VERN DIDN’T GET THE PHOTOGRAPH ON HIS PHONE UNTIL HE CAME out of the water at sunset. At first the dragon didn’t know what he was looking at, figuring the boy was pranking him, which seemed to be a popular pastime on the Internet, but then he took a closer look and realized that someone had sliced Waxman up like so much gator bait and placed the pieces around a knocked-out Squib. Vern was no stranger to savagery. He’d seen enough of it in his life, mostly concentrated around the time of the purge, when humans had inflicted just about every atrocity on dragon-kind that they could come up with. Vern had seen the looks on the faces of those humans in the aftermath and figured that they had surprised even themselves with the innovative forms of murder they’d freestyled with maybe half a dozen swords, a couple of elephants, and a vat of oil.
Vern had seen it all and his heart had broken and his mind had snapped.
But hearts and minds can heal.
And now Vern was plunged into hell all over again. Waxman was dead. The human Hooke had done the deed and Vern felt the deep blues creeping over him like a storm cloud and his thoughts slowed and it felt like blinking and breathing was just too much trouble.
Then a text buzzed through. Squib had set the text alert to light saber.
The text read: Hey, dragon. Didn’t you get my picture? I got your little buddy here.
The text was signed with a hook emoji, which made it clear who was sending it.
Five seconds later the light saber buzzed again.
He don’t look so good. You better get down here.
This was followed by a Google map pin on the Marcello Hotel in New Orleans.
A third buzz.
Ivory Conti says kill him now, but I’m gonna give you an hour before he ends up like Waxman.
This one came with an attachment: another picture of Waxman. This time just the mogwai’s head sitting on a post.
Hooke made a mistake, thought Vern. He shoulda killed Squib, too. Now I got something to live for.
For sixty minutes.
TEN MINUTES LATER Vern was in the air and in a state of disbelief about current events in general.
For one: He was entering New Orleans airspace for the first time after all the shit with the janitor’s video a couple of years back.
For another: He was risking his scaly ass for some kid he’d known barely a wet week because—because what? Squib ferried vodka and dragon porn to the shack: hardly worth killing or dying for.
And for the third strike: He was allowing some asshole cop to get him so riled up that he was flying into a den of gangsters, in no small part to win a pissing contest.
Whatever happens on this night, Regence Hooke ain’t walking away from it, nor crawling neither.
“You have plumb lost your mind, Lord Highfire,” he told himself strictly. “Turn yourself around right this minute.”
But he didn’t turn around because Squib was a good kid. Good and loyal.
I’m rewarding loyalty in humans. Next thing I’ll be swearing allegiance to a goddamn sheep.
And still Vern did not turn around. Hooke’s actions could not be allowed to stand, even if it was an obvious trap.
Vern flew low across the Gulf, enjoying the warm updraft in his membranes.
Enjoying the updraft, are you?
Well then, Almighty Wyvern, if you ain’t turning around, then at least get your goddamn head in the game.
Which was a fair comment.
He might be a powerful dragon, and they might be nothing but a clatter of dumb humans all conveniently clustered together for easy slaughter, but sometimes dumb gets lucky and powerful gets dead.
Focus, Vern baby. Remember the time Grendel took out that longhouse of Vikings? Let’s do it just like that. Except for the Vikings, read Italians. The longhouse is a downtown hotel. And the swords are semiautomatic weapons.
Vern was beginning to realize that metaphors were not his strong suit.
NEW ORLEANS WAS lit up like the whole town was a carnival. Monolithic slabs of skyscrapers, garish tombstones against the night, were not half as pretty as their painted-on reflections. Especially the Superdome, a purple boob of a building which reminded Vern of a lady dragon he’d met one time in Brazil, as it was now called.
South American drago-ladies. Shit.
Vern drifted over the Delacroix marshes barely ten feet above the Mississippi port. He kept his wings as tucked as possible, and his mouth shut tight. A single hint of flame and he’d be lighting himself up for whatever cameras were pointed his way. And if there was one thing Vern knew, once you hit civilization in this century, there was always some dick with a camera. And nowadays the dick could even be a robot. Roll on a dystopian technology-free future, then things might get a little easier for a dragon just trying to survive.
