California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  He killed the engine and let the boat drift. Canal lights cast wan yellow light over the black water. A few days ago, this was a vibrant place of galleries and restaurants and shops. Now, all was quiet. The current rippled, and Gabriel let it carry him along, like an amusement park dark ride.

  City workers had already erected a construction fence around the charred ruins of the coffee bar. In a few days they’d have the wreckage cleared, and in a few weeks the property would be granted to someone else, and something new would be built on the site and it would be hard to remember what had stood here before. Property in Los Angeles was a revolving door.

  Gabriel valued documentation and reports and spreadsheets. Records were history. Even bureaucratic records. And history was important. He flipped open a notepad, got out his pencil, and wrote, “Former Uses of 3922 W. Sunset Canal.”

  He took a moment to consider before writing anything down. He liked his reports succinct.

  People used to come here to drink coffee.

  They played chess and checkers and backgammon and bridge and hearts.

  They read Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times and the Chinese Daily News and the La Opinión and the Herald Examiner. They read the official hagiographies of the mages. They read westerns and detective novels and fotonovelas.

  They wrote poems and plays and novels and screenplays and manifestos.

  They did crossword puzzles and sketched and doodled. They met for first dates and blind dates and for immoral and unethical affairs. They fell in love.

  They were beaten with clubs and shoved through plate-glass windows. They were arrested, and they bled, and they burned.

  “Max. Tell me why you killed your last handler. The true reason.”

  The hound tucked his chin into his chest, as if he were trying to avoid a foul odor.

  “I already told you. I wasn’t lying.”

  “I don’t think you told me the whole truth. Tell me now.”

  “He had power over me. I was tired of people having power over me. So I killed him.”

  “Don’t I have power over you?” Gabriel asked.

  “Obviously.”

  “But?”

  “Is there a but?”

  “I’m still breathing, so there must be.”

  “You never made me wear a leash,” Max said.

  Gabriel had taken off Max’s leash because he thought he could get better work out of him that way. There was no kindness in the act, only utility.

  “And that was reason enough to kill? Because you didn’t like someone having power over you?”

  Max gave him a look, innocence combined with irritation. “Is there a better reason?”

  “Fenmont Szu called me a risk taker,” Gabriel said. “I was insulted. I took some risks because I didn’t see any other choice. Now I’m about to take another one. A big one.” He glanced over at Max, in his fine gray suit and lavender tie, the profile of his nose carved sharp against the canal lights. Here was a man who had been used as a tool most of his life, and when Gabriel looked at him, he couldn’t imagine him as a boy or an adolescent. It was as if he’d come this way out of the box.

  Gabriel started the engine. “If you want to leave, now would be a good time.”

  “Where would I go?”

  “I could get you to the desert. I have a cousin there. She could help you get out of the Southern kingdom.”

  “She could? But would she?”

  “She’s rich and she likes me. We used to stick gum to the bottom of pianos.”

  Max sniffed. The tinge of soaked wood and smoke still hung in the air.

  “I think I’ll stay with you,” Max said. “This cousin of yours would sell me back in less time than it’d take to soften a wad of gum.”

  Max was probably right about that. Blood ties didn’t mean much. Nor did personal history.

  Gabriel threw his notepad in the canal. The pages darkened, and his neat, precise writing blurred, and the pad sank below the surface of Mulholland’s canal.

  * * *

  Most of the great powers in Los Angeles kept private prisons in their strongholds. Disney’s was said to be sunken beneath his haunted house, but Gabriel didn’t know. Maybe he dressed his prisoners in international costume and forced them sing that “Small World” song.

  William Mulholland kept his prisoners in tanks.

  The room where the tanks were kept was not called a prison or a jail or even a detention facility. It was simply called “Tank Room 17.” Gabriel took note of the high number.

  Tank Room 17 was chilly and damp. The floor, walls, and ceiling were lined with mint-green ceramic tiles, like a public shower. It contained a dozen cylindrical glass tanks, each eight feet tall and connected to an elaborate system of pipes and hoses. Inside two of these tanks were Daniel Blackland’s associates, Cassandra Morales and the man called Moth, whose real name Gabriel hadn’t yet uncovered. In fact, he’d stopped trying.

