Dying Is My Business

Twelve

“It doesn’t look so bad,” Thornton said.

Ingrid smiled warmly. She pulled the long white glove back over her arm. “You’re a bad liar, Thornton, but a good man. I bet your aura was a beautiful color. Probably a bright royal blue.” She put her hand in her lap, as if to hide it. “You know how it is when you carry magic inside you. This is what it did to me. Morbius managed to contain the infection before it got worse, and before it could corrupt my mind, but the damage had already been done.”

“Who is Morbius?” Bethany asked. “The name sounds familiar.”

“A powerful mage, and a dear friend,” Ingrid said. “He’s the one who put the ward around this house. He’s no longer with us.” For a moment she was quiet, lost in her own memories. I got the sense that she’d seen more and experienced more than anyone I knew, and not all of it was good.

“I want to show you something, Ingrid,” Thornton said. He began unbuckling his leather bracelet. His stiff fingers made it difficult.

“Do you need help?” Ingrid asked. She reached for the bracelet.

Just as he’d done with me, Thornton jerked his arm away from her. “Don’t. Sorry, I don’t mean any offense, but I don’t let anyone touch this bracelet.”

“It must be very important to you,” Ingrid said.

Thornton managed to unbuckle the clasp and remove the bracelet. There, on the inside of his wrist, was a patch of skin that was marbled and glassy like an opal. He tapped it with a fingernail. It made the same sound as tapping a stone. “Once upon a time, I was young and foolish, too. Back then I had trouble accepting what I was, and like a fool I thought magic could cure me. It didn’t. It didn’t do anything but infect me, though it was several years before any symptoms manifested. Isaac contained it before it spread, but it left me with this souvenir.” He buckled the bracelet around his wrist again. “See, Ingrid? If I judged you, I’d only be judging myself, too.”

Ingrid looked at him a long moment. “I think I love you back, Thornton Redler.”

She stitched him up as best she could, a job made easier by the fact that he couldn’t feel any pain. While she worked, Bethany took a handful of bandages from the first-aid kit and came over to me. “Take off your shirt,” she said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“That gargoyle got your back pretty good,” she said. “We should take care of it before it gets worse.”

“I’m fine. Really.” I gestured at her injured leg. “You should probably tend to that knee instead.”

“It can wait,” she insisted. “I’m serious, Trent. Between getting mauled by a gargoyle and being in a car crash, you’re not fine. That’s the adrenaline talking. After everything that’s happened, your wounds might be a lot worse than you think they are. So, the shirt.”

She was determined, which meant nothing I said was going to change her mind. I knew that much about her already. There was no way to explain to her that no matter how bad my wounds were they weren’t life threatening, not to me; no way to explain that the thing inside me always brought me back from the dead fully healed, which included wounds both old and new. I wondered sometimes what would happen if I lost an eye or a hand, if they would grow back too, but it wasn’t something I ever hoped to put to the test.

“Have it your way,” I said, “but I’m telling you I’m okay.” I unbuttoned my shirt, pulled it off, and tossed it on the carpet. I turned my chair around and leaned forward with my back exposed. “You should save the bandages for yourself. You’ll just be wasting them on me.”

“You don’t have a very high opinion of yourself, do you?” Bethany asked. She circled around behind me, and a moment later I felt her unusually warm hands on my back as she inspected my wounds. Her touch on my bare skin made me uneasy. I felt vulnerable, like I’d left myself open to a knife between the ribs. I was pretty sure Bethany wasn’t the knifing type, but after a year among the criminals of Brooklyn, old habits were hard to shake.

Her hands felt good on me. Too good. I didn’t like that, either.

“You’re tense,” she said.

I grunted in reply, which only proved her right.

“Looks like the gargoyle didn’t cut you too deep. The bleeding’s not too bad,” Bethany said. “You got lucky. One good swipe from a gargoyle can cut clean through bone. About an inch to the right and an ounce more force and it would have severed your spinal column.”

