morning storming about like the world’s largest wet wasp.” He nodded back at the dining hall. “There are plenty in there that think you’re not worth the trouble.”
He eyed them both. Cyrus stopped chewing. Antigone dropped her toast. “But you are worth it, aren’t you? The kitchen knows you are.” His voice sank even lower. “Hear this, Smithlings: People say old Bones carried a pair of keys on a ring. People are wondering where those keys might be. And they’re thinking, well, Skelton was killed in your motel — God rest his dirty soul. John Horace Lawney caught himself a bullet getting the pair of you here. You two are candles lit for trouble’s moths, and the kitchen knows why.”
He smiled and raised his thick eyebrows above friendly eyes. “Phoenix hasn’t got the keys, nor has that bone-chewing stooge, Maxi. If he did, he wouldn’t care one wormed apple for you two. But you see, I know it’s more than just keys that’s lighting this fire. Before his death, whisper was that Bones was holding a set of triplets — relics rarer than a butcher’s fresh cut.” Reaching up, he tapped the bell on his right ear. “A tidal pearl, I heard.” He tapped his left ear. “Bark of a truth tree.” He leaned all the way forward and his eyes bounced between them. “A Resurrection Stone.”
“What?” Antigone asked. “Are we supposed to know what that is?”
Big Ben Sterling curled back his lips and clicked his jaw. “The Soul Knife. The Reaper’s Blade. Old Draco’s Crown — the Dragon’s Tooth. In the chapel, you’ll find brass plates scratched with the names of the O of B’s dead from each of the World Wars. You’ll find newer plates listing the thousands lost at sea, lost on land, and fallen from the sky just in my own lifetime. Those lists run long and sorrowful, but another plate could hang just as long, etched with the names of those who died questing and feuding for that Dragon’s Tooth.
“Keepers and Explorers have died for it, murdered for it, betrayed for it, sold their souls and been damned to the Burials for it.” He paused. “Billy Bones found it. Or so the little birds began whispering two years back. This world has a nest of secrets, but there can’t be many that Phoenix wants his claw hands on more than that little chip of death. If I were a betting man, and I am, I’d put my vice-cook’s name right on that brass list of dead, just beneath William Skelton’s. And those keys, well, I might have just heard some Keepers whispering about doors being opened in the night that should have been closed.”
Antigone glanced at her brother. Cyrus swallowed. His hand floated up toward his neck and stopped. He could feel Patricia, but the weight of the keys was gone. His hand dropped. He’d slept with them in his pocket, but he couldn’t feel them against his leg. Sterling’s eyes were on him. He couldn’t reach for his pocket now. Scooping up eggs, he loaded his cheeks.
“Mr. Cyrus,” said the cook. “Miss Antigone. You can trust Ben Sterling. I was a friend to your father and he to me. I even taught your mother a few of the kitchen’s ways, and that’s not something that’s happened for another. Time may come when you two need a friend who can keep a secret. If you do, Ben Sterling will be standing there, just like he always was for your father.”
Cyrus slid his hand down to his leg and looked at his sister. He could feel chilly sweat beading on his forehead. He groped his legs, but the only lump was a little square that he knew was holding a beetle. Antigone was staring at him, her eyes widening.
“Something wrong, Mr. Cyrus? Egg too slippy?”
“No.” Cyrus was forcing himself to breathe slowly. “No.”
Antigone spun back to the cook. “What is that thing, the tooth, even supposed to do?” Her voice was pitched too high. She knew something was wrong.
Cyrus shoved his hand into his pocket, but he already knew the keys were gone. The lightning bug glass buzzed his fingers as he searched around it.
Ben Sterling turned back to Antigone, scratching his beard. “I couldn’t say — not being a wizard, an angel, a demon, or a man of science. I’m just a cook missing his legs and making do with a pair of delicate ears.”
Hesitating, Sterling twisted around, scanning his kitchen. “Susanna!” he yelled. “Watch the line.”
Cyrus pulled a small piece of paper from his pocket where the keys had been. A short message had been written in hurried black letters.
