He wears a body impossible by what human beings would consider the normal rules of biology and physics. Now, suddenly, he exists in a world where aerodynamics, the square-cube law, and the tensile strength of muscle and sinew all mean something.
The wind becomes a wall, tearing wings back, ripping joints out of their sockets, splintering delicate bone, shredding skin. The long serpentine neck snaps back, vertebrae separate and fracture, as a head the size of a human body slams into his back above the base of his tail.
His body tumbles in a spinning downward dive as overtaxed lungs separate from the chest wall and his heart busts open with the pressure of his blood.
No longer a shadow gliding across the sky, he is a plummeting missile. More people see him now, they can hear the whistle of air sliding by his body. There is the slight, horrible, chance that—as his body falls out of the dead spot and back into the mana sea—the thinking part of his brain might awaken enough to
understand
.
Then he hits.
Aloeus, one of the most private of creatures, suffers the most public of deaths. Fifteen tons of dragon slam into a gravel mine on the western shore of the Cuyahoga River within sight of downtown Cleveland.
The body hits at such a velocity and such an angle that it keeps moving. Bones turn to jelly and flesh tears away as it skids across the ground. Gore marks gantries two hundred feet up and fifty yards away. The body tears into a docked cargo ship, twisting bulkheads and steel as it tumbles off the far side and plunges into the river, finally, to rest.
And, before the last postmortem tremor leaves Aloeus’ epic corpse, the dominoes have started to fall.
CHAPTER ONE
T
HE domino with my name on it happened to be Columbia Jennings, a whip-thin, middle-aged Hispanic woman who was the Metro editor of the
Cleveland Press
. Third in the chain of command and my immediate boss.
Don’t get me wrong about this, I like my job. Cleveland, for various reasons, is one of very few places where serious print journalism is still kicking. Seniority gave me the ability to concentrate on investigative reporting and op-ed pieces. There are few times I dislike coming into the office.
All those times have Columbia’s name written on them.
When I came in that morning, and sat down at my workstation, and saw a little messaging icon with her name on it hovering in the middle of the LCD flatscreen display, my first response was to look around the office to see if anyone had witnessed my arrival and could testify if I bolted for the fire exit.
When an unseen escape proved not to be an option, I gritted my teeth and clicked on the message. Meeting, her office, three minutes ago. I think my wince was barely visible.
The words, “You’re late,” greeted me as I opened her office door. I looked around the office. Just me and her. Bad sign. She waved at me to close the door, which was worse—if only because it confined the stale smell of cigarette smoke in the room. Columbia reeked of it, and the air around her made my eyes water.
I took a seat across from her and said, “I just got your message.”
I don’t know exactly how she did it, but she could radiate disapproval without changing her expression. “Have you heard any news broadcasts this morning?”
I shook my head. One of my few personal rules was not to take work home. When I was off duty, I was off duty. Between whatever point I got home to my condo, and coming into work the next morning, I avoided news broadcasts, newspapers, even C-SPAN. It only took my wife and daughter moving to California to learn me that lesson, though I doubt my ex gives me any credit for it.
The disapproval wave hit me again.
“They found a dragon floating in the Cuyahoga River this morning.”
“I didn’t know they could swim.”
“Dead.” She snapped the word.
I was taken aback. It must have shown, because she let a shadow of a smile leak from the corner of her mouth. Common knowledge was that dragons were supposedly immortal. The things were supposed to be able to take a bullet directly into the brain or heart and still keep flying—though I don’t know anyone personally who’d had the balls to put that theory to the test.
Christ, there were only a handful of dragons on this side of the Portal. This wasn’t just news, this was
major
news.
Which made things pretty damn obvious to your truly.
“You
know
I don’t do fuzzy gnome stories.”
“This isn’t a fuzzy gnome story,” she said, “and you know it.” She was giving me a very cold look. I had the impression of an Old Testament pagan idol, the kind they fed babies to.
“This isn’t my kind of—”
“Bullshit, Maxwell.” She stood up. “You may have a privileged position here because you’ve been covering City Hall since they played football in Browns Stadium, but you can only take that so far. You still work for this paper.”
I shook my head.
“You think you’re too good to cover Morgan’s beat?”
Morgan would have been the man to cover this story. If he’d still been at the paper, this probably would have been his crowning achievement, actual feature material.
I shook my head no.
“Good, because you are the only person on the staff who hasn’t had to cover for him.”
I gave a resigned nod. I know very few reporters at the
Press
who envied Morgan’s beat. All the paranormal crap was, supposedly, what made Cleveland interesting. Makes sense, right? The fact was, the guy on the magic beat, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, is working the ubiquitous “fuzzy gnome” stories. All the stupid (in)human interest stuff that’s filler in the paper and gives the morning dee-jays something stupid to talk about. Unicorn sightings, gremlins in the sewer line, the occasional talking frog—which never has anything interesting to say. All the kind of stuff you would have found in a supermarket tabloid before the Portal opened and the crap started actually happening.
The difference is, of course, when the hacks in the tabloids were making the shit up, they made sure it was interesting.
Morgan was a transplanted Kentuckian who was one of the few people who actually enjoyed hearing mages pontificate on the different varieties of graveyard soil.
Unfortunately for everyone, Morgan’s interest in his subject had overcome a prudent professional detachment, and it wasn’t just his objectivity that suffered. The stories on how it happened varied; the cleaner versions had him ingesting some elixir he shouldn’t have, the more ribald versions had him intimate with something not quite human. Either way, everyone agreed that four weeks ago, Morgan broke out in a carpet of tumors all over his skin. That would be bad enough, but apparently all these warts grew tiny little eyes that started staring at him. They did an MRI scan and discovered the little buggers scattered everywhere in his body.
