eighteen 
eighteen CYRUS WAS STANDING ON A STATUE floating in black water. She was higher now. Inches higher. He wheeled around. There was Dan, eyes shut, head resting on his arms. There was Antigone, braiding her hair.
“Dan!” Cyrus yelled. “We’re being bombed! I don’t have time for this!”
“Have you found the girl?” Dan asked. His voice was tense. “You have to find her. There’s not much time. Go! You shouldn’t be here right now!”
Cyrus couldn’t breathe. He had been on the cellar stairs when the last round of bombs dropped the world on him. Stone rubble was pressing down on his chest, and his mouth was full of blood. He wormed free of the pressure and began to hack out dust with his first weak breaths. At least he wasn’t burned. He hated burns. He managed to twist onto his side and pulled himself in the direction he believed to be up. It was up. He could see fire. And gray daylight.
Cyrus crawled up the rubble slope into what had been the kitchen. Now it was a crater of smoking stone with walls that were mostly holes. He snorted and spat out blood made black with dust.
“Cyrus!”
He looked up. Antigone was climbing toward him over a hill of glass and stone where the kitchen windows had once been. She was wet from the rain, and she was dirty, but she was wearing her leather coat belted. Gun on one hip and long knife on the other. Angel Skin alive with light at her throat. Her hair pulled back into a tight braid. She was dressed exactly as she had been in the dream.
She was hurrying forward. She was pulling rubble off of him. She was checking him for broken bones. She was talking.
Cyrus wasn’t listening.
“Hey,” he said. “Antigone.”
She paused, her eyes spilling worry.
“We have to get into the Burials. Like, now.”
Radu Bey walked barefoot through his human hall, chains dragging behind him. Anann the Morrigan walked with him, stride for stride. Muffled by the walls of bodies but still audible, sirens whined in the world outside. The full force of the Ordo Draconis had assembled in his temple. They were silent. They were ready. But with so many transmortals in one place, the city blocks around them had slipped into chaos.
Outside, the police. Again. Emergency, emergency. Humans are weaklings. Azazel, the dragon inside him, could sense every breathing body the police dragged away from his temple. And before they could be taken too far away, Radu felt Azazel ripple and slither beneath the skin of his chest as the serpent used the power of the temple to snip their soul strings and send another servant into death.
This building had never been meant as a long-term home. Radu smiled. It was a launching point. An egg that would hatch into his new empire. And it had been his first real feed. Something quick and easy after centuries of chains.
Tonight, when every Burial of Ashtown had been emptied into his temple, he would lead his army of gods out into the crowded streets and show them the tall towers of light, and he would make them his. Together they would shatter the City of Man with chaos, ascend the great towers, and then turn their eyes to the world.
Tonight, he would claim his capital city.
Radu’s first wave had reached Ashtown, and he could see fire when he shut his eyes. The second wave would be sweeping the rubble for survivors … and for any of Phoenix’s Reborn with their tooth potions. The potions were a worry, but Phoenix would not have sent the sample to him unless he had wanted Radu to worry. It was potent, but it was a bluff. Phoenix couldn’t possibly have produced enough of it to down two dozen transmortals for any length of time, let alone two hundred. It was a complicated ritual preparation that required at least one full phase of the moon to mature. Since Phoenix’s factory had been destroyed, there hadn’t been time for that many new batches. One batch, maybe, but he would have needed vats and vats boiling down the mixture for a month to get as much as he would need. The sheer strength of Radu’s force was enough to overwhelm even one thousand of the Reborn if they were foolish enough to engage the gods with only a few tranquilizing dart guns.
“The road is long ready,” Anann said. “Your army is waiting. My sister is waiting.”
“Yes,” Radu said. “And she can wait a little longer.”
Anann grabbed his arm and the two stopped.
“You swore to me,” she said. “She will be the first. She is waiting.”
“As is Phoenix,” Radu said. “We will tread cautiously when the path is prepared by an enemy, even one as weak as Phoenix.”
He studied the hard, scarred face of Anann the Morrigan. There was beauty in her bloodthirst, in her dedication. She was like the cliffs along the North Sea—jagged of soul, pitiless, unmoving. He traced one of the blue ink scales on her neck with a long bronze finger.
“We will wake your sister,” he said. “We will bring her here. The altar is ready. I myself will stand with you as she receives her sacrifice, and Azazel shall honor her power with a temple of ten thousand souls when this city falls.”
