Dying Is My Business

Forty

For a moment, there was only blackness, an empty void. Was this the dark that separated the worlds of the living and the dead, some part of me wondered? Were the dead watching me even now? Then, suddenly, there was light again. Way too much light. Even before I sucked the first gulp of air into my lungs, I knew something was wrong. I opened my eyes, and what came out of them was a coldly burning white fire, the same fire that had burned in Stryge’s eyes. The fire of the Ancients. I exhaled, and more of it erupted from my mouth and nose.

I felt like I’d swallowed a nuclear reactor. It flowed like lava through my veins, burned inside me like the heart of the sun. I felt … altered. Changed.

It is a combination of elements that were never meant to be combined.

I got to my feet, but I couldn’t stand for long. I dropped to my hands and knees, vomiting up more gouts of cold white fire. It just kept coming. There was more of it in me than my body could hold.

It is a danger to all who live.

Had the oracles foreseen this? Had they been trying to warn me?

As long as it walks upon this world, as long as it dwells among us, it puts us all in peril.

The fire burned and burned and felt like it would never stop.

Bethany’s voice came from a distance. “Trent? Are you okay? What’s happening?”

She’d come back to check up on me. I squeezed my burning eyes shut and turned away from her. “Stay back! I don’t know what’s happening to me!” I heard her footsteps running toward me, and shouted, “Damn it, stay away!” Something powerful coursed through me, something frightening and building in pressure. “The plan worked, but something’s wrong, it’s different this time.” Then I couldn’t contain it anymore. I leaned back and screamed, the white fire jetting from my eyes, nose, and mouth. Before I knew what was happening, I was floating into the air, as though I were being lifted. I stopped myself somehow, hovering a dozen feet above the ground.

Above, the red and black clouds Stryge had summoned were gone, replaced with a far more normal-looking gray cloud cover. The warring factions of gargoyles were gone, too, probably frightened off by Stryge. In the near distance was the wreckage of the Cloisters, its broken stones littering the hillside. The bits of trees and rocks and body parts had fallen to the ground as well, the laws of physics restored with Stryge’s death.

As for Stryge himself, the once mighty creature lay on his back below me where he’d fallen to the ground. A thirty-foot-tall mummy, shriveled to bone and dried tissue. Once again, I’d done the impossible. I’d killed an Ancient.

Out of habit, I added his name to my mental list.

11. Stryge.

Eleven names. Eleven lives I’d stolen. God. My heart felt heavy at the number, and even heavier when I thought about how many more had died over the last couple of days. More than I could count, and most of them had died because of me. It felt like there was so much blood on my hands they would never be clean. The oracles were right. I was a threat.

Bethany stared up at me in awe, which angered me. Didn’t she know what a monster I was? What an abomination?

But of course she did. She’d seen it firsthand. The thing inside me had almost killed her. I had almost killed her.

My anger boiled inside me. Everything around me changed, as if a filter had been put over my eyes. Suddenly I didn’t see Bethany, or the park grounds, or the wreckage. I saw through them, into them. I saw the millions of silken threads that bound their atoms together, and the more I looked at them, the more I understood how easy it would be to sever those threads, to break those atoms apart. As an experiment, I chose one of the threads in the ground directly below me. I plucked it with my mind. It was a gentle pluck, not even a break, and the ground crumbled. A sinkhole formed as the dirt poured into the darkness below. It was so easy. I could make it bigger, I thought, and plucked again. The sinkhole grew into a crevasse that cut through the ground like a wound. I laughed at how easy it was. I could pluck all the strings if I wanted, even break them and bring everything crashing down, and it would hardly take any effort at all. Perhaps I ought to. Maybe that was what I was meant to do. I could unmake everything and start over from scratch. Or maybe skip starting over altogether. Maybe I would just float in the void I’d created, endless, deathless, until I was as old as Stryge.

Bethany stepped back as the expanding crevasse crept toward her. “Trent, what are you doing?”

