became corrupted, was just magic of a different kind.

  At the moment, he was very glad to have that particular magic at his fingertips. There must have been tens of thousands of references to Voodoo in his files, and those were only among the documents and volumes he'd recorded. He glanced over at the boxes and books piled along the wall and shook his head.

  "Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever even begin to catch up," he said. "I have deposit boxes in the vaults beneath the bank downtown. You know Joel?"

  Amethyst nodded.

  "I've done business with them myself. Their security is top-notch."

  "If I'm right," Donovan said, "what we need is going to be among the documents I've already recorded. I started with the oldest, the most dangerous, and those most difficult to handle without causing damage. In some cases I had to photograph them carefully because I couldn't pick them up, or touch them with my skin for fear of their crumbling away and being lost.

  "A large number of those earliest and most fragile documents came out of Africa. Others were collected from the islands, Jamaica, and Haiti. I don't remember them all, there's no way that I could, but I've at least scanned everything once, and there's something I'm forgetting – something I've seen."

  Cleo leaped from the floor to the desktop, walked to the edge nearest Amethyst, and arched her back, purring. Amethyst laughed, stood, and lifted the cat into her arms. She scratched Cleo's ears and pressed her face into the warm fur.

  "I know," she said. "He gets like this around books. But what are we going to do? He's cute."

  Donovan grunted, but didn't look up. He continued scanning documents and indexes. Amethyst carried Cleo over to the bar, set her down gently, and reached for a bottle of deep amber liquid. She poured two fingers each into two tumblers and carried one back to Donovan, who took it gratefully, but did not look up from the computer screen.

  "What is it?" Amethyst asked.

  "I'm not sure," he said. "I think I may have found something, but it's slow going. I scanned and archived these documents, but there was no way I could translate them all, so I'm having to wing it as I go. It's a little easier now – I have software that can perform OCR text recognition in nearly a thousand languages – but even computers take time for this sort of thing."

  "You say OCR and I hear yada yada yada," Amethyst said. "Seriously, what is it you think you found?"

  "This," Donovan said. He sat up so that she could see the screen better. What appeared was a very old document written in spidery, difficult script. It was even harder to make out because the paper it was written on was a dark shade of tan.

  "Couldn't you whiten the paper in the image?" she asked. "I can't make out a word of it, but even if I knew that language, this would be hard."

  "I did what I could," Donovan said. "It was darker before. That manuscript is written on human skin. It was a tattoo. When the original – owner – died, they preserved it. When I got the manuscript, it was rolled around a femur and sealed in a tube made of tree bark and sealed with sap. I'm not sure of the age, but it was brittle. I had to use special oils – a formula I got from the Egyptians, as a matter of fact – to work the skin so that it could be unrolled, and then it took another week to photograph it in parts and piece the images together."

  Amethyst stared at the document a moment longer, and then turned to him.

  "You have got to be kidding me? A spell so powerful – so important – that it was preserved on live human skin?"

  "Apparently. I wouldn't have hit on this connection at all, but it cross-references to an entry I found to something resembling your amulets. I think they came from the same area of the world, and I think they are more connected even than Anya Cabrera knows. If I'm correct, the moment she set this plan of hers into motion, they were attracted – that they were meant to find their way here."

  "The amulets, you mean? They are part of the spell?" Amethyst asked. Her face wrinkled in disgust.

  "Not exactly," Donovan said. "What I've read seems to indicate that they are part of what was originally used to control, or combat it. I think they are here because they were attracted by need."

  "What does it say?" Amethyst asked.

  "I don't have all of it yet," Donovan said. "Translation programs are still pretty rudimentary, and as you can imagine, those dealing with ancient languages are even worse. I know this much – Anya Cabrera is not summoning the Loa we are familiar with. She isn't hoping to see Papa Legba; it's something darker she's after. There are apparently levels of spirits that can be summoned and these are one of the lowest. They can possess worshippers just as the more powerful Loa can, but they don't assume control. They don't have the intelligence for it – they're elemental powers, and it's the summoner who retains control. In this case, that would be Anya."

  "But the Loa don't remain beyond the ritual," Amethyst protested. "I've seen the ceremony."

  "True," Donovan said, leaning forward as another bit of text spit out of the translator. "But this is a different ritual entirely. It's a matter of repetition and degree. These spirits linger for longer periods the more often they are summoned. If they return to the same hosts repeatedly, the forces binding them to the underworld weaken. Eventu
ally they can be ripped free, snapping the bonds holding them in their own realm and remaining in their hosts."

  "Like powerful slaves," Amethyst said.

  "Exactly. They don't belong on this plane, and they are desperate to return, but they can't fight the summoning any more than those possessed can free themselves. Only the Houngan behind the spell controls their captivity, and by a series of rituals intended to promise a freedom that will never come, they are tricked into subservience and trapped in human form forever."

  "There has to be a backlash," Amethyst said. "You can't just drag a power from one realm to another without repercussions."

  "That's why the amulets exist," Donovan said. "This document explains how they were first created, from the residue of the bodies of those possessed. They exist in both realms, and when worn prevent those who have been displaced from seeing those who bear them. At the same time they apparently provide a conduit for spirits on the other side to assist. We didn't know about that little tidbit, or we might have made use of it."

  "I don't know," Amethyst said. "You know how the things make your skin crawl, and feel – sort of unclean? That is probably the touch or influence of the powers you're talking about calling on. I'm not sure it's an improvement."

  "Whoever wrote this believed it was."

  The program finished its rough translation, and Donovan clicked the icon to print it.

  "We need to get back to the Barrio," he said. "We have to find Martinez and show this to him, and we have to find out when Anya might be planning another ritual. If I understand this correctly, and it's entirely possible that I don't, since the translation is very weak, she hasn't performed the ritual enough times to make it permanent. There is time to stop her, but we have to find out if she's planning to repeat that ceremony, and if she does, we have to stop her. If she gets her army of spirit warriors in place, we're going to need a lot more horsepower than we have locally to put an end to it, and even with help we might be in over our heads."