Dying Is My Business (26 page)

“Of course,” the dragon said. A gigantic hand rose from beneath the bridge, its scaly claws balled in a fist. All three of us backed up to give the hand room as it came to rest before us. “I promised you I would keep it safe, and I have done no less. I would give it to none but you.”

Thornton nodded. “I know. Believe me, just this once I wish that weren’t the case.” He looked at the dragon’s massive fist. “Thank you, I’ll take it now.”

“However,” the dragon said, “it is such a
pretty
box.”

Thornton rolled his eyes. “Gregor…”

“I would hate to lose such a beautiful item from my collection,” the dragon continued. “It brings me such pleasure to look at.”

I glanced at Bethany. Once again she gestured for me not to say or do anything to interfere.

“Gregor, I’m running out of time,” Thornton said. “The Breath of Itzamna won’t last much longer. Please, I need the box.”

“I propose a barter, then. A fair trade,” Gregor said.

Thornton frowned and shook his head. “What do we have that you could possibly want?”

“Something of equal beauty that I may keep,” Gregor said. He swiveled his massive head until he loomed over Bethany, and my blood went cold. The dragon wanted
her
? For what, a snack? I moved to get between them, but she warned me to stay back with a quick shake of her head. Gregor continued, “The bauble that hangs around the female’s neck has caught my eye. I would have it in exchange for the box.”

I breathed a sigh of relief, but Bethany didn’t. “Now just a minute,” she said, putting her hands on her hips.

The dragon lowered his head to regard her more closely. His burning eyes narrowed with contempt. “Thornton, inform this tiny topsider that she is not to address me unless I require it.”

Thornton put his head in his hands. “Oh God, that’s not going to go over well.”

“I’ll address you as I see fit!” Bethany shouted back at Gregor. The sight of a five-foot-tall woman bellowing indignantly at a titanic, eons-old dragon would have been funny if I weren’t so worried that Gregor would respond by squashing us all with one gigantic hand. “And furthermore,” she continued, lifting the charm on the string around her neck, the blue veins in the little pearl-like sphere sparkling like glitter, “do you have any idea how hard it is to engineer a personal energy-barrier charm? This
bauble
, as you call it, isn’t for sale!”

“A shame. Its colors please me,” Gregor said. “I am afraid we have no deal, old friend.”

Thornton looked up at the dragon sharply. “Gregor,
please
.”

“I have given you my terms,” the dragon said.

Thornton looked at Bethany. Bethany looked at me—the real reason she was reluctant to part with it. “I told you, you’re safe now. It’s over,” I said. She looked skeptical. “Bethany, I know I kept something from you, something bad, but sooner or later you’re going to have to start trusting me again.”

She took a deep breath, lifted the charm from around her neck, and held it up by the string. “Don’t make me regret this,” she said to me.

A second enormous hand appeared from below the bridge, one long talon extended. Bethany hooked the charm’s string over the tip of the nail. The hand receded back into the mist with her charm.

Gregor’s other hand opened, and something tumbled out of his enormous, scaled palm to land at Thornton’s feet. My breath caught in my throat.

The box.

It was just as Underwood had described it, a foot wide by two feet long, and fashioned from a dark, weathered wood. The corners were cased in brass. A brass handle was hinged on one side so it could be carried. A trunk lock, also brass, was bolted to the wood and kept it securely closed. On the lid was the crest Underwood had said would be there, an iron-stamped coat of arms featuring two lions standing on their hind legs, their mouths open in pantomime roars. Between them, their forelegs supported a shield topped with a bejeweled crown. Unfurled across the face of the shield was a banner with words written in a language I didn’t know:
IN DE EENHEID, STERKTE.

After everything we’d been through, the creatures we’d fought, and the lives that had been lost, the box looked crushingly ordinary. But then, boxes didn’t have to be special. It was what they contained that mattered, and what was inside this one had left a trail of blood, death, and betrayal behind it.

I’d known this moment would come eventually. I’d been anticipating it, even dreading it. But I already knew what had to be done.

Thornton took the box by its handle, but he was too weak to lift it.

“Let me,” I said, moving toward him.

