California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  A man in his early thirties lay at Daniel’s feet. His head was shaven, his cheeks pockmarked, his teeth yellow and crooked.

  Daniel let the electricity die. He plucked the revolver from the ground and dropped it in one of the dumpsters.

  “Who are you?”

  The man angrily wiped away a tear. “My name doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m going to torture you if you don’t answer my questions. And I’m very angry right now and won’t feel bad about it.”

  “Fuck you—”

  Daniel shocked him again, delivering about half an amp.

  The man lay on his belly, gagging.

  “Who are you?”

  “Steven Baker,” he choked out. “You don’t know me.”

  “No,” Daniel said. “That’s right, I don’t. What have you done with my friend? Where’s Jo?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Daniel shocked him again, and he screamed.

  “I don’t know, you asshole,” the man said, shuddering. “Ask your uncle.”

  “Otis?”

  The man, Baker, nodded. “He’s got her somewhere. I really don’t know.”

  Daniel’s anger at Baker drained away, replaced by new anger at himself. He should have known, from the second in the Ossuary when he’d smelled Steven Baker’s wound. It was an entirely different mix of shape-shifting essences than Jo’s. He should have put it together.

  “How long have you been posing as her?”

  “I replaced her the night before the job started. Otis was prepping me while you were prepping your crew.”

  “And he wanted control over me in the field, so he installed his own inside man.”

  Steven Baker coughed and nodded. “You win the balloon.”

  It made sense now—Jo balking at leaving the Ossuary, arguing that they should go back and finish the job. Because Otis had promised to deliver Daniel to the Hierarch, and as things stood, he’d reneged on that promise, so Daniel had to go back.

  “You should have tried harder to keep me down there,” Daniel said. Electricity sizzled at his fingertips, the sound of flies dying on bug zappers.

  “I wanted to. But Otis underestimated your loyalty magic.”

  Daniel squinted at Baker. “Loyalty magic? What are you talking about?”

  “You know, the spell your dad put on you. That makes people willing to follow you.” Baker seemed confused by Daniel’s lack of comprehension. “Come on, you really don’t know?”

  The pins and needles in Daniel’s fingers strengthened to knife jabs as he gathered more kraken electricity.

  Baker glared at Daniel with contempt. “Your friends love you. They would do anything for you. They would die for you. They do die for you. But you never wondered why? Did you think it was your personal charm? Because you’re such a great guy? No. It’s because your daddy gave you an osteomantic gift that makes people loyal to you. Because he knew one of the best protections he could give you was the love of your protectors.”

  “Otis told you this?”

  Baker nodded.

  “He lies,” Daniel said.

  “Eocorn horn, heated to seven hundred degrees, melded with Panthera atrox and terratorn coprolite. That sound familiar?”

  Those were the ingredients Sully had long ago sold to Daniel’s father. He’d said they were the makings of a love potion.

  A reality of friends, of love, of things Daniel thought given to him out of generosity, dissolved like cotton candy on the tongue.

  Baker shook his head with a laugh of disbelief.

  “I’ve only had short exposure to you, but even now, I almost want to join your gang for real. Even after everything’s gone to shit, I almost want to be your best pal. I almost want you to take me out to the malt shop. How fucked up is that?”

  “Did you hurt Moth and Cassandra?”

  Baker shook his head. “The worst I did to them was stealing Moth’s tracksuit. I don’t think he’ll miss it.”

  Electricity webbed between Daniel’s fingers. “How much is Otis paying you?”

  Baker smiled bitterly. “He’s not paying me. He’s holding my daughter hostage.”

  Jo, Steven Baker, and Baker’s daughter. Three more people with the misfortune of tangling their fates with Daniel’s. It took a particular kind of genius to compromise Daniel’s crew and somehow make it Daniel’s fault. Otis was good.

  “Get up,” Daniel said. “We’re going for Moth and Cassandra. If you’re lying about them, I’m going to kill you from the inside out.”

  Steven Baker rose gingerly to his feet. “You’re getting more violent, Daniel. You were a nicer guy when I met you.”

