by Mel Odom
The stream continued, but it had become soupy and primordial, a sludgy trickle she would never have risked drinking from. Things grew in the foul liquid, too. They wriggled and writhed, and every now and again one would tear free of the gelatinous substance and take to the air on dripping, translucent wings. It was like the stream was giving birth to tiny monsters.
A few of the creatures had attacked Bordelon, tearing at him with tiny teeth and razor-sharp, hooked claws. He had sung, and she’d seen the energy in him now—the shimmer that revealed his spellcasting—and knew he was getting weaker.
His spells didn’t protect him any more. She did. Their roles had reversed, and now she was the guardian. He was struggling to stay here because the land was fighting him more, resisting his presence.
“I need . . . to rest.” Finding a rocky outcrop on a nearby boulder, Bordelon sat. He took off his top hat and placed it beside him. Taking a deep breath, he raked a sweat-slick arm across his sweat-slick face and succeeded only in moving perspiration around.
Rachel gazed up at the night sky, which was still coming, converting more and more of the blue overhead to black. “Not for long. We need to keep moving. Getting caught out here during the night will put us in more danger than we’ve faced so far.”
Bordelon squinted at the sky, then turned and looked farther along the creek. “How far away are we from where you’re going?”
“We’re close.” Rachel sighed in frustration. She knew they were almost where she needed to be, but they weren’t there yet, and night was falling fast. They needed to be safe before the darkness was complete. Somewhere out there in the darkened lands, the monsters roared and screamed in bloodlust.
“Do you know where we’re going, cher?”
“I do.”
“Then tell me. Please.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. I feel it, but I can’t see it.” She waited a few more moments, then knew she had no choice. “Get up. We need to get moving.”
Bordelon stood and placed his hat back on his head. “I’ll follow, but I don’t know if I can keep up.”
“If you can’t, I’ll leave you. I have no choice. My time here is almost up.” She knew that was true too, although she couldn’t say exactly what she meant by it, or why she was so certain.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
“Professor Fredericks’ dig was funded by Ayumi Sukenobu,” Dolphin said.
Hawke sat in the shotgun seat of the second-hand RV Flicker had waiting for them in Mankato, Minnesota. Outside Minneapolis, even though there’d been no sign of pursuit from Ngola’s private sec force or Lone Star, they’d split up and made their separate ways to the rendezvous point.
Except for Dolphin. She was still in Denver, not far from where Flicker and Snakechaser guarded Rachel Gordon, whose prognosis hadn’t changed. Her entire body was compromised, nearing full-on medical freefall. From what Flicker could guess, Snakechaser’s presence with Rachel—wherever the two of them were—was helping, but he couldn’t dam the tide of life leaking out of the woman.
“Who’s Sukenobu?” Rolla was stretched out on a sofa in the back of the RV, munching on fare from a Senor Taco they’d stopped at while refueling. He wore shorts and a loud red Hawaiian shirt featuring parrots and troll females in bikinis. He claimed the shirt was a disguise, and Twitch told everyone that Rolla usually wore Hawaiian shirts when not working.
Twitch sat cross-legged, but she wasn’t on the floor. Instead she held herself up on her fingertips, swaying slightly as the RV rocked along the highway at just below the speed limit. Her eyes were closed. Bruises along her right arm showed where the bullets had nearly penetrated the armor. Others were on her torso, but none were anything more than inconveniences. Neither she nor Hawke had mentioned any of the injuries to Jovi when they had briefly talked earlier that morning.
Evidently marriage didn’t mean Twitch was going to share everything with Jovi. Hawke didn’t know how that knowledge made him feel. If Twitch held things back from her wife, it was possible—unlikely, but possible—that the gunslinger might be holding things back from him, too.
Thinking like that was circular, and made Hawke’s head throb. It was one of the main reasons he was against taking on permanent partners. There was too much trust involved, too much not knowing everything and everyone involved. Runs were messy, but personal lives were more along the lines of an M. C. Escher painting. Coming and going, everything blending together until nothing was accomplished.
