Dying Is My Business (29 page)

“It’s called a Methusal spring,” Gabrielle explained as they approached the tub. “It’s the same spell the dryads in Central Park have used for centuries to extend their lifespan, ever since the pollution made them infertile. It has enormous regenerative properties. The dryads are very protective of it and don’t normally share it with anyone. I had to call in a lot of favors for this.”

Bethany paused, knitting her brow. “Gabrielle, maybe we shouldn’t do this. It’s only going to cause him more pain. He’s been through enough.”

“No, if anything can help him, the Methusal spring can.” Gabrielle turned to Thornton and murmured in his ear, “It’s going to work, baby. I know it is. There’s so much more we’re still going to do together. The annual naming of the manticore cubs, the mermaid migration down the Hudson River. Remember how much you liked that one last year? How the mermaids’ song got stuck in your head for weeks?”

Thornton didn’t answer. He was so far gone he couldn’t anymore. Philip helped them lower Thornton delicately into the tub, still in his clothes. Bethany hung back, watching and chewing her thumbnail nervously. As soon as Thornton was fully submerged, the water lit up with a rich, golden glow that reflected off their faces.

Gabrielle knelt beside the tub and reached into the water to take Thornton’s hand. Her voice cracked as she spoke. “If this is going to work, it’s got to come from you, Thornton. You’ve got to want it. You’ve got to
fight
.” She pulled his hand out of the water and kissed it. One of her braided dreads came loose and fell in front of her face, but she refused to let go of his hand to push it back. “Please, baby. I need you to stay with me.”

There was a long silence. All I heard was the gentle sloshing of the water and my own breath. I looked from one face to the next. Any of them could be the one who’d betrayed us at the safe house. Gabrielle’s full attention was on Thornton, her eyes full of hope and expectation. Isaac stared down at Thornton, the wrinkles around his eyes and forehead deepening with concern. Philip was unreadable behind his sunglasses. I didn’t like the way he was still wearing them inside. It reminded me too much of Underwood.

I looked at Bethany next. Though she was facing me, she didn’t meet my eye. She hadn’t looked my way once yet. It bothered me. It bothered me a lot more than I was comfortable admitting to myself, but maybe it was a blessing in disguise. At least this way I didn’t have to see the disappointment in her eyes again.

Then, suddenly, Gabrielle laughed, her face lighting up, and she wiped a tear from her eye. “He squeezed my hand. He heard me. He’s still with us.” She lowered his hand gently back into the glowing water. “I’ve got you, baby. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I really don’t think this is a good idea—” Bethany began.

Gabrielle cut her off. “Stop it, Bethany. Just stop it. It’ll work. It has to.”

Under the golden-hued water, Thornton lay like a corpse, his eyes closed and his hands clasped over his chest.

Twenty-four

With nothing more to be done for Thornton but wait and let the Methusal spring do its job, Isaac decided it was as good a time as any for a good old-fashioned interrogation. His questions ran the gamut of predictability: Who was I? Why had I lied to Bethany and Thornton? What was my mission? Who was Underwood, what was my connection to him, and what did he want with the box? Easy enough questions to answer—most of them, anyway—if I were at all interested in cooperating, but I wasn’t about to tell him anything. Someone had sent the shadowborn to the safe house to kill us and steal the box, and the more I thought about it, the more Isaac became my prime suspect.

Bethany said mages like him were powerful enough to carry magic inside them without becoming infected, but what if she was wrong about that? I’d seen proof that Isaac carried magic inside him. What if it had infected him after all, made him decide he wanted the box for himself and the rest of us out of the way? The clues were as clear as day in my head. Isaac had sent us to the safe house. He knew where we would be, and with his knowledge of the safe house he could tell the shadowborn exactly where to go so the ward couldn’t hide it from them. But why would Isaac send the revenant of Bennett to get me out of the way? What was the point of that?

“I asked you a question, Trent,” Isaac said, interrupting my thoughts. He stood in front of me, crossing his arms over his chest. Philip and Bethany flanked him, waiting, their faces like stone. Bethany was finally looking at me, but there was a coldness in her blue eyes that felt like ice. I liked it better before, when she wasn’t looking at me at all. “What were you planning to do with the Van Lente Box?” Isaac pressed. “Give it to Underwood? Sell it?”

