The Drowned Vault (22 page)

Little Dixie stormed forward. “You! One Hand! Tell me where he is
right now
!” She grabbed at his cane.

The man snarled. The back of his hand slammed into her face. The cane lashed across her chest and sent her sprawling.

Dixie gasped in pain, trying to breathe, trying not to cry. Her mouth was filling with blood.

The men opened the crate.

Dixie found herself staring at four scrawny olive-colored limbs and a pile of tangled black rope. The rope pile rose slowly, and she was looking into a filthy female face. The rope was hair; there was more of it than Dixie had ever seen on a person before. Two huge eyes peered out from beneath the pile. They had whites as clear and bright as polished porcelain, and they were studying Dixie.

“So …,” said Phoenix. He clicked open the silver knob. The black tooth swallowed light in his hand.

The eyes blinked in surprise. And then the crate exploded.

Wooden shards flew in every direction. The scrawny figure launched through the air toward a surprised Phoenix. Arms and legs coiled around him, and ropes of hair did the same, constricting and slithering like snakes, pinning his arms to his sides, winding tight around his neck.

The tattooed men jumped forward, grabbing wrists and ankles and fighting to unwind hair. While they did, Phoenix began to sputter and laugh, and when the snaking hair had been unwound from his neck, he managed to speak.

“Pythia, doll, you’re not thinking. I can’t be crushed. I can’t be killed. Not in this cloak, and not with the Reaper’s Blade in my hand.” He looked up at his men. “Give her the shot.”

Instantly, the rest of the hair uncoiled. The hands released, and the shape dropped to the floor and retreated into a corner.

“It knows English?” one of the men asked.

“She,”
said Phoenix, “knows every tongue there ever was and ever could be.” He glanced back at Dixie. “Now lock that one up. She’ll be useful.”

Dixie blinked, tearing her eyes off the strange shape in the corner, suddenly remembering where she was. She rolled over and jumped to her feet to run, but big hands caught her up into the air and she was thrown over a shoulder like the dead man had been.

She kicked. She punched. She screamed and tried to bite. And as she bounced away, two wide eyes in the corner met her own. They watched her go.

eleven
THE PROPHET DANIEL

D
ANIEL
S
MITH FELT VERY, VERY ALIVE
. The first
very
came from the long bleeding cut down his left shin, carved there by the metal-capped spike on the shoe of one of his opponents. The bone was throbbing, and the torn skin felt more burnt than cut. Blood was sponging into his sock.

The second
very
came from his ribs. The last hit he’d taken should have broken several of them. One year ago, it would have broken all of them. But one year ago, Daniel Smith would not have been playing rugby or even thinking about rugby. He would have been thinking about how to feed Cyrus and Antigone, and whether Cyrus needed to see a therapist, and how he would never be able to afford one.

Now his ribs were humming, his shin was screaming, his lungs were heaving, and he couldn’t stop smiling as he stood on the sidelines, chewing on his mouth guard, watching the scrum out on the field. Navy-and-gold rugby shirts pressed against the red-and-white of his own university.
Even that was still weird to him—
his
university. He had left his brother and sister in strange but apparently safe hands and had gone off to college. His first two semesters had been amazing, and he’d even managed to get back to Ashtown to see his siblings and his mother twice. Now he was finishing summer classes to make up for lost time, but he’d be back on that strange Estate soon enough, after classes ended and the next rugby tournament wrapped up.

For the first time since his father had died, life felt like it was working—especially with this new body. Getting the body had been horrible. Being kidnapped and wired up by that crazy, twitching cripple in his dirty white coat, having a psychotic invade his mind, all of that had been a great deal less than pleasant.

Dan shivered. Then he clenched his fists, slurped on one end of his mouth guard, and flexed his shoulders, feeling the explosive tension in his muscles. Psychotic or not, the man had done good work. Dan was taller. He was thicker and faster and a great deal healthier. He could hit and be hit harder than he’d ever thought his body could withstand—in high school he’d sprained an ankle in gym class at least once a month. Last match, he’d quit bothering to even tape his wrists, and the coach had pulled him out of the game to lecture him about how to soften an impact so he wouldn’t get injured.

Dan pulled out his mouth guard, spat in the grass, and
smiled. He didn’t want to soften an impact. He wanted to reach his absolute maximum, to find the limits of this new body, to discover just how much pain it could take. It bruised and bled and split and swelled, but it never broke. There were times when Dan actually felt almost grateful that Phoenix had grabbed him. If it weren’t for his eyes, he would be.

His eyes had been blue. Now they were a deep chocolaty brown. He didn’t care too much about the color, and his vision was sharper than ever. He cared about what they saw, and how sometimes what they saw wasn’t really there.

Sometimes it was just glimpses of the past that would rush in. Sometimes he felt like he was seeing the present, but from somewhere else—somewhere close or distant, but through borrowed eyes. And sometimes, weirdest of all, he wondered if he was seeing the future.

He couldn’t be. He knew that. It was impossible. But then it would happen again. Whatever he was looking at would disappear and his eyes—his brain—would fritz. Memories or moments or scenes would crowd out his vision, and they wouldn’t let go until they wanted to. The Archer Motel with renovations completed. The old California house being built almost two centuries ago. The same house ancient and rotten and leaning with empty windows. The day Cyrus had been born on the cliff top along the coast.

The longest vision had lasted two minutes. All of them had to do with beginnings or endings. Births. Deaths. Rebirths. Most seemed to connect to Cyrus. Some to Antigone.