Vern sent a message to his pigment cells, which blended him in pretty well with the Mississippi to the casual observer, gave himself a little lift to avoid the party cruises, but stuck to the river, following it northwest to the French Quarter. From there his sense of smell went insane with the sheer variety of scents drifting up from the streets, a cornucopia of spices and perfumes which were making it difficult to think about anything except gumbo.
I need a little cover, Vern realized. Some space to spy on the hotel in the photos; then I grab that motherfucker Hooke and rip his pumpkin head clean off and maybe pickle his balls in vodka.
And then a moment later, a little shamefaced, And also rescue Squib. Do that first.
VERN HOOKED A talon around St. Louis Cathedral’s middle spire and squared himself away in the shadows way up there with a bird’s-eye view on the modern-day Gomorrah laid out below him.
I must look amazing, he thought. Big badass dragon hanging off a steeple. Christopher Nolan would shit himself if he saw this.
No one would see him, though. That was the whole point. Resisting the urge to show off for the crowd was how he’d stayed alive so long. But it was so difficult for a guy who was totally magnificent in action to rein that in. Vern thought he would give a decade of his life to cut loose just once.
I don’t even know how much damage I could do, he realized. That’s how long it’s been.
The Quarter below had that downtown vibe where gloss was painted over vice, so the tourists could stuff po’boys down their gullets or flash their college breasts without actually feeling threatened. Or, if they got really loaded, maybe buy some fake voodoo charm to get into someone’s pants.
That used to be a carnival thing. Now it’s all the damn time, thought Vern. The dicks are coming out, too. I’m surprised it took menfolk so long to get into the game.
But the French Quarter’s paint job was patchy, and the underworld poked through at the corners and down the alleys. Vern smelled the scouring sweetness of cheap spirits, the oily plastic stink of burned crack, the rank musk of all-day drinkers. He saw the boisterous out-of-towners all whooping and hollering like they were invincible, like there wasn’t a 9mm or switchblade within five feet on every side. Like they couldn’t be snuffed out without much thought or effort. He saw the workers, industrious as ants, moving through the crowds, selling baggies, picking pockets, wheedling marks into their establishments. It was all going on as it had for centuries, apart from a week of reduced service due to multiple FEMA fuckups after Katrina flooded eighty percent of the city.
On another evening, Vern might have enjoyed the exotic change of scenery, but tonight he was on a mission to avenge Waxman’s savage murder, rescue his boy, and bury Constable Hooke so deep they’d need an archaeologist to find him.
Vern’s heart couldn’t believe that Wax was actually gone, but his gut was churning with that old familiar friend/family member killed by a human feeling that he remembered so well.
Vern knew from way too much experience that revenge wouldn’t magically make that feeling go away but it sure would dull it some.
Vern spotted the Marcello Hotel right away. This guy Ivory sure liked his columns. Must’ve been half a dozen of them out front of his establishment, couple of blocks behind Rampart, knocking up against Treme, all painted gold in the grooves, festooned with concrete vines and grapes. And, of course, the sign was gold, too: “The Marcello Tower. Classic Elegance.”
Where did this guy think he was? New York in the ’20s?
It occurred to Vern that once upon a brighter day, he would have torched the entire building simply because the sign irritated him.
Glory days, he thought. You said it, Bruce.
He fancied a closer look, so he risked a five-second glide to the building opposite the Marcello, which was a redbrick apartment building with honest-to-God gargoyle heads peeking over the rooftop.
How convenient, thought Vern.
There was one guy on the roof, all set up for the evening with a lounger and reefer. Vern dropped down behind him like he was on a wire and breathed a lungful of fumes all over the guy’s head, knocking the stoner out cold.
“Cheaper than weed,” said Vern, “but a bitch of a sulfur hangover.”
