Dying Is My Business Read online

  I got back on my feet and tucked my gun into my pants. It was useless against the creatures, but I knew better than to toss it. It was Underwood’s Golden Rule, drilled into my head since day one: Never, ever lose your gun. You never know when you’re going to need it.

  Across the room, the short woman was swinging her staff at the creatures. They hung in the air above her, bobbing and feinting just out of reach. She grunted and bit her lip in frustration. Scarface had rejoined the pack, and together the creatures trilled and clucked. The sound was alien but unmistakable. They were laughing at her. Toying with her before moving in for the kill.

  I glanced at the open door. Yellow Eye had gone to join in the fun, too, leaving the door unguarded. Just outside, I could see the brick wall that sheltered the warehouse from the surrounding piers. The low, distant hum of West Side Highway traffic floated to me. It would be easy to escape, to leave this insanity while the creatures were distracted and run back to the safety of the world I knew. Getting out while I still could was the smart choice.

  The short woman grunted as she swung her staff at the five chittering things flapping in the air above her. I looked at her, then back at the exit. Screw this. I took a quick step toward the door. Then I stopped.

  Five. There were only five of those things toying with the woman. Where was the sixth?

  I turned around just as the sixth creature came winging out of the shadows in the corner of the ceiling and rammed into the woman from behind. She fell. The staff flew out of her hands, clattering to the floor and rolling until it came to a stop at the base of a stack of crates on the opposite side of the room. All six of the creatures descended toward her like a pack of wild dogs on a wounded animal.

  Scarface got to her first, wrapping long talons over the top of her head. Her eyes—a clear, astonishing blue, I noticed for the first time, and as bright as the noontime sky—widened in terror. She scrabbled against the floor, trying to pull away, reaching desperately for the staff that was dozens of feet too far from her fingers. The creatures swarmed around her.

  She didn’t look like she could put up much of a fight against the six of them, especially without her staff. They would make short work of her, but it might give me enough time to get away. The open doorway was right behind me.

  So why weren’t my stupid feet moving?

  Ah shit, I thought, and ran toward the pack. Even with amnesia, I had no doubt this was the dumbest thing I’d ever done in my life.

  When I reached them, I grabbed the nearest creature around the neck and tried to pull it away from her. It didn’t even turn to look at me, it just swung its arm into my face. It felt like getting hit with a wrecking ball. I was thrown clear across the room. I landed on my back, sliding across the floor until I slammed into one of the thick wooden support beams. A sudden, searing pain raged in my shoulder.

  I struggled to sit up, but I could tell right away my shoulder had been dislocated. Across the warehouse from me, Scarface yanked the woman’s head back, exposing her throat. The others gnashed their teeth in anticipation. The woman’s face was a mask of defiance. She slipped one hand into a pocket of her cargo vest and pulled out a small, round, reflective object. A mirror of some kind, I thought. She held it out toward Scarface, muttered something, and a bright light burst out of the mirror. Scarface shrieked and let go of her, backing up a step and covering its eyes. The woman scrambled to her feet and started to run.

  I admired her courage, but she didn’t get far. The other five creatures tackled her, bringing her down to the floor again. They trilled in laughter and drew back their claws to strike. I tried to stand, but the sharp pain in my shoulder was too much and I fell again. Like a fool, I’d gotten involved, stuck around to try to save this woman when I could have gotten away, and now, for my trouble, I would get to watch these creatures tear her to pieces. Lesson learned.

  With a loud crash, a window in the wall behind me exploded inward, and what looked very much to my startled eyes like an enormous gray timber wolf came rocketing through in a shower of broken plywood. It landed on the floor, then bounded again, pouncing on Scarface. The two fell in a tangled mess. The other creatures took to the air again. The wolf got its jaws around Scarface’s neck and clamped down, shaking it violently even as the creature scratched and raked at the wolf’s flanks. There was a snap, loud enough that I heard it from the other side of the warehouse, and Scarface went limp in the wolf’s jaws. Its wings twitched and then fell still.