“Fulfilling my destiny,” I told her. “You heard what the oracles said, you were there. I’m a threat to all life.” I looked at the Bethany-shaped silhouette where she stood, filled with a thousand silken strings connecting all the little sunbursts of atoms inside her. It looked like she was made of comets and stars. It would be so easy to stop them cold, to just sever the threads inside her. The urge to do it shocked me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. “They said I was an abomination. They were right. I always was. And now this abomination has the power to unmake everything.”

“Trent, listen to me,” she said. “Somehow you absorbed Stryge’s magic when you got his life force. I don’t know how it happened, but the magic of the Ancients is different from ours. It’s not meant for us, our bodies can’t contain it. If you don’t get rid of it somehow, it’ll kill you.”

“But it can’t. Nothing can kill me, not even this.” I looked up at the sky, and saw through it, saw the gears of the universe moving like clockwork. It was filled with spheres, gorgeous, singing, rotating spheres decorated with mystical symbols and designs that made my heart soar. The spheres circled each other like dancers. It was so beautiful. So pure and unsullied by all the horrors of our world. “I have the powers of a god, Bethany. I can unmake it all. I can put an end to the suffering and cruelty, to the killing and the pain, and all I would have to do is pull a loose thread.”

“Don’t. You’d only be proving the oracles right. But they’re not right, Trent, this isn’t who you are. You’re not a killer.”

“I have a list of names that says otherwise,” I said. “But even so, it wouldn’t be murder to unmake this world. It would be mercy. Watch.”

It took no effort at all to reknit the threads below me with a thought, joining them together in a new pattern. The ground shook, and long, sharp fragments of stone burst up out of the crevasse, forming a crooked fence of giant stone spears. Bethany gasped and took a step back from it. She was afraid of me. She was right to be.

Philip came at me from out of nowhere, moving so fast I almost didn’t see him. I’d been wondering where he was. Had he reached me, he could have done some serious damage, but I didn’t let him get that far. There were threads all around him. I bent two of them, and Philip came to a sudden stop in midair, as if he’d hurled himself into an invisible wall. I plucked a thread, and down he went, tumbling to the ground. The threads inside a vampire were different, I noticed, darker in hue, and the atoms they bound burned colder, brighter. It was beautiful, in its own way.

Isaac came at me next, running over a nearby hill. The mage’s entire body crackled with an energy only I could see—magic, shimmering inside him like a star, pure, uninfected. He threw a spell my way, a bright burst of searing light, but I worked a few threads and the spell dissipated. Gabrielle attacked then, wielding the morningstar with her good arm. I sent her sprawling into the dirt next to Philip.

“Stop it!” Bethany yelled. “Stop it, all of you!”

There was so much anger in her voice that it pulled my attention back to her. Isaac’s, too. He lowered his crackling hands, and Philip and Gabrielle stood up, brushing dirt off their clothes.

“You’re not going to unmake the world, Trent, because you’re not a killer,” Bethany insisted. “That’s not who you are. I know it’s not.”

“You don’t know me,” I said.

“But I do.” She walked closer, skirting around the jagged spears of rock until she was right under me. She wasn’t afraid anymore. “Do you want to know why I kept you around after the power inside you almost killed me? Or why I didn’t kick you out after you drew your gun on me? It’s because despite everything, I saw something good in you. I saw who you could be if you only gave yourself a chance.”

I looked down at her, concentrating until the atoms-filled silhouette was gone and I could see her face again. “But the oracles…”

“To hell with them. Believe me, I’ve been called every name in the book. I know what it’s like. When you’re a kid and you’re different, the other kids make sure you know it, every single day. It’s hard not to let it get to you when someone calls you an abomination. It’s hard not to internalize it, but it’s normal. It’s human.”

“What if I’m not human?” I asked.

“What if you are? Would it make your life easier? Would it make you a different person? You still have free will, Trent. What matters isn’t what you are, it’s who you are, right now, in this moment. What matters are the choices we make. That’s what defines us. Nothing else.”

I felt myself calming, and sensed the new power inside me growing calmer, too. A moment later, the white fire in my eyes, nose, and mouth sputtered and died out.

“Now,” Bethany said, putting her hands on her hips, “are you going to stop this and come down from there, or am I going to have to pull you down myself?”

