The Dragon's Tooth (26 page)

Water dripped down his sun-mottled skin and off his beaked nose.

“Is he dead?” Antigone asked.

Cyrus tapped the man on the shoulder. “Hey! You’re not gonna catch much in the storm.”

“Cyrus …” Antigone leaned all the way over the man. A wave washed into the jetty and splintered on the stones. “He’s not breathing, Cyrus. He’s dead. He is. Call someone!”

“Who’s dead?” the man sputtered. “Where? Don’t just stand there! Dive in!”

Antigone jumped backward. Exhaling slowly, she closed her eyes for a moment, and then looked up at the sky.

“I’m sorry,” Cyrus said. “Mr. Douglas, right? We were worried about you. My sister thought you weren’t breathing.”

The old man’s sparse hair was matted down on his scalp. His skin was the color of spotted greasy cardboard, and his needle eyes hid in the shadows of badly organized coal-and-ash eyebrows. He glared at Cyrus, and then turned to Antigone.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry. You really scared me. Of course you were breathing. I just … never mind.”

“I wasn’t breathing,” the old man said. Water dripped from his unevenly stubbled chin. “Hardly ever breathe. Only when I need to talk, or when young bits of skin come rouse me from my diving.”

“Your diving?” Cyrus asked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean my diving, you giblet. I was fifty meters down, floating with my bulls, sometime in the summer of fifty-two. They’re still down there, wondering where I’ve got to.”

“Right,” said Cyrus. “Well, we heard you might be willing to be our free-diving tutor.”

“Your what?” the old man asked, squinting. “What summer is this, anyhow? Not fifty-two. Nope. Nope. This is a wheelchair and my hands look half in the grave. I’m no tutor, and never would have been to a pair like you. Scurry on, boyito. Leave me be.”

Cyrus’s mouth snapped shut, molars grinding.

“What bulls?” Antigone asked, shooting her brother an eye warning. “What did you mean, ‘floating with my bulls’?”

“Sharks, lovely.” The man showed her his false teeth. “Bull sharks. Some people have dogs. I had sharks. Keepers didn’t take kindly to them. Tried to spear every last one. I cried for a week, and I don’t mind saying it.” He looked back out over the lake.

Cyrus moved around to face the man. “My name is Cyrus Smith, and this is my sister, Antigone. We have to achieve the 1914 standards for Acolytes—it’s a long story. And that means free diving. Can’t you help us? Maybe start by telling us what free diving is.”

The man sneered.

“Oh, we know what free diving is.” Antigone shrugged, trying to seem casual. “If you don’t want to help, that’s fine. It seems easy. We’ll manage.”

“Ha!” The man snorted. “The dusky beauty says it’s easy. Can you hold your breath for ten minutes? Can you walk on the bottom of this lake in nothing but your skin? I can. I have. I will again.”

Cyrus looked at his sister. She crouched beside the wheelchair, staring into the old man’s eyes. And then she smiled. “Mr. Douglas, I don’t believe you.”

The old man laughed. “You think I’m dumb? You think I don’t know what you’re tryin’, girlie? Spray me down with a pretty smile, and then doubt me till I’m itchy? Maybe sixty years ago, that works. Not now. Keep your smilin’ to yourself. Now it’s all about making a fair trade.” He smirked. “I’ll tell you what—if you throw me in the lake right now, we got a deal.”

Antigone straightened and crossed her arms, taking in the wheelchair and the man’s skeleton arms. “No way.”

“I’ll do it,” said Cyrus. “If he sinks, oh well. He wasn’t going to help us anyway.”

“That’s the spirit, lad.” The old man grinned. “Be a savage. Do it. Throw me in and I’ll help you. My word is gold.”

Cyrus stepped forward. Antigone shook her head.

“Come on now!” the old man yelped. “You can’t offer a treat like that and not follow through. We have a deal?”

Cyrus spread his legs, bent his knees, and leaned over.

