California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “But I’m so comfy here.”

  With blows of the groot-coated shovel, she hacked at the door until the gap was large enough for her to squeeze through.

  She ran to his side and sliced the rubber straps. When she pulled the bag off his left hand, she gasped.

  “Oh, god. Your hand.”

  “I’m okay. Hey, you know I always really loved you, right?”

  “Is this the best time to be talking about this?” Gently she helped him to his feet.

  “Sully was saying some stuff in Ocean Park about love potions.”

  Cassandra gave him a grim look.

  “And then Punch said some stuff—”

  “You’re delirious. Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

  He nearly toppled, but Cassandra caught him. She was good at catching him. His thoughts felt slippery, but he understood this was a breakout, and not keeping his head together was bullshit.

  “How’re the others?”

  “I got the others out, plus most of our gear. The guards were divvying it up. Spoils of war or something. I need something for your hand. Your kit wasn’t with the rest of our stuff, but maybe we can find some hydra regen somewhere.”

  She looked miserable and desperate.

  “What about Emma?”

  “She helped us with the guards. Otherwise, we’d be in a world of fuck-all right now.”

  “We’re not in a world of fuck-all?”

  “Even bigger fuck-all,” said Cassandra.

  “As long as we’re together.”

  In the corridor, Jo and Moth were searching the pockets of the unconscious guards.

  Moth turned his head, and Daniel winced at the sight of Moth’s left ear. It was just a hole, streaming blood.

  “Damn, Moth.”

  Moth grinned, wicked and mad. “What’s that, stumpy? A little hard of hearing right now.”

  He wasn’t the only one wounded. Blood ran from a six-inch-long gash in Jo’s forearm.

  “Jo…”

  “I’m okay,” she said, biting her lip against the pain as she pinched her claylike flesh to mold the wound shut.

  Daniel caught the metallic whiff of her blood, but also other smells that confused him. Akhlut? Colo Colo? These were shape-shifting creatures, but not the specific ones that gave Jo her ability.

  Maybe his nose was off.

  With the sight of his friends alive and mostly whole, and with neutralized guards sprawled on the floor and cleaver-clubs scattered about, it was tempting to hope that everything was okay now. But his crew were all high-value prisoners, Daniel especially, and the Hierarch wasn’t going to let them bash in some heads and run away from the Ossuary.

  Proving him right, klaxon bells rang out.

  “Back to the air shafts?” Cassandra asked.

  Emma came tearing around a corner, a twist of smoke curling from her mouth. “No. They know how we came in. The shafts will be guarded and blocked. But there’s another way. Follow me.”

  “Don’t trust her,” Jo urged.

  “If you want to get out of here, you’ll have to,” Emma said.

  Everyone looked at Daniel, waiting for his decision. Jo looked tortured. Daniel was in no shape for this. His head burned, and the world seemed tilted sideways, and everything smelled funny, and he could feel magic streaming from his stump.

  “Get us out of here, Emma,” he breathed.

  Emma took them down a row of more cells. They were unoccupied, but a choking stink of suffering lingered outside them. After some more twisting passageways, she delivered Daniel and crew to yet another shut door. Footfalls approached behind them.

  “Through here,” Emma said.

  Cassandra and Daniel performed a hasty inspection for osteomantic wards and mechanical booby traps, and before being fully satisfied it was safe, Daniel told Moth to take the door.

  Moth’s shovel tore into three-inch steel, filling the space with metallic shrieks. Flechettes of debris flew through the air and clanked on the ground. Moth was making quick work, but not quick enough.

  Guards came down the corridor, guns drawn. Daniel moved to put his body between the guns and his crew, and the only thing saving him from being cut to shreds by bullets was the fact that the Hierarch didn’t want his meal contaminated with dirty projectiles. The guards widened their positions to shoot around him, and Daniel raised his bloody left hand.

  His lightning traveled a jittering web down the ceiling and walls. In the instant before it struck, Daniel glimpsed the patch sewn on the windbreaker of the guard at the front of the pack. The patch was embroidered with the wings-and-tusks emblem of the Hierarch’s security apparatus, as well as with the guard’s name: Lopez. Daniel was killing a person named Lopez, and reverberations from this death would travel out in countless unseen directions, like a swarm of Jinshin-Mushi beetles creating earthquakes and toppling buildings in places Daniel would never see.

