California Bones (13 page)

“I’ve told you six times already,” said Messalina Sigilo Blackland, incautious and angry. “When your man comes back—”

“When my man comes back from the guard station, he’ll either bring word that you’re telling the truth, and I will apologize for my discourteous treatment of you. Or, he will bring word that you’re lying, and I will belly-shoot you, and you will die, moaning in the dirt.”

“I got through by bribing the Southern kingdom guards,” Daniel’s mother said, her jaw tight.

“I think our Southern counterparts are more loyal to their Hierarch than that.”

“Anyone can be bought.”

The woman looked as if she’d just heard a mildly amusing joke. “Are you offering me a bribe?”

Daniel’s mother spat on the ground. She was not herself. “That’ll be the day.”

“Maamah,” said Daniel. His voice was slurred.

“Tell it to be quiet,” the woman said.

His mother looked at him oddly, with a mix of familiar love, but also something else. Fear. Or maybe revulsion.

“Hush,” she said.

Down a dusty track, a rooster tail of dirt clouded the air, and soon another car drove up and came to a stop. A uniformed man got out and jogged over to the woman who smelled of rose hips. He spoke some words in her ear, too low for Daniel to hear.

“Stand down,” the woman barked, and the man with the rifle lowered it. The Garm hound was led away to piss. The woman called out some more orders, and everyone started getting into cars. “You’ll ride with me,” the woman said to Daniel’s mother. “I’ll leave a detachment behind to watch over that.” She looked at Daniel when she said “that.”

“He belongs to me,” his mother said. “He’s too valuable to be left with your guards.”

The woman shook her head. “It’s Southern magic. We don’t know what it is or how it works, so arrangements will have to be made to bring it to San Francisco. It stays behind.”

“He’s not dangerous,” his mother said. “I can control him.”

“It’ll have to be examined by guild osteomancers while you’re being debriefed. If it turns out there’s no reason to keep it separated from you, it will be returned.”

His mother was dirty and tired. Her hair hung like wet yarn in her face. Only now did Daniel register the scratches on her face, the torn skin on her knuckles. However they had gotten here from Los Angeles, there’d been costs. And Daniel saw in his mother’s face that there was only so much fighting she was willing to do to keep Daniel with her. He didn’t understand.

“Maammah,” he said.

What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he speak normally?

“Maammah?”

Uniformed men closed in around him as his mother got into the woman’s car, and her door was shut, and his mother looked at him one last time through the window, and what he saw in her eyes wasn’t love. Pity, maybe. Regret. But not love.

He watched the car recede until it faded in its own dust cloud, and then he looked down at the shoes that fit him but were not his, and he was alone with the uniformed men.

“How do we want to do this?” one of them said.

“Make it quick,” said another. “I mean, Jesus, he
looks
like a kid.”

One of the uniformed men came to stand in front of Daniel. He was a little older than the rest, and his face was kind.

“Son, we’re going to check to make sure you weren’t hurt during your trip,” he said. “We just need you to kneel for a second.”

“Maaamah?”

“She’s fine, son. Just kneel. It won’t hurt. Trust me.”

Daniel gazed up into his face. He was smiling and kind. His gun holster was unsnapped.

Daniel knelt in the strawberry field.

ELEVEN

Real estate listings called the cabin-style house a “charmingly eccentric handyman’s special.” Gabriel would have called the place a haunted wreck. Cobwebs laced the weathered gray plywood boards over the windows. Orange-brown pine needles carpeted the cedar shingle roof. Someone had hacked at the weeds enough to form a path from sidewalk to front door, or maybe it was the work of deer and rabbits. No one had lived in Sebastian Blackland’s house since the Hierarch’s purge ten years before.

“Smell anything?” Gabriel asked, following Max up the walk.

“Raccoon urine and coyote scat. Some marijuana, but that’s probably from the neighbors. And somebody’s cooking tomato sauce down the canal.”

Gabriel tried the front door. Locked. He spent a few minutes with his lock picks and pushed open the door. Afternoon sun spilled onto the scuffed living room floor. The stale odors of wood and plaster and dark mold wafted out.

“How about now?”

Max shook his head. “You weren’t really hoping to find magic after all these years, were you?”

Gabriel stepped into the house. “No.”

