California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

Daniel stood, brushed the sand off, and turned his back on the sea.

  There was a safe house, Daniel remembered. His father had told him to go there, one of the last things he’d ever said. His mom would be there, waiting. He reached for sint holo invisibility, but he couldn’t sense a whiff of it. He didn’t even remember what it smelled like. So, exposed, he hid from sirens and searchlights. He hid from the drum of boots on pavement. In Mar Vista, he cowered in an alley behind a trash bin as flashlight beams probed the shadows.

  At last he found his way to the yellow house with aluminum siding in Venice. He climbed front steps of sloppily troweled concrete, rising from a patch of dead grass. The door opened for him. His mother threw a protective arm around him, and she swept him inside.

  On the beach, Daniel had felt hollowed out, like a husk of skin. Now, with his mother’s solid presence, he felt real. His father was the magician in the family, but his mother was always the strength.

  And yet, she was a secret. She taught Daniel how to fight with his fists. She taught him how to fire a gun. She taught him how to spot a plainclothes cop, and how to know he was being followed, and how to forge a signature. Daniel didn’t know why she knew these things.

  She held his face in her hands and stared into his eyes. Somehow Daniel felt there was only one possible thing to say to her now: “It’s me. I’m Daniel. I’m your son.”

  “Were you followed?” Her voice carried a brittle edge, as though it might crack apart into a million shards and cut him bloody. Daniel had never seen his mother frightened of anything. It was always the opposite. When his parents were still together, at dinners and backyard parties, his father’s colleagues from the Ministry always treated her with careful deference. She was not an osteomancer, she held no position at the Ministry. Officially, Messalina Sigilo Blackland was a wife and a mother. But people seemed to know she was other things as well. She was a mystery, a foreigner who’d emigrated from Northern California during a very brief truce between the two California kingdoms. If people didn’t know quite what to make of her, they were at least certain that she was a quietly concealed threat, like a sheathed knife. But wielded by whom?

  “I wasn’t followed.”

  She checked him over to see if he was hurt.

  “They killed Dad.”

  “I know, Daniel.”

  “Are they coming for us?”

  He so desperately wanted her to say no, even if it was a lie. But she’d never lied to him. She’d never even softened a truth.

  “It’s a purge,” she said. “The Hierarch is killing anyone he thinks is disloyal, or a threat of any kind. He’s arresting the families, too.”

  He remembered the glint of the Hierarch’s fork. He would pick Daniel apart if he found him. The Hierarch would dissect him, and he’d feel the Hierarch’s teeth sinking into his muscles.

  “They won’t find you. I won’t let them. Do you trust me?” Her voice sounded empty of emotion, as it did whenever she hurt most.

  “I trust you,” he said.

  A noise came from the front door, and suddenly there were two guns in his mother’s hands leveled at Otis’s face. He stood in the doorway, still as a wax figure.

  “Easy, Messalina, it’s me.”

  “Were you followed?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure—”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I wasn’t followed, Messalina. I was careful. Let me in.”

  Only then did she lower the guns. Otis came inside, shutting and bolting the door behind him. He was not alone. He had a kid with him. Or a thing.

  The thing looked almost exactly like Daniel. Its hair was a little longer. It was dressed in one of his shirts. It was wearing his other pair of sneakers. It made dull eye contact with Daniel, then looked at a table lamp with the exact same degree of interest and comprehension.

  “What’s this?” Daniel said when he found his voice again.

  “It’s nobody,” Otis said quickly.

  “This is something I have to do,” his mother said. “To protect you. You can’t understand now, but later—”

  “I can’t understand what you won’t tell me,” Daniel said.

  His mother held his shoulders. She scanned his face, as if trying to memorize it. She was crying now, something Daniel had never seen before, and it horrified him.

  “You’re my son, and I love you, and I will always love you. Never believe anything else.”

  Otis put a hand on him, and too late Daniel realized it wasn’t for comfort, but to restrain him as his mother and the vacant thing that looked like him, that wore his clothes, that held his mother’s hand, headed out the door.