The charge guns had all been buried or burned. When Cyrus and most of the mortals had been helped up out of the rubble, Nolan began passing out weapons from his bag. Some he handled casually and quickly, but others received his full attention, and he was careful to touch them only with his gloves.
Horace took a stone hatchet with a heavy black head. Nolan handled it like a jeweled egg.
Gunner and Jeb both already had sidearms, but they took long black knives that made Nolan’s lip curl, and as many small glass canisters of pyro-newt eggs as he would give them. The eggs themselves were packed tight inside glass and surrounded with clear fluid. They looked like large charcoal olives, but Cyrus could see a dull orange glow in the center of each one.
Cyrus watched Jeb, stitched up and grit covered, one eye patched and one eye squinting at the glowing eggs in his hand. Jeb was coming straight from the hospital back into battle.
Nolan, shivering, handed Jax a short black machete, and Diana a black trumpet-mouthed blunderbuss, along with a bag of powder and a heavy sack of tooth-charmed shot.
“Jeb,” Cyrus said.
Jeb looked up at him.
“Thanks,” Cyrus said. “For helping get my mom out of here. I haven’t seen you since.”
Jeb cracked a dusty grin. “Anytime. You’d do the same for me.”
Diana was watching the two of them from beside her father. Cyrus glanced at her, at her father, and then back down at Nolan’s bag.
Yes, he would. For Jeb’s mom. Diana’s mom.
Rupert was helping Sterling to his feet. Niffy was nowhere to be seen.
The Captain and Gilgamesh exploded up from another buried cellar. Arachne crawled out behind them.
The Captain roared, his face red and purple, his body shaking with anger. He stomped rubble off of his knee-high boots and then jerked his dragon sword out of its sheath.
“Where are the beasties?” he bellowed. “Where are the fools who desecrate these halls with flame and fire?”
While the Captain raged, Gilgamesh crossed to Nolan and held out his huge six-fingered hand. Nolan hesitated. Then he drew out a thick horn bow, unstrung. He handed it to Gil along with a quiver packed tight with thick black feathered shafts. The arrowheads were made of glistening obsidian.
“Don’t touch the tips,” Nolan said. “Or maybe you should. Touch them with your chest.”
Gil smiled.
Sterling was wobbling on his metal feet.
Nolan carefully handed Rupert a long, gently curving black sword and a belt of six glass spheres. Cyrus had seen them used before. Break them and a crackling lightning ball would rip through a room. Rupert strapped them on above the double holster he already wore.
“Transmortals with me,” Rupert said. “Robert, get the mortals down to the planes and out of here.”
“Hold on!” Gunner blurted. “I didn’t come to run.”
“Rupe,” Jeb said, “I stand with you.”
Cyrus reached into Nolan’s bag and grabbed one canister of pyro-newt eggs and a long fat-bladed knife. When he touched it, a cold electric whisper shot all the way up into his shoulder. He and that knife had both known the Dragon’s Tooth. But he didn’t have time to wonder or remember or wish about what had been. He grabbed Antigone’s arm.
“Come with me,” he whispered. “Right now.” Then he turned and ran.
He heard Rupert groan. Glancing back, he saw Antigone on his heels. Diana watched him go, and Dennis danced in place, eager but too afraid to follow.
“John,” Rupert said. “Go.”
The Captain jumped after them.
Cyrus scrambled through the gash in the wall where a door had been and slid into the great hallway. Up ahead, he saw that Brendan’s boat had toppled from its stand. Chandeliers and portions of the ceiling had dropped onto the tile floor. At the far end, the tall wooden door to the courtyard had been blown in, and its splintered remains leaned against a wall of crushed displays, still smoking, its jagged edges licked with flames.
Beyond it, an unseen Leon began to snort and roar.
Cyrus didn’t know exactly where he was going, but he had to trust in Dan’s dream, and he had to move fast. There was girl somewhere who was going to be sacrificed, and he was meant to find her. He was meant to send Babd Catha back down into the dark, along with the hundreds of others who would try to rise behind her if he failed. And that meant he had to go down himself. Way down. Through doors Nolan had never let him open. As deep as or deeper than he had ever been.
He knew where to start. Picking up speed, dodging rubble, he veered around the toppled boat and slammed against a locked door that he knew would lead him to a hallway with stairs down into hallways with stairs down into chambers with even more stairs down. This was the way to the Polygon. But there were forks to some of those stairwells as well. There were doors on those lower levels that led to whole subterranean wings of Burials.
From the main entrance, Leon belched rage and Cyrus paused, listening to the echo. He couldn’t see past all the rubble, but he could hear shouting and the turtle’s chain rattling and jerking. Antigone stopped beside him.
