Dying Is My Business

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 wanted 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. Thornton 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.”

“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 continued. “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.

“Hey,” the man called again.

Under the table, I pulled my Bersa semiautomatic out of the back of my pants and transferred it to the pocket of my leather jacket, just in case.

“Hey, you!” the man called.

This time Thornton turned around. “Jesus Christ, what?”

They came forward hesitantly, taking half-steps but keeping their pack positions. Their fear of Thornton was so strong it had turned into a seething hatred. It was like watching a herd of gazelles muster up the courage to attack a lion.

The bartender finally lifted the object from behind the bar. A wooden Louisville Slugger. I let out a small breath of relief. It was better than a shotgun, and it meant as long as these guys didn’t start with the pitchforks-and-torches routine I could leave my gun in my pocket.

I slid out of my seat and showed them my empty hands. “Is there a problem?”

Porkpie Hat jutted his chin at Thornton. “He’s the problem. What does he want? Why is he here?”

Thornton opened his mouth to answer. I knew he was going to say something smart-assed that would only make things worse, so I jumped in fast and said, “We’re not looking for trouble.”

“Then why don’t you just get the hell out,” the bartender said. Then, to emphasize his point, he hit the countertop with his baseball bat a couple of times, like he was shooing away a raccoon.

“We were just leaving,” I said.

“See to it, then,” the splotchy-faced man said.

We left the booth and left the bar, exiting back out onto Eighth Avenue. I hoped Isaac and the others were doing their job keeping the gargoyles distracted, because now that we were outside again we were exposed and vulnerable.

Bethany led the way downtown. I kept an eye on the sky, but so far so good. No gargoyles, at least none that I could see against the dark.

“What the hell was their problem?” Thornton demanded.

“Sorry, but I told you,” Bethany said. “It’s a survival instinct left over from primitive times. People can sense the undead, but only on a purely subconscious level. If you asked any of them back there why they were so on edge, they wouldn’t be able to tell you. They couldn’t help themselves.”

“That’s me, always bringing out the best in people.” He sighed. “So I really am a pariah, then.”

“Not to us,” she said. She took him by the good arm as we crossed Eighth Avenue. It struck me as a rare moment of warmth from her, the first time I’d seen her act like Thornton’s friend instead of his supervisor.

We cut through one of the side streets. We were in the theater district, but it was already late enough that the restaurants and piano bars were closed. The sidewalks were deserted. I didn’t like being this out in the open.

We passed an alley between buildings. Instinct made me turn and look inside. I didn’t see anything but a thick cloud of steam. It roiled and twisted, and then something broke through it. A gargoyle. It crawled sideways along the brick wall like a bug. I froze.

The gargoyle lifted its head to look at me. I recognized it from the warehouse. Yellow Eye. But then it did something I didn’t expect. Without making a sound, Yellow Eye retreated back into the steam and vanished. I didn’t understand. The gargoyle had seen me. There was no way it couldn’t have. So why didn’t it attack?

Bethany stopped walking. She came back to see what I was looking at, but by then it was just an empty alley. “What is it?”

“I thought I saw—” I started to say.

The chilling shriek of a gargoyle sounded somewhere above us. I looked up and saw a winged shape moving along the rooftops.

“Run,” I said, but the gargoyle was already swooping down toward us.