“Cyrus!” Antigone blinked. “You’re not really going to—”

The fragile old man rose up in Cyrus’s arms, as light as a mannequin.

Antigone jumped forward, but Cyrus had already stepped onto the rocks. A wave washed up around his ankles.

The old man was laughing.

Cyrus heaved. The water leapt.

The blanket swirled on the surface. Llewellyn Douglas was gone.

“Mr. Cyrus! Miss Antigone!” The voice was distant. Lost in the wind.

Antigone stood, motionless, hands over her mouth, eyes on the water.

Cyrus looked back over the jetty, over the harbor, at the lawns and the underground hangars.

A boy in a bowler hat was sprinting toward them, his cape snapping in the wind.

seventeen

LILLY THE BULL

“C
YRUS, YOU MURDERED
him. Jump in! Find him! Pull him out!”

Cyrus stared back at the gray frothing water. The blanket was clinging to the rocks. There was no sign of Llewellyn.

“He wanted me to,” Cyrus said. “He’s a free diver. Don’t you think he’ll be fine?”

“Guys!” Dennis had crossed the airstrip. The wind softened his shouting.

“No, Cyrus. I don’t think he’ll be fine. Get in there!”

Cyrus took off his jacket, unstrapped and tugged off his boots and socks, and then edged farther down the rocks. “Give him a minute. He’ll come up.”

Antigone stepped forward and punched the heels of her hands into Cyrus’s shoulder blades. Waving his arms, he rocked forward, overbalanced, and slapped into the water, swallowed by an oncoming wave.

Antigone chewed nervously on her fingernail. She was alone in the growing wind, standing in a fading glimmer of sunlight with an empty wheelchair. Suddenly, she dug into her pocket.

Cyrus swallowed cold water. He spat cold water. He felt his muscles and joints tightening as he sank. He felt a wave carrying him back toward the rocks.

Blinking, forcing his inflated lungs to relax, he pulled himself deeper and away from the jetty.

He wasn’t going to bob right back up and yell at his sister. Let her wonder. Let her worry. She’d earned it.

Twisting, Cyrus scanned the water for any signs of the old man.

The stone jetty sloped down twenty feet or more until it reached a small, muddy, timber-dotted shelf. Beyond the shelf’s edge, deep water became dark water, which became cold, lightless nothing.

Down on the edge of blurry invisibility, Cyrus could just make out a pale shape. Letting out a little of his air, he kicked toward it.

Cyrus could swim. His parents had made sure of it. But this was deeper than he had ever tried to dive. He knew he could hold his breath for one hundred and five seconds before crazy desperation would force him to inhale, and he’d managed to hold his breath for at least that long a few weeks before while scaring a PE teacher and a school nurse.

But he didn’t know how long this would take.

As he descended, the pale shape of Llewellyn Douglas became clearer. The old man was swirling in place by the drop-off. And he’d stripped down to his bones, his skin, and a pair of baggy white skivs. He spun in two backflips as easily as a seal—a wrinkly, skeletal, furless seal—and then he shifted, gliding on his back along the shelf’s edge.

Spotting Cyrus, he straightened up, laughing bubbles. His false teeth drifted out of his mouth, but he snatched them as they sank and popped them back into his grin.

He pointed up. “Go!”

“Teach us?” Cyrus bubbled, and that was it for his air. He bit his lip and ignored the empty feeling in his chest.

A sparkle of light caught his eye and he looked down. His ball of Quick Water had almost entirely hatched through the fabric of his pocket, and it was erupting with sunlight. Cyrus grabbed at it, but his arms were too slow in the water.

The ball of daylight wobbled free and began to sink. Cyrus flailed while the old man watched. He kicked at it, but the ball parted around his toes and reunited on the other side, wobbling away as it sank like liquid steel, down toward the darkness.

