Empire of Bones (12 page)

Niffy blinked, surprised. “If you’re in a true need, we’re like to know already.”

The old monk bullied Niffy out the door, and then backed through himself, trailing the massive snake behind him.

As the hissing head disappeared, Patricia finally relaxed.

Rupert and the Captain raced to the door. Gunner drew a long revolver and stood to follow them. Cyrus realized that Antigone was squeezing his arm almost as hard as Patricia had been squeezing his neck.

Nolan began to laugh. “Wow,” he said. “Gil, I hope you feel loved. No allies for this little band while we have you.”

Llewellyn rolled his wheelchair toward the door. “I’m not leaving, Rupert Greeves!”

Rupert disappeared outside.

Llewellyn only shouted louder. “I’m not! You all can scram-flutter to your next roost like spooked pigeons now that you’ve been found, but I’m going no place!”

Antigone let go of Cyrus, put her face in her hands, and moaned. “We’re moving again, aren’t we?”

Cyrus looked at Nolan. Nolan nodded. “A long retreat becomes a long defeat.”

Rupert Greeves raged back into the room. Cyrus stood up, watching his Keeper, waiting. Rupert held his hands over his head, and then turned, raising a fist to punch the wall, He dropped it to his side instead, clenching and unclenching his fingers. He swore loudly, hooked a chair with his toe, and flicked it up into his hands.

“Rupert …,” Arachne said coolly.

“That one’s always been wobbly,” Llewellyn said.

Rupert Greeves turned, yelling, and the chair spun through the air into the fireplace. Ash and splinters exploded out over the hearth. A cloud of gray rolled slowly over the floor.

Breathing hard, hands on his hips, Rupert faced the group.

“Well,” he said, “they’re gone, and I don’t know how. With enemies all around, they’ll tear Ashtown down from the inside. Phoenix and Radu can pick through the ruins. And they know where we are, which means those fool Brendanites will know, and Bellamy will have eyes on them, which means he will know, and that’s just as good as giving Phoenix an engraved invitation.” He turned in a slow circle and then looked at Llewellyn. “I could eat.”

The room was silent.

Llewellyn cleared his throat. “I have a whole summer larder of smoked meat. Fish, deer, elk, bird. Cheeses, too.”

“Clever you,” Rupert said. “Beer?”

Llewellyn grinned.

“Do we need a new plan?” Antigone asked. “Or do we just keep recruiting and … running?”

“I have a new plan,” Rupert said. “I have a dozen new plans and more brewing. What I don’t have is a full stomach.”

Cyrus ate on the lodge roof, seated on the accumulated mulch of needles and cones and branches compressed by time and weather. Antigone sat on his left. Dan on his right. Five minutes earlier, Dennis Gilly, still in his short shorts and tall socks, had wandered out of the lodge door below them with a loaded paper plate in his hands. He had looked around for a grub buddy, but the Smiths had chewed silently and unnoticed above him. He’d gone back inside.

“How’s Mom?” Antigone asked. She was picking at a small pile of oily smoked salmon.

“Tired,” Dan said. He rolled his big right shoulder like it hurt. Then he stretched his muscled arm across his chest. “Sad. Asleep, I hope. It’s strange, I was so scrawny and small and blond when we last saw her. I’m completely different now, and I notice every single change when she looks at me. It’s like I’ve switched bodies.”

Cyrus understood, even though his body had merely
grown. Dan’s body had been overhauled from toes to nose—his hair had darkened, his eyes changed along with what they sometimes saw, and his underfed surfer physique was long gone. He looked more like a professional fighter now. His heart still tried to explode whenever he had serious visions, but Arachne’s flesh-weaving touch had helped with that. It hurt him, but it hadn’t been able to kill him.

Antigone set her plate beside her. “Why is Mom sad?”

“Why wouldn’t she be?” Dan asked. “Think about it. For her, it’s like Dad died two months ago. She was trying to swim after him and she passes out. We were a family when she fell asleep. Homework. Sports. Fishing. That stupid little garden she made us weed. Then she wakes up and the last thing she remembers is swimming. Dad’s really gone, I’m completely different, Cyrus is grown up, and Antigone had no mother to dress her or teach her girl stuff, and on top of that we’re all caught up in Dad’s old world and people are trying to kill us.”

“I did okay,” Antigone said.

“Sure,” said Dan. “But that’s not the point. Mom lost more than we did, and she lost it all at once, right when she woke up. Her body is weak and her mind, well, she spent the last three years dreaming. All she remembers are some weird things about being in a bird. She gets distracted. She has trouble focusing. And when she does focus, she remembers everything and she cries.”

Cyrus looked up at the swaying trees. They were almost too tall for their trunks, bending and rocking as they strained and stretched to reach the sun. It made him dizzy. But these days, everything made him dizzy.

“Will she get better?” Cyrus asked.

“Rupe thinks so,” Dan said. “But not if we keep running like this.” He tucked his final bite into his cheek and folded his greasy plate in half.

Antigone sighed and looked down between her knees at the forest floor below.

“Do you think we could get away?” she asked. “I mean just us. And Mom. Could we just change our name to Wankenschnitzel or something and move to, I don’t know, Des Moines? Go back to school. Have friends.”

“We have friends,” Cyrus said.

Antigone laughed. “We have Diana, Jeb, and Dennis and a bunch of unstable people who don’t die.”

