The Drowned Vault Page 16

  Phoenix rolled his head slowly and stared at the face that had once belonged to Lawrence Smith—peaceful, handsome, undecayed. He wasn’t really alive, and it was infuriating. He was supposed to be. That was the whole point of the tooth—power over life and death, even among the transmortals. The power was there; Phoenix could feel it. Always … feeling it … around him. In him. But handling it? The handles were slippery and hard to find. And now his eyes twitched, and his fingers never stopped moving.

  Phoenix brushed his tangled and unwashed black hair back over his shoulders as he hobbled toward Lawrence. Not Lawrence. Puppet Lawrence manipulated into walking around—he might as well be hooked to strings. There was no soul in there, no human spirit, just the borrowed life force of a sleeping wild pig two walls away. And if the pig woke up in its pen, there would be problems. The man shape in front of Phoenix would collapse right where it stood. And if Phoenix kept playing with his puppet for much longer, the pig would never wake up at all. Which would be a shame. The pig was the most useful battery Phoenix had found. It had already outlasted three stray dogs and two big gators.

  Phoenix stepped even closer to Lawrence, studying the man’s gently closed bluish eyelids. He should walk him back into the freezer now, while he was still on his feet. But maybe the time had come for another risk.

  Inhaling sharply through his teeth, Phoenix flipped open the silver knob on the top of his cane, revealing the extreme tip of a tooth that had once been as long as a sword. It was black, blacker than night’s night, a light-empty triangle. He pressed the tip of the tooth to the lips of the body that had belonged to Lawrence Smith.

  “Puppet,” said Phoenix. “Open your eyes.”

  The eyelids didn’t even flutter. Instead, all at once, the body went limp, collapsing to the ground in a tangled pile of limbs.

  Through two walls, a pig squealed. Out in the darkness, a girl screamed.

  Phoenix wheeled around, eyeing the black. Nothing. He stepped onto the ramp.

  “Who’s there, now?” he drawled loudly. He tapped his cane on the planks. “Ain’t polite to spy, darling.”

  “Is it polite to kill people?” The young voice floated out of the darkness.

  Phoenix laughed. “Oh, you’ve clearly misunderstood the circumstances—not that I blame you, mind.” He looked at the body. “These circumstances aren’t the easiest to grab at a glance. For myself, sometimes I wish I had a little instruction manual.”

  “He’s not dead? You didn’t kill him?”

  Phoenix grinned slowly. “Now, I can’t lie to a sweet little thing like you, Dixie Mist-from-down-the-way. Wouldn’t be neighborly. This man is dead, God rest him, but I didn’t kill him. Leastways, I didn’t do it myself. Some rough men did it for me, but that was just about three years ago now, and in another state.”

  Phoenix waited, smiling at the shadows that surrounded the base of the ramp. The girl, he knew, would be confused by every single thing he’d just said. And she wouldn’t like that he knew who she was. How could he not notice such a close little neighbor? He’d been saving her for later, and she hadn’t caused any trouble to speak of.

  In the distance, he could hear a boat—his boat.

  “Dixie,” he said, “why don’t you come on in and we can talk about all sorts of things. Behave yourself, and I might even let you see your daddy.” He sighed. “But if you run … I’m afraid there’ll be dogs on your heels. Dogs like you ain’t never seen and never hope to see.”

  One second of silence. Two. Three. The boat was growing closer. And on that boat … Phoenix’s smile became genuine, the smile of a child ready to open the only present he really wants, a present he’s already peeked inside. The boat was bringing him his handles, an instruction manual of sorts. In a few days, he would truly know how to use the tooth, he was sure of it.

  No more puppets. Soldiers would be better.

  At the bottom of the ramp, Dixie Mist stepped into view. “You’re a liar,” she said.

  “Sometimes,” Phoenix said, nodding. He inhaled the muggy river air slowly, savoring the smell. He was listening to the boat. “But not tonight. Tonight I become the Truth.”

  He turned and walked back inside, stepping around the body of Lawrence Smith. He’d have him lugged back into the freezer soon enough.

  Dixie Mist chewed her lower lip. Her father? He was inside? It couldn’t be true. Not if he was okay. And that poor man up there was dead. But he couldn’t have been dead for three years—he’d been walking around. She’d seen him. He’d opened the big door.

  She inched up the ramp and then paused. Was it a trap? But what would that crazy Mr. One Hand in the dirty white coat want with her? He wasn’t paying her any mind at all.

  There were men’s voices inside. And she could see the lights on a boat flashing through the pylons beneath the factory. A long rattling echo told her that another big door had been thrown open somewhere.

  Two laughing men in shirtsleeves suddenly stepped into view, and Dixie caught her breath. One had a tightly shaved head. The other wore a cap. Both had tattoos of their own bones traced onto their bare arms. Both were barefoot. And they moved strangely—fluidly, like bored cats. They were clearly aware that she was watching them, but they also clearly didn’t care.

  One of them jerked the body up off the ground and slung it easily over his shoulder. Still laughing, the two walked away.

  Dixie exhaled. No one was paying any attention. She could hear someone shouting about unloading the boat and someone else complaining about the time.

  She couldn’t walk away. Not without looking inside. One Hand had talked about her father. And he had known who she was. He had to know where she lived.

  Dixie Mist walked slowly up the ramp, into brighter and brighter light, into her father’s old factory.

  When she stepped inside, she saw three men working an old timber crane, hauling something up through a hatch in the floor. One Hand was with them, his straggly black hair dangling in his face, the silver knob on his cane pressed against his lips.

  The room was cluttered. There were bookshelves everywhere. Near the middle of the room was a large table covered with papers. Worn couches and deep chairs were scattered around without design. Her father’s old work radio hung from a hook. She saw the old familiar ladders and tight spiral stairs her father had let her climb up through the holes in the ceiling. A regiment of oversize clear lightbulbs—each as big as a pumpkin—dangled in tight rows from the beamed ceiling. The timber walls and plank floors glistened in the light—the long, hard work of Dixie’s father. She’d watched him sand these timbers, and she’d watched him lacquer them over and over again until they’d been sufficiently reborn.

  Dixie’s heart was pounding, but she wasn’t afraid. Not anymore. Her ringing ears, her grinding molars—this was anger. These men had stolen everything.

  “Where is he?” Her voice was louder than she’d expected it to be, but the men didn’t flinch. They kept hauling on their rope. A large crate was rising through the floor. Tattooed arms shone beneath sweat.

  “Hey!” Dixie yelled. “Where’s my father? This place is ours!”

  The men swung the wooden boom away from the hole as the crate banged onto the floor.

  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 …,” sa
id 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

  DANIEL SMITH 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.