Dying Is My Business

Twenty-six

I helped them move Thornton’s body to the antique Queen Anne couch on the far side of the room. Philip went upstairs and brought down a white sheet. He covered Thornton with it. I felt like a hole had been torn inside me, a bitter, angry emptiness. Beneath that white sheet, Thornton’s body was good as new from the Methusal spring. Fully healed, yet still dead. It was a cold and merciless irony, courtesy of a world that didn’t give a damn.

Gabrielle sat on the edge of the couch, her head bowed in grief. The others gave her time alone with Thornton as they took the tub away and drained it someplace. I stood in the empty spot in the middle of the room where the tub had been. There were divots in the carpet from the tub’s clawed feet, the only reminder of where Thornton had died. Soon they would fade away, as if they’d never been there at all, and that only made me angrier.

I watched Gabrielle and thought of the goblin Binding Oath she’d taken with Thornton. It’d been the happiest day of her life. I could only imagine what she was feeling now. Gabrielle peeled back the white sheet to reveal Thornton’s face. With his eyes closed, he should have looked asleep, but instead he just looked … empty. She stroked his cheek.

The others came back. Bethany sat beside her, putting her arm around Gabrielle’s shoulders. Isaac whispered words of comfort. I stood apart from them, still an outsider. The four of them had a connection that bound them tight, a shared history and a trust that had developed over time. Those were things I’d never had with anyone, things Underwood had taught me were weaknesses to be exploited, but now, seeing the way they cared for each other, I understood it was what I’d been missing all along. A sense of belonging, of family. I wanted it more than anything.

Isaac came over to me. His face was long, and even paler than before. He sighed and said, “We still need to find out everything we can about Underwood. I could use your help.”

“Why bother?” I asked. “Stryge’s head is safe now.”

“Because I want to know why your boss wanted it,” Isaac said. “How did he even know about it? It’s not common knowledge.”

I shrugged. “He has buyers, people who commission him to find valuable items. One of them must have been familiar with the story.”

He nodded, but he didn’t look convinced. “Come with me, there’s something I’d like you to look at.”

We returned to the long table beneath the stained-glass windows. Isaac pulled up a chair and opened a sleek, expensive-looking laptop on the table. He tapped a few keys. The six video monitors on the wall flickered to life.

Faces began appearing on the screens, a different one on each monitor, and a few seconds later they were replaced with new ones. Some were photographs, others were paintings and drawings. The faces were male and female, old and young, every color and ethnicity; some were human and others, such as the tentacle-faced monstrosity that appeared briefly on one of the screens, were definitely not.

“What is this?”

“I’ve been putting together a database of the Infected,” Isaac said. “It’s far from complete, but it’s a good start. What I’d like you to do is watch the faces and keep an eye out for Underwood, or anyone you’ve seen him having dealings with.”

“Underwood isn’t infected,” I said.

“How do you know that?” he asked. “If he knows about Stryge’s head, odds are he knows about magic.”

He had a point, though I found it hard to believe. If Underwood were infected it would mean he had magic—which meant he wouldn’t need enforcers like Tomo and Big Joe. He wouldn’t need me, either. But I dutifully watched the parade of faces for a while, studying each one closely before moving on to the next. One resembled a woman who’d been genetically crossbred with a bat. Another looked for all the world like the pickled remains of a human head in a glass globe. “I really don’t think these are his kind of people,” I said.

“Just keep looking,” Isaac said. “Let me know if you see anyone you recognize, anyone at all.”

Another image flashed onscreen. This one caught my eye. A figure in a red hooded robe with a golden skull mask over his face. “Wait, hold on.”

Isaac tapped the keyboard and the image froze on the screen. “This one?”

“I’ve seen him before. I’m sure of it.”

“Where?” Isaac asked.

“Outside the safe house. He was standing across the street, watching the house. And then he disappeared.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Bethany demanded. She came over from the couch to join us.

“There wasn’t exactly a lot of time with the shadowborn trying to break down the door,” I explained. “After that, with everything that happened, I guess it slipped my mind.”

