Blood Magic

SIXTEEN

HAD it been up to Washington, San Diego would not have received a dragon. True, it was home to a major naval base, and there was an Air Force base just north of the city. But after the Turning hit and ambient magic levels began rising, lots of cities wanted a dragon. Dragons were immense magic sponges—they soaked up all the free-floating magic that interfered with technology. The government had, not unreasonably, wanted a dragon sopping up excess magic in L.A., not the smaller city.

It hadn’t been up to the government. The Dragon Accords that Grandmother had negotiated awarded each dragon a permanent base, but made an exception for one of them: the black dragon, the eldest of them, known to Lily and Rule as Sam and to others as Sun Mzao. Officially, Sam’s territory was wherever he happened to be.

In practice—and in the eyes of the dragons—Sam’s territory included much of the West Coast, down into Mexico. He’d agreed to overfly Los Angeles frequently, and Sacra mento occasionally, but he laired just outside of San Diego.

At slightly under half a mile high, San Miguel Mountain wasn’t the largest peak around, but it was close to the city and highly visible. To the consternation of environmentalists, that was where Sam had dug his lair—in the west side of the mountain, facing the Sweetwater Reservoir. An unusually large dragon needed a great deal of fresh water, after all.

That’s where Lily and Rule headed shortly before eight A.M. that morning, taking Highway 54 out to Reservoir Road. There was no guarantee that Sam would be home, but he usually flew at night, so they had a good chance of catching him.

Or he might know they were coming and either wait for them or leave to avoid them. Lily didn’t know what the limits were on his ability to touch other minds or read thoughts outright. Distance mattered, but she didn’t know what his range was. Earth and stone mattered, too, which was one reason most dragons liked a rocky lair. It cut out the ambient mind-noise.

On the way, Lily made a couple calls, then took out her laptop. She pulled up the list of suspected professional hits that headquarters had sent her, skimmed it . . . and thought about dragons.

In the Western world, dragons had been considered a myth for centuries. Lily had certainly believed that—right up until one seized her in his talons and carried her off. That happened in Dis, otherwise known as the hell region, where the dragons had emigrated more than three hundred years ago when Earth’s magic grew too thin for them.

And now they were back.

At least some of them were—twenty-three, to be precise. Lily had the idea there might be more dragons in some distant realm. Sam wouldn’t say, but they must have a home realm. She was pretty sure dragons weren’t native to Earth.

Sam’s bunch had lived here a very long time, though, before temporarily relocating to Dis when Earth’s magic grew too thin for them. How long? No one knew except the dragons, and they weren’t saying.

Lily did know a few things about dragons, at least about the ones living here. They were compulsively curious, hoarders of knowledge more than gold—but they liked gold, too. Part of their fee for overflying their assigned territories, soaking up excess magic, was a measure of gold dust. No one knew why they wanted it.

She knew that dragons were mostly solitary, but they got together at times that fit some internal rhythm rather than the calendar . . . and sang. They sang to fulfill needs she couldn’t guess. They also sang to work magic.

That’s how Sam brought them all back from hell. The dragons couldn’t open a gate themselves—which did not make sense, because they’d left Earth once, so why couldn’t they make a gate? But dragons weren’t big on explaining, so that question resided in Lily’s find-out-one-day mental file. Sam had either taken advantage of the arrival of Lily and Rule in Dis, or he’d in some obscure way been counting on it so he could use their gate.

Only their gate had been far too small for dragons, and they hadn’t been able to open it for reasons that had to do with there being two of Lily at the time. Lily had taken care of the latter problem the only way she could. Sam had handled the first problem, singing the gate large, singing it open long enough to bring his people home . . . and with them, Max and Cullen and Cynna and Rule. And Lily, of course.

One of her. Most of her. She tried not to think about that too much.

She also knew why Sam had chosen San Diego for his lair. Li Lei Yu lived here. Therefore, so did the black dragon.

Lily wanted badly to know what her tiny, indomitable grandmother had shared with the enormous black dragon back in China so long ago. But Grandmother was impervious to questions—a trait she might have learned from Sam more than three centuries before Lily was born. Until this year, Lily had known Grandmother was older than she appeared; she hadn’t known how much older. She assumed Grandmother’s longevity had something to do with her interlude with Sam, but she didn’t know what.

Lily supposed to she had no real right to ask for details. but dammit, she wasn’t good at not asking questions.

