California Bones (5 page)

“Bells and boxes. That’s me. Who else?”

“Utility muscle. Not one of Otis’s guys. They piss me off and I don’t trust them. It’d have to be friends only.”

“Right,” Cassandra said. Her cheeks flushed and she walked faster, growing excited. Daniel tried not to notice the change in her body chemistry. It smelled too good. “What about Big Carly?”

“She’s doing a two-year bit for carrying dirty labor papers.”

Cassandra forged on. By now they’d both walked past their gondola stops. “How about Moth, then?”

“We’re still just talking theoretically, right?”

“Of course.”

“Then Moth is perfect.”

Cassandra nodded, satisfied with Daniel’s answer. “And a shape-changer? That’d be Jo, of course. What about Otis’s inside man?”

“Otis is going to stay tight-lipped until he knows I’m in,” Daniel said. “But just by showing me he knows where the Ossuary is, he’s proving he’s got solid intel. I saw the drawings. They’ve got the whiff of truth.”

“Hm.”

They walked in silence for another half block.

“I don’t want the job, Cass.”

She studied his face. “Because of Punch? Punch wasn’t your fault.”

It was a warehouse in Sylmar, belonging to a man named Castillo, who fancied himself a rival to Otis. He’d taken delivery of a juvenile monocerus recovered from a peat bog, and Otis wanted the horn. Not just for its magic, but to send a message to Castillo. Daniel’s crew was supposed to break in, saw the horn off, and leave the rest for Castillo to contemplate. Daniel spent three weeks planning it. Not counting the boat drive out to Sylmar, the job took less than four minutes. Until Punch decided six hundred pounds of monocerus carcass was too much magic to leave behind. Things went bad very quickly, and the job went from being a burglary to a rescue, and, ultimately, an effort to recover Punch’s bullet-riddled corpse.

“Maybe not my fault. But my responsibility.”

Boats continued to chug down the canal, their wakes pushing coffee cups and fast-food wrappers against the sidewalk pylons.

“But I have to take the job, don’t I?” Daniel said.

“It’s too rich not to.”

“No, not for that reason. Otis is right about the sword. My dad put my essence in it.”

“But the Hierarch’s had that sword since you were a kid, and you’ve been okay.”

“I know. It’s just…” He couldn’t find the words, because he wasn’t sure what it meant, to have part of him invested in an artifact, and for that artifact to be stored in the vault of the most powerful magic user in the realm. In the years since the Night of Long Knives, he’d never stopped thinking about the sounds of the Hierarch eating his father. But he hadn’t thought much about the sword. It was a part of him that was gone, like his tonsils, like his baby teeth. Now that the possibility of recovering it presented itself, he couldn’t get it out of his head.

“Otis says the Hierarch’s taking the sword out of storage. And if the Hierarch’s wielding the sword, then he’s wielding me.”

Cassandra’s enthusiasm resolved into something more serious.

“We’ll do the job, then,” she said.

Daniel didn’t respond, but he was already imagining the underground world depicted in Otis’s drawings. He saw himself slipping through dark places where he wasn’t allowed to go, and his heart beat with longing.

*   *   *

That night Daniel was awoken by a wraith. He jolted up in his sofa bed and took a moment to remember where he was—a bare studio apartment in Mar Vista. He seldom stayed anywhere longer than a few months, and he’d only had this place a week. He owned a cast-iron skillet, an enameled Dutch oven, copper pots and pans, and a beautiful set of Japanese knives, a gift from Cassandra for his eighteenth birthday. The same skills that made him a good osteomancer made him a good cook, and when he thought of a life away from Los Angeles, he pictured himself in chef whites, in the kitchen of his own restaurant. But the cookware seldom made it out of the boxes.

The TV was an old twenty-two-inch set, left behind by a previous tenant, and between the rabbit ears was perched the apartment’s only personal touch, an empty picture frame. Long ago, it had held a picture of him and his mother. But Otis urged him to get rid of it. It was too dangerous to keep a piece of evidence clearly linking him to his parents. So, at the age of fifteen, Daniel had torn it up and held it over a gas burner and watched the pieces blacken and curl. He remembered a sense of icy satisfaction as the flames overtook the smiling faces, as if they could obliterate the memory of a mother who’d fled to the north when her son was hunted, who’d never come back for him, who’d never even sent word. Now, years later, Daniel understood it was more complicated than that. Now, when he looked at the empty frame, he tried to remember his mother’s face without the flames. But the flames never really went away. They were more real than any memory the photo captured.

