Empire of Bones Read Online Free PDF

play dumb,” Flint said. “You’re dumb enough already.” He turned and walked back toward the motel, and Cyrus exhaled. He preferred having the man’s back toward him. “You know the Smiths will be sent off to the transmortals as a peace offering, and Rupe is as good as dead. And you know the Brendan is cleaning house until Ashtown sparkles. The Boones are all gone either way.”
    Flint flipped a switch on the motel wall. The pool suddenly glowed with pale light. Cyrus could see the paper globes.
    They were in the pool, flattened like trash and floating in a cloud of dark dissolving ink.
    “Hello,” Flint said. “What’s this?”
    From beyond the fence and one green fold of pasture, two huge engines shook the evening air.
    Old-man cicadas grew silent. Surely, the end had come.

 three 
    SOGGY
    C YRUS BIT HIS LIP . Flint and Eric both stared across the pool and over the fence.
    “Helicopter?” Flint asked.
    “Plane,” said Eric. “But I’m done. And if this is how Brendan Bellamy Cook wants Keepers to behave, the whole Order can go to hell. It already has.…”
    He turned toward the sliding motel door, but Flint raised his gun, pointing it squarely at Eric’s back. He tucked two fingers into his mouth and whistled long and hard.
    “Just so we end this honestly,” Flint said. “I’m glad I get to be the one to put you down. Turn around.”
    Cyrus vaulted the chain-link fence, and then leapt the corner of the pool. Eric the Red turned to face Flint, angry and defeated. His eyes widened as Cyrus picked up a wooden patio chair and smashed it over Flint’s head. The tall man crumpled.
    Cyrus didn’t have time to talk. He dropped into thepool, scooped up the two paper blobs, slapped them over his shoulders, and exploded back out of the water.
    Two more men stepped out of the motel door. They raised shotguns.
    Eric the Red roared, lowered his shoulder, and drove them back into the doorway. A shotgun fired. Glass exploded. Cyrus turned toward the end of the pool, the fence, the scrub plum trees.
    Six men rounded the corner of the motel and stopped beyond the fence. Heart racing, Cyrus slipped to a stop on wet feet. They had cut off his path through the plums. He could jump the fence straight at the pasture, but the brush was too thick and too tall. He’d be stuck until they plucked him out.
    Another gun fired, and Eric the Red staggered and fell. Tall Flint rose slowly to his feet, bleeding from his scalp, gun smoking.
    Cyrus stepped onto a patio chair and hopped onto the top of the chain-link fence. Metal dug into his feet, and the plums walled him in. He turned, wobbling, racing along the fence, grabbing at branches. Then he jumped for the Archer Motel’s new gutters.
    Fingers caught, metal bent, but both held. Cyrus chinned himself up, hooked his right leg onto the hot metal roof, and rolled himself up.
    He scrambled toward the peak, keeping low andbreathing hard. From here he could clear the plums. But it was a big drop. A bone-breaker.
    “Tuck and roll,” he said. “Tuck and roll.” He exhaled and crouched on hot feet, ready to dash and leap and crash.
    He paused. There were already men in the pasture. They were running away from Cyrus, toward the sound of the plane.
    Something thumped onto the gutter at the edge of the roof. Two hands.
    Cyrus dropped into a baseball slide straight toward them. His wet shorts shot him down the hot metal roof, but he dragged his palms and they squealed like bad brakes. He leaned back and cocked his right foot.
    The hands quivered and Flint’s head rose between them. Cyrus stomped his bare heel into the bridge of the man’s nose. Bone crunched and blood spattered up between Cyrus’s toes. Flint dropped to the concrete, half-unconscious.
    Cyrus twisted onto his belly and tried to scramble back up to the peak, slipping on his bloody right foot. Behind him, guns fired and sparks kicked off the metal roof all around him. Ricochets went whining up into the sky.
    He