Dying Is My Business (22 page)

Bethany bumped me as she ran past, heading for the stairs. Smart woman.

I followed her, glancing quickly over my shoulder. The second shadowborn was sprinting like a flash behind us. In a single smooth, quick motion, it jumped, somersaulting through the air, and landed gracefully on its feet halfway down the stairs. It started climbing toward us. Bethany and I backed away. Thornton stood his ground, snarling.

I looked around frantically, searching for another way out, but all there was on the third floor were bedrooms. At the far end of the hall, the first shadowborn edged toward us. Shit. The stairs were the only way down, and trying to fight past the shadowborn on a narrow staircase would be suicide. So would staying put, but with one shadowborn coming up the stairs and another approaching from the opposite end of the hall, we were penned in. Then I saw the roof access ladder in the corner of the landing.

It was our only chance. I ran for the ladder and started climbing. Bethany and Thornton guarded the ladder, her sword raised, his teeth bared, ready to fend off the two remaining shadowborn and give me enough time to get the trapdoor to the roof open.

The trapdoor was secured with a simple sliding lock. I slid the small metal bar back from its housing, then shoved the trapdoor open. Bright morning sunlight poured in from above. I pulled myself up onto the tar and cement surface of the roof.

Bethany started up the ladder next, climbing fast. As soon as she was high enough, I grabbed her wrist and quickly pulled her the rest of the way up. When she was safely on the roof, I looked down through the opening again. Thornton was still on the floor below, snarling at the shadowborn. They were keeping their distance from him for now, but they wouldn’t for much longer.

“Thornton, come on!” I called, though I wondered how he was going to join us on the roof. A wolf couldn’t exactly climb a ladder, and Thornton wouldn’t risk changing back to his human form while the shadowborn had him surrounded.

In a moment, I had my answer. With a mighty leap, Thornton was halfway through the trapdoor, his front paws on the roof, his hind legs dangling below him. He pushed and scrabbled against the ladder until he was all the way through. Below, the shadowborn gathered at the base of the ladder and looked up with their featureless steel masks. I kicked the trapdoor closed. It didn’t lock from the outside, which meant it couldn’t keep the shadowborn from following us, but hopefully it would buy us a few extra seconds.

I glanced around, trying to get my bearings. A cement wall as high as my knee traced the perimeter of the roof, separating it from the roofs of the neighboring town houses. It also fenced off the steep drop to the street at the front of the building. I moved to the back and saw an interior courtyard below, walled in by the backs of the buildings that abutted it. There was no fire escape, and despite the heaps of big black trash bags and bundled cardboard along the walls, the courtyard was definitely too far down to jump safely.

Bethany was breathing hard, still catching her breath. She had a cut on her cheek from a shadowborn’s sword. “What happened down there? How did you get the charm to do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said tersely. I scanned the rooftops for the fastest way to get back to the street.

Bethany grabbed my arm and looked at me angrily. “Well, you better start figuring it out. A displacer can only move one person at a time. Reverse it to a containment spell and the same principle should apply, only when you touched it the spell was a hell of a lot stronger than it should have been. It affected
all
of them. So tell me what the hell is going on!”

Through the closed trapdoor came the sounds of the shadowborn climbing the ladder. “They’re coming. We have to keep moving,” I said.

Bethany cursed, annoyed that I hadn’t answered her question, but when I ran, she ran too. We headed away from the trapdoor and across the roof, skirting around a big metal air-conditioning vent and satellite dish in our path. We jumped over the low wall to the adjacent roof and kept running, moving from rooftop to rooftop. On each one I searched for a door that could lead us inside, but they all had trapdoors like the safe house, locked from below with no way for us to pry them open. I slowed down to look back and saw that the shadowborn had smashed through the trapdoor and were pulling themselves up onto the roof. I turned and kept running. Up ahead, Bethany and Thornton had come to a stop. Directly in front of them, the wall of a tall apartment building towered into the sky like a windowless brick cliff face. There was nowhere left to run.

