California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  The smells swirled over Daniel like ropes, binding him, pulling him down.

  “What the hell?” said Cassandra.

  The lock of hair was Daniel’s. The tooth was his. The skull fragment was his father’s.

  No, not the sword. Just samples of the ingredients that Sebastian Blackland had invested in it.

  Daniel had thought he was so smart. He thought he’d come up with a brilliant plan and half a dozen alternatives and backups in case things went to shit. Alarms and locks and wards. He’d prepared himself and his crew for everything. Except for this.

  He was vaguely aware of Cassandra standing beside him with her hand on his arm. “Daniel—?”

  He slammed the drawer shut so hard the cabinet rocked. He raced down the aisle, Cassandra and Emma trailing him.

  “We have to go,” he roared to Moth and Jo, still digging their hole.

  Moth poked his head up like a gopher. “What’s up?”

  “Trap,” Daniel said.

  The contents of the drawer smelled exactly like the Blackland sword. They were a lure, and Daniel had come all the way to the Hierarch’s Ossuary to bite.

  Moth gave him a bitter smile. “What’s the new plan?”

  Daniel unscrewed the cap on the bottle of Jinshin-Mushi flakes and sprinkled them into his mouth. He tasted molten rock and heat and pressure, and his jaw fractured into rubble and tremors ran through his skeleton, and his ribs splintered and his pelvis cracked. But these were just sensations. This was just the flavor of magic. This was sorcery, and it would either destroy him, or he would master it and be an osteomancer.

  He directed the seismic power to his hands. He didn’t know quite what to do with it.

  “The plan, Daniel? What’s the fucking plan?”

  Daniel’s hands began to shake violently.

  “Get out of the hole.”

  Moth boosted Jo to the cracked stone-mosaic floor and scrabbled after her. He coughed fine-powder dust, and with the others, watched Daniel to see what amazing new act of cleverness he’d conjure to save them all.

  Daniel just stood there with quaking hands, wondering if he could pull this off.

  He knew about plate tectonics and faults and fissures. He knew how to create tremors. If he could direct that energy into the beginnings of the tunnel Moth and Jo had dug, to push the earth away and complete their escape route in seconds instead of minutes …

  White light flashed, and the air stank of unfamiliar magic. It was old and deep and enormous, and it drove Daniel to his knees.

  He screamed for his crew to run. Or he thought he did. He couldn’t hear himself, and he couldn’t see anything but a figure striding toward him. He blinked spots from his eyes and tried to bring things into focus.

  To his shame, he was just as terrified of the Hierarch as he’d been that day, ten years before. His father had been so strong, yet the Hierarch devoured him. He devoured his father and in a sense, devoured his mother. He devoured Daniel’s life, and as powerful as Daniel was now, with the osteomancy of the morgue and Emmaline Walker’s workshop and the magic Otis had given him and that Daniel had stolen and traded for, he felt like nothing more than thin broth.

  It wasn’t the Hierarch. He recognized Fenmont Szu from television. In person, he was taller. His hair was blacker. The drape of his suit, more impeccable. His face was a little too symmetrical, his cheekbones tapering in sculpted S curves. Cosmetic osteomancy. It was all a little grotesque.

  Twenty guards accompanied him, armed with assault rifles.

  Daniel put his hands in the air.

  The Shinjin-Mushi beetles crawled beneath his skin. If he could free them, he could bring the ceiling down and crush the pillars and the cabinets and the guards and Fenmont Szu, flattening them under tons of rubble and bone.

  But he couldn’t do it without also killing his friends.

  Szu regarded Daniel like a violin teacher judging his student’s fingerings and shook his head with disappointment. He took a single, small step forward. A crushing weight drove Daniel to the floor. On his back stood a mammoth. That’s what it felt like, and he smelled the mammoth’s strength and mass, paralyzing him.

  He wondered if he’d black out before his spine splintered. He tried to say he was sorry, to Cassandra, to Moth and Jo. He wouldn’t waste words on Emma. No doubt she’d helped engineer this trap.

  He should have been smarter.

  A single spark of kraken electricity flared over his knuckles. It sputtered out.

