Pacific Fire

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “Oh,” Sam said. “Wandering the desert? Yes. I have been wandering the desert.”

  This answer seemed to please the man. He rubbed his hands together. “Gathering your malice and power. It is what I hoped.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Sam said. “I have been wandering the desert, gathering my malice and power.”

  “So, your chickens,” Em prompted.

  The man drew himself up to all the haughty dignity he could muster. “Not my chickens. The Hierarch’s chickens.”

  He pulled the tarp away, scaring up a cloud of dust and disease vectors. The animals in the cages weren’t chickens, but they used to be. Now, they were the size of beach balls. Their heads were featherless, more feline than avian. Vestigial rear legs grew from their hindquarters. They were covered in sand-colored fur.

  “You fed them magic from the box,” Em said.

  The man nodded, proudly at first, but then shrank once he realized he may have displeased Sam.

  “They were always scratching there,” he said, defensive. “You know how chickens are.”

  “Griffin magic in the cache?” Sam asked Em.

  She nodded.

  Sam did not relish eating the chickens in hopes of extracting traces of griffin.

  Em gave the man a cross look. “Poaching the Hierarch’s magic is a death sentence.”

  Even Sam winced at her punishing tone.

  “I am sorry, majesty.” Tears clung to the man’s eyelashes.

  And now Sam had to decide what to do. There was protocol in case someone ID’d him. The man didn’t know he was the Hierarch’s golem, but him thinking he was the actual Hierarch was maybe even worse. Daniel would have fogged the man’s brain, but Sam didn’t know how to summon lamassu magic. Would Daniel have killed him?

  Yes, to protect Sam, certainly.

  But there was another option. Sam could actually assume the Hierarchy.

  He imagined the old Hierarch standing on this hilltop, commanding everything from the sea to the mountains and beyond.

  “You have failed me by stealing my magic,” Sam said. The man peered up at him, as if to glimpse the ax coming for his neck. “But the Hierarch is merciful. And he rewards those loyal to him. So, I shall forgive you.”

  “Oh, your most beneficent majesty—”

  “And I do more than forgive. As I honored you before when I ate your chicken, so I shall again. I have a task for you.”

  Shivering in unseemly ecstasy, the man bowed his head.

  “You will be my herald. When my people hear word of my return, they will hear it from you. But not until the time is right.”

  The man was sobbing uncontrollably now. “I am unworthy, your majesty. But I shall do your bidding. Only … how will I know? How will I know when it’s time?”

  Em gave Sam a “yeah, good question” look.

  “You will know only when you hear it from my lips.”

  On his way out, Sam stopped in the doorway of the bunker and looked at the wall and all the money pinned to it, with all the versions of his face. It was a sizable collection.

  “One more thing.”

  “Yes, your majesty?”

  “Do you suppose you might spare your lord and liege some of this cash?”

  * * *

  Em rented a two-seater pedal boat and bought a couple of ice cream sandwiches. The ice cream would help them look like tourists, she explained. Sam was skeptical, but he wasn’t going to turn down ice cream.

  This was a peaceful place, with walking paths winding through green lawns and palm fronds gently swaying in the breeze. Vendors sold snow cones and papaya spears. Children chased soap bubbles and dogs chased butterflies, and couples and families in row boats meandered around Echo Park Lake, a blue pond reflecting white clouds. Sam saw nothing frightening here. None of the horrors Daniel talked about when he spun his tales of LA. At least not at first.

  Sam and Em pedaled across the pond, past lazy flotillas of ducks and geese, out to a tiny, grassy island in the center of the pond. A half dozen stakes were planted in the grass, and upon each stake was mounted a severed head.

  The island’s only living inhabitant was a prematurely wrinkled man tanned like a horse saddle. He wore a straw boater, a blue pinstriped seersucker jacket, and white trousers. A shiny metal change dispenser was clipped to his belt.

