California Bones (21 page)

“Open the cabinet, Cassie.”

Cursing, she examined the wards with her jeweler’s loupe. It took her three minutes to get the cabinet open with lock picks made of sphinx tooth.

Emma carefully placed them in a padded casket from her bag. “Thank you,” she said, her voice shaky.

“The sword,” Cassandra said, anxious to get on with it.

They dove into the aisles. The plan had been for Daniel to locate the Blackland sword by scent. More than leading the crew, this was supposed to be his major contribution to the job, the one thing he could do that nobody else in Los Angeles was as qualified for. And, indeed, the trail couldn’t have been clearer had it been spray-painted in red and marked with neon signs. He smelled his father’s aftershave, and his electricity, and his intelligence and discipline and knowledge of deep magic. He smelled libraries. Chinese ink on old paper. Workshops full of centuries-old wood and glassware. Unexpected tears filled his eyes. These weren’t mere sense memories. This was his father, or what was left as him, as fully present as he would ever be. He smelled the house in Laurel Canyon with the eucalyptus and jacaranda trees and his father’s blood and sharp chemical pheromones of fear. And he smelled himself. His hair clippings and nail trimmings and baby teeth, and his own childhood magic.

He blinked his eyes dry. “Here,” he called, standing before a single-drawer cabinet.

Cassandra crouched to examine the lock on the front of the drawer.

“I’m not smelling sphinx,” Daniel said.

“Yeah. It’s not sphinx. It’s a nhang lock.”

Emma bent forward for a smell. “I don’t smell nhang.”

Cassandra rummaged in her kit. “If I say it’s nhang, it’s nhang.”

Daniel consulted his watch. “Clock’s ticking. Can you do it?”

“Maybe if you two stop quacking at me.”

She brought out a bone chip the size of a domino. Its texture was like modeling clay, and she began flattening it between her palms while ordering Emma to aim her flashlight into the lock. Daniel was glad Jo wasn’t nearby for this. The key was fashioned from the remains of a human shape-shifter.

“Keep working,” Daniel said. “I’m going to check on Jo and Moth.”

“Quacking,” muttered Cassandra.

Daniel ran clear of the aisle. Across the floor, Moth was neck-deep in a hole, which had already swallowed Jo. Their shovels cut through stone and concrete and packed earth as though it were soap. Given another ten minutes, they’d be through to the building’s foundations, and from there they’d tunnel out to safety. Then Daniel would cover their tracks with the Jinshin-Mushi beetle he’d gotten from Sully in Ocean Park, and they’d be home free. They had the basilisk fangs for the cash score, Emma had her jars of potato people, and if Cassandra had anything to do with it, Daniel would have the Blackland sword in hand.

“You guys doing okay?”

“We are digging a hole to a world of beauty and class,” Moth said, not even breathing hard.

Daniel got back to Cassandra just as the nhang lock sprung open with a satisfying click.

Cassandra stepped back from the cabinet to make room for Daniel. “Just in time to take all the credit for my work.”

“Quack,” he said.

He slid the wide, flat drawer out. The smells of the sword curled into the air. But there was no sword inside.

A tuft of black hair, bound in string. A small molar filled with silver. Firedrake dust, hardened like a sugar cube. Sint holo, wavering in Daniel’s peripheral vision. And part of a human skull’s face, the tobacco-brown cheek and orbital.

The smells swirled over Daniel like ropes, binding him, pulling him down.

“What the hell?” said Cassandra.

The lock of hair was Daniel’s. The tooth was his. The skull fragment was his father’s.

No, not the sword. Just samples of the ingredients that Sebastian Blackland had invested in it.

Daniel had thought he was so smart. He thought he’d come up with a brilliant plan and half a dozen alternatives and backups in case things went to shit. Alarms and locks and wards. He’d prepared himself and his crew for everything. Except for this.

He was vaguely aware of Cassandra standing beside him with her hand on his arm. “Daniel—?”

He slammed the drawer shut so hard the cabinet rocked. He raced down the aisle, Cassandra and Emma trailing him.

“We have to go,” he roared to Moth and Jo, still digging their hole.

Moth poked his head up like a gopher. “What’s up?”

“Trap,” Daniel said.

The contents of the drawer smelled exactly like the Blackland sword. They were a lure, and Daniel had come all the way to the Hierarch’s Ossuary to bite.

Moth gave him a bitter smile. “What’s the new plan?”