“And a short lawyer and his tall driver,” Dan said. “Don’t forget them.”

“We have Rupert,” Cyrus said. “And Rupert doesn’t have much more than us.” He Frisbeed his paper plate off the roof and watched it flutter into the trees. “No matter where we go, we are who we are. Skelton left us what he left us. I’ve done what I’ve done and started what I’ve started. People who don’t die won’t forget that. Those poor Wankenschnitzels wouldn’t last very long with Radu Bey and Dr. Phoenix looking for them. Skelton
knew a lot more than we do, and he only survived on the run for two years.”

“You just don’t want to go back to school,” Antigone said.

Cyrus smiled and shrugged. Then he climbed to his feet.

Antigone nodded at his plate, caught in a spray of ferns twenty yards away. “You gonna pick that up?” she asked.

“Nope,” said Cyrus. “But you can. Thanks for asking. I’m gonna go sit with Mom.”

“Cy,” Dan said. “Hold on just a sec.”

Cyrus looked at his remodeled brother—at the muscles on Dan’s too-square jaw, at the rope-size veins on his bull neck, at the deep brown eyes that had once been blue, the eyes that saw things. Those eyes were worried.

“More dreams?” Cyrus asked. “I’ve heard it, Dan. I know.”

“Cyrus,” Dan said. “This is different. I saw real things … like I did when I dreamed about Dad’s body in Phoenix’s cigar factory. That dream led us to him. You can’t blow this one off.”

“I’m not,” Cyrus said. “But if I don’t understand it, it doesn’t matter anyway.”

“My heart tried to stop,” Dan said. “Twice. It hurt like … well, it hurt. Then my eyes stopped seeing everything
around me and I fell down. Pythia was with me in there, in the vision.”

Cyrus knuckled his eyes, groaned frustration, and turned away. Antigone, still seated, grabbed his ankle.

“Wait, Cy,” she said. “Listen to him.”

“Why?” Cyrus asked. “It’s been the same thing almost every night. I almost have it memorized. Let me guess: ‘Seventy weeks will soon be passed. One comes on the wing of abominations, and there shall be no end to war. He shall be called the Desolation and bad, bad, bad, worse, worse, worse.’ Phoenix is scary. Radu Bey is scary. I know, Dan. I’m scared enough already without you reciting that to me all the time.”

“But the dream has never been about Phoenix,” Dan said. “And it’s not about Radu Bey. Pythia helped me. I saw …”

Cyrus tugged his leg out of Antigone’s grip and stared at his brother.

“Who?” he asked. “Super villain number three?”

Dan’s dark eyes locked onto his brother’s.

“You, Cyrus. It’s about you.”

 seven 

THE DEVOTED

M
ERCY TRIED NOT TO PAY ANY ATTENTION
to her warped reflection as she flowed through the people rivers and around the great glass towers of Midtown Manhattan. But only because her reflection looked pitiful. She was too small for the heavy mailbag on her shoulder, too short and too thin for her blue-gray shorts and her official uniform shirt. The shoes had seemed comfortable at first, but now every step on the uneven concrete sent needles up into her feet.

Her uncle had said this would be hard when he’d hired her. He’d said she wouldn’t last the week. And yes, he had been willing to bet. If she did last, he would owe her a week of restaurant dinners. If she quit, she would owe him a week of cooking with her grandmother’s recipes. Butter. Lard. And no more fat-free sour cream.

Mercy Rios, eighteen (and a half), temporary letter carrier.
Mailman. Mailgirl
. She puffed a strand of loose hair out of her face and stole a glance at her reflection in
a pane of black bank glass.
Broken little beast of burden in borrowed clothes
.

Pausing before she reached the next street and putting one foot up onto a bench, Mercy adjusted the bag strap. It was her third day, and there was no longer any unbruised patch of shoulder willing to carry the weight. Not on either shoulder. But the pain wasn’t what bothered her. She knew pain well. And physical pain could be pushed away and eventually forgotten. In the gym, she had been a fearless little gymnast, crashing on the balance beam and scrambling back up through the blood and tears, flying off the bars, tumbling onto her head. There had been pain every day, but she had never held herself back. She had never attempted only what she knew she could do. It was the unknown, the dangerous darkness of the harder, higher thing, that she had always chased.

In her last meet, two years ago, she had defied her coach. Her team’s victory had already been assured when she’d chalked her hands and walked to the uneven bars. Her coach had crouched down, and with his nicotine breath and yellow smile, he’d told her which of the more difficult elements to drop. He’d told her to play it safe. And Mercy had nodded. She’d smiled.

She’d meant to. But once her blood was flowing, once she was flying and swinging faster and harder and higher
than any girl was meant to, something else took over. She didn’t drop her double back flip. She tripled it.

Mercy knew what it was like to hear a bone snap, to see and feel it jutting out of her thigh. That pain was long gone. But the pain of her coach’s anger, the pain of being thrown away, of being pushed out and told not to come back … that was the kind of pain that could last a lifetime.

Hitching her bag, Mercy straightened up and stared down the sidewalk toward the next intersection. People parted around her, leaving her behind.

This next street, this next part of her route, was why she wanted to quit. It was why other carriers had already quit or pulled rank to be reassigned or had simply disappeared. It was why her uncle had been willing to give her a chance.