  Flashing bleached teeth, he called out his spiel: “Fifty shells a piece gets you a ten-minute visit and an oral history of the island and its denizens. Oh, excuse me a sec. Yaw!” He thrust a pole at a pigeon that had landed on one of the heads. The pigeon cooed and flapped away, but not before depositing a white blob.

  “Do you have to clean that?” Sam asked.

  The Keeper of Heads glanced at the head. “His relatives are behind on maintenance fees, so, no. You kids want the tour or not? It’s free to look at the heads from the pond, but once you’re landed…” He squinted at Em. “You look familiar. Do I know your family?”

  “You might have met some of my sisters,” Em allowed.

  He didn’t look excited to see her. “You’re very young. Why’d they send you?”

  “Can’t say. Operational security. Speaking of which…”

  A couple who looked as wholesome as a white picket fence approached in a rowboat. They even had a picnic basket.

  The Keeper stopped talking about anything to do with the Emmas and went back to his tourist spiel: “Starting from the far left, we have Adrienne Chu, who worked in the kitchen of Sister Tooth. As I’m sure you’ve read, she attempted to sneak basilisk venom into our dear matron’s soup. Sister Tooth was wise to the diabolical Miss Chu from the very moment she was hired, of course, and the soup never had a chance of reaching her lips.”

  Chu’s head was just a skull with a few shiny patches of snail-colored skin and strands of hair. The crime and trial and execution must have all happened some time ago. Probably all on the same day.

  The Keeper continued to tell the tales of the executed criminals. Each violator had committed a heinous crime, and each came off as hideous and evil but inadequate to the task of achieving their goals. The message was clear: mess with power and you’ll end up as the most gruesome kind of lollipop.

  “What do you need?” the Keeper said to Em, once the couple in the rowboat was out of earshot.

  “We need a source for bone. Someone we can trust. Preferably someone who’s worked with my sisters. Sint holo, meretseger, seps, salamander. Processed is okay, raw is better.”

  The Keeper whistled. “Is that all? You got that kind of money to spend?”

  She showed him the edge of the wad of bills they’d collected from the chicken man’s wall.

  “For that, I can give you an address. No guarantees my contact will have what you need, but it’s the best I can do right now.”

  Sam was satisfied, but Em wasn’t. “I know the stuff we’re asking for is rare, but there’s got to be more than one person in LA dealing it.”

  “There used to be two,” the Keeper said. He pointed his pole at one of the heads. It had no eyes and no lips and only the left half of its nose. “Now there’s one.”

  They took the address.

  * * *

  The neighborhood off Melrose Canal was an unlikely place to find an arms dealer. Jacaranda trees sprinkled vibrant lavender petals over narrow waterways. Neat little Moroccan- and Spanish- and Tudor-style houses lined the canals.

  Em docked the boat in front of a pink cottage. They went up to a door painted with flowers and bees and hummingbirds, and Em knocked.

  The woman who answered was younger than Sam had expected, near Daniel’s age, in her early thirties. She was short, in a tight gray T-shirt that exposed strong shoulders and biceps.

  Sam realized he knew her. They’d met ten years ago, right before Daniel took him away from LA.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said. She recognized Sam, too.

  She ushered Sam and Em inside as if she were taking delivery of some embarrassing package she didn’t
want the neighbors to see and shut and locked and dead-bolted and chained the door.

  “You’re Daniel’s kid,” she said accusingly.

  “I go by Sam now.”

  Em looked back and forth between them.

  “Em,” Sam said, “this is Cassandra Morales. Old friend of Daniel’s. Cassandra Morales, this is—”

  “An Emma. I know the look.”

  “Her name is Em,” Sam said pointedly.

  “Is Daniel with you?”

  Sam knew a lot about Cassandra Morales. She and Daniel had grown up together, pulled a lot of jobs together. Her areas of expertise included mechanical locks, electronic locks, sphinx riddles, alarms, osteomantic wards, and shooting.

  “Daniel couldn’t make it,” Sam said.

  “What does that mean?”