  Wincing in pain, I got to my feet. I steadied myself against the support beam, then slammed my shoulder into it, knocking the joint back into its socket. The pain was staggering. Bursts of light flared behind my eyes. A moment later the pain subsided to a dull throb. I looked up. The five remaining creatures were winging toward me. Apparently they had decided I was an easier target than the wolf. Lucky me.

  “The staff!” the woman shouted at me. “Use the staff!”

  It was on the floor by my feet. I picked it up. The wood felt thick and heavy, as solid as a Louisville Slugger. Then I nearly dropped it again in disgust. Up close, I saw that what I’d originally mistaken for a black ball at the end of the staff was actually a mummified human fist. A real one.

  But the winged creatures were streaming toward me and I didn’t have time to think about why there was a dead human hand attached to the staff. I swung the wooden end of the staff at the creatures, trying to bat them away.

  “You’re holding it the wrong way!” the woman shouted. “Turn it over! Hit them with the fist!”

  Right. Sure. The fist. I tried to turn the staff around again, but one of the creatures grabbed the other end and wouldn’t let go. It sneered at me with a grotesquely scarred mouth. I tug-of-warred with Harelip while the others circled. My injured shoulder throbbed.

  “Use the fist!” the woman yelled again. She sounded annoyed.

  “What do you think I’m trying to do?” I yelled back.

  But it was too much. My shoulder was still too weak after its dislocation. The staff slipped from my hands. Without the counter-tension of my tug-of-war partner, I fell on my ass. Harelip bobbed in the air with the staff in its hands, laughing at me. The others joined in. Assholes.

  The wolf sprang again, bounding over my head. I caught a glimpse of a leather cuff fastened around its right front leg. The wolf clamped its jaws through Harelip’s leathery wing and dragged it back down to the floor. The other creatures bobbed and shrieked in the air, eyeing the wolf warily. The wolf snapped its massive jaws at Harelip, who dropped the staff and grabbed the wolf’s snout, batting at the animal’s head and haunches with its wings. It got its legs up under the wolf and raked its sharp nails along the wolf’s belly, tracing deep red lines through the fur.

  “Thornton!” the woman cried out in anguish.

  The wolf whimpered in pain. It tried to get its jaws around Harelip’s neck, but it was already too weak. The wolf’s hind legs buckled. Harelip flipped it over, straddling it and scratching more deep gashes into its belly. The wolf whimpered again and squirmed to get away. Harelip grabbed it and stood, lifting the wolf over its head and effortlessly tossing it across the room. The wolf struck the far wall, leaving a red spatter of blood where it hit. Then it dropped, crashing through a pile of old crates and furniture that tumbled down on top of it.

  “No!” the woman yelled. She ran toward where the wolf had landed. The creatures in the air flew after her, chittering.

  Except for Harelip. Harelip stayed where it was, facing away from me as it licked wolf blood from its fingers. I picked up the staff, gripping it toward the bottom like a baseball bat, the blackened fist at its top.

  Harelip sensed me coming. It spun around, fixing me with its jet-black eyes. It opened its wide, tusked mouth in a bloodcurdling hiss.

  “You picked the wrong night to fuck with me,” I said, and swung the staff like I was batting for the outfield. The human fist at the tip struck Harelip square in the chest.

  Bullets bounced off these creatu
res’ skin, so in truth I didn’t expect any better results from the staff, despite the short woman’s insistence that I use it. But the moment the fist connected there was a bright explosion of light and fire. Harelip was knocked backward through the air. A glowing, orange spiderweb of fire spread across its skin. Harelip tumbled through the air trailing embers and char, and hit the wall on the opposite side of the warehouse so hard that the bricks cracked and buckled. Harelip exploded into a chunky cloud of burning ash.

  I blinked dumbly at the staff in my hands. What the hell just happened?

  Six

  The four remaining creatures hovered in the air above the short woman. They glanced at the charred remains of their companion at the foot of the wall, then glared at me. They looked pissed, but they also looked wary of the staff in my hands.

