Empire of Bones (4 page)

“Release them both,” Nolan said. “Slowly.”

Boniface licked his bloody lips, then spat out a molar. Cyrus heard it click away across the asphalt, and he heard Rupert gasp, breathing suddenly. The pain in his own shoulder suddenly vanished. He rolled away quickly and rose to his knees.

Pat the cook held a short shotgun, and Dan and Antigone stood beside him. Rupert rose slowly, coughing, chest heaving, and then he pointed his gun down at the monk.

Brother Boniface Brosnan looked up at them all with his thick white limbs splayed and Nolan’s knife at his throat. He snorted and spat a glop of blood after his tooth. Then he grinned.

“Well,” he said, “shall we try, try again? My best mates call me Niffy. It’s truly a pleasure to meet your little outlaw band.”

Nolan turned his deep, timeworn eyes onto Rupert, waiting for instruction.

Rupert shook his head and wiped a trickle of blood
from his nose onto the back of his forearm. Nolan withdrew his knife as Rupert looked at the road and another passing semi with a chattering trailer.

“Get our dear Brother Niffy inside,” Rupert said. “Guns and blood and brawling, we’d best get out of sight and quick.” He turned to Cyrus. “Your shoulder okay?”

Cyrus nodded. “But my foot hurts from kicking him.”

Niffy stood and straightened his robe. “And my jaw’s just brilliant, thanks. A lovely boot you have.”

“Don’t start, Irish,” Rupert said. “Get inside and have your story ready. I’m missing people.”

Dan and Antigone were lifting a whimpering Dennis between them. Dan paused, cocking his head. “Are those for us?” he asked. “The sirens?”

Everyone froze. Cyrus looked at Antigone, at Rupert, at Dan and Nolan. He heard nothing but cicadas. Then a van passed and faded. But Daniel wasn’t working with normal human ears. He’d gone through horrors on Phoenix’s table, and his heart could still beat thanks only to the flesh-weaving magic of Arachne. But there were some upsides to the modifications. Dan turned to Rupert and nodded.

“They’re coming closer. And a car. Fast. Someone is seriously hauling.”

Slow seconds passed. And then Cyrus heard it, too. At first, only the distant whine of sirens. Definitely more
than one. And then tires screaming on asphalt, sliding on unseen corners.

A classic limo-long black car fishtailed around a corner and into view. Smoke rose behind its tires as it again accelerated. Cyrus had ridden in that car before, and he knew it couldn’t have been any faster if it had been part rocket. But speed didn’t help on corners.

The car whipped around, nearly kissing the Archer’s pole with a chrome fender, and then entered the parking lot sideways, dragging smoking stripes of black rubber behind it.

As it rocked to a stop, Diana Boone leapt from a rear door. Her strawberry hair was cinched back in a tight braid. She was wearing a long safari shirt belted with a caramel leather double holster. One gun was missing. One shirtsleeve was black and smoking.

“Jeb’s hurt!” she shouted. “Rupe, it’s bad. And we lost Dennis. Some monk …” Her green eyes landed on Niffy, and then darted to Dennis.

Rupert was already running toward the car. Gunner, Horace’s tall Texan nephew, rose out of the driver’s side. He was in a black suit minus the jacket, and twin revolver butts peeked out from under his arms.

“Mr. Greeves,” Gunner drawled. “There ain’t no time, sir. Two minutes tops. We need to move on out and now. They’re hot after us. Two dozen, at least, loaded for bear.”

Rupert stopped at Diana’s door and looked inside
the car. Cyrus watched the big man’s face fall and his chin drop to his chest. But the sadness was only there for a moment. Rupert tugged a small card and a pen from his pocket. He began scrawling on it while he spoke, his voice as calm as it was quick.

“Daniel Smith, get Dennis into this car now.” He looked up and bellowed, “Arachne!” Cyrus turned back to the diner and saw his mother and Horace standing at the window, watching. Arachne hurried out the front door, cradling her heavy spider bag like an infant, but it sagged like a sack of mud.