“Hold this,” Cyrus said. He handed Antigone the pyro-newt eggs and tucked the knife into his belt. Then he slipped Patricia off his wrist, slid the keys off her tail into his hand, and raised the snake up to his neck.
The Captain grabbed Cyrus’s shoulder.
“Come on then, lad,” he said. “Back to the flock with you.”
Cyrus looked up into the grizzled face and sea-sharpened eyes of his ancestor.
“They’re here,” Cyrus whispered. “They’re coming.”
A tall shape ran up to the distant shattered door and leapt onto the side of the toppled boat. He wore leather on his arms, a long chain-mail shirt with loose flaps that hung between his knees, and a gleaming silver onion-shaped helmet with a single gold spike on the crown. He had a thin black beard that looked like lichen drooping off a tree branch, but his face was too solid for a mortal’s, and his eyes seemed to eat the light. Perched on the boat, he raised a sword in each hand, pointing them stiffly at the little group.
The Captain backed into the middle of the hallway with his sword arm.
“Tamerlane,” the Captain said.
“Dog,” said the man on the boat. Another shape jumped up beside him—a man’s shape, but his face was hidden behind a mail mask. Three stones dangled from cords in his right hand, and he held a spear with a long, forking blade in his left.
“Crescens,” the Captain said. “Will I find every maggot in the rot of this carcass?”
A blond woman walked slowly around the boat, and the air seemed to ripple away from her like heat on a highway. She raised a long, slender, jewel-encrusted musket to her shoulder. Leon the turtle was still bellowing. More were coming.
“Rupe!” Antigone shouted, and she threw the jar of pyro-newt eggs.
The glass shattered at the foot of the boat. The eggs bounced out and rolled across the floor. The transmortals watched them, unworried, like bored children. For one moment, nothing. And then each egg flickered to life and sought a target, darting for the closest warm body.
With concussions like gunshots, eggs punched into all three transmortals at once. Red fire slammed them into walls and sent them tumbling. One egg slammed into the Captain’s breastplate, throwing him backward. The red flash kicked Cyrus and Antigone up against the door, but they kept their feet.
Cyrus fed his gold key into the locked door, pushed through it into cool darkness, and dragged his sister inside. Slamming it behind them, he locked it as quickly as he could.
“Rise if ye dare!” the Captain was shouting. “I’ll reap your devil guts for chum!”
More gunshots. Or eggs. And shouting.
“Cy, what are we doing? Where are we going?” Antigone was breathless. Cyrus couldn’t blame her. His heart was pounding and his lungs were fluttering. Just three transmortals. And there would be dozens. Hundreds? The reality of it was sinking in. Rupert wasn’t a pessimist. He might have actually seen the only way through this. Even if he and Antigone stopped the sacrifice and kept things from getting worse, Radu and all his transmortals would still be waiting for them after. And probably Phoenix. Along with his Reborn.
Justice and Wrath and Rupert might have stood a better chance.
Patricia slid easily off of Cyrus’s neck and wound her glow around his hand. He slipped his finger through the key ring and pulled his sister down the hallway.
“We have to get down,” Cyrus said. “Into the Burials. There’s one we have to find. Dan had a dream. We can’t stop all of them. But there’s one … we have to.” He tried not to picture all the stone fingers rising out of the water in the dream. He tried not to think about leaving his friends under attack. Doom seemed heavy in the air around him, slowing his blood, slowing his limbs. “And a pair of huge statues,” he added. “It would be good if we found them. Just in case this goes as bad as Rupe thinks it will.”
They reached the first stairs and Cyrus turned, raising Patricia, studying his sister’s terrified face in the silver glow.
“I’m sorry I told you to come,” he said. “I … this might be it, Tigs.”
Antigone shook her head. “No. It’s not. No way. Cowboy up, Tarzan. Let’s go.”
Cyrus actually laughed. He felt lighter just hearing her use the line from the dream. Antigone forced him down onto the stairs.
The first part of the descent was familiar. They ran down halls crammed with storage and furniture mounded beneath sheets. They watched for the ominous-looking doors—the oldest doors, the doors of foreboding that they had always been told not to open. Those would lead them down.
The first door they tried led to a massive amount of antique and very clearly forgotten janitorial supplies. The second door led to spiral stairs that only ran up. The third door led to a completely empty room, with a stone floor layered in dust and rattraps in the corners.
They ducked back out and moved on.
“So,” Antigone asked, “what else can you tell me about this Burial we’re supposed to find?”