  EIGHTEEN

  They put Daniel in a room with no light, except for a weak nimbus leaking from the bottom of the door. He was splayed on his back atop a rubber mat, wrists bound by rubber straps to rings in the wall. His hands were sealed in rubber bags, secured with duct tape. He’d been insulated to nullify his electricity.

  Silver spikes of pain radiated from the center of his spine, but at least he could feel his legs and even wiggle his toes if he didn’t mind gasping.

  He tested the straps, but only out of some sense of obligation to resist captivity. Moth might have managed to yank hard enough to rip the rings from the wall, or else rip his own arm out of its socket. Jo could resculpt her wrists and make them slender enough to slip through. Cassandra could dislocate her thumbs. But Daniel was a sack of useless magic.

  The job could have gone better.

  The door opened and Daniel lifted his head. He made out the silhouettes of at least four guards out in the hall before the door shut. With the click of a switch, harsh yellow light stabbed his eyes, and he found himself alone with Fenmont Szu.

  Szu moved with a confidence that must have required dance lessons. His suit seemed to flow around him, never bunching, never creasing. Was that magic or merely good tailoring? Only the left pocket of his jacket bulged conspicuously.

  Daniel coughed. “How’s your day going?”

  “Pretty well, thank you,” said Szu in a voice like cream. “Are you in pain?”

  “I wouldn’t mind an aspirin, if you’re offering.”

  A chuckle from Fenmont Szu.

  “You’re being very brave, Mr. Blackland. An aspirin. I stepped on you with the weight of a mammoth.”

  Again, the chuckle. Fenmont Szu was a chuckler. Daniel hated chucklers.

  “Are we going to have the kind of conversation where you just make fun of me? Let me save you the trouble. I walked right into the Hierarch’s trap and you kicked my ass. It was amateur hour. A clown show.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself, Mr. Blackland. Dozens of would-be thieves have entered the catacombs, but only a rare few make it all the way to the Ossuary. You really did quite well.”

  “Nice of you to say. Is Otis working with you guys? This whole time it’s been a con to get me here?”

  Szu dragged a chair from the corner and placed it at Daniel’s feet. He sat, crossing his long legs, hands folded on his knee. He had the fingers of a concert pianist.

  “You’re quick to figure it out.”

  “You don’t have to blow sunshine up my ass. It’s all pretty obvious, when you stop to think about it.”

  Otis was a businessman. What was the most valuable commodity in his warehouse? Daniel. And who was his richest possible customer?

  “Otis gets, what, the fangs and the sword?”

  “What makes you think there’s still a sword?”

  “Because if there’s not, I’m going to feel really, really bad about myself. I mean, even worse. So, when’s dinner?”

  From his jacket pocket, Szu removed a pair of thick, black rubber gloves. He pulled them over his graceful hands, and suddenly his musician’s fingers looked like crude implements of torture. Also from his pocket came a pair of garden shears. The blades were serrated, the grips coated in more black rubber.

  “Let my accomplices go,” Daniel said, not capable of concealing his desperation. “They’re not osteomancers. I’ll cooperate with you. You can do whatever you’re going to do to me.”

  “You have a bleak sense of hum
or, Mr. Blackland.”

  Szu walked beside Daniel’s outstretched body. He crouched and took a gloved handful of Daniel’s hair, grabbing it close to the roots, and squeezed.

  I can handle this, Daniel thought. But he couldn’t handle wondering what was being done to Moth. To Jo. To Cassandra.

  “I’ll work for you,” Daniel said. “I have all my father’s power, plus power of my own. And I’m the best thief in the kingdom, you practically said so yourself—”

  Szu placed Daniel’s nose between the blades of the shears.

  “I am here to do one thing,” Szu said. “To make sure you really are Sebastian Blackland’s son. Otis isn’t the most trustworthy of partners, I’m sure you’ll agree. So I need a piece of you for testing. If you are Daniel Blackland, then the Hierarch will eat you. If not, I’ll dine on you myself. And on your friends.”

  “They’re not osteomancers.” The shears pinched Daniel’s nostrils, and his voice sounded nasal. Comical. Hilarious.