The dragon dropped to all fours and crawled to the lip of the roof, where the gargoyle heads sat up on the cornerstones. From there he had a decent view of the Marcello. Even better, he wasn’t overlooked on any side.
There was no real need for him to do what he was about to do, he realized, as his pigment cells were still okay at this distance, crude as his coloring was.
But what the hell. Live a little.
He wriggled one taloned finger into the seam of desiccated concrete connecting one gargoyle to the wall and in less than a minute had the bust separated from its groove.
“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 Sheetrock 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.
Not exactly a noble way to go.
Vern’s blood was up now, and he yanked the freezer door right out of its frame when he could easily have turned the handle, which caused his back to twinge. Hard to believe, but when he picked up that back injury all those years ago, he had been doing nothing more strenuous than eating a horse.
The freezer was a big walk-in job with frosted sides of beef hanging in rows like dry-cleaning. Squib was squatted down at the back between towers of ice cream buckets with his T-shirt pulled over his knees and a candy-red pool of blood frozen around one bare foot.
“Hey, Vern,” said the boy. “Am I dreaming you?”
“No, son,” said Vern, “you ain’t dreaming. There’s an honest-to-God dragon come to save you.”
Squib smiled weakly. “Not all of me. Hooke done took his gut hook to my foot.”
Vern squatted down and breathed sulfur over Squib’s head.
“Are you putting me to sleep, Vern? Why you wanna do that?”
Vern popped out a claw and blew flame on it till it glowed white.
“’Cause you don’t wanna be conscious when I seal those wounds, kid.”
“I guess,” said Squib, one eye already closing. “We gonna fuck Hooke up, boss?”
“That guy is already fucked,” said Vern, “all the trouble he’s brought to Ivory’s door. Hooke is super-fucked, no doubt.”
“Super-fucked,” said Squib. “I sure do like the sound of that.”
And then he was asleep, so Vern elevated his boy’s leg and got to work.
Funny for a dragon, but the smell of burning friendly flesh always made Vern gag a little. He could give a shit about hostiles, but there was something about cauterizing a familiar that turned his stomach.
Squib had lost three toes, which made his foot look like it had a Mohawk, which caused Vern to giggle and took his mind off his stomach. He quickly finished up the field surgery, then took a fist of frost from the freezer wall and ground it onto the melted flesh, rising up a fierce hiss and cloud of steam. Squib did not even moan throughout the process, though he’d feel it plenty tomorrow.
Poor little bastard will be hopping around like a pirate for a few weeks, he thought. But he’ll live, providing I make good on my rescue boast and get us out of here.
The human world was beginning to cotton on to the fact that something out of the ordinary was in their midst, and Vern didn’t have to test his senses to the limits to find evidence of this. Chatter from the kitchen was maybe three octaves higher and fifty decibels louder than it ought to be. A couple of heads poked around the crumpled doorframe, only to hurriedly withdraw.
From on the street, Vern heard sirens indicating the police were approaching, drawn by a commotion which was above and beyond the usual, even for the French Quarter.
I sure wish I could stick around to watch Hooke explain what he’s doing here, thought Vern, but his own desire to send the constable to meet his Maker would have to take a back seat. There wasn’t time for a full-scale rampage at the moment, not now that cruisers had shotguns and SWAT rode around in tanks.
The best thing for it is a quick-style exit and back to the bayou. Still, he added to himself, guess there’s always time to fuck up a Mafia hotel.
Vern picked up Squib with a sight more tenderness than he usually employed when laying hands on a human, wrapping his wings around him like he was a little baby dragon. He stepped out of the refrigerator and then used a technique which, once upon a time, was known as “calling the cavalry.” He blew a dense column of roiling flame which burned the living hell out of anything it touched, and scoured a series of holes straight through to the night sky. That was the thing about dragon fire: It was closer to the fourth-century-BC Greek fire than your common or garden fire: an incendiary liquid flame which ate through anything unfortunate enough to be in its path and did not give a shit about someone dumping water on it.
