Empire of Bones (Ashtown Burials #3)

by N. D. Wilson

  “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.”

  Not too far above an altitude of ten thousand feet, Cyrus blinked, squinted, and shielded his eyes. Flying due west, the little plane had caught up to the setting sun.

  “Bright,” Diana said simply. She reached beneath her seat and handed Cyrus an old pair of aviator glasses. “Push her a little faster and climb. This is the only way you’ll ever see the sun rise in the west.”

  Cyrus put on the shades and did what she said. He pushed the plane harder and climbed higher, until the sun rose above the horizon. Diana actually laughed, and even though the sound was quiet and crackly and filtered through a headset, it made Cyrus feel better.

  The plane shook a little more at this speed, battering its way through rough air.

  “Did Rupe ever tell you about the Sun Chaser?” Diana asked.

  “No,” Cyrus said. “He doesn’t do a lot of telling.”

  “It was the first time Jeb helped him,” Diana said. “There was this Greek family, in the O of B but never that active. Close with some of the goofier, more harmless transmortals. Big money. Not just private-island people. Private-islands-all-around-the-world people. But they went nuts. Decided they were descended from the god Apollo and would only let their kids marry kids from families as wacked about descending from gods as they were. So they got more and more inbred, and weirder and weirder. Finally, one son goes nuts and starts killing people.”

  “Wow,” Cyrus said. “I thought this was a funny story.”

  Diana shrugged. “The Avengel doesn’t usually get involved until a story stops being funny. Anyhow, they’d named this kid Icarus, like in the myth. And he always freaked out in the dark. That’s when he killed people, but he never remembered it when the sun came up. So he gets the fastest plane he can, and he starts flying west, chasing the sun like we are, only he actually keeps up and would even get ahead of it. He only touched down to refuel, and he just flew and flew. He burned through millions in fuel and replacement planes and a network of rogue ground crews, always changing where he touched down, and he just kept going. It took Rupe eighteen months before he caught him.”

  “Seriously?” Cyrus asked. “He flew with the sun for a year and half? He was never in the dark?”

  “Nope,” Diana said. “Not once. Icarus the Sun Chaser. Rupe said he was all the way nuts and practically blind when they caught him. He thought the guy would be angry or depressed, but he’d burned his eyes so bad, he always had this huge flaring afterimage. He thinks the sun follows him now.”

  “Where is he?” Cyrus asked.

  “Back in Greece, in a hospital. Jeb said the guy was the saddest killer he’d ever seen. Tons of money, no mind, and the last survivor in his crazy family.”

  Even behind shades, Cyrus blinked and turned away from the bright horizon.

  “Don’t worry,” Diana said. “It’ll go down again. We’re not flying that fast.”

  The sun did set again, but slowly. And the sky held on to its blue for hours, while down below, the ground was swallowed up by the darkest shadow Cyrus had ever seen.

  Diana yawned and looked over at Cyrus’s leg. An hour into the flight, Antigone had dragged him back into the cabin and their mother had bandaged it, warning him that they would have to dig the pellets out later. Just a little something to look forward to, Cyrus had thought. And Dan had rubbed his head like he was still a kid. Which he guessed he was.

  Horace had been surly, refusing to even look at Cyrus. Antigone had hung the two paper globes from the ceiling to dry, where they looked like a pair of enormous, ridiculously droopy socks. Cyrus hadn’t seen a drop of ink left on either of them.

  Nolan and Niffy had been sleeping side by side. Dan had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, both eyes on Flint, who was hog-tied with Niffy’s belt and curled up on the floor. All the vents were open and blasting cool air, but the little cabin had still smelled an awful lot like people.

  When the sky had grown black and the time had finally come to descend, Diana was asleep. Her arms were open in her lap, her head was tipped just a little back, and her shades had slipped two freckles farther down her nose. Her lips were parted slightly. Cyrus twisted in his seat and looked back into the cabin. He couldn’t see Nolan and Antigone, but the others were all asleep. Only Flint’s shoulder was in view, but even he was still.

  Cyrus turned back to his instruments, and the darkness on the ground below him. He could see a city web of pinprick lights in the distance, but not a big city, and they weren’t flying that far anyway. He had the coordina
tes Rupert had given Diana, but nothing else. There were stars above him, but no moon. He hoped there would be lights wherever they were supposed to land, because coordinates were only going to help him so much.

  He nosed the plane down a little too quickly, and Diana’s head lolled forward, then tipped toward him. Cyrus leaned over and pushed it back up. No good. Her chin hit her chest.