  “That’s all right,” said Szu. “Not every meal needs to be nutritious.”

  Szu squeezed the shears, and Daniel reached desperately for kraken lightning, for sint holo, for seps serpent, for firedrake. All he could smell was Szu’s deep magic.

  The sharp pressure of the shears went away.

  “I’m just playing with you, Mr. Blackland. Your nose is far too interesting an instrument to damage with pruning shears.”

  “You have a bleak sense of humor.”

  “Indeed.”

  In a swift movement, he grabbed Daniel’s left hand and gripped his little finger through the bag. The blades of the shears cut rubber and broke skin and crunched bone, and Daniel’s finger was off.

  I can handle this, thought Daniel, and he wailed.

  * * *

  Szu left him there. No food, no water, no sense of time. Just a tiny finger gone. The pain thundered. He bled, filling the bag over his hand. Pretty clever, the bag. It made sure no blood got spilled. His blood was too potent to waste. How much magic had his father lost to the Hierarch’s cutlery before he was dead? Did he whine? If he had, Daniel couldn’t hear him over the sound of the Hierarch’s chewing.

  His head felt bloated and hot. Feverish. What were the odds that Fenmont Szu sterilized his pruning shears before amputating Daniel’s finger?

  Fenmont Szu was an asshole. Everyone was an asshole.

  Daniel moaned, and the room drank his voice to silence.

  Once upon a time, Daniel could fly. He was not a man, then, nor even a boy. He was a sleek creature the length of a gondola-bus, and he cut through air with beats of his steel-scaled wings, and anyone who dared hunt him—feathered Garuda, Fenghuang, packs of chengrong dog-birds—died in flame and ash. He was once this creature, not long ago, for a bare few seconds. But now, except for the faint flavor of methane on his tongue, he was not.

  He composed a list of people he’d make suffer.

  Otis was at the top. Obviously.

  Then came the Hierarch and Fenmont Szu.

  Emma Walker.

  He closed his eyes and imagined their names, written in elaborate script on parchment, like a proper recipe, bursting into blue flame.

  The biggest name on the list was his own. Someone had to pay for Moth and Jo and Cassandra. And for Punch.

  Punch was the wrong nickname for Pauline Moana. She did her work with pressure points and jabs. But with red hair from her incarcerated Scottish mother, and coloring and facial features from her Tahitian father, the rules of the schoolyard deemed it inevitable that she’d be known as Hawaiian Punch.

  On the eve of Punch’s last job, she sat in a booth in the back corner of Ship’s Diner on La Cienega with Daniel and the rest of the crew. Daniel liked Ship’s. Every table came with its own toaster, and he found that neat. As he created the entire toast spectrum, from flour white to tar black, he asked each member of his crew what they would do if they had all the money in the world.

  Jo went first. “I’d buy my own theater. Just a little playhouse, maybe two hundred seats. One-woman shows, maybe some improv workshops, some banned plays. Mostly just art for art’s sake.” She spread jam on toast with an elegant flourish.

  Moth, by contrast, had a list of coveted possessions. A diamond toilet brush would not be the most ostentatious of his purchases.

  Cassandra, her arm hooked around Daniel’s, revealed only that she would buy a few things but invest most of it. “Someone’s got to be a responsible adult,” she said.

  “What about you, Daniel?” Punch said, passing him a plastic container of strawberry jam. She knew strawberry was his favorite.

  Daniel thought for a moment. Not about what he’d do with a pile of money, but about how much he wanted to reveal. And then he decided he was being silly. This was his crew. These were his friends. His family. He could tell them anything.

  “Guess I’d use it to get out of town,” he said. And because this was his family, they knew exactly what he meant. They knew why he wanted to leave the Southern Kingdom. Of course. He lived in fear that one day, someone would figure out who he really was, and then he’d be hunted. And they knew that if he ever had enough funds to buy his way over the border, they’d have the choice of coming with him, because he wouldn’t leave them behind unless they wanted him to.

  “What’s it going to be for you, Punch? Champagne swimming pool or gold dirigible?”

