California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  Older Emma released her grip, letting Cassandra crash to the floor. Jo went to her.

  Daniel gathered his electricity. Sharp jolts shot down his arms.

  “Why did you leave me?” Older Emma said again.

  “Because I won’t be kept like a gallstone in a jar,” Younger Emma answered.

  Older Emma blinked welling tears. She nodded, resolved. “Then I free you.”

  Her lips parted. A lick of blue flame played over her tongue.

  “No,” Younger Emma said, and she stretched her jaws wide. With a roar, blue fire rolled in a wave across the floor and washed over Older Emma. The flames climbed her legs and she howled and raised her arms, as if in surrender, desperate to keep them away from the heat.

  Younger Emma’s head and shoulders swayed in the slow, sinuous motions of a cobra, and this way she controlled the flames, entwining Older Emma’s torso in a swirling embrace. Then, Younger Emma snapped her jaws shut and Older Emma collapsed to the floor. The flames guttered over her charred and blistered body, and her movements were the involuntary convulsions of the dying.

  The air was thick with bitter ash and cloying sweetness and methane. The stench was sickening, but Daniel also smelled wondrous things. As Older Emma smoldered, she released magic into the air and the chamber filled with the speed and strength and agility of saber-toothed cats and lions and hippogriffs. Daniel smelled cerberus wolf and black dragon and firedrake, and his cells drank it in, and he was ashamed for savoring it.

  Emma cocked her head to the side and regarded her victim. Her brow furrowed. She turned to Daniel. “I suppose you’ll want an explanation.”

  * * *

  Red bruises striped Cassandra’s throat. Her breaths came in shallow gasps. Jo knelt, supporting Cassandra’s head, and stroked her hair with one hand and aimed her needle gun at Emma with the other. As Daniel prepared an ampoule of hydra regenerative for Cassandra, he was very conscious of Emma standing behind him.

  “Down the hatch,” Daniel whispered, squeezing the thick hydra oil in Cassandra’s mouth.

  When he was satisfied it was going down, he left her in Jo’s care.

  “So, let’s have it,” he said, facing Emma. “Who was she? Your mother?”

  “My mother was a glass jar,” Emma said, unconvincingly chirpy.

  Sparks of kraken snapped beneath Daniel’s fingernails.

  “Don’t test my patience, Emma. Not now. You kept something from me, and my friends are hurt because of it. They’re willing to die for me. And I’m willing to kill for them.”

  Emma rubbed her eyes. She looked drawn. “Your father invested parts of himself and parts of you in the Blackland sword. But Emmaline Walker did one better. She crafted a whole, complete, external version of herself. A living replica. Emmaline Walker had a golem. She had me.”

  She curtsied.

  Threads of kraken electricity arced between Daniel’s fingers.

  “Why make a golem? What purpose does it serve?”

  “It serves the Hierarch, of course. If magic is so finite that the Hierarch’s taken to eating his own mages, then how useful to grow mages in a bottle. To fill the ranks of his armies. Or the platters on his dinner table.”

  A physical memory struck Daniel like sudden pain from a phantom limb. He remembered the thing that had gone north with his mother. The boy, that incomplete, broken version of him, wearing his clothes. Holding his mother’s hand.

  It wasn’t just a thing that looked like Daniel. It was closer than a twin. It was made from him. His father had harvested bits of Daniel and made a broken version of him and his mother took it along as a decoy. He was in the boy’s head when it knelt in the strawberry field.

  What kind of people did that?

  “You led us right to the real Emma,” Moth said in a low, menacing whisper.

  “I thought she was in Cancún,” Emma said with a shrug.

  The electricity sizzled over Daniel’s palms now, and there was heat in his mouth, and the stink of methane in his nose.

  “What’s in the Ossuary, Emma? What do you want?”

  Emma regarded the burnt remains of Emmaline Walker. Her body still simmered with magic, and Daniel could not stop drinking it.

  Emma massaged her temples. “I’m not the only Emma that Dr. Emmaline Walker has made. The seeds of us are kept in the Ossuary. I won’t see them served on the Hierarch’s plate. Not any more of them. You get into the Ossuary to get your sword. I get there to free children.”

