Dying Is My Business Read online

  Thornton frowned like he thought I’d just insulted him. Then he raised a hand to his cheek and felt the flap of skin hanging loose there. “Ew.” He pressed the skin back into place until it stuck. Now it just looked like he had two big, ugly scars on his cheek that came to a point under his eye. “Better?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure better is the right word, but it’s good enough.” I turned back to Bethany. She was still bent over, carefully removing bits of dirt and gravel from her wound. Her thick, dark hair fell forward to reveal one ear. My breath caught in my throat. Her ear came to a point at the top. It reminded me of Ch’aqrath, the elf prince in The Ragana’s Revenge.

  “Are you—are you an elf?” I blurted. Hearing it out loud like that, I immediately cringed at how stupid I sounded.

  She looked up at me, her sky-blue eyes flashing with indignation. Then she straightened up and quickly brushed her hair over her ear again. “Don’t be absurd,” she snapped. “No one’s even seen an elf since World War Two.” She said it as if I should have known something so obvious.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Trent, what was that back there?” she asked. “That energy that came out of you, how did you do that?”

  I looked at my hands. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see, but they didn’t look any different to me. “I don’t know. It just sort of happened.”

  “Bullshit,” Thornton said. “You did magic, Trent. Magic doesn’t just happen.”

  “What?” I scoffed. “Come on, give me a break. There’s no such thing as magic.”

  Thornton rolled his eyes. “No such thing as magic, he says. You might as well say there’s no such thing as gravity.”

  Granted, there shouldn’t have been any such thing as gargoyles, werewolves, amulets that raised the dead, or knights who turned into crows, either. Maybe Thornton was right and magic was real after all. Hell, maybe The Ragana’s Revenge was nonfiction. Who was I to say? I was an amnesiac. Everything I knew about the world I’d learned from a Brooklyn crime boss and old black-and-white movies on a half-busted TV.

  “No one has ever fought the Black Knight and survived,” Bethany said. “Not until you.”

  “Fess up, Trent,” Thornton said. “First you turn the Anubis Hand into a freaking cannon, then you zap the Black Knight back to whatever hole he crawled out of. You’ve been holding out on us. What are you? A magician? Thaumaturge? No, let me guess, a mage?”

  I shook my head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I honestly don’t know what happened back there. All I did was touch him.” A noise from the street caught my attention. The cops were trying to get the Explorer’s doors open. “We don’t have time for this. We have to keep moving or they’ll find us.”

  “Fine,” Bethany said. She took my hand and started limping determinedly up the street, leading me like a dog on a leash toward Eighth Avenue. Thornton followed with his broken arm swinging loosely at his side. “Come on, magician,” she said. “Forget what I said about going our separate ways. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

  And just like that, I was in.

  Ten

  We continued making our way toward Eighth Avenue, but we moved maddeningly slowly. The cut on Bethany’s knee had stopped bleeding, but her jeans leg was slick with blood and she was still limping. Thornton walked stiffly, hugging his broken arm close to his side. The car crash had done a number on me, too, reopening the scratches on my back and adding new, small ones on my face that itched more than they hurt. I was pretty sure the Black Knight had left finger-shaped bruises on my neck, too. We were a sorry bunch. As we hobbled our way up the sidewalk, I glanced back every few steps, hoping the cops hadn’t noticed us. So far, they hadn’t.

  “It’s not the police we need to worry about,” Bethany said, huffing with exertion. “Ten to one the gargoyles are still on our trail. We might have gotten away, but that’s only a temporary setback for them. They won’t stop until they get what they want.”

  “Shh,” Thornton hissed, stopping. Bethany and I stopped too. Thornton scanned the sky quickly. “I thought I heard something.”

  I looked up, glancing at the rooftops and fire escapes. There were no gargoyles in sight, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close by.

  “Keep moving,” Bethany said.

  We rounded the corner onto Eighth Avenue. The sidewalks were busy with pedestrians and people milling outside the bars smoking cigarettes. I felt myself relax a bit. Maybe there was safety in numbers. But then, gargoyles didn’t seem like the type to care if any innocent bystanders got between them and their prey.

