Highfire

by Eoin Colfer

  “Let’s go, little fella,” said Vern, and wiggled it slowly backwards off its perch.

  Not a bad likeness, he thought, inspecting the gargoyle. Needs a little more forehead.

  Dragons didn’t look much like gargoyles up close, but from below at night, it would definitely fool ninety-nine percent of humans, eighty-three percent of whom were dumber than pig shit in a slop bucket.

  And then he slid his own head in the gargoyle’s space and gazed down on New Orleans with impunity.

  THE MARCELLO WAS four floors of solid steel and stone, with heavy granite columns and a beveled double doorway. Built in this century to withstand a hypothetical Katrina II, the hotel wasn’t in the least flimsy. Plus she was a hive of activity. Plenty of soldiers out front keeping things moving, and a bustling Italian restaurant that took up half of the ground floor. Most of the windows had decorative iron grilles bolted across their frames, and there were Hollywood spotlights lighting up the facade. This Ivory guy was probably going for an updated version of classic Italian, architecture-wise, when he had the front done, but plonked down in the middle of a row of colorful stucco Creole town houses, the Marcello looked like the Vulcan embassy: i.e., humorless and bland.

  Even with spotlights on it, the place is boring.

  Vern yawned just looking at it.

  This groove is actually pretty darned comfortable, he thought. Power nap?

  Ten minutes would set him up nicely after the flight in.

  But what about Squib?

  Probably better to lift the kid out of there and then have a nap.

  Vern focused his awareness in both nostrils. Where are you, Squib boy? Where you hiding out?

  Dragons had a better sense of smell than the average bloodhound once they had a scent to follow, although this sense tended to deteriorate over the years, due to sulfur deposits along the nasal passages. Vern had been almost completely bunged up for a couple of centuries at his previous digs in the Everglades, until this nice Thai lady who lived on a river shack talked herself out of a barbecuing by offering to candle his nostrils. It was a dangerous travail, working with flame right next to a dragon’s person, but Lily got clumps of crap out of Vern’s nose and goddamn if he couldn’t smell into the future afterwards. He slept better too with clear airways.

  And so Vern let Lily go unharmed, and she in return set the mob on him. And that was all she wrote for Florida. Since that time he’d hung out in Honey Island.

  But it was worth it. You ain’t got nuthin’ if you ain’t got your health.

  Vern thought that once he snatched his troublesome familiar, he would have Squib do a little Internet research on candling and see if the boy couldn’t do a session on his nostrils. Though the buildup was nowhere as severe as it used to be, on account of he rarely got to flame on these days.

  Which might be about to change.

  Vern had brought an old shirt of Squib’s from the shack. He tugged it from his cargo pants pocket, held it to his snout, and sniffed.

  Come on, twitchers. Seek and find.

  Of all the places Squib could have gotten himself stashed, New Orleans in general was the worst, and the French Quarter in particular was the worst of the worst. All the usual odors hung around: carbon monoxide, human fluids, swamp musk, restaurant vents, street smokers, food trucks, with that added Katrina shake-up after-smell which still hadn’t dissipated. So you took all of that, made it super-spicy, added a cloying mist of the lemony bleachy street wash-down, and the occasional waft from Cancer Alley’s leaking drums over in the River Parishes, and it made for one hell of a bouquet.

  Not for the faint of nose.

  Most humans can’t smell shit anyhow, thought Vern, but his fourth sense was working just fine, and he almost immediately picked up Squib’s scent on the third floor of the Marcello. The kid wasn’t hard to find, scrubbing as he did with that cheap-ass soap that came in pillow-mint-sized packets. More industrial detergent than anything else. Poor ignorant Squib didn’t know it, but he was slowly bleaching his own skin.

  That scent, along with Squib’s own signature blend of sweat, adolescence, and attitude, was so clear to Vern that he could read it as clear as tendrils of neon smoke reaching out to him from across the street.

  Third-floor rear, he thought. In and out. Anybody who gets in my way—well, not my problem. I’ll try and keep the body count low in respect for Squib’s feelings about homicide and Waxman’s souls theory, but in my defense before the fact, these are all bad guys.