  That was the last time he saw his mother. Later, Otis told him she went north, over the Tehachapi mountains and into the Central Valley, trying to get to the border of the Northern Kingdom. She was supposed to bribe the border guards and make contact with friends in San Francisco, the city of her birth. But the bribe must not have been good enough, because the guards killed her. Then Otis told Daniel he’d take care of him, that things would be okay, that he knew he couldn’t replace Daniel’s parents, but he could be his friend.

  Daniel rocketed upward, through the strata of earth, through the scum at the bottom of the canal, and he gasped for air, coming back into himself in the boat, next to Cassandra.

  “So? Getting anything?” she said. She hadn’t changed position. Her facial expression hadn’t changed. No time had passed.

  Daniel’s belly felt scooped out. Emma’s teacup contained everything: the emotions of those early bad days, with the crunch of cartilage and watching his mother get into the boat without him and his dull twin looking back at him and listening to Otis telling Daniel he was alone.

  “I think I may have just gotten a little too much.”

  FIVE

  Gabriel Argent rode the private cable trolley from the foot of Mount Hollywood to the flattened hilltop and arrived at Griffith Observatory. The house’s size was deceptive, for much of it was hidden underground, but even the aboveground parts impressed the visitor. Built of white stone with three symmetrically placed domes of patinated green copper, the building was a masterwork of Art Deco elegance.

  Standing outside the house on the railed mountain ledge, Gabriel could see almost all of Los Angeles, from the lit downtown towers to the twinkling pinpoint lights of the harbor, and all the gridded golden sparkle of the canal system between. This was not the entirety of the Hierarch’s realm, but it was its heart. The house belonged to the leader of Los Angeles and Southern California, possibly the most powerful magician in the Californias, and certainly one of the most powerful in the world. He used it for parties.

  Gabriel, the Hierarch’s grandnephew, was feeling neither awed nor powerful as he circulated through the evening garden-party crowd. It was a glamorous affair, the city’s elite gathered to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of Southern California’s independence from the United States of America. The clothes were expensive and the crudités traveled on silver trays.

  Gabriel suffered a few exchanges of riskless conversation, but mostly he tried to keep to himself. Nobody was willing to say anything that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as seditious or disrespectful here. Which was fine with Gabriel, except people insisted on making strained conversation anyway. He watched his various cousins doing the rounds, speaking to the right people, saying the right things in hopes of making an impression that would earn them a place more central to the regime’s inner circle. There was his cousin Connie, wrapped like a deli sandwich in a peach designer dress, trying to hold the attention of General Ramirez. She was wasting her time. The Hierarch didn’t trust his relatives and few of them ever rose high. But that wouldn’t stop her from nattering about some actress caught stumbling from the Viper Room with her panties around her ankles. All the trust-fund kids, actors, aristocrats, glittery things, and cousins here tonight made Gabriel miss his desk at the Ministry Off
ice of Accountability.

  Why can’t we few hundred guests enjoy some good, companionable silence? he thought, pursuing a servant and his tray of tasty little cheese puffs.

  “Gabey!”

  A rush of red silk and oleander perfume took him in a surprise embrace. He tensed at first, then relaxed and returned the hug.

  “Apple,” he said, with real pleasure.

  Abigail “Apple” Sandoval, née Argent, was one of the rare cousins Gabriel liked. As kids they used to hide at family gatherings under the inevitable grand piano and stick gum to its underside.

  “Oh, god, Apple, are you wearing a tiara?”

  Indeed, she was wearing a circlet of silver encrusted with fossilized smilodon chips. Gabriel did a quick mental calculation and estimated its worth as roughly that of his condo.

  “Why not?” she said with mock haughtiness. “I am, after all, a baroness now.”

  She’d married Orlando Sandoval earlier in the year. He was an old man with no magic, but he kept the Mojave territories secure, and the Hierarch rewarded him richly for it.

  “It suits you,” Gabriel said. “Palm Springs treating you well?”

  She shrugged. “Well enough. Tennis keeps me in shape, and I’m catching up on my reading. Speaking of boredom, where’s your date?”

  Apple seldom approved of his girlfriends, who were always careful, studious young women whom she deemed joyless.

  “I came stag. I’m just here to be polite. Then, home, paperwork, maybe a glass of milk.”

  “Joyless,” said Apple. “But I have exciting gossip. Want to hear?”

  “Is it juicy? What am I saying, of course it’s juicy.”