  “If things work out, I’ll help you get your daughter back. I promise. But you’re going to have to work with me.”

  With a spasm, Baker bent over and clutched his belly. Guttural sounds emitted from his throat, ridiculously like a seal struggling to bark. He jerked with convulsions. Daniel took a quick step back, ready in case this was just a ruse. But Baker looked at Daniel with wide eyes, not just in pain, but with accusation, as if Daniel had betrayed him and was doing this to him. He fell, striking his head on the pavement, like the crack of a cue stick against a billiard ball. Blood puddled beneath his head.

  From the alley’s mouth, a voice: “Dammit, I told you not to kill him.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Argent, I didn’t mean to. His physiology was weird.”

  Four men stood at the alley’s mouth. Two of them, including the one who’d apologized, wore Department of Water and Power uniforms. A third man, tall and thin, took in the air with flared nostrils. He was pointing like a gun dog, waiting for his master’s release.

  The final man, about Daniel’s age, wore a nice suit and stared at Daniel with sober resignation.

  “Daniel Blackland,” he said. “You are under arrest.”

  Daniel raised his hands.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. No problem.”

  Electricity crackled over his fingers, and he decided not to feel sorry for these men.

  A seizure of pain gripped his abdomen, and he doubled over, just as Steven Baker had done before he fell and died.

  * * *

  He never lost consciousness, but the pain was too great for him to do anything but groan softly as the DWP men wrapped his wrists, hands, feet, and ankles in rubber and clamped a bag over his head. They hauled him into a boat. Everything seemed muffled and distant as it pulled into traffic.

  “You’re not injured,” said a voice. It belonged to the man who’d told Daniel he was under arrest. One of the DWP guys had called him Mr. Argent. “Your friend would have been fine if he’d kept to his feet, but the head injury he sustained when he fell was fatal.” His voice thickened. “I really am sorry.”

  “Accidentally killing someone takes a special kind of incompetence,” Daniel said through the bag. He smelled nothing but rubber and his own hot breath.

  “The people I’m with are water mages, and I’m not very familiar with water magic. I’ll be more careful next time.”

  “That’ll be a great comfort to my friend’s family.” Silence followed. “Who are you and what do you want with me?”

  “My name is Gabriel Argent. I’d like to say I’ve been looking for you for a long time, but it only seems that way.”

  Daniel detected a bitterness in his voice. “Well, congratulations. How’d you do it?”

  The boat stopped, probably at a traffic buoy.

  “It wasn’t easy,” Argent said. “Your trail went dead right outside the Ossuary. But I figured you had to go somewhere. The canals seemed reasonable.”

  “A lot of canals around the Ossuary.”

  “Tell me about it. I took samples from over two thousand locations. You know what’s in the canals?”

  “Shit?”

  Argent sounded tired. “Everything’s in those canals. If I enumerated it all, it’d induce cramps. But my techs isolated a mix of osteomantic essences. And my associate here, Max, identified that mix as
being particular to you.”

  Max said nothing, but Daniel knew what he was. He’d encountered hounds before.

  “So you knew I was in the water. That doesn’t tell me how you traced me here. Not even the Hierarch’s security is that good.”

  “They could be,” Argent said, “with better organization. But you’re right. I’m not working for the Hierarch. I’m working for someone else.”

  “I’m getting boat sick with this bag on my head.”

  “Sorry.”

  Firedake rose from Daniel’s gut and filled his mouth with heat and pressure. A blast hot enough to melt the rubber would burn his own face, unless he became even more firedrake, with the dragon’s armor of impervious scales. He could do that. He saw himself throwing his wings back in a dive, plunging through a volcanic eruption of his own making.

  Then something gurgled in his belly, and he writhed in pain on the boat deck. He reached for lightning, and the pain bent him in two.

  * * *

  The boat came to a stop and Daniel was frog-marched to an elevator that dropped a long way into cold and damp. The doors opened to sounds of rushing water, like a room full of waterfalls.

