Empire of Bones by N. D. Wilson Page B

hardly an army. It was hardly even an outlaw band. And that was including his mother and Llewellyn Douglas in his wheelchair. But the mortals weren’t really where thisgang packed its punch. He looked across the room at the transmortals.
    Nolan was slumping in his chair with his knotted paper-colored arms crossed and his eyes almost shut. His blue veins were faint beneath the surface of his skin, like long-healed bruises. He was calm, but no one who had seen Nolan angry would ever forget how dangerous he could be. Those veins weren’t always faint. Cyrus had seen them bulge and writhe.
    Arachne was beside Nolan, sitting straight up in her chair with her hands folded politely over her saggy bag of spiders like an etiquette instructor. Her icy eyes were focused on Niffy, where he stood on the hearth, and her obsidian hair was pulled back so tight that it looked like black glass. Cyrus wondered if her spiders had done it for her. Probably. Arachne was small and quiet, and he’d never seen her move quickly, not even when she’d faced Phoenix. Wherever there were spiders, she was dangerous. And spiders were everywhere.
    Gilgamesh overwhelmed a little wooden chair, and it squealed in pain every time he breathed. His legs stuck out like felled trees, and his six-fingered hands were splayed out on his knees. His serpentine lips were sneering in his beard, and his cow eyes always seemed to be on Cyrus. He could explode like a humpbacked rodeo bull, and the small ice-eyed spider girl beside him might have been the only thing keeping him from tearing Cyrus’shead off. Of course, Cyrus had saved Gil from Phoenix in a burning cigar factory on the Mississippi. Maybe that was enough to erase Gil’s hate.
    Cyrus met the huge man’s eyes. They were still and dark and unblinking. Anger was trapped inside them, like a prisoner behind glass. Cyrus looked away quickly.
    Gil was a problem.
    The Captain stepped into the lodge, carrying Pythia on his back. The small girl with the wide eyes and the dark skin peered over the Captain’s shoulder. Her thick ropes of hair were coiled around his arms, holding her in place. The other transmortals seemed almost normal by comparison. Her hair moved and gripped like the tentacles of an octopus, and life—ancient and mossy—almost dripped from her eyes. But unlike the other transmortals, her bright eyes looked young, and her focus seemed sharp enough to bend the world and time around it. She was mute, communicating in thoughts and dreams to seers like Dan, or in mysterious words written in fire on leaves so that they couldn’t be kept and treasured.
    From the Captain’s back, Pythia cupped a dry leaf in her hands and blew it at Niffy. A fiery word sparked on the leaf as it fluttered through the air and settled on the hearth beside the monk’s feet. Without a glance, he kicked it back into the fireplace.
    The Captain lowered Pythia to a chair, but she slipped down onto the floor, wrapping her hair aroundherself and beginning to rock in place. Her eyes were locked on Cyrus, and he could see her lips moving in a string of endless whispers. He could guess what she was saying—the same thing Dan had been dreaming about for months, starting right before they had found their father’s body and stopped Phoenix in the cigar factory where he had been using the tooth to redesign and resurrect a crop of New Men, where Phoenix had even managed to resurrect himself into the body of his nephew, Oliver.
    Dan only ever came away from the dream with a string of words about the one called Desolation, and abominations, and the darkness of his shadow, and even the dragons being afraid.
    It was about Radu Bey. Or Phoenix. One or the other, and as far as Cyrus could tell, it didn’t really matter which. They were both terrifying enough without a crazy oracle or Dan’s nightmare visions to spread the good news.
    Nolan, Arachne, Gil, John Smith, and Pythia. Five transmortals. None if you figured that Gil was going to