'I don't know if I can do it,' he said. His voice nearly broke. 'Senor Snake…I did not know him for long, but…he was like a father…or a brother. He gave me strength, purpose. For the first time in my life, I felt as if I mattered. Now…'
'Now more than ever,' Donovan said, 'you matter. It's in your hands. Your gift — your talent — you can make it right. You can't bring him back, but… you can make certain he didn't die in vain.'
Jake walked into the room then. In his hand, he held a small square of fabric. Donovan looked at it more carefully and saw that it was part of the sheet that had held Snake's dragon. The big man held it almost reverently. He laid it on the table in front of Salvatore and stepped back.
Salvatore stared at the white cloth in silence. Martinez rose and left the room. When he came back, he held the remnant of the Rojo Fuego, still carefully wrapped. He also had a bag filled with the other colors, and Salvatore's brushes. He laid them on the table beside the cloth. Donovan nodded to the old man, and they turned. A moment later, everyone had left the room, and Salvatore sat alone.
'I'll return before morning,' Donovan told Martinez. 'I have to help Amethyst with the girl.'
'Does she remember anything?' the old man asked.
Donovan shook his head.
'She's scared. The last thing she remembers is following her boyfriend to Anya Cabrera's circle. I don't think she'll go back there. Can't say that I blame her. If my boyfriend offered me up for a voodoo ritual sacrifice, I'd have some serious questions about the future of the relationship.'
Martinez laughed drily.
'I'll watch over the boy,' he said.
Donovan stepped to a window and glanced out into the night sky.'Can he turn them back?'
'I don't know,' Martinez admitted. 'It's what I feared all along. If Snake had lived, there would have been balance. Now the portal between this world and that other has grown thin. I have never been able to walk that road. The boy has been there many times. I wish I'd had the time to teach him more — but in this instance, he is the master.'
Donovan glanced back through the doorway into the kitchen. Salvatore had the paintbrush in one hand. He stared at the cloth intently. Dragons guarded the doorways, their backs turned to give the boy privacy.
'I hope he has the strength,' Donovan said.
He turned to the doorway. Martinez faced him, and, tentatively held out his hand. Donovan took it without hesitation.
'We will have things to talk about,' he said, 'once things are settled. I will see you before the sun rises.'
He turned and slipped out into the night. Amethyst waited impatiently by the side of the road. He slipped up on the opposite side of the girl and daraped his arm around her back. They moved off into the shadowed streets without a word. Behind and above them, a huge shadow slid across the face of the moon.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Salvatore stared at the cloth. He traced designs across the surface with the fingernail of one hand. At first the motion was random. His mind was far away. He tried to concentrate on the city, or the dragons, but something intruded. It was a pattern, a geometric shape. His finger began tracing that shape onto the white cloth, and he frowned. It was familiar, and at the same time he was certain he'd never seen it before — not exactly.
His paints were laid out beside him. There was also a worn piece of black charcoal. He picked it up almost absently and began to sketch. He continued to trace the pattern. There were six corners. He filled in circular shapes near the points, and in the center he drew a larger circle, with a concentric ring inside it.
He shaded the edges, and darkened the spaces between the circles. At some point he reached for one of his brushes, and the paint. He started with green. He shaded one of the circles carefully. He lightened the green and highlighted the edges, then switched to white until the sphere appeared to glow.
He worked more quickly now. He shifted colors and brushes. He worked with violet, and blue, red and yellow. His hand became a blur. He painted the spheres around the outer edge, but his mind — his concentration — was fixed on the center. It was plain and white, but in his mind, it pulsed and glowed. He reached for the last packet of paint, opened it reverently, and dipped his brush.
The shift was sudden and absolute. The second his brush dipped into the Rojo Fuego he felt the chair fall away. He was dropping through the air, and beneath him the city spread out in a wide, geometric panorama of color and shadow. He saw the towers, one for each color, and the pattern of his painting focused. Beneath him, the glowing read upper chamber of the central tower approached at sickening speed.
He gripped the brush, somehow it made the passage with him, and though it swirled in the open air and not across the surface of the white canvas, he knew he could not stop. If he let the pattern slip — if he failed to blend the colors in his mind, he was lost. As he fell, his eyes filled with tears. They slid across his cheeks and whipped off into the night sky of a world that could not be. It didn't matter. He didn't need to see what was in front of him. He knew what to do — what to paint.
An impossibly loud scream rose above and behind him. Even over the whistle of wind through his ears he heard the crashing boom as enormous wings flapped. The dragon screamed, but this time it was different. The sound echoed with sadness. There was pain in its voice, and loss. Salvatore's heart nearly stopped from a sudden, empathic sensation of immense sorrow.
Salvatore gripped the brush more tightly. The tower was very close. Red light glowed from windows on all sides of a circular parapet. The roof was smooth stone. As he grew nearer to it, he saw what appeared to be a network of fine, dark cracks rippling across the surface. As he neared, they resolved into a pattern of scales. He couldn't tell if they were painted, or if the tower had actually been carefully assembled from thousands of separate pieces of stone.
He closed his eyes. The image in his mind was nearly complete. He'd filled in the red glow at the windows and now he willed the brush to shift colors. He painted the spider-web-thin cracks. Though he could no longer see the network of stone scales, he brought them to life in his mind.
There was a sickening shift that nearly cost his equilibrium. One moment he was falling, and the next he stood on solid ground. His first instinct was to open his eyes, but he fought it. He had a final line to draw. He bit his lip, steadied his wobbly knees, and drew the brush through the air.
Then he opened his eyes.
The chamber was circular. The walls were convex glass lenses. In the center of the room, too bright to look at directly, sat the largest ruby Salvatore had ever seen. Light shone up from beneath it, caught the carved facets of the jewel, and shot out in all directions. The very air was crimson, like walking through a froth of blood.
He was not alone. Facing one of the windows, seated in a very large, ornate throne, a tall man with long, wavy hair stared out across the city. He sat very still, arms resting on the chair and hands gripping the wood frame tightly.
Salvatore stood before a wrought-iron easel. The white cloth was stretched across it. The painting — the image of the city from above — was complete. Salvatore let his hand fall to his side.
'Is it finished, Sal?' the man asked.
Salvatore's heart nearly stopped. He knew the voice. Now, looking more closely, he saw that he knew the man, as well. It was Snake, and, at the same time, it was not. There were no tattoos on the muscled arms. There were flecks of gray in the dark hair. The man wore a dark red tunic and some sort of robes.
'Senor Snake?'
The man rose slowly and turned.
'No, Salvatore, I am not Snake. Not exactly. You know me, though. You know my brothers. We are connected.'
Salvatore dropped to one knee. There was something in the man's expression, something in the tone of his voice that demanded respect. He felt as if he were in the presence of royalty, and he was frightened, but at the same time he was compelled to step forward.
'How…' he asked.
'It is not what you think,' the man said. 'We have met, you and I, but not like this. I have not spoken with one