“Sukenobu is one of the chief program designers at NeoNET,” Dolphin went on. “But she’s also the granddaughter of one of the corp’s founders.”
The RV came with a trideo projector system that displayed images on the windshield in front of Hawke and in the center of the back area. Video footage of the woman at a black tie affair filled the projection area. Sukenobu was in her early forties, tall and thin, with short, dark hair. She wore a necklace of variegated brown and black scales pieced together around her neck. Smiling, she walked to a large, well-lit stage and waved a hand, signaling for a hologram wall to disappear. When the wall was gone, a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton stood revealed, frozen in a timeless roar.
“Are those real bones or a trideo printing?” Rolla asked. More interested now, he leaned forward while scooping another overflowing burrito out of one of his greasy fast food bags.
“Those,” Dolphin said, “are real. Six years ago, they were excavated from a site in Alberta by an archaeological team Sukenobu funded after a local professor researching migratory patterns of dinosaurs led him to believe they might find a skeleton in the area. It took them almost three years of digging to locate it.”
“Three years?” Nighthorse sat at a built-in booth closer to the front of the RV. Before her, several small pieces of dark green and yellow rock lay on a large piece of black velvet. During the trip, she’d been concentrating on assembling the pieces. With half of them used now, the construction was beginning to look like a bowl. “She’s very serious about her dinosaurs.”
“She is,” Dolphin agreed. “Serious doesn’t begin to cover it. She’s obsessed with the subject.”
Copies of screamsheet pages flicked across the trideo projection area, followed by more images of Sukenobu and dinosaur skeletons.
“But that’s only the surface of what she’s really interested in.”
“She really wants to know more about dragons,” Paredes said.
He stood in the small kitchenette, preparing a large salad in a bowl. He hadn’t wanted to resort to fast food. Luckily, they were in Nebraska, over halfway to Denver, and there had been plenty of small grocery stands close to the highway.
“Correct,” Dolphin said, sounding surprised. “How’d you know?”
Paredes carried bowls of salad to Twitch and Nighthorse, both of whom thanked him. “I may know a guy who knows a guy who was involved in a theft of a Muttaburrasaurus skeleton in Queensland a few months ago.”
The combat mage smiled and picked up another salad bowl, lifting it in Hawke’s direction. Hawke got up and met him halfway.
“Thanks.”
Paredes nodded. “De nada, amigo. My pleasure.”
Hawke took the bowl and a fork back to the front of the RV and resumed his seat. The driver’s seat was empty. Flicker was driving through a remote connection. She was wired into the traffic reports, and knew where and when to dodge checkpoints and speed traps.
Rolla glanced up at Hawke in disbelief. “Seriously? You’re going to eat that?”
“I am.” Hawke stuck his fork into a piece of grilled chicken. The salad was simple, but Paredes had embellished it with spices and candied pecans. Some of the condiments had come stocked in the RV.
Shaking his head, the troll took out a handful of empanadas and popped one into his mouth. “I don’t see how you keep your strength up.” He glanced back at the trideo images. “So why does Sukenobu jones so hard for dinosaurs if she’s really interested in dragons?”
“Dragons like their privac
y,” Twitch said. “And their mystery. Even now we don’t know much about them, and they like it that way. Everybody knows you never deal with a dragon.” She made a pistol of her thumb and forefinger and shot Rolla. “Not if you want to live.”
Rolla scowled. “Dinosaurs ain’t dragons.”
“No,” Nighthorse agreed, “but there are some who believe dinosaurs were the progenitors of the great dragons. According to the legends, and shadow whispers among the Awakened, dinosaurs existed in the First World, and were wiped out by a great evil. During that time, the dragons entered the world from wherever they were—assuming they weren’t just created during the deconstruction of the First World and the formation of the Second World. Evil, with a capital E, came into the world during that time, and the balance had to be restored.”
