The Dragon's Tooth

six. HAIL

HORACE WASN’T BREATHING. Antigone pushed herself into Cyrus, sliding him down the bench beneath the window.

Maxi smiled and sat down in the booth next to Horace. He commandeered Horace’s cup of coffee and carefully picked out a single slice of bacon.

“So,” Maxi said, chewing. “You ask about me. I am honored. But is now the time for stories? A brother has vanished. Perhaps can I assist you?”

“You can give him back,” Antigone snarled. “You shouldn’t have taken him in the first place.”

“Shouldn’t?” The small man picked up a piece of toast from Antigone’s plate. “Little sweetness, shouldn’t, oughtn’t, can’t—these are words I cannot be understanding. What do they mean? I have burned cities and killed kings while others were studying shouldn’t. Ma chérie, if Maxi can, then Maxi should.” He leaned his small, grinning face toward Antigone. “And Maxi always can.”

Antigone slid back in the booth, and her hand dug into Cyrus’s leg.

Cyrus picked up a table knife. “Where’s Dan? What did you do to him?”

Maxi’s gapped smile widened. “Can you cut me with that? I am not butter.”

Horace managed to stand, sputtering anger. “Mr. Robespierre, you are a dog, a murderer, a demon, a poison. But know this, you will be struck down in the end. The Order will see your flesh rot in the soil like the rest of us.”

Maxi gripped Horace’s sleeve and tugged him back down. “The Order? The gaggling Brendan geese? Fat lawyer, I outlived all your wise men, your explorers, and I will be outliving you. Be silent.” He turned to Cyrus. “Boy, what I need, you have, do you not? Give it to me. I will take you to your brother, and you shall never be separated again until the land is swallowed by the sea. You hear me swear it.” Maxi wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “The tooth, the keys. What are they to you if your brother dies? Give them to me. What else can you be doing? You cannot leave. You cannot escape.” He grinned. “Or … when Daniel is dead, I can cut you, too, so that you beg to give them to me. Can you stop me?” He pulled out a pair of long, slender knives. Both had smooth wooden handles black with age and needle blades worn with sharpening, glassy at the edge. He let them rest on the table. They looked like they’d been made for gutting fish. Or bigger things.

Cyrus felt Antigone’s grip tighten on his leg. Pat was gone. The farmers were drinking their coffee. Horace was rigid with fear.

Cyrus breathed slowly, but his mind was racing. The keys didn’t matter. But he wouldn’t give Maxi the tooth. Not if it … He couldn’t. And without the tooth, the keys would never be enough.

Cyrus set his hands on the table across from the knives and looked into Maxi’s jaundiced eyes. They had to get out of the diner. He slid his legs back, tensing, bracing to launch.

“Well?” Maxi raised his eyebrows. “Choose your path, young Cyrus Smith. Will I love you, or will I be angry?”

Cyrus exploded forward onto the table, sweeping a storm of plates and sausage and eggs into Maxi’s face. The two knives skittered to the floor, and Cyrus swung for Maxi’s jaw. He didn’t connect. Maxi slid to the side and a fist slammed into Cyrus’s neck. Gasping, he rolled into the hash browns in front of Horace.

“Go!” Cyrus yelled, but there was nowhere to go. Maxi was on his feet, holding his knives. A huge, round man with a beard and apron came hurrying out of the kitchen, but stopped when he saw the uniform.

Maxi stepped forward, eyes on fire and tiny teeth grinding, knives held low. Orange juice and egg ran down his uniform. Cyrus slid back beneath the window, knocking over waters. Horace was standing. Antigone was crouching on her seat.

“Enough,” the lawyer said. “Enough. Let the children go. I’ll get you everything you need.”

Maximilien laughed. The scar around his pale neck flushed red. “No,” he said. “No. You cannot. The keys, Smith boy. Give them to me. Now. Before you die.”

Cyrus felt a shadow move above him, and the window exploded with a roar.

Maxi staggered backward and fell. Glass rained down on Cyrus’s face and neck and chest, bouncing like crystal hail on the table. Above him, Cyrus saw a long gun barrel fire again and again, spitting wide flame, but he heard nothing.