Daniel unscrewed the cap on the bottle of Jinshin-Mushi flakes and sprinkled them into his mouth. He tasted molten rock and heat and pressure, and his jaw fractured into rubble and tremors ran through his skeleton, and his ribs splintered and his pelvis cracked. But these were just sensations. This was just the flavor of magic. This was sorcery, and it would either destroy him, or he would master it and be an osteomancer.

He directed the seismic power to his hands. He didn’t know quite what to do with it.

“The plan, Daniel? What’s the fucking plan?”

Daniel’s hands began to shake violently.

“Get out of the hole.”

Moth boosted Jo to the cracked stone-mosaic floor and scrabbled after her. He coughed fine-powder dust, and with the others, watched Daniel to see what amazing new act of cleverness he’d conjure to save them all.

Daniel just stood there with quaking hands, wondering if he could pull this off.

He knew about plate tectonics and faults and fissures. He knew how to create tremors. If he could direct that energy into the beginnings of the tunnel Moth and Jo had dug, to push the earth away and complete their escape route in seconds instead of minutes …

White light flashed, and the air stank of unfamiliar magic. It was old and deep and enormous, and it drove Daniel to his knees.

He screamed for his crew to run. Or he thought he did. He couldn’t hear himself, and he couldn’t see anything but a figure striding toward him. He blinked spots from his eyes and tried to bring things into focus.

To his shame, he was just as terrified of the Hierarch as he’d been that day, ten years before. His father had been so strong, yet the Hierarch devoured him. He devoured his father and in a sense, devoured his mother. He devoured Daniel’s life, and as powerful as Daniel was now, with the osteomancy of the morgue and Emmaline Walker’s workshop and the magic Otis had given him and that Daniel had stolen and traded for, he felt like nothing more than thin broth.

It wasn’t the Hierarch. He recognized Fenmont Szu from television. In person, he was taller. His hair was blacker. The drape of his suit, more impeccable. His face was a little too symmetrical, his cheekbones tapering in sculpted S curves. Cosmetic osteomancy. It was all a little grotesque.

Twenty guards accompanied him, armed with assault rifles.

Daniel put his hands in the air.

The Shinjin-Mushi beetles crawled beneath his skin. If he could free them, he could bring the ceiling down and crush the pillars and the cabinets and the guards and Fenmont Szu, flattening them under tons of rubble and bone.

But he couldn’t do it without also killing his friends.

Szu regarded Daniel like a violin teacher judging his student’s fingerings and shook his head with disappointment. He took a single, small step forward. A crushing weight drove Daniel to the floor. On his back stood a mammoth. That’s what it felt like, and he smelled the mammoth’s strength and mass, paralyzing him.

He wondered if he’d black out before his spine splintered. He tried to say he was sorry, to Cassandra, to Moth and Jo. He wouldn’t waste words on Emma. No doubt she’d helped engineer this trap.

He should have been smarter.

A single spark of kraken electricity flared over his knuckles. It sputtered out.

EIGHTEEN

They put Daniel in a room with no light, except for a weak nimbus leaking from the bottom of the door. He was splayed on his back atop a rubber mat, wrists bound by rubber straps to rings in the wall. His hands were sealed in rubber bags, secured with duct tape. He’d been insulated to nullify his electricity.

Silver spikes of pain radiated from the center of his spine, but at least he could feel his legs and even wiggle his toes if he didn’t mind gasping.

He tested the straps, but only out of some sense of obligation to resist captivity. Moth might have managed to yank hard enough to rip the rings from the wall, or else rip his own arm out of its socket. Jo could resculpt her wrists and make them slender enough to slip through. Cassandra could dislocate her thumbs. But Daniel was a sack of useless magic.

The job could have gone better.

The door opened and Daniel lifted his head. He made out the silhouettes of at least four guards out in the hall before the door shut. With the click of a switch, harsh yellow light stabbed his eyes, and he found himself alone with Fenmont Szu.

Szu moved with a confidence that must have required dance lessons. His suit seemed to flow around him, never bunching, never creasing. Was that magic or merely good tailoring? Only the left pocket of his jacket bulged conspicuously.

Daniel coughed. “How’s your day going?”

“Pretty well, thank you,” said Szu in a voice like cream. “Are you in pain?”

“I wouldn’t mind an aspirin, if you’re offering.”

A chuckle from Fenmont Szu.