  Vern shifted backwards, inching his head from the gargoyle’s niche. He was pretty sure no one had spotted him. Camouflage cells plus nighttime plus drunk-ass humans equaled virtual invisibility, or so he sincerely hoped.

  Vern did a few push-ups, then popped half a dozen burpees just to get his blood pumping. He considered some split squats, but he hated that exercise with a passion.

  Those bastards are harder for me, he reasoned. My center of gravity is lower.

  Push-ups and burpees would have to do, and of course a cursory check to make damn sure his dragon tackle was tucked up about as far as it could go.

  His little voice piped up, Are you nervous, Wyvern? Holy shit, are you scared?

  Vern answered back under his breath, “I ain’t scared, asshole. I’m prudent, is all. It’s been a while, and I’m the last dragon, so far as I know. The world can’t stand to lose me.”

  But Vern was nervous, and possibly a smidge scared, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though he wouldn’t admit it to his little voice.

  Even Adele gets stage fright, he told himself. Be like Adele and use the energy.

  And before he could change his mind, Vern took a running jump off the roof and aimed his armor-plated head at the third-floor window’s grille.

  And missed by a country yard.

  VERN WENT IN through the wall, which is a tough breach, even for a dragon. Luckily, though the blocks were stone, they were cavity blocks, with nothing more than plasterboard on the interior. The wall barely qualified as a wall by the standards of some of the medieval castles he’d busted into. Three feet of solid rock, those bastards were, with some fucking Norman pouring boiling pitch onto your back, which really gunked up a guy’s scales. So he broke through, but his wings got torn up some and there was dust everywhere.

  “Fuck,” swore Vern. “Fucking dust and shit.”

  Which was his way of blaming the environment for his aim being off.

  He shook the stars out of his eyes and lifted his haunches from the floor before the fat pooled in his ass and the mafiosi came upon him lolling there like a steer ready for the bolt. Vern found himself jammed in a corridor, which wasn’t good: In here, he was restricted. A dragon generally preferred a little room to maneuver: get a little scything going with the talons, do some damage with the tail. In an ideal world a dragon wouldn’t even touch down during battle, but no one had ever accused the French Quarter of being perfect, unless in the tone of Oh, perfect. That’s just fucking perfect.

  Two guys came around the corner, and one seriously misinterpreted the threat level.

  “Hey, man,” he said to Vern, kinda smiling, kinda not, “you like some cosplaying motherfucker?”

  The second man was slightly more on point. “Holy shit, Alfonse, that’s the real deal right there. It’s a fucking gargoyle.”

  Which was a low blow, in Vern’s opinion.

  At any rate they both skipped over negotiating and went straight for shooters.

  I got no choice, thought Vern. I gotta go operational.

  Yep, said his little voice. Like that was never the plan.

  Then the first bullet from a semiautomatic hit him square on the chest plate. Fortunately, Vern had been in crisis so often that the plate’s valves had seized up and stayed permanently rigid, which was a bitch when he was trying to sleep some days, but paid off when there was a wiseguy taking shots at close range. Still, the impact smarted a little, so Vern the amiable swamp dragon went away for a spell, and in his place
emerged Lord Highfire, battle dragon.

  Battle dragons do not listen to their little voices.

  They go directly to war.

  Which is what Vern did.

  His fight-or-flight instinct pumped extra blood into his armor plating to further toughen his shell. His pigment cells picked up the navy blue in the corridor’s wallpaper, and the glands at the back of his throat spurted sulfur oil onto his molars.

  Here we go, thought Battle Vern, chomping his back teeth together, causing a spark, which ignited the oil, providing him with a pilot light.

  Feed the fire, thought Vern, and converted ten pounds of body fat into plasma, which he breathed onto the pilot light. This ignited the plasma, transforming it into that particular stream of flame which has been written about for centuries, which the victims rarely survived.

  The stream of flame had already charred the two armed heavies down to their bones before Vern got a grip on it and tightened his lips to a tight whistle, narrowing the stream to a perfect tube which he used to carve a hole in the wall at the end of the corridor. Then he swallowed his flame and barged through the embers ringing the hole, expecting to find Squib on the other side.