“It’s bad,” Cyrus said. He was distracted and breathing hard. He slowed down in the hallway. Something was nagging at him. “Nasty woman war goddess human sacrifice girl going to die to bring her back.” He didn’t even hear himself. He’d been in two Burials before. One had been the Captain’s drowned vault. The other had been Rasputin’s, and he’d been sneaking around with his Solomon Keys for the first time when he’d found it. That was one of the most recent Burials, so it had been higher up, but it had still been hidden—the floor of an empty room had fallen away into stairs.
Boom.
The sound was distant enough, but the stone floor vibrated slightly under Cyrus’s feet. That had been huge. His friends were up there. Diana was up … No. He couldn’t think about that right now. He couldn’t be Rupert. Individuals might die. They all might die. But they couldn’t lose this fight.
Antigone was looking around at the walls. She was thinking about the people they’d left behind.
“The Burials don’t have doors,” Cyrus said suddenly. “I mean, they do. But not normal wood-and-hinges doors.”
Antigone faced him. “Cy, do you—”
“The empty room,” Cyrus said. And he ran back the way they had come.
Inside the empty room, Cyrus began scraping at the dusty floor with his feet. Rasputin’s Burial had been opened with a single keyhole set in a stone. The Captain’s had been a keyhole in an epitaph.
Antigone worked beside him. A dust cloud billowed up around their knees. Soon they wouldn’t be able to see at all.
Antigone moved along the walls. She paused in a corner.
“Cy?”
Cyrus jumped over beside her. Antigone dragged her foot across a tiny silver chain with seven links inlaid in a single stone. In the middle of the last one, there was a keyhole.
Cyrus dropped to his knees, slid his silver key into the hole, and turned.
The room echoed with the sound of grinding stone. The floor sank away into a flight of stairs.
Ancient air crawled up through the dust to meet the Smiths.
“Okay,” Cyrus said. “Stay with the keys until I call you. It will shut again if I pull them out.”
Cyrus raised Patricia above his head and stared at the dark spiral descent at his feet. He didn’t have time to be afraid. He didn’t have time to worry. He drew the fat-bladed knife he’d taken from Nolan’s bag and pointed the dark naked steel in front of him. His hand buzzed with cold power, a charmed memory of the Reaper’s Blade itself.
From here, it was all new—very old—territory. He dropped onto the stairs, counting every quick step with a tongue-tip whisper inside his teeth. From here, he had to track his direction like Rupert had shown him.
The stairs were longer than he had expected. The dropping floor had simply bridged him down to solid permanent stairs that bent and curled and twisted instead of keeping a consistent spiral. His legs tightened and grew heavy. His whispered count slurred into one prolonged but punchy hiss.
The air was suddenly cooler on his face and in his lungs. It thickened so much, he felt like he was splashing through it.
And his feet hit the bottom. He stopped, breathing hard. Heavy dust, undisturbed for centuries, swirled away from him.
There was no choice of paths. A single arched corridor stretched away from the stairs, disappearing in nothingness beyond Patricia’s glow.
He waited. He listened. Something hidden dripped. Something invisible scratched. The corridor was creepy enough to send any sane person right back up the stairs. But Cyrus had lived in the Polygon, bathing in icy drips, sleeping just out of reach of thousands of scratching feet. And he was here in search of one of the sleeping never-dead because his brother had shown him dreams.
“Eighty-four, up,” he whispered. He extended Patricia left and right. No doorways, no keyholes.
“Tigs!” He threw his voice back over his shoulder. A second later, grinding stone echoed above him. The floor vibrated beneath his feet.
“Wow, that was close!” Antigone’s voice rattled down around him and the grinding banged to a stop. He could hear her incredibly slow footsteps, like she was stopping to tie her shoes on each step.
“Cyrus? Cy? Could you turn Patricia on, please? It’s so dark, I feel dizzy.”
Cyrus raced back up the steps, three at a time, burning his legs and his lungs all over again by the time he reached his sister.
Antigone handed him the keys as he caught his breath. A dozen steps above her, the stairs simply stopped. The floor had closed. The ceiling was solid above them and well out of reach.
“Great.” Cyrus dropped the keys into his pocket. “One light, one set of keys, we stay together now. And we have to hurry.”
At the bottom, Cyrus didn’t stop to let Antigone take in the corridor. He settled into a jog, whispering his step count as he did, sweeping Patricia back and forth, trying to watch the walls.
The corridor began to slope down, and at the same time, it bent slowly to the right.
“Cy!”