  Lopez shrieked and fell back, and the stench of melting rubber-soled boots and cooked meat bloomed in the air.

  Daniel shot more lightning and hit the advancing guards. Hot blue arcs leaped from body to body. A guard in the rear leveled her rifle, and Daniel sent a bolt from the ceiling into her gun. She coughed out a scream and fell.

  That was easy, thought Daniel. Why was that so easy? His control had never been this good. Maybe because he’d been exposed to kraken particulates in the Ossuary. Or maybe he’d inhaled some of his father’s skull when he opened the drawer. Or maybe he’d just never been so afraid and so angry at the same time.

  “We’re through,” Moth hollered. Daniel turned away from the guards, sprawled on the floor, smoke rising from their backs. A few were moving. There were some groans. Most were still, and Daniel felt sick and powerful.

  He joined his crew and slipped through the remains of the door. Moth slammed an inner door of decorative wood behind them.

  From a place of klaxons and screams and steel and concrete, they had passed into one of order and contemplation. The walls of the long, narrow room were paneled in rich wood. Light from shaded glass lamps cast a warm glow. There was a bar, with a silver ice bucket and crystal decanters. Leather-upholstered club chairs. Oil paintings, including what looked like a van Gogh. Jo didn’t even give it a greedy glance.

  Deeper in the room was an oak table, long enough to seat twelve on a side. The chair at the head of the table, topped by a carved wooden dragon emerging from a wooden scroll of waves, was grand enough for a throne.

  This was a dining room, and Daniel knew what fare was served here.

  They continued on, through another door at the far end. Here, a Persian carpet ran down the center of the room, little more than another corridor with glass walls, behind which, hanging on hooks and racks, were human bodies in various stages of butchering. There were bones, from knuckles to complete, articulated skeletons, most of them tar-stained from osteomantic consumption. There were strips of skin, stiff like rawhide. Joints and slabs of meat. On shelves sat jars of eyes and bits of liver and stomach and brain and tongue, and cans whose contents Daniel could only guess.

  The glass windows were bordered by rubber seals, but the scents pushed their way into Daniel’s head. The remains belonged to osteomancers. This was the Hierarch’s meat locker.

  He wanted to look away but found he could not. The drawer he’d expected to find the Blackland sword in had instead held a small part of his father’s remains. Maybe there were more. Maybe the Hierarch hadn’t consumed the rest of him. Daniel’s gaze passed over every scrap of what was once a human being, wondering if he was looking at his father.

  Emma was saying something, but it was just background noise until she yanked his arm hard enough to get his attention. She was pointing at something on the carpet.

  “Dig here,” she was saying. “It drops down to a utility canal. Swim north fifty or sixty yards and you’ll see a bricked-up airshaft. Go up the shaft until you hit ceiling, and then tunnel up.”

  “Why does it sound like you�
��re not planning to come with us?”

  He didn’t get a chance to press Emma further. The potent, now-familiar aroma of Fenmont Szu’s magic washed over him. “He’s coming for you. Tell your friends to start digging.”

  Daniel nodded, and Cassandra and Jo and Moth dug into the floor with their shovels. They broke the skin of the carpet, tore through wood, and began tossing up scoopfuls of concrete as though it were beach sand.

  “I still haven’t figured you out,” Daniel said.

  Emma smiled, wry and enigmatic. She handed him her bag, containing the casket of potato people. Her sister golems. “Take this to 5022 West Pico Canal. Give her the bottles. Tell her I sent you. They’re your best chance of seeing another sunset.”

  “Why don’t you just come with us?”

  “You have a better chance of surviving on the outside. I have a better chance of holding off Szu. Deliver the casket.”

  “To who?”

  Emma turned and headed off to meet the redolent wave of Fenmont Szu’s magic.

  “Emma!” he called to her retreating figure.

  Moth and Cassandra and Jo were already knee-deep in their new tunnel.