  But there was no Squib—not an entire Squib, at any rate, just one of the kid’s toes on a napkin. Scribbled on the napkin was:

  “Fuck you, lizard.”

  Vern sighed.

  Goddamn, Hooke. He ain’t got no idea. Poor fool figures he can trap me like I’m a wild animal.

  And then it occurred to him: Hooke mutilated my boy.

  Vern heard the particular rowdy clatter of a mob barreling down the corridor.

  Now ain’t that a blast from the past?

  He turned to see a dozen or so assorted hoodlums hustling toward him, all stoked for gunplay.

  I can smell the coke from here, Vern thought. A little Colombian courage.

  These guys sure were dumb. Hadn’t they ever watched 300? Never overload a narrow avenue with bodies. It don’t matter how many people you have: Two at a time was all that had to be dealt with.

  But Vern thought, I ain’t got the time, patience, nor inclination to be dealing with no two at a time.

  And so he sparked up and opened his jaws wide, sending a five-second burst of viscous flame down the corridor, which reduced his would-be assailants to piles of bones and set their ordnance popping off every which way, knocking chunks from the masonry. The unfortunate wiseguys never even had time to get a good look at what they were charging.

  Does anybody even use that term anymore? “Wiseguys”? Seems a little dated.

  Vern raised his nostrils, reaching out for a fresh trail, and found two, fainter than the toe he was standing over but unmistakably Squib Moreau.

  More digits, the dragon guessed. That goddamn sadist, he thought. This is torture.

  Yeah, said his little voice, says the guy who just torched an entire battalion.

  At least they went quick, argued Vern. My fire don’t burn slow. No one ever got mildly scalded from dragon flame.

  “Fulminated” was the word, or used to be.

  Two separate scents: which meant that Hooke was leading him on a wild-goose chase which was supposed to end in his goose being cooked. While that was unlikely to happen, who was to say that this Ivory wannabe didn’t have a rocket launcher waiting for him beside one of the toes?

  Vern took a moment to consider. A rocket launcher would definitely leave a mark.

  If I had a restaurant and a hotel at my disposal, where would I stash a boy I didn’t want smelled?

  The answer came to him pretty quick.

  Even a dragon found it difficult to smell through aluminum.

  But in his long experience, the meat locker was always at the back of the kitchen, and if there was one thing Vern could smell, it was a kitchen.

  He went back out the way he came in, this time digging his talons into the stone and crawling snout-first down the wall.

  Down the wall and into the kitchen was the plan, but being a little out of practice with facades and with his meter tipping over into reckless because of the adrenaline blast, Vern dug in a little deep with one set of claws and pulverized a block.

  Shitballs, he thought as he lost his grip and went plunging headfirst toward the pavement.

  No time to spread the wings—and even if he had managed to get a little span going, it wouldn’t have slowed him down much—so Vern instinctively tucked his chin in and prepared to take the brunt on his armored crown.

  Luckily his two-story plummet was broken by a couple of wrong-place, wrong-time doormen, who were also broken by the two-story plummet. Vern didn’t feel bad about it because they were armed and he was in the moment.

  However, crashing into a French Quarter sidewalk outside a restaurant was a little higher-viz than Vern would have liked. There must have been a couple of hundred tourists meandering along this section of the street, with dozens more looking out through the restaurant windows. The humans shrank back from the impact like ripples from a stone in water, and Vern found himself bathed in streetlamp glow, in full view of the public he had shunned for so long.

  Nice job, Lord Highfire, he told himself. Still think this rescue operation was a shit-hot idea?

  Once upon a not-so-distant time, folks’ first reaction to a dragon dropping unexpectedly into their environs would have been to fall over themselves running the hell away. You could generally expect a couple of the more lily-livered youngsters to crap themselves or pass out. All of these things happened now, but a large percentage of the witnesses also reached for their cell phones. It was all about the documenting of the moment in modern America. As recently as ten years ago, the documenters would have had to reach all the way into their handbags or pockets for their devices, and even if they did get their phones out in time, the video would’ve been virtually useless in this light. Now, however, every individual on the continent over the age of two was in possession of at least one fully loaded HD movie studio clutched in their sweaty hands at all times. After all, people couldn’t be expected to eat, sleep, work out, or jack off without a smartphone.

