Dying Is My Business Page 9

  “Is Bethany a were—a lycanthrope, too?”

  “Oh God, no,” he said. “Though sometimes I wish she was. She could stand to ease up a bit, lose that stick up her butt and get in touch with her wild side. But no, she’s human, I guess. Though sometimes I wonder.”

  “The ears,” I said.

  “Yeah. That and the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever seen her laugh,” Thornton said. “So, quid pro quo time. Now I get to ask you something.”

  I squirmed in my seat, uncomfortable with the spotlight suddenly being turned on me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t used to lying, I lied all the time on these collection jobs; it was that for some reason, just then, I didn’t want to. Against my better judgment, I was starting to like Thornton. “Shoot,” I said.

  “The Black Knight,” he said. Funny, his question didn’t come out as one, either.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I’m not a magician or a mage or … whatever that other word was.”

  “Thaumaturge,” he said. “Someone who works miracles.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m definitely not that. I can’t explain what happened. As soon as the Black Knight touched me it felt like my strength was draining right out of me. I felt tired, weak, and cold, like the temperature dropped thirty degrees in a second.”

  Thornton nodded. “That’s what he does. One touch and the Black Knight sucks the life right out of you. It’s why no one has ever survived a fight with him. No one until you. I’m sure you can understand why I’m interested in how you managed that, exactly.”

  I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better, actually. Right now, nothing is making any sense. I didn’t do anything, it just … happened.”

  He looked skeptical. “You really don’t know?”

  “It feels like this is all a practical joke and I’m still waiting for the punch line.”

  “Huh,” Thornton said. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a newbie. The way you handled yourself, I would have thought you’d been working magic for a long time.”

  “Magic.” I shook my head. “I’m losing my damn mind.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Thornton said. “The first time I got my wolf on, I felt pretty much the same way you do now. I almost lost my shit.”

  “Did you get bitten?” I asked.

  He rolled his eyes. “Please. Forget all that bullshit from the movies. You’re born into lycanthropy. You don’t need to get bitten, and you sure as hell don’t need a full moon to change. My first time happened in ninth grade when the school bullies decided to chase me home from school. I was terrified. I thought they were going to kill me. The next thing I knew, I was running on all fours. Maybe it’s the same for you. Your life was in danger back there, and you tapped into a power you didn’t know you had. A survival mechanism. But it’s nothing to worry about. Take it from me, these things get easier to control after the first time.”

  “You’re saying what happened back there could happen again?” I looked at my shot glass and wished it weren’t empty.

  “You’ll get used to it. People get used to all kinds of weird stuff.”

  He had a point there, said the man who kept coming back from the dead. But I was barely used to that, how was I supposed to get used to this new ability, too? What other surprises were lurking beneath the surface, waiting to show themselves? It felt like too much to think about.

  I glanced at the TV showing NY1, and my heart jumped. On the screen, a reporter in Times Square was standing in front of my upside-down Explorer, which was walled off by yellow police tape. Thornton caught my expression and turned to see for himself. The reporter’s lips moved in a silent pantomime of speech while the closed-captioning subtitles scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

  … LEFT THREE OFFICERS INJURED, ONE CRITICALLY, IN WHAT WITNESSES ARE CALLING A YOUTUBE STUNT GONE DISASTROUSLY WRONG …

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “How can they just brush it off like that? Those witnesses saw the Black Knight. They saw us fighting.”

  Thornton shrugged. “People see what they want to see. It’s human nature. They barely glance at strangers’ faces. Their minds fill in the blanks, and unless they know differently they just see what they expect. It’s the same when it comes to magic or the supernatural. People just see what they want to see.” I threw him a skeptical look. “You don’t believe me? Okay, tell me then, what did you see when you first went into the warehouse? Was it gargoyles?”

  I thought back. I had entered the warehouse with my gun drawn, seen the hole in the ceiling first, and then Bethany, and facing off against her—

  I’d seen exactly what I expected to see.

  “Men in trench coats,” I answered. Thornton nodded as if he’d proven his case. “Did the gargoyles make me see that?”

  “Nope, that was all you. But don’t feel bad about it, it could have been worse. A lot of people don’t see gargoyles coming until it’s too late. All those stories you hear about people disappearing off of cruise ships or kids vanishing from school trips without a trace…”

  “That’s gargoyles, too?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s other things. Gargoyles aren’t the worst of what’s out there.”

  There were worse things? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “Okay, but what about the Black Knight? Everyone saw him. How can they just explain him away as some lunatic making a YouTube video?”

  Thornton leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Most people think that all they see is all there is. Sometimes they don’t even know what they’re really seeing. Look around, look at the people in this bar. Any one of them could be a lycanthrope, or a vampire, or a shape-shifting demon in human form. If you didn’t know those things were real, how could you tell?”

  I looked at the drinkers lined up at the bar, studied their faces, but everyone looked normal to me. “I can’t,” I conceded.

  “Exactly,” Thornton said. “Magic exists, but it’s a shadow world. It flourishes in the places people don’t look, the streets they don’t go down at night. Sometimes it’s right under your nose, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re not going to see it.”

