California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  Daniel pushed again, and the Hierarch doubled over.

  He pushed, and the Hierarch fell.

  “You killed my dad before he made me a true osteomancer,” Daniel said. “But he did live long enough to make me a glutton.”

  It would take some time to kill him. The Hierarch was much older than the body he was wearing, and he was good at staying alive.

  But the magic in the earth flowed up through Daniel’s body, and the Hierarch would die on this hill, overlooking his kingdom. Daniel had chosen this.

  He wondered what the Hierarch’s heart would taste like, and his mouth watered.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The city didn’t yet know what had happened to it.

  Traffic flowed on some canals. On others, boats fouled the water with idling engines. Searchlights probed the air, but they were just promoting clubs and bars. Fireboats shot water on the Magic Castle, and white smoke billowed over the hillside.

  Stumbling down Sunset in his torn, burned clothes, Daniel was the most interesting thing on the sidewalk. Stares, averted glances, looks of disapproval … He must be a fascinating sight. He’d already been passed up by three cabs, but he couldn’t blame the drivers. He didn’t have any money to pay them with anyway.

  “Watch out,” the Hierarch’s golem said. “Glass.”

  Daniel stepped around a broken bottle in his bare feet, wondering if his flesh could still be cut.

  “Thanks.”

  He clutched the boy’s hand. In his other hand, he held a plastic grocery bag. Inside the bag was a treasure. Or half a treasure. The part that Daniel hadn’t eaten. He kept the sword tucked through his belt. He looked like a lunatic.

  It wasn’t until he passed Sunset Newsstand, west of La Brea, that he overheard someone talking about the fire. The newsstand proprietor sat on a stool, reading the racing report, obviously trying to mind his own business while a man in a fine suit tried gamely to engage in conversation.

  “Saw some lightning up there,” he was saying. “Weird lightning. Heard there were some fireballs, too. And shaking.”

  The newsstand man flipped a page. “You don’t say.”

  “Localized tremors like that don’t happen naturally. Seismic waves travel, you know.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “You ask me, it’s osteomancy. The castle used to be some kind of private wizard club, and those guys get territorial. You think?”

  “I don’t think,” the proprietor said. “I sell papers, cigarettes, candy, and porn, and I mind my own business.”

  A safe policy, Daniel thought. The Ministry had spies, and they could afford good suits.

  Good Suit gave up on his conversation and took notice of Daniel. He stared into Daniel’s grimy face, then at the boy, then back at Daniel. He reached into his jacket.

  Daniel wasn’t sure what to do about this. He had so many options.

  From Good Suit’s pocket came a wallet. He passed a note to Daniel as if he were tipping a maître d’.

  “Get your boy something to eat and some decent clothes,” he said. “And don’t drink it.” Then he bought a copy of Hustler and went on his way, leaving Daniel with the fifty.

  It took all of it to convince a cabbie to take him to the Ship’s Diner on La Cienega. Daniel set the boy up at the counter and ordered him a bowl of tomato soup and a glass of milk. When the waitress assessed Daniel’s appearance and found him wanting, she asked him if he could pay for it. Daniel put on his winningest smile. He promised her a twenty-tusk tip if she’d give him a few minutes to go get some money. More out of pity for the boy than being charmed by Daniel, she agreed.

  “I’m going to be just outside,” Daniel told the boy. “If anyone bothers you, scream. Loudly.”

  “A banshee’s scream is a hundred and ninety-four decibels. Anything louder than that and the sound wave breaks down. Will that be loud enough?”

  “It’ll do,” Daniel said.

  In the parking docks behind the restaurant, he climbed into the front passenger seat of a black stretch outrigger. Gabriel Argent sat behind the wheel. Argent’s hound lurked in the back. Back east, this was how they conducted mob hits.

  “I wasn’t sure you were going to make it,” Argent said. “Lots of fireworks up in the hills. God, you look like hell. Should we be going to the hospital?”

  “I lived. He died. Give me my friends.”

