Dying Is My Business (16 page)

Thornton turned to enter his room, wobbling momentarily on his feet. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was drunk. “If you two are going to make out all night, try to keep it down.”

“Bite me, werewolf,” Bethany said.

Thornton slammed the door in her face.

“Poor thing,” Ingrid said. “He may not feel pain, but he’s hurting inside.”

Bethany didn’t answer. Her face was long and weary, the face of someone whose decisions were weighing on her.

Ingrid continued the tour, opening the bedroom next to Thornton’s for Bethany. For me she opened the door across the hall. “This was Morbius’s room,” she told me.

I was surprised Ingrid and Morbius hadn’t shared a bedroom. I thought they’d been lovers. Maybe they never got the chance. I saw regret etch itself deeper into the lines of Ingrid’s face as she took in the room. I got the feeling she stood in this doorway a lot and reminisced.

She came back to herself, and looked at me. “You’re about Morbius’s size, give or take. There should be something in the closet that’ll fit you if you want to change out of those clothes.” She turned to Bethany and sized up her diminutive frame. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I have anything that will fit you.”

Bethany shrugged. “You and every clothing store in New York. Trust me, I’m used to it. I’ll be okay with what I’ve got.”

Ingrid bid us good night and disappeared into her bedroom at the end of the hall. I went into my room. It was bigger than the other two, with a queen-sized bed against one wall, a small desk and chair, a love seat, and in front of the curtained window a tall dresser topped with more photos of the Five-Pointed Star. I wondered if Ingrid had kept this room exactly as it was when Morbius died.

Bethany followed me inside. I heard her quietly close the door behind her. I didn’t turn around.

“It’s not going to work,” I said.

“What’s not going to work?” she asked.

I draped my ruined leather coat over the desk chair and sat down on the love seat, facing her. She stayed standing in front of the door.

“Whatever spell Gabrielle comes up with,” I said. “It won’t work, will it? I saw it in your face as soon as Thornton mentioned she was trying to find a way to help him. He saw it, too, I think, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He wants to believe there’s a way to keep the amulet going indefinitely.”

She nodded, her face clouding. “There’s a good reason the Breath of Itzamna isn’t permanent. I’m sure you’ve noticed how bad Thornton’s muscle functions are now, the discoloration of his skin, the smell.”

“The smell is hard to miss,” I said.

“His body is decomposing at an accelerated rate. It’s a side effect of the amulet. His body will keep decomposing faster and faster as long as the amulet is functioning.” Her eyes wavered and broke contact with mine. “I had to do it. I had to bring him back. But there’s no magic in the world that can bring the dead back to life. Not fully, not the way you and I are alive.”

Her words struck me with an unexpected force. After everything I’d learned tonight about magic, I was convinced my ability to come back from the dead was magical in nature—a spell some magician had put on me, or a spell of my own that I no longer remembered. But if Bethany was right, then even now, even in a world where magic existed, I was no closer to the truth than I’d been yesterday, or the day before that, or any of the days since I’d woken up in front of that brick wall.

“There’s nothing?” I pressed.

She shook her head sadly. “There are some things even magic can’t do. But trust me, it’s better this way. Even if Gabrielle
could
find a way to keep the amulet functioning, Thornton’s body is still dead. It’ll keep decaying. He would be stuck in a rotting shell until there’s nothing left but dust. That’s not something I would wish on my worst enemy. No, for Thornton’s sake, the best thing we can do is just let it run its course.”

“So you lied to him,” I said. She stayed quiet. “You told him he could go back to Gabrielle in the morning, but that’s not your plan at all, is it? You still need him to get the box.”

She looked away, refusing to meet my eye. “I don’t like it any more than you do. He’s my friend. But when things go wrong, someone has to keep a clear head. Someone has to keep their eyes on the goal so things don’t get worse.”

“And that would be you,” I said. “Even if it means letting your friend die.”

She glared at me, her face setting hard as stone. “You need to wrap your head around this, Trent. Thornton is already dead. There’s nothing anyone can do for him now. Not me, not you, not Gabrielle. Dead is dead, and no one can change that.”

But someone
had
changed it. I’d come back from the dead more than once, and fully back, not trapped inside a rotting corpse like Thornton was. I just wished I knew how or why. If I did, I could help him.

