California Bones (3 page)

Delivery boats and taxis left trails through rainbow-slicked waters. After more than a century of use, the Los Angeles canals had become a swill-clogged circulatory system on the verge of seizure, not so much the quaint Venetian paradise Abbot Kinney had envisioned in the early 1900s. Daniel’s father used to rant about how LA deserved a land road system worthy of the kingdom. Ten years after his assassination, roads were few and canal traffic was even worse. The Hierarch liked gondolas in his city.

Daniel climbed up the dock steps and glanced over to the community bulletin wall, where the Hierarch’s authority was on display. The hands of thieves decorated one section of the wall like fish scales. Nearby, the crow-picked corpses of subversives hung in gibbets like wind chimes.

Entering the sprawl of Farmers Market, Daniel negotiated the maze of stands and awnings and bins and baskets where little old ladies with sharp elbows crowded the lanes. Deeper into the market he went, through aromas of charred meat mixed with garlic and cloves and ginger and grease. The market was even busier than usual, with shoppers eager to spend for the upcoming Victory Day celebrations. Dragon magicians smoked the air with flash-powder, while jugglers and snake charmers vied for space with guitar-strumming buskers whose repertoire spanned the spectrum from soulful pop to soulful folk-pop. But what Daniel noticed most was the smell of tar from parcels of gas lurking below the streets like jellyfish.

He made his way to Apothecary’s Row, where the shelves bore a dizzying array of things in pickle jars: teeth, bones, penises, glands of all kinds.

“You got a problem?” said a man behind a stall. His face was creased like a cinnamon stick. “Yeah, I can tell. You got lots of problems. Fatigue, listlessness, bedroom difficulties, am I right?”

“I don’t have bedroom difficulties,” Daniel said, defensive. He’d passed by this stall three times this week, sniffing. He knew the apothecary’s pitch. He knew there was a storage space behind the curtain at the back of his stall. He knew in which pocket the apothecary kept his keys.

The man shook a few grains of bright orange dust onto a metal tray. It looked like dehydrated cheese powder from a box of instant macaroni.

Daniel sniffed. “What’s this?”

“Dragon-turtle,” said the apothecary, his smile revealing jade teeth. Jade veneers were catching on as a fad. They were believed to counteract poisons.

“Real dragon-turtle?”

The apothecary launched into an unlikely narrative about the turtle’s origins. The Chinese still had dragon-turtles, he explained, living ones grown from ancient fossils, and there’d been a typhoon last week and a Chinese turtle carcass had drifted all the way across the Pacific to wash up on a San Diego beach. There, a lifeguard, who just happened to be the apothecary’s brother-in-law, got to it before the Hierarch’s men were able to confiscate it.

Daniel had to give him credit: It was not the worst spiel he’d ever heard.

A woman in a black peacoat stepped up to the counter and stood at Daniel’s elbow. She glanced at him, her brown eyes level with his, and he took in her talcum-powder and clean-soap scent, and suddenly the thought of needing an aphrodisiac was beyond absurd.

“Are you going to try it?” the woman said to him.

“I really don’t need—”

“My husband does,” she said, waving her hand to show off a loose-fitting gold ring crowned with a sparkly chunk of rock. “But he’d kill me if he knew I was shopping for this kind of thing.”

“There’s no shame in it,” Jade Teeth said, turning on the charm. “But you have to be careful where you get your magic these days. Some of the vendors around here aren’t selling anything more potent than baking soda. And that only works if you want your man foaming at the mouth.”

The woman laughed extravagantly and waved her hands in a gesture of careless hilarity. Her ring slipped off her finger and flew across the counter. She and the apothecary fumbled hands as they both made a grab for it, but it ended up in her palm, and then back on her finger. Daniel caught an expression of lost opportunity flash on the apothecary’s face, but Jade Teeth hadn’t noticed the woman’s hand dip into his pocket.

“That would have been a disaster!” the woman said with a relieved gasp. “He would have just
killed
me if I’d lost my ring! I guess I should take that as a sign or something. No bedroom enhancements today, thanks.”

She smiled, her nose crinkling in a way that Daniel found unbearably fetching, and with a small wave good-bye at the apothecary, she drew away from the counter. The apothecary hungrily watched her go.

“Try the dragon-turtle,” he said, snapping back into sales mode, “and you might have a chance with a girl like that.”

