Dying Is My Business

Seventeen

The shadowborn advanced on us, blocking our one exit. I grabbed Bethany by the hand and pulled her into the nearest bedroom. Thornton bounded in after us. Inside, I let go of Bethany and kicked the door shut. Then I hit the lock button in the center of the doorknob, more from habit than because I thought it would actually help. There was no way that flimsy lock would stop the shadowborn. Neither would the door for that matter, not if they could pop up wherever they wanted. We needed a better way to keep them out.

I turned from the door and saw that we were in the room I’d stayed in last night, Morbius’s room. It, too, had been searched by the shadowborn. The bed was overturned, the love seat smashed to pieces, the dresser drawers dumped, clothes from the closet torn off their hangers and heaped on the floor. What the hell had they been looking for?

Bethany pulled a small object out of her vest and slapped it onto the wall next to the door. It stuck in place, a wooden disc with a round, obsidian stone at its center. As the stone gave a brief flash, the charm sent a glowing latticework of light across the entire wall and door before it faded.

“What is that thing?” I asked.

“An Avasthi phalanx,” she said. “It’ll keep the shadowborn from phasing through the wall, but it won’t hold them for long. It’s only a matter of time before they just break down the door instead. But I have no intention of making it easy for them.” She glanced quickly around the room. Her gaze settled on the dresser near the window on the far side of the room. Its drawers had been pulled out and the pictures of Morbius and the Five-Pointed Star had been swept off it onto the carpet. “Trent, bring that dresser over here.”

I hurried to it, kicking the empty drawers and their contents out of my way. I grabbed the top corners of the dresser, but a sudden movement outside the window caught my eye. A sliver of the street below was visible through a gap in the curtains. On the sidewalk across from the house, a shape in a hooded, blood-red cloak moved toward the mouth of an alley between two buildings, an alley that glowed with a flickering blue light. The shape stopped and turned toward me, as if somehow it knew I was watching. Inside the hood was a skull, not of bone but of polished, gleaming gold. The flickering light from the alley reflected off its hollow eyes and rictus grin.

The shadowborn thumped angrily on the other side of the door, and Bethany shouted, “Trent, the dresser!” I turned to look at her, then the door, then back to the window. Below, the sidewalk was empty. The shape was gone. So was the strange flickering light.

“I thought I saw…” I started to say, then stopped. What did I think I’d seen? The Grim Reaper? Death finally coming for me? Had someone really been there, or was I seeing things?

I slid the dresser across the floor and propped it in front of the door as a barricade. The shadowborn continued banging from the other side. It sounded like they were throwing their shoulders into it, trying to force it open. The dresser rocked away from the door. Without its drawers, it wasn’t heavy enough to do the job, but there was no time to gather them and put them back in. Instead, I put my back to the dresser and dug my boots into the carpet.

Another heavy thump. The door rattled in its frame and the dresser bucked behind me. “We need to get out of here, fast,” I said. “It’s too far down to jump out the window. We’d never make it without breaking our legs on the sidewalk, and then we’d be sitting ducks. You got anything else in that vest of yours that can help? Like maybe a rope ladder?”

Bethany shook her head. “Besides, we can’t leave without Ingrid.”

“Ingrid’s dead,” I said. It came out with all the delicacy of a blunt object to the head, but I had to break the news to her and we didn’t exactly have time for tact.

Bethany’s shoulders slumped. “Oh God. She insisted on staying downstairs and holding them off so we could find a place to hide. I told her it was too dangerous, but…”

The shadowborn battered the door. The dresser lurched against my back. I dug my boots deeper into the carpet and hoped the door would hold.

Thornton paced back and forth across the floor, limping on stiff legs. The decomposition that plagued him in his human form had transferred to his wolf form as well. His gray pelt was mangy, knotted, and in places thin enough to show the discolored, rotting skin beneath. The stench of decay came off him even more pungently than before, caught and amplified by all the hair. The amulet’s lights pulsed rhythmically from where it sat embedded in the fur of his chest, above the dark zigzag of stitches along his underbelly.

“I don’t understand,” Bethany said, pulling my attention back to her. “This house was supposed to be safe. How did the shadowborn get in? Did the ward fail?”

“No,” I said, “the ward is still up. I felt it downstairs, just as strong as before.”

“Then how the hell did they find us?” she demanded.

“They’re not the only ones,” I said. “Someone else got inside. Last night, when you were asleep.”