“Told you I was fine,” I said.

“You’ve been mauled by a gargoyle,” she said. “I think we have different definitions of fine.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“Funny, you don’t have any scars to show for it.”

Of course I didn’t. “They’re on the inside,” I quipped.

“I’m going to have to clean out your wounds.” Bethany retrieved a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a few cotton balls from the first-aid kit. “This might sting a bit.”

“I think I’ll be okay.”

“Your tough-guy act isn’t as convincing as you think it is.” She dabbed an alcohol-soaked cotton ball against my back. I bucked in the chair, loudly sucking air through my teeth. “See? Not so convincing.”

“It was just cold,” I insisted, clenching my jaw as the burning alcohol cleansed my wounds.

Ingrid laughed. “I never thought I’d say it, but I kind of miss this. Being part of a team, I mean, like you three and Isaac.”

“We’re not exactly a team,” Bethany said. “We’re more like freelancers. Isaac hires us when he needs us to secure an artifact.”

“It’s a living,” Thornton said. “When Isaac found me and offered me a job, I jumped at it. I was at a low point in my life, probably the lowest I’ve ever been. I felt like I had nothing to live for back then. Now I do.” He looked down at the amulet on his chest. “How’s that for irony?”

Ingrid tsked and shook her head as she continued her stitch work. “Freelancers. It was different back in my day. We were together all the time. We would eat together, drink together, and on occasion we even lived together, right here in this house. It was a bond that lasted a lifetime.”

“Who’s we?” Thornton asked.

“There were five of us back then, fighting the good fight,” she said. “We called ourselves the Five-Pointed Star.”

Bethany froze in the middle of attaching a self-adhesive bandage to my back. “Wait, you were part of the Five-Pointed Star?”

“Oh yes,” Ingrid said with a grin. “You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, but I could mix it up in my day.”

“I thought I recognized the name Morbius,” Bethany said. “He was the Five-Pointed Star’s leader, wasn’t he? I’ve heard stories about them—about you, the things you did back in the day. You were legendary.”

Ingrid blushed and shook her head. “Sometimes I forget four decades have passed since Morbius brought us together. Time has a way of sneaking up on you. The others are all gone now. I’m the only one left to remember it all, and there’s so much to remember. Fighting trolls under the Kosciusko Bridge. Vampires in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Sirens off the coast of Coney Island…”

As she spoke, I noticed a framed photograph on the end table near my chair. I picked it up for a closer look. Five people stood in the same room we were in now, three men and two women. This was the Five-Pointed Star, I realized. I almost didn’t recognize the woman on the far right in the batik-print caftan dress until I noticed the white glove on her left hand. Ingrid, some forty years younger. She’d been strikingly beautiful back then, with long, chestnut-brown hair parted in the middle, and sharp, chiseled features that hadn’t yet softened with age. The other woman in the photo wore a long, black, wool knit dress, a small star tattoo at the center of her forehead peeking out from beneath her black bangs. Her skin was as red as brick, and her eyes burned yellow like two miniature suns. Two men stood side by side between the women, both with long stringy gray hair, lengthy knotted beards, and matching dark blue robes embroidered with strange gold symbols. They looked like twin wizards right out of a storybook; all they were missing were big pointed caps on their heads. And standing at the center of the group was the man I figured had to be Morbius, their leader. He stood tall in a wide-lapelled herringbone jacket, black iridescent necktie, and bell-bottomed trousers. His arms were crossed in front of his chest. His square, lightly stubbled jaw jutted forward as if he were daring the world to take a swing.

They were freaks, just like me, each with their own strange abilities. But more than that, they’d found a place where they belonged. With each other.

I put the picture back on the end table. It was a lot to take in at once. The world was nothing like I’d imagined all those times I lay awake in my room in the fallout shelter. It was so much bigger. Worlds within worlds, just like Elena De Voe had written in The Ragana’s Revenge. There was so much I didn’t know, so much more I needed to learn. The weight of it felt staggering.