From the sideline, Dan blinked and whooped at his team. He didn’t like thinking about it. And while he blamed his eyes, he knew his brain was the real culprit. Phoenix had crossed his wires somewhere in there, and occasionally his physical eyes would shut down and some subconscious and usually morbid corner of his brain hijacked his vision for a little while.

“Yo, Ben! Shad! Get in there at wing!”

Dan looked up. His coach was yelling at him, at the one they all called Ben Shad. Rupert Greeves had wanted Dan hidden and had given him all the documents he’d needed to become a new person. Not that anyone would have recognized Ben Shad off of Daniel Smith’s old driver’s license anyway.

Dan ran onto the pitch, fitting in his mouth guard as he went. Opposing players saw the substitution and called it out, adjusting strategy. They’d seen his last match, and Daniel grinned at their recognition. Adrenaline filled every bit of him, from his toenails to his hacked-off dirty-blond hair. The referee tucked his whistle into his mouth, impatient to start play, as Daniel raced to his position.

He wasn’t that abnormal. He wasn’t superhuman. He wasn’t yoked with oversize muscle the way some of the
players were. But when he collided with them, he felt like a stone that couldn’t be stopped. They felt like wet clay.

The scrum was long and slow—a raft of red-and-white bodies with arms linked over shoulders, heads pressing against another human raft of gold and blue. Daniel danced on the edge of the mass, and then the ball was kicked back. They’d won possession. His teammate, the center, scooped it up and raced to the left. Dan raced with him, trailing well outside and just behind him, ready for the pitch when it came.

And there it was, floating in the air, a simple thing to grab if angry men weren’t racing toward him with thoughts of murder.

Dan’s jaw clamped down, and his teeth bit straight through his rubber mouth guard. He snatched the ball out of the air and jumped to the inside as a body dove toward him. Another, and he jumped back outside, toward the left sideline.

He ran.

The turf was soft. His whirring cleats chewed it like chocolate. A big man was bearing down on him. Dan could already see the end of the field, and the long route he’d have to take to get there. He could see the cuts he would—and could—make. The big man would be an easy side step. Dan braced himself to plant. He could already see it happening … and then he couldn’t.

What Dan could see was a graveyard. And he had
become Cyrus. The big man was suddenly much bigger and bearded and his hands had six fingers.

Dan heard the hit. He felt the ball float out of his hands. He landed on his back with an impossible weight on top of him. He was still Cyrus and he was in the bottom of a grave, pinned beneath loose dirt. Antigone was looking down at him. Phoenix was beside her in his dirty white coat. He opened his mouth and spoke, but the voice wasn’t his. It belonged to a woman—high and quiet, lilting like a lullaby: “The 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 when he casts his shadow, even dragons shrink in fear.”

Antigone and Phoenix were swallowed up as a tall shadow stepped into view at the foot of the grave.

Pain exploded in Daniel’s chest. His heart stopped.

Cyrus squirmed beneath the weight of the dirt. His stomach collapsed, and his ribs sighed and popped. Why were Antigone and Phoenix just standing there staring down at him? Why did Phoenix sound like a woman? Cyrus tried to shout at Antigone, but his mouth filled with dirt as soon as he opened it. He tried to squirm, but the loose earth had him well pinned. It was chewing him, swallowing him slowly deeper into the grave.

And then there was no sister. No Phoenix. There was
simply a shadow. The shadow became a shape, and the shape became a man. The man’s chest was bare, and beneath his skin there was a circular red dragon—like the dragons on the men he’d dreamed, the men whose heads were on his patch.

The man’s powerful limbs were hairless and glistened like polished stone. His hair was black with curl, but short. His jaw and nose and brow were hard and smooth. His black eyes were craters, scarred with old anger.

The man looked like a photograph of a statue that had hung in the art room at Cyrus’s old school. Cyrus swallowed. It was weird to notice that right now. It didn’t matter. This man was no statue. He was very, very alive.

The man stared at Cyrus, and Cyrus stared back from the bottom of his grave. The man’s long upper lip curled slowly, and he smiled.

“Loquere, serpens,”
the man said quietly.

Cyrus spat earth and grunted. He couldn’t reply.

Suddenly, a thin girl with a huge tangle of ropes for hair jumped down into the grave and stood on top of Cyrus, holding a stack of dry leaves in the crook of one arm. Mumbling and rocking in place, she began writing fiery letters on the leaves with her finger. She threw the leaves into the air one at a time, and one at a time they burned into ash and rained down on Cyrus, sprinkling in his eyes, floating up his nose.

His eyes should have been burning. He should have been sneezing. Instead, down at the other end of the grave, his feet began to tickle. Horribly.

Cyrus spat out dirt and swallowed mud. “Stop it!” he yelled at the girl in his grave. “Stop tickling!”

Rupert Greeves appeared beside the statue man. He was also bare-chested, and he was dripping wet. But his arms were striped with old scars. His chest carried a snarled nest of them. Cyrus realized that the statue man had no scars. Not one. He couldn’t even see any freckles.

“Rupe!” Cyrus begged. He tried to kick, but his legs wouldn’t move. “Make her stop! She’s tickling. Please! I swear I’ll do the book training things.”

“I’m busy,” Rupert said. “Swimming.”

Cyrus spasmed and twitched beneath the dirt, but the tickling only grew. The girl on his chest looked down at him.