Is there a verb for that? she wondered as she closed her laptop. They’d left the highway for Reservoir Road, and she knew from experience coverage was spotty here. Maybe she should call it minding her own . . .

Her phone sang out the first bar of “The Star Spangled Banner.” She answered. The caller turned out to be Ida, Ruben’s secretary, rather than Ruben himself. Her news was not welcome.

“She’s going to what?” she exclaimed. “That’s crazy. I can’t be sued for performing my duty.” She listened a moment. “That’s crazy, too. Jesus. Okay, sure, thanks for letting me know.”

“You’re being sued?” Rule said.

“It’s that Blanco case.” Lily dragged a hand over her hair. Earlier this year, she’d stopped a killer with a strong Earth Gift. When Lily tackled the woman, Adele Blanco had used her Gift to try to bring down the mountain on both of them. “She still blames me for the way she burned out her Gift. Claims I sucked it out of her.” Which wasn’t possible, of course, but making the earth shake so you could kill your enemy along with yourself was not the act of a sane and balanced person.

“She’s suing from her jail cell, and get this—Humans First is financing the lawsuit.”

“That’s peculiar of them, considering their views on the Gifted.”

“It’s a win-win for them,” Lily said bitterly. “The lawsuit will probably be thrown out, but in the meantime they can milk it for publicity. We’d managed to keep the earthquake thing quiet, but it will come out now.”

“The experts were unable to say for certain that Adele caused the quake.”

“People don’t need proof to be afraid.”

“True.” He paused a moment. “I’m going to be seeing your mother tomorrow.”

The change of subject gave her mental whiplash. “My mother? Why?”

“She asked me to go over a list of possible sites for the wedding. Apparently she’s asked you already, with what she considered insufficient results.”

“I don’t have time for this. You don’t have time for this.” Lily wanted to grab her hair and yank. “I’ve got a case. It’s a little more important to find this weird-ass killer than it is to chat about . . . You want me to call her and explain why we can’t do this right now?”

“We aren’t doing it. I am.”

They weren’t holding the wedding at Clanhome. That would have been easier—no reservation required—but Rule felt it would rub the clan’s nose in his decision. He wanted his wedding free of that sort of tension.

Was that even possible? His business, Lily reminded herself. Hers was . . . Well, surely the bride was supposed to consult with her own mother, not the groom. “I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to do the sit-down with my mother about these details.”

“Do you want to?”

“No, but—”

“Many places are booked a year in advance. We need to make this decision. I have some time; you don’t. So I’ll take care of it.”

“You’re already overloaded.”

“Amazingly enough, I can tell when I’ve taken on too much.”

She snorted. “You’re an overachiever, just like me. You think you can do everything and still add one more chore to the list.”

In the silence that followed Lily realized what she’d just said. And winced. “Ah . . .”

“I won’t mention the possibility that you’re projecting. I’ll just ask which of us you think is more likely to get what we want from your mother.”

Lily sighed and caved. “You’re in charge of venue, then.”

“Any preferences? Anything you absolutely don’t want?”

“I don’t want a big church wedding. Maybe someplace outside. I liked that about Cynna and Cullen’s wedding, that they held it out of doors.”

“You realize this means we have to set a date.”

“I’m okay with whatever you pick. Though I guess it had better not be in the summer, not if we do it outside. Uh—do you want to do it outside?”

“Frequently. Oh, you meant the wedding. That, too.”

She grinned. As some of the tension eased from her neck and shoulders, she realized she’d been wound way too tight. With reason, maybe, but it wasn’t helpful. Impulsively she reached out and squeezed his hand. “You’re good for me.”

It delighted her to see surprise, then pleasure, spread over his face. “Good,” he said. “That’s good. I love you.”

Happiness had a kick sometimes. She smiled. For once he was a bit tongue-tied. “Before I get back to work—which I really, really need to do—I’ll just add that you matter. It still scares me sometimes, how much you matter, but I’ve decided . . . Well, sunshine matters, too, but I don’t go around worrying about the sun, do I? So mostly I’m not worrying. Except about the wedding, and I’m trying to cut back there, too.”

“You might let me be in charge of worrying along with venue.”

She shook her head. “You’re not good at it. Me, I’m a champion worrier. You remember what Grandmother said about how to get a dragon to do something?”

He followed her jump in topics without trouble. “There are only two ways—strike a bargain, or go to war. We’re not interested in the second option, I assume.”

“Good assumption. She also said never owe a dragon a favor, as they tend to expect a really healthy repayment. But it isn’t a favor if they offer something without you asking.”

