California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  Daniel would have a harder time. The hounds were trained to detect magic, and Daniel was magic.

  He shouldered his way past a clump of people surrounding a street performer in silver paint doing a human robot bit. Threading himself into the knot, he unzipped his black hoodie, reversed it, and put it back on, red-side out. That wouldn’t fool the dogs, but if the handlers radioed in a fleeing suspect, at least the description of his clothes would be a little off. Much better, of course, if the dogs didn’t pick up his scent. But a wet canine snuffle sounded from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. The dogs were less than a dozen yards away, noses to the ground, sweeping.

  No point in running now.

  He came to a stop in a crowded market corridor. Sunlight filtered through the multicolored plastic canopies and bathed the space in a floral glow. The hounds were close enough to cover the distance to him in a single lunge. They strained against their harnesses, twisting, threatening to slip their restraints. Alarmed shoppers shoved one another to get out of the dogs’ way. A woman dropped her purse and a man stepped on her hand as she bent to pick it up. Oranges spilled out of someone’s bag, starting an argument that ended with the snarl of a hound.

  Sebastian Blackland had taught Daniel osteomancy, but Otis had taught him almost everything else necessary to survive as the son of an osteomancer. He drew his shoulders in. He expanded his abdomen to create a small paunch. This wasn’t magic. It was acting. He was no wizard’s son now. He was no professional thief. He had no power. He was a man of little consequence. Of no interest. He was just a guy.

  It didn’t work. The hounds smelled the truth. They smelled it in his blood and lymph. They smelled it in his marrow. They howled as though he were a rabbit at the end of the hunt, and the handlers drew their cleaver-clubs. Daniel would have to burn them with lightning or let himself be beaten and cut and taken into custody. If he was lucky, he’d just end up with his body parts pinned to the community wall. But that was probably too good a fate to hope for. He was Sebastian Blackland’s son, and the Hierarch would make a project out of him.

  He called on the sint holo now. He remembered its chaotic, contradictory aromas. It was slippery, ungraspable, and he drew its memory from his bones. Most osteomancers needed constant replenishment of osteomantic materials to use magic. But there were the rare few, like Sebastian and Daniel, who retained the osteomantic properties of what they ingested. With Sebastian the ability had come from research and training. With Daniel, it had come from being used by his father as a human laboratory. He’d eaten what his father gave him, and surrendered his baby teeth and hair and nail clippings, and then Sebastian cooked the magic residue in them, reprocessed them, and fed the refined results back to Daniel, again and again until the magic embedded itself in his bones.

  He became invisible now.

  Glassy-eyed from sint holo miasma, the dog handlers merely looked through Daniel. But the hounds reached for him. They’d been bred to detect osteomancy, and nothing got them more excited than sniffing out magic. The hounds paused. They half turned away, then back, then away again. Addled and crestfallen, they bowed their heads and whimpered.

  “What are we even doing?” one of the handlers asked his partner.

  The other sheathed his cleaver. “I don’t know. It’s weird.”

  Daniel didn’t stick around to see if the hounds would reacquire his scent. As quickly as he could, without running, he moved through the market. By the time he reached the docks, the sint holo had worn off, leaving him exposed. He hoped he’d fogged the brains of the hounds and handlers enough that any memories of the pursuit would be something like the sense of dread following a long night of drinking, where you could remember having your pants around your ankles at some point but not much more than that.

  He raised his hand to flag a water taxi when he felt a presence behind him. He knew what was about to happen: A massive hand took hold of his thumb and pinky in a grip that threatened pain if Daniel resisted. At the same time, a white van floated up to the dock. The side door slid open, revealing two more muscle-slabbed men inside.

  First cops, and now Otis’s goons.

  “I’m not having a great morning,” Daniel said.

  THREE

  “Let’s go,” said the muscle with the death grip on Daniel’s fingers.

  “Oh, please don’t hurt me,” Daniel wailed. “It’s not manly to weep in public.”

  “Get in the van or you’re gonna be crying blood.”

  “You know, that literally makes no sense. Did Otis tell you who I am?”

