Empire of Bones (5 page)

They wore canvas shirts, safari shorts, and boots. Wide leather belts held holsters and short sheaths.

One of the men was shorter than Cyrus, with immense shoulders. He had brown hair and a short reddish beard. Cyrus had seen him dozens of times in the dining hall, but even more often training Acolytes in the great yard of Ashtown. His name was Eric Romegas, but the Acolytes all called him Eric the Red.

The other man was taller, leaner, blonder, and looked more like someone who wanted to be photographed for a living. A short, heavy gun was slung over one shoulder, and he cradled it against his stomach. Cyrus had never seen him before.

Eric the Red squared up and faced the taller man. “You hear me, Flint. I trained Jeb Boone. He was a member in good standing.”

The man called Flint smiled with half of his pretty face. “They took the bait. But we didn’t take them, did we? Funny how Jeb and that brat Diana just happened to
lead us off the trail. If they hadn’t, the Smiths and that mutineer Rupert Greeves would be facing their Brendan tonight.” He shrugged. “Or lying in their own blood at the feet of their Brendan.”

“What you did was evil,” Eric said. “I’ll have no part of it.”

Flint walked toward the fence and Cyrus held his breath, fighting to slow the thunder of his heart.

“ ‘I’ll have no part of it,’ ” Flint mocked. “No part! Not for Saint Eric! Well, too late, lad. You knew the game. You came to play.”

Eric shook his head. “The Brendan has a right to question any members of the Order, and the Avengel must stand before him prior to being removed. Any rule-respecting member would help bring them in. It’s all in good order. Pumping Jeb Boone full of lead is not!”

“Oh, don’t play dumb,” Flint said. “You’re dumb enough already.” He turned and walked back toward the motel, and Cyrus exhaled. He preferred having the man’s back toward him. “You know the Smiths will be sent off to the transmortals as a peace offering, and Rupe is as good as dead.
And
you know the Brendan is cleaning house until Ashtown sparkles. The Boones are all gone either way.”

Flint flipped a switch on the motel wall. The pool suddenly glowed with pale light. Cyrus could see the paper globes.

They were in the pool, flattened like trash and floating in a cloud of dark dissolving ink.

“Hello,” Flint said. “What’s this?”

From beyond the fence and one green fold of pasture, two huge engines shook the evening air.

Old-man cicadas grew silent. Surely, the end had come.

 three 

SOGGY

C
YRUS BIT HIS LIP
. Flint and Eric both stared across the pool and over the fence.

“Helicopter?” Flint asked.

“Plane,” said Eric. “But I’m done. And if this is how Brendan Bellamy Cook wants Keepers to behave, the whole Order can go to hell. It already has.…”

He turned toward the sliding motel door, but Flint raised his gun, pointing it squarely at Eric’s back. He tucked two fingers into his mouth and whistled long and hard.

“Just so we end this honestly,” Flint said. “I’m glad I get to be the one to put you down. Turn around.”

Cyrus vaulted the chain-link fence, and then leapt the corner of the pool. Eric the Red turned to face Flint, angry and defeated. His eyes widened as Cyrus picked up a wooden patio chair and smashed it over Flint’s head. The tall man crumpled.

Cyrus didn’t have time to talk. He dropped into the
pool, scooped up the two paper blobs, slapped them over his shoulders, and exploded back out of the water.

Two more men stepped out of the motel door. They raised shotguns.

Eric the Red roared, lowered his shoulder, and drove them back into the doorway. A shotgun fired. Glass exploded. Cyrus turned toward the end of the pool, the fence, the scrub plum trees.

Six men rounded the corner of the motel and stopped beyond the fence. Heart racing, Cyrus slipped to a stop on wet feet. They had cut off his path through the plums. He could jump the fence straight at the pasture, but the brush was too thick and too tall. He’d be stuck until they plucked him out.

Another gun fired, and Eric the Red staggered and fell. Tall Flint rose slowly to his feet, bleeding from his scalp, gun smoking.

Cyrus stepped onto a patio chair and hopped onto the top of the chain-link fence. Metal dug into his feet, and the plums walled him in. He turned, wobbling, racing along the fence, grabbing at branches. Then he jumped for the Archer Motel’s new gutters.

Fingers caught, metal bent, but both held. Cyrus chinned himself up, hooked his right leg onto the hot metal roof, and rolled himself up.

He scrambled toward the peak, keeping low and
breathing hard. From here he could clear the plums. But it was a big drop. A bone-breaker.

“Tuck and roll,” he said. “Tuck and roll.” He exhaled and crouched on hot feet, ready to dash and leap and crash.

He paused. There were already men in the pasture. They were running away from Cyrus, toward the sound of the plane.

Something thumped onto the gutter at the edge of the roof. Two hands.

Cyrus dropped into a baseball slide straight toward them. His wet shorts shot him down the hot metal roof, but he dragged his palms and they squealed like bad brakes. He leaned back and cocked his right foot.

The hands quivered and Flint’s head rose between them. Cyrus stomped his bare heel into the bridge of the man’s nose. Bone crunched and blood spattered up between Cyrus’s toes. Flint dropped to the concrete, half-unconscious.

Cyrus twisted onto his belly and tried to scramble back up to the peak, slipping on his bloody right foot. Behind him, guns fired and sparks kicked off the metal roof all around him. Ricochets went whining up into the sky.

He dove over the peak for shelter, and as he did, a swarm of bees stung him in the calf. Not bees. Pellets. Hot, fiery, shotgun-belched pellets. With one hand
gripping the roof, he grabbed at his leg and bit his lip against the pain. Little craters, erupting blood.