  Emma sighed. She looked tired. “And there’s something else. Emmaline Walker wasn’t the Hierarch’s only golem-maker. There’s enough of you in the Blackland sword to grow another Blackland. If you don’t want any more little brothers running around, you won’t abort this job.”

  Moth flexed his fingers. “My wrist’s feeling better. Should I crush her head?”

  Wounded and lied to, Daniel’s friends still looked to him, waiting on his word.

  Crackling with magic, he’d never felt more powerful and more unsure.

  SEVENTEEN

  The glyph of Fenghuang, king of birds, marked the door. Depicted in brilliant reds and blues and golds, the chimera bird spread his wings, as if to beat winds powerful enough to bend the mightiest trees. Beyond Fenghuang’s door was the Ossuary’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning control room.

  The room was guarded by four sentries, now slumped on the floor with needles in their necks. As Moth dragged them away to stash them in a broom closet down the corridor, Cassandra worked the locks. The last of seven magical wards fell, and the crew was inside the concrete-block room.

  Daniel surveyed the pipes and vents and ducts and fans. Not wanting to raise his voice above the roar of the air handlers, he gestured to a vent near the ceiling. He seldom used air ducts. Crawling through sheet aluminum was noisy as hell, and he’d had a bad day once in a shoe warehouse when the duct he was creeping through collapsed under his weight and he’d dropped onto a load of counterfeit high-tops. But the Ossuary’s ducts were built out of stone. The Hierarch made sure his own structures were sturdy enough to withstand his punitive earthquakes.

  The crew slipped on knee and forearm pads in preparation for the long crawl. The more comfortable they were, the less chance they’d betray themselves with a fatal grunt.

  Daniel stepped into Moth’s interlaced fingers, and Moth boosted him up to the vent grill. After four squirts of grease and many rotations of his screwdriver, he pulled the grill off and stowed it in the vent. The breeze flowing into the duct rustled his hair. He didn’t like the feeling. It was too much like being inhaled.

  With Moth’s help and a little struggle, he climbed into the duct.

  His flashlight showed a clear path down the shaft, so he signaled the others to come up after him. Moth’s bulk barely fit in the tight space. Daniel wondered if he should have packed a tub of margarine to lube the way for him.

  Daniel took point. Twenty feet ahead, branch right, thirty feet, branch right again, another few dozen yards, then take the middle of three branches. He came to a stop at another vent and looked down into a dungeonlike chamber plunging a hundred feet to a stone floor.

  If you were sickeningly wealthy, thought Daniel, and possessed so much gold that even the room in which you stored your gold bricks was made of more gold bricks, you might have something in common with the Hierarch.

  The Ossuary was the size of an airplane hangar. Stacked mammoth femurs lined the walls. A chandelier of eocorn horns, white as snow, hung from a ceiling of mammoth tusks.The floor gleamed with a mosaic of claws and delicate vertebrae and bone fragments.

  Tall shelves with railed library ladders occupied most of the space, arranged in dozens of narrow aisles. There were museum cabinets and steel safes the size of Daniel’s living room. Chain-link cages housed fully articulated skeletons: a serpent at least forty feet long, a feline-shaped skeleton the size of an elephant. Mounted on a far wall, a rack held kraken spines as long as javelins.

  The aromas sho
uld have overwhelmed him, but he smelled nothing. The negative-pressure maintained by the HVAC system meant no magic exited the Ossuary without the Hierarch’s express command, not even smells. The system pumped air inside, and outventing air was captured by a filtration system to catch magic-bearing particulates and gasses. Whenever the filters were changed, the old ones were processed to recover the trapped magic, which was then condensed and presumably sent back to the Ossuary for storage. The filters themselves were worth a fortune.

  Below, the Tireless Guard stood watch. Decked out in livery like Christmas nutcrackers, they numbered at least two dozen. Each guard was equipped with a shoulder-holstered machine pistol and a lance tipped with a serrated basilisk fang. A good osteomancer could cook the fangs down to a quart of weapons-grade venom with higher street value than a bucket of diamonds, assuming the osteomancer could get his hands on it without being reduced by a well-magicked sentry to a puddle of cooling sludge.