The knocking on his door was as light and persistent as the beating of a moth’s wings. Daniel crept to the one window in the living room, overlooking a courtyard of jacaranda petals, and beyond that, the black ribbon of Slauson Canal. He spotted no cop boats, heard no helicopters in the sodium-orange sky. He tugged his jeans up over his skinny hips and went to the door. A dreadful face looked back at him through the peephole, gray and smudged as a kneaded gum eraser.

He opened his door.

The wraith was a boy of ten or eleven, with underfed arms sticking out from a billowing men’s undershirt. His hair was a colorless tangle, his sockless feet swimming in battered sneakers. His birdlike eyes darted in deep hollows.

“Pier Four, Broadway Canal, Chinatown,” said the boy, the night air turning his arms to goose skin. He passed on a few instructions, then turned and walked back down the cement steps to the courtyard.

Daniel fumbled for a moment, thinking he should give him something to eat or a jacket or a pair of socks, but he knew the boy wouldn’t eat anything offered, and any clothes would be quickly shed and abandoned. He was a wraith and would only accept what his keeper gave him. He could go only where his keeper told him to, and could say nothing except what his keeper told him to say. And if he were followed, he would drown himself in a canal before bringing unwelcome visitors home. That’s what made wraiths useful messengers, and that’s why Otis kept them.

Daniel locked his door and turned on the TV and watched infomercials until the sun came up. Today, he’d be meeting Otis’s inside man.

*   *   *

He cut a path through the scents of ginger and deep-fry grease and spotted a tall white woman leaning against a concrete fu dog. Late forties, her chestnut hair streaked with silver, she struck a smart figure in a camel-hair coat and a red scarf. Daniel stopped in front of her and stared openly until she looked up. She held an unlit cigarillo tucked between two slender fingers. He smelled tobacco and vanilla.

“Got a light?” she asked. Her accent reminded Daniel of the posh BBC programs his mom would sometimes pull down on the shortwave radio at night.

“I don’t smoke,” said Daniel.

Her eyes crinkled with amusement. “That wasn’t the signal.”

“I know. I’m not much into cloak and dagger.”

“Spoil my fun, then.” The cigarillo went into her pocket. “Let’s get some tea.”

She had a favorite place a few blocks away, and they sat at a banquette of pink vinyl repaired with duct tape. Daniel was dubious until he tasted the Oolong. It was a rare delicacy in Los Angeles these days, and Daniel was glad she was paying.

“What do I call you?” she asked.

“Today? Daniel Torres. And you?”

“I’m Emmaline Walker. I go by Emma. That’s my real name, and you’re welcome to keep using it for as long as we’re acquainted.”

Daniel clinked his cup into Emma’s a little harder than cordiality required.

“You live around here, Emma?”

“I do.”

“A woman in your occupation, you could live anywhere. I’d think you’d have a nice beach house, or a place in the Golden City. Beverly Hills, Bel Air…” Otis said his inside man—woman, it turned out—worked for the Hierarch in the Ossuary, which meant she was by definition a person of high rank and privilege.

“I have a few residences. But I do like Chinatown. Nostalgia, mostly. Chinatown used to be the heart of osteomancy in Los Angeles. In fact, the only licensed apothecaries are still here. Also, the best restaurants. And the tea, of course.”

“How do you know Otis?”

“My memories of Otis go back from … well. From before. Good days, I recall. It was like a big social club back then. Pool parties, dinners out, nightclubs, a lot of fun. Until the night things went ugly. But you know all about that.”

There was nothing flippant or mocking in Emma’s demeanor.

“I respected your father,” she added.

“Emma, right now there’s only one thing I want from you: I need you to answer a question. And I actually need an honest answer before I agree to work with you.”

“I treasure honesty, Mr.… Torres. Ask away.”

“You already have position and money. Why risk that? What’s in this for you?”

The obvious answer was even more money, and Daniel was prepared to accept it.

Emma poured more tea for herself and Daniel. “Do you read any of the older Chinese script styles? It was a required subject when there was still a school for osteomancy in Los Angeles. The most important texts were written in Chinese, and many of them haven’t been translated. Much has been lost.” She sipped tea. “In any case, ‘Oolong’ is a word from the Min Nan. It means ‘the black dragon.’ The black dragon is not only a potent creature—”

“An extinct creature.”

