N. Wilson - The Dragon's Tooth

William Skelton raised his arm to throw. Eleanor Eldridge cocked two hammers and braced herself.

“Hold on!” Cyrus yelled. “Hold on! I don’t know what the fight is, but it doesn’t matter.” Still holding the waffle with one hand, he reached over and pushed the gun barrels to the side. “He can stay. It’s fine.” He turned to the old man. “You want a room, right? We can give you a room. Not a problem. Nobody needs to get shot, and nothing has to burn down.”

The old man grinned. “Listen to the boy, Eleanor. Nobody needs to get shot.”

“You’ve got no say here, Cyrus Smith.” Mrs. Eldridge clamped her wrinkled jaw, but her eyes were worried. “I made a promise to your mother and that’s that. Now get inside.”

“I don’t think he’s leaving,” Cyrus said. “And I own one-third of this motel, and I’m going to let him in.”

The old man laughed and slid his glass cube back into his pocket.

Mrs. Eldridge didn’t move. Potholes were overflowing now. The motel’s gutters rattled. Cyrus looked down at the waffle in his hands. Half-sponge, half-dough, it was swamping on the plastic plate. Hooking one finger into its side to keep it from falling, Cyrus tipped the plate and dumped the water. Then he held it out to Mrs. Eldridge.

“Your waffle,” he said. “It was done before the power went out.”

The old woman lowered her gun and took the plate. She didn’t look at it. Her veined eyes were searching Cyrus’s. “Me or him?” she asked. “I told Katie I’d keep you safe. If he stays, I can’t do that. Not from what’s coming. I leave. No more protection. Not from anything.”

“Protection?” Cyrus looked at the thin old woman, at her bone-white fingers on the black barrels of the shotgun. “No,” he said. “No more protection. But you don’t have to leave if you don’t want to.”

Mrs. Eldridge seemed to deflate. She looked at the plate in her hand, and her lips were tight. Scowling, she turned back into her room and slammed the door behind her.

Cyrus hurried down the stairs and moved slowly toward the man called William Skelton. He stopped a car’s length away.

“How did you do that?” Cyrus pointed up at the Golden Lady. The wet asphalt warped and spattered her reflected light.

“The sign?” The old man shrugged. “The lightning, maybe. I didn’t do anything.”

“It came on after you touched it.”

William Skelton smiled. “Did it? Well, it wasn’t me, exactly.”

Cyrus licked rainwater off his lips and wiped it out of his eyes. “What was the glass thing?”

The old man blinked slowly. Up close, his skin was the color of caramel, freckled with patches of paper white and bone gray. He smiled, once again reaching into his jacket. “Boy, you ever seen a lightning bug?”

“Every summer,” Cyrus said. “Why?”

“Not fireflies, son.” The old man held out the glass square. “I’m talking lightning bugs.” The glass was rippled and warped — homemade somehow. Frozen in its center, with six legs folded against its belly and black armor that glistened with blue, there was a heavy beetle. The glass was drip-free and dry. The rain didn’t seem to touch it.

Cyrus stepped closer, squinting. “A beetle?” In glass. Like for a microscope. He wasn’t sure what to say. What could be frightening about a beetle, even one the size of his big toe? But Mrs. Eldridge had definitely been scared, even with a shotgun.

Cyrus looked into Skelton’s eyes and nodded at the Golden Lady. “This did that?”

The old man shook his head. “Nope. This didn’t do anything. But you asked to see it.”

Cyrus inched closer, watching the old man.

Water ran down around Skelton’s eyes, dripping off sparse and antique lashes. He didn’t blink. Instead, slowly, he looked down at Cyrus’s bare shoulders, at his hands, at his feet.

The sky groaned, rolling thunder in its throat.

Cyrus reached for the old man’s extended arm, his cracked glove, the glass square and its prisoner beetle.

“Careful, she’s hot,” Skelton said, and Cyrus closed his fingers around the glass.

Electricity shot up his arm, buzzing in his joints, tingling in his teeth. He staggered backward and swung his arm down, shaking himself loose from the current. Glass shattered on the asphalt at his feet, and the heavy beetle tumbled free.

Skelton hadn’t moved. Hadn’t flinched. Gasping, Cyrus watched the beetle right itself and lever up its wing casings. The wings beneath them were much too small to do anything, especially in the rain.

William Skelton whistled between his teeth. Blinking, Cyrus tore his eyes off the beetle and looked at the old man.

“If I were you,” the man said, “and I wanted to stay alive, I’d get those bare feet off the wet ground and inside. Fast. She’s ready to lay her eggs, and she’s been waiting in that glass a long, long time.”

Cyrus’s feet began to tingle. With a pop and a crackle, the lightning bug launched and landed and launched again. Blue electric arcs trailed from its abdomen and flicked between its wings as it circled, bumblebee-heavy.

Cyrus spun away, asphalt tearing at the balls of his feet as he scrambled toward the motel. Four strides. Five, and he was in the courtyard. Ten, and he’d reached the front door. He jerked it open.

Thunder knocked him forward.

Antigone Smith yawned. She hated riding in the car. She hated it more than waffles. More than the Archer Motel and its wood paneling. More than the foul-smelling reception area. Of course, she only ever rode in the ancient red station wagon — the Red Baron — and she was sure that riding in the station wagon was less comfortable than riding in a wheelbarrow. It wasn’t as bad when Cyrus came along. He always sat in the permanently reclining front passenger seat like it was some kind of throne. While Dan fretted over traffic or fuel or strange sounds behind the dash, Cyrus would cross his arms like a mummy and give cool commands, refusing to call Dan anything but Driver.

If it weren’t for the mold on the seat belts, or the bloodred velveteen upholstery, Antigone wouldn’t have minded the backseat. At least it wasn’t angled like a dentist’s chair. But Dan never let her sit in the back when it was just the two of them, and so she was stuck staring at the fabric bubbles on the ceiling, kinking her neck trying to watch the road, or perching on the front edge of the seat and crossing her arms on the dash with her face inches from the glass — which made her feel like a bobble-head. If she were just a couple of inches taller, as tall as her lanky little brother, she might have been able to lean back comfortably in the broken seat. But she wasn’t tall by any standard, not for thirteen and a half, and feeling like a bobble-head was better than feeling like the seat was swallowing her whole.

Antigone sighed, adjusted the two worn camera cases that hung around her neck, ran her fingers through her cropped black hair, and then stretched her arms back until she touched the ceiling.

Rain chattered on the roof above her, and the station wagon’s badly timed wipers flailed uselessly at the water on the windshield. She couldn’t blame them. It was tough to wipe water off both sides of the glass. She dropped her hands into her lap and watched her older brother. His hands were tense on the wheel, and his jaw was grinding. Two years ago, he’d been a laid-back, sun-baked eighteen-year-old surfer thinking about college. Now he was thin and pale, eyes hollowed by stress, twenty going on forty.

“Dan?” Her brother didn’t answer her. “Dan, relax. We’ll be fine. We’re close.”

Lightning flickered silently in the distance. Dan twitched.

“Breathe, brother. Breathe,” Antigone said.

Dan shot her a glance. “What will breathing do?”