  Argent eyed the bag in Daniel’s lap. “You brought the thing?”

  Daniel opened the top of the bag and let Argent peer inside.

  “Max?” Argent said to the hound.

  The hound leaned forward and sniffed. “It smells like everything.”

  “I’m not sure that’s helpful,” Argent said. But Daniel knew what the hound meant. The Hierarch’s heart tasted like it smelled, like liver and beef and like the thousands of different kinds of magic the Hierarch had ingested during his long life.

  “It’s the real thing,” Max concluded.

  Argent held out for the bag, but Daniel moved it out of his reach.

  “First you free my friends. If you can’t or won’t, your heart goes into the bag, too.”

  Argent didn’t seem to take the threat personally. “I freed them four hours ago. Look.” He pointed out the windshield at the diner’s entrance. There, standing on the sidewalk, were Cassandra and Moth. Cassandra looked at her watch, and they went inside.

  It felt to Daniel as if steel bands squeezing his chest had sprung loose, as if he could breathe properly for the first time in days, and he spent a moment to gather himself.

  “Four hours ago, I hadn’t even made it to the Magic Castle yet. But you freed them anyway. Why?”

  Argent took his time answering. “I’m not a good man,” he began. “I’ve been involved in some very bad enterprises. I’ve ordered people hurt. I’ve killed. I’m the man who removed the head from the Department of Water and Power. But you’re the man who stole the kingdom’s treasure. And I don’t want you as an enemy.”

  Daniel handed him the bag. Argent opened it and considered the Hierarch’s heart.

  “It looks like there’s only half there.”

  “Plenty left for you to sell or use or whatever you want. What are you going to do with all that power?”

  “What are you going to do with yours?”

  Daniel licked the back of his teeth and tasted magic. He opened the door and stepped outside. “You’re right, Argent. You don’t want me as an enemy.” He shut the door and went to meet his friends.

  It would be a brief reunion, he knew.

  He needed to go see Otis, with whom he did not have an appointment.

  * * *

  Outside Otis’s warehouse, Daniel placed his palm flat against the concrete block wall. It was hard to decide what to do. He could secrete seps venom and burn through the blocks. He could dissolve them like talc. With a simple push, he could bring the building tumbling down. He wondered if the Hierarch had paused like this on the night he burst into his father’s house.

  Daniel decided to go through the back door.

  It wasn’t even locked.

  He anticipated a volley of bullets from Otis’s bodyguards. Instead, his footsteps echoed through the empty warehouse. The crates and boxes, the sacks of pet food, the posters for flea collars and kitty litter had been removed. The menagerie of magic-detecting birds and hamsters were gone. The chain-link wraith-slave pens alongside the wall were vacant as well. Even the air smelled empty. Any osteomancy residue had been sucked into vacuum cleaner bags and hauled away.

  He continued to Otis’s office. The file drawers were pulled out, empty. The hobo clown painting rested on the floor, leaning against the wall.

  On the cleared-off desktop rested a white envelope, placed so dead center that Daniel imagined Otis using a ruler and calipers.

  Daniel tore it open and read the note inside:

  Sorry for not leaving a forwarding address. I suppose you’re the new Hierarch now. Good luck.

  Sincerely, Uncle Otis


  Daniel read the note again. He concentrated on every word, every pen stroke. He could see Otis smirking as he folded the note and licked the envelope and placed it there for Daniel to find.

  How fun it must be, to be Otis.

  His fingers grew hot, and pencil lines of smoke rose from the paper.

  “Daniel?”

  He turned. Standing in the doorway was the real reason he’d come back.

  “Jo.”

  She rushed him and threw her arms around his neck, and they stood that way for minutes, until Daniel pushed her away and held her at arm’s length.

  “I’m okay,” she said, misinterpreting the way he examined every contour of her face, every subtlety of her expression. He smelled the nhang spirit and kitsune fox and dragon’s teeth that gave her shape-shifting, and he still couldn’t be sure if it was really her.

  “Tell me something only you and I know.”