I caught myself. Help him? Wouldn’t it be easier to let him die? That way, his blood wouldn’t be on my hands when the time came.

Bethany sighed. “Let’s just drop it, okay? This isn’t what I came here to talk about.”

“So what did you come here to talk about?”

She looked at me like I ought to know. Suddenly I wasn’t happy to be alone with her. I felt like she could see right through me. At that moment I was very glad to be sitting on the love seat, because it was about as far from those probing eyes as I could get without actually leaving the room.

Finally, she crossed her arms over her bulky cargo vest. “I think I’ve been more than patient with you, Trent. I figured you would tell us the truth when you were ready, but I don’t think we can afford to wait anymore.”

I looked up at her sharply. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s obvious you haven’t been honest with us,” she said. “It’s time to come clean.”

My heart thumped like a tin drum in my chest. How much had she figured out? I glanced at the closed door directly behind her. Standing between it and me, her message was clear. There was no way out, not until she got an answer.

“The Anubis Hand, the Black Knight,” she continued. “The things you did shouldn’t have been possible.”

I very nearly sighed with relief. She didn’t know anything. “I told you before, Bethany, I don’t know how I did those things. I was as surprised as you were.”

“Huh,” she said. The word dripped with skepticism. “See, I keep going over it in my head, but your story doesn’t add up. You weren’t just passing by that warehouse tonight, were you? You said you heard me scream and came looking, only I didn’t scream. I don’t scream, Trent. Ever.”

“I don’t know, maybe it was a gargoyle I heard,” I said. “Whatever it was, it was enough that I thought I should investigate. Anyway, what’s with the third degree? If I’d decided to ignore it and keep moving, you’d be dead right now.”

“But you weren’t just investigating, you were expecting trouble. You walked into that warehouse with your gun already drawn.”

“I always carry a gun,” I said. “New York’s a dangerous city.”

She arched an eyebrow, not buying it. “Enough games. I want the truth. Who are you? For real?”

“Bethany, come on.” I shook my head.

“Because here’s the thing, Trent,” she said. “The reason your story doesn’t add up? I put a ward around that warehouse. It didn’t work on the gargoyles because they already knew we were there, but the ward was still active. That means even if it couldn’t stop the gargoyles, it still should have kept the warehouse hidden from everyone else. It should have been hidden from
you,
Trent. Unless you already knew it was there. Unless you
meant
to come to the warehouse. So do you still want to insist you were just passing by, or do you want to tell me the truth?”

I remembered the peculiar feeling of the little hands pushing me back as I drew closer to the warehouse. At the time, I thought it was just a manifestation of my own reluctance about the job, but now I understood it was more than that. Without knowing it, I’d walked right through Bethany’s ward. No wonder I’d felt the same thing on the front steps of the safe house.

Bethany’s sky-blue eyes bore into me. I looked away. She had me dead to rights, and like a cornered animal I felt the need to protect myself. My leather jacket was still draped over the desk chair. The grip of my Bersa semiautomatic peeked out from the pocket. It was so close I could draw it in a second. Less than a second.

But if I did, there would be no going back. I would cross the threshold to cold-blooded killer. Was that what I was? Or was that what Underwood wanted to turn me into?

I hated this tug-of-war inside me. How could I know what kind of a man I was when I didn’t even know
who
I was?

“Everyone has their secrets, Trent,” Bethany said. “I get that. But if I’m going to keep you around, I need to know if I can trust you. So I’ll ask you again, who are you really?”

I blew out my breath and whispered, “I don’t know.” I said it so softly I didn’t know if Bethany could even hear me.

“I don’t believe that for a second,” she said. I should have known nothing got past those pointed ears of hers. “I have charms in my vest that can make you tell the truth, but they’ll also cause you a lot of pain. I don’t want to have to use them, but I will if you keep lying to me.”

“I’m not lying,” I said. “I don’t know who I am.”

She furrowed her brow. “What do you mean? How can you not know?”