  I shook it at them threateningly. “Anyone else want a piece of this?”

  Yellow Eye shrieked angrily at me, then flew up through the gaping hole in the ceiling. The other three followed, and they disappeared into the dark night sky.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” I said.

  Now that the creatures were gone, I went to see if the woman was all right. If she was injured, she didn’t show it. She began frantically tossing aside the old crates and debris that stood between her and the wolf that had come out of nowhere.

  “They’re gone,” I told her.

  She glanced over her shoulder at me. “Help me. I can’t leave Thornton here.”

  “Look, lady, I’m sorry about your dog, but those things could come back at any moment,” I said. “We have to get out of here.”

  “He’s not a dog,” she said. She gritted her teeth as she pushed a half-smashed crate out of her way. “Just help me.”

  If she wanted to stay here to find her pet, she was crazy. Which probably meant I was, too. We’d both seen the same impossible things, fought off the same creatures that couldn’t be real. And yet, she didn’t seem fazed by it at all. Maybe she was used to being crazy. I could always ask her for tips.

  With a heavy sigh, I put down the staff and helped her lift away the heavier bits of furniture and junk. “What were those things?”

  “Gargoyles,” she said, grunting as she pulled another crate clear of the mess. “They must have followed us here from the cathedral. I cast a ward around this place, but I guess it was too late. They must have already seen us come here.”

  I didn’t understand half of what she said. I looked up at the gaping hole in the ceiling again. “Gargoyles? For real? Like, off of buildings…?”

  She glared at me. “Do they look like they came off of buildings?” She sighed and gazed up at the hole. “They waited until I was alone, and then they broke through.” I understood that part, at least. It was the gargoyles who’d put the hole in the roof. “I should have known better. This is all my fault.” She picked up an old metal folding chair from the pile and threw it aside in frustration. It clattered loudly on the floor. I decided to hold off on any more questions for a while.

  Between the two of us the job went quickly. A few minutes later we finally cleared away the last of the debris.

  “Thornton!” she said.

  But the body on the floor wasn’t Thornton. Thornton was a big gray timber wolf, but what lay on the floor was a naked man, curled on his side in the fetal position. He wasn’t breathing. The floor around his body was slick with blood from the long, deep scratches in his chest and stomach. Bits of something red and meaty poked out of the wounds.

  Then I noticed a leather bracelet around his right wrist, in the same place I’d seen it on the wolf’s leg. It had the same intricate, interwoven design in the leather and thin strands of gold. How was that possible? I was sure I’d seen a wolf.

  I thought of the old movies I’d seen on the TV in the fallout shelter, ones where Henry Hull and Lon Chaney Jr. played men who became wolves. There was a word for it, but it was impossible. I didn’t even want to think it.

  She knelt beside the naked man and felt his neck for a pulse. “Oh no,” she said.

  “He’s dead,” I said. It wasn’t a question so much as confirmation. There was no way Thornton couldn’t be dead with his body torn open like that, but sometimes people didn’t believe it until they saw for themselves. They had to touch the body with their own hands because the enormity of it was too much to process otherwise. The mother of the little boy, number eight on my list, had done that. She’d put her hands on the boy’s cheeks like she was checking him for a fever. The memory turned into a rock in my stomach. Suddenly I felt useless and stupid standing there watching yet another woman mourn her loss.

  She leaned back on her haunches and shook her head. “Oh, Thornton.”

  “We should go,” I said. I took her arm to help her up, but she yanked it away.

  “I told you, I’m not leaving him here.”

  I knelt down across the body from her. “Look, those things, those gargoyles aren’t going to stay away for long. We need to move now, before this place is crawling with them.”

  She looked over her shoulder at the empty warehouse. “They’ve gone to get help. I’d say we’ve got about fifteen minutes before they come back with twice their number. That should give us plenty of time.”

  “Plenty of time for what?”

  She didn’t answer. She reached into another pocket of her cargo vest and pulled out a long, thick, golden chain. Dangling from its end was a pendant in the shape of a starburst. Four small red gems were arranged in a diamond formation at its center.