“Back then, you couldn’t walk two feet in Bushwick without tripping over a portal to some other dimension,” Ingrid was saying. “That was how Maalrok, the war god of the Pharrenim, found his way into our world. Oh, he was a nasty one, let me tell you. Half man, half lizard, ten feet tall with six arms.” She gestured at the glass case over the mantelpiece, where the six antique swords were displayed. “Those were his. I kept them as a souvenir. Of course, we never could have stopped him and closed off the portal to his world without the help of a talented young man from the neighborhood by the name of Isaac Keene.”

“So that’s how you know Isaac,” Bethany said. “He talks about the Five-Pointed Star a lot. They were his inspiration.”

Ingrid nodded, but the smile faded from her face. “I remember the way he looked at us that day. His eyes were so wide. There was such innocence in them. Such wonder.”

Bethany dabbed an alcohol-soaked cotton ball on a small cut on my forehead, but I waved her away. “I’m fine, really. You’ve done enough.”

“Suit yourself. You can put your shirt back on.” She sat down on a nearby chair and began cleaning her wounded knee through the hole in her jeans leg.

I bent to pick my shirt up off the floor, half expecting the pain in my back to flare up. It didn’t. Bethany had fixed me up like an expert. Somehow that didn’t surprise me. She struck me as the kind of person who strived to be an expert at everything.

“After Morbius died, Isaac wanted to take his place on the team,” Ingrid continued. “I wouldn’t let him. It was too dangerous. You don’t need me to tell you what it’s like out there, and it’s only getting worse, not better. I told him the best thing he could do was keep his head down and not draw attention to himself. I made him promise—no, I made him swear to leave it alone, but it wasn’t easy. Morbius had filled that boy’s head with the same grandiose nonsense he put in mine back when he first asked me to join his grand experiment. Morbius believed that burying your head in the sand wasn’t the answer. It didn’t make you any safer. He said there comes a time when you have to take a stand, even if no one stands with you. He knew damn well there was no safe way to fight the darkness that’s spreading through the world, but he was convinced it had to be done no matter what the risk. And it cost him his life.”

“What happened?” I asked.

She frowned, her lips pressed tight. “The Black Knight happened. With a touch, he sucked the life right out of Morbius. That’s all it took, just one touch. It was so fast, it was horrible. After Morbius died, we couldn’t go on without him. He was the glue that held us together, he and his dream of a better world. The darkness was too strong for us to fight. If it could kill Morbius, it could kill anyone.” She looked down at her hands. “I didn’t want that to happen to Isaac, so I told him to do exactly what Morbius said not to. I told him to hide.”

“I’m sorry,” Bethany said.

Ingrid took a deep breath, collecting herself. “It was a long time ago. But now it seems the Black Knight is after you, and I can guess why. Isaac told me what you found. I’m begging you to be careful. I don’t know what happened just now, why the Black Knight flew off like that, but we got lucky. He’ll keep coming for you. I wish I knew how to stop him, but don’t I think he can be stopped.”

“Trent did a pretty good job of it earlier tonight when he kicked the Black Knight’s ass,” Thornton said.

“What?” Ingrid looked at me, surprised. “You fought the Black Knight and survived?”

I took another cookie off the plate and bit smugly into it. “I didn’t just survive, I sent him packing.”

Ingrid’s mouth fell open. Unexpectedly, her face reddened with anger. “You should have killed him when you had the chance.”

There was so much fury in her voice, a fury that had built up for decades, that my smugness wilted. She peppered me with question after question about my encounter with the Black Knight. I told her everything I knew. When I was finished, she nodded to herself like something finally made sense. “You’re the reason he backed off outside. You hurt him once. He doesn’t know what else you’re capable of.”

“That makes two of us,” I said.