The threads around me started to vanish, but a split second before my vision returned to normal, the world seemed to break open, and I saw what lay behind its mask. I saw seven titanic figures, seven pairs of eyes watching, always watching, and an empty space where an eighth figure should have been. Then it was gone, and everything took on solid shapes again. Unable to stay afloat, and unsure how I’d managed it in the first place, I fell out of the air and onto the ground at Bethany’s feet.

She knelt beside me and helped me up. I stumbled on weak legs, and she steadied me. “I’ve got you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t think I could have stopped if you hadn’t…” I trailed off, words failing me again.

Bethany gave me a wry smile. “See what happens? I leave you alone for five minutes and you almost destroy the world.”

I smiled back, but it was halfhearted. Inside, I felt unstable and unsure of myself. Was my self-loathing so strong that I’d nearly taken the world apart because of it?

“Is it gone now?” she asked.

I shook my head. The power was still with me, I could feel it burning inside me like a low flame, but I couldn’t reach it, couldn’t make it do what it did before. It was as if the power had gone dormant. “It’s still in me, but it’s under control.”

“Be careful,” she said. “I’m serious. There’s a reason no mortal has ever tried to carry Ancient magic. It’s volatile. Dangerous.”

I nodded to let her know I understood. She went to make sure Isaac, Gabrielle, and Philip were all right. I was going to have some apologizing to do to the team. Again. At this point, it was practically a pastime.

My boot kicked something that tinkled along the ground. I looked down and saw the thin, delicate ammonite shell lying shattered on the ground where it had fallen. I knelt and sifted through the tiny pieces, but there were too many of them for the amulet to be salvaged. Damn. I hadn’t had a choice, taking it off had been the only way to stop Stryge, but Bethany’s little charm had changed everything, even if only for a moment. Losing it stung. We hadn’t even had the chance to come up with a name for it. I sighed, and was about to stand up again when the sound of something cutting rapidly through the air caught my attention. Before I could react, an arrow embedded itself in the dirt right in front of me.

I jumped to my feet. Melanthius stood on a mound of broken Cloisters stones, an archer’s bow in his hands. He pulled another arrow from the quiver strapped to his back, notched it into the bowstring, and sent it flying at Bethany. She jumped aside, but the arrow tore the sleeve of her shirt and drew a line of blood across her shoulder. She gasped, but it was only a flesh wound. She ran for cover behind one of the big, jagged stones sticking up from the crevasse.

Either Melanthius was a bad shot or he was trying to get our attention. I figured it was the latter. Well, now he had it.

He reached for another arrow, but before he could pull it out, a dark blur rushed out of nowhere and slammed into him. Philip ripped the bow from Melanthius’s hands and punched him across the golden skull mask. Melanthius stumbled backward and almost fell, but Philip grabbed him by the front of his cloak and pulled him back up. While Melanthius was still dazed, Philip took a piece of rope out of his pocket, the same rope his own hands had been tied with earlier, and used it to tie Melanthius’s hands behind his back. It struck me as a fitting irony.

The rest of us gathered by Stryge’s body as Philip approached with his captive. Melanthius’s golden skull mask regarded me stoically, emotionlessly.

“This isn’t over,” he hissed.

“Wanna bet?” I asked.

“As a matter of fact,” Melanthius said, “I do.”

On the ground between us, Stryge sat up suddenly. I jumped back.

Stryge’s eyes opened, and where they had once blazed with white fire, they now glowed red with Reve Azrael’s necromancy. The thirty-foot-tall revenant rose to its feet, towering over us.

“My God,” Isaac breathed.

“Stay back, all of you!” I shouted. They backed away. Melanthius chuckled inside his mask.

Reve Azrael looked down at me through Stryge’s eyes. She spoke through the Ancient’s wide, tusked mouth. “I owe you a debt of gratitude, little fly. My plan would never have worked without the one weapon that could kill an Ancient. You.”

“You knew what I would do to stop him,” I said, fuming. “You used me.”

“You exist for me to use.” She turned her enormous host body to the others and said, “Release Melanthius.”

“Why don’t you come and get him?” Philip snarled back.

