Dying Is My Business

Nineteen

What do you care who dies, as long as you get to keep living?

They were Underwood’s words, spoken some two months before. The day things started to change.

My mark was a crooked antiquities dealer called Naschy. It was supposed to be an easy job, at least according to Underwood, but I’d already been his collector long enough to know things were never really that easy. There were always complications. In this case, the complication took the form of Naschy seeing me coming and gaining a few minutes’ head start. By the time I followed him into a crack house on a desolate stretch of Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, he could have already been anywhere inside. With no electricity in the old, abandoned building, the darkness only helped him hide.

I moved through the rooms with my gun out. Skinny, hollow-eyed crackheads sat on filthy mattresses along the walls, taking drags off their glass pipes and picking at their soiled rags. Some of them bolted when they saw my gun. Some didn’t bother.

In a nearly lightless hallway deep inside the house, a shape came out of the darkness in front of me. I raised my gun, but it wasn’t Naschy, it was a young boy dressed in filthy clothes, with his hair all tangled in knots. He couldn’t have been more than ten years old.

I lowered my gun and asked him if he’d seen anyone matching Naschy’s description. The boy pointed at a closed door at the far end of the hall. I walked cautiously toward it. The boy followed me. “Beat it, kid,” I whispered. The boy just stared. “Go on, get out of here. Go home.”

The boy didn’t move. He gave me a confused look, and I realized my mistake. This was his home.

“You don’t want be anywhere near here, kid.” I gave him a hard shove. The boy ran off, ducking around the far corner of the hallway. I watched him go, then kicked open the door. Naschy was waiting inside, a briefcase in one hand, a gun in the other.

“Back off,” he snarled.

“That’s not going to happen,” I told him. “Hand over the briefcase and we can both walk out of here, Naschy. This doesn’t have to end badly. Underwood just wants what’s his.”

Naschy shook his head. “This isn’t his to take.”

“I’m told otherwise.”

“You have no idea what kind of man Underwood is, what he’s capable of,” Naschy said. Sweat dotted his brow. “Whatever he told you about me, about what’s in this briefcase, it’s a lie.”

“I don’t particularly care,” I said.

Naschy fired, cutting our conversation short. The bullet hit me in the chest and I dropped like a sack of bricks. Naschy ran out of the room, his footsteps tracing a path toward the front door.

As I lay bleeding, cold and numb with shock, I heard the scuff of sneakers in the doorway. It was the boy, staring at me from just outside the threshold. A creeping blackness filled the corners of my vision as the boy took a few tentative steps toward me, and then the blackness swallowed the world.

When I opened my eyes again, I didn’t know where I was, or why I was lying on a bare, filthy floor. I didn’t know why there was a woman weeping in the corner. She was kneeling and cradling something in her arms. I lifted my head and saw what it was—the withered remains of a little boy. Her son, I figured, and then it all came back, slamming into me with the force of a stone. I’d cheated death again, but this time the thing inside me hadn’t stolen some thief or murderer’s life. It had stolen a little boy’s. An innocent’s.

The woman’s hair was as knotted and dirty as her son’s. Her nose ran as she wailed. Her lips were pale from the drug. She said, “You come in here with a gun, big man shooting up the place. It should be you who dead, not him, not my boy. He never hurt no one. He a good boy. But not you. What kind of monster steal from a child? Steal his soul?”

I stared at the dead boy in her arms. The walls felt like they were crushing me, the whole world coming down on my head.

She fixed me with a cold, hateful glare. “You gonna burn for this.”

Afterward, deep beneath the abandoned gas station with its broken HELL sign, I sat trembling in my room. Tomo had picked up where I left off and gotten the briefcase from Naschy. He didn’t say how, but if I were a betting man I’d wager the cops would find Naschy in an alley somewhere with two in the back of the head.

The others were still celebrating their score with shots of Black Label in the main room of the fallout shelter, but I didn’t feel like joining them. I didn’t see the point. I wondered if there’d ever been one.

Underwood appeared, leaning casually against the door frame of my room. “What’s the matter, Trent? You worried I’m angry because Naschy got away from you? Don’t sweat it. We got what we wanted. You’re still my go-to guy.”

“It’s not that,” I said. I told Underwood what happened with the boy. “It shouldn’t have gone down like that. He was just a kid.”