  Changes in guard shifts were usually the best time to execute a job, but the Tireless never required relief. They never broke watch, never changed shifts, and according to Emma, didn’t even need piss breaks. Watching them through the vent, Daniel detected not a twitch, not a blink, not a breath. Compared to these guys, the Queen’s Guard at Buckingham Palace were a bunch of spastics.

  Cassandra squeezed in next to him and looked out the vent. Her gun was already assembled, a custom-built dart rifle with an air canister half the length of the barrel. She licked her lips. The shot was total Annie Oakley stuff, through the vent, a hundred and thirty feet to her nearest target. She sat with her legs folded awkwardly, shoulders hunched and head bent. She couldn’t even extend her arms all the way. Five shots, and each one had to hit, because her ammunition was precious and rare.

  She slipped the barrel through the grid of the air vent and teased the trigger with her index finger. She licked her lips. When they’d first started running jobs together, Daniel had interpreted the lip-licking as nerves. Now, he knew it was just eagerness.

  She squeezed the trigger five times, tracking left to right, each shot punctuated by the hiss of high-pressure air release. Five darts struck the floor, glass capsules shattering and mixing catalyst with gorgon essence. Yellow vapors billowed in the space below.

  Two of the guards looked up. One reached for his holster, but his hand went cement gray, and his face froze into a rigid mask. Like the others, he was still as stone.

  Daniel tugged his goggles and filter mask in place. He lowered the chain ladder to the floor and began the descent. All the while, he envisioned being impaled by a flung basilisk lance, and all the magic in his flesh-and-blood cauldron squirting out.

  With every rung of the ladder, the air seemed to grow thicker. He felt like a deep-sea diver, moving into zones of increasing pressure. It was the presence of so much magic. It enveloped him, this hyperbaric osteomancy, pushing wind and muscle and fire and force through his pores, into his bloodstream. For a moment, he regretted gorgon-freezing the Tireless Guard, because he thought there was a chance he could take them head-on.

  You’re losing it, he admonished himself. That kind of thinking was just crazy cakes.

  He reached the floor, unscathed. Before signaling the others to follow, he wanted to make sure the gorgon was working, so he brought electric tingle to his fingertips and stepped up to one of the guards, edging closer as cautiously as a postman approaching a growling dog. He aimed the pencil beam of his flashlight in the guard’s eyes. The guard’s pupils didn’t change. Either the guard was playing possum, or the vaporized gorgon extract worked perfectly.

  Daniel’s crew joined him on the ground. They spread out through the Ossuary in a choreographed dance to relieve the guards of their pistols. Using cable saws, they detached the basilisk fangs from their lances. The entire process took two minutes, and at the end of it, the crew had made its first score of the heist.

  If Daniel called off the job right now, they could tunnel their way out, and he could bring the room down with an earthquake to cover their tracks. He could break through to the surface near the dockhouse at Wilshire and Fairfax, and everyone could go home. If Otis fenced the basilisk fangs for as much as he promised, they would all walk away from the job wealthy. They’d encountered no barrier they could not breach. They’d tripped no alarm. They’d faced no guard who could stop them or call an alert. They’d overcome unknowns—the coelacanth, and Dr. Emmaline Walker. If they got out now, they would be the first ever thieves to infiltrate the Ossuary and walk out with treasure.

  Crime of the century. One for the ages. History.

  But Daniel hadn’t come here for the fangs.

  The gorgon vapors should have been sucked through the vents on the far wall by now, so Daniel pulled the filter mask away from his nose and sniffed.

  He staggered. The osteomancy was so strong he couldn’t believe the aromas weren’t visible. The eocorn chandelier blazed with renewal and optimism. The griffin skeleton burned with flames of raw power. In their rack, the kraken spines gave off an entire ecosystem of scents, so much darker and more potent than the tiny sliver Daniel’s father had fed him on the beach.

  This is what Sebastian Blackland had prepared him for. Daniel was a cauldron, a sponge, and he grew more powerful simply by standing here. He wanted to remain in this room forever and merely breathe.

  Moth and Cassandra both reached for him.

  “I’m okay. It’s just … There’s a lot of magic here. Keep your protection on. I don’t want you running into a pocket of bad air.”

  Moth and Jo assembled their digging tools and headed off for the east wall.