Rupert handed Diana the card. “That’s where you’re going. Do not relocate again before we arrive unless there’s an emergency—your secondary location is on there as well. Cyrus flies tonight. You’re too shook, but keep him sharp. Nolan”—Rupert turned and pointed at Niffy—“if he gives you any heartache, deal with him. You listening, Irish? I want you as proper as the pope.”

Daniel had gotten Dennis into the front seat. He shut the door and stepped away from the car. Arachne slid into the back, and Cyrus saw her ice-blue eyes widen as she looked at the floor.

Diana shook her head. “Rupe, I have to stay with him.” She grabbed at Rupert’s shirt as he climbed into the car. “Please.”

Rupert put a big hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.
No discussion. We’ll get him help.” He looked around at the little crowd. “Go!”

With that, Rupert ducked into the back of Horace Lawney’s modified limousine. The engine throbbed, Gunner spun the car around, and it bounced out onto the little road.

Diana Boone’s shoulders shook.

Cyrus looked at Antigone, at Dan, and then at Nolan. Pat the cook rested the shotgun on his shoulder and turned back toward his diner.

“I know I’m new to the club,” Niffy said. “But it seems we’d best be off.”

Cyrus nodded. The sirens were growing louder, and the people they really needed to worry about would be even closer than the cops.

“Dan,” Cyrus said. “Get Mom. Leave the wheelchair. Do you think you can carry her?”

Dan was already jogging away.

“Di?” Cyrus said.

Diana Boone spun on her heel. She dragged her hands quickly down her cheeks, streaking soot over her freckles. She looked from Antigone to Cyrus with wet wide eyes.

“We need to go,” she said. “Right now.”

Cyrus led the way, ducking through the old tunnels beneath the overgrown plum trees and holding back branches for Dan, with their mother in his arms. Antigone and Diana followed. Horace, Niffy, and Nolan brought up the rear.

Cyrus was still wearing flip-flops, and he’d almost forgotten to snatch his canvas pack out of Room 111, where he’d hoped to spend the night. He had completely forgotten to thank Pat and Pat, but he figured they would understand.

“Daniel, I can do it.” Katie Smith patted her son on the chest. “Set me down and I’ll walk.”

Daniel didn’t answer. Cyrus slid out of the plums into a dry pasture and pulled a bundle of branches aside until they popped with concern.

“Daniel …,” Katie said.

“Mom,” said Cyrus. “We have to be quick. And quiet. Just let him carry you. And hang on.”

As the train emerged, Cyrus turned and began to jog through the tall grass, glancing back to make sure Dan could keep up without jostling their mother too much. He shouldn’t have worried. Daniel’s head was high and relaxed, and he wasn’t even breathing hard. Cyrus hated admiring his brother’s strength. It meant that Phoenix was good at what he did. And it always reminded Cyrus that he would never again see his tall, straw-haired, blue-eyed
California brother. Dan was a quick brown-haired ox, with a patched-up heart and dark-brown eyes that saw things he didn’t like to talk about.

Cyrus wondered what his mother thought of Daniel’s change. She’d known about it; she’d been brought up to speed on almost everything during her two months of therapy in Ashtown. But she hadn’t commented on Dan. She’d said more about the changes in Cyrus.

The group shuffled across an old beam over a muddy pasture stream, and then Cyrus led them up a low hill, through a cattle gate, and down into a green bowl. Milk cows looked up, still chewing, and watched them descend. The motel disappeared from view behind them.

At the bottom of the bowl, beside the ruins of an old barn with a broken back, an odd-looking tilt-rotor plane basked in the long grass. Two large propellers had been rotated up above the wings, making it look and act part helicopter. Once in the air, the props could rotate forward. The strange plane had once belonged to Rupert’s old Keeper. It had been borrowed from his widow, and the loan had become mostly permanent.

