Part 42 (1/2)

She looked down, and he gave her time to think.

”It would be very expensive,” she said, cautiously, rubbing the fingertips together as if they'd lost sensation. ”We would have to move quickly, if poachers have already found your ... mother-cave. And you're talking about a huge engineering problem, to move them without taking them apart. I don't know where the money would come from.”

”If the expense were not at issue, would the museum accept the bequest?”

”Without a question.” She touched his eye-ridge again, quickly, furtively. ”Dragons,” she said, and shook her head and breathed a laugh. ”Dragons.”

”Money is no object,” he said. ”Does your inst.i.tution employ a solicitor?”

The doc.u.ment was two days in drafting. Orm the Beautiful spent the time fretting and fussed, though he kept his aspect as nearly serene as possible. Katherine-the curator-did not leave his side. Indeed, she brought him within the building-the tall doors and vast lobby could have accommodated a far larger dragon-and had a cot fetched so she could remain near. He could not stay in the lobby itself, because it was a point of man-pride that the museum was open every day, and free to all comers. But they cleared a small exhibit hall, and he stayed there in fair comfort, although silent and alone.

Outside, reporters and soldiers made camp, but within the halls of the Museum of Natural History, it was bright and still, except for the lonely shadow of Orm the Beautiful's song.

Already, he mourned his Chord. But if his sacrifice meant their salvation, it was a very small thing to give.

When the contracts were written, when the papers were signed, Katherine sat down on the edge of her cot and said, ”The personal bequest,” she began. ”The one the museum is meant to sell, to fund the retrieval of your Chord.”

”Yes,” Orm the Beautiful said.

”May I know what it is now, and where we may find it?”

”It is here before you,” said Orm the Beautiful, and tore his heart from his breast with his claws.

He fell with a crash like a breaking bell, an avalanche of skim-milkwhite opal threaded with azure and absinthe and vermilion flash. Chunks rolled against Katherine's legs, bruised her feet and ankles, broke some of her toes in her clicking shoes.

She was too stunned to feel pain. Through his solitary singing, Orm the Beautiful heard her refrain: ”Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.”

Those who came to investigate the crash found Katherine Samson on her knees, hands raking the rubble. Salt water streaked opal powder white as bone dust down her cheeks. She kissed the broken rocks, and the blood on her fingertips was no brighter than the shocked veins of carnelian flash that shot through them.

Orm the Beautiful was broken up and sold, as he had arranged. The paperwork was quite unforgiving; dragons, it seems, may serve as their own attorneys with great dexterity.

The stones went for outrageous prices. When you wore them on your skin, you could hear the dragonsong. Inst.i.tutions and the insanely wealthy fought over the relics. No price could ever be too high.

Katherine Samson was bequeathed a few chips for her own. She had them polished and drilled and threaded on a chain she wore about her throat, where her blood could warm them as they pressed upon her pulse. The mother-cave was located with the aid of Orm the Beautiful's maps and directions. Poachers were in the process of excavating it when the team from the Smithsonian arrived.

But the museum had brought the National Guard. And the poachers were dealt with, though perhaps not with such finality as Orm the Beautiful might have wished.

Each and each, his Chord were brought back to the Museum. Katherine, stumping on her walking cast, spent long hours in the exhibit hall. She hovered and guarded and warded, and stroked and petted and adjusted Orm the Beautiful's h.o.a.rd like a nesting falcon turning her eggs. His song sustained her, his warm bones worn against her skin, his voice half-heard in her ear.

He was broken and scattered. He was not a part of his Chord. He was lost to them, as other dragons had been lost before, and as those others his song would eventually fail, and flicker, and go unremembered.

After a few months, she stopped weeping.

She also stopped eating, sleeping, dreaming.

Going home.

They came as stragglers, footsore and rain-draggled, noses peeled by the sun. They came alone, in party dresses, in business suits, in outrageously costly T-s.h.i.+rts and jeans. They came draped in opals and platinum, opals and gold. They came with the song of Orm the Beautiful warm against their skin.

They came to see the dragons, to hear their threaded music. When the museum closed at night, they waited patiently by the steps until morning. They did not freeze. They did not starve.

Eventually, through the sheer wearing force of attrition, the pa.s.sage of decades, the museum accepted them. And there they worked, and lived, for all time.

And Orm the Beautiful?

He had been shattered. He died alone.

The Chord could not reclaim him. He was lost in the mortal warders, the warders who had been men.

But as he sang in their ears, so they recalled him, like a seash.e.l.l remembers the sea.

Needles The vampires rolled into Needles about three hours before dawn on a Tuesday in April, when the nights still chilled between each scorching day. They sat as far apart from each other as they could get, jammed up against the doors of a '67 Impala hardtop the color of dried blood, which made for acres of bench seat between them. Billy, immune to irony, rested his fingertips on the steering wheel, the other bad-boy arm draped out the open window. Mahasti let her right hand trail in the slipstream behind the pa.s.senger mirror, like a cherub's stunted wing.

Mahasti had driven until the sun set. After that, she'd let Billy out of the trunk and they had burned highway all night south from Vegas through Cal-Nev-Ari, over the California border until they pa.s.sed from the Mojave Desert to the Mohave Valley. Somewhere in there the 95 blurred into cohabitation with Interstate 40, and then they found themselves cruising the Mother Road.

”Get your kicks,” Billy said, ”on Route 66.”

Mahasti ignored him.

They had been able to smell the Colorado from miles out, the river and the broad green fields that wrapped the tiny desert town like a hippie skirt blown north by prevailing winds. Most of the agriculture clung along the Arizona side, the point of Nevada following the Colorado down until it ended in a chisel tip like a ninja sword pointed straight at the heart of Needles.

”Bad feng shui,” Billy said, trying again. ”Nevada's gonna stab California right in the b.a.l.l.s.”

”More like right in the water supply,” Mahasti said, after a pause long enough to indicate that she'd thought about leaving him hanging but chosen, after due consideration, to take pity. Sometimes it was good to have somebody to kick around a little. She was mad at him, but he was still her partner.

She ran her left hand through her hair, finger-combing, but even at full arm's stretch, fingertips brus.h.i.+ng the winds.h.i.+eld, she didn't reach the end of the locks. ”If they thought they could get away with it.”

She curled in the seat to glance over her shoulder, as if something might be following. But the highway behind them was as empty as the desert had been. ”We should have killed them.”

”Aww,” Billy said. ”You kill every little vampire hunter who comes along, pretty soon no vampire hunters. And then what would we do for fun?”

She smiled in spite of herself. It had been a lot of lonely centuries before she found Billy. And Billy knew he wasn't in charge.

He feathered the gas; the big engine growled. He guided the Impala toward an off ramp. ”Does this remind you of home?”

”Because every f.u.c.king desert looks alike? There's no yucca in Baghdad.” She tucked a thick strand of mahogany-black hair behind one rose-petal ear. ”Like I even know what Baghdad looks like anymore.”

The door leaned into her arm as the car turned, pressing lines into the flesh. The dry desert wind stroked dry dead skin. As they rolled up to a traffic signal, she tilted her head back and scented it, curling her lip up delicately, like a dog checking for traces of another dog.

”They show it on TV,” Billy said.

”They show it blown up on TV,” she answered. ”Who the f.u.c.k wants to look at that? Find me a f.u.c.king tattoo parlor.”

”Like that'll change you.” He reached across the vast emptiness of the bench seat and brushed her arm with the backs of his fingers. ”Like anything will change you. You're dead, darlin'. The world doesn't touch you.”

When you were one way for a long time, it got comfortable. But every so often, you had to try something new. ”You never know until you try.”