“He must have known we were in the house,” Bethany said.

“How? The ward was still active.”

Isaac tapped the keyboard, bringing up more information. The picture of the hooded figure appeared on five of the monitors, while the sixth filled with text. “He’s called Melanthius,” Isaac said, reading off the screen. “He’s half high priest and half manservant to an entity called Reve Azrael, also known as the Mother of Wraiths, and the Mistress of the Dead.”

“Sounds charming,” I said. “What do you mean by entity? Or do I not want to know?”

“No one has ever seen her,” he said. “No one knows what she looks like, or even what she is. All we know is that she’s a powerful necromancer.”

“So she can create revenants,” I said. “Like the one of Bennett that came to the safe house.”

“Precisely,” Isaac said.

“But what would she want with Stryge’s head?” Bethany asked.

He frowned. “That I don’t know.”

I stared at the picture on the monitor. Melanthius’s golden skull stared back at me, expressionless.

I spent another half hour reviewing the rest of the faces in Isaac’s database, but nothing else jumped out at me. No Underwood, and no one I’d seen him have dealings with. I wasn’t exactly surprised. Underwood was a violent and dangerous criminal, but one of the Infected? No.

“Damn. It was worth a shot,” Isaac said, leaning back in his chair. “So either Underwood’s new to the game, or I’m wrong about him and he’s not a player at all. Either way, we’re no closer to an answer than we were before.”

From the couch, Gabrielle said, “There might be another way.” She covered Thornton’s face with the sheet and came over to us, wiping away her tears.

Bethany touched Gabrielle’s arm. “Are you sure you want to do this? You don’t have to.”

Gabrielle patted Bethany’s hand and forced a thin smile. “It’s okay. Thornton would want us to carry on. He understood the importance of what we’re doing. Just … Philip, can you stay with him? I don’t want him to be alone.”

“He’s dead, he’s not going to care,” the vampire said flatly. Isaac shot him an angry look. Philip crossed his arms. “Fine,” he said, and went to sit beside Thornton’s body. “Humans. I’ll never understand you.”

Gabrielle turned to Isaac. She was putting up a strong front, but I could tell she was still in shock and deeply hurting. “There’s an old gas station in Brooklyn with a fallout shelter beneath it. That’s where Underwood operates from,” she said. Then, amazingly, she gave them the exact street address of the station on Empire Boulevard. She turned to me with a sheepish grin. “Sorry, I was in your head. I saw everything, even the street signs.”

Jesus. It was a good thing I didn’t have a bank account or I’d have to change my PIN number.

Isaac tapped furiously at the keyboard. A moment later, all six monitors lit up with images of the Shell station, each from a different angle, some far away, some as close as across the street. Rain fell across the images like strings of static. The sight of the station made my chest squeeze tight. I hadn’t realized how much I hated that place until now.

“That’s it,” I said.

“These are live feeds from security and traffic cameras all over the area,” Isaac explained. “I wish I could get closer, but this is the best I can—”

A bright flash on each of the video monitors interrupted him. The walls of the gas station blew apart in a huge, silent fireball—the cameras Isaac hacked into had no sound, only video. Towering gouts of flame shot into the sky. Weakened by the blast, the signpost tipped over, and I watched in shock as, from every conceivable angle, the broken HELL sign that had so aptly defined my life for the past year fell into the flaming wreckage.

Bethany and Gabrielle gasped in surprise. Philip came running from the couch. I stayed frozen in place, watching the gas station burn. “What happened?” I demanded. It came out as little more than a whisper. I turned to Isaac. “Did you do something?”

He looked back at me, his hands still on the keyboard of his laptop. “What do you mean, do something? It’s a MacBook Pro, Trent, not NORAD missile command.”

“Don’t,” I warned him. “You could have cast a spell, or—”

Philip appeared suddenly between us. “Back off,” he snarled.