  “Cassandra, take this,” Daniel said, handing her Emma’s bag. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Szu’s coming. Emma can’t take him alone.”

  “He’ll kill you.” Cassandra’s voice lacked inflection, and her face betrayed no emotion, and that’s how Daniel knew she was terrified.

  “Keep digging, okay? I’m counting on you.”

  “Daniel—”

  “I can handle this.”

  He caught up to Emma in the dining room. Fenmont Szu still hadn’t arrived, but his magic was already there, a mass of roiling dragon and thundering mammoth herds.

  “Don’t let the smell unnerve you,” Emma said. “He’s not unlimited, and every particle of magic he’s exuding on scent means less magic he can use for his attack. He’s just trying to intimidate us.”

  “You think we can beat him?”

  Emma laughed. “We’ve got no chance. But I’m going to delay him, and you’re going to go back to help your friends survive.”

  Her breath smelled of damp fungal caves, with a strain of sulfur.

  “So your plan is to die here while we dig a hole?”

  “Either I die here, or your friends do.”

  “We can hold him off together.” He brought electricity to his fingers. The arcs were weaker from recent use, but he could still fight.

  “There are worse places in the Ossuary than the parts you’ve seen, Mr. Blackland. There are worse things than butchery. You have the gifts to do something about them. One day, you might also have the strength. 5022 West Pico Canal. Tell her what happened down here.”

  “Tell who?” he asked her again. “What are you talking about?”

  The floor shuddered, and Fenmont Szu came thundering down the long dining room floor. In appearance, he was still himself. But his smell, his aspect, his essence, marked him as something else. Fenmont Szu wasn’t merely using magic. He was magic.

  Daniel had seen power like this once before, in his father’s living room, when the Hierarch appeared with his fork.

  Emma smiled. “I’ll attend to this. Shoo.”

  She turned toward Szu and opened her mouth. Flames wavered on her tongue.

  The glasses behind the bar jingled and the paintings on the walls rattled as Szu drew close. Emma widened her mouth and vomited cascades of flame. Waves of heat seared Daniel’s face and eyes, and through tears and heat-blurred air, he watched Szu slow and stagger.

  Szu took three more crushing steps forward.

  Emma roared. Everything in her path vanished behind the erupting flames.

  Daniel threw an arm across his face and ran back to Cassandra and Moth and Jo.

  He helped them dig.

  NINETEEN

  The police boat’s searchlight probed the ice-cold water. From six feet under, at the bottom of the canal, the light seemed to bend unnaturally. Was this just simple refraction, or was the light source osteomantic? Daniel flattened, forcing his chin deeper into mud and algae slime as the boat made its achingly slow pass. Languid horntail and coontail fronds waved in the current. When the plants grew still, Daniel peered toward the surface to make sure the boat was gone.

  He’d managed to tease more aquatic magic than should have been possible from the last of the kolowisi, bagil, and panlong sea-creature extracts, but he and his crew had been huddling on the bottom of the canal for nearly half an hour now, and soon they’d be terrestrial creatures again and would have to surface.

  Moth gave in first, launching himself up through the darkness for air. After that, there was no point in delaying the inevitable. Daniel’s face broke the surface and he filled his lungs with oxygen and diesel fumes.

  He swam for the bank and crawled up among rusted buoys and shopping carts and milk crates. He was tempted to collapse in the mud and sleep. It had taken them hours of tunneling to get out of the Ossuary, with Daniel using Jinshin-Mushi beetle to collapse the tunnel behind them.

  With a groan, he rose to his feet and helped Cassandra to hers.

  “Worst job ever,” she said, her voice shuddering with the cold.

  Like him, she was soaked and caked in mud. They helped drag Moth and Jo up, and Daniel led his battered crew through shadowed alleys.

  They spent the dark morning hours camped beneath a flume-way overpass. A homeless man threatened to knife them unless they found another place to sleep, but when Moth flexed the ridiculous muscles in his forearms, the man retreated back to his nest of blankets and garbage bags and cardboard boxes. Another man offered them a swallow from his jug of Wolfskill, which only Moth accepted.