Cyrus stopped before his forty-second step. A large single slab of stone was built into the left-hand side. It was peaked and slightly smaller than a door, though bigger than the epitaph stone that had sealed the Captain’s underwater chamber.
Cyrus extended his snake hand toward it, and Antigone ran her hands over the stone’s uneven surface. A tiny trickle of water from the ceiling had marred the stone over centuries, striping it with bulging mineral deposits that looked like vertical sinews. Right in the center, there was a small inscription and a single silver chain-link inset around a keyhole.
“It’s in Latin,” Antigone said.
“This is why I brought you,” said Cyrus. “What does it say? The nasty female we’re looking for is called Babd Cathy.”
“Pietru Cax-something,” Antigone said. “The name isn’t Latin. It’s Greekish, and it’s definitely not Babd or female.” She looked back at her brother. “It’s like an epitaph, but it’s mostly hidden now. Do we open it to check?”
Cyrus shook his head. “No time. Come on.”
He picked up his count at forty-three, but the next stone was only ten steps farther on. And it belonged to someone named Ambrosius. Antigone skimmed the epitaph.
“Something about being a father of witches,” she said. They moved on, but only ten more steps.
“Horsa,” Antigone said. “Never heard of him. Or her, I guess. Might be a feminine ending.” The inscription was badly obstructed. “Invader, blood drinker, brother to someone, so definitely a guy.”
Ten more quick steps around the curve and Cyrus slowed before he even saw the stone.
Slab number four. Another silver link around a keyhole. There had been seven links in the floor of the entry room, and Cyrus was starting to think he knew why.
This slab was already different. The stone was gray, but veined with green smokelike swirls. And when Cyrus wasn’t looking directly at it, the green veins seemed to be moving. The wet mineral deposits from the ceiling parted around this stone, leaving it clean. There wasn’t even any dust.
The inscription was in the sharp chopped lines of Sanskrit or something like it.
Antigone touched the stone and jerked her hand back. The surface had depressed under her fingers like mud. While Cyrus watched, his sister’s finger dents disappeared. The Sanskrit disappeared. With a low, wet sucking sound, another inscription formed.
In English.
Smoky green veins writhed through it. The silver link sprouted silver branches and tiny silver leaves.
“Okay …,” Cyrus said. He turned to move on.
“The touch of life,” Antigone said. “I’ve heard of him. He wanted to be Buried, but Brendan had him make two living statues first.”
Cyrus looked at his sister. He looked back at the stone that should have been stone but was acting like clay—if clay could rewrite things, and if it could swirl colors like water.
“The Brothers Below?” Cyrus asked. “Those living statues? This guy made them?”
“That’s what Lemon said,” Antigone answered. “A Druid with the touch of life.”
Cyrus wanted to forget Babd. If this guy had made the Brothers, then maybe he could change the Brothers. He might be able to tell Cyrus where to find them. He could definitely tell him how to wake them, and how to keep them from killing absolutely everything. Maybe.
Cyrus tallied his step count in his head. This was not what he was supposed to be looking for … not if he believed Dan. And he did. He had to. But the maker of the Brothers?
He needed to stay on task. Cyrus nodded at Antigone, sheathed his knife, and jogged on, dragging his fingers down the wall as he went, no longer counting his steps.
The next three slabs in the curving corridor turned up an Italian name, a French name, and more Latin. But no Babds and no Cathas. Not even a Cathy.
And no other stairs. No other doors or corridors. Nothing.
Cyrus kicked the dead end. He kicked it until his foot screamed, and then he kicked it one more time. Breathing hard, he turned around, put his hands on his knees, and leaned against the wall. The cool stone pulled the heat from his back but not from his frustration. Somewhere up above him, people who died were fighting people who didn’t. They needed him to get this done and get up there. He had to be faster. He had to find the Burial of a feather-haired war goddess with a skeleton face and stop a human sacrifice so that the real versions of every statue in Dan’s black dream water wouldn’t rise up around them and destroy the real world. And now he couldn’t even stay focused on that.
QUICK. With the touch of life …
He breathed slowly, trying to clear his head. Dream Dan had told him that Antigone would die if he didn’t find Babd Catha and prevent her from rising. In which case, he should be sprinting back up those long stairs already, trying to find a way out of this place, and a way into the next dank suite of Burials.
Cyrus wiped his forehead on the back of his wrist.
“Cy?” Antigone asked. “What are we doing?”
Cyrus slid down into a crouch. He had to make a decision now.
“Quick,” he said. “We find out about this touch of life.”
