California Bones (12 page)

He turned seaward, to the burial grounds of Pacific Ocean Park. Through the roar and rumble of the surf, he thought he heard the grinding sounds of skateboards on concrete, but it was probably just rocks rolling against the stubs of the old pier. He was spooking himself. He crossed a belt of weeds and entered the amusement park.

The steel arches of Neptune’s Courtyard curved over him like the limbs of a monstrous starfish. A few bathyspheres swayed overhead, creaking on their skyway cables. Rats chittered from the dark recesses of the Davy Jones Locker funhouse.

Daniel found the man he was looking for at the seal pool, a drained concrete pit filled with tall, yellow grass. Sully chopped mackerel on the wall bordering the pool. He was a handsome man in his seventies, thick silver hair neatly combed, just a few age spots marring his good cheekbones. He had the jaw of the hero in an old war movie. In fact, he had played a bit part as a heroic submarine commander in
Siege of the Catalina Island
. But his wardrobe was all wrong today: an oil cloth apron over a stained white T-shirt and greasy khaki trousers. He didn’t look up as Daniel approached, just kept on cutting the mackerel into bits.

Who could the fish possibly be for? Daniel spooked himself again, contemplating ghost seals, but then he heard rustling in the tumbleweed and smelled cat piss. There was a yowl.

“Don’t mind the bad man,” Sully crooned into the pit. “He’ll be leaving soon. Were you followed?”

“Come on, it’s me,” Daniel said. “Of course not. You got my message?”

“Your wraith delivered it last night.”

“Not my wraith. The wraiths belong to Otis.”

Sully shrugged, as if the distinction made no difference. “Do you have the thing?”

Daniel patted his messenger bag.

“Okay,” Sully said, hurling the fish bits into the pit. “Let’s go to my house.”

Leaving the sounds of scrabbling cats behind, Daniel followed Sully down the promenade, beneath the dark skeleton of the Sea Serpent roller coaster. On either side of the walkway, gutted and collapsing buildings gave little indication that, for a short time, this had been Southern California’s most popular amusement park. When it opened in 1959, Pacific Ocean Park did better ticket business than Disneyland. And that’s what doomed it. In the fight between Disney and Ocean Park, the Hierarch sided with Disney. Storms, fires, dwindling attendance, and neglect had all done their damage, and now this was a place of rubble and rust. Nobody claimed responsibility. In these latter days of the kingdom, that’s how things went. Disasters and entropy served as the Hierarch’s disciplinary tools.

Past the buildings housing the Enchanted Forest, the House of Tomorrow, and the Flight to Mars, they came to the oldest structure in the park, the Fox Dome Theatre. In the dark, with mist crawling up the pier, it was easy to imagine that the hundred-foot domed roof was still intact. But Sully cleared a mess of wooden pallets and rusted barrels concealing a doorless back entrance and they went inside. The illusion vanished. A few weak lights revealed the fallen-down palace.

The collapsed balcony of the two-thousand-seat theater left a jumble of wood and plaster and concrete and rotting velvet seats. The projection booth had come down with it. In its place, Sully had propped a salvaged projector on a ladder.

He slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves. “Let’s have it.”

Daniel handed Sully a metal film canister. Like a kid opening his Victory Day present, Sully pried off the lid and carefully removed the film reel inside. He extended a foot of film to the light, squinting, and beamed with movie-star teeth. Biting his lip with concentration, he mounted the reel on the projector and began threading the film through the puzzle of gates and sprockets.

“Slow down, Sully. This is a transaction. You know how these things work.”

Frustrated by the interruption, Sully dug into his apron pocket and tossed a plastic baggie at Daniel. Inside was a small quantity of dark red flakes. Daniel opened the bag and had a sniff of sulfur and molten earth.

“What’s your source?”

“Is that your business?” said Sully, returning to the job of threading the film.

“Yes, it is my business. The time you sold me Etruscan leokampoi? Turned out to be eighty percent catfish.”

“I let you smell it before you paid for it, didn’t I?”

“I was thirteen. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Sully looked sad. “I know, kid. I shouldn’t have encouraged your delinquency. But I liked your old man and I figured I was doing you a favor.”

Daniel faltered. “I didn’t know you did business with my dad.”