He’d read the post-arrest report, which consisted mostly of inventory. The Ministry had carted off Sebastian Blackland’s possessions and torn up the carpet and stripped the walls of paint. They’d taken his books and tools and bottles and jars. Anything osteomantic had been sorted and processed and either consumed or taken away to storage. Including Sebastian Blackland’s body. Carbon. Calcium. Phosphorus. Potassium and sulfur and sodium and magnesium. Copper, zinc, selenium, molybdenum, fluorine, chlorine, iodine, manganese, cobalt, iron. Trace quantities of lithium, strontium, aluminum, silicon, lead, vanadium, arsenic, and bromine. Also, sint holo, kraken, firedrake, aataxe, abassy, abada. Criosphinx. Hippogriff.

Notably absent from the inventory were the unauthorized weapons he’d been working on, ostensibly the reason for his arrest and summary execution.

Max paced the walls, sniffing. “If you were hoping you’d find Daniel Blackland here, you’re going to be disappointed. I could have told you that without even needing to make the trip.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ve tracked a lot of fugitives. They don’t stay close to home. And they don’t come back to places they’re associated with. The only thing they want is a hole to hide in or a place to run. Every twenty-four hours they survive with their bones still inside their skin, they’re happy.”

No, Gabriel thought. Not always. He’d survived a bad night when he was about the same age Daniel must have been on the night of his father’s death. He had lost a parent. He’d moved on, learned to survive. But he still couldn’t go a night’s sleep without smelling freshly spilled magic.

Daniel didn’t need to come back here. He’d never really left.

Max took this in, his face unreadable. “So what do we do now?”

Gabriel breathed in the stagnant air of a cold trail. “Just our jobs,” he said. “Let’s just go do our jobs.”

*   *   *

“Are you fucking my hound?”

Gabriel didn’t like meetings. He particularly didn’t like the kind that consisted mostly of his boss screaming from across his desk with spit-inflected profanity. Watanabe was round of shape with a peculiar pointy head and a face that reddened with anger. He resembled a radish. Like Gabriel, he came from a family of osteomancers, and he’d gained his position in the Ministry by turning in his own parents on the night of the Third Correction. He might have risen even higher had he not run out of relatives to betray.

“No, sir, I’m using Max for an investigation. I filed an NRT-3070—”

But Watanabe didn’t want to hear about paperwork. In fact, Gabriel wasn’t certain the man could read.

“The hound was supposed to be put down this morning. I went to the kennels myself to supervise. I woke up early for it. And when I got there? No hound.”

What kind of man, Gabriel wondered, liked to start his day by watching something die?

Gabriel opened one of the file folders he’d brought with him and placed the sketch of Daniel Blackland on Watanabe’s blotter.

“Who’s that?”

“Daniel Blackland, son of Sebastian Blackland and Messalina Sigilo.”

Watanabe stared at Gabriel as though he were a piece of dry toast.

“Sebastian Blackland was an osteomancer, specializing in munitions,” Gabriel pressed on, dauntless. “He was taken in the Third Correction by—”

“Does this have anything to do with my hound? I asked you where my hound is? Are you fucking my hound?”

Gabriel closed his eyes. “No, Minister Watanabe, I am not fucking your hound. As I indicated in the NRT-3070.”

“I don’t have time for his, Argent. Wilson Bryant is missing a seps head, which you’d know if you weren’t so busy fucking my hound.”

“If you’ll just hear me out—”

But Watanabe didn’t want to listen to anything other than his own invective. While he railed at him, Gabriel kept his cool with visions of strapping Watanabe to a rock and letting condors eat his intestines. They were pleasing visions.

Knowing Daniel Blackland remained alive was either a gift or a curse. It was the kind of information a savvy person could manipulate for their own gain. Bring in Sebastian Blackland’s son after all these years and you were a hero. It was the kind of knowledge some might kill for, just so they could claim credit themselves. Gabriel had taken a risk, coming to Watanabe with this. Maybe it was a good thing that Watanabe was too stupid to see what Gabriel was trying to give him.

Watanabe caught his breath. He wiped spit from his lips and straightened his tie. “You have until five o’clock to return my hound to the kennels, Inspector Argent. Fail to deliver, and the hound might not be the only thing around here getting a lethal injection.”