Oliver Laughlin yawned and stretched his Reborn but still adolescent body. He crossed his feet at the ankles and folded his hands around the Dragon’s Tooth, letting them rest on his stomach. The plane was absurdly loud and absurdly cold, but collecting as many aircraft as he had over the last few weeks had required the remainder of his wealth and a great deal of theft. Pickiness would have been foolish. And he could, after all, silence the noise inside his skull; he could push warmth through his body. The flip-down stretcher he had claimed for himself was uncomfortable enough that it must have been intended for use by the dead. But that could be altered within his mind as well. Complaining nerves were tamed and his mind focused on the broader game at hand.
Phoenix was striking for the throat.
Radu was testing the trap. He had firebombed Ashtown and sent in a team of at least nine transmortals. Somehow, Rupert Greeves was on-site, but he wouldn’t be for long.
Radu Bey would enter Ashtown. The Burials would be opened, and Phoenix and two hundred of his sons would be in place, ready to constrict.
The old powers would be offered a choice.
Mortality: true, complete, and final death.
Immortality: but only in blood-bound allegiance to Phoenix.
Phoenix knew that some would fight. But his Reborn would be firing darts full of tooth potion already tested and proven in that skirmish in the cigar factory. If the darts could stun Gilgamesh, a sufficient number could temporarily drop any of the transmortals. Phoenix had even sent Radu a little sample along with the ritual tokens to help him enter Ashtown—a threat to accompany his gift.
In the end, Phoenix expected to execute many with the tooth that tipped his cane—perhaps even rebestowing transmortality on a few of his most-trusted Reborn sons. But surely most of the dragons would kneel. They were lovers of power, unused to fear. They would feel terror and awe, and they would be bound to him.
And then he would govern the storm.
Oliver yawned and felt the pleasure of young lungs inside a taut chest, undecayed by age. The human authorities were scurrying. A plane had crashed in the lake. The smoke rising up from Ashtown would be visible for miles. Some fools were sure to investigate.
Oliver closed his eyes and smiled at the thought of what those people would be walking into.
The living stone was warm beneath Cyrus’s palm. It felt like mud, but it was dry, and as dense and heavy as stone. Because it was stone. If he punched it, his knuckles would break. But when he pressed on it lightly, it depressed beneath his fingers. If he had time to experiment, he could probably stab his knife right through the slab, one slow centimeter at a time.
“Cy, are you sure about this?” Antigone chewed her lower lip while she watched.
“Of course not,” Cyrus said. “I’m unsure about everything right now.”
The silver Solomon Key rippled and morphed into a long, jagged leaf as he slid it into the hole and turned.
The slab bent inward slowly in the center, and then swung open.
The room inside was on fire with sunlight. Cyrus staggered back across the hall, blinking. Antigone threw an arm up over her eyes.
Warm air swirled out into the corridor. The floor of the chamber was covered with vines and grass and bright flowers that looked like they were made of pottery or porcelain, but all of it was moving, bending slightly in a breeze. The chamber was deep, the vaulted ceiling high, and the far wall held the white fiery orb of a false sun. It was setting, inching down toward the floor. Every pillar had sprouted branches, and they were heavy with fruit and blossoms. Huge clusters of grapes hung down from the ceiling.
Cyrus stepped inside, and the grass bent around his feet, light enough to be real.
In the center of the room, water burbled out of the stone floor and flowed in a small circular river. Inside that circle, the grass was thick and emerald bright, bent and tangled in a ring like a nest.
In that nest, a small boy was sleeping. He was on his side with his knees pulled up to his chest. He wore pale rawhide trousers but was shirtless. His skin was the color of caramel and was thickly spattered with dark chocolate freckles. He had no hair.
“Um, excuse me?” Cyrus inched forward. “Hello?”
The boy’s eyes opened. They were even greener than Patricia’s. As green as two glowing leaves held up in front of the sun.
He sat up, looking from Cyrus to Antigone in the open doorway. He blinked, and then stretched, bending slowly backward until his body was shaped like a horseshoe. In a flash, he snapped back upright. Apart from the baldness, he didn’t look more than eight years old.
Cyrus cleared his throat. “I’m Cyrus, and this is my sister, Antigone. We need your help.”
The boy’s bright eyes narrowed. After a moment, he leapt to his feet. As he did, his legs changed, and a goat’s body sprouted below his waist. He landed on four prancing hooves, now a young goat centaur. He turned in a circle, while Cyrus and Antigone gaped at the boy’s freckled torso on the spotted goat’s body. Finally, he faced them, a rear hoof still scraping at the grass. When he spoke, his voice was a wide whisper that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once but was still barely louder than the little stream that encircled him.