“Oh, sure. The last time I saw him, I sold him eocorn essence, some terratorn coprolite, and some high-quality
Panthera atrox
. Pure stuff. Your dad could tell the difference.”

Horn from a Pleistocene unicorn, fossilized condor crap, and American lion essence. That didn’t form any combination Daniel knew about.

“What was my dad cooking?”

“Didn’t say. But those are love potion ingredients.”

“He didn’t do love potions.”

Sully wasn’t going to argue. “He was a high-level osteomancer. Who knows what he could cook?”

Daniel shook the baggie at him. “Where’d you get the beetle?”

“Guy I know who used to work special effects at Universal. You ever see
Earthquake
?”

“Charlton Heston. Yeah.”

“This is what they used for the earthquakes.”

“If it’s not,” Daniel said, “I’ll be back.”

“Good. Bring me a burrito, too.”

Sully flipped a couple of switches on the projector. The lens cast a dusty cone of light, and wheels turned, clacking. A blurry image appeared on the screen. After Sully turned the focusing ring, his own youthful face looked back at him, and the steely-eyed submarine commander confidently barked orders at his crew. He was only on-screen for a dozen seconds before the clip looped back to the beginning. Again and again, Sully embodied the handsome submariner. Maybe it was a trick of flickering light and shadow, or maybe it was the osteomancy used to develop the film, but the age spots on Sully’s cheeks seemed to fade, and a few strands of dark hair appeared in the combed silver.

Daniel secured the baggie in his messenger bag. He picked his way across the debris and found the door, and he was almost outside when Sully called back to him.

“You know this is just a down payment, right? I did you a favor, and now you owe me one. That’s the way these things work.”

“Yeah,” Daniel said. “I know how things work. Take care of yourself, okay, Sully?”

“I will, kid. See you next time.”

The twelve seconds of the Sully’s youth continued to shine in the dark.

“Next time,” Daniel said.

*   *   *

Daniel’s workshop was a plywood propped on sawhorses in the back of Otis’s warehouse. His shelves were boards and bricks, and he stored his osteomantic materials in a mechanic’s tool chest. Otis would have provided furnishings worthy of great magic if Daniel had asked, but Daniel didn’t want anything more from him than was absolutely necessary.

He was supposed to be working with the seps venom, but instead he sat, contemplating a jar of dusky, oily fluid: the lamassu extract he’d spiked Emma Walker’s tea with in Chinatown. It hadn’t worked on her, but it had worked on him, unlocking memories of the last time he’d seen his mother. Not really unlocking the memories, actually, so much as amending them.

He picked up the jar of lamassu and held it up to the buzzing fluorescent bulbs overhead. Even without unscrewing the lid, he could smell the ancient oil. It smelled like revelation. Like the flare of a lamp in a room best left dark.

It’d been a long time since he’d been scared of magic.

He set the jar aside and turned his attention to the seps venom.

The snake’s skull looked as fresh as if it had been bottled yesterday, but if Daniel removed it from the preservative, it would crumble to ash in seconds. The jar was coated in finely ground firedrake scales, the only substance known to withstand seps venom, but even so equipped, there were a lot of ways he could screw this up. Spill the venom and it would eat through the jar, the worktable, the floor, the foundation, the fabled dragon heart at the center of the earth, and probably shoot up in an acid geyser on a quiet residential street in China. So, you know, thought Daniel, don’t spill the acid.

From an awkward standing position, he worked a hand drill through the left maxilla and stopped when the drill bit neared the fang. The snake’s venom sacs had decomposed thousands of years ago, but if any osteomantic essence was left behind, Daniel would be able to cook it into a weapon.

He smelled vanilla and tobacco.

“Hello, Emma,” he said, without turning around.

She dragged over a stool and sat beside him. “I’m going to try again. You have all the makings of a very good osteomancer.”

“Enh. It’s like making brownies. Anyone can follow a recipe.”

She shook her head, frustrated. “You’re planning to use the venom of a seps serpent. But you could
be
a seps serpent, just like you
are
kraken. It’s not a thing you do. It’s what’s in you. It’s what you are.”

“You’re not the first osteomancer to take an interest in what’s inside me, once you’ve seen the actual insides of an osteomancer, it’s hard to take it as a compliment.”

“Understandable. I’m sorry.” Emma peered at the skull through the glass. “I think you could be one of the greatest osteomancers ever.”