Lily’s dream last night had been the cobwebby sort—gossamer yet sticky. Its residue had clung to her as she stood under the shower’s stream, sticky strands of event and emotion clogging her thoughts. While she was rinsing out the shampoo, she’d realized why she’d dreamt of dragons.

There was one place Cullen should be entirely safe from a sorcerer or Gifted assassin who could disguise himself magically: a dragon’s lair. Like sorcerers, dragons saw magic. Like Lily, they were almost impossible to enspell. They were highly territorial. They were also telepathic.

It was damned hard to sneak up on someone who “heard” your mind buzzing if you got near.

There remained one problem: how would they get Sam to agree? Grandmother might have done it, had she been around. But she wasn’t.

Lily rubbed her breastbone, where worry had lodged like a tumor, hard and bothersome. That was the other reason she wanted to see Sam. If anyone knew where Grandmother was, he did.

The reservoir spread along their left to the east, vast and still, smiling up at the sky in placid blue. Lily looked at the unruffled water and tried to absorb some of its stillness.

“Are you hoping you can get Sam to offer Cullen asylum without asking for it?” Rule asked.

“I’m hoping to appeal to his curiosity. Somehow.”

“Hmm. I have some ideas. It might not be too difficult to persuade Sam. Cullen got along with Micah well enough back in D.C.”

Micah was Washington, D.C.’s dragon. “Micah’s a lot younger than Sam. I’m not sure Sam will find him inherently interesting in the same . . . Shit, there’s the sign. I’d better come up with something.”

The sign she referred to marked the entrance to a gravel road. “WARNING: THIS AREA IS RESTRICTED” it read in large letters. Fifty yards down the road was a gate and another sign: “DRAGON LAIR AHEAD. U.S. AND STATE LAW SUSPENDED BEYOND BARRIER.”

That suspension of law had been one of the trickiest parts of the negotiation that ended in the Dragon Accords. Dragons considered human laws absurd and obviously not applicable to them. Unsurprisingly, the government disagreed. In the end, the dragons had agreed to abide by a few basics: Respect for private property. No eating pets. No killing at all, apart from their allotted livestock, save in self-defense—not even when some human was particularly annoying.

With one exception. A dragon cannot conceive of his lair being subject to any authority but his own. According to Grandmother, it wasn’t that they insisted on absolute sovereignty there; they literally could not imagine anything else.

Technology had been faltering near the largest nodes, and it would only get worse. The country needed dragons, so tiny pockets were created where dragons’ whims prevailed, rather than human law. States—or countries, since just over half of the dragons went to other nations—that refused to create the necessary pockets around lairs simply didn’t get a dragon.

Every state except Utah and North Dakota had complied. So had Great Britain, Japan, China, Italy, Mexico, Germany, Brazil, New Zealand, and Canada, as well as twenty nations who had little hope of getting a dragon, but tried anyway. France refused, as did Russia and Australia.

In the U.S., the area around a lair was fenced and posted. Some of the dragons set magical booby traps or other defenses. The younger ones lacked their elders’ magical expertise, but they did set crude wards. If someone entered in spite of fence, wards, and warnings, the dragon could do whatever he wanted with the intruder—chat, maim, ensorcell, kill.

People being people, there had been incidents. None here, but then, Sam had ways of discouraging pests. Even the paparazzi had quit hanging out near the fence pretty fast. Their cameras kept suffering mysterious breakdowns—when they didn’t just explode.

Elsewhere, though, there had been problems. A photojour nalist had tried to sneak past the fence in Seattle, snap some pictures, then run really fast back to safe territory. He hadn’t been fast enough. Four gangbangers in Chicago had thought an area ungoverned by law would be a great place for drug deals, and saw no reason they couldn’t do the deal quickly just inside the fence, then vault back over. Curiosity seekers in London and Houston had made the attempt, as had an unaffiliated witch in Toronto who wanted a dragon’s scale.

All of them ended up injured, a couple of them badly. One of the gangbangers seemed to be permanently ensorcelled. He could speak only in nursery rhymes.

The Chicago incident had delighted some people. Jay Leno had told jokes about it for a week. That city’s dragon—he called himself Alec—had thoughtfully deposited the injured gang members on the roof of Cook County Hospital. While he’d declined to give a statement, he had offered one comment to the chief of police.

Turned out the one who now spoke in nursery rhymes had had his iPod turned up especially loud when he entered the lair. And Alec didn’t like rap music.