And then Horace dove over him and out the window. Antigone pulled him up and drove him out the gaping window hole. His knee caught the sill, singing with pain, and the two of them were falling together, tumbling onto an old bicycle, through tall grass, and onto gravel.

Cyrus climbed to his feet and staggered after his sister, around the building, toward the big black car. Horace was in front of them, diving into the backseat. The lean driver was holding the door for them, tall in his black suit, his big gun trained at the diner. There was a police car and two other men ducking behind it. The driver fired again. And again. Leaving the rear door open, he jumped in behind the wheel. Antigone dove inside, and then Cyrus followed, landing facedown on the car’s strangely soft carpet. The car showered half an acre with gravel as it roared forward onto the road. The rear door slammed with the acceleration.

The heavy car rose and fell smoothly, gliding and shifting in time with the curves and dips of the road. It was an old car — Cyrus had known that at first glance — but it wasn’t moving like one.

“I feel sick,” Antigone muttered. “We should be dead right now. I could throw up.”

Cyrus exhaled slowly. “Me too.” He was holding the keys at his neck, clenching them too hard, digging metal teeth deep into his palm. Any harder and he would bleed, but he couldn’t let go.

Antigone’s leg was kangarooing in place. She had her eyes shut and was twisting her hair. Cyrus looked around the car and up at the glass divider. He wanted to see the driver. He wanted a good look at his face. The man with the big gun.

John Horace Lawney sat with his back to the driver and his head down, massaging his temples.

Outside the windows, bushes and pastures and signs and road reflectors snapped and flickered past like frames in one of Antigone’s home movies.

Antigone looked up. “Maxi’s dead, right?” She nudged Horace with her toe, and the little lawyer looked up. “Please tell me he’s dead.”

Horace sighed, and the car bounced gently and banked hard around a curve.

He shook his head. “That … man … was born Sebastián de Benalcázar in Córdoba, Spain, more than five hundred years ago. As a conquistador, he traveled with Ponce de León into Florida — until Ponce had him shot. He escaped into South America and tried to set himself up as a governor, slaughtering Incas and his fellow Spaniards along the way. He was hung, stabbed, poisoned, and even keelhauled. But to no effect. The Order finally captured him when he tried to return to Europe. He was held without food or water for more than two centuries before some weak-minded fools released him. He reemerged in France under the name of Maximilien Robespierre. There, his taste for destruction reached revolutionary heights. More than thirty thousand French men and women were sent to the guillotine, including King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and several of the Order’s most notable French members. The Order did not capture him again until the mobs turned against him and he himself was beheaded — you saw the scar on his neck, did you not? It was a simpler matter when his head was in a basket and his body was in a cart. He was imprisoned again but escaped the Order’s French Estate when it was destroyed during the Second World War.”

Horace looked up at Cyrus, and then into Antigone’s eyes. His brow was furrowed. “Unfortunately, the answer to your question is no. Dead is one thing that he certainly is not.”

Cyrus swallowed. His throat had tightened and his serpent necklace felt suddenly heavy. He had nothing to say. He wanted to disbelieve, but he couldn’t — not with everything he had already seen. He looked at his sister, and her dark eyes were worried.

The car surged forward and swooped around an RV. The Archer was visible in the distance. Cyrus leaned against his window. The Golden Lady was on her pole. But she wasn’t golden. She was pale. Dead.

As the car approached, she began to glimmer. The tooth was returning.

“Who are they?” Antigone pointed at the motel. Three men were picking through the rubble. A fourth hopped out of Skelton’s camper.

All four looked up as the big car screamed past. Two of them were tall and identical, pale green in the daylight. The other two were bare-shouldered. Tattooed. One bearded, one bald.

The driver ignored a double yellow line and passed two cars at once. Two minutes later, they were nearing town. And traffic lights. The first one was red.

“Um …” Cyrus sat up.

They shot through it.

Antigone looked around the interior of the car. They slowed slightly for traffic and ran the next light. She grabbed her brother and tugged him back in his seat. “Buckle, Cy. We’re in trouble.”

There weren’t any seat belts.