I saw the top of a fire escape ladder hanging off the back edge of the roof we were on, leading down to the interior courtyard. “There!” I said, pointing.

We ran for the ladder. The shadowborn had almost caught up already, sprinting unbelievably quickly across the rooftops. For what were essentially corpses in leather jumpsuits, they were a hell of a lot more agile than they had any right to be. At this rate, we’d never make it down the fire escape in time.

I stood in front of the ladder and held my sword ready. Beside me, Bethany did the same. “Go,” I said. “I’ll hold them off.”

“Forget it. You can’t handle both of them on your own.”

“Bethany, go!” I said, but she didn’t budge. I shook my head. “You are infuriating.”

“So are you,” she said.

The two shadowborn leapt nimbly over the last low wall and landed a few yards away from us. Thornton sprang at them. They split up, and Thornton landed in the empty spot between them. They were already running past him as he skidded to a halt, lost his footing, and fell over. The shadowborn advanced on Bethany and me.

I intercepted the first one, while the second went for Bethany. Free from the narrow confines of the hallway, I found myself better able to use a sword. Unfortunately, so did the shadowborn, who attacked so viciously and swiftly that it was all I could do to make sure I didn’t get cut to ribbons. I backed up. The shadowborn attacked again and again so fast that its blade would have been invisible if the metal hadn’t flashed in the sunlight.

The relentless onslaught forced me back against the top of the fire escape ladder. I tried to push my way forward again, but the shadowborn didn’t yield. Neither did I. I couldn’t. There was no place to go but the four-story fall to the courtyard below.

The first shadowborn swung its katana in a swift arc. The blow knocked the sword out of my hand. The shadowborn swung the katana back again quickly, and sliced open my throat.

The skin of my neck felt like it was on fire. I couldn’t breathe. My throat, mouth, and lungs filled with blood. I put my hands over my neck, trying to stanch the bleeding, but it didn’t help. The blood kept flowing out over my fingers. I wobbled on my feet, light-headed. My vision grew gray and fuzzy around the edges.

“Trent!” Bethany shouted. She sounded a thousand miles away, but I saw her, a blurry, Bethany-shaped blob running toward me. Behind her, the wolf was tearing the second shadowborn to pieces.

The first shadowborn was still standing in front of me, taking satisfaction in watching me die. I heard the
swish
of a sword cutting the air, saw the shadowborn’s head fly off its shoulders, and then there was only Bethany and the wolf staring at me. Bethany said, “Oh God, Trent, your throat…”

She reached for me, but my legs buckled and I fell backward. Then everything tipped away and I was falling.

I twisted my head to look down. The hard concrete floor of the courtyard rushed up to meet me. This one was going to suck.

When I hit, the impact broke my back, both legs, and one arm. Maybe my neck, too. It was hard to tell because I couldn’t feel anything anymore. But I knew from the impossibly odd angles in which my limbs were arranged and the glistening pool of blood spreading out from my head that it was bad. I heard a deep, echoing thunderclap in the distance, followed by another and another, growing softer and further apart each time, and realized it was my own heartbeat.

My vision clouded and blurred for a moment, and suddenly Bethany was crouching over me, her hands on my neck, trying to stop the bleeding. It was futile. Even if the blood loss didn’t kill me, my other injuries would. Bethany’s lips were moving, she was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her over the slowing thunder of my heart.

The familiar feeling of dying came over me—the cold emptiness, the sense of falling without movement. I had only a few seconds left. I had to warn Bethany. If she was this close to me when I died—

Get away!
I shouted, or thought I did, but the shadowborn’s blade had taken my voice from me.

You have to run, Bethany! You have to get away from me!
I tried again, but all that came out of my mouth was a wet gurgle. The gray at the edges of my vision turned black and crept across my eyes, slowly dimming everything around me to nothing.
Please …

The last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed me whole was Bethany’s face, too close, still too close …

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.”