“You’re being very brave, Mr. Blackland. An aspirin. I stepped on you with the weight of a mammoth.”

Again, the chuckle. Fenmont Szu was a chuckler. Daniel hated chucklers.

“Are we going to have the kind of conversation where you just make fun of me? Let me save you the trouble. I walked right into the Hierarch’s trap and you kicked my ass. It was amateur hour. A clown show.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself, Mr. Blackland. Dozens of would-be thieves have entered the catacombs, but only a rare few make it all the way to the Ossuary. You really did quite well.”

“Nice of you to say. Is Otis working with you guys? This whole time it’s been a con to get me here?”

Szu dragged a chair from the corner and placed it at Daniel’s feet. He sat, crossing his long legs, hands folded on his knee. He had the fingers of a concert pianist.

“You’re quick to figure it out.”

“You don’t have to blow sunshine up my ass. It’s all pretty obvious, when you stop to think about it.”

Otis was a businessman. What was the most valuable commodity in his warehouse? Daniel. And who was his richest possible customer?

“Otis gets, what, the fangs and the sword?”

“What makes you think there’s still a sword?”

“Because if there’s not, I’m going to feel really, really bad about myself. I mean, even worse. So, when’s dinner?”

From his jacket pocket, Szu removed a pair of thick, black rubber gloves. He pulled them over his graceful hands, and suddenly his musician’s fingers looked like crude implements of torture. Also from his pocket came a pair of garden shears. The blades were serrated, the grips coated in more black rubber.

“Let my accomplices go,” Daniel said, not capable of concealing his desperation. “They’re not osteomancers. I’ll cooperate with you. You can do whatever you’re going to do to me.”

“You have a bleak sense of humor, Mr. Blackland.”

Szu walked beside Daniel’s outstretched body. He crouched and took a gloved handful of Daniel’s hair, grabbing it close to the roots, and squeezed.

I can handle this, Daniel thought. But he couldn’t handle wondering what was being done to Moth. To Jo. To Cassandra.

“I’ll work for you,” Daniel said. “I have all my father’s power, plus power of my own. And I’m the best thief in the kingdom, you practically said so yourself—”

Szu placed Daniel’s nose between the blades of the shears.

“I am here to do one thing,” Szu said. “To make sure you really are Sebastian Blackland’s son. Otis isn’t the most trustworthy of partners, I’m sure you’ll agree. So I need a piece of you for testing. If you are Daniel Blackland, then the Hierarch will eat you. If not, I’ll dine on you myself. And on your friends.”

“They’re not osteomancers.” The shears pinched Daniel’s nostrils, and his voice sounded nasal. Comical. Hilarious.

“That’s all right,” said Szu. “Not every meal needs to be nutritious.”

Szu squeezed the shears, and Daniel reached desperately for kraken lightning, for sint holo, for seps serpent, for firedrake. All he could smell was Szu’s deep magic.

The sharp pressure of the shears went away.

“I’m just playing with you, Mr. Blackland. Your nose is far too interesting an instrument to damage with pruning shears.”

“You have a bleak sense of humor.”

“Indeed.”

In a swift movement, he grabbed Daniel’s left hand and gripped his little finger through the bag. The blades of the shears cut rubber and broke skin and crunched bone, and Daniel’s finger was off.

I can handle this, thought Daniel, and he wailed.

*   *   *

Szu left him there. No food, no water, no sense of time. Just a tiny finger gone. The pain thundered. He bled, filling the bag over his hand. Pretty clever, the bag. It made sure no blood got spilled. His blood was too potent to waste. How much magic had his father lost to the Hierarch’s cutlery before he was dead? Did he whine? If he had, Daniel couldn’t hear him over the sound of the Hierarch’s chewing.

His head felt bloated and hot. Feverish. What were the odds that Fenmont Szu sterilized his pruning shears before amputating Daniel’s finger?

Fenmont Szu was an asshole. Everyone was an asshole.

Daniel moaned, and the room drank his voice to silence.

Once upon a time, Daniel could fly. He was not a man, then, nor even a boy. He was a sleek creature the length of a gondola-bus, and he cut through air with beats of his steel-scaled wings, and anyone who dared hunt him—feathered Garuda, Fenghuang, packs of chengrong dog-birds—died in flame and ash. He was once this creature, not long ago, for a bare few seconds. But now, except for the faint flavor of methane on his tongue, he was not.