  Her mouth quirked in a mischievous smile. “He’s going to make an appearance,” she whispered. It took Gabriel a second to realize who “he” was.

  “Seriously? When?”

  And now Apple’s smile became devilish. “Here. Tonight.”

  He looked around the grounds, with the Chinese lanterns like fairy orbs, the elegant waiters and their trays, the fluttery sparkle of Los Angeles aristocracy … none of it made sense. The Hierarch hadn’t been seen by anyone outside his innermost circle in six years. There were rumors—always expressed in terms of love and concern for the realm’s dear leader—of illness, of feebleness, of his more than nine decades as ruler finally catching up to him. And Gabriel believed them. He knew very well how magic was being acquired and spent. He saw the meager resources, both magical and otherwise, going into the basic upkeep of the city. It was the little things. Public bakeries going dark because nobody was maintaining the wind farms. Schools switching to a recitation curriculum because paper shortages meant they couldn’t afford books. Hospitals losing patients because their pharmacies couldn’t get magical stock. Sometimes it seemed like nobody was running the kingdom.

  Apple’s face flashed with alarm, looking over Gabriel’s shoulder.

  “A word with you, Mr. Argent.”

  Gabriel turned to find himself staring down into the face of a shrunken little man swimming inside a gray business suit. Disney’s blue eyes retained some of their merry shine, but everything else about him was ancient. His gnarled brown hand almost blended into the knotty wooden knob of his walking stick.

  “Come with me,” said Disney.

  Gabriel looked to Apple, but she was already a retreating figure in a shiny red dress. His beloved cousin had abandoned him. So much for pianos and chewing gum.

  Gabriel followed Disney into the house, past the giant Foucault pendulum knocking over pegs in the foyer, and down a corridor guarded by guys in immaculate black suits who admitted them into a book-lined parlor. A guard shut the door and left the two men alone.

  “It’s cold in here,” Disney said, sinking into a plush red chair. “I suppose your uncle doesn’t get to this part of his house much.”

  “I’ll build a fire.” But Disney motioned him to take a seat. Gabriel settled into a chair much harder than Disney’s and withstood the old man’s baleful glare. He stifled the urge to fidget.

  The glamour mage was one of the Hierarch’s most successful projects. Starting in the 1920s, Disney’s “Imaginancers” began developing a potent distillation of osteomantic intoxicant, and once they started misting it into movie theaters, they acquired an audience of happily addicted consumers who kept coming back for more. The Hierarch had been sufficiently impressed with Disney to grant him resources suitable to his ambitions, including an entire theme park built over an expanse of orange groves, where Disney constructed gussied-up roller coasters and whimsical dark rides and a replica of Mad King Ludwig’s castle and pirate-ship tableaus and a haunted house to gently satisfy macabre urges, all in an ingeniously engineered miasma of osteomancy that kept visitors feeling like they’d come to the happiest place on earth.

  But the magic was going dry, and Gabriel guessed that was the subject of this meeting.

  “It’s his damn war,” the glamour mage blurted without preamble. “He can’t take his eyes off San Francisco long enough to see that without people like me, he’ll have a war right here in his own city.”

  Gabriel weighed how to respond to this openly seditious statement, made within the walls of the Hierarch’s own house. Of course he would not in any way voice agreement with Disney, but neither did he want to provoke the old mage’s ire. It was said the Mouse had its own enemies list.

  “I’m certain he has nothing but the utmost respect for the contributions of your art, sir.”

  Disney made a sour face. “Art? I never called it an art. Entertainment is a business, and it’s one of the most important businesses a man can devote his life to. I have lived a very, very long life, Mr. Argent. I was around when the Ministry was just a squabbling cabal of cutthroats, and the citizens of this kingdom were no better. Southern California was not a happy place back then. I helped make it a happy place for business. And now the Hierarch is taking a grand crap on my happiness.”

  “Maybe we should lower our voices, sir.”

  But Disney gnat-waved Gabriel’s caution away. “We’re down to two hundred pounds of eocorn. One hundred forty pounds of parandrus. I haven’t seen an ounce of sint holo in years. My theaters and park serve a critical function, and if I don’t have enough bone to run my operations, everyone will discover just how critical.”