I smirked up at him from where I sat tied to the chair. “You know, you didn’t need magic to put me to sleep. Listening to you talk would have done the trick just fine.”

“Just answer the question,” Bethany said. “The sooner you do, the sooner we can figure out what to do with you.”

Her voice was colder than I’d ever heard it. I’d blown any chance she would trust me again. She probably hated me. I deserved it, I supposed, but that didn’t make it any better.

“You told me you wanted to destroy the box because it was the only way you’d be free,” Bethany continued. “What did you mean? Free from what? Or was that just another lie?” I kept my eyes on Isaac and didn’t answer. She continued, growing more frustrated, “So what was the plan, Trent? You knew the shadowborn were coming to the safe house, so you came back to … what? To look like a hero? To get us to trust you so we’d take you to the box? It’s not like you were in any real danger from the shadowborn, right? You knew they couldn’t kill you. Not permanently, anyway.”

Damn, she really knew how to push my buttons. I wanted to tell her she was wrong about me, but I couldn’t risk giving Isaac any information. Instead, I turned away from her. It was just as well. I couldn’t stand the way she was looking at me.

“Bethany said you claim to have amnesia,” Isaac pressed. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe it. Pretending not to have any memories is a long con to play, Trent. Sooner or later, you’re going to slip up. It’s inevitable. You might as well come clean now.”

I looked up at him sharply, trying to bite back my anger, but the floodgates broke. “It’s not a lie.”

Standing next to Isaac, Philip said, “Sure it’s not. You know who lies about who they are? Criminals. Thieves. Spies.”

I glared at him, forcing myself to keep my mouth shut. Why couldn’t the others see it? Why couldn’t they piece it together the way I had? Maybe Isaac had cast some kind of spell on them.

Philip let out a frustrated groan. “This is bullshit. Give me five minutes alone with him and I’ll get him talking.”

“That’s not how we do things,” Isaac said. “You know that.”

Philip shook his head. “Humans. I’ll never understand you. Trust me, the best way to loosen his tongue is to tear part of it out. But if you’re not going to do that, and he’s not going to talk anyway, you might as well just get Gabrielle to do her Vulcan mindmeld thing and get it over with.”

Isaac nodded, taking a deep breath. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that, but I don’t think he’s left us much choice.” He turned to Gabrielle, who was still kneeling on the carpet beside the clawfoot tub where Thornton lay submerged, still holding his hand in the water. “Gabrielle? I’m sorry, I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, but we need you.”

She turned to Isaac, the golden hue of the water reflecting on her face. She looked angry. “Not now. Find some other way.”

“I would if I could,” he said. “None of us have your special talent. You’re the only one who can get inside his mind and tell us what you see.”

“Wait—what?” I stiffened in the chair. Were they serious? Could Gabrielle really do that? Of course she could, I realized. At this point it was foolish to be skeptical about anything these people were capable of. Still, withholding information from Isaac was the only leverage I had, and if she told him everything, I’d lose that.

Gabrielle let go of Thornton’s hand and stood up with a sigh. “Fine, but let’s keep it quick.” She walked over to me, inhaled a deep, steadying breath, and held my face in her hands. One was still wet from the tub, the spell in the water tingling against my skin like the brush of a feather. I tried to pull away from her, but with my wrists bound behind the chair there was nowhere to go.

“Don’t do this,” I said.

But it was too late. She was already in my head. I could feel her there, leafing through the pages of my mind as effortlessly as she might a magazine on the beach. She closed her eyes and bent closer, close enough that I saw the wet trails her worried tears had left in the corners of her eyes and along the sides of her nose.

She pulled my memories to the surface, dredging them from the swamp of my mind. In my head, unbidden, I saw the abandoned Shell gas station on Empire Boulevard. She saw it, too. Then she peeled the image away like the outer layer of an onion, and beneath it was my room in the fallout shelter, sparse and dreary, the overhead light flickering dimly. She peeled that one away, too, and beneath it she found what she was looking for.

“It’s Underwood,” she said. “I see him.”

The memory of Underwood’s face hung like a ghost in my mind, remaining frozen there no matter how hard I fought to keep my mind blank. Gabrielle was too strong. Now that she was inside my head, she could look wherever she wanted and I couldn’t stop her.