  “We get the sword first,” Cassandra said to Emma, her voice muffled by the mask. “Your agenda is strictly optional.”

  Emma turned crisply on her heel and made right for a black, glass-doored cabinet. Inside were stored a dozen glass jars, about the size of baby-food containers.

  “If you would get this open for me, I could address my agenda right now.”

  Daniel went over to the cabinet, waving off Cassandra’s protests.

  Inside the jars were lumpy, flesh-colored things the size of his thumbs. They had the beginnings of eyes, dark little indentations covered by onionskin film. Not so much like fetuses. More like blue-ribbon county fair oddities, potatoes taking on human form. They should stay in the jars, he thought. They should stay locked away with the lights out, so that they’d never become something else. A golem had once been made from Daniel, and it died in a strawberry field, asking for its mother. For Daniel’s mother.

  “Open the cabinet, Cassie.”

  Cursing, she examined the wards with her jeweler’s loupe. It took her three minutes to get the cabinet open with lock picks made of sphinx tooth.

  Emma carefully placed them in a padded casket from her bag. “Thank you,” she said, her voice shaky.

  “The sword,” Cassandra said, anxious to get on with it.

  They dove into the aisles. The plan had been for Daniel to locate the Blackland sword by scent. More than leading the crew, this was supposed to be his major contribution to the job, the one thing he could do that nobody else in Los Angeles was as qualified for. And, indeed, the trail couldn’t have been clearer had it been spray-painted in red and marked with neon signs. He smelled his father’s aftershave, and his electricity, and his intelligence and discipline and knowledge of deep magic. He smelled libraries. Chinese ink on old paper. Workshops full of centuries-old wood and glassware. Unexpected tears filled his eyes. These weren’t mere sense memories. This was his father, or what was left as him, as fully present as he would ever be. He smelled the house in Laurel Canyon with the eucalyptus and jacaranda trees and his father’s blood and sharp chemical pheromones of fear. And he smelled himself. His hair clippings and nail trimmings and baby teeth, and his own childhood magic.

  He blinked his eyes dry. “Here,” he called, standing before a single-drawer cabinet.

  Cassandra crouched to examine the lock on the front of the
drawer.

  “I’m not smelling sphinx,” Daniel said.

  “Yeah. It’s not sphinx. It’s a nhang lock.”

  Emma bent forward for a smell. “I don’t smell nhang.”

  Cassandra rummaged in her kit. “If I say it’s nhang, it’s nhang.”

  Daniel consulted his watch. “Clock’s ticking. Can you do it?”

  “Maybe if you two stop quacking at me.”

  She brought out a bone chip the size of a domino. Its texture was like modeling clay, and she began flattening it between her palms while ordering Emma to aim her flashlight into the lock. Daniel was glad Jo wasn’t nearby for this. The key was fashioned from the remains of a human shape-shifter.

  “Keep working,” Daniel said. “I’m going to check on Jo and Moth.”

  “Quacking,” muttered Cassandra.

  Daniel ran clear of the aisle. Across the floor, Moth was neck-deep in a hole, which had already swallowed Jo. Their shovels cut through stone and concrete and packed earth as though it were soap. Given another ten minutes, they’d be through to the building’s foundations, and from there they’d tunnel out to safety. Then Daniel would cover their tracks with the Jinshin-Mushi beetle he’d gotten from Sully in Ocean Park, and they’d be home free. They had the basilisk fangs for the cash score, Emma had her jars of potato people, and if Cassandra had anything to do with it, Daniel would have the Blackland sword in hand.

  “You guys doing okay?”

  “We are digging a hole to a world of beauty and class,” Moth said, not even breathing hard.

  Daniel got back to Cassandra just as the nhang lock sprung open with a satisfying click.

  Cassandra stepped back from the cabinet to make room for Daniel. “Just in time to take all the credit for my work.”

  “Quack,” he said.

  He slid the wide, flat drawer out. The smells of the sword curled into the air. But there was no sword inside.

  A tuft of black hair, bound in string. A small molar filled with silver. Firedrake dust, hardened like a sugar cube. Sint holo, wavering in Daniel’s peripheral vision. And part of a human skull’s face, the tobacco-brown cheek and orbital.