  He saw the fear cross her face and remembered that she was more to Daniel than an ex-associate. They’d been a couple. Daniel didn’t talk about that part much at all, but he’d let it slip a few times, and when he did it was one of the rare times he painted LA as something other than just a corrupt shithole to avoid. It was a place where he’d left behind people he loved. Staying away cost him.

  He told Cassandra about the tsuchigumo attack.

  “He’s strong,” she said, too quickly. “He’ll be all right.” Sam couldn’t tell if she was reassuring herself or him. “That doesn’t explain why you’re not with him. Or what you’re doing in the last place he’d ever want you to be. It’s risky for you to be walking that face of yours around Los Angeles.”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t recognize me,” Sam said. “Not everyone does.”

  “There’s an artist’s impression of the Hierarch as a boy hanging in the Norton Simon Museum, and it might as well be you.”

  “We weren’t planning on being in LA,” Em said. “Plans changed.”

  Cassandra picked up a big black cat nuzzling her shins, which somehow made standing in her living room slightly less awkward. Her little pink house was as charming on the inside as it was on the outside, the spaces filled with knickknack crockery themed on hens and roosters and sheep and cute red mushrooms with white dots. Light spilled in through the back windows with a view of a backyard vegetable garden. Something must’ve been cooking in the kitchen, because the smell of onion and garlic made Sam’s mouth water. He hadn’t spent much time in houses. He decided he liked houses.

  Cassandra put down the cat.

  “Come to the kitchen. I was about to have lunch.”

  They sat around Cassandra’s little round table, with its red-and-white-checkered tablecloth and rooster and hen salt and pepper shakers and mismatched, hand-painted wooden chairs. She served up bowls of albóndigas soup. Daniel, who was an excellent cook when he had a kitchen and ingredients, couldn’t make soup this good. Sam wanted to sit in this quaint little house and eat this soup for the rest of his life.

  Cassandra ate and listened without comment while Em and Sam told her everything, from Gabriel Argent showing up at the Salton Sea to getting her address from the Keeper of Heads.

  Cassandra chewed a panko-breaded meatball. “Why did you come to see me?”

  “We need munitions,” Em said. “Explosives. And stealth magic. Something that can destroy a Pacific firedrake.”

  “Let me see these plans Argent gave Daniel.”

  “We lost them in the plane crash,” Sam said.

  “That’s a problem.”

  “We’ll see.” Em asked for something to write with, and Cassandra fetched a pen and legal pad and set them in front of Em with an air of challenge.

  Over the next ten minutes, Em reproduced Argent’s map of the island and diagrams of the facility. She included doors, cable tunnels, ventilation shafts, known guard locations—everything, as far as Sam could tell. Sam had looked at the plans. He thought he’d studied them. He realized he and Em had different standards for what constituted study.

  If Cassandra was as impressed with Em’s memory as Sam, she didn’t show it.

  “How recent is your intel?” she asked, once Em lifted her pen.

  Em looked embarrassed. “We’re not sure.”

  Cassandra placed a Día de los Muertos saltshaker on the part of Em’s drawing labeled “hangar.” The ceramic skull grinned.

  “When this was the Hierarch’s fortress, they used to launch airships from here. It’s the only area big enough for assembling a dragon. There’ll be some kind of tank for all the osteomantic goop to grow tissues in and whatever else it takes to turn bones into a living creature. This here,” Cassandra said, indicating the center of the facility, “is the power plant.”

  “The power plant is the key to our plan,” Em said. “We cut the lights and the alarms, and then we make our way to the hangar and blow it up.”

  “How?”

  “Salamander resin would do it,” Sam said.

  Cassandra shook her head. “I’m always in favor of being equipped for boom and mayhem, but you can’t blow up a Pacific firedrake. A dragon like that is basically a living explosion inside an impenetrable shell.”

  “Poison, then,” Em said.

  Cassandra thought it over. “Maybe.”

  “You’ll help us,” Sam said with confidence. “Because you know what could happen if that dragon gets built.”

  “Actually, now that you’ve told me your plan, I know what will happen if I let you go to Catalina Island. And that’s why I’m not letting you go.”

