Empire of Bones (36 page)

A sharp whistle shot out of the kitchen.

“Rupe!” Niffy shouted. “Planes! One low and landing, and one coming in fast—”

Engines roared. Air shrieked. Glass shattered. The ground shook Cyrus off his feet as white fire billowed out of the kitchen, sucking the air dry.

Rupert was on his face. Cyrus rolled over and elbow-crawled to him. He grabbed for his Keeper’s pulse, but Rupert knocked his hand away and pushed himself up, his back smoking slightly.

“Niffy!” Cyrus shouted, but he couldn’t hear his own voice. The only noise now was a shrill shrieking in his head, the impossibly loud ringing of some internal fire alarm.

Rupert scrambled up and ran into the obliterated kitchen. Cyrus staggered after him.

The wall of windows had become a gaping hole. The wall between the kitchen and the dining hall had been split wide, and the smoking remains had been thrown across the smoking tables. Everywhere, things were burning.

Tucked in the shattered shadow of a half-gone fire island, Sterling lay across the bodies of Jax and Niffy. All three were moving slowly.

Rupert turned to the dining hall.

Cyrus could hear him shouting but his voice was muffled and distant.

The Captain erupted out of the rubble, his square beard gray with dust, his breastplate dented, and his camouflage pants smoking. Bellowing curses, shaking with rage, he drew his sword and stomped toward Rupert.

Gilgamesh rose slowly, uncurling himself from around the body of Arachne. She was untouched and her bag uncrushed, but Gil’s broad back was a bloody swamp, studded with shrapnel.

“Robert!” Rupert waded into the destruction, heading toward the table where Robert, Jeb, Gunner, and Dennis had been sitting. A solid slab of wall lay across that part of the room.

Dennis emerged on his hands and knees from beneath it.

“We’re fine, Mr. Greeves!” he said. “All fine!”

Rupert spun back around.

“Cellars!” he shouted. “Everyone into the cellars. Get belowground! We’ll get pounded before we make our stand.”

Just as they touched down on the little green airstrip, Antigone saw the jet scream over and the fireball swallow the kitchen. And the Brendan’s rooms looked like they had already been destroyed.

“Not good!” Horace yelled behind her. The little lawyer was out of his seat and pressing his face against a window. “Not good! Not good! Not good!”

Nolan leaned forward between Diana and Antigone, looking up the slope at the smoke rising from Ashtown. The jet responsible was out of sight, but at the speed it had been moving, it could be back on top of them between two heartbeats.

“Let me out,” Nolan said. “Then take off and disappear.”

Antigone shook her head. “Diana can leave, but I’m coming with you.”

Diana pointed to a plane at the end of the runway. “That’s my dad’s,” she said. “I’m staying.”

As the plane stopped, Antigone pulled off her
headset and Nolan threw open the cabin door. Still wearing gloves, he had the heavy black bag slung over his shoulder.

Nolan, Antigone, Diana, and Horace jumped out one after the other. The props were still turning as they ran up the hill.

Low on the horizon, Antigone saw the jet approaching again. Nolan dropped to one knee and unzipped the long black bag. He jerked a short, fat brass tube from the jumble of gear. It had a brass wheel on the side, a handle and trigger on the underside, and an oversize musket-style hammer on the top. Nolan flipped a tiny lever, and the tube suddenly telescoped out to at least six feet long. Nolan’s hands were moving fast, digging back through the bag.

“Crank that wheel!” he yelled, and Antigone and Diana both jumped forward. Antigone had her hands on the wheel first, and she began to crank it clockwise as fast as she could. Three twists. Four, and it clicked.

Nolan dropped a dark canister down the wide end of the tube, grabbed the handle, and cocked the oversize hammer.

The snub-nosed, dual-nostriled jet roared in over Ashtown. Black spheres dropped from its belly as it came.

Nolan pointed the fat end of the tube straight up and pulled the trigger.

With a crack, the long telescope sprang back together, lifting Nolan off his feet and hurtling the canister up into the wet gray sky.

The jet’s bombs were erupting in a chain as they slammed into walls and roofs and grassy earth.

Nolan’s lonely canister slowed at its peak and crumbled into barely visible dots.

The jet roared beneath it.

The dots struck faster than Antigone could see. While bombs marched down the grassy slope toward the airstrip, hundreds of small explosions punched into the jet’s wings and cockpit.

Bomb heat lifted Antigone off the ground and flung her back onto the airstrip in a cloud of earth. She landed and rolled. Spitting dirt and blinking, she looked back up at the sky from her belly.

Trailing smoke, the jet hit the lake at full speed. A pillar of flame and water marked its end.

She could hear Nolan laughing. He was on the ground only a dozen feet away.

“Two hundred pyro-newt eggs in a crank launch!” He looked at her, eyes gleaming in his dirty face. “Not a banned weapon, but an antique!”

“Is it done?” Antigone asked. “Is that it?”

The pale boy leapt up easily, the fat tube dangling from his hand. He looked happier than Antigone had
ever seen him—full of a strength and energy that was, for once, not powered by rage.

“Done? Antigone Smith, it hasn’t even started.” Nolan shook his head. “That was just Radu knocking on the door.”

 eighteen 

THE QUICK AND THE DOOMED

C
YRUS 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.