“But you hurt him,” Ingrid repeated. “He may find you unpredictable, but he’ll be back. You can count on it. You’ve got his attention now. You’re going to need help, and I think I have just the thing.” She walked over to the bookshelves and started scanning the spines, tapping her finger against her chin. “Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of information available about the Black Knight. No one knows where he came from or the extent of his powers. Just about all anyone knows is that he’s the king of the gargoyles, though he wasn’t their first king, and he’s not a gargoyle himself.”

So that was why the Anubis Hand hadn’t worked on him, I thought. It only worked on gargoyles. Good to know. “So what is he then?” I asked.

Ingrid ran her finger along the hardcovers crammed into the shelves. “Good question. I’ve been researching the Black Knight for years, ever since he killed Morbius. I tried to find out anything I could—where he came from, what he is, if he has a base of operations, any weaknesses or vulnerabilities, anything—but I hit dead end after dead end. And then I found something interesting in Bankoff’s annotated Libri Arcanum. A connection I hadn’t noticed before. Ah, here it is.” She pulled a thick, hide-bound tome off the shelf, put her reading glasses on again, and flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for. “There’s a story of an alchemist who came to the New World from Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century. His name and likeness have been lost to time, but he’s widely considered to be the first known European magician to come over. Supposedly, he lived for a few months in a Dutch trading settlement called Fort Verhulst on the southern tip of Manhattan. Then one day, for reasons unknown, he ventured out into the wilderness and was never seen again. Everyone figured he was either killed by the Lenape Indians who lived in the area and weren’t exactly friendly with the Dutch, or that he died from starvation or exposure.” She flipped ahead again, moving whole chunks of pages until she stopped near the end of the book. “Now, listen to this. The first known sighting of the Black Knight was in the mid-seventeenth century, shortly after Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians. That was around the same time that Stryge, the first king of the gargoyles, died. No one knows where the Black Knight came from or how he became the gargoyles’ king, but here’s where things get really interesting. The very first sighting of the Black Knight was at Fort Verhulst, the same settlement the alchemist used to live in.”

“What happened?” Bethany asked.

“He came with gargoyles. They killed fourteen people that night. Fourteen seemingly random people—shopkeepers, traders, trappers, farmers, a bartender. The strange thing is that according to firsthand accounts, the gargoyles left Fort Verhulst long before sunrise, and they left the rest of the settlers alive.” She looked up from the book, peering at us over the reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. “You know how bloodthirsty gargoyles are. They revel in violence and carnage. For them to leave the other settlers alive, to show that kind of restraint, just doesn’t make sense. So it got me thinking. If this was the same settlement the alchemist lived in, maybe the victims weren’t chosen at random. Maybe they had a connection after all, one no one thought to look into.”

“The alchemist himself,” Bethany said.

Ingrid nodded. “Precisely. Look at the timeline. The alchemist disappears from Fort Verhulst. Not long after, the Black Knight makes his first appearance at the same fort, and orders the gargoyles to kill fourteen specific people. It can’t just be a coincidence. I think the alchemist and the Black Knight are the same person.”

“But that would make him over four hundred years old,” I said.

“Obviously he’s not human anymore,” Ingrid explained. “But what if he was once? And what if the first thing he did after becoming the … the thing he is now was to eliminate everyone in the settlement who knew his true identity?”

“But why bother?” I asked. “What would be the point? They already thought he was dead and probably would have gone on thinking it.”

“Exactly. Why bother? Unless those fourteen people knew something about him that he didn’t want them knowing. Something that was dangerous to him, that would leave him vulnerable.”

“But even if that’s the case, everyone who knew the Black Knight’s secret died four hundred years ago,” Bethany said.

Ingrid closed the book. “True. It’s just a theory I’m working on. I hadn’t given it much weight before because I assumed, as everyone did, that the Black Knight was simply invulnerable. But then Trent came along, and now more than ever I’m convinced.”

“Convinced of what?” I asked.

She leveled her gaze at me. “If we discover what the Black Knight’s secret is, we can kill the son of a bitch.”