Bethany, still holding my gun, lifted it and squeezed off two shots. The bullets bounced off Stryge’s withered skin.

Reve Azrael laughed. “Tiny, foolish thing. You think because this body is dead its hide is any more vulnerable? It is still the body of an Ancient. It contains vast, inexhaustible power. There is no limit to what I can do.” She started toward Bethany. Bethany backed up, but Reve Azrael stopped suddenly. She looked down at her host body. “Wait. Something is wrong. This body is nothing but an empty shell. What has become of Stryge’s power? Where is it?”

I looked up at her. “Take a guess.”

She turned her glowing red eyes to me. There was so much anger in them, so much rage, that they glowed all the brighter for it.

“You thought you had the perfect plan, but there’s one thing you forgot to take into account,” I said. “Ancients aren’t like the rest of us. Their magic is different from ours.” She stared at me, still not comprehending. “Ancients were the first living creatures in the world, right? They’re millions of years old. Magic alone couldn’t have kept them alive all this time. It’s the strength of their life force; it’s part of what they are. Their life force is their magic. And now it’s in me.”

“Of course,” she sneered. “That is what you do, isn’t it? Absorb their life forces for yourself? Steal what rightfully belongs to others? You are a thief, little fly, in more ways than one.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But what does that make you? Just another talking corpse.”

Reve Azrael bellowed in rage, furious that she’d been denied Stryge’s power. Her anger distracted her, and Isaac took advantage of it. He pushed out his hand. Crackling arcs of electricity flared from his palms and hit Reve Azrael in the back. She roared louder and turned to face the mage. He hit her with the spell again. This time it knocked her backward. Arms spinning wildly, she fell onto one of the huge, sharp stone fragments. The weight of her body coupled with the unyielding strength of the stone drove it into her back and out through her chest.

She struggled and squirmed to pull herself off the sharp stone, but she couldn’t. She was stuck. Good. I wanted her to suffer the way she’d made others suffer. I wanted her to hurt. But this was only a host body, not the real thing. I had no idea if she could even feel pain through a revenant.

She stared at me angrily. “You have Stryge’s power, so why do you not use it? Why hesitate? You could unmake me in a heartbeat, break me apart into dust!”

As tempting as that sounded, it wasn’t an option. I couldn’t control the power inside me. But she didn’t have to know that.

“Because you have something I want,” I replied. “No more games. No more evading the question. Tell me the truth. What do you know about me?” She didn’t answer. I tried again. “Who am I?”

“Trent, just end this,” Isaac said, coming forward.

“Wait,” I barked at him. He stopped where he was, but he didn’t retreat. “We found your homunculus, Reve Azrael. I know that’s how you kept tabs on me, but it doesn’t explain everything. The only time you could have hidden it on me was when you came to the house in Bennett’s body, but that doesn’t make sense. You wouldn’t have come to the house unless you already knew I was there. How did you know?”

She stayed silent.

“Trent,” Isaac warned again, but I lifted my hand to stop him.

“Tell me the truth,” I demanded. “How do you know me? Who am I?”

“Allow me to take Stryge’s power back from you, and I will give you all the answers you seek,” she said.

“Stryge’s body is ruined,” I said. “His power is useless to you now.”

“I can still read his memories,” she said. “These wounds and broken bones mean nothing. Once Stryge’s power is returned to his body, they won’t matter.”

“Trent!” Isaac shouted. His palms began to glow. “End this, or I will!”

“It still burns inside you,” Reve Azrael said. “But it is not made for mortal bodies. In time, the power will consume you from within. It will destroy you. Give it to me, save yourself, and I will tell you everything.”

I watched her lips curl into a smile, and felt cold inside. She was using me again, manipulating me to get what she wanted, and she would keep on doing it as long as she had something she could hold over me. I’d been down that road before, and I didn’t like it the first time. Isaac was right, it was time to put an end to this.

Willem Van Lente’s sword lay on the ground nearby. I walked over to it and picked it up.

“Listen to what I am offering you,” Reve Azrael insisted.

I carried the sword back over to her.

“Fool, this is the body of an Ancient,” she sneered. “A sword forged by man will do nothing.”

