Before either one of them could slide into the cop car, an avatar popped up in front of them. Shapur Razmara hadn’t seen this one. He would have remembered her. If he’d ever had a wet dream about an Asian woman ... He shook his head. His wet dreams were nowhere near this hot.
She looked from him to Sergeant Kyriades and back again. Then she shook her head in what might have been scorn or pity or both at once. “You poor sorry assholes,” she said in a voice like sin dipped in honey. A split second later, she was gone.
“Fuck,” Kyriades said wearily. “How do they do that shit, anyway?”
“If I knew...” Razmara shook his head and spread his hands. When you banged into avatars and Real and all that other stuff, banged into ‘em headlong and full throttle, cell phones and computers and DNA kits started looking like mighty small potatoes.
“Well, we gotta try,” Stas said as he got in.
“Uh-huh.” Razmara buckled his seat belt. Away they went.
The dragon studied Pablo with topaz eyes full of ancient evil. “You shall not have my hoard,” it hissed, each word sounding individually scorched.
“That’s what you think, Charlie.” Pablo took a step forward. He could feel the way the soft leather of his boots gripped his feet and his calves. He could feel the slight scratchiness of his heavy wool breeches against his legs, and the soft smoothness of his sapphire silk tunic.
And he could feel the weight of the sword on his left hip. His hand dropped to the hilt. The dragonhide in which it was wrapped was rough against his fingers. His neck muscles tensed against the weight of his helmet.
“Flee now, while you still have the chance,” the dragon warned. It smelled of brimstone and serpent and terror.
Pablo’s heart thuttered inside his chest; he could distinctly feel each beat. He looked around—quickly, so the dragon didn’t strike while he was distracted. No, no one else had come up the trail through the dark woods with him. A breeze blew fallen elm and oak leaves across the path.
He drew the sword. All the light in the neighborhood seemed to focus on the blade. “You’re the one who’d better run,” he growled. Brandishing that shining weapon was the most natural thing in the world. “I’ve got your number, man, and you know it.”
“Even fate yields to fire,” the dragon said. It opened its mouth wide. Its breath smelled like five sacks of groceries forgotten for two weeks in a locked car in the middle of August. And then the flame flowed forth. Whoever’d invented napalm back in the old days must have been thinking of dragons.
But nothing stopped napalm. When the sword with the dragonhide hilt smote the dragonfire, it magically transformed the flames to harmless mist. The dragon’s hoarse, guttural shriek of despair almost deafened Pablo.
He thrust home. He could feel the point piercing the hard scales of the dragon’s belly. He could feel it probing for the monster’s heart. And, as he’d felt his own heart pound, he felt the dragon’s stop. The creature tried to curse him, but died with the words still unspoken. That was good, because curses here were as Real as everything else.
Dragon blood steaming and smoking on the sword, Pablo pressed past the bend in the path to find out how big a hoard the great worm had had. Gold: coins and chains and rings and armlets. Silver: more coins, and bowls and spoons and a mighty drinking horn half as tall as a man. Jewels: some set into gold and silver, others simply sparkling alone, rubies and emeralds and sapphires and diamonds. A king’s ransom? It was the ransom of a continent full of kings. And it was Pablo’s, all Pablo’s.
He’d pretty much expected that kind of stuff. What he hadn’t expected was that the dragon’s hoard also included the most gorgeous redhead he’d ever seen. All she wore was her hair, which fell nearly to her waist.
“My hero!” she cried in a voice like bells, and cast herself into his arms.
From then on, matters proceeded rapidly. They lay down together. He thrust home. He could feel everything that happened after that, too. Oh, could he ever!
Shapur Razmara stared down in tired disgust at the guy lying on the sidewalk with a little square of green cardboard plastered to the side of his head and a shit-eating grin plastered all over his face. “Another one,” he said, in exactly the tone of voice he would have used to count cowflops at a fertilizer factory.
“Fuckin’ dingleberry,” Sergeant Kyriades agreed. “Let’s get Real.” He sounded about ready to york on his shoes.
“More and more of these stupid...” Razmara’s voice trailed off. Even though he was a cop with twenty years on the job, he couldn’t think of anything vile enough to call them. He wanted to spit into this unconscious punk’s face—not that that would have accomplished anything except to win him a disciplinary hearing, and not that the punk would even have noticed.
“We go through the motions?” Kyriades asked resignedly.
“Got a better idea, Stas?” Razmara said.
“They don’t pay me enough to have ideas,” his partner answered.
“Oh, yeah, like I’m so goddamn rich.” Razmara snorted. “Twenty million a month and all the acid-blockers I can pop. Hot damn!” Twenty million dollars a month and you could pick two out of three from child support, rent, and food. You couldn’t have ‘em all—he’d found that out again and again, the hard way.
“More’n I bring in,” Kyriades said. Which was true, but he’d managed to stay married. Not for the first time, Lieutenant Razmara wondered how. Sure as hell wasn’t his looks.
That was a worry for another day. “Gather up the goods,” Razmara said.
“Right.” The sergeant nodded. Persians and Greeks—they’d only been fighting for 2,500 years. But Razmara and Kyriades got on fine. And, since they were both white men whose first language was English, they counted for Anglos in Los Angeles. A Muslim Anglo? An Orthodox one? Why not? There were plenty of Jewish “Anglos” in L.A., but mostly on the West Side.
Kyriades pulled a plastic evidence bag and a tweezer out of his jacket pocket. He used the tweezer to capture the green square—you didn’t want to touch it barehanded. The LAPD had found out about that—again, the hard way. Along with the rest of the United States, the LAPD was finding out about all kinds of things the hard way these days.
“So we’ll take it back to the lab, right?” Kyriades said, carefully stashing the little square in the evidence bag.
“Sure.” Razmara nodded. “What else? Gotta follow procedures.” His great-granddad would have talked the same way about following the Koran. Stas’ great-grandfather, no doubt, would have yattered about the Bible the same way. To them in the old days, and to the lieutenant now, Holy Writ was Holy Writ. If you didn’t follow procedures (or the Koran, or the Bible—check one), Bad Things Would Happen.
Well, Bad Things were already happening. Getting Real, for instance.
“So we’ll take the fucking thing back to the lab,” Kyriades repeated. “And the gals in the white coats will do whatever the hell they do, right? And then they’ll tell us the same thing those sorry suckers tell us every goddamn time.” His baritone rasp—he sounded like a three-pack-a-day guy, though he wasn’t—went falsetto: “‘We can’t analyze what’s in it. We’ve got no clue how it fucks up the assholes who use it.’ Shit.” The last word was in his usual tones again.
“Yeah, yeah.” Shapur Razmara had heard it all before. Hell, he’d said it all before. It was all true. Saying it didn’t do a thousand dollars’ worth of good. The LAPD was screwed. The whole country was screwed, and had been for years. Just the same ... “You have a better idea, Sherlock?”
“I already told you, they don’t pay me enough for that.”
“You tell me all kinds of crap,” Razmara said. “You expect me to keep it sorted out, too?”