  The prisoners were as lethal in their own ways as Blackland himself, and if not for the water mages Mulholland had loaned him, Gabriel wasn’t certain he’d have pulled off arresting them. As it was, the people he’d found hiding with them had escaped into their labyrinth of interconnected warrens and were scattered who-knew-where. Gabriel had lied and told Mulholland he was working on tracking them down, but he didn’t think Mulholland cared that much about them.

  Stripped naked, Blackland’s friends floated vertically in their cells. Cassandra Morales’s hair waved languidly, like the tendrils of an anemone. Moth was stuffed in his tank like a pickle in a tight jar. They were given no breathing apparatus, but the water in the tank was rich with perfluorocarbon, which carried more oxygen than blood. They stared hatefully at Gabriel through fluid and glass.

  Liquid breathing was the way we were meant to live, Mulholland had proudly declared to Gabriel. He believed man had evolved from aquatic apes, and Mulholland had some sort of mad utopian dream of returning to that natural state. Gabriel couldn’t understand why guys with power couldn’t be content to make sure people had adequate food, shelter, transportation, education, and opportunity. Why wasn’t that ever enough?

  A single guard sat behind a steel office desk. He looked hopelessly bored.

  “I need a few minutes alone with the prisoners.”

  The guard wasn’t even armed. The tanks were sealed with custom bolts, and it took a special wrench to turn them. That wrench was kept elsewhere under lock and key. There were slots near the top of the tanks through which once a day someone sprinkled food flakes, exactly as though the prisoners were goldfish.

  The guard got up and reached over his head to stretch. He yawned. “If you can spot me five minutes, that’d be great. All the water in this place but I still gotta walk through half the building to take a leak.”

  And suddenly Gabriel was doing the guard a favor instead of asking for one.

  “No problem.”

  He waited until the guard was gone and then approached Cassandra Morales’s tank. It must have been awful to be immersed. They must have thought they were being drowned. Mulholland’s “natural state” was preceded by terror.

  Moth pounded on the inside of his tank with his massive fist. The glass was so thick Gabriel couldn’t even hear the impacts.

  The door to the room opened, and Max slipped inside. He dropped a duffel bag in front of the tanks.

  “Guard went to the john?”

  “Yes,” Max confirmed.

  Gabriel turned back to Cassandra Morales. She showed him her middle finger, and Gabriel showed her what he’d been keeping in his pocket. It was a triangular wedge of firedrake scale, honed to a razor point. Firedrake could cut through diamond. It could certainly cut through glass. Taped to it was a note with detailed instructions for now and for later.

  He found a stepladder behind the guard’s desk and brought it over to Morales’s tank. Standing on the top rung, he dropped the firedrake wedge into her feeding hole. It sank, spiraling down like a fi
shing weight, and Cassandra Morales caught it in her nimble fingers.

  * * *

  The tunnel from the Hierarch’s gallery enclosed a single, narrow canal. The way was dark, but Daniel followed the smells of power until they grew strong enough to drag him along. An hour of walking brought him to a place with walls of cooked brick and a floor of soot. Terrific. He’d delivered himself to an oven. But, no. He pulled aside a curtain of fine iron links, and like a magic trick, found himself in the fireplace of a Victorian parlor. He ducked under the mantel and stepped through, his ash-covered shoes sinking into plush, red carpet. Books lined wooden shelves. Candles flickered in a fussy chandelier overhead. He recognized this place.

  Done up like a French château, the Magic Castle used to be an exclusive club for the city’s osteomancers, entertaining them with bars and lounges, a dining room, secret passages, stages for lectures and demonstrations. Why would the Hierarch, a man with true magical power, engage in a child’s amusements? It was theater. Judges had their wigs and gavels, priests had their robes and candles, kings had their scepters and sparkly hats, and the Hierarch had a castle. So typical of Los Angeles, a city with deep magic in its bones and arteries, to express its power with film-set realities. Like the Hierarch, the city showed her true face to few, and to see it, you had to gouge the surface and dig.