  Punch moved a blob of strawberry jam over her toast. She met nobody’s eyes, just stared at the wood-grain laminate table as she spoke. “I think I’d give my money away to whoever needed it most.”

  For the rest of the meal, everyone but Daniel laughed and talked about the Punch Moana annual telethon for the needy.

  Daniel didn’t laugh because he knew Punch meant she’d give all her money to him. And he should have wondered why. He should have looked deeper. Instead, he just accepted. She loved him. Cassandra loved him. Jo loved him. Moth loved him. He didn’t question it. He just accepted. He just took it.

  “You mope too much.”

  Daniel craned his neck forward. A girl sat at Daniel’s feet in Fenmont Szu’s chair. He recognized her round, brown, freckled face, and the tufts of red hair jutting from beneath a black beret.

  “Hey, Punch,” he said. “You can’t be here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re dead.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I know that, Daniel. I was there when I died.” She began pointing at places on her body, her arms and shoulders and belly and breasts and temple. Those were the places the bullets struck her during the botched monocerus job.

  “I know you’re not here, Punch. I can’t smell you.”

  “I can’t smell you either. Does that mean you’re not here?”

  “That’s hardly the same thing. You’re dead.”

  “We haven’t seen each other in years, and you’re so hung up on me not being alive you can’t even say, ‘Hello, how ya been?’”

  Pugnacious, but with hurt in her eyes. So very Punch.

  “I’m hallucinating you. I think Fenmont Szu gave me tetanus.”

  Punch stood and examined the room, walking along the wall. Her boot heels tapped against the concrete floor. “Fenmont Szu is an asshole.”

  “Duh,” Daniel said, letting his head fall back.

  So, okay, he was hallucinating his old, dead friend. This didn’t have to be a crazy moment. Daniel didn’t believe in horoscopes, in the predictive power of tarot cards, in the ability to divine literal meaning from dreams. But that didn’t mean those things weren’t useful. They could be tools for self-reflection. And when one was in pain, locked away in an enemy’s dungeon, what better time to self-reflect?

  “Why’d you go back for the monocerus, Punch?”

  “You know why.”

  He did, but he hoped he was wrong, and he wanted Punch to give him another answer. He wanted her to tell him she went for the bigger score because she got stupid and greedy. But he knew better. She went back for it because
she thought she could fence it herself and wouldn’t have to give Otis a cut and then she could give Daniel a big sack of money and he could add it to his escape-from-LA fund.

  Why would she tell him any different? She was a ghost, and alleviating him of his massive guilt would be the antithesis of a haunting.

  “Can you untie me?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so,” Daniel said, unsurprised yet still disappointed.

  “I’m sorry I’m not more useful to you.”

  “Why are you here?”

  She leaned over him, her face entering his field of vision. “The same reason the others are here. The same reason I pulled jobs for you. The same reason anybody does anything for you. Because they love you.”

  “That’s really heartwarming.”

  Punch drew back. The flat impact of her footsteps circled him.

  “We all love you.”

  Daniel sighed, and the ravaged stub of his finger leaked blood. “Why?”

  “You haven’t figured it out yet?”

  “My mind’s been occupied.”

  “I think you have figured it out, but you don’t want to admit it. It’s like, if you say it out loud, the people who love you will disappear and you’ll be alone.”

  “I’m alone now, Punch. Fenmont Szu cut off my finger with a dirty garden tool and now I’m sick and I’m hallucinating.”

  “Thieves steal more than just things,” said the whisper of Punch’s voice. “And you’re not alone.”

  There were no more footfalls and no sound of the door, but Punch was gone.

  Daniel closed his eyes for a time. How long, he couldn’t say.

  A scream of metal jolted him back to awareness. A blade punched through the door like a knife through a wad of tissues and drove a chasm straight down the middle of it. Cassandra’s head emerged through the gap, like a baby being born.

  “Hey, quit screwing around,” she said. “We gotta go.”

  He could see it in her face, the love Punch was talking about, that she usually did such a splendid job of masking. Her scent was possibly the most beautiful and most real thing Daniel had ever smelled.