  Oh, well. He’d have to wake her up soon anyway. He wasn’t about to just pick a spot in the darkness and try to land.

  “We overshot.” Diana’s voice was quiet in his headphone. She yawned. “Get low out over the lake and come back around.”

  “Lake?” Cyrus asked.

  “We’re just over it. That town out there is at the far end.”

  Cyrus leaned forward and stared at the ground. Then he looked out of his side window. Nothing. All blackness.

  Diana tapped a little screen down at knee-level between them. And there it was. Small 3-D mountain ranges made of green lines, clicking slowly forward. A flat space was growing between them, broadening and extending. Cyrus hadn’t paid any attention to the screen before because he hadn’t known what it was, and no one had told him to.

  “Nothing’s that flat but water,” Diana said. “I normally hate these things. I’d rather fly with my eyes. But it’s nice on a night this dark, and without a lit strip.”

  Cyrus nodded, as if he had often flown and landed at night, let alone without a lit runway to land on.

  He brought the plane lower and lower, until they were just below a thousand feet, and halfway out over the invisible lake. Then he went into a slow right turn.

  “Tighter,” Diana said. “We’re between mountains here.”

  Cyrus banked harder, pointing his right wing down at water he wished he could see. His altitude dropped, but Diana didn’t seem worried.

  When he straightened out, he was below five hundred feet and aiming his plane at … he had no idea.

  “Do you want to take it in?” Cyrus asked.

  Diana looked at him and smiled. “You’re doing fine.”

  “Yeah, right until I smack us into a mountain.” Cyrus exhaled. The cockpit was cool, but his forehead was suddenly damp.

  “Lower your gears and come in slow.” Diana made it sound so simple. “Then I’ll tilt the rotors and set her down.”

  Cyrus climbed slightly, just for his own sake, leveled back off, and then slowed until he thought they were going to stall.

  “Nice,” Diana said. And then she took over.

  Cyrus flopped back into his seat, wiped his forehead, and tried not to pant. He felt the plane scoop and slow even more as the engines rotated up. It felt like they were in a helicopter, in a plane that could twist and slide and shuffle through the air as slowly as he could walk.

  And then Diana flipped three switches, and spotlights on the wings and nose of the plane bathed the lake surface in icy halogen. Cyrus could see smooth dark water shooting past beneath them.

  “Seriously?” Cyrus said. “Those were there the whole time and you didn’t say anything?”

  “You didn’t need them,” Diana said. “They would have just distracted you.” She flipped a joystick down out of the instruments and pointed at it. “Find us a parking spot.”

  Where Cyrus swiveled, the spotlights swiveled. And up ahead, wedged between the still black water and a jutting mountain clothed in firs, there was a small cluster of cockeyed cabins. Huge cedar trees loomed between them, draping shadows over roofs and chimneys with heavy limbs, shielding structures from the spotlights where they could. Off to the right of the camp, there was a mountain stream descending into the lake, and beside it a small meadow.

  “Right there,” said Cyrus, but Diana had already seen it.

  As the plane rose to hop the trees and settle in the meadow, down below the front door of a little cabin opened, and an old man rolled out onto the tiny porch, seated in a wheelchair.

  He had a long rifle in his lap.

  four

  EMPIRE OF BONES

  CYRUS WOKE FACEDOWN on a bare mattress that smelled like dog. He blinked his eyes into focus and managed to lift his head. There was a brown Australia-shaped stain just beneath his face. The entire southern half of the continent had been flooded with his drool.

  The mattress hadn’t looked nearly so disgusting last night. With a little darkness and a lot of exhaustion, any flat surface can look pretty good. Last night, Cyrus would have given the grimy cabin floor four stars, let alone the bottom of a bunk bed.

  Cyrus pressed himself slowly up onto his elbows. His right calf was shrieking with every heartbeat, which was probably what had woken him. Or maybe it had been the woodpecker doing major construction right outside the cabin’s open window.

  Cyrus sniffed, wiped his damp chin, and eyed a little window across the room. The sun was up, but big trees hid most of the light. He was pretty sure that Antigone had been on the bunk above him, but he wasn’t even sure why he thought that. He could remember the plane landing in the meadow and sinking in the mud almost to its belly, and the crooked cabins, and the old man in the wheelchair pointing a rifle at him.

  Llewellyn Douglas. The old free-diving kook who’d trained bull sharks in Lake Michigan. He’d forced Cyrus to drink something black and nasty. Then Cyrus had staggered into the closest cabin and picked a bed.