He could hear shouting, but it didn’t matter what was being said. He knew it was about him. They would surround the building. They would shoot him again. He had to get to the plane. But that meant standing. And then running. And then jumping into the pasture and slamming into the ground. Then standing back up and dodging and outrunning grown men with guns in a four-hundred-meter cross-country sprint. Not likely.

But the other option was dying.

Cyrus rose to his knees. He could hear gunfire that was not meant for him. Distant gunfire. And then he heard the airplane change its roar. Diana was taking off.

Cyrus could hear men below him on both sides. He heard a metal gutter pop and squeal. They were coming up for him.

The turbo-prop, tilt-rotor plane rose above the pasture and glided forward like a helicopter. It drew every pair of eyes. Nolan was leaning out of the open door with a revolver, taking aim and firing whenever a gun was raised below him. Dairy cows bellowed and thumped around in panic, trying to organize a stampede.

Cyrus clambered to his feet and began to wave his arms.

He couldn’t see Diana, but he knew when she saw him. The plane swiveled, and swooped in above the
motel, beating the air down around him, sending Cyrus slipping back to his knees.

The men below finally had a target that was easy to hit. Sparks rattled off the wings, but every time Nolan fired, another gun on the ground went silent. Two men were scrambling onto the roof, and then Niffy dropped out of the door of the plane, robes fluttering as he fell. He landed on the metal roof like a ninja elephant and immediately somersaulted down toward the climbing men. As they raised guns, Niffy tore his rope belt loose, and in his hand, it lashed out like hemp lightning. The end cracked the first man in the face and sent him toppling backward over the edge. The rope wound around the second man’s legs, and Niffy jerked his feet out from under him. The man fired into the air as he fell.

Cyrus crawled beneath the plane, looking up at Nolan leaning out of the open door at least ten feet above him. He had to stand, to jump. And then a huge hand slid beneath Cyrus’s left arm, and another hand grabbed him by the seat of his shorts.

Cyrus rose until he was perched just above Niffy’s right shoulder. The thick monk suddenly dropped into a crouch, sucking in a long whistling breath, his grip tightening on Cyrus’s rear.

Cyrus flailed. Niffy heaved.

Cyrus floated up through the wind like he’d been spat by a trampoline. Nolan’s eyes widened; then Cyrus
smacked into him, and the two tumbled back into the cabin in a tangle of arms.

The end of Niffy’s rope flopped up onto Cyrus’s back, and Dan grabbed on to it, threading it quickly through the metal bones beneath Antigone’s seat and then gripping the end tight with both hands.

“Go, Di! Go!” he shouted, and the plane slid to the side, away from the motel.

Cyrus sat up on Nolan’s legs, grabbed the edge of the open door, and hopped up onto his good leg. Nolan slid back into his seat.

Cyrus leaned out of the door and looked down as the plane moved over the parking lot and the road and the trees. Niffy dangled from the end of his rope belt with only one hand. His thick bare legs were cinched tight around the arms and chest of a bloody-faced and panicking Flint. While Cyrus watched, Niffy swabbed his free little finger around the inside of his own fat cheek, and then wiggled it in Flint’s ear.

“Cy!” Antigone shouted. “Cy! Your leg!”

Cyrus looked back at his sister and his worried mother. Then he twisted, glancing down at his calf. He grimaced at the sight but was actually surprised that it didn’t look worse. He had expected something gorier, more chewed. It felt like it should belong to the shark bite school of wounds. But this shark had bitten with only a
dozen or so very small and scattered teeth that had left behind oozing golf ball puckers in his leg. Still … 
ow
.

“Ricochets!” Horace yelled, the hair above his ears lashing his bald scalp in the wind. “You’re lucky. Not much worse than a BB gun! You’ll be fine! Where are Skelton’s globes? Or was all of this without purpose?”

Nolan laughed. Cyrus snorted, and then shouted back, “How ’bout I shoot you twenty times in the leg with a BB gun!” He peeled the soggy paper off his shoulders. Horror flooded Horace’s eyes. “They were in the pool!” Cyrus yelled. “I don’t think they ripped, but the ink is pretty bad.”

Antigone looked like she was going to be sick. Cyrus draped the two paper mats over her knees. Then he smiled at his mom and limped into the cockpit. He wormed down into the pilot’s seat and slipped on his headset.

Diana looked at him. Her voice crackled in his ears. “Is that fat monk dangling from the plane?”

Cyrus nodded.

“I knew we were dragging something heavy. Can we drop him? Or should we tilt these rotors down and flap him off at three hundred miles per hour?”

Cyrus shook his head. “Find somewhere close and set it down. He’s one of the good guys.”

Diana nodded. She banked the plane back over the
road toward a low, flat-roofed building with a cracked and weedy parking lot. Cyrus knew it had once been a grocery store, but the windows had been boarded up longer than he knew.

“How’s the leg?” Diana asked. “Didn’t look great.”

Suddenly, Cyrus’s leg didn’t feel quite as bad.

“Still attached,” Cyrus said. “Hurts. But I’ll be fine.”

“Good,” Diana said. She began to lower the plane toward the parking lot. “They got Jeb with a shotgun, too.” Cyrus watched her profile—soot-streaked freckles, flexing jaw, angry,
angry
eyes. “In the chest and face. I … we—” Her voice broke off in Cyrus’s headset. He felt sick. His leg was nothing. He watched Diana sniff. Swallow. “We even knew some of those bastards, Cy. Eric the Red trained us both.”

“I don’t think Eric made it,” Cyrus said. “He was mad about Jeb. Then he helped me, and they shot him.”

Diana said nothing. But she nodded, turning the plane as she did. Cyrus felt Niffy’s weight release. The plane surged up slightly, and then Diana set it all the way down.

“Are you going to be okay?” Cyrus asked.

Diana nodded. Then she wiped her cheeks again. “Get the chunky monk in if you’re gonna. We’ve got a long flight.”