Dying Is My Business

Thirty

I ran outside into the rain. The storm clouds had turned the late afternoon as dark as night. It took me a moment to get my bearings. I hadn’t been awake when they brought me to Citadel, so I didn’t know where I was. There was no street outside, no sidewalk or lamps either, just grass, and a thick forest in the distance. The familiar skyline of Fifth Avenue loomed above the trees, illuminated windows glittered against the clouds. I was in Central Park, I realized, closer to the East Side than the West.

There was no sign of Reve Azrael or Melanthius. Not even footprints; the grass had already been pounded flat by the small army of revenants they’d brought with them. I scanned the forest edge in the dark, but I knew they could be anywhere by now. Central Park was more than eight hundred acres of forests, grottos, and hidden paths. I couldn’t even tell which direction they’d gone.

I turned to go back inside, and got my first view of Citadel. An imposing three-story building of gray stone and stained-glass windows, it took my breath away. At each corner, a stone tower topped with crenellated battlements rose two additional stories above the domed roof. Suddenly the name Citadel made sense. It looked more like a fortress than a home. A paved path, just wide enough for a Parks Department vehicle, snaked past and forked in two. One path led back into the woods. The other ended in a patch of dirt beside Citadel, where the Escalade was parked.

Funny, I’d been through the park numerous times and never noticed this building before. But then, I wasn’t supposed to. No one was. That was the point of wards.

I went back inside. Isaac had burned the shadowborn while I was out, leaving only a spear sticking out of the wall and a mound of ashes beneath it.

“Reve Azrael is gone,” I reported.

“Of course she is, she got what she wanted,” Isaac said, his tone bristling with anger. He cast another spell to burn the bodies of the revenants scattered on the floor—either as a precaution or because he was so furious, I couldn’t tell—and in a flash the carpet was so thick with ash the room looked like the inside of a cremation furnace.

“Isaac, I need your help,” Bethany said. She was crouched over Gabrielle’s unconscious body on the other side of the room. She’d torn open the shoulder of Gabrielle’s shirt and was applying pressure to the bullet wound to stop the bleeding.

Isaac hurried to her, telling me to go look after Philip.

The vampire was still on the middle landing. He’d regained consciousness but was weak. I helped him down the steps. He leaned his weight on me, his body as hard and heavy as stone. I finally got him onto the antique Queen Anne couch where we’d laid Thornton’s body earlier. Even as he settled onto the couch, breathing hard and sweating, he never took off his mirrored shades. I took that as a sign that he was probably okay.

Philip winced as he adjusted himself to get comfortable. “Hurts like hell,” he said. “Take it from me, never be on the wrong end of a shadowborn’s sword.”

“Too late,” I told him.

“Oh yeah, that’s right. You’re the man who doesn’t stay dead. Must be nice not having to worry about it.”

“Not as nice as you’d think,” I said. “Anyway, what’s it to you? I thought vampires were supposed to be dead already.”

“You’ve been watching too many movies, man. I’m as alive as you are. Vampires just live longer, that’s all. And we’re a hell of a lot harder to kill.” He poked gloomily at the long tear across the fabric of his shirt. “Damn. This was the last of my black turtlenecks.”

“If it’s any consolation, my shirts get ruined all the time, too,” I said. “You learn not to get attached.”

Philip pointed at a small marble box sitting on an end table. “Do me a favor and hand me that box?” I got it for him. When he opened it, I saw it was filled with dirt, as rich and dark as coffee grounds. He took some in his fingers and smeared the dirt on his wound. He winced again, like someone putting antiseptic on a fresh cut, but the dirt seemed to lessen his pain.

“Is that … magic dirt?” I asked. This was what my life had become. Asking if dirt was magical.

“It’s just dirt,” he said, but didn’t explain further. He rubbed some more on his chest. “I’ll be fine now. You don’t need to stand over me like a mother hen.”

“Suit yourself,” I said.

Philip seemed to be recovering fine. Gabrielle had me a lot more worried. I went over to where Isaac and Bethany were crouched over her. They hadn’t moved her off the floor yet. They didn’t dare move her at all until she was stabilized. Isaac was holding a wooden bowl filled with some kind of fibrous green goop, while Bethany scooped out handfuls and patted them over the bullet wound. I knelt down beside Gabrielle. Her face was coated in sweat from shock, but she was still breathing and I could see the faint throb of her pulse in her neck. “Is she going to be all right?”