“I plucked Cyrus the mighty Persian from his goatherd home,” he said. “You are not he, but perhaps his distant echo. I wept for Antigone as she hung in the cave, her tomb. You have not her darkness.”
“Different people,” Cyrus said. “Not us. But we really do need your help. We have to stop the sacrifice of some girl we don’t even know, though I did see her face in a dream. And I think we’re going to need the Brothers Below or something just as strong. Is there any way we can find them and wake them up without dying?”
The boy cocked his head. “I do not know them.”
“Justice and Wrath,” Cyrus said.
“Law hearts,” said Antigone. “You made them for Brendan in exchange for this Burial.”
The goat boy shut his eyes, breathing slowly. He shook his head.
“Listen,” Cyrus said, moving forward. “The transmortals are coming. Radu Bey is coming. He’s going to wake up some crazy war goddess without a face, and if she gets this sacrifice, then she’ll be too strong to stop and all the people I love are going to die, and these Burials will be opened, and the world is going to get absolutely hammered with pretty much every single member of the awful villain hall of fame all at once.”
“My sleep is older than these words. I do not know them.” The boy’s eyes stayed closed. His sun was sinking fast and the color of the room was shifting to red and orange. A small moon was rising on one wall.
“Immortals,” said Antigone. “Radu Bey is a Dracul, a blood sorcerer and dragon gin. He shares his flesh with Azazel.”
The boy flinched at the name, but his eyes stayed firmly closed.
“They’re coming to wake Babd Catha,” Cyrus said. “And everyone else will follow.”
At that name, the boy’s eyes snapped open. He stared straight into Cyrus’s and down inside him. Cyrus coughed. He felt heat in his head, in his gut, in his chest. And in a flash, it was gone.
“It is now the truth,” the boy whispered. “It must be made a lie. But you do not have the strength to face her. The Reaper has kissed the knife you now carry, but only the Reaper’s true blade can harm the storm crow, mother of death and devils.”
“Right,” said Cyrus. “Well, I lost that one. So we should find her Burial and make sure she doesn’t come out and no one kills this girl for her.”
“Her place of sleep is sealed with living stone from my hands,” the boy said. “There is no door, no keyhole, no hinge. The stone will swallow ax and pick and blast. A way cannot be opened from without.” His bald, speckled brow furrowed, and he shut his eyes again. “And yet she rises. A dragon has been given charms to guide him. He spends the strength of a thousand souls to come to her. A thousand more to wake her and open the stone from within.” His eyes opened, and their green was dimmed by sadness. “She will walk these halls. She, the oldest of evils but one, will see the sun.”
“What about the sacrifice?” Cyrus asked. “The girl. Can we stop that? Where is she?”
“Many hundreds of miles distant,” the boy said. “On an altar of men, in a chamber of bodies, in a temple of pain and slowly departing souls.”
Cyrus groaned. So Dan’s dream had simply been an announcement. It was done. Babd Catha was rising no matter what, and her human sacrifice was hundreds of miles away. All the stone shapes would rise up from the water, and he knew what that meant. Dan had seen death for all of them. That was all that was left—for Cyrus and for his sister and for his friends, for everyone he had called to join in the impossible defense of Ashtown. Some general.
Antigone shivered. She had actually seen pictures of Radu’s old body buildings. There was a new one? And some girl was inside one on an altar made of people? It made her feel sick.
“Okay,” Cyrus asked. “So how do we wake the Brothers Below?”
The boy’s goat legs vanished and he was human again.
“The kiss of law,” he said. “Breathe your law into them and stop their throats. They shall arise and slay.”
“Us first,” Cyrus said. “Right? I mean, if it has to be that way, it has to be that way. But I’d rather it not. And there are others, too.”
The boy didn’t blink. His eyes were still.
“Listen,” said Cyrus. “Please, help us. We’re not looking to purge silly people. If you made the Brothers for anything good at all, this is it. I have to stop Babd and Radu. There are people we love, and they are upstairs, fighting for us right now.”
Antigone moved up beside Cyrus, her face on fire in the false sunset. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ears and met the boy’s eyes.
“A boy called Quick,” she said. “Is that really your name?”
“I have worn many names,” the boy said. “I have taken many sacrifices. With a stolen spark of life I have grown much folly and seasoned much wine and spread much foolish love. Always, in every temple, in every rite, I was the fool, always I was Quick and Quickening.” He looked from sister to brother and back. “A greater Fool came. A greater Folly. I was broken and found peace.”