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. “What? Who?”

“His name is Bennett. Was Bennett. He’s dead now.”

She blinked. “You killed him?”

“Complicated question, but no, when he stopped by he was already dead. He was all … messed up.”

“You should have told me someone got in,” Bethany said angrily.

“I didn’t have a chance. He gave me something, a charm I think, and the next thing I knew it zapped me across town to Columbus Circle. But first Bennett warned me. He said something was coming for me. Bethany, this is all my fault. It’s me they’re looking for.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “They’re not looking for you, they’ve been turning this place upside down looking for the box. That’s the only reason Thornton and I are still in one piece. They were too busy trying to find the box to look for us.”

“That doesn’t make sense. The box isn’t even here. You said it was with Gregor.”

“They don’t know that.” She chewed her bottom lip as she thought. “Whoever summoned them gave them the wrong information. But it still doesn’t explain how they got past the ward.”

Ingrid had wondered the same thing. She’d said someone had betrayed us.

And then it hit me. God, how could I have been so stupid? I’d wondered why Bennett was bothering to help me, but I should have trusted my instincts. When I’d come back to the house, the front door was unlocked. Someone had to have done that from the inside, and there was only one person who would have.

Bennett. He’d led the shadowborn right into the safe house.

If I saw that dead son of a bitch again, I would put a stake through his fucking heart.

“It was Bennett,” I told Bethany. “He lied to me. He played me like a damn fool.” But if Bennett and the shadowborn were working together, why give me advance warning? Why get me out of the house before they came? What was he up to?

The dresser bucked hard against me, as if all three shadowborn had thrown themselves against the door at once.

“You said he gave you a charm?” Bethany asked. “Let me see it.”

Bracing my legs, I pulled the small, bean-shaped object out of my pocket and tossed it to her quickly.

Bethany studied the charm a moment, turning it over in her hand. “It’s a displacer, a limited range teleportation charm. They’re almost impossible to come by and extremely difficult to engineer. Dead or not, this Bennett has some impressive skills.”

“I doubt he made that thing,” I said. “That’s what keeps sticking in my head. If Bennett had access to something like this, he would still be alive.”

She frowned. “You should have told me. It’s never a good sign when the dead are up and walking.”

Thornton growled at her.

“Present company excluded,” she added.

“But that’s the weird thing, he wasn’t like Thornton,” I said. “He didn’t have an amulet. He was just … walking and talking.”

“That’s impossible,” she said. “Spirits of the dead can only possess the living, they can’t possess dead bodies, not even their own. At least, not without the help of a charm like the Breath of Itzamna. And to even get a dead body to rise at all is…” She paused. “Wait. Did you see anything in his eyes, like a light that didn’t belong there?”

I nodded, gritting my teeth as I pushed back against the lurching dresser. “A red light.”

Thornton stopped pacing. He turned to Bethany and whined.

“Trent, that wasn’t the man you knew,” she said. “That was a revenant, a dead body controlled by magic. It’s a puppet, nothing more.”

“But he knew me,” I said. “He mentioned things only he would know.”

“Whoever created the revenant would have access to his memories as long as his brain was still fresh enough. But to even create a revenant, you’d have to be an extremely powerful necromancer…” She trailed off, chewing her lip again. “I don’t like this. Something’s going on. Revenants, the shadowborn … this is much bigger than we thought.”

There was another thump on the door. This time, the sharp tip of a katana broke through the wood. I flinched away from the blade but kept my back against the dresser.

“We’re running out of time,” I said. “Tell me you’ve figured out a way to get past the three zombie musketeers out there.”

She sighed. “We can’t, that’s the problem. We’re trapped here. The Avasthi phalanx is the only thing keeping us safe. The minute we leave this room, we’re dead.”

“There’s got to be a way,” I said. “We fought off the gargoyles, we’ll fight these guys off, too.”

She shook her head the way you do when a small child says things that are funny and sad at the same time. “We don’t stand a chance. The shadowborn are trained assassins. They don’t leave survivors.”

“We’re not dead yet,” I told her. “We’ve still got Bennett’s charm, the whatever you call it, the displacer. Do you know how to make it work?”

Her grim expression told me it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. “I do, but displacers are designed to teleport a single individual, not three. It won’t get us all out.” She held the charm out to me. “You should take it. I can get you away from here. This was never your fight to begin with.”

The shadowborn pushed against the door. I strained against the dresser to keep the door from breaking. “Forget it. We’ll find another way.”

