California Bones (23 page)

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—”

“Right, because going back would be stupid.”

“—and you can pulp them with your earthquake-beetle trick. Pulverize the whole place, kill most of the guards. Between your nose and our digging tools, we can still find the sword.”

“We don’t even know if it’s being kept in the Ossuary,” Daniel said. “We don’t even know if still exists.”

“Emma believed in it, and she turned out pretty square.”

“Maybe we’ll consider that Plan F.”

A fresh red stain bloomed on the bandage covering the gash in Jo’s forearm. For the second time, Daniel smelled unfamiliar shape-shifting essences coming from her.

Something was off.

“Better have Cassandra take care of that,” he said.

*   *   *

Cassandra stole a pontoon van and drove it to the five-thousand block of West Pico Canal, a neighborhood of mechanics and used furniture stores and a day-slave market behind a hardware store. Armed men in uniforms checked slaves in and out of the fenced pens, but they were private security, not cops or Ministry security. They wouldn’t be looking for Daniel and his crew.

Cassandra tied the van off beneath the shade of a dusty palm tree, and Daniel led the crew down cracked sidewalks. It was a short but nerve-jarring walk, especially when a pair of black-and-white water cycles zipped down the waterway, but it turned out the cops were only escorting some baron’s luxury yacht downtown.

“Aw, can’t we have breakfast, at least?” Moth moaned as Daniel rushed them past Roscoe’s House of Chicken N Waffles.

Cassandra made a face. “I find the combination dubious.”

“The waffles are substandard,” Moth allowed, “but the chicken is delectable. They elevate each other.”

Cassandra would not be convinced. “I don’t believe chicken and waffles can mate and produce viable offspring.”

Jo glowered.

They arrived at a two-story corner building with bars over the windows. A vacuum cleaner shop occupied the first floor. It wasn’t quite 7
A.M.
, and the sign on the window was flipped to
CLOSED
. In the unlit shop, upright vacuum cleaners stood in ranks, like soldiers.

Out of habit, Cassandra examined the door lock. “Want me to break in?”

“Let’s try it legal for a change,” Daniel said. He rapped his knuckles against the door glass.

A light in the back of the shop went on, and a figure wove a path through the vacuum cleaners to stand a few feet back from the door. She wore a belted bathrobe, the pale skin of her face and neck standing in soft contrast to the darkness of the shop. Tall and slender, she appeared not much older than her mid-teens, with large, pale-gray eyes, and a delicate finger curled around the trigger of a shotgun.

“She doesn’t seem friendly,” Cassandra said.

“Or like someone who can help us,” added Jo.

Daniel moved his face closer to the glass. “Emma Walker sent us.”

The face changed, so quickly Daniel almost missed it, but for a flash the girl’s eyes grew hard as diamond, and the fine features sharpened to hawklike intensity, and Daniel no longer knew what the fierce thing on the other side of the door was, other than that it was osteomantically potent.

Then she resumed being what she’d been before, at least in appearance. She unlocked the door.

“Come inside,” she said.

They followed her through the showroom and upstairs, to the second-floor apartment over the shop. There was a living room and a sparse kitchen. The furnishings were high-quality thrift-shop finds, mostly black-lacquered wood and red silk upholstery of Chinese design. The only books in view were a copy of the Yellow Pages and a stack of soap opera digests. At the girl’s invitation, Daniel and his crew took seats, looking like admonished burglars invited in for tea.