California Bones (22 page)

He composed a list of people he’d make suffer.

Otis was at the top. Obviously.

Then came the Hierarch and Fenmont Szu.

Emma Walker.

He closed his eyes and imagined their names, written in elaborate script on parchment, like a proper recipe, bursting into blue flame.

The biggest name on the list was his own. Someone had to pay for Moth and Jo and Cassandra. And for Punch.

Punch was the wrong nickname for Pauline Moana. She did her work with pressure points and jabs. But with red hair from her incarcerated Scottish mother, and coloring and facial features from her Tahitian father, the rules of the schoolyard deemed it inevitable that she’d be known as Hawaiian Punch.

On the eve of Punch’s last job, she sat in a booth in the back corner of Ship’s Diner on La Cienega with Daniel and the rest of the crew. Daniel liked Ship’s. Every table came with its own toaster, and he found that neat. As he created the entire toast spectrum, from flour white to tar black, he asked each member of his crew what they would do if they had all the money in the world.

Jo went first. “I’d buy my own theater. Just a little playhouse, maybe two hundred seats. One-woman shows, maybe some improv workshops, some banned plays. Mostly just art for art’s sake.” She spread jam on toast with an elegant flourish.

Moth, by contrast, had a list of coveted possessions. A diamond toilet brush would not be the most ostentatious of his purchases.

Cassandra, her arm hooked around Daniel’s, revealed only that she would buy a few things but invest most of it. “Someone’s got to be a responsible adult,” she said.

“What about you, Daniel?” Punch said, passing him a plastic container of strawberry jam. She knew strawberry was his favorite.

Daniel thought for a moment. Not about what he’d do with a pile of money, but about how much he wanted to reveal. And then he decided he was being silly. This was his crew. These were his friends. His family. He could tell them anything.

“Guess I’d use it to get out of town,” he said. And because this was his family, they knew exactly what he meant. They knew why he wanted to leave the Southern Kingdom. Of course. He lived in fear that one day, someone would figure out who he really was, and then he’d be hunted. And they knew that if he ever had enough funds to buy his way over the border, they’d have the choice of coming with him, because he wouldn’t leave them behind unless they wanted him to.

“What’s it going to be for you, Punch? Champagne swimming pool or gold dirigible?”

Punch moved a blob of strawberry jam over her toast. She met nobody’s eyes, just stared at the wood-grain laminate table as she spoke. “I think I’d give my money away to whoever needed it most.”

For the rest of the meal, everyone but Daniel laughed and talked about the Punch Moana annual telethon for the needy.

Daniel didn’t laugh because he knew Punch meant she’d give all her money to him. And he should have wondered why. He should have looked deeper. Instead, he just accepted. She loved him. Cassandra loved him. Jo loved him. Moth loved him. He didn’t question it. He just accepted. He just took it.

“You mope too much.”

Daniel craned his neck forward. A girl sat at Daniel’s feet in Fenmont Szu’s chair. He recognized her round, brown, freckled face, and the tufts of red hair jutting from beneath a black beret.

“Hey, Punch,” he said. “You can’t be here.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re dead.”

She rolled her eyes. “I know that, Daniel. I was there when I died.” She began pointing at places on her body, her arms and shoulders and belly and breasts and temple. Those were the places the bullets struck her during the botched monocerus job.

“I know you’re not here, Punch. I can’t smell you.”

“I can’t smell you either. Does that mean you’re not here?”

“That’s hardly the same thing. You’re dead.”

“We haven’t seen each other in years, and you’re so hung up on me not being alive you can’t even say, ‘Hello, how ya been?’”

Pugnacious, but with hurt in her eyes. So very Punch.

“I’m hallucinating you. I think Fenmont Szu gave me tetanus.”

Punch stood and examined the room, walking along the wall. Her boot heels tapped against the concrete floor. “Fenmont Szu is an asshole.”

“Duh,” Daniel said, letting his head fall back.

So, okay, he was hallucinating his old, dead friend. This didn’t have to be a crazy moment. Daniel didn’t believe in horoscopes, in the predictive power of tarot cards, in the ability to divine literal meaning from dreams. But that didn’t mean those things weren’t useful. They could be tools for self-reflection. And when one was in pain, locked away in an enemy’s dungeon, what better time to self-reflect?

“Why’d you go back for the monocerus, Punch?”

“You know why.”

He did, but he hoped he was wrong, and he wanted Punch to give him another answer. He wanted her to tell him she went for the bigger score because she got stupid and greedy. But he knew better. She went back for it because she thought she could fence it herself and wouldn’t have to give Otis a cut and then she could give Daniel a big sack of money and he could add it to his escape-from-LA fund.

Why would she tell him any different? She was a ghost, and alleviating him of his massive guilt would be the antithesis of a haunting.

“Can you untie me?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so,” Daniel said, unsurprised yet still disappointed.

“I’m sorry I’m not more useful to you.”

“Why are you here?”

She leaned over him, her face entering his field of vision. “The same reason the others are here. The same reason I pulled jobs for you. The same reason anybody does anything for you. Because they love you.”

“That’s really heartwarming.”

Punch drew back. The flat impact of her footsteps circled him.

“We all love you.”

Daniel sighed, and the ravaged stub of his finger leaked blood. “Why?”

“You haven’t figured it out yet?”

“My mind’s been occupied.”

“I think you have figured it out, but you don’t want to admit it. It’s like, if you say it out loud, the people who love you will disappear and you’ll be alone.”

“I’m alone now, Punch. Fenmont Szu cut off my finger with a dirty garden tool and now I’m sick and I’m hallucinating.”

“Thieves steal more than just things,” said the whisper of Punch’s voice. “And you’re not alone.”

There were no more footfalls and no sound of the door, but Punch was gone.

Daniel closed his eyes for a time. How long, he couldn’t say.

A scream of metal jolted him back to awareness. A blade punched through the door like a knife through a wad of tissues and drove a chasm straight down the middle of it. Cassandra’s head emerged through the gap, like a baby being born.

“Hey, quit screwing around,” she said. “We gotta go.”

He could see it in her face, the love Punch was talking about, that she usually did such a splendid job of masking. Her scent was possibly the most beautiful and most real thing Daniel had ever smelled.

“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.