  Em put down her fork. “Let us go? You can’t stop us.”

  “Oh, honey. You wanna bet?”

  “I’m a combat-trained Emma. He’s the Hierarch’s golem, trained by Daniel. You like your odds?”

  “Easy, Em. She’s a friend.”

  “I’m Daniel’s friend,” Cassandra corrected. “So I know what keeping you safe means to him. You’re the embodiment of the man who ate his father. Yet Daniel left his home, and his friends, and any chance he ever had for comfort and relief, all to make sure nobody rips the bones from your flesh.”

  “I know what he’s given up,” Sam said. “I’ve been with him every waking moment of the last ten years.”

  “Then you know he wouldn’t want you going anywhere near Catalina.”

  “He’d be going himself if he could. And he’d be asking you to come with him.”

  Cassandra looked off at nothing in particular. “In that case, Daniel would be disappointed.” She picked up the cat and scratched behind its ears. The cat gave Sam a reproachful glare.

  “This is a really cute place,” Em said. “You carry firedrake insurance?”

  Cassandra smiled at her. “That was subtle. I have other places. Not as cute, but remote enough that I won’t be worrying too much about firedrakes if Otis decides to raze Los Angeles.”

  “And the firedrake can be someone else’s problem,” Em said with contempt. “You can sit in your remote hideaway and watch Los Angeles burn on TV.”

  “That’s right. You should come with me. It’s what Daniel would want.”

  Sam found he couldn’t be angry with Cassandra. She’d just enumerated what protecting Sam had cost Daniel, and now, with Daniel possibly dead, she was proposing to uproot her life with its knickknacks and kitchen and garden and take up Daniel’s burden. This, after having known Sam less than half an hour.

  “We’ll go somewhere else if you won’t equip us,” he said.

  “There is no one else.”

  “That’s not true. There’s Mother Cauldron.”

  Of all the Los Angeles osteomancers, Daniel feared Mother Cauldron most. She was potent and knowledgeable and unpredictable. She might sell Sam what he needed. Or she might make him an ingredient in one of her soups.

  Cassandra surely knew this. She pressed her lips together, and for a while, the only noise was the kitchen clock ticking.

  She scraped her chair away from the table. “Come with me.”

  Her backyard was bordered by a high brick wall crawling with bougainvillea and bean vines. There was a birdbat
h and hummingbird feeders and a red chicken coop where plump white hens clucked away. She took Sam and Em into a shed done up like a little red barn. Inside were some gardening tools, a lawnmower, a bicycle with a wicker basket.

  “Give me a hand here.”

  Sam and Em helped her roll back a rug, revealing a plywood door in the floor. She pulled it up by a rope loop and they followed her down a ladder into a storage space twice the size of the shed. Lights flickered on, illuminating steel shelves neatly lined with army-green ammo boxes, mason jars, caskets. A refrigerator hummed in the corner. Small rockets and sabertooth bayonets lined racks.

  Sam examined a heap of rukh eggs the size of hand grenades.

  “Where did you get all this stuff?”

  “I was a thief for a long time,” Cassandra said. “Now I’m a smuggler. This is what I do when I’m not working in my garden.”

  She walked the length of the storage area, depositing packets of magic in a fruit basket as if she were shopping at a farmers’ market. “You’ll need sphinx skeleton oil for locks and alarms. Some seps venom corrosive enough to melt through stone and steel.” She tossed a few packs of bandages in the basket. “These are soaked in eocorn and hydra regen. You’re going to get hurt at some point. It’s diluted, so don’t expect miracles.”

  She opened a footlocker and lifted out two sets of black thermal underwear. “These are impregnated with sint holo and meretseger bone dust. They won’t make you invisible or silent, but they’ll help make you less noticeable when you’re sneaking around, right before you step into a trap or a detail of armed thugs or fall into a hole filled with acid or blow yourself up. Some people like conspicuous deaths, but I say there’s nothing dignified about being a spectacle. Let’s see, you’ll also want night vision, rope, field rations.… Do you have guns?”