  “We found you, and we bagged you. What does that tell you?”

  “That he doesn’t like you much. Well, okay, then.”

  He stepped forward and ducked into the van, where the muscle-slabs shoved him down onto a bench seat. The door slammed shut and the van rumbled into traffic and started slogging toward Culver City.

  He’d learned to drive getaway in a van much like this, when he was fifteen and Otis’s thugs were schooling him in the basics of thiefcraft. Daniel noted the odors of stale fast-food grease and pine air freshener, and he was getting nostalgic when he saw drops of old blood on the carpet and caught the faint tinge of urine.

  The van passed beneath the shadows of RKO Studios, where chimney towers poked above the fortress walls and vented eocorn-tinged steam into the gray morning sky. Daniel usually tried to avoid steering this close to such high-powered operations, but Otis liked headquartering near them. Hiding in plain sight was one of his specialties.

  The van docked behind a low-slung brick warehouse, and Otis’s thugs brought Daniel out with some extracurricular shoving and a stinging slap on the back of the neck. It was hard enough to bring water to Daniel’s eyes. Two of them gripped his biceps and marched him through a maze of plywood and drywall to Otis’s office.

  Otis wasn’t there, but his menagerie was, housed in cages and fish tanks. The animals were oddly quiet. No ear-gouging screeches from the parakeets or cockatiels. The mice and hamsters didn’t run on their wheels or gnaw their cages. Even the fish seemed spooked. The animals had been bred to detect osteomancy. They were Otis’s alarm system.

  “Daniel, my boy!”

  Otis’s mass entered the room, his arms spread in welcome, his voice booming. A pink-cheeked, carrot-haired white man, he looked like someone who could fit in anywhere. Put him in a suit, he was a lawyer. Put him behind a bar, he was a bartender. Here, smiling warmly, he could be someone’s favorite uncle, and Daniel reminded himself Otis was none of these things, but was in fact a kind of monster. His goons still held Daniel fast.

  “How about a drink? Horchata? I remember how much you like horchata. Boys,” he called out to nobody in particular. “Can we welcome Daniel home with a glass of horchata?” Daniel was aware of some scrambling around, as Otis’s minions combed the warehouse in search of whatever he demanded.

  “Hello, Otis,” Daniel said. “Watch this.” He reached back for the memory of kraken. The brine-and-mud scent filled his nostrils and electricity tingled through his veins. A sizzling crack of kraken energy burst from his skin.

  The hired musclemen screeched like cats and leaped back.

  “That’s for the slap on the neck,” Daniel said.

  One of the men stared at him with wide “how could you do this to me?” eyes. The other sucked on his burned fingers and looked like he was trying not to cry.

  “You don’t send your fuck-clowns after me, Otis. I don’t owe you money and I’m not your boy.”

  “But you don’t answer my calls! You ignore my letters!” Otis was still smiling, his eyes a-twinkle. He was a black marketer, a crime lord, and also not a very nice man, and he enjoyed himself immensely.

  Daniel turned to leave, and the muscle looked to Otis for instruction. They feared another shock from Daniel, but they feared their boss more.

  “All right, boys. Let him go and get lost.”

  With great relief, the men squeezed themselves through the door and disappeare
d.

  “I wasn’t sure you still had the juice,” Otis said, “which is why I told the guys they could be a little rough. I’m surprised you didn’t burn them when they bagged you.”

  “What do you want?”

  Otis smiled his avuncular smile and removed a smog-stained oil painting of a sad hobo clown from the wall, revealing a standard-looking wall safe. There was no point in spinning the dial, because the lock didn’t work. To all appearances, the safe was empty. But Daniel knew better. It was lined with ground-up sint holo vertebrae and treated to bring out properties of visual confusion. Otis reached into the seemingly vacant space and pulled out a rolled sheet of paper.

  “There’s a job.”

  “I don’t want a job.”

