Cyrus tucked the key ring into his mouth. Then he unwound Patricia and held her next to the door, her silver body pooling light on the dark wood. The keyhole was set exactly in the middle, but Patricia quickly ate her own tail and disappeared.
“C’mon.” Cyrus unwound Patricia again. Her emerald eyes stared at him. Her mouth opened, and her tail flicked up.
“Uh-uh,” Cyrus said. Before he could think, he popped the tip of his forefinger into her mouth. She hesitated, looking at him, and then she slid herself up past his first knuckle and wrapped her body tight around his fingers.
Cyrus laughed, spitting the keys down into his free palm. “I hope you come off just as easy.” He held his snaked hand up to the door and looked at the keyhole. It wasn’t small. He slid the gold key in easily and felt the metal change in his hand. He turned the key. Inside the door, a latch clicked. Cyrus pulled what was now a plain gold skeleton key out of the hole, glanced at it, dropped it into his pocket, and pushed open the door.
Holding Patricia up in front of him, Cyrus moved into a narrow arched hallway. Small doors pocked the walls. Stone faces, part bust, part gargoyle, looked down at him from the ceiling. Light glowed beneath one of the doors, and he could hear the low mumble of voices.
Cyrus hurried forward. Beside a large tapestry of a woman decapitating a unicorn, the hallway ended in a tight stone spiral stair. Up or down? Cyrus went down, moving in Patricia’s faint silver light.
At the bottom, he entered an undecorated hallway. The ceiling was higher and the hall was longer, but there were only two facing doors. Both were black riveted steel. One had been left open.
Listening to his drumming pulse, Cyrus stared at it. He could hear footsteps. He saw flashlights. Tugging his finger out of Patricia’s mouth, he jumped backward into the shadow of the spiral stairs.
Exhaling and biting his tongue, Cyrus leaned his head into the hallway. Two men, nothing but shapes behind their flashlights, stood at the open door.
“I don’t care,” one of them said. “He can’t make us open it. We checked the lock and that’s that. If Rupe wants to check the inside of a Burial, he can do it himself. I might be stuck as a watchman for the next two months, but I’m not the bloody Avengel.”
The other man spoke, but his voice was too low to make out, swallowed by whispering echoes. Cyrus slid forward.
“Can’t see the fuss of it all,” the first one said. “Double guards and Burial checking? Does he think old Rasputin’s gonna up and walk away? And what exactly am I gonna do if he does? Or Tamerlane? I’d like to see the two of us put that one back to bed.”
The black door boomed shut behind them, and flashlights flicked in both directions. “Who’s Rupe protecting anyhow? Skelton’s mutts? And for what? They’ll be twice the trouble he was — there being two of them — and it’s Billy’s own outlaw friends that have Rupe sweating.” The man snorted and then shivered loudly. “Truth? Run me into that nightmare Maxi, and I’d hand those two Smiths right over — with Parmesan, too, and an offer to grind the pepper. And Phoenix is worse than worse. Will you be dying for those two?”
“No, sir,” said the second man. “Leave the dying to Rupe.”
The men had turned and were walking away, voices fading with their footsteps.
Cyrus stepped into the dark hallway. When it was as silent as it was dark, he found Patricia’s head and popped his finger back in her mouth. She didn’t even seem surprised, sliding all the way up to the second knuckle. Holding his coiled silver light above his head, Cyrus moved slowly to the big black door. He slid his hand over the cold, rivet-puckered steel and found a single star-shaped keyhole beneath a heavy ring.
He looked around. Why not? Rupert had basically told him to test the keys. He breathed slowly, trying to quiet his pulse. His muscles were tightening — he felt just like he had before he’d climbed onto the roof of his school with a bucket of water balloons. Antigone would hate this. Dan would yell at him. He had no endgame at all. The principal would ask him exactly what he had been thinking, and there would be no answer. But still … he dug out his keys. The gold one was too big. The silver one slid in easily, became a starred shaft, and turned.