“You’re saying dragons are good?” Rolla smirked at that.
Nighthorse shook her head. “Not all. Balance sometimes only means that opposing powers have to exist. Some believe the dragons took over the bodies of the surviving dinosaurs, and converted them into forms they could use.”
“Okay, let’s back away from Saturday morning simsense-land and get to the baseline on this thing.” Rolla shifted, reached down for his beer, and drained the bulb. “Sukenobu hired—”
“Funded,” Dolphin corrected.
Rolla ignored her. “—this professor and the girl to go down to Guatemala and find dinosaur bones?”
“No,” Dolphin said. “According to the proposal presented by Professor Fredericks, he wanted to go to Guatemala and look for an artifact he called the Dragonseed.”
“What’s that?” Rolla asked.
“Fredericks found a document that described the Dragonseed as a device that created dragons,” Dolphin said.
Only the steady hum of the tires on the highway filled the RV for a moment.
Nighthorse glanced at Paredes. He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Neither have I,” she replied. “But the corps would pay dearly for any scrap of information that would enlighten them about dragons. Of course, the dragons would be just as happy eliminating any chance of that.”
Nighthorse turned back to Dolphin’s image in the lower left of the projection area. “Are there any drawings of the artifact in those documents?”
Dolphin shook her head. “No. All I’ve seen is its mention in Fredericks’ papers. I’ve swept the Matrix and found lots of rumors and myths, from Greek mythology—they were called dragon’s teeth, and Cadmus and Jason used them to grow warriors—to anime and online game references.”
“Where did Fredericks’ info come from?” Rolla asked.
“He translated a document the University of Virginia has had in their collection, acquired and donated by Thomas Jefferson himself. Supposedly, it was found during the Corps of Discovery’s mapping of the Louisiana Purchase. The knowledge of exactly where it was found has been lost.”
Rolla grunted derisively. “Or got lost on purpose. Even back then, people lost information they didn’t want other people to have. Probably happened back in Neanderthal days, too.”
“How did Fredericks translate the document?” Paredes frowned. “I find it unbelievable that a professor who has been his position as long as he has would suddenly have an epiphany on a scale like this.”
“That’s because he didn’t have the epiphany,” Hawke said. “Rachel Gordon did.” Then he started telling them what Fredericks had revealed to him while they’d been traveling toward Distrito Caracas.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
When Hawke finished his tale, Nighthorse looked up at him with her dark eyes. “Rachel is bonded to the Dragonseed.” She glanced at Paredes, who nodded as if he understood what she was alluding to.
“What do you mean?” Hawke didn’t understand any of what they were talking about. He felt a little better that Paredes and Nighthorse had a handle on the magical knowledge they might need, but he still wasn’t happy about them getting deeper and deeper into this magical quagmire.
“The artifact—call it a Dragonseed, or whatever you wish—it’s possible it was designed only for certain people to find.” Nighthorse seemed certain of her declaration.
“That’s why she was having the visions, omae,” Paredes added. “Maybe only a handful of people could have translated those documents—which I highly suspect are not Mayan in origin—and perhaps they were intended only for one individual.”
“Rachel.”
Paredes nodded. “Exactamente.”
Hawke frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. I saw the dig site. That underground cave system had been buried for thousands of years.”
“So?” Paredes pursed his lips.
“No way anyone could plan that.”
“You’re thinking too small. Technology, history, even—all of that is too short when you start thinking about Old Magic. Especially when you’re talking about the dragons. They’ve been around for a long, long time, and they’ve spun plots and machinations and campaigns since they’ve first drawn breath. Perhaps this is only one more. Or perhaps this is something they wanted to remain forgotten.”
Hawke looked at his team, and thought about all they had gone through, the blood they’d already shed to get this far. He tried to guess how much more they’d have to risk if he continued being involved with Rachel Gordon and her problems.
