California Bones (28 page)

Moth pounded on the inside of his tank with his massive fist. The glass was so thick Gabriel couldn’t even hear the impacts.

The door to the room opened, and Max slipped inside. He dropped a duffel bag in front of the tanks.

“Guard went to the john?”

“Yes,” Max confirmed.

Gabriel turned back to Cassandra Morales. She showed him her middle finger, and Gabriel showed her what he’d been keeping in his pocket. It was a triangular wedge of firedrake scale, honed to a razor point. Firedrake could cut through diamond. It could certainly cut through glass. Taped to it was a note with detailed instructions for now and for later.

He found a stepladder behind the guard’s desk and brought it over to Morales’s tank. Standing on the top rung, he dropped the firedrake wedge into her feeding hole. It sank, spiraling down like a fishing weight, and Cassandra Morales caught it in her nimble fingers.

*   *   *

The tunnel from the Hierarch’s gallery enclosed a single, narrow canal. The way was dark, but Daniel followed the smells of power until they grew strong enough to drag him along. An hour of walking brought him to a place with walls of cooked brick and a floor of soot. Terrific. He’d delivered himself to an oven. But, no. He pulled aside a curtain of fine iron links, and like a magic trick, found himself in the fireplace of a Victorian parlor. He ducked under the mantel and stepped through, his ash-covered shoes sinking into plush, red carpet. Books lined wooden shelves. Candles flickered in a fussy chandelier overhead. He recognized this place.

Done up like a French château, the Magic Castle used to be an exclusive club for the city’s osteomancers, entertaining them with bars and lounges, a dining room, secret passages, stages for lectures and demonstrations. Why would the Hierarch, a man with true magical power, engage in a child’s amusements? It was theater. Judges had their wigs and gavels, priests had their robes and candles, kings had their scepters and sparkly hats, and the Hierarch had a castle. So typical of Los Angeles, a city with deep magic in its bones and arteries, to express its power with film-set realities. Like the Hierarch, the city showed her true face to few, and to see it, you had to gouge the surface and dig.

Daniel had been here before. His father brought him as a young boy to meet his colleagues. He’d shaken hands like a grown-up and been weighed and measured. He didn’t remember everything. But he remembered how one gained entry past the parlor.

In one of the bookcases sat a pewter owl. Daniel spoke the secret word to it: “Marrow.” The bookcase swiveled open to reveal a hallway, and he stepped through.

Mulholland had sent him here to assassinate the Hierarch, which was just funny when you thought about it. But Daniel’s deal with Gabriel required something even more difficult of him. He was here to steal the Hierarch’s beating heart.

At the end of the hall, he found a small theater with a stage and vaudeville curtains.

“You’re here,” came a voice from behind the curtains. It was surprisingly mild. Even bland. And very tired. The voice wasn’t frightening. What scared Daniel was the complete lack of odor. Everyone smelled of something. Food. Soap. Osteomancy. Something. But not this man.

“You’re not very stealthy,” said the voice.

“I didn’t suppose I’d be able to sneak up and kill you in your sleep. You knew I was coming. Otis almost managed to hand me over to you. And now Mulholland’s completed delivery.”

“But you came of your own free will.”

“I had no choice,” Daniel said. “My friends are being held hostage. If I kill you, I get them back. Full disclosure.”

“Mulholland promised you that? Do you believe him?”

“I’m really not going to go into great detail about all my business arrangements,” Daniel said. “Are you going to come out from behind that curtain? Not being able to see or smell you is freaking me out.”

“I’ll give you this, then.”

Aromas fell upon him in waves. There were things he knew, like mammoth and kraken and wyvern, and other smells he’d never been exposed to, of arctic creatures and things from the center of the earth and things that hinted of plasma and frigid lunar wastes. Daniel staggered and choked and turned to flee, to run long and far and never return, but the bookcase swiveled back in place, closing him in.

“Does that help, Daniel?”

Breathing was no longer an involuntary act. Daniel had to tell his lungs to pull in air. He swallowed. “Really, really freaked out.”

“You must care a great deal for your friends, to put yourself through this.”

“I like them well enough.”

“Maybe you can murder me, Daniel,” said the voice. “You’re pretty powerful. You breathed in a lot of my magic when you crept through my Ossuary.”