“She hasn’t lost too much blood,” Bethany answered. “The Sanare moss will stop the bleeding and help the wound heal faster.”

“The bullet went right through her,” Isaac said. “The exit wound is pretty bad, but at least the bullet missed the brachial artery in her shoulder.”

She was lucky. It would have been a lot worse if the bullet had stayed inside her. I knew that from personal experience.

I watched Bethany apply more of the Sanare moss to Gabrielle’s shoulder. “Why did you give me the charm instead of using it yourself?” I asked her.

“It wouldn’t have worked otherwise,” she said. “There was something wrong with my containment spell, remember? Reverse engineering is never as good as using an original spell.”

“But still, you gave it to me,” I said. “You thought it would work if I used it?”

She looked up at me. “It did, didn’t it? That’s what happened last time, so I took a chance it would happen again.” She shrugged. “Somehow, magic just seems to work better for you.”

“That was a hell of a chance to take,” I said. “If it hadn’t worked…”

“But as she said, it did,” Isaac said. “How often does that happen to you?”

“How often does what happen?”

He looked at me curiously. “Is magic always more powerful when you’re in contact with it?”

I shrugged. “Damned if I know.”

“It happened with the Anubis Hand, too, didn’t it? When you used it, it didn’t just stun the gargoyles, it killed them. Burned them up, that’s what Bethany said. And then there’s the shock Gabrielle experienced when she went too deeply into your mind. She said it was like feedback. Her own psychic energy coming back at her, but stronger…” He trailed off, tapping his short red beard in thought.

Great, I thought, more reasons to think of myself as a freak. But I’d seen magic in its rawest form, and it was terrifying. If it was connected to me somehow, I had to know. “Okay then, so what does all this mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Isaac said with a sigh. “Magic is an element of the natural world, no different from wood or fire, even if it has been tainted by the Shift. Casting a spell is just channeling and transforming that elemental energy, but even so, the energy should remain constant. If the charm didn’t work for Bethany, it shouldn’t have worked for you either.”

“What about you?” I asked. “You’re a mage. Aren’t your spells supposed to be stronger or something?”

He shook his head. “It’s not the same thing. Mages have access to a different level of magic, and through study and a greater understanding of the element we’re manipulating, it can be carried inside us with less chance of infecting us—”

“Wait, less chance?” I interrupted. “I thought mages were immune.”

“Nothing is foolproof,” he said. “There have been mages who’ve become infected. Some were weak-willed, or had an affinity for darkness already. Others … well, fending off the infection can be a struggle even for the most powerful among us.” I didn’t like the sound of that. Did it mean Isaac could become infected, too? At any time? “But, Trent,” he continued, “even a mage can’t make a faulty charm work, let alone operate with the kind of increased intensity that one did. That was all you. Somehow, you’re like a shot of caffeine to magic. A supercharger.”

“How?” I asked. “I don’t even know when I’m doing it.”

“The real question isn’t how, Trent, it’s why,” Isaac said. “Why does magic become stronger around you? Why can’t you die? And why is Reve Azrael able find you whenever she wants?”

Isaac had studied magic enough to become a mage, and yet even he didn’t know what to make of me. That wasn’t exactly comforting.

“Guys, she’s coming around,” Bethany said.

I looked down at Gabrielle. Her eyes fluttered open.

Isaac smiled at her. “Welcome back. You gave us quite a scare.”

With her good arm, Gabrielle pushed a few loose dreadlocks out of her face. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse, gravelly. “I’m sorry. I saw his face and I—I just couldn’t do it.”

“It’s all right,” Bethany said. “Don’t move. Just try to relax.”

Gabrielle groaned as the pain of the gunshot wound finally sank in. “At least tell me you stopped them.”

Bethany scooped more of the Sanare moss onto Gabrielle’s bullet wound. “I wish I could, but they got away. They took Stryge’s head with them.”

“They took Thornton, too,” I said.