Underwood shrugged. “He lived in a fucking crack house. You really think he had a future? If he wasn’t hitting the pipe already, it was only a matter of time. So he’s dead, big whoop. You’re alive, that’s all that matters.”

“It’s not right,” I said. I didn’t feel cold, but for some reason I couldn’t stop trembling. “That kid didn’t have it coming. He didn’t deserve it.”

“The fuck do you care? It’s the law of the jungle. The lion eats the monkey, or whatever the fuck lions eat. He doesn’t do it because the monkey had it coming, he doesn’t give a fuck about the monkey. He does it because that’s what he has to do to stay alive. Just like everyone else. Just like you.”

I couldn’t shake the woman’s words. You gonna burn for this.

“Don’t go soft on me now,” Underwood said. “This is who you are. It’s your gift. This city, Trent, it’s a jungle too, and the same laws apply. Kill or be killed. So you gotta ask yourself, when the shit goes down who would you rather be, the lion or the monkey?”

I gasped air into my lungs and opened my eyes. The sunlight stung like needles. I was lying on the hard concrete floor of an outdoor courtyard, but I couldn’t remember why. Had I died again? How? Where was I?

A moment later it came rushing back, the fight, the fall, and the last thing I’d seen—

Oh God. Bethany.

I turned, expecting the worst, but she was there, kneeling beside me, looking down at me with a shocked expression on her face.

I was just as shocked as she was. “You’re alive!”

“More to the point, so are you,” she said. She stared at me like she didn’t know what she was looking at. “Except you died right in front of me. I saw it. I know you were dead.” She showed me her palms, red and wet. “Your blood is still on my hands, only you’re not even bleeding anymore. What the hell is going on here?”

I ran a hand across my throat. The cut from the shadowborn’s katana was gone, healed over. She stared at me expectantly. “I don’t stay dead,” I told her. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I don’t know how or why. It’s just the way I am.”

She wiped the blood off her hands on the cement. I stood up. She didn’t help me. I got the sense she didn’t want to touch me. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Trent. Coming back from the dead? That’s not supposed to happen. But that’s not even the worst of it.” Her eyes studied me like I was a specimen in a petri dish. “Something came out of you. When you were lying there, dead, that same energy that attacked the Black Knight came out of you again. Tendrils of it, snaking out of you like it was looking for something.”

I blinked, surprised. The power that had zapped the Black Knight was the same that kept bringing me back from the dead?

“It came right at me,” she continued. “It felt like I’d stuck my finger in an electric outlet. It tried to get inside me, the way magic does, only the sigil of the phoenix couldn’t stop it. It felt like it was draining me. I think it was trying to kill me.”

“God, Bethany…” I reached out, but she backed away. Damn. I was a monster to her now.

“When you opened your eyes, you said you were surprised to see me alive.” Her gaze bored into me, as though if she looked hard enough she could figure it all out. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you? It’s not the first time.”

“I tried to warn you, but…” I hung my head, knowing how foolish I sounded. I should have told her the truth from the start. “You stopped it,” I said finally. “How?”

“I almost didn’t,” she said. “It was strong, and it was relentless. I could barely move. It took my last ounce of strength to pull this out of my vest and put it on.” I hadn’t noticed the object dangling from a string around her neck until she lifted it to show me. It was a small, pearl-like sphere veined with a sparkling blue ore. “The charm deflected it away from me. Another second and I would have been dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know how to control it. I wish I could. I wish I knew what it was, or why it keeps happening.”

I was relieved that Bethany had survived, but I’d also learned something important. She’d deflected it with a charm. That meant the thing inside me wasn’t an unstoppable force. It meant there was a chance it could be contained or controlled, if only I could figure out what the hell it was.

A chill crept over me then. It meant something else, too, I realized. Something horrible.

“Oh, no. Bethany, if you deflected it, where did it go?” I spun in a circle, looking at all the buildings that enclosed the courtyard. There were dozens of apartments nearby. Inside any one of them could be a body crumpled lifelessly on the floor, another innocent victim.

Bethany grabbed me by the arm and turned me to face her. “Trent, stop it. I need to know if it’s going to happen again. I need to know if we’re safe.”

My heart pounded in my chest, each beat a reminder of the stolen life that surged inside me. My limbs and back weren’t broken anymore. The ache of my dislocated shoulder was gone. So was the dull throb where the gargoyle had lacerated my back. There was blood from my no-longer-slit throat on my shirt and trench coat, but other than that everything was back to normal, reset to zero, and all because someone else had died in my place.