Bethany got there first. She lifted the heavy box with a grunt and held it like a suitcase at her side. “No offense, Trent, but I’m not letting this box out of my sight again.”

Damn. I nodded and smiled like it was no big deal. I would have another chance.

Gregor began to descend back into the mist. “Guard that box well, old friend, and beware. What sleeps inside it must not be allowed to awaken. There are whispers. The oracles warn of an immortal storm, a gathering force so powerful it threatens all existence.”

“I don’t understand,” Thornton said. “An immortal storm? What does that mean? What does it have to do with what’s in the box?”

“Warn the others who dwell topside. The immortal storm must not come, or it will seal the doom of all—mortals, Ancients, and Guardians alike.”

Gregor disappeared into the mist and was gone. Thornton ran to the edge of the bridge and looked over. “Wait!” But there was no sign of the dragon.

As we walked back toward the tunnels, I kept my eyes on the box. I’d looked at the situation from every angle. There was only one way to throw off Underwood’s yoke from around my neck and send the message that he couldn’t manipulate me anymore. Only one way to keep Bethany and Thornton safe from the dangerous forces that wanted the box for themselves. Only one way to bring to an end all the suffering and death the box brought with it.

I had to destroy it.

Twenty-one

By the time we climbed out of the sewers and emerged from the field behind the brick ruins by the West Side Highway, storm clouds had rolled in to give the sky a gray, swollen overcast. Rain was coming. I could feel it in the soupy humidity that drew sweat from my pores. Was this the immortal storm Gregor had warned us about? Nothing about the dark clouds overhead seemed different from any I’d seen before. Whatever an immortal storm was, and whatever dangers it brought with it, I was pretty sure this wasn’t what the dragon had meant.

A dragon. I’d seen a living, breathing
dragon
under New York City. Yesterday I would have scoffed at the idea of dragons—
had
scoffed at it while reading
The Ragana’s Revenge
—yet everything that happened since then had been a crash course in just what was and wasn’t possible. It was as if I’d fallen through the rabbit hole directly into Elena De Voe’s head. Even the name of the Nethercity, Tsotha Zin, was like something out of her book, though I supposed even in the real world an ancient, magical city underneath New York wasn’t going to be named Boise. I promised myself that if I ever met Elena De Voe, I’d ask how much of her novel was fictional and how much was true.

We traveled east, trying to hail passing cabs, but with the sky threatening rain all the cabs were already taken. Bethany cursed and kept walking, keeping a tight grip on the box. Thornton limped stiffly beside her. The pedestrians on the sidewalk, instinctively sensing a wrongness about him, gave him a wide berth, even if they didn’t understand why. I was starting to envy them their blissful ignorance.

But I had my own situation to worry about. How was I going to convince Bethany and Thornton to give me the box? After everything they’d been through to keep it safe, would they give it up without a fight if they knew what I planned to do with it? However it happened, I was going to have to do it soon. Much sooner than I’d thought.

Because a sleek black sedan had been following us for blocks now, ever since we left the ruins. It hung back in traffic, trying to stay inconspicuous as it shadowed us around corners and down side streets, but my instincts knew when I was being followed. Worse, I recognized the car. I’d seen it before, just this morning, with a dark-eyed woman at the wheel.

How the hell did Underwood keep finding me? One time I could chalk up to bad luck, but this? This was the universe laughing at me, telling me that no matter how hard I tried, no matter what I did, I’d never be out from under the man’s heel. I’d made a deal with the devil, and if there was one thing I knew from watching old horror movies, it was that no one ever walked away from a deal with the devil.

Two men dressed in black appeared at the far end of the block, rounding the corner and walking toward us. They were too far away to see clearly, but from their size and the way they walked I recognized them right away: Tomo and Big Joe. I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t. Their appearance had the inevitability of clockwork. Maddening, infuriating clockwork.

“Shit,” I said, stopping.

Bethany and Thornton stopped, too. “What is it?” she asked.

“We’re being followed.”

“What?” Bethany looked up and down the street, but she didn’t know what to look for, not the way I did.

