Read California Bones for Free Online Page A

handle barriers.”
    “Of course. That’s you,” Cassandra said. “Who else?”
    “Someone to handle conventional alarms and locks. And a good box man, because the sword will be protected by both the magical and the mundane.”
    “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