Back to normal. That was a joke. There was nothing normal about me. According to Ingrid, I wasn’t even human.

The woman in the crack house had been right about me. I was a monster, and I would burn for this.

Bethany wanted to know if she was safe, but the truth was, no one was safe. Not from this. Not from me. She stared at me, and in her eyes I saw such fear, such disgust, that I wished I’d stayed dead this time.

Thornton’s voice called out suddenly from a distance, interrupting us. “Bethany! Bethany, you need to see this!”

She held my gaze for another second. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, then broke away and ran to the corner of the courtyard, where an alleyway connected it to the street. I followed her. When I got to the alley, I saw Thornton standing about halfway down. He was back in human form, fully dressed again, and as unharmed by the thing inside me as Bethany was. Of course, he technically wasn’t alive anymore, so he had no life force to steal, but the sight of him upright and functioning came as a relief all the same.

When he saw me, though, it wasn’t relief that showed in his face. It was shock. “What … I thought … how…?” he stammered.

They both stared at me, waiting for an explanation, but I didn’t have one.

“Trent, how did you do it?” Thornton pressed. “You were dead. I saw you die.”

“I don’t know how it happens,” I said. “It just does.”

Thornton’s gaze fixed me with the intensity of a laser sight. A flood of emotions washed across his features—confusion, resentment, anger. Finally, he snapped out of it and stepped aside, revealing a shape down by his feet. “There’s something you should see.”

A skeletal figure sat slumped against the alley wall, papery and withered. Damn. Another one.

“It looks like he’s been dead a long time,” Thornton said.

I squatted down beside the corpse. “No. Only a few minutes.”

“But look at him,” Thornton said.

“Trust me. I know what I’m talking about.” A T-shirt hung loosely off the corpse’s rib cage. I read the words printed in flaming letters on the shirt and realized I’d met this man before. I hadn’t helped him when he’d asked, hadn’t even spoken a word to him, just ran right past him like he didn’t matter. Now he was dead because of me, another innocent bystander, another name to add to the list. The tenth. I didn’t have the list with me, but it didn’t matter. I’d committed it to memory. I didn’t know this man’s name any more than I knew the name of the boy in the crack house, so I mentally added him to my list with the only information I had, the words on his T-shirt.

10. Child of Fire

I looked up at Bethany. “This is where it went. When you deflected it away from you, it found him instead.”

“What found him?” Thornton demanded. “What are you talking about?”

“There’s something inside me that won’t let me stay dead,” I said. “It steals the life from whoever’s close by and gives it to me. That’s what it was trying to do to you, Bethany. You were right, it was trying to kill you.” I stood and looked down at the body again. “Trying to do this to you.”

Bethany stooped down to touch the corpse’s neck, as if she were feeling for a pulse. “Fascinating. Complete energy transference from one body to another. Only, that’s not supposed to happen, ever. It shouldn’t be possible.”

“But the Black Knight does the same thing, doesn’t he? Sucks the life out of his victims?”

“That’s different. The Black Knight can kill with a touch, but he doesn’t absorb his victim’s life force. He doesn’t use it as his own.”

“How do you know?”

She straightened up again. “Because magic is a natural element. There are immutable laws that govern it, just like there are laws that govern physics or chemistry. Certain things just aren’t possible, and in just the past few minutes you’ve already done two of them.”

I looked down at the body again. “That’s why I believed Bennett when he said it was me the shadowborn wanted. Because of what I am.”

She studied my face. “And what are you, Trent?”

“I don’t know.”

She crossed her arms and arched an eyebrow at me. “You answer every question with ‘I don’t know.’ You don’t know who you are, you don’t know what you are, you don’t know how you do the things you do.”

“What do you want me to say?” I snapped. “I could make something up if you want. I’ve made up a hundred stories already trying to explain this to myself, but none of them are the truth. Do you have any idea what it feels like, not knowing what you are? Not even knowing if you’re human?”

“I remember feeling that way quite a bit before I accepted what I am,” Thornton said.

“I still feel that way,” Bethany said. “But there’s a world of difference between my not knowing who my parents are and you not knowing how you’re able to come back from being dead.”

“You said you could help me find out,” I pressed. “Last night you said I could be a mage.”