“It’s no ordinary sword,” I said. “Search Stryge’s memories. I’m sure you’ll recognize it.”

Her eyes went wide as it came to her. “No,” she shrieked. “I have worked too hard and waited too long to be cheated like this! It’s not fair!”

“Lady, if you’ve got a problem with the way life treats you, get in line.” I lifted the sword up over my head, its blade pointing down between her eyes.

“Wait! Do this and I will never tell you what you want to know! You will live out the rest of your days knowing how close you came to the truth before you threw it all away.”

“I’ll live,” I said, and drove the sword deep into Stryge’s forehead, into his brain, severing Reve Azrael’s link to his body. The red glow faded from Stryge’s eyes as her consciousness fled. I pulled the sword free, the barbs on the back of the blade caked with thick grue.

God, I thought, we did it. I couldn’t believe it. Somehow, against all odds, we’d actually saved New York City. I laughed with relief, and nearly dropped to my knees in exhaustion.

A sudden, pained cry startled me. I turned around to see Melanthius standing behind Philip, holding a small silver dagger to the vampire’s neck. Loops of severed rope dangled from Melanthius’s wrists. He inched backward toward the ruins of the Cloisters, keeping a firm grip on his hostage. Bethany lifted the gun again, drawing a bead on Melanthius’s gold skull mask over Philip’s shoulder, but she didn’t fire.

“Shoot him,” I said.

She shook her head. “I can’t. It could hit Philip.”

“He’ll be fine, he’s a vampire.”

“Silver saps a vampire’s powers. The bullet could kill him.” But she didn’t lower the gun. She kept it trained on Melanthius, waiting for him to slip up and give her a clean shot.

“Let him go,” Isaac warned.

“Stay where you are, mage,” Melanthius said. “Make a move, any of you, and the vampire dies.”

“Drop the knife,” I said. “It’s over. Reve Azrael is gone.”

Melanthius laughed. “My mistress is never far.” He pulled Philip up onto the rubble.

We followed, keeping a cautious distance. “You’re outnumbered, Melanthius,” Isaac said. “There are only two ways out of this. You stop, or we stop you.”

“No, there is another way.” Melanthius plunged the silver dagger into Philip’s chest, then shoved the wounded vampire toward us. Isaac caught Philip before he fell.

Melanthius ran into the ruins of the Cloisters. I sprinted after him, Gabrielle right behind me. We chased him into a crumbling, dark corridor of stone. Each step I took brought a cloud of dust raining down on my head, making me wonder if the whole structure was going to come down on top of us at any moment. In the distance, Melanthius produced something small from a pocket inside his cloak. I was too far away to see what it was before he threw it down on the ground in front of him. It broke open, and a hole appeared above it, an opening in the air itself that swirled like a vortex and flickered a bright blue. I’d seen that flickering light before, I realized, the first time I saw Melanthius outside the safe house. The same light had been coming from the alley he disappeared into.

Melanthius leapt into the flickering hole. At the same time, Gabrielle threw something at him, though I didn’t see what it was. A weapon of some kind, I supposed, but she must have missed because Melanthius didn’t cry out or slow down for a second. Then the vortex swallowed him, and the hole in the air closed. He was gone.

I stopped, putting my hands on my knees and catching my breath. Gabrielle did the same. The front of her shirt was red with blood from the reopened wound in her shoulder.

“What the hell was that … that hole?” I asked.

“He had a charm that opened a portal,” Gabrielle said. She winced and touched her bleeding shoulder. “Damn it. I should have guessed he would have an escape plan.”

We walked back to where Isaac and Bethany were tending to Philip. Bethany was cradling his head against her knees while Isaac rubbed dirt on the knife wound. The vampire’s face was twisted with pain and glistened with sweat.

Gabrielle told them about the portal. “But a portal to where?” I asked.

Isaac shrugged and shook his head. “Who knows? Another dimension. Some other part of the city. Timbuktu. It could be anywhere.” He turned to Gabrielle. “Did you get him?”

Gabrielle nodded. “I think so.”

“Get him with what?” I asked.

Isaac looked at the ruins where Melanthius had disappeared. “Plan B.”