The car accelerated and skimmed past a police car, nearly clipping its side mirror. Cyrus and Antigone wheeled around, watching the patrol car flick on its lights and then quickly miniaturize behind them. They were already through the small town. Fields and highway stretched ahead.

Horace cleared his throat. “Please don’t worry yourselves. This car is a thing of beauty. She came off the line in 1938 and track-tested above three hundred feet per second. They won’t catch up to us. Gunner up there isn’t even pushing her yet, are you, Gunn?”

Cyrus turned back around, watching the tall driver’s hands on the wheel. Something slammed into the roof above him.

A hole appeared in the leather ceiling and tiny feathers snowed down from the upholstery. Another. And another. Like hammer blows. Like piercing hail. Lead hail.

The car swerved. Glass shattered. Bullets rained down.

John Horace Lawney jerked and fell to his side.

The car jumped off the road, roared down a bank, and sent a wire fence sprouting into the sky. Cyrus bounced against the ceiling and grabbed at the door. Antigone rattled on the floor with Horace.

“Hang on!” Gunner yelled, and he cranked the wheel. The car twisted sideways, sailing at airplane speeds through a pasture of sun-browned grass. Seed heads lashed and whistled at the doors, and a cloud of dust and chaff and splattered plant rose up around them.

On his knees, Cyrus stared out his window. Bellowing cows were running, cows that hadn’t been meant to run, two-ton milk jugs, spotted black and white. One of them froze, panicked, unable to choose a route.

Cyrus braced himself, but the car swung in time, slamming his face against the glass. Antigone and a bleeding Horace tumbled up beside him.

Another fence flipped up the hood and off the roof, and they were heading downhill, past a barn, sliding by a farmhouse, through someone’s garden and beneath a tree, thumping an ancient tire swing into orbit, jumping a ditch, and fishtailing onto a gravel road.

“Everyone okay?” Gunner glanced in his mirror. “We all alive?”

“No!” Antigone was stretching the lawyer onto his back between the seats. “Stop! Horace got hit in the shoulder, right by his neck.”

“Can’t stop.” Gunner shook his head. “He breathing?”

“I think so!” Antigone yelled. She leaned her ear down to Horace’s mouth as he coughed, misting her cheek with blood.

“Get some pressure on the wound!” Gunner yelled. “Cyrus, get your window down and squeeze on out. I need your eyes on the sky the next couple miles. And hang on! I don’t want to lose you!”

Cyrus cranked his window down and immediately went deaf with the roar and rattle of gravel and wind. The driver lobbed back a pair of goggles.

“Pull ’em tight!” he yelled. “Tight!”

Antigone, white-faced, was crouched on the floor, pressing a wadded-up suit coat against the little man’s shoulder. Looking into his sister’s terrified eyes, Cyrus took a breath, pulled down his goggles, and fished himself out the window and into a hurricane.

Gripping the inside of the car, Cyrus eased his rear up onto the door, and his chin rose above the roof. The goggles shook, and his nose felt like it might disappear. The roof of the car was pocked with holes, and dust tornadoed on the road behind them. Gradually, gently, Cyrus looked up. At first, with his head shaking in the wind, he could only make out two contrails. And birds. Three of them. Maybe hawks or crows. High and circling.

Too big. Wrong wings. Kites? Hang gliders? The three shapes crossed paths and adjusted, forming a triangle. They were descending, following the car.

Cyrus turned his face forward, into the car’s absurd speed, and the spatter of bugs stung his cheeks. In the distance, Lake Michigan, a smooth plane of perfect blue, stretched to the horizon. Beside it, the buildings of Milwaukee were clustered like a collection of models.

A minute later, gasping and wiping his face, Cyrus told the driver what he’d seen.

“We have to get to a hospital,” Antigone said. “We have to call the police.”

“We have to change routes,” said the driver. “No more front gate for us. They’ll be waiting. It’ll push our time, but you can make it. And don’t you worry about Johnny Horace. Not just yet. He’s taken worse. He doesn’t know how to die.” The car accelerated even more. “Let’s see how fast the old girl can run.”

Cyrus and Antigone bounced on the floor of the car, popping like corn around the unconscious lawyer, taking turns pressing down on the man’s bloody shoulder until Antigone began to be sick and Cyrus pushed her away.

