Magic Time: Ghostlands Read Online Free PDF

and belt with a white-gold buckle, his long black coat fanning out behind him. He held a dark cigarette with burning red tip, and smoke curled from his cold thin lips.
    As he walked toward her, Mama Diamond knew this contained, silent man had not been one of the brute voices within. His voice would be as clear and sharp as a stiletto.
    She stood watching as he came near, and in the merciless gray light it seemed as if he suddenly shimmered like ripples on a storm-wracked lake and changed, growing bigger and bonier, like strata shooting up out of a rock face. His black leather cloak altered, too, stretching out long fingers, gaining its own powerful architecture, becoming…
    Wings, leathery wings big as box kites, supported by vast pebbled shoulders, which in turn supported a scaly head, ridge-boned and hard-angled, with eyes set deep in burnished sockets, eyes golden as Kazakhstan amber wrapped around a Jurassic spider. The cigarette was gone from his taloned hand, but a memory of smoke still curled from between his dagger teeth.
    I’m too old to run away, Mama Diamond thought. Probably crack a hip if she tried, and then what? No 911, no ambulance out of the county clinic.
    Anyway, she thought, when Death comes for you with bat wings and golden eyes in a black impossible train, running probably isn’t much of a strategy.
    Her knees trembled. She hoped they wouldn’t buckle on her. The dragon drew up close to her now—slowly, smoothly, with the invisible majesty of great power—and fear bubbled through Mama Diamond like a dizzy drug.
    The dragon-thing, this grotesque that had been a man—no, merely seemed a man—moments ago, stood glaring down at her.
    “I couldn’t decide what to wear…so I thought I’d give you a choice.” His voice, clearly New York/East Coast, held the precision of a keen blade, plus a resonance potent as a boulder rolling down a rocky slope.
    A choice, Mama Diamond thought. Like the train itself, changing as it drew near, somehow taunting, threatening.
    “Which is the truth?” Mama Diamond asked, and was surprised at how level her voice sounded.
    “Both…but this is the latest model.”
    Mama Diamond studied the razor claws, the teeth like a tyrannosaur. “If this is what I have to deal with, I’d just as soon see it.”
    “You’ve got sand,” the dragon said. “Or I could say grit…or stones.” Mama Diamond knew he was toying with her, playing his cruel games as he had no doubt often done even before the world had turned over, before he had become what he’d always been within.
    Mama Diamond said nothing. Silence, she knew, could be a blade, too. Or at least a tool to make folks get to the point.
    “Good of you to meet me,” he said, and even in the gray light of winter coming, his black scales held an iridescence like the peacock pyrites she’d once hawked to city dwellers who’d only seen those colors in grease streaks on tarmac.
    “I have to confess I didn’t know you were coming.”
    “But you did. On some level. We know a lot of things we don’t think we know. You are Judith Kuriyama?”
    Not for a long time, not really. “People call me—”
    “Mama Diamond.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Proprietor, Rock and Bone?”
    “Yes. And you are—?”
    “Ely Stern. Attorney-at-law. Once upon a time.”
    “What do you want, Ely Stern?”
    “We’ll start,” the dragon said, “with a look at your shop.”
     
    Arnie Sproule, an old friend of Mama Diamond’s, dead since ’92, used to tell this joke:
    What’s the difference between a dead lawyer in the middle of the road and a dead snake in the middle of the road?
    And before you could answer, Arnie would grin and say: There are skid marks in front of the snake.
    An old groaner, and not a particularly funny one. But now here was Ely Stern, combining perhaps the worst aspects of the two, lawyer and serpent. Any skid marks in front of Ely Stern would surely have represented a fevered attempt to brake and flee.
    The worst