“Do you recognize him?” Isaac asked. “Is he someone you’ve seen before? Maybe under a different name?”

She shook her head, her eyes still closed. “No, I don’t know him.”

“But Trent does,” Isaac pointed out. “Tell us what he knows.”

She burrowed deeper into my mind, sorting through random images as if they were photographs: Underwood slapping my cheek and calling me a good dog. Underwood handing me a gun. Underwood sliding the address of the warehouse across the table to me. I was surprised at how vivid it all was, the colors, the sounds, even the smell of Underwood’s plentiful cologne. With Gabrielle along for the ride, the memories felt as fresh as if I were living them for the first time.

She laid open my mind, picking over my most private memories like Thanksgiving leftovers. She effortlessly pried them free and told the others what she saw—a thief who couldn’t remember his past, the low-level Brooklyn crime boss who took him in, and the mission to steal the box for an anonymous buyer in return for the information Underwood claimed to have found. I felt exposed, helpless, but most of all, hearing it spelled out so matter-of-factly, I felt foolish for having believed Underwood for as long as I did. He was a criminal, a master of lying to get what he wanted. I’d been an idiot to think he wouldn’t lie to me, too.

“So Underwood gave him the address of the warehouse,” Bethany said, talking about me as though I weren’t there. “That explains how he got past the ward. I thought there was something off about his story. But how did Underwood know we were there?”

Gabrielle found another memory: Underwood disappearing behind the black door. “He heard it from a mobster named Bennett, who belonged to a syndicate that owns the warehouse,” she said. “Underwood tortured him for the information. He killed him.”

“So Trent was telling the truth about that, at least,” Bethany said. “Bennett was the name of the dead man he saw at the safe house. He told me he knew Bennett, he just didn’t say how.”

“Now we know,” Isaac said. “Bennett is connected to Underwood, too. They all are. So who is he, and why haven’t we heard of him before?”

My breathing fell into sync with Gabrielle’s, to the point where I couldn’t tell which breaths were hers and which were mine. The longer she spent inside my head, the more our minds became entwined, knotting together like tree roots. Other memories began to bleed through into my own, memories I didn’t recognize until I realized they weren’t mine. They were hers. Most of them were of Thornton; her thoughts of him were still the rawest, closest to the surface. The fallout shelter faded from my mind, and I saw Gabrielle and Thornton kissing on a hilltop beneath a bright full moon and a sky full of stars. Their hands were clasped, their wrists bound by shiny white ribbons that reflected the moonlight. Figures moved around them, squat and low to the ground, dressed in ceremonial robes and intoning in high-pitched voices. Her memory filled in the blanks for me: They were goblins, and with that knowledge came a sudden understanding of what it was I was seeing.

Gabrielle and Thornton were engaged to be married. They’d done it in secret in Prospect Park, in a ritual the goblins called the Binding Oath, but they hadn’t told the others yet. They’d planned to surprise them with the news once Thornton had finished securing the box, but now … Now she didn’t know what would happen. Her concern for Thornton, her deep regret at not being at his side when he needed her, the overwhelming fear she felt at the prospect of her beloved dying in pain, the infinite sadness she’d pushed down just so she could function—it all put a crack in her heart, a crack that I felt, too. I knew with certainty now that she wasn’t the traitor. She loved Thornton too much to ever put him in danger.

She winced suddenly, and the memory was yanked forcefully from my mind. I felt her defensiveness, her outrage that I had seen something so private. It shouldn’t have happened. Distracted by her worries, she’d carelessly allowed her own memories to seep through.

Isaac spoke again. “Does Trent know who Underwood was planning to sell the box to?”

Gabrielle dug tentatively through my mind once more, this time making sure to keep her own memories shielded. “He doesn’t know. Underwood never told him. The buyers are always kept anonymous.”

Isaac grunted, frustrated. Suddenly I was very happy that Underwood hadn’t told me anything. Probably, Isaac only wanted to know who his competition was so he could send the shadowborn after them, too. The longer he was in the dark, the harder it would be for him to keep up the charade. Sooner or later he would slip up and the others would learn the truth about him.