They were fortunate, Lily supposed, that no intruders had been killed. . . . as far as anyone knew. Since a dragon might decide to eat the evidence, that wasn’t certain. What part of “can’t sneak up on a telepath” did people not understand?

The narrow gravel road began climbing. Lily felt her heart rate climb, too.

Not because Sam would attack. He had informed them months ago that they would be allowed to visit occasionally, and Rule had done so. The first time had been an official welcome from Nokolai, in which Rule opened a discussion with the dragon about territory. He’d gone back officially twice and had made a purely personal visit recently, too.

Lily hadn’t.

“You okay?” Rule asked as he stopped the Mercedes in front of the gate.

“Sure.” Aside from cold, damp palms and an overly excited heartbeat. “I’m not scared of Sam.”

“Hmm.” He got out of the car, announced out loud that he and Lily were there to speak with Sam, and expressed the hope that their visit was not an intrusion. That was a courtesy, since Sam listened to minds, not voices—but he insisted that humans thought in such a cluttered way it was easier to “hear” what they meant if they spoke it aloud.

Lily took a slow breath, trying to settle herself. Rule hadn’t argued when she said she wasn’t afraid of Sam. He might have, though she’d spoken truly: she didn’t fear the dragon. It was the stuff in her own mind that made her palms sweaty.

Memory could be a bitch sometimes. Even the memories she couldn’t quite recall. Especially them.

It was a manual gate. Once Rule opened it, Lily scooted over to the driver’s seat so she could drive the car through, then wiggled back to the passenger seat to wait while Rule closed the gate again.

“I believe,” Rule said as he shut the door, “you might leave the bargaining to me.”

“You do, huh?” Her heartbeat was calming down. See there, she told her inner fearmonger, that wasn’t so bad.

“Cullen is clan as well as friend, so he’s mine to protect. If anything must be offered to gain that protection, that’s mine to give. And I can offer what you can’t—limited hunting rights in Clanhome.”

“Sam gets all the steers and pigs he wants.”

“He doesn’t get to hunt. Grabbing the animals released in this enclosure isn’t the same. I’m already negotiating with him on this.”

She looked at him, surprised. “You are?” She’d known he was negotiating something. He hadn’t talked about the terms . . . and she hadn’t asked, had she?

She’d been letting her fear control her. And hadn’t even noticed.

The road was climbing sharply now. Gravel crunched pleasantly beneath the tires. “We’d already have reached an agreement,” Rule said, “if he didn’t enjoy the bargaining itself so much.” He glanced at her, smiled. “Madame Yu advised me to bargain vigorously. Sam wouldn’t trust a deal too easily struck.”

Unconsciously Lily rubbed her breastbone again. Grandmother had survived wars, famine, and who-knew-what-all in China. In this country, she’d dealt with a minor god, negotiated with the president, and battled a really large demon. And those were just the things Lily knew about. Grandmother would survive whatever this adventure was, too. “What will Nokolai get in return?”

“A favor.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “Just one?”

“That was our initial request. I’m allowing him to bargain me down.”

“Down? Asking for more than one favor is being bargained down?”

“A debt that accumulates over many years could end up as a very large favor. He doesn’t want that, so we’re discussing how often Nokolai has to clear its tab. He wants it done frequently, so he can pay the debt with small favors. Naturally, I want the opposite.”

“Hmm.” The road curved up and around, a pale scar on a sere brown slope surrounded by ruffled land. It looked a lot like parts of Clanhome, and if you went by air—the way Sam would—the distance between the two wasn’t great. By road it was much longer. “I wonder what Sam considers a very large favor.”

Rule snorted. “Anything that seriously inconveniences him, I suspect.”

“You like him.”

“I do. The wolf understands him better than the man does, but I . . .” Rule’s voice trailed off. He braked to a gentle halt.

They’d rounded a tall, knobby earth-shoulder. Ahead the gravel road petered out into a broad, flat expanse of bare dirt.

Lily had expected that. Rule had told her about Sam’s architectural efforts. He’d used the rock and dirt excavated from his lair to build a large landing pad or front porch—first the rocks to make it stable, then enormous amounts of dirt, tamped down and leveled off.

She hadn’t expected the brightly colored canopy over the bit of carpet set on this end of that long landing pad. Or the middle-aged woman in loose white pants and a blue, short sleeved shirt standing in that small pavilion, smiling at them.

“Well,” Lily said after a moment, “it looks like we’ve found Li Qin.”