  “Tigs?”

  Nothing. He rolled slowly onto his side and lowered his bare feet to the floor. His right calf screamed with the increased blood pressure, and muscle fibers began to twitch and quiver beneath his skin. His bandage was new, but a dozen little bloody dots had soaked through.

  Cyrus carefully slid his finger beneath the gauze and pulled it away from his leg. The top two puckers had been stitched shut.

  The cabin door banged open and Rupert Greeves stepped inside. Cyrus squinted up at him.

  “How’s it feel?” Rupert asked.

  “Like a shark bite,” Cyrus said. “When did you get here?”

  “An hour ago,” Rupert said. “We got Jeb to a safe hospital and then stayed with him through most of the night. It’s almost noon now.” Rupert leaned his back against the wall by the door. “You’ve had a lot of shark bites, then?”

  “Oh, yeah. Tons. Somebody stitched it up last night.” He straightened his leg out slowly. “How’s Jeb?” He wasn’t sure he wanted an answer.

  “Sorted,” Rupert said. “For now. It was bad. If not for Arachne, he wouldn’t even have made it to hospital.”

  Cyrus exhaled relief. “And my mom?”

  “Tired. Resting now.” Rupert rubbed his jaw and smiled. “Three years asleep, two months awake with nurses all around to keep things calm and easy, and then yesterday … her first day back with you lot.”

  “You mean us lot,” Cyrus said. He flexed his toes and groaned. “I guess I shouldn’t be feeling sorry for myself. Jeb almost died getting my mom out of Ashtown. I got shot for those stupid paper globes, and they were ruined anyway. I think I should make Antigone do my laundry for life or something. Where is she?”

  “Up and useful, unlike you.” Rupert crossed the room and lifted Cyrus easily to his feet. Cyrus sucked in his breath through his teeth and hopped on his left foot. He leaned against the bunk bed and exhaled, trying to keep his breathing slow and steady. Rupert watched him.

  “Can we at least stay here awhile?” Cyrus asked. “Or are we running off again?”

  Rupert smiled slightly. “You should see the whole place before you ask that.”

  “I’m serious,” Cyrus said. “For two months we’ve been running. When do we just park somewhere?”

  Rupert raised his eyebrows. “Not long ago, Cyrus Smith was begging to come along wherever I went. Now he just wants to park? You want me to drop you someplace comfortable and go on with this alone?”

  “Come on, Rupe.” Cyrus shut his eyes. “You know that’s not what I mean. I’m just tired, and I hurt.”

  “Cyrus Lawrence Smith.” Rupert’s voice was a low growl. “You have w
itnessed the rebirth of an old war, the rekindling of a fire that once consumed nations like parched grass. The blame may not be yours, but you held the spark that set the flame. It is young and growing. Maybe, maybe it may still be quenched, so long as the Almighty bathes us in courage and luck and we do not rest and we do not tire and we do not listen to our own pain.”

  Rupert’s chest heaved. His dark eyes did not leave Cyrus’s. “Phoenix sets out to remake men according to his own demented imagination, but that twisted creature needs time. And so he stirred up the transmortals against the Order. Now the beasts have been loosed and our eyes must be on them. The great transmortals need no time at all to begin their destroying. Radu Bey will be drawing servants to him—men and women will flock to him without even knowing what draws them, like metal shavings to a magnet.”

  Rupert locked his jaw and gripped the side of the bunk bed. Old wood popped and Cyrus exhaled slowly. He’d rarely seen Rupert angry, and even now he knew the big man was holding back. Clenched fists and muscle-striped arms were ready to hurl the whole bed against the wall. Rupert’s ribs rose and fell, and he seemed ready to shake the little cabin with a roar, but when he spoke again, his voice was calm and cold.

  “My anger is with my own Order, Cyrus. Not with you. The O of B exists for such times as this. It exists only for such times as this, and yet it is the first to offer up sacrifices to the old darkness. Even good men and women of the Order now duck their heads and hide, hoping to avoid this war, hoping like so many fools through the ages have hoped before them, that only a few of the weak will die and then this storm of devils will quiet itself. You and I and your sister have been cast out to the Dracul, like the children of centuries ago, sent to feed a dragon.”

  He sighed, shook the bed slightly, and dropped his head onto his extended arms.

  Cyrus had no idea what to say. His calf must have been ashamed, because already the screaming pain in his leg had muted slightly. He lowered his right foot to the ground and forced weight onto it.