  Bethany finally released my hand. She’d been keeping a tight grip on it the whole way up the block from Seventh Avenue, as if she were worried I’d run away. Her palm had felt warm against mine, much warmer than I’d expected it to, like there was a tiny furnace burning inside her. Probably it was just adrenaline, or maybe women with pointy, elflike ears ran naturally higher body temperatures. When she let go, I felt a confusing mix of relief and disappointment not to be holding her hand anymore. I reminded myself it was better not to think of her as a person. She was a mark, someone I intended to steal from at the soonest opportunity, nothing more. I couldn’t afford to slip up again, not when so much was riding on delivering that box to Underwood.

  Bethany slowed down to catch her breath. She turned to Thornton. “Do you still have your phone? I have to call Isaac and let him know what happened.”

  There was that name again: Isaac. Who was he? Their boss, it sounded like. If they were thieves like me, Isaac was their version of Underwood.

  With his good arm, Thornton pulled a cell phone out of his pants pocket, but the crash had turned it into junk. Its casing was broken open and a deep crack bisected its blank screen. He fiddled with the power key, but the screen stayed dark. “This phone’s deader than I am,” he said and stuffed it back into his pocket.

  Bethany turned to me. “What about you? Have you got a phone?”

  “Sorry, no.” Underwood didn’t let me carry a cell phone. The calls were too easy to intercept, he said, even from the anonymous pay-as-you-go phones. Even worse, the authorities could use the array of cell towers all over the city to triangulate your physical location in seconds. When I was out on a job, like now, I was on my own. Sink or swim. “You don’t carry one?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “I can’t. There’s too much interference from all the charms in my vest. Every cell phone I’ve ever owned has gotten fried.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, what we need is to get out of the open and find someplace where we can think, preferably someplace with a public phone.”

  A public phone was a tall order in this day and age, but Thornton spotted a neighborhood bar up the block. A sign above the door read CELTIC PUB in big white letters and a neon four-leaf clover lit up the window. “Bars usually have phones. I don’t know about you two, but I could use a drink anyway.”

  “I wouldn’t say no to that,” I said. After everything that had happened, a drink to take the edge off was just what I needed.

  Walking into the bar in our torn and bloody clothes, we were quite the sight. If we wanted to look inconspicuous enough to blend casually into the crowd, we failed miserably. But then again, this was New York City. No one even looked up from their drinks when we entered. It was like a bad joke: An elf, a zombie, and a man who can’t die walk into a bar, and no one cares.

  There were only a dozen customers inside, all of them sitting along the length of the bar. The cushioned booths on the other side of the room were empty. The air smelled of greasy food and spilled beer. A jukebox in the corner played the Drifters at high volume: “They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway, they say there’s always magic in the air…”

  Magic. God, Thornton said I’d done magic. I’d seen magic, too, hadn’t I? Or was there some other explanation for an amulet resurrecting a dead man, or a man in black armor turning into a flock of crows and flying away? I didn’t want to think about it. I just wa
nted a drink.

  Two big flat-screen TVs hung on the wall above the bar, one showing the tail end of a baseball game and the other tuned to the local twenty-four-hour cable news channel, NY1. The sound was off on both, but the closed captioning had been turned on, white subtitles scrolling across blocky black backgrounds at the bottom of the screens. The bar’s overhead fixtures were turned down low and supplemented by multicolored chili pepper lights that had been strung up along the walls. A woman stood in the short, narrow hallway at the back of the bar, talking on a pay phone. I pointed out the phone to Bethany.

  “You guys sit tight, I’m going to call Isaac,” she said. She seemed calmer. She was in her element now, taking charge of a situation.

  “Wait, let me,” Thornton said. “Gabrielle’s there, too. I have to talk to her.”

  Bethany shook her head. “Sorry, no. I need you to lay low right now and not draw attention.”