  Daniel had been here before. His father brought him as a young boy to meet his colleagues. He’d shaken hands like a grown-up and been weighed and measured. He didn’t remember everything. But he remembered how one gained entry past the parlor.

  In one of the bookcases sat a pewter owl. Daniel spoke the secret word to it: “Marrow.” The bookcase swiveled open to reveal a hallway, and he stepped through.

  Mulholland had sent him here to assassinate the Hierarch, which was just funny when you thought about it. But Daniel’s deal with Gabriel required something even more difficult of him. He was here to steal the Hierarch’s beating heart.

  At the end of the hall, he found a small theater with a stage and vaudeville curtains.

  “You’re here,” came a voice from behind the curtains. It was surprisingly mild. Even bland. And very tired. The voice wasn’t frightening. What scared Daniel was the complete lack of odor. Everyone smelled of something. Food. Soap. Osteomancy. Something. But not this man.

  “You’re not very stealthy,” said the voice.

  “I didn’t suppose I’d be able to sneak up and kill you in your sleep. You knew I was coming. Otis almost managed to hand me over to you. And now Mulholland’s completed delivery.”

  “But you came of your own free will.”

  “I had no choice,” Daniel said. “My friends are being held hostage. If I kill you, I get them back. Full disclosure.”

  “Mulholland promised you that? Do you believe him?”

  “I’m really not going to go into great detail about all my business arrangements,” Daniel said. “Are you going to come out from behind that curtain? Not being able to see or smell you is freaking me out.”

  “I’ll give you this, then.”

  Aromas fell upon him in waves. There were things he knew, like mammoth and kraken and wyvern, and other smells he’d never been exposed to, of arctic creatures and things from the center of the earth and things that hinted of plasma and frigid lunar wastes. Daniel staggered and choked and turned to flee, to run long and far and never return, but the bookcase swiveled back in place, closing him in.

  “Does that help, Daniel?”

  Breathing was no longer an involuntary act. Daniel had to tell his lungs to pull in air. He swallowed. “Really, really freaked out.”

  “You must care a great deal for your friends, to put yourself through this.”

  “I like them well enough.”

  “Maybe you can murder me, Daniel,” said the voice. “You’re pretty powerful. You breathed in a lot of my magic when you crept through my Ossuary.”

  “That’s what you wanted. You loaded me up on magic to make me a more nutritious meal.”

  And despite his terror, he did feel powerful. He’d absorbed so much magic since rappelling down from the HVAC vent in the Ossuary that every breath of charged air strained his thin skin. He was an overflowing container. Maybe he could survive this day. Stranger things had happened.

  He looked at his hands. Blue aurora danced across his knuckles.

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Daniel. No, you’re not.”

  The stage curtain jingled and squeaked as it drew back, and there, standing on the scuffed boards, was a tall man in a white shirt and black slacks. He was thin, bony, with bent shoulders and hair the color of cobwebs. Daniel had expected the monster in the living room, the thing too hideous and awesome to look at directly, the thing that ate his father with a fork. Nothing about this man suggested a mighty sorcerer. He looked old. A little sick. Like someone who spent too long losing at the greyhound track.

  But Daniel had been fooled by shape-shifters, by golems, and by potions that caused him to mistake love stolen through osteomancy for love given freely. He’d been fooled by accomplished liars and by actors and by magic. And Daniel had smelled him. He knew better.

  “Abracadabra,” said the Hierarch.

  * * *

  Daniel directed lances of kraken electricity at the stage. The flash of his own lightning blinded him. He heard a hoarse scream of pain. Smoke rose from the Hierarch’s chest. He opened his mouth to say something, but Daniel wasn’t planning to listen. Instead, he stretched his jaws and released a torrent of blue flame.

  With the sound of a thousand flags ripping in the wind, a parcel of fire spread out before him. He pushed with his lungs, sending a wall of fourteen-hundred-degree air at his enemy.

  The Hierarch reached out, as if to catch a ball. “Stop that,” he said.