  “I’m going to have them take the bag and the restraints off,” Argent’s voice said, low near Daniel’s ear. “For your own sake, don’t do anything stupid. You’re outclassed here. Just listen to what the man has to say.”

  The rubber bag clung to his sweating cheeks and forehead as it was tugged off. The rubber sheets and straps over his hands and shoes came away. His escorts surrounded around him in the damp space. Gabriel Argent faced him.

  “Take my advice, Daniel. You can’t win down here.”

  Daniel gave him no response.

  “I’ll be back for you later,” Argent said, as if he were trying to sound reassuring. He and the hound and the two DWP goons withdrew to the elevator.

  Daniel was left alone in a cavernous chamber, where the incessant, soft roar of fluid made him think of a vast ear canal. Saturated air coated his skin. An intricate network of pipes and spigots and valves rose from the stone floor to a domed latticework of plumbing. In the gloom, Daniel made out waterwheels, turning with unfathomable purpose.

  “Please step forward, Mr. Blackland. I have bad eyes.”

  Daniel moved toward the only light source in the room, an Olympic-sized pool, glowing turquoise. A broad steel desk rose from the center of the pool, like an island. Hunched behind it in a voluminous white suit was William Mulholland. His blue eyes twinkled like a sun-dappled pond.

  “Thank you for coming to meet me.”

  Daniel forced a laugh. “You mean thanks for being assaulted and kidnapped? I guess you’re welcome.”

  Mulholland hummed a chuckle. “You remind me of your father.”

  “Do I? Or is that one of those obligatory things old men say to the sons of other old men?”

  “Your father was an elegant man,” Mulholland said. “He was educated and graceful. You are not.”

  “He was a tall Anglo and I’m a short brown guy, you mean. That’s kind of racist.”

  “Ah, but you did inherit Sebastian’s recklessness. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I started out as a ditchdigger. If I’d been afraid to take risks, I’d have probably died with a shovel in my hands.”

  “And now you’re the kingdom’s most powerful plumber.” Mulholland and the Hierarch had risen to power together. Without the Hierarch’s life-extension magic, Mulholland would have died half a century ago. But without Mulholland, Southern California would still be a desert.

  Mulholland’s chuckle sounded like digestion. Great, another chuckler. “Most people go through life with a severe misconception about the nature of water. They think water gives. That it flows around obstacles. The Hierarch once thought that of me.”

  “He was wrong?”

  “In 1941 I brought down the Sepulveda Dam and let the Los Angeles River kill three hundred and forty-eight of the Hierarch’s citizens. I do not give.” He coughed, liquid gurgling in his lungs. When he got it under control, he smiled kindly, like a grandfather. “Your heist into my old friend’s Ossuary went dreadfully wrong, didn’t it?”

  Daniel saw where this was going. One way or another, he was headed back to the Ossuary, either as merchandise delivered to the Hierarch, or as a thief to pick up something in there Mulholland wanted. Death sentence either way. But if it was the latter, maybe he could get a reprieve.

  “I’ve had better days,” Daniel said.

  The water mage rose and moved around his desk, stepping out onto the pool and walking on water toward Daniel. By Mulholland’s pleased expression, Daniel knew he’d betrayed an instant of awe.

  Mulholland stood before him now. He wasn’t a physically impressive man, just a sagging container of flesh filled with magically preserved innards. But he was ancient and mighty.

  “This kingdom runs on magic, Mr. Blackland. But it’s the wrong kind of magic. Osteomancy. A consumable. A nonrenewable. Europeans stumbled on these shores, looking for gold and magic, and like they did all over the world, they found it being used by the people who’d lived here since before the invention of history itself. It was only a matter of time before a man like the Hierarch decided to take it all and kill anyone who got in his way, and he dug out every last bone in every last tar deposit. Bones that had been lying in the earth for millennia, bristling with magic, pried out and ground up and smoked away in decades.”

  He motioned Daniel to follow him into the dark forest of humming pipes.