Tears welled in Gabrielle’s eyes, and she turned away. “So that monster is still walking around in Thornton’s body, doing God knows what with it?” She choked back a sob, but then she couldn’t hold it in anymore and her body shook as she wept.

“I need you to keep still,” Bethany said.

“Keep still?” Gabrielle demanded, her sadness shifting to anger. “How the fuck am I supposed to keep still? She has his body, Bethany. She’s wearing him like a fucking dress. We have to go after her.”

“Opening that bullet wound again isn’t going to get Thornton back,” I said. “Let them fix you up.”

“While she takes him farther and farther away?” Gabrielle raged. “How can you say that? You know what he was to me. You fucking saw it!”

“It doesn’t change anything,” I said. “You’re not in any shape to go running after her.”

“What is she talking about?” Bethany asked me. “What did you see?”

“Something happened when she was inside my mind,” I explained. “Somehow, I got inside hers too for a second, and I saw … something.” I stopped myself there. It didn’t feel right that it should come from me.

“He saw that Thornton and I were engaged,” Gabrielle said, closing her eyes. I couldn’t imagine how hard it was for her to say the words out loud. How much it hurt. But she braced herself, opened her eyes again, and said, “It happened a few days ago. He wanted to tell you all right away, but then the new job came up. Securing the box. Thornton only took the job so we’d have money for the wedding.” She closed her eyes again, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “It was my idea to wait until after the job was over to tell you, so we could celebrate properly. I thought we had time.”

“Oh, Gabrielle,” Bethany said, stroking her hair. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Isaac said.

“You want Stryge’s head back. I want Thornton back,” Gabrielle said. “We have to go after them.”

Isaac didn’t answer.

“I won’t let her use Thornton like this,” she insisted. “I won’t let her desecrate his body. He deserves better than that. Isaac, we have to go after them!”

Isaac looked down at the floor. I could see in his eyes that he was wrestling with something inside. A promise he’d made long ago.

“She said to tell you she was wrong,” I said.

Isaac looked up at me. “What?”

“Ingrid,” I said. “She was still hurting from Morbius’s death when she told you to keep your head down and not get involved, but she regretted it. Right before she died, she asked me to tell you to keep fighting the good fight. To not let Morbius’s dream die with her. She said she was wrong. She wanted you to know that.”

Isaac nodded and closed his eyes, as though a great weight had been taken off his shoulders. When he opened them again, he said, “I spent so much time worrying about drawing attention to myself that I asked others to risk their lives for me, and all the while I stayed hidden away here in Citadel. Thornton paid the price for that. No more. It ends today. Reve Azrael brought the fight to us. Now we’re going to bring it to her. Together.” He started pacing the floor, thinking out loud. “She’s crazy if she thinks she can just wake Stryge up and make him do her bidding. He’ll kill her the moment he opens his eyes.”

“So why don’t we let him?” Philip asked, coming over from the couch. He’d taken off his black turtleneck and draped it over his shoulder like a towel. Remarkably, the wound had already closed and scabbed over, leaving only a thin white scar across his hairless, dirt-smeared chest. Apparently dirt helped vampires heal faster. Good to know. I filed it away with the hundred other ridiculous and impossible things I’d learned over the past twenty-four hours.

“And then what?” Isaac asked. “Once Stryge is awake, there’s no way to stop him.”

“Willem Van Lente did it four hundred years ago, right?” I pointed out. “We could do it again.”

“How? No one knows how Van Lente brought Stryge down, and he didn’t leave any clues behind.”

“Reve Azrael’s plan doesn’t make any sense,” Bethany said. “There’s no way to control an Ancient.”

“Maybe she found a way,” I said. “Maybe there’s a spell no one knew about.”

“It’s possible,” Isaac said. He sighed and brushed his hands through his cropped red hair. “Reve Azrael craves control. It’s why she surrounds herself with revenants. All that nonsense about the city being too loud, that’s just a symptom of her madness. It’s life she hates. Life is messy and loud, and she can’t control it the way she controls the dead. She wants to snuff it out.”