“No one’s asking you to be a hero,” she insisted. “This might be your only chance to get out of here alive. Please, just take it. I don’t think I can handle another death on my conscience.” Her bright blue eyes were big and shimmering. It would have broken my heart if there weren’t three moldering corpses on the other side of the door trying to kill us.

“I’m not leaving you here,” I said.

She stared at me, then sighed and dropped the displacer into a pocket in her vest. “I don’t get you, Trent. I can’t figure you out.”

“Join the club,” I said. “Look, last night I told you I don’t know who I am, but the truth is, I’m starting to think maybe I do. And right now, I’m the guy who gets you out of here.”

Thornton gave a short warning bark as two more katana blades broke through. The shadowborn were focusing their efforts on one part of the door, trying to chop a hole in the wood.

Bethany sat down on the floor, dropped her sword, and put her head in her hands. She was panicking, giving up, but I couldn’t let that happen, not if we were going to survive this. I had to keep her focused.

“If I’m going to get us out of here, I need you to tell me everything you know about the shadowborn. You said spirits can’t possess dead bodies, but I saw what’s under their masks. They look pretty damn dead to me.”

There was another loud thump against the door. The dresser rocked precariously, almost knocking me away. Bethany flinched. It unnerved me to see her this frightened. If someone like her could come undone, it meant none of us were safe.

“Bethany, I can’t do this without you,” I said.

Finally, she looked up at me. “Right, the shadowborn. Okay. Legend has it they were heroes once, defenders of the weak and vulnerable. Some well-meaning magician put a spell on them, an immortality spell, to thank them. This was in the early days after the Shift, when no one knew yet just how dangerous magic had become. The spell twisted their minds. They became thieves, mercenaries, assassins for hire. Only, the immortality spell worked, or at least it half-worked. They were granted eternal life, just not eternal youth to go with it. They never stopped aging. The shadowborn aren’t spirits who’ve returned to their dead bodies. Their spirits never left their bodies, not even after those bodies withered and rotted. That’s why there’s nothing we can do. That’s why we can’t kill them. There’s nothing left to kill.”

Thieves, killers, unable to die—it occurred to me I had more in common with the shadowborn than I did with Bethany or Thornton. It made me wonder if my fate would be the same as theirs. I’d never given any thought to whether I was aging normally. If I was, if I kept growing older but couldn’t die, would I end up like them, a shambling undead thing?

The door jolted behind me. It wasn’t going to hold much longer. We were running out of time. “Okay, so if we can’t kill them, how do we get out of here?”

She shrugged. “We don’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You saw what they did out there. The shadowborn can phase out of the material plane at will. When they do, you can’t touch them, you can’t even see them. They can walk right past you, right through you, and you wouldn’t even know it. They can pass through walls or doors like they’re not there. They can attack from any direction, from out of the shadows. It’s how they got their name. It’s what makes them such perfect assassins.”

There was another loud thump on the door, followed by the chuk of a katana blade cutting into the wood. Bethany’s face went the color of ash.

“Fine, if we can’t attack them and we can’t get out, how do we at least even the odds?”

Bethany opened her mouth to speak. Her expression informed me I was about to be called an idiot again, but then she stopped. She reached into her cargo vest, pulled out the displacer charm, and started scraping at it with her thumbnail.

Another thump. The wood splintered behind me. “Put that thing away, Bethany. I told you I’m not leaving without you.”

“I know, and that was sweet of you.” She glanced up at me, but as soon as our eyes met she looked back down at the charm quickly, as if suddenly embarrassed. “Anyway, that’s not what I’m doing. Basically, charms are a way to carry magic safely. Every charm has a spell inside it that gives it its power. I just need to find a way to reverse the spell inside this one.”

“What will that do?”

“Think about it,” she said. “It’s a teleportation charm, right? What’s the opposite of teleportation?”

“I don’t know, staying where you are?”

“Being stuck where you are,” she said. “What you said got me thinking. Even the odds. If I can change the spell inside this charm from a displacement spell to a containment spell, the shadowborn won’t be able to phase anymore. We might actually stand a chance of fighting our way out of here.” She inspected the displacer closely, turning it over and over. “This would be a lot easier if I’d engineered the charm myself. Whoever made it could have used any of a hundred different spells, and without knowing exactly which one I don’t know how to properly reverse it. It’s a crapshoot.”