Daniel suppressed a sudden urge to punch the man in the nose. He licked his fingertip and applied it to the powder and gave it a deep, healthy sniff. Mostly flour, a small touch of sulfur, a pinch of deer horn, mixed with common herbs. Fairly harmless, and not even remotely osteomantic.

True osteomancy was scarce these days, but that didn’t stop the market. People craved magic. Magic to heal their ailments, magic to boost their mental acuity, magic to put some octane in the old sex tank. And people like the apothecary were only too happy to sell them counterfeits.

Behind the apothecary’s back, the curtain blocking off the back room wafted ever so slightly.

“This is not making me horny,” said Daniel.

“You only had a little.”

“It’s not even making me a little horny. Do you have anything other than kitchen experiments?”

The apothecary squinted. “Are you a cop?”

“Do I look like a cop? I don’t even have a mustache.”

“I got nothing for you.”

“But what about my bedroom difficulties?”

“Fuck your bedroom difficulties.”

Daniel shrugged his eyebrows and moved back into the crowd.

He found the brown-eyed woman with the loose ring near the doughnut stand on the other end of the market. She handed him a small white bag. He peered inside.

“Devil’s food! With candy sprinkles!” he said, delighted. He took a munch of doughnut. “So, how’d we do?”

“You tell me.”

She undid the two top buttons of her coat and flapped the lapels. A sour tinge of cerberus wolf passed across Daniel’s senses. Not a lot of it, and it was cut with a dozen useless compounds, but these days it counted as a decent score. Still, it rankled Daniel to be punching so far below his weight class.

Cassandra Morales rebuttoned her coat. “Don’t give me that look. That’s a month’s rent for each of us. Beats working, anyway.”

Daniel actually had nothing against working. But getting straight work in Los Angeles wasn’t an option for him. Straight work meant submitting to an interview by the Ministry of Labor, which meant an hour-long interrogation, background check, peeing in a cup, letting a hound sniff your skin. It was an opportunity to slip up in the smallest way and earn a place back at the end of the line, or a flogging, or worse. And for Daniel, with his magic-saturated bones, walking into the Ministry of Labor was equivalent to volunteering for a vivisection. Los Angeles wasn’t a safe place for the son of Sebastian Blackland.

So, he was left with these petty thefts of trace magic.

“It’s a lot of work for little gain,” said Daniel.

“Speaking of work, you didn’t tell me I’d have to break a sweat to get into the safe.”

“I saw you steal the apothecary’s key.”

“Yeah, but there was an alarm. All you had to do was talk to the apothecary and lick stuff.”

“I’m just saying this was hardly the heist of the century.”

“Well, okay,” Cassandra allowed, “sniff us out a better score, and we’ll see what we can do.”

Daniel caught a whiff of something and his mouth went dry.

Cassandra noticed. “What’s wrong?”

“Hounds,” he whispered.

They came from the other side of the food court: Garms, the lean, smoke-colored breed favored by the Ministry. Like hyperactive vacuum cleaners they sniffed the carpets and wares of the stalls and the shoes of the shopkeepers. Even now word would be filtering through the network of black marketers, and contraband magic was being flushed down toilets or sent off with runners.

“Go,” he told Cassandra, and she trusted him enough not to argue. Daniel wasn’t too worried about her, nor the cerberus wolf in her pocket. She could take care of herself. With a talent so sharply honed it might as well be magic, she melted into the crowd and was gone.

Daniel would have a harder time. The hounds were trained to detect magic, and Daniel
was
magic.

He shouldered his way past a clump of people surrounding a street performer in silver paint doing a human robot bit. Threading himself into the knot, he unzipped his black hoodie, reversed it, and put it back on, red-side out. That wouldn’t fool the dogs, but if the handlers radioed in a fleeing suspect, at least the description of his clothes would be a little off. Much better, of course, if the dogs didn’t pick up his scent. But a wet canine snuffle sounded from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. The dogs were less than a dozen yards away, noses to the ground, sweeping.

No point in running now.

He came to a stop in a crowded market corridor. Sunlight filtered through the multicolored plastic canopies and bathed the space in a floral glow. The hounds were close enough to cover the distance to him in a single lunge. They strained against their harnesses, twisting, threatening to slip their restraints. Alarmed shoppers shoved one another to get out of the dogs’ way. A woman dropped her purse and a man stepped on her hand as she bent to pick it up. Oranges spilled out of someone’s bag, starting an argument that ended with the snarl of a hound.

