Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 42

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."

"Like it'll be open." The Impala ghosted forward with pantherine power, so smooth it seemed that the wheels had never quite stopped turning. "It's three in the morning. Even the bars are closed. You'll be lucky to find an all-night truck stop."

She looked out the window, turning away. The soft wind caught her voice and blew it back into the car with her hair. "You wanna try to make L.A. by sunup? It's all the same to me, but I know you don't like the trunk."

"Hey," Billy said. "There's a Denny's. Maybe one of the waitresses is knocked up. That'd be okay for both of us."

"They don't serve vampires." Mahasti pulled her arm back inside, turned to face front. With rhythmic push-pull motions, she cranked the window up. "Shut up already and drive."

Colorado River Florist. Spike's Bar-B-Que. Jack in the Box. Dimond and Sons Needles Mortuary. Spike's Saguaro Sunrise Breakfast. First Southern Baptist Church (Billy hissed at it on principle) and the Desert Mirage Inn. A Peanuts cartoon crudely copied on the sign over a tavern. Historic Route 66 ("The Mother Load Road," Billy muttered) didn't look much as it had when the Impala was young, but the motel signs were making an effort.

Of Needles itself, there wasn't much there there, which was a good thing for the vampires: they crisscrossed the whole downtown in the hollow dark before Billy pulled over to a curb and pointed, but it took them less than a hour.

Mahasti leaned over to follow the line of his finger. A gray corner-lot house with white trim and a yard overrun by Bermuda gra.s.s and mallow huddled in the darkness. It was doing a pretty good impression of a private residence, except for the turned-off neon OPEN sign in the window and the painted s.h.i.+ngle hanging over the door.

"Spike's Tattoo," she said. "Pun unintended?"

As they exited the car, heavy swinging doors glossy in the street-lit darkness, Billy cupped his hands and lit a cigarette. It flared bright between streetlights. "Why is everything in this d.a.m.ned town named after some Spike guy?"

Mahasti tugged her brown baby-doll tee smooth from the hem. An octopus clutching a blue teddy bear stretched across her insignificant b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Billy liked Frye boots and black dusters. Mahasti kicked at a clod with fuchsia Crocs, the frayed hems of her jeans swaying around skinny ankles. "Because he lives in the desert near here."

Billy gave her a dour look over the ember of the cigarette. He took a drag. It frosted his face in orange.

"Peanuts?" she tried, but the blank look deepened. "Snoopy's brother? It's their claim to fame."

Billy didn't read the newspapers. It wasn't even worth a shrug. He flipped the cigarette into the road.

He was dead anyway. He hadn't been getting much good out of it.

"Come on." Gravel crunched on the dirty road as he strode forward. "Let's go ruin somebody's morning."

Mahasti steepled her fingers. "I'll be right back. I'm just going to walk around the block."

Spike's Tattoo bulwarked the boundary between the commercial and the residential neighborhoods. Mahasti turned her back on Billy and walked away, up a quiet side street lined on either side by low block houses with tar-s.h.i.+ngled roofs that wouldn't last a third of a Minnesota winter.

They didn't have to.

Mahasti moved through the night as if she were following a scent, head tilted to one side or the other, nostrils flaring, the indrawn air hissing through her arched, constricted throat.

Billy came up behind her. "You smell anything?"

She shot him a look. "Your f.u.c.king menthol Camels."

He smiled. She jerked her chin at the gravel side drive that gave access to the gate into the backyard of Spike's. "I'm taking that one. You better go roll a wino or something."

"b.i.t.c.h," he said without heat. "I'll wait at the front door, then."

He spun on the scarred ball of his cowboy boot. He was lean, not too tall, stalking down the street as if the ghosts of his spurs should be jingling. The black duster flared behind him like a mourning peac.o.c.k's tail, but for once he hadn't shot the collar. A strip of brown skin with all the blood red dropped out showed between his coa.r.s.e black hair and the plaid band of his cowboy s.h.i.+rt. Even as short as that, the hair was too straight to show any kind of curl.

She sighed and shook her head and turned away.

"Tucson was f.u.c.king prettier." Mahasti could b.i.t.c.h all she wanted. There was no one to hear.

The houses here had block walls around the back, water-fat stretches of gra.s.s in the front. The newer neighborhoods might be xeriscaped, but in the 1940s a nice lawn was a man's G.o.d-given American right, and no mere inconvenience like the hottest desert in North America was going to stop him from having one. She walked up a cement sidewalk between stubby California fan palms on the street side and fruitless mulberry in the yards, still pausing every few feet to cast left and right and sniff the air.