Even Vern didn’t fully understand his own physiology, because that level of understanding came with a price tag, and that price tag would include anesthetic, restraints, a gurney, and a team of medical types in scrubs. Which, as prices go, was a little Wolverine, in Vern’s opinion. He had let this Italian polymath guy poke around a little in the fifteenth century, but all Vern had learned from that was that his flame was a “nonadhesive petroleum distillate”; plus the guy had done a sketch of Vern having a fight with this lion, balls out—when Vern had specifically told him his balls were in.
Goddamn polymaths.
So Vern sent up a blast of petroleum distillate which blew a six-foot-wide shaft right through the heart of the hotel, letting a silver dollar of Louisiana moon peep through up top.
Voilà, thought Vern. Exit stage right. Thank you, and good night.
And then: Please, God, no helicopters.
HOOKE HAD TO admit that he was surprised by the actual volume of ruination Vern was visiting on the Marcello. He’d been expecting maybe SEAL-team-level destruction, but this dragon was more like a natural disaster: some kind of whirlwind–forest fire hybrid. All this and barely seven feet tall.
Impressive.
Looks like maybe old Vern will do me the courtesy of taking care of my pain-in-the-ass boss. So no need for plan B.
Now all Hooke needed was to get into the vault.
Once the elephant-sized shit hit the windmill-sized fan, cracks started running like black lightning along the penthouse walls and San Pellegrino went spraying everywhere.
“What the fuck was that?” said Ivory, falling back against his fitness desk.
“Well, it’s like this, boss,” said Hooke easily. “It looks like a dragon showed up after all.” He reckoned the truth was an easier sell now that the building was wobbling like a tower of boxes in the bed of a speeding pickup truck.
“Fuck you, Hooke,” said Ivory, but a part of him believed it. Humans have race memory, after all, so consequently everyone believes in dragons in a pinch.
Hooke thought that maybe Ivory Conti was entitled to a little self-pity, firstly on account of how he looked corresponding so perfectly with his name—viz., White Count—which no doubt accounted for his variation on a Napoleon complex. And secondly, because of the fact that ten minutes ago he was king of this little castle with a pretty solid business model, and now his best guys were dead, his authority was under threat, and there was a giant death-breathing fire lizard he might not even believe in coming to barbecue him in his very own fortress.
Poor little fucker, thought Hooke.
At least Ivory was finally taking the situation seriously now, even if it had taken a dead bodyguard and a shaky building to motivate the man. He unlocked the walk-in safe at the back of his office and, appropriately enough, walked in.
“Oho,” said Hooke, actually rubbing his hands. “So Ivory Conti’s been hiding his toys. What you got in there, son?”
He followed Ivory into the safe—and into an Aladdin’s cave of goodies. Regence Hooke was impressed, and he’d seized a fuck-load of treasure in Iraq.
“What is this place, boss?” he asked like he didn’t know. “This ain’t no regular lockup.”
“It’s a safe room,” said Ivory. “Take a good look ’cause you won’t ever be seeing it again, capisce?”
“Capisce”? thought Hooke. Really?
Ivory took a spanking-new modular combat rifle from its brackets. “Your dragon ain’t the only one with fire-power,” said Ivory. “Let’s see how he likes a gutful of this.”
“I admire your attitude, boss,” said Hooke. “You got spunk. We come outta this and the city’s ours.”
The safe room really was impressive, guns displayed like that, all regular-spaced and lined up. People underestimated the care and attention to detail that kind of arrangement required. It was a goddamn exhibition, is what it was. Hooke had heard that Ivory hired an art installer from a gallery over in the Warehouse District to come in here and lay out the weaponry. Took the guy a week and cost eight grand, or so he’d been told, but it was worth the inconvenience and price tag, because he’d be willing to bet it made Ivory want to jerk off every time he came in here; plus he’d let his competitors get a glimpse from time to time just so they knew what caliber of a man they might be thinking about fucking over. Because guys in Ivory’s business thought about fucking each other over 24/7, 365.