  “How am I going to draw attention while I’m on the phone? Besides, have you seen your leg? It’s like something out of a horror movie. You’re going to draw a lot more attention than I am.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s not true,” she said. “You have to trust me. There’s something that happens to people when they’re around the undead.” She paused and glanced around to make sure no one could hear her over the music. “They may not know what it is, but they’ll sense something’s wrong. Their instincts will tell them. The more they’re aware of you, the more on edge they’ll be. I need both of you to just take a seat and keep your heads down, all right?”

  I remembered the feeling I’d had when Thornton sprang back to life, that urge to make him properly dead again, even if it meant caving in his skull. Bethany was right, that had come from somewhere deep inside, some primal instinct.

  Thornton frowned. “Great, so I’m not just dead, I’m a pariah, too?”

  “Thornton, I promise you I’ll put you on the phone with Gabrielle if I can, but first I need to report back to Isaac. It’s protocol, and we haven’t had a chance to check in since last night. He needs to know things have escalated.”

  Thornton nodded, but he didn’t look happy about it. “Everything has to be by the book with you, doesn’t it,” he said bitterly. “Protocol above all else. Christ, you don’t have a heart in your chest, you’ve got fucking Robert’s Rules of Order. Just remember I don’t have a lot of time left, and right now I could not give less of a rat’s ass if everyone in this bar gets a funny feeling off me. I have to talk to Gabrielle.”

  If his insult stung her, she didn’t show it. “I know you do. I’ll be quick, I promise.” She made her way to the back and stood behind the woman on the phone. I watched her ask the woman to hurry, but the woman turned her back and kept gabbing. She ignored Bethany and tapped the small, yellow garbage can under the phone with the toe of her shoe.

  “I need a drink,” Thornton said. “Like, now.” He leaned against the end of the bar and flagged down the bartender.

  He was a beefy, bald man with a salt-and-pepper goatee and a tight black T-shirt. He did a double take when he saw Thornton. He frowned, narrowed his eyes, and said, “Look, buddy, we don’t want any trouble here.”

  Thornton raised a confused eyebrow. “No trouble, I just wanted to get some drinks for me and my friend here.”

  The bartender’s eyes dropped to something behind the bar. I figured it was either a baseball bat or a shotgun. I tensed, but then the bartender said, “Yeah, sure. Just keep it cool.”

  “Always. So, one Guinness and…” He turned to me. “What’ll you have?”

  “A shot of Jameson,” I said.

  The bartender nodded, and with one last wary glance at Thornton went off to get our drinks. Thornton turned to me. “What’s his problem?”

  “Bethany said this would happen,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, he’s just going to have to deal. They all are. I didn’t exactly ask for this.”

  The bartender came back a moment later with our drinks. He didn’t look Thornton in the eye when he set the glasses down on the bar. Thornton struggled to reach into his right pants pocket, but his broken right arm wasn’t cooperating. He tried again with his left hand but the angle was wrong. “Damn it,” he muttered. He turned to me and jutted his hip forward. “Can you just reach in there and grab my wallet?”

  “Uh, that’s okay, I got it.” I pulled out my own wallet and threw some of the bills Underwood gave me onto the bar. The bartender scooped them up and left. He couldn’t get away from Thornton fast enough.

  Thornton took the pint of Guinness with his left hand and started walking toward one of the booths near the back. I picked up my shot of Jameson and noticed my hand was shaking. The amber liquid threatened to spill over the rim of the shot glass. I put it down again and took a deep breath, trying to calm myself.

  Something had come through me back in Times Square, something powerful that I didn’t understand. It had been strong enough to send the Black Knight packing and yet, like the nine times I’d come back from the dead, it was something I couldn’t control. The energy that came out of my hands—nothing like that had ever happened before. Suddenly the question of who I was took a backseat to the question of what I was. That frightened me. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know. What if I didn’t like the answer?

  I picked up the shot glass again and downed the Jameson in a single gulp. It burned on the way down and warmed my stomach. This, at least, was something familiar, something I could control. I tapped the empty shot glass and asked the bartender for another.