“That’s what you wanted. You loaded me up on magic to make me a more nutritious meal.”

And despite his terror, he did feel powerful. He’d absorbed so much magic since rappelling down from the HVAC vent in the Ossuary that every breath of charged air strained his thin skin. He was an overflowing container. Maybe he could survive this day. Stranger things had happened.

He looked at his hands. Blue aurora danced across his knuckles.

“I’m ready,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Daniel. No, you’re not.”

The stage curtain jingled and squeaked as it drew back, and there, standing on the scuffed boards, was a tall man in a white shirt and black slacks. He was thin, bony, with bent shoulders and hair the color of cobwebs. Daniel had expected the monster in the living room, the thing too hideous and awesome to look at directly, the thing that ate his father with a fork. Nothing about this man suggested a mighty sorcerer. He looked old. A little sick. Like someone who spent too long losing at the greyhound track.

But Daniel had been fooled by shape-shifters, by golems, and by potions that caused him to mistake love stolen through osteomancy for love given freely. He’d been fooled by accomplished liars and by actors and by magic. And Daniel had smelled him. He knew better.

“Abracadabra,” said the Hierarch.

*   *   *

Daniel directed lances of kraken electricity at the stage. The flash of his own lightning blinded him. He heard a hoarse scream of pain. Smoke rose from the Hierarch’s chest. He opened his mouth to say something, but Daniel wasn’t planning to listen. Instead, he stretched his jaws and released a torrent of blue flame.

With the sound of a thousand flags ripping in the wind, a parcel of fire spread out before him. He pushed with his lungs, sending a wall of fourteen-hundred-degree air at his enemy.

The Hierarch reached out, as if to catch a ball. “Stop that,” he said.

He squeezed the air.

Daniel’s flame guttered. He crumpled under the Hierarch’s phantom grip, feeling his ribs bending inward. A raspy whistle emitted from his throat as his lungs compressed, and he fell to his knees. But the kraken lived in the black depths of the sea. Its body thrived under pressure even greater than what the Hierarch was punishing him with, and Daniel was kraken.

He shot to his feet and summoned Jinshin-Mushi beetles. They emerged from his palms and the backs of his hands. They ran down his arms, scuttling out from under the cuffs of his sleeves, from between the buttons of his shirt and from the back of his neck and the front of his collar. The beetles scurried down his legs and spilled, clattering, over his shoes. He vomited beetles. They crawled out his ears. In their thousands, they tunneled through the Persian rug at his feet, through the floorboards, into the earth. Glass chandeliers shattered. The building’s joints squeaked and groaned and cracked. The floors buckled and the walls swayed.

The Hierarch leaped off the stage and took three steps toward Daniel before the floor beneath him collapsed. He fell, quick as a man through the trapdoor of a gallows. The ceiling followed in a deluge of wood and plaster chips and dust, and the stage tilted down and slid, joining the avalanche of debris.

After a few seconds, the earth stilled.

Daniel crept up to the edge of the pit and took a breath. Dust and debris settled one floor down. He still felt the beetle manifestations roiling beneath his skin. They wanted to be let out. They wanted to make more earthquakes. And Daniel wanted to let them. He could bring down the entire castle. He could bury the remains in a mudslide. He could go back to the Ossuary and crush the Hierarch’s precious treasures, and bring down his Ministry headquarters.

From the hole came soft moans of pain.

Good. He hoped there were bones sticking through the Hierarch’s flesh. The thought of him suffering was Daniel’s only comfort. All he had done was survive several seconds of confrontation.

He peered over the shattered floorboards. It was about a twelve-foot drop, with no easy way down. He preferred it here on the ledge. Down there was danger. Down there was a wizard who might be seriously injured or just simply angry.

Debris shifted below. There was a cough. Green smells of regeneration wafted up from the hole: hydra essence, from a creature so resilient you could sever its head and it would grow back. The Hierarch was already healing himself.

A child’s voice: “You can’t beat him that way.”

At the theater entrance stood a boy, seven or eight years old. Shaggy-haired and dressed in an oversized T-shirt and jeans too short for him, his feral appearance reminded Daniel of a slave-wraith. But there was awareness and intelligence in his solemn eyes, which seemed to be appraising Daniel. He exuded a tantalizingly familiar and powerful aroma.