Inflating his cheeks, Cyrus rolled the paper into a tight ball and dropped it back into his pocket. Trust Nolan? He’d been robbed. He felt insulted. Moronic. Was Nolan taunting him? He looked down at his breakfast, his appetite fading.
“The tooth,” Sterling said. “In tales older than the oceans, from when the moon was young and green, the tooth is always said to have the power of Death. But any sharp stick can kill you, I’m not meaning that. I mean Death’s own power. Death as men imagine him to be, carrying that long-bladed scythe, harvesting souls like corn. The tooth is like the Reaper’s Blade.”
Sterling breathed in deep. When he spoke again, his voice had found a different rhythm. The swirl and bustle of the kitchen was forgotten. His story had dropped into a rocking chair beside some quiet fire.
“When Man was first tilling ground and tending gardens, before he thought to wall his cities, Draco the Devourer came on down from his stars. He hated Man for his body and soul, joined together in one creature, and he meant to rip the two apart forever — Man would be mere flesh, or mere soul, but never both. Old Draco fashioned himself a monstrous scaly body and a set of charmed teeth with edges to them that could slice a soul’s hair sideways.
“But things just didn’t go as planned — they never do for dragons. Raging, Draco spread his wings and dropped through the sky’s floor. Cities burned, and everywhere he went, souls withered, sliced and uprooted from their flesh. But one boy picked up a stone, and while men fled screaming, he threw it into the demon’s mouth and knocked out just one tooth as long as the boy’s own arm. He picked it up by the root, and with it, he slew the dragon body. Draco retreated into the stars, but he left behind that tooth.”
The cook smiled. “And if you listen to an old cook, that’s where the tooth came from.”
“You’re joking, right?” Antigone asked.
“Am I?” asked Sterling.
Antigone ran her hands over her hair and looked at him sideways. “Well, you don’t believe that. A star dragon?”
Sterling straightened. “Come with me,” he said, and springs squealed in his steel legs as he strode away. Cyrus and Antigone followed him across the kitchen to a side door.
“I’ll tell you this much,” the cook said over his shoulder. “Jason used that tooth to fetch the Golden Fleece. Called up immortal warriors with it from sown Dragon’s Teeth, and it was the only blade he could use to cut them down. Cadmus used that blade to call warriors from bone when he founded Thebes. It can call the dead to life — though not as they were — and shatter the undying. Alexander used it to raze the world and only failed when it was stolen. Julius, Hannibal, Attila, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler — all of them sought it, and some of them found it. For a time.”
The cook lumbered down the corridor in front of them, bells jingling, flour drifting off him in slow curls. He was leading them back toward the Galleria, toward the leather boat on its pedestal. Before they reached it, he stopped and pointed up at the wall, where an enormous reptilian skin ran along above the floor.
“Is that real?” he asked.
Cyrus scanned it. “Is it from a huge snake?”
“Not a snake, lad. Follow it around the corner.” The cook turned down a side hall, and Cyrus and Antigone followed him. The skin ran with them. And then it splayed into the fingers of a claw — three forward and one back, each of them longer than Cyrus was tall.
“Not a snake, lad,” Sterling said again. He walked to the end of the hallway and turned into another passage. Cyrus, in a daze, staggered along beside his sister, not paying any attention to where they were going. Whatever the tooth did, it was gone now. Probably forever. He should be relieved. He tried to be. But all that he felt was lead-bellied failure.
Sterling stopped and gripped the handle of a black door.
“Well, it doesn’t have to be a star dragon,” Antigone said. “It could be a dinosaur.”
“Could be,” Sterling said. “But if I was eye to eye with a flying reptile the size of a house and with a mind to eat me, I wouldn’t use the word
He forced the door open with a pop and stepped to the side. “After you, Miss Antigone.”
Antigone stepped into darkness. Cyrus followed her, dust and decay trickling into his lungs. He sneezed. The door boomed closed and they were left with only four senses — ears straining, skin tingling, the smell of fur and
