Dragon Coast Read Free Page A

and wet. He drew in breath, closed his eyes, and analyzed the scents.
    â€œI smell a heart pumping fire,” he said.
    From his pocket, Gabriel took a ball of glass about the size of a baby food jar. It was filled with strangely silver water, so pure it glowed with its own light. In his other hand, he held a tuning fork.
    â€œDragon’s climbing,” came the spotter pilot’s voice. “I’m trying to keep it in range.”
    â€œMax, I need to know if it’s the firedrake.”
    Gabriel knew what he was asking of his friend. The dragon, if it was a dragon, was thousands of feet in the air and miles away. Just to detect it at all, Max had to use every bit of concentration and sensitivity he could summon. And Max knew as well as Gabriel that they only had one chance to get this right. There was only enough water in the jar for one attempt.
    Gabriel lifted the binoculars again and peered through the thinning low clouds. He saw a dot now. He couldn’t be sure if it was the dragon or his plane or a pelican at lower altitude. This was the price for not using his resources to build a military force. Instead, he used them to deliver water and life through the realm.
    â€œI smell the old Hierarch,” Max said, at last.
    This is what Gabriel expected. The Hierarch, of course, was long dead. Daniel Blackland had killed him in a duel, and instead of taking the old wizard’s place as ruler of the Southern Californian realm, Blackland had gone running, devoting himself to keeping the Hierarch’s legacy safe. That legacy was a boy living in an osteomantically generated duplicate of the Hierarch’s body: Sam Blackland.
    Unlike Daniel, Sam had acquired a tendency to run toward trouble instead of away from it, and in trying to prevent a cabal of Northern osteomancers from making a weapon of mass destruction in the form of the Pacific firedrake, Sam had ended up being absorbed by the dragon. Or fused with it. Or some other magical thing Gabriel didn’t quite understand.
    In any event, killing the dragon meant killing Sam Blackland. Not something Gabriel was eager to do.
    The pilot’s urgency cut through the radio crackle. “Dragon’s still climbing. Please instruct.”
    â€œIs there anything else it could be, Max?”
    Max held his head rigid, still sniffing. “It’s the boy, Gabriel. You know it is.”
    Sam wasn’t the Hierarch. He was a kid. A very decent one. A courageous one. Gabriel wished he could let Sam live.
    But the dragon had been ravaging the kingdom. It had breathed fire down on neighborhoods from Sherman Oaks to Palm Springs, from Anaheim to San Juan Capistrano. Whenever the dragon turned inland, houses burned and hundreds died.
    All Gabriel had to do was release the silvery water from the jar and strike the tuning fork. A simple procedure that had taken him a year of preparation and thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars. He’d dug deep wells for it. He’d gone back to Catalina to recover the last few extant drops of the dragon’s amniotic fluid. At great expense, he’d built a team of osteomancers and hydromancers who linked the water to the dragon.
    The water contained the compressed vibrations of a force equivalent to 25,000 tons of TNT. Release the water, strike the tuning fork, and the dragon would die. And Sam with it.
    Gabriel felt the ticks of his watch in his wrist bones, or maybe it was just his pulse. Cold brine sprayed his face, and the deck rose and fell.
    â€œTarget climbing,” the pilot reported.
    Gabriel sensed Max watching him.
    â€œClimbing fast.”
    â€œGabriel?” Max reached for the jar, maybe thinking Gabriel had suffered paralysis, but Gabriel moved the jar out of his reach.
    â€œTarget above five thousand feet,” came the pilot’s voice.
    According to Gabriel’s calculations, the water would lose effectiveness at atmospheric pressures below twelve pounds per square