“It’s all right, Philip, relax,” Isaac said. He turned back to his laptop. Only then did I see how ashen his face was. He’d been as surprised by the explosion as I was.

“What happened?” I asked again.

Isaac shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m seeing if there’s a way to rewind the feeds so we can find out. If the files are stored digitally on the same server, we might have a shot at it.” His fingers danced across the keyboards. A moment later the images on the monitors reversed themselves. Flames and smoke retreated back into the building, the walls closing around them and sealing themselves whole again. The signpost lifted itself back up. Rain rose off the sidewalks into the sky, and cars sped backward along Empire Boulevard.

“Wait, there!” Bethany exclaimed. Isaac froze the images. She pointed at one of the monitors, where two shapes could be seen walking through the gas station parking lot. “Those are the men from the auto body shop,” she said.

“Tomo and Big Joe,” Gabrielle said before I had a chance to. It was eerie how much she knew about my life now.

Isaac began the playback again. Onscreen, Tomo and Big Joe walked with an aggressive gait, angry after their humiliation at the auto body shop. They weren’t used to losing. The bravado and posturing also masked how worried they likely were about how Underwood would react once he learned the box had slipped through their fingers. Underwood didn’t take kindly to failure. They entered the fallout shelter through the storm doors at the back of the station. Then all was quiet. No one else approached the gas station before it exploded.

“Whatever caused this, it must have happened inside the building,” Isaac said.

We watched the feed unfold again. This time we could see that the blast didn’t come from inside the abandoned gas station itself, but beneath it, from the fallout shelter.

There was no way anyone could have survived the explosion. I wondered if Underwood had been there, too. It was a possibility. After driving away from the auto body shop, he probably would have gone straight back to the fallout shelter to plan his next move.

Did that mean they were all dead?

“Wait, hold it,” Gabrielle said suddenly. She’d been poring over the images on the monitors for clues, and now she pointed to one of the screens. The picture was angled from across Empire Boulevard, catercorner to the gas station and high above street level. A traffic camera. “Isaac, go back. Go back on this one.”

The feed rewound as Isaac tapped the keyboard. The playback began again. This time I saw what had caught her eye. It was just barely visible behind the inferno, but it was there. It was unmistakable.

A flock of big, black birds taking off into the sky.

“Are those crows?” Bethany asked.

Isaac said, “The Black Knight.”

I watched the birds fly into the sky until they were nothing but tiny digital dots. “What the hell was the Black Knight doing there?”

“Looking for you,” Bethany said.

“Me? Why?”

“You’re the only one who’s ever taken him on and lived,” she pointed out. “It’s like Ingrid said, you got his attention. He must have traced your footsteps back to the gas station.”

I looked at the raging fire on all six monitors. “So this was meant for me?”

Isaac shook his head, squinting at the screens. “Something’s not right. This kind of flagrant, wholesale destruction doesn’t seem like the Black Knight’s style at all—”

Philip interrupted, tensing suddenly. “Someone’s here. Citadel’s ward has been breached.”

“What? That’s impossible,” Isaac said, standing out of his chair.

“Just like at the safe house,” Bethany said. “It’s happening again.”

“What the hell is going on? Are wards just giving out all over the damn city?” Isaac demanded. “Philip, how many of them are there?”

Philip looked up at the ceiling, his lips pulling back from his sharp teeth. “I can hear them on the roof, but I can’t see them. They’re not giving off any body heat at all.” He inhaled sharply through his nose, then cringed. “Ugh, they smell stale and dry, like dust.”

A bright flash of lightning illuminated the stained-glass windows. Two silhouettes appeared in the light, one in each window, swinging down from the roof on long ropes. Just before they hit, the shapes vanished and the ropes thumped, empty, against the glass.

A second later, the two figures reappeared just inside the windows, somersaulting through the air above us. I caught a glimpse of lithe bodies clad head to toe in black leather. They landed together in the middle of the room in a graceful, wide-legged stance, turned their steel-masked faces toward us, and drew katanas from the scabbards on their backs.

Shadowborn.