  So when Vern came down, the humans made two noises. The first was a collective gasp, and the second was a variation on the word “Record.”

  Also, two possibly drunk girls flashed him.

  Goddamn it, thought Vern. Now I either gotta leave Louisiana or get myself killed. Humans don’t understand what kinda hoops a dragon has to jump through just to get Wi-Fi.

  He was tempted to flex a little, spread the wings, to give the folks their money’s worth, but he hadn’t survived this long just to blow it on a moment’s grandstanding.

  So the dragon leaped from the pulped doormen straight through the restaurant window, showering a bar mitzvah party with glass and tangling a red velvet drape around his shoulders like a superhero dragon.

  “Mazel tov,” Vern said to the stunned kid in the hat, then scooted along the tabletop and through the swing doors.

  He moved fast, quicker than he had for decades, and he could feel his heart ramping up.

  I gotta do more cardio, he told himself. This is ridiculous. Time was, I could fly the length of this continent without breaking a sweat. Now I can’t even run through a restaurant without panting.

  Nevertheless, Vern was still the fastest living thing any of these humans had ever seen—which is why they didn’t see him, not clearly. He was a bear-sized blur that left a general impression rather than a detailed image.

  The bar mitzvah kid, Tony Cohen, said later to Fox 8, “I thought it was two alligators fucking.”

  Which went viral, getting more hits than any footage of Vern himself. Clearly little Tony had been sneaking vodka shots, which is what his parents get for throwing a bar mitzvah in the French Quarter.

  Vern hit the double doors with his noggin and took them clean off the hinges. There was one of Ivory’s soldiers in the corridor, hitting on an obviously uncomfortable waitress by showing her his gun, so Vern palmed the guy into the She
etrock on the way past. A chef in toque blanche was holding a Baked Alaska on a silver tray, which Vern set alight with a squib of flame, just for giggles.

  I mean, how is a guy supposed to resist that? he thought as the dessert’s whoomph of blue fire set off the sprinklers.

  As he had surmised, the meat locker, a walk-in aluminum job, was buttressing the back wall. There were two goons on the door.

  Guarding the beef? I don’t think so.

  All credit to Ivory’s boys, they did manage to get their guns out before Vern reached them, but this was probably because of the minute or so of chaos which had heralded the arrival of some form of threat.

  That, and the fact that the cop Hooke had told them, “Guard the door with your balls.”

  One of the guys had queried the instruction. “Hey, cop, ain’t that supposed to be ‘guard the door with your life’?”

  And Hooke had answered, “No, son. Balls. ’Cause that’s what I’m gonna hack off if you let anybody or anything in there.”

  Constable Hooke backed up his threat with a mean old stare, and this, coupled with the evocative nature of the verb “hack,” ensured that the guardians of the refrigerator stayed frosty.

  That being said, they had assumed that whatever threat they were to face would have a human face.

  The threat streaking toward them was surely not human.

  Vern was alternately amused or irked by humans’ reaction to his appearance. On this occasion, he experienced both emotions within a second of each other.

  The first guy blurted, “Hail, Satan.”

  Which was presumably a last-ditch attempt to change saviors to appease the devil heading for him.

  This made Vern smile, until the second guy said, “Fat fucking super-hog.”

  Which wiped the smile off Vern’s face. “Super-hog”? What the hell?

  If Vern had slowed down a little, the kitchen staff might have gone batshit crazy at the sight of him, but as it was, reactions were trailing a couple of seconds in his wake and the hysteria wouldn’t make it into the kitchen until Vern was long gone.

  He hit the fridge guardians hard, flattening their rib cages like concertinas, which pulverized their hearts. One guy did manage to squeeze off a shot, which pinged across Vern’s upper thigh and would surely have clipped his dick had he not had the foresight to withdraw it earlier. Dragon junk does not have protective plating, and a dick nick could easily have had him bleeding out on the kitchen tiles.