  Before daybreak, Cassandra went off for some badly needed supplies. Daniel’s watch ticked off a tense fifteen minutes before she returned with clean clothes, first-aid supplies, bottled water, wet wipes and towels, and a bag of granola bars, half of which she gave to the man with the Wolfskill.

  “Thought you’d ditched us,” Moth said, changing into a grass-green tracksuit.

  “You wear XXXXL pants, dude. Took me a while to find a big-and-tall store to break into.”

  “I think you added an X there, dear.”

  Daniel hissed while she treated the hideously ragged stump of his little finger with alcohol and applied a gauze dressing.

  “There’s a whole zoo of canal microorganisms in there,” she said. “You’re probably going to grow a second head.”

  “I don’t care, as long as it’s as pretty as you.”

  She punched him in the neck, but very lightly.

  Things felt normal. Trading quips. Moth wearing stupid clothes. It was as though they were only bruised and bloodied instead of hunted and wounded.

  Jo wasn’t having it. She sat off on her own, with her back to a concrete pillar, her knees drawn up, staring a thousand-yard stare.

  Daniel kicked aside broken glass and a rusty nail and sat beside her.

  “We’re going to have to move on in a few minutes. You okay?”

  She took a long time before answering. “I don’t even know what we’re doing anymore. It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”

  “I know, Jo. I know it was supposed to go different. I’m sorry.”

  Having spoken the words, and hearing how inadequate they sounded, he wished he hadn’t spoken at all.

  “Every cop in the city’s looking for us.”

  “Well, I’m used to that. That’s my life. But look at me. I’m still the crazy free spirit you know and love.” He held up the throbbing wad of gauze packed around what remained of his little finger. “Okay, minus half an inch, maybe.”

  “It’s not funny,” she said, too loud. “Maybe we can hide from the cops, but we can’t hide from Otis. He sold you. You were supposed to deliver yourself. You know what happens when Otis makes a deal and the other party doesn’t deliver. He’ll grind us up and
sell us as dog food.”

  Moth walked over and put his finger to his lips and shushed her like a librarian. “Easy, kiddo. Worry about the Hierarch. The boss can deal with Otis.”

  Jo shot to her feet. Her eyes looked wet and bruised. “Oh, really? How’s he doing so far? We got no sword, we’re hiding like rats, and we got no place to go. But you’re all still licking Daniel’s ass like it’s ice cream.”

  “Maybe you should lower your voice,” Cassandra said.

  But Jo wasn’t done. “I say we go back down, and we finish the job we were hired for. That’s the only way we get out of this with an inch of skin left. If we don’t, Otis will—”

  “Jo,” Cassandra said with chilling calm. “Lower your voice.”

  Jo swallowed the next part of her rant, but her clenched fists boiled below the skin. Her cheeks fluttered. Daniel had never known her to shape-shift in response to emotion, but she was losing herself now. And it was his fault.

  He drew her away from the others, his hand on her shoulder. Her could feel her shoulder blade shifting beneath her shirt.

  “I screwed up,” he said.

  Her lips thinned, deflating. “Yeah. You really did.”

  “I didn’t figure out what Otis was doing until it was too late. He knows I’m too slippery to let myself get bagged in an alley, but I’m dumb enough to walk into the Hierarch’s trap under my own steam.”

  “Dumb,” Jo agreed.

  “But here’s the thing. This is still a job. It has to be a job if we’re going to make it out the other end. The objective’s the only thing that’s changed. The score now is staying alive.”

  “You have a plan on how we’re going to manage that?”

  “Not much of one. But Emma gave me an address. She said there’d be help there.”

  “An address. From Emma. That’s your plan. Please tell me you have a Plan B.”

  “I’m working on it,” he said.

  “Then let me help you with that. Let’s go back underground, get the sword, and deliver it to Otis. That way, not only do we survive, but we get rich. Sure, there’s still a guard presence. Sure, maybe Fenmont Szu’s still alive after whatever Emma did to him. But they’re looking for us here on the outside, not in the Ossuary. They’d never expect us to come back—”