  “Tito’s,” she said, obeying without hesitation.

  “What about it?”

  “The first time you told me what happened to your parents, and the first time I told you what happened to mine, we were at Tito’s Tacos. You complained that the chips were like roof shingles, but you liked it there, because the old men in the back knew how to roll a burrito tighter than a cigar.”

  “Jo,” he said, and he drew her back into a hug. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t find out Otis replaced you until we were out of the Ossuary.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she said.

  Daniel gave her more apologies, which she was too ready to accept. In his system was a mixture of eocorn essence, terratorn coprolite, and high-quality Panthera atrox that made his friends love him and quick to forgive. He could thank his father for that. And it was a gift he knew he had to rid himself of, even though the thought of casting it away terrified him.

  “He gave me a message for you,” she said.

  “What?”

  She hesitated. “He’s probably just screwing with you. It’s like his hobby.”

  “Jo. What’s the message?”

  Wincing, she reached into her pocket and fished out a folded slip of paper. She handed it to Daniel.

  The paper was yellowed and brittle. Written in fading ink, the precise, block-printed letters spelled out, “I’m ready. Send my son.”

  The note wasn’t signed, but no signature was necessary. Daniel recognized his mother’s hand.

  Otis had never shown Daniel the note. He’d never told him his mother had sent for him. He’d kept Daniel all to himself.

  Daniel would find Otis. He’d smoke him out of whatever hole he was hiding in and he would kill him, loudly and publicly. He would make a spectacle of Otis, and everyone, the whole kingdom, would know what happened when you pushed Daniel Blackland.

  He sighed and folded the note.

  “Come on,” he said, taking Jo’s hand.

  * * *

  Moth sniffled as he carried Daniel’s bag. The bag contained little: a couple of spare shirts, some underwear and basic toiletries, an empty picture frame, but Moth still insisted on loading it into the trunk of Daniel’s boat. He bear-hugged Daniel, gave him a gentle punch to the chest, hugged him again, and then Daniel got sniffly, too.

  “Stay out of trouble,” Daniel told him.

  Moth snorked and guffawed. “What are the odds?”

  “Not so good. Just be careful, okay? I don’t know what Otis is planning.”

  “If he comes looking for me, then he’s gonna get his head tore off and shoved so far up his ass it pops out his neck hole and becomes his head again. I love you, Daniel,” Moth said.

  “I know. My dad didn’t give you much choice.”

  “I don’t care about that loyalty-potion shit. I still love you.”

  Daniel tried to find a joke, but the well was empty. More powerful than he’d ever been, he was empty. “Why, Moth? I’m honestly at a loss here. Why do you love me?”

  Moth paused, collecting his words. “Because you, buddy, do have a choice in who you love. And you choose to love your friends.” He cuffed Daniel on the side of the head. “Go talk to Cassie.”

  After a final, huge, spine-cracking hug, Moth lumbered down the dock to give Daniel and Cassandra some privacy.

  “Hey,” Daniel said. He glanced at her, which was a mistake, because now he couldn’t look away, and he knew at some point he’d have to look away.

  “Hey,” Cassandra said, her hands in her pockets.

  “You won’t change your mind and come with me?”

  “What do you think, Daniel?”

  “I think you should change your mind and come with me.”

  She sighed. He exasperated her. He always did. “You know I didn’t break up with you because I stopped thinking you were cute, right?”

  “I know I’m cute,” he said.

  “I didn’t break up with you because I stopped loving you.”

  “I know.”

  “I broke up with you because even then, I knew I couldn’t stop loving you. I don’t mean in a stupid love-song way. I mean … I knew I couldn’t stop. And I don’t know how I knew, but it felt wrong to me. Even then.”

  “I’m sorry my dad did that to you guys. I really am, Cass. I hope you know I mean it.”

  She crossed her arms and looked down the canal. Moth was still there, trying to make it seem like he wasn’t watching them.

  “I know you mean it, kiddo.”