Even so, his prognosis was pretty good. They just had to life-flight him down to Columbus, away from the influence of the Portal.
Bad news, returning anywhere within a hundred miles of this town would probably wake up all the little bright-eyed tumors, with fatal results.
“Do we know who it is?”
“They haven’t released any information yet.”
I stood up. “Okay, Bea, where am I going?”
She scrawled directions on a Post-It note and handed it to me. And for a brief moment I saw something that I’ve rarely ever seen in Columbia’s eyes.
Relief.
I did spend some nominal time on the way there wondering how it was, when a hundred-foot-long, fifteen-ton corpse with a 150-foot wingspan clogged the Cuyahoga River in the shadow of the Hope Memorial Bridge, that the
Cleveland Press’
senior City Hall reporter got the plum assignment.
Unfortunately, while I am pretty good at spotting real or imagined conspiracies in city government, I wasn’t that good at seeing them at my own newspaper. In retrospect it was probably the willful blindness of a middle-aged man comfortable in his job that made me avoid asking a few key questions until much later.
I got to the scene a little after nine a.m. About five blocks from the river I was solidly wedged in traffic backed up from the bridge. I could just catch sight of police and EMS flashers at the base of the northernmost art-deco tower.
I looked up and saw a few traffic ’copters hovering above the river. Above them, reptilian shadows circled in the blue August sky. Other dragons paying their respects.
I turned on the radio and scanned through the stations. Each one announced itself with a few brief seconds of Portal-generated babble before the digital circuitry managed to decipher the real broadcast from the extraneous magical signals that ate up fifty or sixty percent of the bandwidth. The interference resolved into the tail end of a traffic report. “—nasty tie-up on Carnegie near the river. Police have closed the Hope Memorial Bridge, but that hasn’t seemed to stem the tide of curiosity seekers, who’ve tied up traffic all the way back to the Convocation Center—”
I grunted in frustration. It had already taken me fifteen minutes to move half a block, so I decided to change modes of transportation. I cut off a rust-bucket Hyundai and pulled my Volkswagen up on the sidewalk.
It was already headed toward the nineties, so I had been driving with the AC full blast. So I wasn’t quite prepared for it when I opened the door.
The smell of the decedent hit me like damp towel soaked in rancid bacon fat. The kind of smell that sort of slithers in when you inhale it. My lungs stopped in a sort of appalled shock, and I had to force myself to keep breathing.
Jesus, it’s coming from the river.
During my twenty-some years as a reporter I had been close to some ripe bodies. That did not make me relish dealing with them. During my career I had done my damnedest, in fact, to get away from situations where I had to deal with them. I hadn’t planned on getting close enough to the dragon to smell it.
Apparently, there was a flaw in that plan.
I could picture Columbia laughing at me.
So Maxwell’s uncomfortable with magic? Let’s not just hand him one of Morgan’s stories, let’s give him the one with the highest gag factor.
I decided that she was pissed at me, and this was her way of showing it.
It only got worse as I walked toward the bridge. I wasn’t getting anywhere near the source of that smell without a little preparation.
It landed last night! These things must rot real quick.
I stopped in a drugstore two blocks away. The place was empty except for a scrawny little Indian guy who was busy lighting the fifteenth lucky-number votive candle on the counter in front of the cash register. It wasn’t doing any good. The guy’s eyes were watering. I grabbed what I needed and placed it on the counter next to a Madonna backlit in red wax. “Hey, if you’re staying here, you need some of this.”
The guy blinked at the small blue-green package. I shelled out five bucks, tore open the box and unscrewed the lid of the small canister of Vicks Vapo-Rub. I got two fingerfuls of the gel an smeared it above my upper lip, under my nose. “Menthol,” I explained.
I held my hand out to the guy.
“Many thanks,” he said as he repeated my gesture. He took a few deep breaths. I could almost see his sinuses clear as he smiled. “Oh, God, thank you.” He pushed my five back at me. “No charge.”
My good deed for the day.
I walked out, taking my own deep breaths. I still sucked air through my mouth, the gel couldn’t kill the evil slithery smell, but it prevented the smell from triggering a gag reflex or shutting my lungs down in horror.
The closer I got to the bridge, the more I had to watch my step. The sidewalk was splattered with the stomach contents of people less prepared than I.
In theory I was supposed to meet the
Press
photographer out here. Looking at the traffic, I decided that waiting for the guy was an exercise in masochism. I doubted that he would have any trouble finding carnage to digitize without my help.
So I walked up to where the cops had set up a perimeter, a few hundred feet from the bridge itself. A pair of black-and-whites lorded it over a forest of red cones that blocked all four lanes of Carnegie, diverting everyone onto Ontario or I-90. No cops immediately in evidence, so I just walked past the roadblock.
Once I passed the perimeter, I heard a car door slam, and a slightly strangled voice say, “Hey . . .”
I turned around and saw a uniformed cop coming out of one of the black-and-whites. The cop was a kid, less than half my age. It was probably some detective’s idea of a joke setting the guy up here.
“You,” he coughed, “can’t go up t-there.”
I was impressed that the guy wasn’t falling to his knees from the smell. He was sweating. The druggist’s eyes had been watering, but this guy’s eyes were leaking down the sides of his face.