“For the past year, I’ve been living without any memories. Who I am, where I’m from, everything about myself, it’s all just a big blank.” I fidgeted in my seat, wondering if I was doing the right thing. Aside from Underwood, I’d never told my story to anyone. There hadn’t been anyone else to tell, frankly, and keeping it to myself for so long had buried it deep enough that after a while it felt like something that needed to be protected. Trusting Bethany with the truth made me uncomfortably vulnerable, but it also felt oddly freeing, like shrugging off heavy chains.

She narrowed her eyes, wondering whether to believe me or not. “You’re talking about amnesia?”

I nodded. “I can’t remember anything before a year ago. Not my friends, my family, my job. It’s like I didn’t exist at all before then. As far as I can tell, no one’s even looking for me. Amnesia is supposed to be temporary. I hoped I would remember eventually—hell, I try to
make
myself remember all the time—but it’s been a year and the memories haven’t come back.” I looked up into her eyes. “Bethany, I know I shouldn’t be able to do the things I did. I don’t know how I did them. I didn’t have any control over it, I swear. They just
happened
.”

She shook her head. “People can’t cast spells without knowing how, Trent. There’s no such thing as involuntary magic.”

I shrugged. “There is now.”

She crossed the room so quickly that I froze in surprise when she pulled open my collar and put her hand down the back of my shirt.

“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded.

I tried to get up from the sofa, but she pushed me back down. “Sit!” I felt something sticky peel off my back and thought she’d removed one of the bandages. But when she pulled away from me, I caught a glimpse of what was in her hand. My skin crawled. It wasn’t a bandage. It was moving. Alive.

I leapt off the sofa for a closer look. At first I mistook it for a spider, but then I saw there were no legs attached to its fat, ridged thorax, only round, slimy, saucerlike suction cups. Whatever it was, it was small, roughly the size of a nickel. It fit snugly in the center of her palm and glowed a bright neon green.

I shivered. How long had that thing been stuck on my skin? “What is that?”

She studied the creature. “It’s green.”

“I can see it’s green, Bethany, but what the hell
is
it?”

“A Collodi tick,” she explained. “It’s a rare interdimensional insect that feeds by absorbing a harmless amount of its host’s psychic energy. But they’re also remarkably sensitive to their host’s psychological state. They actually change colors when exposed to different psychic stimuli. It makes them the perfect lie detector. They turn yellow if the subject is lying, and green if the subject is telling the truth. Yours is green. That’s good.”

My jaw dropped. “Wait a minute.
You
put it on me? Downstairs, when you were bandaging me up, you put that
thing
on me?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to be sure.”

I stared at her, taken aback not just by what she’d done, but also by what a close call it’d been. More than anything else, it drove home the fact that I was walking a very thin line. “You had no right, Bethany!”

She pulled a small, clear plastic box from a pocket in her cargo vest, dropped the Collodi tick into it, and replaced it in the pocket. “Try to see it from my perspective, Trent. You come out of nowhere, a complete stranger who claims to have no knowledge of magic whatsoever, and then you start killing gargoyles like a pro and fending off the Black Knight with powers no one else possesses. You can see how that might make me suspicious. I had to be sure I could trust you.”

“And what if that thing was yellow instead? What would you have done?”

“This.” She extended her arm. A wooden wand shot out of her sleeve and into her hand.

I blinked. “A magic wand? Seriously?”

“Scoff all you want, but the Endymion wand is stronger than you think,” she said. “It would put you into a deep sleep before you knew what hit you.”

I doubted that. I don’t sleep, and I was pretty sure no wand would change that. “You had that thing all along but you didn’t think to use it on the gargoyles, or the Black Knight?”

“It only works on humans. Against anything else it’s just a pointy stick.” She tucked the wand back into her sleeve. “Look, I don’t expect you to understand, but this mission Thornton and I are on is too important. If the box falls into the wrong hands, a lot of people will die. I can’t let anything get in our way, or anyone.”

I sighed and sat down on the love seat again. “The box. Everything comes back to that damn box. What’s in it that’s so important?”

“Something ancient, and powerful, and extremely dangerous under the right conditions. You’re safer not knowing any more than that. Anyway, right now I’m a lot more interested in talking about you. A man with no memory of who he is. It takes a lot to surprise me, but I honestly didn’t see that one coming. It could explain a few things, though.”