  “Sir—”

  “Yes, I’m talking about unrest. Protests. Riots. That’s what happens when people aren’t happy. The idiots will burn their own neighborhoods. You get the reports, the ones that don’t end up in the Times. You know the insurgents are making gains. This kind of thing catches and it’ll be a conflagration. You have to soothe them, don’t you know. Rock them like babies. Any idea how much magic that takes in a kingdom the size of Southern California? I could show you spreadsheets.”

  “I’m sure if you spoke to the Hierarch … You’re old friends. I’m sure he’ll listen…”

  The glamour mage’s trim mustache twitched in irritation. “Oh, he’s far too busy for me. I can’t get into his chambers. I’m not one of the Six. You must convince him for me. You must convince him to grant me audience.”

  Gabriel almost laughed. “I’m flattered you think I have that kind of influence.”

  “Mr. Argent, I despise insincerity. You are the Hierarch’s nephew.”

  “Grandnephew. The Hierarch has a lot of grandnephews. He’s sired a pretty large brood.” Gabriel wondered if Disney was putting each and every one of his cousins through a meeting like this. Maybe Apple was next on the list.

  “The Hierarch was fond of your mother,” Disney said, as if that were the capstone to some well-constructed argument.

  Being related to the Hierarch just meant you were a little closer to his dinner table.

  Gabriel did his best to murmur and nod politely at the right times as Disney subjected him to another half hour of complaints.

  In truth, Disney’s grievances and warnings were legitimate. Southern California’s easily accessible natural supply, th
e resources the Hierarch used to establish his rule, had been mined decades ago. The stuff remaining was scant and difficult to obtain. There were still imports from Mexico and Central and South America and the Far East, but those had slowed in the last several years. Gabriel wasn’t privy to the reason why, but he understood how fragile those trade relationships were. From his knowledge of smuggling operations in the north, he knew San Francisco must have some osteomancy left—historically, the north’s supply came from the Siberian steppes, where entire mammoths and griffins could be found preserved in the permafrost—but nothing could change the simple fact that there wasn’t enough bone to go around.

  Disney rose from his chair. He leaned on his walking stick, gripping it with both hands and driving it into the Hierarch’s carpet. “I hope you’ve been listening, Mr. Argent. And not just to my petition. Ask around. Talk to Mulholland. Talk to Weinstein. Go see Baron Doheny. Go see Baron Chandler. The powers that run this kingdom have huddled in the Hierarch’s shadow for a long time, but they won’t do so forever.”

  Gabriel could not let a declaration like that stand unanswered.

  “The Hierarch runs the kingdom, sir.”

  The mage smiled, revealing a ghost of the comforting presence he still managed to project when he hosted his TV programs.

  “Even the most powerful engine needs fuel,” he said. “And this time, the osteomancers won’t sit idle while the Hierarch grinds our bones for it.”

  Gabriel stayed behind once the mage had left the room, giving Disney time to get some distance. Then he rubbed his temples and rejoined the party. A fog had come in off the sea, a ghostly electric haze lit orange-yellow by thousands of canal lights.

  Apple and her red dress came out of the mist in a rush to besiege Gabriel. She clutched his arms and leaned in conspiratorially. Gabriel assumed she wanted the skinny on his meeting with Disney.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, but she shook her head.

  “You almost missed it. He’s about to show.”

  She towed him around to the front of the observatory, where a great clot of party guests stood, gazing up at a balcony. The music had stopped, and all conversation fell to whispers. The moan of a barge horn came from somewhere down the mountain, but all other sound from the outside world was swallowed in the thick, wet air. French windows behind the balcony opened, and there was a collective gasp as Fenmont Szu stepped around a silk screen and stood at the balustrade. Tall and thin in a blood-red suit so luxurious it made Apple’s dress look like a valentine card, he directed a withering smile at the gathering. Five others came around the screen to join him. The Alejandro. Mother Cauldron. Madeleine Sing. Sister Tooth. Mr. Butch. These were the Council of Six, the Hierarch’s adjudicators, enforcers, ministers of fear and discipline. Powerful osteomancers, all. Seeing them together at a celebratory gathering such as this, attended by a crowd whose competence lay in spreading gossip, sent a clear signal: The people of Los Angeles had been acting as though they’d forgotten what fear was. It was time to remember.