She finished her stroll around the block and found herself back at Spike's Tattoo. A sun-beat gray house, paint peeling on the south side, it wore its untrimmed pomegranate hedge like a madman's fishy beard. The side door was sunken, uninviting, between s.h.a.ggy columns of leaves and branches. A rust-stained motorboat, vinyl canopy tattered, blocked the black steel gate that guarded the pa.s.sage between the side drive and the backyard.

Mahasti, who'd been sticking to the outside sidewalks on the block she was walking, looked both ways down the street and crossed, fetching up in the streetlight shadow of one of those stubby palms. She eyed the house as she walked into the side yard. It eyed her back-rheumy, snaggled, discontented.

She looked away. Then she stepped out of her squishy plastic shoes ("What will they think of next?" Billy had said, when she'd pulled them from a dead girl's feet outside of Winnemucca) and lofted from ground to boat deck to balance atop the eight-foot gate in a fluid pair of leaps, pausing only for a moment to let her vulture shadow fall into the gravel of the yard.

She spread her arms and stepped down lightly, stony gravel silent under her brown bare foot, the canopy of her hair trailing like a comet tail before swinging forward heavily and cloaking her crouched body to the ankles. It could trap no warmth against her, but it whisked roughly on the denim of her jeans.

Hair, it turned out, actually did keep growing after you were dead.

She tilted her head back, sniffing again, eyes closed to savor. When she smiled, it showed white, even, perfectly human teeth. When she uncoiled and glided forward it was one motion, smooth as any dancer. "Everything we need."

There was a dog in the yard, stretched out slumbering on a pallet made of heaped carpet squares. The third security window-long, narrow, and a foot over her head-that she tried with her palms pressed flat against its gla.s.s slid open left to right. There were no screens.

Hands on the window ledge, she chinned herself. In a cloak of red-black hair robbed of color by the darkness, she slid inside.

It was a cold s.p.a.ce of tile illuminated by a yellow nightlight: the bathroom. Mahasti's bare dead feet were too dry to stick to the linoleum, her movements too light to echo. The door to the hall stood ajar. She slipped sideways through it without touching and paused just outside. The rasp of human breathing, human heartbeat, was stentorian. Their scent saturated the place.

Three. Infant, woman, and man.

Mahasti slithered around the open bedroom door, past the crib, one more shadow among shadows. The little boy slept on his stomach, knees drawn up under him, b.u.t.t a round crooked mountain under the cheap acrylic blanket.

When Mahasti picked him up, he woke confused and began to cry. The parents roused an instant after, their heat crystal-edged against the dimness, fumbling in the dark. "Your turn," the man said, and rolled over, while the woman slapped at her nightstand until her fingers brushed against her eyegla.s.s frames.

"You probably have a gun in the nightstand." Mahasti hooked the hem of the octopus s.h.i.+rt and rucked it up over her gaunt, cold belly, revealing taut flesh and stretch marks. She slung the baby against her shoulder with her left hand. "I don't think you want to do that."

The woman froze; the man catapulted upright, revealing a torso streaked with convoluted lines of ink. His feet made a moist noise on the floor.

"Lady," the man said, "who the h.e.l.l are you? No wetback f.u.c.king junkie is gonna come in my house...."

"You shouldn't put a child to sleep on his stomach."

The baby's wails came peac.o.c.k sharp, peac.o.c.k painful. She cupped him close, feeling the hammering of his tiny heart. She freed her breast one-handed and plugged him onto the nipple with the deftness of practice.

He made smacking sounds at first, then settled down contented as her milk let down. Warmth spread through her, or perhaps the chill drained from her dead flesh to his living.

The vampire didn't take her eyes off the man, and he didn't move toward the nightstand. The mother-a thick-shouldered woman bare-legged in an oversized s.h.i.+rt-stayed frozen, her hands clawed at her sides, her head c.o.c.ked like a bird's. An angry mother falcon, contemplating which eye to go after first.

Mahasti moved. She closed, lifted the woman up one-handed, and tossed her across the room. Trivial, and done in the s.p.a.ce of a blink; the mother had more hang-time than it took Mahasti to return to her original place by the door. The man jumped back, involuntarily, as the mother hit the wall beside him. "s.h.i.+t," he said, crouching beside her. "s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t."

The woman pushed herself up the wall, blood smearing from a swollen lip, a cheek split over the bone.