She shook her head. “I was wrong. You’re not a mage. Mages can’t do what you do. The energy that came out of you … I’ve never felt anything like it before. There’s nothing in any spellbook that can do that. Even the sigil of the phoenix couldn’t protect me.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She frowned at me. “It means this goes way beyond magic, Trent. This is something entirely new.”

Thornton winced suddenly and doubled over. He put a hand on the alley wall to steady himself. “Guys, something’s wrong,” he said. “I’m getting weaker.”

I helped him upright again. His skin looked waxy, the discoloration darkening to a purplish black. Through the material of Thornton’s shirt, the amulet’s lights pulsed much more dimly than before.

He gripped the lapels of my trench coat until he was steady, but when I let go of him he kept holding on. He pulled me closer. “Trent, you’ve got to help me. However you brought yourself back, you’ve got to do it for me too. Please.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “I wish it did.”

“You got back up like it was nothing,” Thornton insisted. “Trent, please, I’m begging you.”

He searched my eyes desperately, but there was nothing I could do. “I’m sorry, I can’t. Whatever this thing is inside me, it only takes life. It doesn’t give it.”

He let go and glared at me. “You mean it doesn’t give it to anyone but you.”

“Thornton, that’s not fair. You can see for yourself how it works.” I gestured at the dead body at our feet. “There are others just like him. They’re all dead because of me. I’d give you this power in a heartbeat if I could, just to be rid of it.”

Thornton scowled. “Don’t talk to me about what’s fair. Don’t ever talk to me about what’s fair. You don’t have that right.” He turned to Bethany. “I’m going now, just like I said. I’m going to see Gabrielle before it’s too late. You’re on your own.” And with that, he walked quickly out of the alley, his anger and determination keeping him upright.

Bethany followed after him. “Thornton, wait!”

I hung back, looking down at the dead body slumped against the wall. Who was he, I wondered? Would anyone miss him? Or was he like me, a man with no past, no family, no ties to the world?

I left the alley and hurried to catch up with the others. I reached them just as Bethany was saying, “Thornton, you can’t go back yet. I’m sorry, but you can’t.”

“It’s not up for debate,” he said. He kept walking, barreling past the early morning commuters emptying out of their apartments buildings. “You gave me your word, Bethany. You said I could go back in the morning. Well, it’s fucking morning, so I’m going back.”

At the corner, he stopped, looking like he was about to fall over. He leaned against a lamppost. Above his head, the crosswalk signal changed from the little walking person to the don’t-walk hand.

“Please, Thornton, listen to me,” Bethany insisted.

“Why?”

She gave a frustrated little groan. “Because Trent had a visit from a dead man who was carrying a charm he couldn’t have made himself. You know as well as I do spells don’t cast themselves. Someone turned Bennett into a revenant and gave him the displacer. Someone who wanted Trent out of the way. Someone who knew exactly where to find us.”

“It has to be the same person who sent the shadowborn,” I added. “I think Bennett led them to the safe house.”

“I told you, it’s not Bennett, it’s just his body. A puppet,” she corrected me.

“Okay, so the Black Knight’s still pissed off about last night, big surprise,” Thornton said. “We’ll be safer back at Citadel anyway.”

She shook her head. “The Black Knight is powerful, but he’s not a necromancer. He can’t make revenants from the dead. There’s only a small handful who can do that, and an even smaller number who would dare summon the shadowborn. Don’t you get it? It’s not just the Black Knight who’s after the box anymore. Word must have spread that the box has been found. For all I know, every Infected in the city is coming out of the woodwork trying to find it. That’s why you can’t go back yet. It’s why none of us can. Because even worse than the fact that they knew where to find us is the fact that they know we’re the ones with the box.”

“But they made a mistake,” I said. “They assumed we had the box with us at the house. That should buy us some time.”

“Not a lot,” Bethany said. “As soon as they realize their mistake, they’re going to come after us again. If they found us once, they can do it again. We have to get the box back from Gregor now.”

The light changed. Thornton started across the street. “We can leave it there, it’ll be safe with him.”

Bethany hurried to keep pace with him. “There is no safe place for it. The Autumnal Equinox is tomorrow. You know that. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Wait, what does the equinox have to do with anything?” I asked.