  “The water running through my network is even more ancient than the bones that came from the La Brea Tar Pits, or the bones imported from Japanese islands and the Gobi Desert. Some people reckon all the water on earth came from space. Bombardments of magic, over billions of years, originating out there, from the deepest closets of mystery. From space to sea to cloud to rain to earth to sea. Ancient. Eternal. But here’s a secret.” He leaned in close to Daniel, like a hideous wave about to crash down. “Southern California has no water of its own.”

  He took Daniel deeper into the pipes, a rain forest of snaking copper tendrils and condensation falling in fat droplets. “The Hierarch’s wars with Northern California aren’t just about territory, or osteomantic spoils. It’s about water. Our war with the United States cut us off from the Colorado River. The Pacific Ocean gives us a near infinite supply, but my desalination plants are old and crumbling to rust, and I can no longer replace them without the Hierarch opening his purse, which he is increasingly loathe to do. And yet the canals still flow. The flumeways still push traffic. Water still comes from the taps. By magic. My magic, which I expend every day, with fewer and fewer resources.”

  He stopped, the lines in his face like the cracks in a dry lakebed.

  “Without water,” he said, “we have no food. Without water, we have no transportation. Without water, we have no industry. The Hierarch murdered your father.”

  The shift in topic was so abrupt, Daniel could only laugh. “He really did. Killed him, cleaned him like a fish, and ate him, right in front of me.”

  He wondered if men like Mulholland and the Hierarch had fathers. Maybe they were hatched from eggs.

  “And you never sought vengeance?”

  “Living well is the best revenge.”

  Mulholland made a soggy cluck. “And are you, Mr. Blackland? Are you living well?”

  “Every minute you don’t kill me is the very best moment of my life, Mr. Mulholland.”

  Mulholland’s face darkened.

  “I must have water. The Hierarch won’t give it to me. So he must be washed away.”

  Daniel shut his eyes. Hadn’t he always known it would come to this? Not because he was the vengeance-obsessed son of a great wizard. He was not. He’d never been. He’d found a different way. Maybe he hadn’t lived a moral life, and he’d never freed himself from the web of power and exploitation he’d been born to, but he’d found a way to survive, and he’d found people he cared about, who,
maybe against their own will, loved him back. But somehow he’d always known he’d be used regardless of his intent. Sebastian Blackland had stirred him and sculpted him to be a weapon, and in this kingdom, a weapon was too useful a tool to be left alone.

  “If I do this for you, it’s just me, alone,” Daniel said. “I don’t want anyone else involved.”

  “You are referring, of course, to your friends.”

  Daniel knew what Mulholland was going to say.

  “They are already involved,” Mulholland said. “Gabriel Argent took them into custody hours ago. If you successfully complete this job for me, they’ll live. If not … Well.”

  Mulholland straightened his jacket and withdrew into his wet jungle.

  Argent was waiting for Daniel in the elevator. His face was the color of newsprint, with shadows under his eyes. He didn’t look like he slept much. The doors shut, and the car rose out of the sodden dark.

  Something occurred to Daniel. “Argent’s your name? Any relation to Rose Argent?”

  “My mom.”

  “My father mentioned her once. Haven’t heard the name since.”

  “Third Correction.”

  “Yeah,” Daniel said. “That happens.”

  “He’s going to kill your friends anyway,” Argent said. “And you, too.”

  Daniel already knew that. Mulholland wanted his rival out of the way. Anyone who killed the Hierarch would automatically become his new rival.

  The doors opened.

  “I can fix this,” Argent said. “We should talk.”

  And so they did.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Los Angeles Museum of Art sprawled across twenty acres of plazas and landscaped park, less than a mile west of the La Brea Tar Pits. In a black business suit, Daniel got in line at the box office. He clutched a briefcase in his right hand. It contained a rubber ball, some wire, a few rolls of duct tape, a gun, and several plastic souvenir snow globes.

  His left hand was wrapped in cloth and elastic bandages. A skiing accident, he was prepared to say, if anyone asked. The throbbing pain of his finger stump still radiated all the way to his collarbone. The aching fatigue of the last few days came in waves. His eyes felt sandblasted and his thoughts came sluggishly. Not good working conditions. So easy to make a mistake.