Cyrus hesitated. He needed to be ascending, getting closer to a desperate, gasping breath at the surface. Instead, he dove after the ball. Before he’d gone far, the old man’s bony hand closed around his ankle and pulled him back. He poked Cyrus in the stomach and pointed up.

“Go!” he bubbled again. And then, shaking his head, the skeleton in underwear slithered down, moving through the water like an eel.

Cyrus floated up, watching the golden ball disappear beyond the shelf. A moment later, a long, bulky bullet shape with fins rose up from the dark water, cruising toward the old man with lazy tail strokes. It couldn’t be a shark. Not in Lake Michigan.

Llewellyn Douglas grabbed on to its dorsal fin and disappeared into the darkness.

Cyrus turned his face up to the surface and surged with every drop of energy he had. His legs and shoulders were out of oxygen. His head drummed, and his vision blurred. And then the surface—air, wind, sun, and gasping lungs.

Sputtering, spitting, wheezing, Cyrus worked to tread water, trying to blink his vision back to normal.

“Cyrus!” Antigone’s voice wasn’t as close as he would have hoped. “Cyrus! Get over here!”

A little more than a pool’s length away, his sister was waving at him from the jetty. Someone in a cape was bouncing beside her.

“Swim, Cyrus!”

His heart was calming. His sizzling lungs were cooling. Cyrus began crawling toward his eager sister. When he reached the stones, two sets of hands dragged him up out of the water, banging his shins, stubbing his toes, and finally trying to force him to stand.

Cyrus sat down and flopped over, blinking at the sky—the sun blinked back, sliding through the front-running storm clouds before the growing black stampede.

“Cy, stand up.” Antigone grabbed at his hands. Cyrus slapped her arms away.

“Mr. Cyrus.” Dennis Gilly, breathless, loomed into view. “Something terrible has happened. Will happen. Mr. Sterling’s been plotting. Something terrible for sure. He tried to kill me.”

Cyrus shut his eyes. “Antigone, I’m waiting for an apology.”

“Why? Because I pushed you in? I’m not apologizing. You didn’t know if he could swim. Now listen to Dennis. We need to hurry. He overheard something big.”

“There was a shark,” said Cyrus. “And I’m pretty sure I wasn’t hallucinating.”

“I know,” Antigone said. “I saw it swim by. The old guy rode it, and I’ve never seen anything more disgusting than that guy in his underwear. I was looking through my half of the Quick Water blob. If you turn it in your hand, you can look in any direction. It’s cool. I’ll show you later. Now get up. We need to run. We need to find Nolan before Rhodes and Sterling do.”

“What?” Cyrus asked, squinting. “Why do they care about Nolan?”

Dennis leaned forward, and his ribboned bowler hat blocked the sun. “Because they’re working for Phoenix, and Nolan has that horrible tooth of Mr. Skelton’s—stolen from you—and Mr. Rhodes tried to have Mr. John Horace Lawney killed, and he was there when Mrs. Eldridge was murdered, and there’s a plan for something to happen tonight, and Mr. Sterling says they have to get Nolan right away. And you two. And Mr. Greeves. Because one of you will have what they need.”

Dennis panted.

Cyrus sat up. “Is this real?” he asked. “Rhodes, sure. But Ben Sterling?”

Dennis inhaled deeply. “Yes! I was sitting on a ledge listening to Misters Sterling and Rhodes talking about it, and when Mr. Rhodes left, I made a noise, and Mr. Sterling noticed and he told me to come down and have a talk, and I told him no and he told me yes and I started humming and pretending not to hear him but he pulls out a little bottle and a tiny dart and he tells me that he was saving it for later but now everyone will think I died of eating a bad apple, and he dipped the dart in the bottle and pulled off the bowl of his pipe and put the dart in the pipe stem, and he was going to shoot me right there.”

Cyrus looked at his sister. She nodded. He scrambled up to his bare feet.

“What happened?”

“I jumped,” Dennis said. “Off the ledge. Over Sterling. Tumbled in the grass. Hurt my knee, but I came running straight here. We have to find Mr. Nolan and Mr. Greeves.”