She ignored me, still trying to convince Thornton to listen to her. “The safest place for it is in Isaac’s vault, where we can keep an eye on it. As soon as we get the box I promise you we’ll go back, but right now we need you. I don’t know how to find Gregor, but you do. And even if I knew the way, he wouldn’t give it to me. He doesn’t trust topsiders, but he trusts you, Thornton. You’re the only one he’ll give it to. We can’t do this without you.”

Topsiders? The equinox? Just when I thought I was getting a decent handle on things, I was confused again. I felt like a preschooler sitting in on a Ph.D.-level class.

Thornton stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to Bethany. Pedestrians, annoyed to find someone standing in their way, mumbled to themselves about stupid tourists, but when they looked up and saw his face they blanched and skirted around him quickly. “I have to see Gabrielle,” he said. “Bethany, I’m fucking dying!”

“You’re already dead,” she said. He winced at the harshness of her words. “If we don’t secure that box, there’s a damn good chance everyone else is going to die, too. I can’t let that happen, even if it means not getting you back in time. This is bigger than you, Thornton. It’s bigger than all of us.”

He glared at her, his eyes like steel. I saw the muscles of his jaw clench under his waxy, pale skin. “You really are a bitch, Bethany. Do you know that?”

“Yes,” she said.

He sighed. “Fine, I’ll take you there. Let’s just get this over with.” He walked back in the direction we’d come from, purposely knocking into Bethany’s shoulder as he passed. The pearl-like charm around her neck jangled.

She shook her head. “I don’t have a choice,” she said, but I didn’t know if she was talking to me or herself.

“You can take off that charm now,” I said. “The danger’s passed.”

She glared me. “I’m not taking any chances,” she said.

I followed then as they walked single file down the sidewalk. They didn’t speak or look at each other. Silence filled the space between us like poison gas. I didn’t like it. For a while there, being with Bethany and Thornton had felt like the closest thing to friendship I’d ever known, but whatever bond of trust and camaraderie that had developed between us was broken now, maybe irreparably.

One thing still nagged at me, something Bethany had brought up but couldn’t answer. Whoever had sent Bennett and the shadowborn knew where we were. But there was a ward around the safe house, and Bethany had told me how wards worked. Nobody should have been able to find us unless they already knew our location.

Ingrid was right. Someone had betrayed us. Someone who knew exactly where we would be last night.

Someone had turned Bennett’s corpse into a revenant in order to get me out of the way before the shadowborn came. Why? And why use Bennett, of all people? That was no accident. It implied that whoever was behind it knew me—or at least enough about me to know Bennett and I had crossed paths before. There were very few people with that kind of information.

Put together, all the clues pointed to someone on the inside.

But who? It couldn’t be Bethany or Thornton. Fear wasn’t something you could fake, and they’d both been genuinely frightened of the shadowborn. What about the colleagues Bethany and Thornton had mentioned—Isaac, Gabrielle, and Philip? Any one of them could have sold us out to get the box for themselves.

All roads led back to that fucking box. Underwood was holding it over my head as leverage and forcing me into an impossible position. It was putting Bethany and Thornton in constant danger. It was getting people killed, good people like Ingrid. I was starting to hate the damn thing.

And just like that, I knew what I had to do about it.

I quickened my pace to catch up to Bethany. Thornton continued walking briskly ahead of us, not looking back and doing his best to stay upright.

“You mentioned the equinox before,” I said. “What does that have to do with the box?”

“The equinox is when what’s inside the box becomes incredibly powerful,” she said. “More powerful than you can imagine.”

“It still sounds like some kind of weapon to me,” I said. She didn’t answer. “I guess I’m finally going to see it for myself, huh?”

“I guess so,” she said, “provided Gregor gives it back to us. He’s a hoarder. He’s not exactly known for sharing.”

“He’ll give it back. We’ll make him if we have to.”

She arched an eyebrow at me. I still hadn’t decided if I found it endearing or annoying. “Good luck with that,” she said.

“Trust me, I can be very persuasive when I want to be,” I told her. “So how far away is Gregor’s apartment?”

“He doesn’t live in an apartment.”

“House, then. Whatever.”

She smirked and shook her head. She pointed at the street corner, where a sewer grate sat at the curb. “He lives down there somewhere. Through the sewers.”

“Seriously?” I asked. “Thornton gave the box to a homeless man?”

“Gregor’s not a man, Trent,” she said. “Gregor’s a dragon.”

I stopped, staring slack jawed at her as she walked ahead. “He’s a what now?”