Sword points pierced the door behind me. “We don’t have a lot of time,” I said. “They’re going to break through any minute. You’ll only have one shot at this.”

“Then I’m going to have to try to force the spell to reverse itself,” she said. She glanced around the room. “I need a talisman, an object to act as a focal point for the spell. It has to be something symbolic of being stuck in place. It could be anything, but it would be best if it were metal, like a pin or—”

“A nail?” I asked.

“A nail would be perfect,” she said.

I turned to Thornton. “In the closet, on the top shelf, you’ll find a wooden idol. I saw it there last night.”

Thornton loped to the closet and rose up on his hind legs. Standing like that in wolf form, he was tall enough to reach the top shelf easily. He nosed his way in and knocked the idol to the floor. The hundreds of nails that had been hammered into it thudded against the carpet.

“That thing got enough nails for you?” I asked.

Bethany picked it up and inspected it. “A West African nkisi. It’s tourist-grade magic, nothing with any real power. No wonder they stuck it in a closet. But the nails are real enough.”

She twisted one of the nails in the idol’s head, gritting her teeth with the effort until it slid out of the wood. She held onto the nail and dropped the idol.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now you cross your fingers while I try to reverse the charm,” she said.

I crossed my fingers. “Does this really do anything? Like, magically?”

She sighed. “It’s a figure of speech. I meant you should hope this works, because if it doesn’t, we’re dead.” She looked up at me from the displacer, her eyes grimly serious. “Trent, I’m going to have to open the charm. When I do, the magic is going to try to get inside you. You can’t let it. If it does, there’s no telling what it’ll do to you. I need you to look away from it. That’s the only way to be sure. Okay?”

I nodded. “What about you?”

“It can’t get inside me. I’ve got the sigil of the phoenix on me. Magic can’t get through that. It’ll protect me.” I remembered the tattoo of the fiery bird on her back. I should have known it was something more than a trendy style choice. “Don’t worry about me, you just remember to look away. You too, Thornton. Ready?”

The door cracked behind me. It wasn’t going to hold much longer. “Do it,” I said.

She wedged her thumbnail into a seam on the side of the displacer and worked it until the charm split open on tiny hinges. A bright white light glowed from within it like a miniature, trapped star. I looked away quickly. A second later, a wall of sound hit me. It was like a hundred voices shouting wordlessly in my ear, and beneath it, a thousand more singing tunelessly. I saw my shadow jumping all over the wall as the spell inside the charm flickered and danced. I felt light-headed and dizzy. My skin burned like it was on fire. Was that the magic trying to get inside me? I thought of Ingrid’s grotesquely mutated arm and the living corpses on the other side of the door. I didn’t want to end up like either of them. I squeezed my eyes shut. That seemed to help.

Somehow I was able to hear Bethany’s voice over the noise. She was muttering in the same weird language I’d heard her use back at the warehouse. Once again the eerie tone of the words gave me goose bumps. Magic—it wasn’t all sweetness and light, Q’horses and elf princes the way Elena De Voe had written about it in The Ragana’s Revenge. I saw now, firsthand, there was a darkness to it, something as old and bleak as an ancient tomb.

Through my eyelids I noticed the light change, dimming from bright white to a pale, rosy red. I heard chunks of wood break away from the door but I didn’t dare open my eyes to see what was happening. “Bethany, hurry!”

Something shoved the dresser hard, knocking it away from the door. It tumbled forward, taking me with it. When I hit the floor, I rolled away to keep the dresser from landing on top of me. “Bethany!” I couldn’t keep my eyes closed anymore, not if the shadowborn had gotten through. I opened my eyes, and just then the screaming in my ear stopped, the bright light went away, and the dizziness passed. Bethany had closed the charm again, I saw, only now the nail was driven through its center.

Portions of the door splintered and broke as the shadowborn punched and kicked their way through. A moment later, the door came out of its frame and toppled to the floor. Thornton backed away with his hackles up, a long, low growl emanating from his throat. I ran for my sword and picked it up off the floor.

Bethany bit one end off the altered charm and spat it onto the floor. Then she held the charm out in front of her like a weapon, aiming it at the shadowborn in the doorway. “The good thing about nails,” she said, “is that they’re not just the perfect talismans for containment spells. They also make damn good triggers.” She pressed the nail’s head with her thumb. A shower of dim, rosy sparks sputtered from the open end of the charm—

And then nothing.

The color drained Bethany’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’re dead.”