Dragon Coast by Greg van Eekhout Read Free Book Online Page A

deal with lightning. But what about the soldiers?
    At a break in the gunfire, he rolled into the doorway, rose to a kneeling position, and let lightning surge indiscriminately from his fingers. He brought down three soldiers. A few others scrambled for cover in the rocks, but the summit was emptier than it had been just moments ago. Where had most of the soldiers gone?
    The airships loomed overhead and lowered more soldiers, but instead of landing on the summit, they came down off the western ledge where the dragon had fallen. When one of the airships lowered a massive bundle of cargo netting and chains, Daniel finally got it.
    This was a heist. Someone was stealing the dragon.
    He charged out of the storm shelter into the howling wind, sending forks of lightning upward and outward. Renewed gunfire answered him, not from the soldiers on the ground, but from the airships themselves. Darting from boulder to boulder, Daniel made his way to the western ledge and peered over. Below him, dozens of soldiers clambered over the dragon as if it were terrain to be conquered. Two of them operated a hydraulic hoist to lift the dragon’s tail and position cargo netting underneath it. Another pair connected the netting to chains dangling from one of the airships.
    Daniel reached back to sense memories of a Colombian dragon, the sensation of wind whipping past smooth, scaled cheeks, the sight of mastodons stampeding in fright. Sam was a Pacific firedrake, and Daniel’s fire wouldn’t hurt him. But Daniel would burn these motherfuckers.
    He vomited blue flames.
    The flames fell short, the soldiers beyond his range. There was one thing to do about that. Without rope and harness, he edged himself to the ledge and began picking his way down.
    Digging his fingers into loose earth, he rested one foot on a pancake-sized protrusion of rock. Pain exploded in his calf. Blood ran down his leg. A single gunshot. He held on, the gloved fingers of one hand gripping rock, the other squeezing the axis mundi bone.
    More shots. One grazed his arm, and he squeezed the bone tighter. Another went through the back of his hand, and he screamed in agony and in frustration. He knew without looking. He could feel it. He could smell it.
    The axis mundi bone was powder, shrieking away in the high-altitude wind.
    Daniel’s foot slipped off the rock and he fell. He glanced off a knuckle of stone with rib-cracking impact, slid down gravel, and came to rest with his feet toward the summit and his head hanging over thousands of feet of nothing. He couldn’t breathe. Blood from his leg and arm and hand ran down the slope, pooling near his head.
    He was supposed to be a mighty sorcerer, and he wasn’t going to lose Sam again from a bullet and a fall.
    But it wasn’t just a bullet and a fall. It was a well-armed and -equipped squadron of quality fighters. It was three airships and lifting gear. It was osteomancy from creatures he didn’t know. This wasn’t Los Angeles. It had to be the Northern Kingdom.
    He tried to move and slipped another inch down the slope. His head hung even farther over the abyss, and only by pressing the palm of his uninjured hand hard against the ground did he keep himself from going over. Helpless, he watched the three airships dip below the mountain, engines straining, carrying Sam away.

 
    FIVE
    Cassandra Morales dug a hole. It didn’t have to be a deep hole, because down in this dry gully on the borders of Los Angeles and Riverside counties it didn’t take much work to hide things. There wasn’t a human settlement for twenty miles, just brown hills and dusty chaparral. Suburban enclaves with names like Quail Valley and Rainbow and Home Gardens had become ghost towns after Gabriel Argent decided bringing water out here was unsustainable and irresponsible, and once he shut off the spigots, the communities got handed back to coyotes and mountain lions.
    Now, here, it was just her and Otis