There was no way to retreat with Underwood in the car behind us, and no way forward with his two enforcers heading our way. I hoped Tomo and Big Joe hadn’t seen me yet, but that was unlikely. They were professionals. They knew exactly who they were looking for. Probably, they’d spotted me the moment they turned the corner. We had to get off the street. I needed someplace close to duck into. I glanced around desperately and spotted an auto body shop twenty feet away, its retractable garage door open to reveal an enclosed workspace that stretched deep into the building. I took Bethany and Thornton by the arm and pushed them toward the shop. “This way. Quickly.”

“Trent, who’s following us?” Bethany demanded.

“Someone dangerous,” I said. “Now move.”

Inside, the auto body shop was wide enough to hold three cars side by side, though there was only one there at the moment, its hood up and its deconstructed engine exposed like entrails. Next to it, a young man in his early twenties sat on a folding metal chair, eating his lunch out of a Chinese restaurant’s Styrofoam container. It wasn’t the perfect hiding place, it would have been better if no one saw us at all, but it would have to do. We were running out of time.

The young man looked up from his meal as we entered the auto body shop, noisily sucking a lo mein noodle into his mouth. He was scrawny, with an unruly mess of dirty-blond hair and a sleeve of tattoos down each arm. His ears were pierced with open metal spools that stretched his earlobes into big fleshy hoops. The patch on his shirt was embroidered with the name Chaz. We only had his attention for a moment before he dismissed us by looking down at his noodles again. “If you need your car worked on, come back in half an hour. Everyone’s out to lunch.”

“Is there a back door to this place?” I asked

That caught his attention. He looked up again, confused. “Huh?”

“A back door, Chaz,” I repeated, annoyed. I scanned the shop. It was small and cluttered. I didn’t see any doors in back. “Or how about another room, the office, anything that’s away from the street?”

He put his Styrofoam container on the floor under his chair and stood up slowly. “Who are you? What are you talking about?”

We were getting nowhere fast. I glanced through the open garage door at the sidewalk outside. How far away were Tomo and Big Joe now? What about Underwood? I waved Bethany and Thornton to the back of the shop, and they retreated to the far wall. It would have to be enough.

“Sorry, Chaz, but if you know what’s good for you, you’re going to have to go.” I nodded toward the open door. “Trust me, in a couple of minutes you’re going to wish you weren’t here anyway.”

“The fuck are you talking about?” Chaz demanded. His confusion was making him angry. He puffed up his chest like a frog trying to look bigger than it was. “You think you’re gonna rob this place? Well, think again, motherfucker!” He started to reach for a metal lug wrench sitting on the car engine.

I didn’t have time for this. I got to him before he reached the lug wrench. I hooked two fingers through the large, stretched hoop of his earlobe and pulled, dragging him toward the doorway.

“Ow! Ow! What the fuck, man?”

I pushed him out onto the sidewalk. “If you want to keep living, Chaz, you’ll walk away from here and won’t stop until you hit the river.”

“Yo, back it the fuck up!” he raged, rubbing his sore ear. “You pull that shit again and I’ll beat your punk ass down!” It was empty bluster, I could tell from the way he tilted on his feet, ready to move away from me, not toward me. I’d spooked him. Now he was more bark than bite.

“Chaz,” I said calmly, making sure to call him by his name again. It was an old con-man trick, or so I’d been told. Keep using the mark’s name and they lower their guard. “Chaz, I don’t have time to tell you how much danger you’re in. You just need to run.” I pulled the gun halfway out of my coat pocket, just enough to give him a peek at it. “So run.”

He stared at the gun. Apparently that was all he needed to finally send him sprinting down the sidewalk.

There was a key box on the wall next to the doorway, the key still in it. I turned the key, and the garage door motor on the ceiling groaned to life. The door rolled down and hit the sidewalk with a solid, comforting
clang
.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Bethany demanded. “Who’s out there?”

“How many are there?” Thornton asked.

I walked toward the back of the auto body shop, where they were waiting. “Bethany, I’m going to need you to give me the box.”

“Forget it. I already told you I’m not letting this thing out of my sight again,” she said. “What’s this about? What’s happening?”

“We don’t have a lot of time,” I said. “The people who are coming are much, much worse than you can imagine. They’re going to take the box from you by force if they have the chance. But if you give it to me, I can do something about it.”