Dragon Coast Read Free Page B

inch.
    â€œGo to the wheelhouse,” he told Max. “Please have them radio the pilot to break off pursuit.”
    â€œBecause you don’t want to kill Sam?” Max said. “Because that would put you in Daniel’s crosshairs?”
    Gabriel didn’t answer right away. He knew he’d just failed to do his job. “I didn’t want to kill Sam because I didn’t want to kill Sam. Because I wanted to be a good man, Max. But sometimes what I need to be is an awful man.”
    â€œI’m not sure it’s possible to be both. I think you have to choose. I think you chose right.”
    Gabriel wiped seawater from his face. “Tell me that again the next time I have to walk through the dragon’s ruins.”
    *   *   *
    The next time came less than twenty-four hours later.
    Rust-colored smoke smudged the morning sky. On the ground, all was charred wood, blackened and crumbling masonry, and the sodden remains of eight square blocks of Mid-City.
    Gabriel toured the wreckage, taking toll. Forty-three houses, sixteen shops, a synagogue, a church, and eighty-nine lives. The fire department had done a good job of preventing the blaze from spreading beyond the neighborhood, and the minimally funded rescue workers had done as well as they could. The Council had done an efficient job of transporting the survivors out to care ships, where they would spend months or years in the dark, scrubbed-out holds of decommissioned oil tankers. Through no fault of their own, they’d languish in homeless prisons, because, well, it was Los Angeles, and Gabriel didn’t yet rule the whole city, only the waterways running through the territories belonging to the great osteomancers.
    In the backyard of what used to be a two-bedroom Spanish Revival, he came upon a swing set. The seats had been consumed, leaving chains dangling from the still-burning redwood frame. Beyond that was a swimming pool. Bougainvillea and jacaranda petals turned black and fell into the water, dissolving into ash.
    *   *   *
    Gabriel remembered another night of flowers and ashes. He remembered Hancock Park, the neighborhood where he lived in a Tudor mansion until the age of six with his mother and father. He remembered koi ponds and private gondolas and ordinances against noise and excess and anything that might jar the tranquility of affluence.
    Gabriel’s father was a real estate attorney. Sedate and successful and rich, he was the sort of person who fit in well there. His mother was an osteomancer, a niece of the Hierarch.
    Both his parents’ occupations were obscure to Gabriel. His father did things with stacks of paper and made a lot of phone calls. His mother went to an office where she stirred things, or something like that. He knew his mother didn’t want him to be an osteomancer. Adults sometimes spoke around kids as though they were stupid or deaf, and once at some dinner party, while he was playing with building blocks under the grand piano with one of his cousins, someone asked his mother about Gabriel’s future. And his mother said, “No, not Gabriel. Not the bone trade for him. Not ever.”
    Gabriel wanted to be a gondolier when he grew up. He went to private school where everyone told him he was very smart. His hobbies were digging for worms with a bucket and shovel in the backyard, climbing the apricot tree, and throwing rocks into the canal.
    Then, one night, a pounding on the door. He shot upright in his bed and went to the bedroom door, but Liliana, Gabriel’s nanny, blocked his way out into the hall.
    â€œIt’s nothing,” she said, preempting any questions. “Go to sleep.”
    Gabriel trusted Liliana. He trusted the strength of her arms to carry him when he fell off his bike. He trusted the coolness of her hand when he had a fever. When his parents argued, he trusted the steadiness of her voice to read to him and make him believe