“C’mon, Horace,” he muttered, leaning all of his weight against the wound. But the car still bounced, and his hands bounced with it, releasing pressure. He had never seen so much blood; he’d never felt so much of it run between his fingers, fingers that were beginning to stick together with the clotting.

“His face,” Antigone said behind him. She was breathing hard. “It’s white. He’s going to die, Cyrus.”

“No.” Cyrus wedged his legs against the door and pushed down harder through the bouncing.

Eventually, the car found asphalt, but the turns were no longer smooth, and Cyrus had to fight to keep from being thrown into his sister or against the doors.

Traffic grew, and soon, the car slowed. Buildings began to dance past the windows.

The turns grew harder. Full lefts and full rights. Squealing U-turns.

Antigone’s face was gray and damp. Cyrus’s arms were shaking as he adjusted the bloody ball of Horace’s suit coat against the little man’s neck. The flow had almost stopped. Might not be any more blood to bleed.

The car squealed to a stop beside a Dumpster. Gunner jumped out and jerked open the rear door.

“C’mon!” He grabbed Antigone’s arms and pulled her out. Then he grabbed Horace by the ankles and dragged him through the door until he was sitting in a scum puddle on the asphalt.

Cyrus stepped out of the car and looked around. They were in a narrow, foul-smelling alley, but on top of the foul smell, blowing out of a big silver vent in the brick wall beside the Dumpster, he could smell pizza.

The driver scooped Horace up off the ground and staggered toward the alley mouth, his shoes clicking as he went.

Cyrus grabbed his sister, and the two of them followed the tall black suit out of the alley and into a little square. There were people, but not many, and all of them stopped to watch the big man with the body.

Cyrus looked up, searching the sky. A single black shape was visible against the blue, almost motionless, hanging in place.

“Cyrus,” Antigone said. “Why are we here?”

The big man, turning sideways, managed to force his way through a small glass door, a little brass bell ringing as he did. The name of the place was arched in gold letters on the front window.

“Milo’s Pizza,” Cyrus read. “I don’t know, but we should go in.”

It was early and the pizza place was empty. It wasn’t even open. Two prep cooks were leaning out of the kitchen watching the driver and his load stagger through the dining room toward a door in the back. Black-and-white tiles checkered the floor, and rickety chairs were perched on the tables. An old Pac-Man arcade game chirped in the corner.

“Hey,” Cyrus said.

“We’re not open.” One of the cooks raised a sauce-covered spoon. “You can’t be in here.”

“We’ll just be a sec,” said Antigone, and grabbing Cyrus by the wrist, she pulled him between the tables.

Gunner had opened the door in the back and was setting Horace down. He stepped to the side, holding the door open. Horace was hunched on an old toilet.

“What?” Antigone asked. “What are we doing?”

The driver beckoned them in, shut the door, and locked it.

It was a tiny bathroom, and there wasn’t enough room for two people, let alone three and a man as tall as the door.

“This is one of the old entrances,” the driver said. “It’s been closed for I don’t know how long. Might be blocked. Couldn’t say when it was last used. Hold on to the sink.”

A plastic air-freshener high on the wall spritzed essence of pine tree onto his cheek.

“Ack!” The driver grimaced and spat, blinking in pain, and then hunched over and lifted the lid off the toilet tank. Plunging his hand into the water, he began to feel around. The toilet flushed.

“What—” Cyrus didn’t finish.

The floor shook and fell away.

Cyrus had only fallen downstairs once before, and they had been straight. These were spiral stairs, twisting down around an old cast-iron sewer line. And he was tumbling with his sister.

Gasping, yelping, crushed and crushing, the two of them rolled and flipped down the metal stairs and sprawled onto cold, wet stone. Nearby, water was running.

Antigone groaned.

Cyrus pushed her off and sat up, coughing in the darkness. In the ceiling above them, he could see the little well-lit and floorless bathroom. The toilet hung in the air, and Horace’s legs dangled over the sides.

The big driver, with his legs spread, squinted down into the darkness. “You all right?” he asked. “I told you to hang on to the sink.”