Sebastian Blackland had taught Daniel osteomancy, but Otis had taught him almost everything else necessary to survive as the son of an osteomancer. He drew his shoulders in. He expanded his abdomen to create a small paunch. This wasn’t magic. It was acting. He was no wizard’s son now. He was no professional thief. He had no power. He was a man of little consequence. Of no interest. He was just a guy.

It didn’t work. The hounds smelled the truth. They smelled it in his blood and lymph. They smelled it in his marrow. They howled as though he were a rabbit at the end of the hunt, and the handlers drew their cleaver-clubs. Daniel would have to burn them with lightning or let himself be beaten and cut and taken into custody. If he was lucky, he’d just end up with his body parts pinned to the community wall. But that was probably too good a fate to hope for. He was Sebastian Blackland’s son, and the Hierarch would make a project out of him.

He called on the sint holo now. He remembered its chaotic, contradictory aromas. It was slippery, ungraspable, and he drew its memory from his bones. Most osteomancers needed constant replenishment of osteomantic materials to use magic. But there were the rare few, like Sebastian and Daniel, who retained the osteomantic properties of what they ingested. With Sebastian the ability had come from research and training. With Daniel, it had come from being used by his father as a human laboratory. He’d eaten what his father gave him, and surrendered his baby teeth and hair and nail clippings, and then Sebastian cooked the magic residue in them, reprocessed them, and fed the refined results back to Daniel, again and again until the magic embedded itself in his bones.

He became invisible now.

Glassy-eyed from sint holo miasma, the dog handlers merely looked through Daniel. But the hounds reached for him. They’d been bred to detect osteomancy, and nothing got them more excited than sniffing out magic. The hounds paused. They half turned away, then back, then away again. Addled and crestfallen, they bowed their heads and whimpered.

“What are we even doing?” one of the handlers asked his partner.

The other sheathed his cleaver. “I don’t know. It’s weird.”

Daniel didn’t stick around to see if the hounds would reacquire his scent. As quickly as he could, without running, he moved through the market. By the time he reached the docks, the sint holo had worn off, leaving him exposed. He hoped he’d fogged the brains of the hounds and handlers enough that any memories of the pursuit would be something like the sense of dread following a long night of drinking, where you could remember having your pants around your ankles at some point but not much more than that.

He raised his hand to flag a water taxi when he felt a presence behind him. He knew what was about to happen: A massive hand took hold of his thumb and pinky in a grip that threatened pain if Daniel resisted. At the same time, a white van floated up to the dock. The side door slid open, revealing two more muscle-slabbed men inside.

First cops, and now Otis’s goons.

“I’m not having a great morning,” Daniel said.

THREE

“Let’s go,” said the muscle with the death grip on Daniel’s fingers.

“Oh, please don’t hurt me,” Daniel wailed. “It’s not manly to weep in public.”

“Get in the van or you’re gonna be crying blood.”

“You know, that literally makes no sense. Did Otis tell you who I am?”

“We found you, and we bagged you. What does that tell you?”

“That he doesn’t like you much. Well, okay, then.”

He stepped forward and ducked into the van, where the muscle-slabs shoved him down onto a bench seat. The door slammed shut and the van rumbled into traffic and started slogging toward Culver City.

He’d learned to drive getaway in a van much like this, when he was fifteen and Otis’s thugs were schooling him in the basics of thiefcraft. Daniel noted the odors of stale fast-food grease and pine air freshener, and he was getting nostalgic when he saw drops of old blood on the carpet and caught the faint tinge of urine.

The van passed beneath the shadows of RKO Studios, where chimney towers poked above the fortress walls and vented eocorn-tinged steam into the gray morning sky. Daniel usually tried to avoid steering this close to such high-powered operations, but Otis liked headquartering near them. Hiding in plain sight was one of his specialties.

The van docked behind a low-slung brick warehouse, and Otis’s thugs brought Daniel out with some extracurricular shoving and a stinging slap on the back of the neck. It was hard enough to bring water to Daniel’s eyes. Two of them gripped his biceps and marched him through a maze of plywood and drywall to Otis’s office.