  Otis reacted as if Daniel hadn’t spoken. He unrolled the paper on his desk. There were actually several sheets, the topmost being a basic canal map of the Miracle Mile district, encompassing Farmers Market, the banks and office buildings of mid-Wilshire, the Tar Pits, and Ministry headquarters. Otis peeled back the map to reveal a civic engineering drawing of some kind, with sewers and pump works and electrical junctions: the flayed city.

  He tapped his finger on a rendering of a pipe or a tube or something. “This is the job.”

  “I’m not looking for a job,” Daniel said, with more force.

  Otis lifted the engineering drawing away to expose yet another beneath it. He liked to unveil things gradually. He liked theater.

  Daniel refused to even look at it. “I don’t want work from you. I don’t do that kind of thing anymore. Not for you. Get someone else. Get Little Al. Hell, get Fat Al.”

  “The Als are dead.” Otis tapped the paper again. “I need you for this, Daniel. And you need me. I know how things are. I know how hard it is. Those little jobs you and Cassandra are pulling? It’s unworthy of you.”

  Again, Otis tapped the drawing, and this time Daniel looked. The page was blank, at least in the visible spectrum. Then, from a desk drawer, Otis produced a corked ceramic vial. Once he popped the cork, Daniel smelled sphinx. The essence of the sphinx was the riddle, and it could be used for locks, for barriers, for secrets and codes. Sphinxes had once roamed all over Pleistocene-era California, leaving hundreds of skeletons behind. Most had been taken east by Freemasons before the Hierarch came to power. Yet Otis had sphinx ink. It wasn’t cheap.

  He moistened a small sponge with the contents of the vial and rubbed it over the paper. A hand-drawn diagram faded in like an apparition. It was a maze of some kind. A labyrinth. A faint circle about the size of a decitusk coin sat just off center. If the drawings were the same scale and orientation, the circle would have to be somewhere beneath the Tar Pits.

  Otis’s smile twinkled. “I’ve found the Ossuary.”

  Daniel rolled his eyes. “Oh, kill me now.”

  To most, the Ossuary was a place out of legend, the vault where the Hierarch was said to store his personal stash of magic. Daniel’s father had worked there, but he’d never revealed its exact location to Daniel. Thieves murmured about it with fear and longing. And there were always rumors: The Hierarch kept entire herds of mammoth remains down there, bones and beautiful ivory tusks, interwoven like mountainous baskets. Basilisk teeth and griffin claws towered to the ceilings over bog-preserved unicorn carcasses.

  And there were stories about attempted heists: Tunneling and mining and armed sieges and all manner of magical infiltrations. The names of thieves who’d tried it were whispered like ghost stories. And the one thing all the stories shared in common was that they ended in executions, in dungeons, in glue factories.

  “Assuming this is even a real place—”

  “It is,” said Otis.

  “—how’d you come by this map?”

  Otis paused as if weighing how much to reveal, but Daniel knew he had this entire conversation planned out from beginning to end.

  “What do the greatest heists in history have in common?”

  And suddenly school was in session again.

  “All the thieves were caught and tortured until they begged to die?” Daniel said.

  “What they have in common is that every single one benefited from having an inside man.” Otis gestured at his drawings. “Same here.”

  “You have a guy in the Ossuary? Okay. Who?”

  “Are you taking the job or not?”

  “I’m not,” said Daniel.

  Otis regarded him for a while. Up to now, he’d been playing the role of jolly uncle and impresario. Now his eyes grew tired and wise and concerned, like the doc character in an old Western. He reached into his desk drawer and came up with a bottle of tequila and a pair of shot glasses. He filled both and slid one toward Daniel, like an opening chess move. Daniel left it on the desk.

  “You can’t afford to be this way, Daniel. You’re all knotted up inside, racing around like a roach on the edges when you could be claiming big piles of treasure right there for the taking. What was the score on that Farmers Market job today? A few hundred? I’m offering you the biggest job of your life. Hell, the biggest job of my life.”

  “So put on some gloves and a black beanie and go get it yourself. You don’t need me.”