From the start, Bethany had insisted that if the box fell into the wrong hands it could be used as a weapon. I couldn’t think of any worse hands for it to be in than Reve Azrael’s. She was planning the full-scale destruction of New York City. I couldn’t even fathom it. I had as strong a love-hate relationship with New York City as anyone else who lived here, but no matter how many times I cursed this city while sardined into an overcrowded subway train or stuck in endless Midtown traffic, actually trying to destroy it never crossed my mind. You’d have to be completely insane. The people who’d tried to destroy this city before—and even with my limited memories I knew about that; you couldn’t live in New York without knowing—only proved the point. Now Reve Azrael was proving it again. She was even more unhinged than I thought.

“She makes revenants from the dead,” Bethany said. “The more people she kills, the larger her forces grow. If she wakes Stryge up and really can control him somehow, the death toll would be astronomical. She’ll have an army of the dead, with each new revenant another weapon in her arsenal. The slaughter would spread exponentially, until eventually there wouldn’t be anyone left alive in New York City but her and Melanthius. Reve Azrael and her servants in five boroughs of rubble.”

“My guess is, once she gets a taste for destruction on that scale she won’t stop with just New York City,” Isaac said.

“All the more reason to go after her,” Gabrielle insisted.

“She could be anywhere. No one has seen her true form. No one knows anything about her, including where her lair is. We’ll never find her in time,” Isaac said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t stop her. We just have to beat her to the punch.”

“I’m not following,” Bethany said.

Isaac began pacing again, thinking out loud. “If she’s going to make Stryge whole again, she has to join the head to the body at the moment of the equinox. The exact moment. And that’s tomorrow at … Philip?”

“Eleven twenty a.m.,” Philip answered.

“Tomorrow morning, eleven twenty. She won’t miss that window. If we’re going to stop her, our best chance is to get to Stryge’s body before she does.”

“Fine, so where’s the body?” Gabrielle asked.

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Isaac said. “It’s got to be somewhere in the city. Come on, Keene, think. After the battle, Willem Van Lente tried to destroy Stryge’s head, but he couldn’t, it kept putting itself back together again. So he hid it instead, and while he was doing that the Lenape Indians hid Stryge’s body. They knew what would happen if the two were brought together again, so to be safe neither party told the other where they were hidden. They didn’t tell anyone. To this day, there are no historical documents, no scrolls, not even any oral histories that give away the locations. Reve Azrael must have some clue where the body is, or she wouldn’t go through all this trouble to steal the head this close to the equinox.” He stopped pacing and took a deep breath. “For four hundred years, magicians, researchers, and scholars have tried to find Stryge’s body and failed. We have until eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“And how exactly are we going to pull that off?” Bethany asked.

Isaac tented his fingers under his chin. “Over time I’ve amassed the most extensive library of arcane and secret knowledge in the city. If there are clues anywhere, it’s there. We’ll search every book, front to back. We’ll start with the major works, The Libri Arcanum, The Book of Eibon, then work our way down from there. It’s got to be there somewhere.”

Gabrielle struggled to her feet, gritting her teeth through the pain and putting one hand on the bandage Bethany had affixed to her shoulder. A second, larger bandage covered the exit wound near her shoulder blade. “Then let’s get started. I don’t want to waste any more time.”

“Hold on,” Isaac said. “For God’s sake, Gabrielle, you just got shot. You need to rest until you’re strong enough—”

“Try to stop me and you’ll see how strong I am,” she said. “Don’t argue with me on this, Isaac. I can’t just sit on the sidelines while she’s got Thornton’s body. When she shows up to put Stryge back together, I want to be there. I’ll pull that bitch out of his body with my bare hands if I have to.”

“If you go after Reve Azrael half-cocked, you’re going to get yourself killed,” Isaac said. “We’ve already lost enough people today.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t you dare lecture me on what we’ve lost. I know better than anyone.”

While they continued arguing, I walked over to the monitors on the wall. They were still broadcasting the feed from the traffic cameras. Fire trucks had gathered outside the burning Shell gas station now, cordoning off the area and turning their hoses on the flames. I’d put the fallout shelter out of my mind during the fight, but I hadn’t forgotten. Now that things had quieted down, it demanded my attention again.

“I’ll catch up with you guys later,” I said. “There’s something I need to do.”

Isaac turned to me, his eyebrow raised in surprise. “We could really use your help, Trent.”