Hooke eeny-meenied his way along the various weapons hung on the wall, passing by the more pissanty models, until his eyes lit upon a Barrett Light Fifty.
“And the winner is,” he said, reaching for the .50-cal and taking its weight like it was a barbell.
It will be interesting, he thought, to see if this portable cannon can punch a hole in an actual dragon. It would also be interesting to see what Vern did when Ivory irritated him with his peashooter.
Dragon’s gonna be pissed, and that’s when I take my shot.
Ivory took a sniper’s stance, elbows on his fitness desk, barrel aimed toward the door.
Maybe he expects Vern to knock.
Meanwhile, Hooke stood back, keeping one foot inside the safe room, which he figured was called “safe” for good reason.
They didn’t have to hold their positions long, it not being exactly the hunt for bin Laden. Within seconds a roar like someone had brought thunder indoors ripped through the building, and a good quarter of the floor was consumed by a bolt of solid flame which punched straight through the penthouse to the sky above.
“Fuck!” said Ivory, his eyebrows crisping. “Fuck balls momma—”
Which pretty much spoke for the room.
As terrible as the column of flame surely was, there were a couple of positives, in Hooke’s view. One, it completely destroyed any evidence of his recent homicide, and two, it was short-lived. Nothing caught alight, as such, just glowed around the edges.
The fire winked out like it had never been, and it was immediately obvious to Hooke what the point had been.
Old Vern is carving himself an escape route, he thought. Which leads directly through this sorry-ass penthouse.
He nudged Ivory’s ass with the toe of his boot. “Lock and load, boss,” he said. “Here we go. Enter the dragon.”
Hooke snickered. Enter the dragon.
VERN’S CLIMB THROUGH the hotel was pretty uneventful so far as journeys through the circles of hell went. Climbing was no biggie for a dragon, as historically they favored altitude. True, they usually flew down to their eyries rather than climbed up, but a fire lizard was equipped with crampon talons and could scale a sheer cliff if he had to, so a four-story New Orleans hotel shouldn’t pose a problem so long as nobody was foolhardy enough to get in the way.
The second floor was absolute chaos, dust everywhere and embers flittering in the afterburn. The sprinklers were sputtering in a half-assed manner, and a couple of Ivory’s soldiers were stumbling around, dazed by the vapor. They were pretty shaken up and did not really compute Vern’s appearance, well, not until he burned most of them down to their bones.
“Was that a gargoyle come to life?” the only survivor mumbled to himself.
“Gargoyle”?
That was twice now.
Up Vern went, cursing Squib, even though the boy with three steaming toe stumps was in deep REM sleep.
“Goddamn familiars,” griped the dragon. “You open your heart for five goddamn minutes, and next thing you know you’re burning escape shafts in Mafia hotels.”
Yeah, like you’re not loving this, said his little voice.
He went up quick, digging in the talons, pretty happy with his progress considering he hadn’t done a whole lot of climbing for a few decades.
I’m gonna feel this tomorrow. He knew this from experience: You neglect the glutes and they will bite you in the ass.
The climb stopped being uneventful at a definite point, and that point was when he caught a glimpse of Regence Hooke on the top floor.
“Bonus points,” said Vern, thinking that he was going to enjoy the hell out of what he planned to do next.
Chop toes offa my boy, will you? Dismember my drinking buddy? You are about to learn what happens when you poke a dragon, Regence.
Vern’s arrival at the penthouse level had been met with a hail of automatic weapons fire. The bullets pinged off his forehead, but damn if it wasn’t irritating as hell, like someone was spitting ball bearings at him.
Vern frowned, and not just because he was annoyed, but because the frown brought a thick plate of brow down over his eyes, shielding him from the assault.
Is there no end to my talents? he thought, peeking out from under the shelf of bone to see who besides Hooke was wasting their ammunition. Little fucker in a Tony Montana outfit was screaming something about his momma and balls, which was inappropriate from any species. Guy looked hysterical in his black shirt with Bee Gee–wingspan lapels and a white waistcoat.