  She kissed him on the cheek and turned and walked away. Daniel’s chest beat with the power of a thousand different osteomantic creatures. It beat with strength, and with power, and with magic, and every beat was slow and heavy. He watched her go, hating the whispering voice that told him to force her to turn back. He could do it, if he wanted to. It would be so easy.

  The voice telling him this was not the Hierarch’s. It was not his father’s. It was all his own.

  * * *

  In the following days, the remaining powers went to war. There was no official statement, and the propaganda machine kept blathering about sports and celebrity news, and the weather reports were noticeably bland and inaccurate, at a loss to explain the lightning cracking the sky apart, and the blue fires that raged in the hills, and the tremors bringing down the mansions of the Council of Six.

  Yet the water still flowed, all the way from the downtown center of the kingdom’s capital to the last capillaries of the desert outpost of Lancaster, where Daniel traded his boat for a land truck.

  As he drove through the night, he left behind the vague orange sky of the city for the dizzying stars. The earth, where all his magic originated, felt thin, without gravity. If Daniel let go, he’d drift, unanchored.

  Gabriel Argent had called the Hierarch’s heart the kingdom’s treasure, and surely it was a treasure. Daniel could still feel the half of it he’d eaten coursing through his veins, filling his cells with its power, and whispering to him, telling him what he was capable of now. The power begged to be used.

  The golem-boy slept in the passenger seat, and he was a greater treasure yet. They’d come looking for him: Council osteomancers, aspiring lesser sorcerers, foreign powers and thieves and people like Otis. Maybe they wouldn’t try to take him by force. Maybe they’d be willing to negotiate. Maybe if Daniel parted him out, piece by piece, a tooth here, a finger bone there, they’d finally leave Daniel alone.

  Daniel would never do that, but the fact that he could even think of it made him push down the accelerator. He was abandoning Los Angeles, but he wouldn’t abandon the boy.

  Cold air came in through the vents, rustling the boy’s hair, and Daniel smelled his fresh magic. He kept driving toward the borders of the kingdom, away from familiar ghosts, toward ghosts he didn’t yet know.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, my thanks go first to Lisa Will, for every kind of help in every part of my life.

  My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, not only made this a better book but repeatedly declared his enthusiasm for the project at times when I need
ed it most. Caitlin Blasdell ably represented my interests at every stage, from proposal to final manuscript submission and beyond. The team at Tor Books turned my manuscript into an actual book, and I would like to thank Miriam Weinberg, Irene Gallo, Theresa DeLucci, and Patty Garcia, among others, for their skill and hard work.

  I haven’t yet published a book that wasn’t critiqued by members of the Blue Heaven writers workshop. In this case, I relied on Cassie Alexander, Paolo Bacigalupi, Chris Barzak, Tobias Buckell, Rae Carson, Deborah Coates, Charles Coleman Finlay, Sandra McDonald, Paul Melko, Sarah Prineas, and Jenn Reese. They are a solid criminal crew, and it is to them I dedicate this book.

  I owe additional thanks to Deborah Coates and Jenn Reese for supportive e-mail correspondence, and especially to Sarah Prineas for a last-minute read that gave me the stomach to send in my final draft.

  Sheila Williams bought the short story that gave messy birth to this novel, “The Osteomancer’s Son,” for Asimov’s Science Fiction. And Dave Thompson not only picked the story for the PodCastle podcast, but helped convince me that a novel-length expansion of it might have an audience. Tim Pratt, whose opinion I highly value, also read the novel and gave me a very welcome thumbs-up.

  John M. Harris and Sharon Takeshita at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles answered my questions about the La Brea Tar Pits. And many people on Twitter suggested heist movies and books for research. I should have written down their names. I didn’t. I’m sorry. But please all consider yourselves Favorited.

  Finally, I would like to thank Tito’s Tacos.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Greg van Eekhout is the author of Norse Code and two middle-grade SF novels, Kid vs. Squid and The Boy at the End of the World (a finalist for the Andre Norton Award). He lives in San Diego, California. California Bones is his first hardcover for adult readers.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.