  He squeezed the air.

  Daniel’s flame guttered. He crumpled under the Hierarch’s phantom grip, feeling his ribs bending inward. A raspy whistle emitted from his throat as his lungs compressed, and he fell to his knees. But the kraken lived in the black depths of the sea. Its body thrived under pressure even greater than what the Hierarch was punishing him with, and Daniel was kraken.

  He shot to his feet and summoned Jinshin-Mushi beetles. They emerged from his palms and the backs of his hands. They ran down his arms, scuttling out from under the cuffs of his sleeves, from between the buttons of his shirt and from the back of his neck and the front of his collar. The beetles scurried down his legs and spilled, clattering, over his shoes. He vomited beetles. They crawled out his ears. In their thousands, they tunneled through the Persian rug at his feet, through the floorboards, into the earth. Glass chandeliers shattered. The building’s joints squeaked and groaned and cracked. The floors buckled and the walls swayed.

  The Hierarch leaped off the stage and took three steps toward Daniel before the floor beneath him collapsed. He fell, quick as a man through the trapdoor of a gallows. The ceiling followed in a deluge of wood and plaster chips and dust, and the stage tilted down and slid, joining the avalanche of debris.

  After a few seconds, the earth stilled.

  Daniel crept up to the edge of the pit and took a breath. Dust and debris settled one floor down. He still felt the beetle manifestations roiling beneath his skin. They wanted to be let out. They wanted to make more earthquakes. And Daniel wanted to let them. He could bring down the entire castle. He could bury the remains in a mudslide. He could go back to the Ossuary and crush the Hierarch’s precious treasures, and bring down his Ministry headquarters.

  From the hole came soft moans of pain.

  Good. He hoped there were bones sticking through the Hierarch’s flesh. The thought of him suffering was Daniel’s only comfort. All he had done was survive several seconds of confrontation.

  He peered over the shattered floorboards. It was about a twelve-foot drop, with no easy way down. He preferred it here on the ledge. Down there was danger. Down there was a wizard who might be seriously i
njured or just simply angry.

  Debris shifted below. There was a cough. Green smells of regeneration wafted up from the hole: hydra essence, from a creature so resilient you could sever its head and it would grow back. The Hierarch was already healing himself.

  A child’s voice: “You can’t beat him that way.”

  At the theater entrance stood a boy, seven or eight years old. Shaggy-haired and dressed in an oversized T-shirt and jeans too short for him, his feral appearance reminded Daniel of a slave-wraith. But there was awareness and intelligence in his solemn eyes, which seemed to be appraising Daniel. He exuded a tantalizingly familiar and powerful aroma.

  “You won’t beat him by throwing fire and poison at him,” the boy said. “He’s got more fire and poison than anyone. You should run.”

  Fresh blooms of magic rose from the hole and assaulted Daniel’s nostrils. Whatever fear he’d been suppressing came to the surface now.

  “Run where?”

  From the hole came more sounds. Scrabbling. Piles of wreckage being shoved aside. Climbing.

  The floor moved in a queasy roll. The walls undulated, and the earthquake smell tumbled through the building. The walls cracked into webs.

  “Burn him,” the feral boy said. “Slow him down a little.”

  Daniel leaned over the pit and loosed a furnace. Swirling flames poured out of him, down into the hole, answered with rising shrieks of pain.

  The boy didn’t wait around to see the results. He darted down the hall and around a corner. Daniel pursued and caught up just in time to see him scurry up a ladder, through an opening in the paneled ceiling. Daniel went up after him, into an attic.

  Rays of grimy light came in through a round, leaded window near the rafters. The space was filled with the mundane storage of a private club: holiday decorations, milk crates full of candlesticks, boxes of paperwork, a mound of junk under a canvas tarp. But there was also a stainless steel operating table, with a drain that fed into a basin on the floor, and a nest of rubber tubes. An array of saws and knives and pincers hung from hooks. There was a copper fork. This was a place in pause, waiting to be filled with screams, more intimate than anywhere Daniel imagined the Hierarch would work his osteomancy, and all the worse because of it.