“You won’t beat him by throwing fire and poison at him,” the boy said. “He’s got more fire and poison than anyone. You should run.”

Fresh blooms of magic rose from the hole and assaulted Daniel’s nostrils. Whatever fear he’d been suppressing came to the surface now.

“Run where?”

From the hole came more sounds. Scrabbling. Piles of wreckage being shoved aside. Climbing.

The floor moved in a queasy roll. The walls undulated, and the earthquake smell tumbled through the building. The walls cracked into webs.

“Burn him,” the feral boy said. “Slow him down a little.”

Daniel leaned over the pit and loosed a furnace. Swirling flames poured out of him, down into the hole, answered with rising shrieks of pain.

The boy didn’t wait around to see the results. He darted down the hall and around a corner. Daniel pursued and caught up just in time to see him scurry up a ladder, through an opening in the paneled ceiling. Daniel went up after him, into an attic.

Rays of grimy light came in through a round, leaded window near the rafters. The space was filled with the mundane storage of a private club: holiday decorations, milk crates full of candlesticks, boxes of paperwork, a mound of junk under a canvas tarp. But there was also a stainless steel operating table, with a drain that fed into a basin on the floor, and a nest of rubber tubes. An array of saws and knives and pincers hung from hooks. There was a copper fork. This was a place in pause, waiting to be filled with screams, more intimate than anywhere Daniel imagined the Hierarch would work his osteomancy, and all the worse because of it.

“Who you are?” Daniel said, his hands tingling with subdued kraken energy and nerves.

The boy reached into his pocket and flipped a quarter at him. Daniel caught it.

“You forgot to call heads or tails.”

“Just look at it,” the boy said.

Daniel did, first at the wings-and-tusks emblem on the tails side, then the heads side, featuring the Hierarch’s portrait.

“See it now?” The boy helpfully tilted his chin and ran his finger down his long nose.

“His son,” Daniel said.

The boy shook his head.

“Golem, then.”

“Uh-huh. I was supposed to wait inside there.”

He pointed to a broken crate.

“You broke out of your box.”

“Yeah.”

Daniel didn’t buy it. “If you’re really his golem, you’d be under guard, in a vault. You’d be the fucking crown jewels.”

“I
was
under guard.” He drew back the canvas tarp. Two bodies in black uniforms lay curled beneath. Daniel smelled venom.

The boy sniffed the air. “You hurt the Hierarch pretty bad. He’s not healed enough to come for us yet.”

Daniel had dropped a ceiling on him and breathed enough fire to burn down an apartment complex. “I hurt him. Well, that’s encouraging. I guess.”

“He’ll get better.”

“I know. I’m not finished with him yet. Just taking a breather.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

The thought hadn’t occurred to him, but it should have. If the boy was the Hierarch’s golem, he was a threat.

Is this something you’re willing to do now? Daniel asked himself. You’re going to kill a kid?

“Of course I’m not going to kill you. You should wash your mouth out with soap for even asking.”

The boy regarded him, wary and curious. “Aren’t you scared?”

“Of course I am. I’m terrified.”

“Then why don’t you run away?”

Daniel shrugged. “Can’t. Won’t. What about you?”

“I already ran away once. That’s why they crated me.”

The Hierarch kept his golem in a box. This is the kind of thing Emma Walker was trying to prevent.

Daniel reassessed the boy’s age. He talked older, but he might only be six. Daniel wasn’t well versed in kid morphology. “What’s your deal, anyway? What’s he using you for?”

“When he wears a golem out, he puts himself in a new one. And I’m it, a golem grown from his own, original flesh. From his own magic. The problem is, I’m not mature enough yet. I’m not powerful enough. He’d be stepping into a weaker body. But he’s too far gone to wait. So, first he needs to nourish me. That’s what you’re for. He calls you a meal fit for a king,” the boy said. “I’m the next king.”

*   *   *

Like a pipe organist, Mulholland sat before an expansive array of controls: switches and levers and valve-wheels, all accessible from a wooden throne on brass rails. Above the console, climbing all the way to the plumbing webwork in the high ceiling, was a board with hundreds of gauges and dials, and a vast configuration of lights that Gabriel recognized as a map of the kingdom’s aqueducts.