  I looked up at the hole in the ceiling. We didn’t have time to play with jewelry. The sooner I left, the better. But I couldn’t leave her behind. If those creatures came back and caught her alone, she was as good as dead.

  She rolled Thornton gently onto his back. Then she depressed the center of the starburst pendant with her thumbs. A long, sharp spike popped out of its back with a metallic snik. She held it over Thornton and chanted some words I didn’t understand. They were in some other language, one I’d never heard before, but there was something eerie about it that drew a shiver down my spine.

  “What are you doing?”

  She ignored me. When she was done chanting, she took a deep breath and slammed the pendant down on Thornton’s chest, driving the spike into his heart like a dagger blade.

  “No!” I shouted, reaching to stop her, but it was already too late. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  She lifted Thornton’s head gently and slid the chain around his neck. “Now we just have to wait and give the Breath of Itzamna time to work.”

  I stared at her, wondering if I ought to leave her behind after all. She was clearly out of her mind. Or maybe the whole damn world had gone mad. After all, I’d died nine times already but was still here, alive and kicking. In what kind of sane world did that happen?

  She saw the confusion in my face and said, “That’s what the amulet’s called, the Breath of Itzamna. It was given to me by a nine-hundred-year-old Mayan shaman in a tattoo parlor in Los Angeles. Let’s hope it works as well as he said it would.”

  Ridiculously, I felt a pang of disappointment that someone so beautiful and brave could also be batshit crazy.

  Against my better judgment, I asked, “Do you really expect me to believe there are nine-hundred-year-old Mayan shamans living in L.A.?”

  “Just one,” she corrected me. “The others are in San Diego these days, mostly. They share an apartment complex near the zoo.”

  Of course. I should have guessed as much. “That’s insane,” I told her.

  “Not really,” she said. “It’s nice there and the rents are cheap.” She turned to me, her brow knitting with sudden confusion, as if it had only just occurred to her that I was a complete stranger. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Trent.”

  “Trent.” She shook my hand. Hers was so small it practically disappeared in my grip. “I’m Bethany. Thank you, Trent. If you hadn’t come along when you did, I don’t know what would
have happened. I guess I owe you my life. I don’t think I could have held off six gargoyles on my own, even with the Anubis Hand.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “The what now?”

  Bethany nodded at the staff on the floor with the mummified human fist. “Only two things in the world can hurt a gargoyle. Sunlight—or any bright light, really—and the Anubis Hand.” She looked at the pile of ashes by the wall that had once been Harelip. “But maybe you can help me out, Trent, because the thing is, I’ve never seen the Anubis Hand do that before. It can hurt gargoyles, it can knock them unconscious, but it’s never burned them to cinders before.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe you can only knock them out, but I’m, what, three times your body mass? No disrespect, but I gave that gargoyle a pretty good smack.”

  She looked at me skeptically. “Well, whatever you did, it saved my life. Probably yours, too.”

  Not likely, I thought. I turned away from her, and Bethany gasped in alarm. “Trent, you’re injured!”

  The adrenaline from the fight had numbed the pain so much that I’d forgotten about the wounds on my back. So much for getting through the night without ruining another shirt. “I’ll be okay,” I told her. “I’m tougher than I look.”

  “It’s not every day someone walks away from a gargoyle attack,” she said. “You should count yourself lucky.”

  “I guess so.” I still didn’t fully understand what had happened. Gargoyles, a staff called the Anubis Hand, an amulet named the Breath of Itzamna, a man who just a few minutes before had been a wolf … If the door had opened just then and a magical, telepathic Q’horse had trotted in, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Come on, Thornton,” Bethany whispered.

  “What exactly are you expecting to happen here?” I pressed.

  She ignored me and continued talking to the dead body. “We need you. You’re the only one who knows where it is now.”

  “Where what is?”

  Finally, she acknowledged my presence again. She shook her head and said, “A box. It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with.”