Beneath his hand, Cyrus felt a quiet series of shafts sliding and tumblers tumbling. And then, nothing. He removed the key, and the heavy iron ring on the door sighed when Cyrus lifted it. The door swung in. Cold breath crawled out of the darkness and into Cyrus’s lungs.
Cyrus stepped forward. The floor was colder beneath his bare feet, and his faint silver light didn’t seem to penetrate the darkness beyond the door. He moved all the way in.
The room was an empty cube, entirely lined with the same black riveted steel as the door. Cyrus stretched his lit hand from side to side, to the ceiling, to the floor, straining his eyes. The floor in the center of the room was patterned — a small circle surrounded by a large ring of flat steel petals, like a black armored sunburst. In the very center, there was a keyhole. Cyrus moved toward it, easing his bare feet onto the broad steel petals. They were the source of the cold, and for a moment, he thought his feet would freeze in place. He knelt and inched forward on his knees, breathing hard.
“What do you think, Patricia?” Cyrus whispered. He was already pulling out his keys. His legs were frozen, his hands were almost pale. The gold key slid down into the floor. But he didn’t turn it. He looked over his shoulder at the door and listened for footsteps. Nothing. He should go back. But retreating now would only mean coming back again later. Tomorrow. Next week. He wouldn’t be able to leave it alone. Not for long.
Cyrus shivered. He was here now.…
Bracing himself, Cyrus turned the key, and the floor began to fall away beneath him. Jerking the key back out, he dove onto his side, rolling clear of the growing hole. Steel whispered to steel as the petals dropped to form another spiral stair. Cyrus scrambled to his feet. Frigid air rolled across the floor, and pale-blue light flickered on the ceiling above the shaft.
“Right,” Cyrus said, and he moved to the stairs. Patricia tightened on his fingers. He knew what he was doing. Maybe. This had to be one of the Burials. There could be a dead body at the bottom — maybe a frozen body. Maybe two. But whatever it was, he was going to see it. He was going to go down even if it froze his feet off.
Cyrus bit his lip and inched forward. Why? Why had he gone through every room in the Archer, opening every drawer, every closet, and lifting every mattress? Why had he pulled tires from streams and wormed beneath the floorboards of barns and climbed into the ceiling of his mother’s hospital room? Because he needed to.
As he descended into the cold blue light, Cyrus clutched Patricia’s body as tightly as she clutched him. Green mixed with blue, flickering like fire. But it couldn’t be fire. The colors were wrong. And it was cold.
Around each step, Cyrus expected to see the source of the light. But around each step, he found only more steps. The steel ran out and became stone. Another slow turn and his feet splashed into moving water. Cyrus didn’t even notice.
In front of him, a large room was full of fast water, swirling in a whirlpool that reached every wall. Down in the whirlpool’s mouth, before it became a throat, there was a nest of icy blue-and-green flame. In the center of that nest, a black stone column ran down out of sight. On top of the column, a man sat with his legs crossed. Cyrus could see the thick iron bands that clamped his crossed legs to the stone. But he could not see the man’s arms. Fifty feet — at least — of brown beard and hair had tangled around his shoulders and arms and was stretched out in the swirling water like seaweed, even reaching the walls. The man’s face was oddly peaceful, even noble. He looked like he was lost in some distant, slow-moving dream, or was savoring the warm crawl of a summer breeze on his face — as if his surroundings, the water, the stone, the cold fire and iron bands, were all illusion. His eyes were closed, and his skin was translucent white. In the center of his forehead, there was a brutal hole the size of a bullet.
While Cyrus stared, the flames between him and the man receded slightly. Something liquid, something warm and alive, reached into him. He could feel it racing in his veins. His jaw locked, and every hair on his body stood up and screamed.
He heard the voice, but the man on the column had not moved. His eyes were still closed.
Cyrus’s right foot slid forward and down a step, deeper into the rushing water. What was he doing? He tried to jerk his foot back. He tried to pull himself away. His other foot was moving forward. The flames shrunk