Cyrus looked at Antigone, impatient. She was smiling.
“We’re not in this situation because we’re wise,” she said. “Please. Help us.”
The boy nodded. “There is one deep rite to turn Justice, one only to shield men from Wrath.”
Quick spread his arms and the grass flew out of his circle. He stood on bare, slowly swirling stone, ringed with water.
“If you would belong to the Fool, slay me,” he said. “Your black blade can bite.” And in one second, his freckles vanished and his skin became perfect. In the next, he dropped to the ground, no longer a boy but a small sheep—short-haired and young.
Slay me.
“No,” said Cyrus. “I can’t do that.”
Antigone drew her brother’s knife and stepped across the water.
Throat.
“Tigs!” Cyrus jumped forward, but he was too slow. His sister bent quickly, grimaced, and jerked the blade up across the lamb’s throat.
Black blood stained white wool and ran down over the stone and into the water. The little river ran red.
The lamb leapt back up into the shape of the boy, one side of his throat gaping. But he didn’t seem to mind. The bloody boy traced three circles in the stone at his feet, and small living bowls sprouted up, pooling with his dark liquid life. The bowls didn’t stop growing until they had closed all the way into spheres the size of small oranges.
He handed two to Antigone, and they were as heavy as solid stone in her hands.
“To stop their mouths,” he whispered. He handed the third to Cyrus. “For those you love.” The boy looked at them both. “Kneel in the water.”
The round stone was hot in Cyrus’s hand. Antigone dropped to her knees in the tiny stream, and Cyrus followed her down, more than a little confused. Sharp, frigid water climbed over his calves and numbed his knees.
Quick reached out with both hands and tore Cyrus’s tight black sleeves off at the elbows. He threw them away. Shocked, Cyrus watched them unravel and sprout up into black grass where they landed.
With a snap of Quick’s hands, Antigone’s leather jacket was gone. He threw it aside, and Cyrus watched it roil on the ground like it was trying to stand up or take root or slide away. Antigone was wearing a short-sleeve olive safari shirt, buttoned only in the center. Beneath it, her pearly Angel Skin glowed. Winged images moved through the visible threads.
Quick smiled at the sight. Then he plunged his cupped hands into the cold water and slapped it up into Cyrus’s surprised face. Cyrus spat, blinking and dripping even as Quick did the same to his sister.
“Lay down your life,” he said, “and find that you have picked it up. Fear no raging beast.”
Quick dragged his fingers through the black blood on the stone. Then he touched his fingertips to Cyrus’s temples and painted a dark stripe down Cyrus’s forearms onto the backs of his hands, and did the same to Antigone. He pointed to the stone ball in Cyrus’s hand.
“Place those you love in a sealed room. Wipe that blood or your own blood around the door.”
Antigone studied the backs of her hands. “What about when it wears off?”
Again Quick smiled, and his eyes flashed spring and summer. “It is the Fool’s symbol, the mark of the lamb who ravaged ancient lions. The symbol fades, but what it symbolizes will live on, growing with every drumbeat of the sun. I am Quick; it is I who say this. Believe, and it is done.”
Cyrus looked at his sister and then at his bare arms. Patricia had been striped with blood as well. “This will keep us safe?” he asked.
The boy called Quick ran his hands over his soft stone, and his blood began to sprout back up into long emerald grass, spreading through the whole ring as it did, swirling into a nest. His throat had healed, and his freckles were returning.
“Safe?” he asked. “I am older than this world. It will not make you safe; it will make you dangerous—light to the darkness, life to the dead, love to the loveless, folly to the wise. Wage your war. Wake the Brothers.”
He curled himself back into his nest of grass.
“But where are they?” Cyrus asked. “How do we find them?”
“Follow your feet down when the floor falls,” Quick said. “Run. Justice and Wrath wait below the rising water. If you seek, you find. Live for those you love. Until the end”—Quick yawned—“of sorrows.”
Cyrus stood up in the little stream. He looked at the heavy stone ball in his hand, and then down at the sleeping boy, mottled with chocolate freckles. Antigone rose, dripping, beside him.
“May the Brothers burn the feathers of Babd Catha,” Quick whispered, his eyes blinking slowly. “And grind her skull to meal. As for the wingless beast, the dragon you called Azazel, feed him no pain.” He breathed in long and slow. “Tell only tales of laughter.”
The sun on the back wall set completely. Only the light of a moon and Patricia lit the sleeping boy in the grass.