*   *   *

Gabriel plotted the Hierarch’s assassination. The first obstacle was determining his location. He maintained multiple residences: Griffith Observatory, his castle in the Hollywood Hills, a penthouse suite in the Jade Tower downtown, not to mention a royal yacht and several bunkers serviced by the civil defense tunnels he’d built during his war with the United States.

“But assume I could fix him to a single location,” Gabriel said, leaning over the city map spread across his desk. He kept his voice low and his office door locked.

Max bit into an apple. In the kennels, hounds were fed a nutritionally balanced slurry. He chewed the apple as though it were the best apple ever to fall off a tree. “You’re making a big assumption.”

“I know, but just go with it. Say a bodyguard or attendant or, I don’t know, a Council member was unhappy enough with his working conditions. Enough to betray his master.”

“An insider? Why go through the risk and trouble of contracting an assassin? Why not just kill him yourself?”

“Come on, Max, you know the answer to that.”

Max chewed. “Because you’d need someone with enough power to face the Hierarch without getting turned inside out.”

“Exactly. So you’ve got an inside man taking out a contract and giving you necessary intel.”

Max wiped juice off his chin with the back of his sleeve. Gabriel’s sleeve, actually, since he’d given Max the spare shirt and trousers he kept in his office. Max wore the outfit with no tie and the shirt untucked. He wore it well. Maybe that’s what I’d look like if I wasn’t always such a tight ass, thought Gabriel.

“You’d still need a different plan for each of his residences,” Max said. “That’s hundreds of obstacles and hundreds of variables.”

“Then we simplify,” Gabriel said. “Let’s limit the possible sites to one of his bunkers. That’s where he probably spends most of his time anyway.”

“You’re picking the best-guarded, most difficult option.”

“Good. If we can work out the most difficult case, then we can certainly work out the easier ones. So, the Hierarch’s underground. He’s got guard units and surveillance, maybe miles of it. But who cares, because you’ve got sint holo and you can slink right past it.”

Max cocked his head. “I didn’t know you could use sint holo.”

“Me? Well, I can’t, of course,” Gabriel said, taken aback. “I’m talking about Daniel Blackland. We’re assuming this is what Daniel Blackland might do.”

“Oh.” Max bit his apple. “Okay. Go on.”

“Jesus, Max, did you think I was planning to assassinate the Hierarch? Me?”

“We’re locked in your office, contriving a plan to do just that. So, yes, that’s what I thought you were planning to do.”

“And you were helping me?”

“Why not? I’m overdue for my own execution, anyway.”

Gabriel rubbed the bridge of his nose. Knowing Max would actually assist him in planning the worst crime imaginable was both disturbing and interesting.

In fact, Gabriel
had
once planned out the Hierarch’s assassination. He’d done it a lot after his mother’s death. Never with magic. He always imagined rifles, bombs, garrotes. Then he grew out of it and replaced childish revenge fantasies with hard work and study. Government employees usually lived longer than vengeance-obsessed sons. Government employees had a better chance of getting a pension.

“I’m talking about Daniel Blackland,” he said. “He has sint holo. So he can get past the guards and the eyes, right?”

“I can’t be the only hound in the kingdom who can nose sint holo. The Hierarch’s got to have others like me.”

Max was probably right, but Gabriel refused to surrender. “So if you can’t maneuver in a guarded place without being seen, you’d have to maneuver in a place where nobody’s watching.”

He imagined what the defense tunnels might look like, envisioning a network of passageways below the city. Maps of the tunnels—assuming such things existed—had to be among the kingdom’s most closely guarded secrets. He traced his finger along his own city map. “What if you could dig your own tunnel?”

“You’d have to do a lot of mining,” Max said. “And not just through earth. There’d be concrete, steel, possibly dragon scale.”

Gabriel sighed. “Yeah. This is starting to look hard.”

Voices from outside drew Gabriel’s attention. He couldn’t make out words, but one voice rose above the rest, and it sounded angry. Shadowed figures paraded past the frosted glass of his door.

“Is my time up?” Max asked. “Are they coming for me?” He still didn’t seem to care much if he lived or died.

“They better not be. I filed all the right paperwork. You just stay here and keep working on our problem while I see what’s going on.”

Max chewed apple.

“And if anyone asks, we are doing
anything
other than contemplating the death of our leader.”