“I don’t believe it.” Cyrus flapped his dripping arms and shook his head. “Dennis, I’m sorry, but I can’t see Ben Sterling trying to shoot you with a poison dart.”

Dennis turned and pointed toward the slope. “I don’t lie, Mr. Cyrus. Ask him when he gets here.” Five shapes had crossed the airstrip and were striding toward the harbor. Sterling, black-bearded and barrel-chested, led the way on his thin metal legs.

“Run!” Dennis sprinted down the length of the jetty, and the approaching men fanned out, ready to pursue. Turning, Dennis dashed back. “Where? Where do we go? They’ll kill us right here. No one’s around. No one’s here. They’ve all gone inside. Get a boat. We should sail! I can sail!” Dennis danced in place like he needed a bathroom.

“They would sail after us,” Antigone said. “Just wait, Dennis. They might not hurt us. Anyone in the kitchen could see.”

“Mr. Cyrus!” Sterling’s voice pierced the wind easily. “I’m afraid our young porter friend isn’t well!”

The men reached the base of the jetty. Sterling had brought four surly-looking groundskeepers along with him.

“Dennis Gilly!” Sterling yelled. “Come with us, lad. You’ve been sniffing the kitchen’s whiskey again, and it’s time you were sleeping off your visions.”

Sterling lumbered half the jetty’s length, ear bells dancing in the sun. His apron was gone. His untied and unnetted black beard stuck out stiffly from his jaw. When he moved his arm, Cyrus glimpsed the flash of metal tucked up his sleeve. The four men behind him were keeping their hands out of sight.

“Seems to me,” said a quiet voice, “that now would be a great first lesson. Dive in and I’ll do the rest.”

Cyrus glanced behind him. Off the end of the jetty, barely visible in the waves, Llewellyn Douglas clicked his false teeth.

“Tigs,” Cyrus whispered. “Dennis. Follow me. No questions. Just jump in and dive down. Get below the surface.” He picked up his jacket and slung it on. He’d ditch it if he had to swim far, but he didn’t want to. He glanced at his boots. Too awkward.

“Mr. Cyrus,” Dennis said. “I can’t—”

“Now!” said Cyrus. He grabbed Dennis by the wrist and turned to grab Antigone. His sister was already gone, kicking in the air above the water.

Cyrus planted his bare foot on the end of the jetty and pushed off. Dennis’s weight tugged him backward, his feet swung up, and he landed flat on his back in the water.

Dennis landed on top of him.

Cyrus thrashed, tangled in Dennis. Tangled in cape. And then someone was pulling his arm, pulling him down. Quickly. Smoothly. Something big and dark and rough thumped against his chest. He grabbed on to it with his free arm, and it felt like a tree trunk wrapped in sandpaper—a muscled, swimming tree trunk. The bubbles cleared and Cyrus looked around. The skeleton in underwear had his left arm hooked over one of the big shark’s pectoral fins. With his right, he was dragging Cyrus by the wrist. On the other side of the shark, Cyrus glimpsed his sister clutching a fin. Dennis and his cape were dragging from Antigone’s ankles.

The shark’s tail thumped Cyrus in the ribs, and Llewellyn Douglas tugged him up to the pectoral fin. Cyrus grabbed on, and then the scrawny man threw his arms around the cruising shark’s back, slid himself up and forward of the dorsal fin, and then patted the shark’s gills.

The tail swept and the shark surged, diving into deep water.

Ben Sterling stood at the end of the jetty, staring at the water. They were kids, brand-new Acolytes. They couldn’t have gone far. Dead or alive, they’d be bobbing up soon.

“Big B?” one of the men asked.

“I have some dynamite,” said another.

Sterling shook his head. “Get back to hunting the Polygon boy. I’ll stay here.”

The men turned and began walking off the jetty. “Double time!” Sterling yelled. The men jumped into a jog.