Cyrus had never flown it.

Diana got the cabin door open and climbed up and forward into the copilot’s seat. Dan set Katie down and helped her climb inside. Horace hopped in, but Niffy paused to admire the plane before Nolan nudged him from behind. Antigone stopped at the door.

“Cy …” Antigone’s voice was one shade short of panic. She turned back toward the motel. “Oh, gosh. Cy … the globes.”

Cyrus stared at his sister, not understanding.

“Skelton’s paper globes,” Antigone said. “I left them by the pool when Mom came and then I forgot them. We have to go back.”

Cyrus sighed. “Why? We never even figured out what they meant.”

“Yeah, but
they
might,” Antigone said.

Cyrus turned and hopped up into the plane’s open door. His mother was in a rear-facing seat, and Dan sat with his legs crossed on the floor at her feet. Niffy was facing forward, perched in a middle seat between Horace and Nolan. The little lawyer was pinned against the rounded cabin wall.

“Horace,” Cyrus said. “What would you say if I told you we lost Skelton’s paper globes?”

Horace snorted. “That I warned him against taking you as his heirs, and that I hope he haunts you into an early grave. I’ve told you that the money and the accounts he had me hiding were only a fraction of his real worth. His real shadow empire, the one he spent his final years sheltering from the O of B
and
from Phoenix—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cyrus said. “I get it.”

Cyrus leaned in until he could see up into the cockpit. Diana looked back at him from the copilot’s seat. She
already had her headphones on, but she lifted one earpiece.

“Give me two minutes, Di,” Cyrus said. “Fire up in one and be ready for me.”

Diana nodded and turned back to her controls. Cyrus dropped his pack on the floor and then backed out of the cabin.

“Cyrus …” His mother’s voice stopped him. Her eyes were wide with worry.

“Love you, Mom,” Cyrus said. “Be right back.” He turned away, sidestepping Antigone as he did.

“Cy …,” Antigone said.

“You’re not coming, Tigs, so don’t even say it.” He kicked off his flip-flops and handed them to his sister. “Stay with Mom.”

And with that, Cyrus Smith began to run.

Antigone watched her brother race through the pasture, weaving a slalom course around grazing dairy cows. As he reached the lip, he ducked low, and then disappeared.

Antigone sighed and climbed up into the plane, dropping into the one empty rear-facing seat, across the cockpit door from her mother. Her eyes stayed focused on the pasture, and her thumbnail rose to her teeth.

Katie Smith took her daughter’s free hand.

“He’s changed a lot,” Antigone said.

“Cyrus?” Katie laughed. “Have you forgotten the boy who ran the cliffs, who always left a worried sister behind?”

“More like an angry sister,” Antigone said. “It was stupid. And he fell, too. He was lucky.”

“Cyrus has grown larger,” Katie said. “But he is the same boy.” She squeezed her daughter’s hand. “I am sorry I left you. It must have been hard to be the one who had to worry for Cyrus.”

“Oh, she wasn’t the only one,” Dan said. “And I wasn’t any good at it.”

“I’m here now,” Katie said. “And I think I will worry enough for all of us.”

Niffy massaged the side of his swollen jaw with two fat fingers. “Touching,” he said. “Truly.”

Cyrus slipped out of the plums and over to the chain-link fence at the end of the pool and patio. He couldn’t see the globes anywhere, but the sun was just down and shadows were deepening. An evening breeze wrapped around the motel and made the short hairs on his neck tingle.

Cyrus could hear voices. They were coming from the front of the motel. Not much time.

And then the door to the pool patio slid open. Cyrus retreated beneath the brush and waited. Two men stepped out.

These were not Phoenix’s men, at least not visibly. No gills fluttered on their necks. No bone tattoos traced their limbs. These were men of the Order of Brendan, men dressed like Rupert Greeves and hundreds of other Explorers and Keepers of Ashtown.