  Otis took one of the glasses. He held it up to the light, as if looking for a speck of magic trapped in amber. “When your dad asked me to take you in, he didn’t have a lot of options. He was a powerful man, but he was trapped in the machinery of the Ministry. I was the only one outside the system he could turn to. But I did it without exacting a price from him. I kept you away from the Hierarch. And more. I taught you everything I know about thiefcraft. About leadership. And for the things I couldn’t teach you, I found people who could. I got tutors to teach you osteomancy.” Otis downed the shot.

  The sphinx ink began to fade, and Otis rolled up the papers. He replaced them in his wall safe, straightened the hobo clown.

  “When you left, I didn’t like it, but I let you be. I didn’t harass you. I showed you respect. Now show me some.”

  Any score from the Ossuary would be huge. The Hierarch had the best magic, and the best osteomancers to refine it. A single cask of pure hydra regenerative could fetch millions on the black market.

  Otis straightened some invoices into a neat pile. He folded his hands over it and looked up at Daniel. “Sleep on it and get back to me?”

  Daniel turned to the door, but he knew Otis wouldn’t let him go before jiggling the lure again.

  “It’s a sword, Daniel.”

  Daniel stopped but didn’t turn around.

  “It’s the sword your father was working on when the Hierarch got him. It’s the best thing your father ever made. The most powerful weapon.”

  And now Daniel felt himself turning back to face Otis, as if he were a compass needle and Otis a magnet.

  “That sword is made of you, kid. And as long as the Hierarch has it, he’s got you.”

  “He’s had it for years. Why is this a big deal now?”

  Otis tried to look grave and concerned, but Daniel knew him too well. He could see Otis’s delight. The old man was enjoying his abracadabra moment.

  “Because my source says the Hierarch’s going to use it. And when he does, he’ll be using you.”

  FOUR

  Daniel was walking down Venice Canal, away from Otis’s warehouse, when he smelled soap and talc. A quick figure darted out of an alley and blocked his path.

  “You okay?” Cassandra said.

  “Yeah. You?”

  She nodded. Daniel wished they could linger over this moment, in which the most important thing on their agenda was making sure the other was unharmed. Some lengthy gazes into each other’s eyes would have been nice. A hug would not have been unwelcome.

  Cassandra pounded down the sidewalk, determined to get distance from Otis’s headquarters as quickly as possible, and Daniel hurried to keep up.

  “You tailed me from Farmers Market?”

  “Lost you when you did your invisibility thing,” she said. “But I figu
red if you slipped the hounds you’d end up back at the bus dock. When I saw you get in the van I hailed a taxi.”

  “Farmers Market to Culver City … that’s not a cheap fare.”

  “I didn’t tip generously. You were in Otis’s place a long time. I almost went in after you.”

  “You think you can just break in and out of Otis’s? I like your spunk. Not sure I like your delusions.”

  No gazing and no hugging, but Cassandra would still risk her life for him.

  “There are seven entrances and exits in and out of Otis’s,” she said. “Otis only knows six of them.”

  Cassandra had joined Otis’s crew when she and Daniel were both fourteen. Her parents were small-time smugglers who’d fallen into Otis’s debt, and when they couldn’t pay, Otis took Cassandra instead. Her parents died the next year, but the debt survived unpaid until Cassandra turned eighteen. This was a very fair arrangement, as far as Otis was concerned. He didn’t mistreat her. He educated her. She learned how to pick pockets with a bell-dummy wired to buzz whenever jostled. She knew more about locks and safes than a locksmith, and as much about barriers and wards as an osteomancer. She could also fight, and she could drive, and she could shoot.

  Daniel was dazzled by her. She was smart and funny and pretty, and she was kind to him when he was a short and scrawny kid with splotchy skin who was entirely incapable of arranging his hair in anything that didn’t look like a bowl cut. And only a few years removed from his father’s murder and his mother’s defection, he wasn’t very fun to be around. After a few months, they were a couple, and they had three years together, running jobs for Otis with their other friends. It was good, profitable fun, right up to the night of the Sylmar job. After that, Cassandra left Otis, and if Daniel had followed right away instead of working another four jobs for him, they might have stayed together.