N. Wilson - The Dragon's Tooth

“My name is Maximilien Robespierre.” His accented voice was smooth, childish. He winked at Antigone and bowed. “But we are all friends and comrades. Please to call me Maxi.”

HORACE WASN’T BREATHING. Antigone pushed herself into Cyrus, sliding him down the bench beneath the window.

Maxi smiled and sat down in the booth next to Horace. He commandeered Horace’s cup of coffee and carefully picked out a single slice of bacon.

“So,” Maxi said, chewing. “You ask about me. I am honored. But is now the time for stories? A brother has vanished. Perhaps can I assist you?”

“You can give him back,” Antigone snarled. “You shouldn’t have taken him in the first place.”

“Shouldn’t?” The small man picked up a piece of toast from Antigone’s plate. “Little sweetness, shouldn’t, oughtn’t, can’t —these are words I cannot be understanding. What do they mean? I have burned cities and killed kings while others were studying shouldn’t. Ma chérie , if Maxi can, then Maxi should.” He leaned his small, grinning face toward Antigone. “And Maxi always can.”

Antigone slid back in the booth, and her hand dug into Cyrus’s leg.

Cyrus picked up a table knife. “Where’s Dan? What did you do to him?”

Maxi’s gapped smile widened. “Can you cut me with that? I am not butter.”

Horace managed to stand, sputtering anger. “Mr. Robespierre, you are a dog, a murderer, a demon, a poison. But know this, you will be struck down in the end. The Order will see your flesh rot in the soil like the rest of us.”

Maxi gripped Horace’s sleeve and tugged him back down. “The Order? The gaggling Brendan geese? Fat lawyer, I outlived all your wise men, your explorers, and I will be outliving you. Be silent.” He turned to Cyrus. “Boy, what I need, you have, do you not? Give it to me. I will take you to your brother, and you shall never be separated again until the land is swallowed by the sea. You hear me swear it.” Maxi wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “The tooth, the keys. What are they to you if your brother dies? Give them to me. What else can you be doing? You cannot leave. You cannot escape.” He grinned. “Or … when Daniel is dead, I can cut you, too, so that you beg to give them to me. Can you stop me?” He pulled out a pair of long, slender knives. Both had smooth wooden handles black with age and needle blades worn with sharpening, glassy at the edge. He let them rest on the table. They looked like they’d been made for gutting fish. Or bigger things.

Cyrus felt Antigone’s grip tighten on his leg. Pat was gone. The farmers were drinking their coffee. Horace was rigid with fear.

Cyrus breathed slowly, but his mind was racing. The keys didn’t matter. But he wouldn’t give Maxi the tooth. Not if it … He couldn’t. And without the tooth, the keys would never be enough.

Cyrus set his hands on the table across from the knives and looked into Maxi’s jaundiced eyes. They had to get out of the diner. He slid his legs back, tensing, bracing to launch.

“Well?” Maxi raised his eyebrows. “Choose your path, young Cyrus Smith. Will I love you, or will I be angry?”

Cyrus exploded forward onto the table, sweeping a storm of plates and sausage and eggs into Maxi’s face. The two knives skittered to the floor, and Cyrus swung for Maxi’s jaw. He didn’t connect. Maxi slid to the side and a fist slammed into Cyrus’s neck. Gasping, he rolled into the hash browns in front of Horace.

“Go!” Cyrus yelled, but there was nowhere to go. Maxi was on his feet, holding his knives. A huge, round man with a beard and apron came hurrying out of the kitchen, but stopped when he saw the uniform.

Maxi stepped forward, eyes on fire and tiny teeth grinding, knives held low. Orange juice and egg ran down his uniform. Cyrus slid back beneath the window, knocking over waters. Horace was standing. Antigone was crouching on her seat.

“Enough,” the lawyer said. “Enough. Let the children go. I’ll get you everything you need.”

Maximilien laughed. The scar around his pale neck flushed red. “No,” he said. “No. You cannot. The keys, Smith boy. Give them to me. Now. Before you die.”

Cyrus felt a shadow move above him, and the window exploded with a roar.

Maxi staggered backward and fell. Glass rained down on Cyrus’s face and neck and chest, bouncing like crystal hail on the table. Above him, Cyrus saw a long gun barrel fire again and again, spitting wide flame, but he heard nothing.

And then Horace dove over him and out the window. Antigone pulled him up and drove him out the gaping window hole. His knee caught the sill, singing with pain, and the two of them were falling together, tumbling onto an old bicycle, through tall grass, and onto gravel.

Cyrus climbed to his feet and staggered after his sister, around the building, toward the big black car. Horace was in front of them, diving into the backseat. The lean driver was holding the door for them, tall in his black suit, his big gun trained at the diner. There was a police car and two other men ducking behind it. The driver fired again. And again. Leaving the rear door open, he jumped in behind the wheel. Antigone dove inside, and then Cyrus followed, landing facedown on the car’s strangely soft carpet. The car showered half an acre with gravel as it roared forward onto the road. The rear door slammed with the acceleration.

The heavy car rose and fell smoothly, gliding and shifting in time with the curves and dips of the road. It was an old car — Cyrus had known that at first glance — but it wasn’t moving like one.

“I feel sick,” Antigone muttered. “We should be dead right now. I could throw up.”

Cyrus exhaled slowly. “Me too.” He was holding the keys at his neck, clenching them too hard, digging metal teeth deep into his palm. Any harder and he would bleed, but he couldn’t let go.

Antigone’s leg was kangarooing in place. She had her eyes shut and was twisting her hair. Cyrus looked around the car and up at the glass divider. He wanted to see the driver. He wanted a good look at his face. The man with the big gun.

John Horace Lawney sat with his back to the driver and his head down, massaging his temples.

Outside the windows, bushes and pastures and signs and road reflectors snapped and flickered past like frames in one of Antigone’s home movies.

Antigone looked up. “Maxi’s dead, right?” She nudged Horace with her toe, and the little lawyer looked up. “Please tell me he’s dead.”

Horace sighed, and the car bounced gently and banked hard around a curve.

He shook his head. “That … man … was born Sebastián de Benalcázar in Córdoba, Spain, more than five hundred years ago. As a conquistador, he traveled with Ponce de León into Florida — until Ponce had him shot. He escaped into South America and tried to set himself up as a governor, slaughtering Incas and his fellow Spaniards along the way. He was hung, stabbed, poisoned, and even keelhauled. But to no effect. The Order finally captured him when he tried to return to Europe. He was held without food or water for more than two centuries before some weak-minded fools released him. He reemerged in France under the name of Maximilien Robespierre. There, his taste for destruction reached revolutionary heights. More than thirty thousand French men and women were sent to the guillotine, including King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and several of the Order’s most notable French members. The Order did not capture him again until the mobs turned against him and he himself was beheaded — you saw the scar on his neck, did you not? It was a simpler matter when his head was in a basket and his body was in a cart. He was imprisoned again but escaped the Order’s French Estate when it was destroyed during the Second World War.”