He went back to drilling. “I don’t need to be great. I’ll settle for alive.”

She examined his osteomancer’s torch, a contraption of copper and brass and knobs and valves. “Living is good. But since my interests coincide with yours, I’d like you to be the most effective osteomancer possible. Your kraken is a good weapon, and your sint holo is a good defense, but you’re capable of more. I can smell your magic. You’re redolent with power, but you don’t realize it.”

Daniel was content to let the grinding of the drill speak for him.

“Do you have any idea how much magic there is in Los Angeles?”

“Clearly not enough,” Daniel said.

“Aha. See, that’s what everyone thinks. But not so.”

Daniel stopped drilling. “If you know about secret caches of osteomancy, that’s generally the kind of thing I’m interested in.”

“Greedy lad, it’s an open secret. You’re breathing osteomancy. You’re bathing in it. It’s concentrated in bones, but the essence is everywhere. It’s in the soil and the air.”

“Trace residues? Yeah, the world is magic, every particle of it. But there’s not a flame hot enough to cook it out.”

“You’re the flame, Daniel.”

“You sound like my dad.”

She looked off in the distance, wistful. “If only. I heard he was working on concepts of direct absorption, taking raw magic directly, with no need of recipe at all. We all lost a lot when he died.”

“I know. I never even learned how to fasten a necktie properly. Tried a half Windsor the other day and almost broke a finger.”

“You’re not taking me seriously.”

“I’m taking you more seriously than you might be comfortable with. Can you tell me anything useful about direct absorption, Emma? Any practical advice? Anything that’s going to help us get in and out of the Ossuary?”

She smiled, as if caught cheating at cards. She was a smiler. “No,” she conceded.

“Then you’re just teasing me.”

Osteomancers loved to trade in secrets, whether or not they actually possessed them. He went back to drilling.

“Otis told me about your lamassu vision,” she said after a while. “You think I’m responsible for it.”

He pulled the drill out of the jar. “It came to me right after I ingested your essence.”

“Lamassu is a finicky magic. It’s easy to misunderstand and misuse.”

“Otis told me that.”

“But you don’t believe him,” Emma said. “What do you believe, Mr. Blackland?”

“I don’t know,” he said, honestly.

“Then I don’t know how to help you,” she said, standing. “I don’t know how to convince you that you can trust me, that I mean neither you nor your friends any harm. I am Emma Walker. I work beneath the Ministry, and I want to help you get into the Ossuary, where you will find your sword. If you discover I’m lying, I know you’ll kill me or have one of your friends do it. That’s the risk I take, working with you. It comforts me to have that knowledge out in the open. I’m sorry I cannot provide the same comfort to you.”

She smiled warmly and rested her hand on his shoulder for the briefest of moments, and as she walked away, Daniel listened to her footsteps fade, much sooner than her scents of vanilla and contained magic.

He fired up the burner and reached for the jar of lamassu. With a pair of tweezers, he removed a small wad of paste. He let it heat over the flame, and when he smelled something like hot sand and olives and puzzles, he deposited the lamassu on his tongue.

He was standing in a field with his mother. Several yards away was a bug-spattered car with the doors, trunk, and hood open. Cars were rare in Los Angeles, and Daniel found himself fascinated by the odd vehicle. It looked neither fast nor comfortable. A box on wheels. Three other cars surrounded theirs. They were on a farm of some kind, a space more vast than any in Los Angeles. The air smelled of freshly turned soil and strawberries.

Men in uniforms crawled through the car’s interior. Another threw a suitcase out of the trunk. It landed in the tan dirt and popped open. A pair of jeans spilled out. They were Daniel’s jeans, softened by wear, but Daniel had never worn them. He was confused and wanted to cry, but his mother’s firm grip on his fingers wouldn’t allow it. Things would be all right. His mom was here. She would keep him from floating away.

All the uniformed men had holstered guns. One man, who stood just a couple of yards away, also had a rifle trained on his mother’s head. Another man had a Garm hound by the leash. Its slobber foamed on his shoes. And there was also a woman, interrogating Daniel’s mother.

“How did you get across?” she said. Beneath the cap of her uniform, her hair smelled of rose hips and jojoba shampoo. She’d had eggs and green chile for breakfast.