Vern thought about saying it, the thing Pacino said in the movie, and he was on the verge when he caught sight of Hooke, hanging back a little.
“There you are, motherfucker,” he growled, but instead of growling, Vern should have been sparking up because Hooke had raised up some kind of mini cannon and blasted off a shot. Two things stopped Vern from dodging the bullet: One, he wasn’t overly concerned, and two, fast as he was, Vern could never go supersonic without a run-up, so the .50-cal was always going to outpace him.
The big bullet clipped his brow, lifting a flap of flesh and chipping the bone, inflicting a level of pain on Vern like he hadn’t felt in many a long year.
Once the blood started flowing, Vern went all heat-of-the-moment, red-mist crazy. He dragged a roar out of prehistoric times and sent a wide-bore kill ’em all blast of flame into Hooke’s corner, somehow managing to incorporate the words “’uck you, ’ooke” into the assault, which was the best diction he could manage with an open mouth.
When the mist cleared, Vern surveyed the devastation he had wrought and he saw that it was good.
No way Hooke is walking out of there, he thought. Fucker is probably a tiny little diamond, considering all the heat I blasted at him.
This was a pleasing notion, and it calmed Vern’s heart rate down somewhat. “All this inconvenience for a kid,” he said to the moon.
Jubelus would laugh his ass off.
The notion that a dragon would take a missile to the face for a human really would’ve had his brother cracking his scales with laughter. Vern would have laughed, too—after all, how desperate would a guy have to be before he gave a solitary sulfur fart about the fate of a specific human?
Exactly this desperate, thought Vern, giving the torched penthouse one last squint, just in case Hooke, slippery customer that he was, had somehow managed to wriggle his way through death’s door. Then he felt the entire building exhale and sag. He clawed his way to roof level. The night air felt cool on his back, which was nice, and he stretched out his shoulders for a second before he spotted a chopper in the night sky. The spotlight slung under its chassis was scything through the darkness toward him.
I never torched a chopper, Vern thought. Could be fun.
Then Squib stirred in his makeshift cocoon, and the dragon thought perhaps he’d better hightail it back to the bayou.
Vern patted his stomach. All this sparking off was costing him his reserves of fat.
I’ll stop off at the Pearl Bar and Grill, he decided, siphon off a few gallons of cooking oil from their stores, just in case there’s any fallout from this bullshit and I need to light up an angry mob.
You didn’t hear so much about angry mobs anymore, but they were still out there, just waiting for a burning cross to congregate around, putting in time between causes screaming at pregnant teens on TV. The losers usually went after their own kind, which was hilarious to Vern, humans hunting down humans because of skin tone, or which port they used in a storm, so to speak. That was the problem with humans: They couldn’t be reasoned with. Vern had had himself a pal, back in medieval England. Nice guy. Lived in a region called Fatfield. Smoked a lot of hashish.
Anyways, he always maintained that a mob could be reasoned with. You give them a demonstration of power, then they’ll think better of it and go back to their farms.
The Fatfield dragon held on to this point of view right up to the day when a bunch of Norman Crusaders used crossbows to stake him down in a marsh and let the elements take care of him.
“Reasoned with”?
If there was one thing Vern had learned, there was no reasoning with humans.
So why are you here, dickhead? asked his little voice.
Vern didn’t have a good answer to that. I am here because it feels right didn’t really stand up to argument, but it was as close to true as he could get.
Squib was a good kid doing his best in a shitty situation, so if Vern had to pick a side, he would pick the one that Waxman had been on, that being Squib Moreau’s.
And I just burned old Regence’s team to ashes.
“A good night’s work,” said Vern, then shook out his wings, thinking for the umpteenth time that he should Google how wings worked and learn something about himself.
“It’s something to do with lift and drag,” he told the unconscious Squib, then grabbed the boy’s waistband and soared into the New Orleans night sky.
“Good-bye, Constable,” he said, mentally ticking off Kill Hooke on his to-do list. “Burn in hell.”