  I kept looking at the drinkers. A few must have felt my eyes on them because they turned in my direction. But it wasn’t me they were looking at, I realized quickly. It was Thornton. They leaned toward each other, murmuring something under the jukebox music and glaring at him with the intensity of a hawk hunting a mouse.

  Thornton, oblivious to the men staring at him, kept talking. “Trust me, it’s better this way. If people knew the truth about what’s really out there, they’d go looking for it and get themselves killed. Or worse.”

  I turned back to him. “Worse? What would be worse?”

  He ignored my question. “It’s not safe out there, and it’s getting worse by the day. There are forces at work that are supposed to keep everything in balance, but I’ll be damned if they’re doing their job anymore. Sure, once upon a time everything was supposedly in perfect balance, the light and the dark. Then the Shift happened, and everything went to hell.”

  “The Shift?”

  “Something happened that tipped the balance. The darkness got stronger, and the light got weaker. Over time, magic grew darker and darker. You can’t carry it inside you anymore the way magicians used to. If magic gets inside you it infects you, corrupts you, turns you dark. It changes you into something wrong. The only safe way to handle magic now is with artifacts, objects that are infused with spells. Charms, amulets, weapons.”

  “Like the Anubis Hand,” I said.

  Thornton tapped a finger against the amulet on his chest. “And this.”

  I thought of the energy that had come out of my hands, and all the times I’d woken up from being dead. Did I have magic inside me? Was that what gave me these abilities? If I did, would it corrupt me, turn me into something wrong?

  Had it already?

  “There are hundreds of the Infected out there,” Thornton cont
inued. “They’ve either embraced the darkness inside them or been subsumed by it, and their numbers are growing every day. The things that thrive in the dark have crept into the abandoned and forgotten places of the world and spread like a disease. It’s an avalanche, growing stronger from its own momentum. I don’t even know if it can be stopped anymore, or if things can be put back to rights. We do what we can. We secure magical artifacts before they can do any harm or fall into the wrong hands, but we keep our heads down. We don’t draw attention to ourselves, and we don’t take anyone on outright.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a lighter and a pack of Marlboro reds. He stuck a cigarette between his lips and lit it. “Maybe you think we’re cowards, but it’s the only way we can survive when we’re this outnumbered.”

  “I don’t think you’re cowards,” I said. “But I think you’re a fool if you think you can change the world. It is what it is. It’s never going to change.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” He took a drag off his cigarette. He couldn’t taste it any more than he could the Guinness, but it seemed to calm him. He let the smoke out in a long, leisurely exhalation, a gray cloud that swirled up toward the light fixture above the table. More smoke wafted out from between the buttons of his shirt, exiting his body through the deep gashes in his torso. I decided it was better not to mention it to him.

  “Oi, you can’t smoke in here!” the bartender shouted over the music. “Take it outside!”

  The men at the bar who’d stared at Thornton earlier turned to glare at him again. A grizzled old man in a porkpie hat added, “You shouldn’t smoke anyway. Bloody things’ll kill you.”

  “Too late for that,” Thornton muttered. He dropped the cigarette into his beer, where it sizzled out.

  I watched Thornton closely. “Are you scared?” I asked.

  “Scared of what?”

  “Dying.”

  “Nah, dying’s easy,” he said. “Comedy is hard.”

  “I’m serious.”

  His gaze was steady as it met mine. “I’m already dead, Trent. What’s there to be scared of?”

  I shrugged. “What comes after.”

  “Ah.” He thought about it a moment, then said, “You know, I’ve seen filthy, abandoned subway platforms turned into beautiful, ornate goblin temples. I’ve seen creatures that live at the bottom of the Central Park Reservoir that would make you scream in terror if you caught even a glimpse of them, only they’re the most peaceful beings I’ve ever met. They spend all day preparing elaborate meals of algae and phytoplankton, and then at night they put on puppet shows for their young. The universe never stops surprising us, Trent. Nothing is ever what it seems. The way I figure it, death is no different. It’s just another kind of existence, another plane of reality.”

  It sounded nice, and I hoped he was right. I didn’t tell him that my own experiences with death were very different. I never saw another plane of existence. I never saw anything at all.

  “It’s not what comes next that scares me, Trent,” Thornton continued. “What scares me is leaving Gabrielle. I can’t even imagine not having her by my side. It’s funny, all the little things in a relationship that can bug you, like your girlfriend’s mad that you left hair in the shower drain, or you’re mad that she turned off the cable box when you wanted to DVR your favorite show, and then suddenly…” He paused a moment, staring at the soggy cigarette floating in his Guinness. “Suddenly there’s an expiration date, and you realize how much time you wasted on stuff that doesn’t matter. You realize love is a lot bigger and a lot more important than you ever thought it was.”

  I was going to have to take his word on that, though I often wondered if there was someone I’d loved, or who’d loved me, before my past was stripped away. My guess was no. If someone loved me, wouldn’t they try to find me?

  “Thornton!” Bethany shouted over the music. She held the phone out for him. Thornton leapt out of the booth and took it from her. He put the phone to his ear and leaned against the wall with his back to the bar. I couldn’t see his expression, but I could guess what it was.