Emma paused, neither agreeing nor arguing. “—but also a creature with cultural associations to kings. Specifically, kings who dwell in the depths of mysticism.”

“I’m not following.”

“Very rare these days, Oolong. But down in the catacombs, beneath Ministry headquarters, where I work? Why, I’ve seen bales and bales of it, hoarded away, drying out, unused. I have seen things down there. I’ve seen what the Hierarch keeps.”

“You want to rob the H-Bomb … because he’s got too much tea.”

“Southern California is a lie, Daniel. And Los Angeles is the heart of that lie. People came here for land and for weather. They came to build their little garden cities, and to pick oranges as bright as miniature suns. They came for oil and opportunity. And many of them came for magic. That’s what they were promised, and that’s why they came from the east, because this was billed as a newer land, and a richer land, and a more bountiful land. And there should have been magic enough. It came from the ground, and up from Mexico, and from across the Pacific, and Los Angeles should have been the paradise they painted on the orange crate labels. But for the Hierarch, it would be.”

“So, you’re not happy with your cut?”

She pressed her pale lips together in a tight smile. “It’s funny you should use that word, ‘cut.’ In the Hierarch’s realm, we’re all human resources, from the highest osteomancer, to the average citizen, to the wraith-slave. It shouldn’t require too much imagination to see why someone might have a problem with that.” She set down her cup and dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “It’s been a real pleasure to meet you,” she said, standing. “I hope you’ve used our brief time together wisely, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.”

She gave him a jaunty little salute and was out the door.

Daniel lingered over his last sip of Oolong, which was too good to waste. He dropped Emma’s teacup into a plastic freezer bag, and the bag went under his jacket. In a moment he was back out on the pier, and then behind the wheel of a Ventura two-seater from Otis’s boat fleet.

Without breaking laws, he passed several slow-moving boats and made it just past a traffic buoy before it turned red.

He got the walkie-talkie out of the glove compartment and keyed it. “Hey, Cass, you still got our guy?”

“Affirmative, yessiree,” came Cassandra’s fuzzy voice. “She’s in nice boat, a totally sweet cherry Kuai, and driving like someone used to getting out of traffic tickets. She just passed Spring and Ord.”

“Keep up with her, but don’t tip her with your driving.”

“Dude, I’m in a pizza delivery boat. I could ram a pontoon bridge and nobody’d even blink.”

“Do not ram a pontoon bridge,” he said.

He tightened his seat belt, took a deep breath, slalomed around a bus and a cargo tug, and accelerated down open water to catch up to Cassandra.

Daniel keyed his handset. “I’ll take up the tail for a few blocks, then you take it back.”

“Roger, over, delta-foxtrot, breaker-breaker.”

Sometimes, Cassandra was a clown. He would not tell her that to her face.

Emma’s route took her past payday loaners and pawnshops and boarded-up businesses west of Chinatown, then through the trendy clubs and galleries of Silver Lake, eventually coming down Third Canal, and west to Hancock Park. Through binoculars, Daniel watched Emma glide up to the guard gate and have a brief and seemingly cordial exchange with security. The iron gates opened for her, and Emma was in the Golden City, where Daniel could not follow.

“Okay, pull over,” he said through the walkie.

At a parking dock a few blocks away, Daniel joined Cassandra in her van. He produced the freezer bag containing the teacup.

“This is Emma’s,” he said. “I slipped her some lamassu when we clinked cups.”

“What’s a lamassu?”

“Avian-mammal from the Middle East. I think Otis brings it in through some Panamanian contacts. Anyway, it’s got useful psionic qualities. If Emma left essence, I might be able to pull something out of her head.”

“Essence?” Cassandra said. “You mean…?”

“I mean spit.”

Cassandra made a face, but he could tell she was impressed, and he liked the feeling.

“Your dad taught you lamassu osteomancy?”

“Well, no.”

“One of Otis’s tutors?”

“Not exactly.”

“By which you mean not at all, you’ve never used lamassu, you’re about to mine into a stranger’s thoughts, and you have no idea what you’re doing.”

“If I die, please sprinkle my ashes at Tito’s Tacos,” he said.