“You know what you’re looking for in those books, but to me it’s all gibberish,” I said. I nodded toward the monitors. “I have to go back to Brooklyn. I have to see it for myself. I have to know.”

“Know what? If Underwood’s dead?” Bethany asked. “No one could have survived that.”

“What if he’s not dead?” Isaac asked. “What then?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I didn’t want to think about what I would do to Underwood if I ever saw him again.

Bethany touched my arm, the unusual warmth of her hand coming through my sleeve. “Trent, you don’t have to do this. You can walk away from that life.”

“No, I can’t,” I said. “Not until I’m sure.”

She frowned. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t argue, either. Even Bethany knew when she couldn’t win.

Isaac pulled a small cell phone out of a drawer in a table by the door. He handed it to me. “It’s got my cell number in the contacts. If you run into trouble, call. I’ll call you if we find anything. Otherwise, let’s regroup here in a few hours.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

He shook my hand. “We may have gotten off on the wrong foot, Trent, but you’re one of us. You proved that today.”

“I’m full of surprises,” I said.

“So I’m learning,” he said. “Stay safe out there, and don’t stay away too long.”

I said my goodbyes. Gabrielle said, “Don’t take too long. We can’t do this alone.”

Philip said, “Go already. What do you want, a hug?”

Bethany crossed her arms and wouldn’t look at me. “This is stupid,” she said.

I left. Walking out the door was harder than I thought it would be. Part of me already knew I belonged with them and wanted to stay. Outside, the afternoon was wearing on toward evening and the storm clouds hadn’t budged. The sky was as dark as coal. The rain had grown chillier, and as it battered me I hugged myself, shivering as I walked away from Citadel. I had almost reached the paved path when I heard Bethany’s voice.

“Trent, wait!”

I turned around. She left Citadel’s porch and walked across the grass toward me. She looked even smaller soaked to the skin like that, her long black hair plastered to the sides of her face.

“Look,” she said, “you’re stubborn and annoying, and you’ve been nothing but trouble since I laid eyes on you, but that doesn’t mean I want to see you go and get yourself killed.” She paused a moment, then said, “Okay, killed again. Someone needs to keep an eye on you. I’m coming with you.”

I shook my head. “I’ll be all right. I know how to take care of myself. I’ve been doing it for a long time. Besides, I thought I was the one who kept saving your life.”

“What, are you keeping score now? Put the headstrong macho crap aside for a second and just accept that I’m not letting you do this on your own.”

“It’s too dangerous,” I said. “The Black Knight is still out there looking for me. I can handle him if he comes for me, I’ve done it before, but you…” I shook my head. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“You have to stop thinking of me as someone you need to protect. I can take care of myself, too.”

“People keep dying because of me, Bethany,” I said. “Ten people I barely know died just so I could keep living. Ingrid is dead because of me, because Reve Azrael followed me to the safe house. She followed me here, too, and nearly killed Gabrielle. Now she’s got the box, and she’s got Thornton’s body, and it’s all because of me. I’m tired of getting people hurt. I’m tired of all the death.” She just looked at me, her bright blue eyes shifting slightly as she looked into mine. “You’ll be safer here with the others,” I said.

“It’s not me I’m worried about,” she said. “Who’s going to protect you? You’ll be out there on your own.”

I recognized the words, and smiled. It was the same thing I’d said to her when she’d tried to get rid of me after the warehouse. It already seemed like a lifetime ago. But I shook my head. “You can’t come with me, Bethany. The others need you.”

“And you don’t?”

I hung my head. That wasn’t what I’d meant. “This is something I have to do alone. It’s a part of my life I have to close the door on, once and for all. I’m no good to anyone until I do.”

She looked at me like she wanted to say something but didn’t have the words. I knew the feeling. There were things I wanted to say to her, too, starting with thanking her for showing me there were good, decent people out there, not just men like Underwood. People worth going to the mat for. But just then my tongue felt too thick to move.

Finally, she said, “Have I mentioned how annoying you are?”

“I picked up on it,” I said.

She stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed my cheek.

“Try to come back in one piece,” she said.

I wanted to say something witty, something charming and memorable, but all I could manage was, “Okay.”

Then she went back inside, and I walked away, into the storm.