Maybe . . . maybe it was better to just let her slip away.
Even when he thought that, though, the part of him he tried to keep from making decisions about biz didn’t like the idea. He focused on his companions, thinking about them and a way out of getting slotted up.
Finally, he shook his head. “We can’t do this. It’s too big. Way bigger than anything I’d imagined.”
Sympathy showed in Nighthorse’s liquid eyes. “We’re already in it, Hawke. Up to our ears. There’s no way out now except to go through it. You know that.”
“We can let them have the woman.” Stubbornly, Hawke refused to name her because he knew it would weaken his resolve when he needed to be strong. “Once they have her, there’s no need for them to come after us.”
“Except to hose us and make sure we don’t tell anybody what little we do know,” Rolla growled. “The Azzies and NeoNET, they’d be all about that.” He took a breath. “Personally, I’d rather take a chance on getting my hands on a big stick to whack ’em back with.”
“More than that, you don’t leave a chummer hanging,” Twitch said softly. “You never have. That’s why I came. So you wouldn’t get left hanging on this.”
Dolphin broke the uncomfortable silence that followed. “We don’t have much breathing room anyway. Aztechnology and NeoNET have stepped up the search for us. I’m doing everything I can, but the run on the Ngola Building attracted their attention. They’re getting closer. I don’t think they’re going to back off no matter what.”
Hawke pushed his breath out and tried to think, but it was like his head was filled with congealed Stuffer Shack grease. The thoughts, the ideas were there, but he couldn’t reach them.
“We’re whole pot committed then,” he finally said. “We stick with this thing and see where it leads. Hope we can find a jackpoint on this somewhere, and bail with our skins still intact.”
“There’s also the possibility we can help the girl,” Nighthorse stated. “Don’t forget that.”
“Do you have a plan to do that?” Hawke demanded. “Because I’m fresh out.”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” While they’d been talking, the shaman had been working on the bowl. All of the dark green and yellow rocks had been used to construct the dish she now held in her hands.
The object was irregular in shape, but the seams between the pieces had almost vanished. The surface caught the light and reflected it, but the bowl’s interior absorbed all light that entered it. Nighthorse could have been holding a black hole in her hands.
“Nice.” Paredes came closer and held his hand over the bowl, taking care not to touch
it. “Very good work.” He pulled his hand back and stepped away.
“I need to do more to make it stronger.” Nighthorse held the bowl in her fingertips and examined it with a critical eye. “But I think it will be ready by the time we reach the girl.”
“What?” Rolla frowned again. “You think an arts and crafts fruit bowl’s gonna fix her?”
“It is not a ‘fruit bowl,’” Paredes said.
“Then what is it?”
“If I told you, your head would explode.” Paredes grinned at him. “As large as your head is, it would make quite the mess.”
Pinching his eyebrows together, Rolla turned his attention back to his bag of Senor Taco. “You can get slotted.”
“I discovered something else while poking around,” Dolphin said. “Despite her interest in dinos and dragons, Sukenobu wasn’t an easy sell when it came to Fredericks’ dig proposal. She’d initially turned it down because the professor hadn’t been able to thoroughly substantiate his claims on the translation. Guess who tipped her to the possible legitimacy of the dig?”
“No clue,” Hawke answered.
“Deckard,” Dolphin replied.
Rolla looked up. “I knew a street sam named Deckard. I heard he got chilled in Santa Fe a couple weeks back.”
“He did,” Flicker said over the RV’s PA. “Hawke chilled Deckard when he tried to bust into this run.”
A savage grin twisted Rolla’s visage. “Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy. Deckard was bad news for most everyone who did biz with him.”
“You’re sure it was Deckard?” Hawke struggled to fit all the pieces together. They fit, but he had no idea why. That explained how the troll had magically “known” about the run the Johnson had brought Hawke in for.
“I am,” Dolphin said. “And I’m just as certain KilmerTek sent Deckard after the Johnson who recruited you.”