  He filled it for me. “There’s something strange about your friend,” he said. “Something I don’t care for.”

  “Don’t worry, he won’t make any trouble.”

  My hand didn’t tremble as much when I picked up the second shot and carried it to the booth Thornton had chosen. In back, Bethany was standing at the phone now, cradling the handset between her ear and shoulder. The woman who’d been hogging it all this time was sitting on the bench behind her, doubled over and vomiting into the same small, yellow garbage can. She looked surprised and embarrassed, as if the sickness had come over her from out of nowhere. I wondered what Bethany had done to her to get her off the phone.

  Bethany reached into a pocket of her cargo vest. At first I thought she was fishing for money to put in the coin slot, but instead she pulled out a small object that looked like scrimshaw, a fragile, round latticework of bone or ivory. She touched it to the side of the pay phone and kept her hand over it, hiding it from sight. A brief flash of blue light appeared between her fingers. Then she put the object back in its pocket and started dialing. Apparently Bethany had something in her vest for every occasion, including making a public phone work without paying. Once a thief …

  I sat down across from Thornton. He was staring in frustration at the pint of Guinness on the table in front of him. He tried to reach for it with his broken right arm, but his arm wasn’t responding properly. His face looked paler, and though I couldn’t be sure in the dim light, I thought I noticed a slight green tinge to his skin that made the dark scar on his cheek even more prominent. The lights from the amulet on his chest pulsed through his shirt. He reached for his beer with his broken arm again and failed.

  “Just use your other damn hand,” I said, losing patience.

  “Screw that,” Thornton replied. “Now it’s the principle of the thing. Anyway, I don’t even think my arm is fully broken, just knocked out of whack. If I can just push this bone back into place…” He put his left hand on his right elbow, where it bent the wrong way. He bit his lip and pushed. I heard a loud crack that made me wince. Thornton lifted his right arm and wiggled his fingers experimentally. “There. I’d say as good as new, but we both know that would be a joke.”

  As he reached for his pint glass, I noticed that the leather bracelet on his wrist had twisted. The clasp had caught his skin and was starting to tear it.

  “Whoa, let me help you with that,” I said. I reached for the bracelet. Thornto
n yanked his arm back.

  “Don’t touch it,” he snapped. “It was a gift from Gabrielle. No one touches it but me.”

  I put up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry, I was just trying to help. It looked like it hurt.”

  Thornton adjusted the bracelet and released the caught flap of skin. “It doesn’t. Nothing hurts. I can’t feel a thing. I didn’t even feel anything when the car flipped over. It was like I was watching it on TV instead of actually being there.” He lifted his pint glass and took a deep gulp. Then he grimaced and slammed the glass down on the table. A dollop of foamy stout sloshed over the side and ran down the glass. He pushed the beer away in frustration. “And I can’t taste anything, either. I should have known. Even in human form I normally have a heightened sense of smell, but that’s gone now. Makes sense I wouldn’t be able to taste anything, either. That only leaves me with two senses, and who knows how long those are going to stick around?”

  In human form? Damn, I’d nearly forgotten he was a wolf when I first saw him. I turned the shot glass around and around between my thumb and forefinger. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.”

  “You’re—you’re a werewolf.” It didn’t come out as a question, though I meant it to.

  He smiled. His lips looked so pale I almost couldn’t tell where they ended and his teeth began. “Werewolf is such a vulgar term. It makes me think of Lon Chaney Jr. in an Afro wig and big plastic teeth. Not to get all formal on you, but lycanthrope is the proper term for what we are.”

  I picked up the glass and downed the second shot a little too fast. I had to suck air into my mouth to dull the burn. “We? There are more of you?”

  He shrugged. “Of course. There are hundreds of us in the U.S. alone, thousands around the world. We’re as thriving and vibrant a culture as any other. You should see our holiday parties. Or on second thought, scratch that. Lycanthropes aren’t exactly known for their table manners, and most of the time we don’t bother cooking the meat. Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s actually kind of a disaster.”