  The bartender, Porkpie Hat, and the rest of the men at the bar watched Thornton at the public phone. They glared at him and muttered to each other. They looked nervous, on edge.

  Bethany came to the booth and sat in Thornton’s seat. She scowled at the pint glass with the cigarette in it and pushed it away. “Ugh, what have you two been doing?”

  “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

  “Just like I said, it’s not safe to meet up with Isaac yet, not with the gargoyles still out there. We can’t risk leading them right to him. But he told me about a safe house that’s just a few blocks from here. We’re supposed to meet a woman there named Ingrid Bannion. Isaac is calling her now to let her know we’re coming. We’ll stay at the safe house until the sun’s up. The gargoyles won’t risk being out in the daylight, it hurts them too much.”

  “But you said it doesn’t kill them?”

  “Not much does.” She leaned closer, her hair falling over her eyes in a way that made her look a lot younger than she was. “I told Isaac about what happened with the Anubis Hand, and what you did to the Black Knight. He’s very interested in meeting you.”

  “Who is Isaac?” I asked. “You’ve been talking about him all night but I have no idea who he is.”

  “He’s the man we work for.”

  I nodded. I’d thought as much. “The one who sends you out to secure magical artifacts before any of the Infected get them.”

  She arched an eyebrow at me in surprise, the corners of her lips curling up in a half-smile. “I see you and Thornton have been talking. Good. I bet Isaac could use someone like you.”

  I liked the fact that I’d impressed her. I liked even more that I’d made her smile.

  I pushed the thought away. It was dangerous to get attached. I knew that. What was I, some goddamn amateur?

  “Right now Isaac, Gabrielle, and Philip are back at Citadel, tracking the gargoyles’ movements,” she said. “They can keep the gargoyles occupied with some spells to misdirect them, but until the sun is up he wants us to wait it out somewhere safe. That’s the best he can do for us.”

  Citadel. She’d mentioned that name before, back in the Explorer. Isaac’s base of operations. I still didn’t know where it was. Citadel was another word for castle or fortress, but where was there any such thing in New York City? It had to be close enough that Thornton had considered going right back there from the warehouse. I also made a mental note that there were five people involved in Isaac’s operation, including Bethany and Thornton. That complicated things. Two people I could steal from without breaking a sweat. Five was a lot harder.

  And then there was the second part of Underwood’s orders, the part about not leaving any survivors. My stomach felt sour thinking about it. I pushed it aside. It was a bridge I’d cross later. First things first. I didn’t have the box yet. I didn’t even know where it was, other than that someone named Gregor was holding onto it for them.

  “Something on your mind?” she asked. “You’ve got that look in your eye again.”

  “I have a look?” I asked.

  “You’ve got a lot of looks, actually, but I call this one the I’m about to punch someone look.”

  She smiled again. I forced myself to look away before it sucked me in. I said, “I don’t get it. Isaac is here in the city, right?” She nodded. “Then why doesn’t he come help you? Why hasn’t he picked you up yet? You’ve been on the run since last night.”

  “It’s policy,” she explained. “Once we’re out in the field, we’re on our own.”

  That sounded uncomfortably familiar. “So he just hangs you out to dry?”

  “It’s not like that. Isaac knows what he’s doing. But if we’re going to do any good, none of this can be traced back to him.”

  That, too, sounded familiar. I found myself growing unexpectedly angry. “Why? What makes him so special that he needs protecting?”

  “It’s
not who he is, it’s what he’s got.”

  Before I could ask anything else, the scuff of somebody’s shoe against the floor made me turn. The people at the bar were off their stools and on their feet, milling about restlessly. They were focused like a laser on Thornton, who was too busy talking to Gabrielle on the phone to notice them. They looked like animals that had been backed into a corner, shifting their weight nervously back and forth, from foot to foot. They didn’t approach Thornton, but it was only a matter of time. I could feel the violence brewing. It thickened the air.

  Thornton hung up the phone and came back to the booth, grinning from ear to ear. His smile made the scar on his cheek look even worse. The torn flap of skin wobbled like it was going to come loose again.

  “See? I told you I’d make sure you got to talk to her,” Bethany said.

  Thornton nodded, still beaming. “She’s sure there’s something that can help me. She told me she’s going to read every spell book she can get her hands on to find a way to circumvent the amulet’s time limit. She thinks she might be able to make its effects permanent.”

  “That’s good news,” I said.

  “If anyone can do it, Gabrielle can. I know she can,” he said.

  Bethany looked down, avoiding his eyes. It looked like she had something to say but had chosen to keep her mouth shut instead.

  “Hey!” someone called. Thornton didn’t turn to see who it was, but I did. It was one of the guys at the bar, a man in his thirties with the sloppy, red-splotched features of someone who’d been drinking since he was old enough to lift a glass. He and the others had clustered together in a tight pack, giving themselves over to a primal herd instinct. Behind them, the bartender had his hand on whatever was under the bar. I was curious about what it was, but not enough to want him to pull it out.