Heaving the little lawyer over his shoulder, he carefully descended the stairs.

At the bottom, he tugged a chain, and a strand of naked lightbulbs fluttered to life.

They were in a tunnel. The walls were made of brick, slimed green and black, arching into the ceiling above.

Cyrus stood up. The stone floor came to an end a few feet from where they had fallen. Beyond the edge, with a mounded back like a snake’s, dark water raced past. Above it, a large basket hung on a heavy cable.

Cyrus glanced back at his sister. Wincing, she managed to stand. “Wow. What now?” She looked at the basket. “No,” she said. “We’re not getting in that.”

“From here, it will be easy for you,” the driver said. With Horace still over his shoulder, he wheeled a flight of stairs out of the darkness and pushed them to the water’s edge. Kicking on a foot brake, he began to climb. The stairs squealed and bowed beneath him.

“No.” Antigone shook her head and looked at her brother. “We don’t even know where we’re going. I’m not getting in a moldy basket dangling over some sewage river in a pitch-black tunnel.”

The driver heaved Horace into the basket and backed down the narrow stairs.

“We’re just going to shoot off somewhere? What happens if the cable breaks? Why are we even doing what you say? We don’t know you.”

Cyrus scanned the tunnel. His head was throbbing and his world had shattered, but he knew what to do next. He knelt by the water, dipping his sticky hands in the cool current. “Not the time, Tigs,” he said. “We’re in it now.”

“I’m Gunner Lawney,” the driver said, and he wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “Johnny’s nephew. Got into some trouble and came up from Texas ten years ago. Was supposed to be an Acolyte, but that didn’t work out too well. But I found my niche.” He smiled. “I can drive, and I can shoot. Beyond that, pretty useless.” Gunner nodded at the basket. “Now get up in there. I gotta get back to the car and get it out of here.”

“What makes you think we can do this alone?” Antigone asked.

“You have to,” said Gunner. “Climb on up and I’ll tell you what to do.”

Cyrus splashed water onto his face and stood up. Antigone groaned, and then stepped behind her brother, pushing him toward the steep, rickety stairs. He climbed carefully, each narrow tread sighing in his hands, and when he reached the top he had to stretch for the edge of the basket. He pulled it toward himself, threw a leg in, and tumbled over the edge onto Horace.

The little lawyer moaned, and the basket swung.

Cyrus sat up and reached back for Antigone’s hands. She grabbed his wrists and he grabbed hers.

Antigone’s teeth were clenched, her eyes wide. “Cy, if you let go, I’m going to kill you.”

Cyrus smiled. “If I let go, you’re going to float away in a black river.”

Antigone jumped, clipped her knee on the edge, and fell inside.

“Great!” Gunner yelled. “Cyrus, there should be a lever in the front of the basket. Pull it when I tell you.”

Cyrus found the lever and waited. Powdered rust came off on his hands.

The basket jerked and the sound of grinding metal gears echoed in the tunnel.

He stood up and looked over the edge. Gunner was standing beside another lever in the wall. Two huge flaps had opened out of the sides of the river. Water was mounding over and around them, forcing them forward.

Something in the ceiling began to click like a roller coaster.

Cyrus looked up. The basket hung from a pulley, straddling the grease-covered cable above the water. But two smaller cables were looped onto hooks on the pulley, and they ran up into the ceiling, where an enormous spring as thick as Cyrus’s thigh was whining as it stretched.

“Oh, gosh.” Biting his lip, Cyrus sat down on his sister’s feet. She had Horace’s head propped on her lap and was squinting at his shoulder.

“The bleeding stopped,” she said. “At least on the outside.”

The clicking in the ceiling slowed. A final metallic click. And then … nothing.

“Get yourselves to the Galleria!” Gunner’s voice filled the tunnel. “Someone will take Horace to the hospitalers. Now hang on tight and flip the lever. I’ll look you up in Ashtown.”

Cyrus slid back beside his sister. “Hold on, Tigs. This is dumb. Really dumb. Are you ready?”

Antigone sniffed and tucked back her hair. “No,” she said. “Not even close. Not even a little bit. Now do it.”

Cyrus kicked the lever.