tree. Branches broke and cut at his flesh, but he was already gone. He hit, finally, and slid for a very long time. The bike lay on its side, engine still idling. The headlight was smashed, but the taillight blinked through the shadows.
The jacket slid up and over the back of his head where he lay, covering him like a shroud.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The call came early the next morning. It did not come to the clubhouse, or to Snake, but to Manuel's mother. The dragon had never married, and though he didn't live at home, that was the address he listed when anything official had to be signed. Elena Delgado answered on the fourth ring. She'd been expecting a call like this one most of her adult life — since her husband Paco had died, and the boys had both taken up with Snake and The Dragons. They were good boys, for the most part, but it was a dangerous life they led. The Barrio was a dangerous place.
What Elena had not anticipated was getting two such calls in a single night. Snake had called, and then visited in person to tell her of Enrique's death. When she'd asked why Manuel had not come — where he had gone — Snake had shook his head. He didn't know. Men grieve in their own fashion, he said. Now Elena cradled the phone in her hand and brought it to her ear.
When the message had been delivered, she didn't hang up the phone. She let it drop from her hand, and she turned away. Tears unfocused the world, and she stumbled back, not really going anywhere, just unwilling to stand still and let reality grip her heart. She had to go somewhere, to do something.
Elena grabbed her jacket, and her purse. It was still dark out, and she knew that she couldn't' drive in her current state. She closed and locked her door, leaving the phone beeping it's off-the-hook busy signal to an empty home, and turned away. It was about a mile to The Dragons clubhouse. She pulled her jacket about her more tightly, bowed her head, and began walking.
~* ~
It was not easy getting the police to release Enrique's jacket. Manuel had worn it when he died, and it was now stained with the blood of two men — two brothers — both dead. The death's had to be explained. In the end, Elena's grief, and the tragic loss of two brothers in the prime of their lives softened even official hearts. Snake was allowed to carry off the jacket and a few other personal effects in an old cardboard box. Elena walked at his side, her back bent. She was silent, for the most part, and he left her to her grief.
At the clubhouse he found the others milling about on the street, awaiting his return. When they saw him walk into site, Elena at his side, they stood in ranks, three deep, on either side of the walk leading up to the door. Snake paid no attention to them at all.
He carried the box past them, looking neither right nor left, and entered the clubhouse. Once inside, he placed the box on a chair and pulled out the jacket. It was tattered now, torn where the blade has sliced through, scraped from crazed fall down the mountain. Snake turned it, held it up, and stared at the ice blue dragon.
There was no expression on his face. He studied the image carefully, as if imprinting it in his memory. The rest of the Dragons slowly trickled in behind him. None of them spoke. There was nothing that they could have said. Three of their number had now died in a very short span of time — more than they'd lost at one time since their formation.
Snake turned back to the box of Manuel's belongings. He reached in, and this time he pulled out a long, thin knife. With this in one hand, and the jacket in the other, he crossed the room toward an empty wall beside the fireplace. As he moved, he picked up speed, until at the last moment, he brought the jacket up, slammed the knife forward, and buried it through the leather into the plaster and wood beyond.
The impact was loud and it echoed through the room. Some of the Dragons took a step back. Others only flinched. Snake stood and stared at the dragon on the leather, now glaring back at him from the wall — trapped there. He turned, and he scanned the others. His eyes blazed with anger and pain.
'No one will touch that,' he said. 'Not now, not ever. I will personally kill the first who does. I have not liked these fancy painted dragons from the beginning. We have colors — they have always been enough. Martinez warned Manuel not to wear the dragon, and he took it anyway. He took it, and it took him in return. We have lost two brothers. It is time for this to be finished. Do you understand? Am I clear on this? That jacket will hang there until eternity comes for us all, and if it does not — it will not be the dragon on the jacket that you should fear. It will be me.'
He stood in silence for what seemed a long time. When no one responded, he spoke again.
'Get the word out,' he said. 'Send notice to every chapter, every brother and sister you can reach. We will meet tonight, and we will decide what is to be done. Los Escorpiones have started this, and we need to find a way to end it. If that old witch Anya Cabrera is behind this — she will pay as well. We must stand, and we must fight. We cannot go on having our numbers whittled down a few at a time, cowering in the shadows.'
They all stood very still, in case he wasn't finished.
'Go!' he said. 'And someone send for Martinez.'
Snake turned and left the room, and the others dispersed like mist, running for phones and bikes. Engines started and revved. In only a matter of moments, the clubhouse was as silent as a tomb. On the wall, impaled by the wickedly sharp, silvery blade, Enrique's dragon held court over the emptiness. It was just past noon.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Donovan bent over the keyboard of his computer, and Amethyst sat on the wooden arm of his chair, leaning on his shoulder and scanning the screen. The program he had open was the viewer he used to browse the documents he'd archived. He'd been working on the project so long that, when he's started, he'd needed a huge mainframe computer. As machines grew faster and programs grew more efficient, his system had evolved as well.
Now he had a small room off of the library, concealed behind several movable shelves, where arrays of water-cooled hard drives and blade servers maintained terabytes of data. He'd been scanning, recording, indexing and studying the manuscripts in his collection for decades, and unlike many of his peers, he embraced technology and all that it offered rather than denying it. One shelf in his den held stacks of recent technical publications and volumes on database design and administration. He liked to tell visitors that computer logic, programming, and magic weren't so far removed from one another.
Programming wasn't really much different than ritual magic. There were exact sequences of numbers and precise patterns of syntax and data required for each operation. Taking a manuscript, converting it to tiny pixels on the screen, and then recording it on an array of data drives that could reproduce it in multiple formats, and even recover it if it became corrupted, was just magic of a different kind.
At the moment, he was very glad to have that particular magic at his fingertips. There must have been tens of thousands of references to Voodoo in his files, and those were only among the documents and volumes he'd recorded. He glanced over at the boxes and books piled along the wall and shook his head.
'Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever even begin to catch up,' he said. 'I have deposit boxes in the vaults beneath the bank downtown. You know Joel?'
Amethyst nodded.
'I've done business with them myself. Their security is top-notch.'
'If I'm right,' Donovan said, 'what we need is going to be among the documents I've already recorded. I started with the oldest, the most dangerous, and those most difficult to handle without causing damage. In some cases I had to photograph them carefully because I couldn't pick them up, or touch them with my skin for fear of their crumbling away and being lost.
'A large number of those earliest and most fragile documents came out of Africa. Others were collected from the islands, Jamaica, and Haiti. I don't remember them all, there's no way that I could, but I've at least scanned everything once, and there's something I'm forgetting — something I've seen.'
