Dying Is My Business (45 page)

Isaac came up and tossed me a staff. “Catch!”

It was the Anubis Hand, new and improved. The blackened, mummified fist had been mounted to the tip of a metal staff this time. I tapped the staff against the floor. It was solid, strong. There was no way this one was getting chopped in half.

Isaac checked his watch and addressed the group. “Two hours until the equinox. Two hours to stop Stryge from waking up and destroying New York City. I’m not going to lie to you, this isn’t going to be easy, and it isn’t going to be safe. We’re severely outnumbered by Reve Azrael’s revenants and the Black Knight’s gargoyles. I can’t guarantee we’re all going to come home from this, or that any of us will. I wanted to take a moment to tell you that you’ve all done your jobs remarkably well. I couldn’t be prouder to work with each one of you. But what we’re about to do is more dangerous than any job I’ve sent you on. This isn’t like securing an artifact. This is Stryge we’re talking about. He has all the powers of an Ancient, and he revels in death and destruction. If something goes wrong and Stryge is awakened, there’s no amount of money I can pay you that’ll be worth the danger you’d face.”

“This isn’t about money, not anymore,” Gabrielle said.

Isaac nodded. “A very wise man once told me there comes a time when you have to rise up and make a stand, even if no one else will. I didn’t listen. I sent you all out into danger instead. You risked your lives for me, while I hung back. No more. But this is the most dangerous thing I have ever asked you to do, so if you have any reservations, if you’ve changed your mind about coming, leave now. The door’s right over there. No one would blame you.” He looked at each of us. No one spoke. No one left.

“Fun speech,” Philip said. “So, are you gonna drive, or am I?”

*   *   *

Philip drove us north on the West Side Highway toward Fort Tryon Park. Seated in the back of the Escalade, I watched the city roll by and gripped the staff tightly. I didn’t know what would be waiting for us on the other end of the ride, but I had some nasty ideas. Were we strong enough to handle it? Prepared enough? I wondered if this was the same trepidation Willem Van Lente had felt as he’d approached the battlefield to face Stryge four hundred years ago.

It was Willem Van Lente’s own fist that had become the Anubis Hand. He’d used magic—dangerous magic—to transform his own flesh into a weapon. The more I thought about that and everything it implied, the more the puzzle pieces slid into place.

The oracles were right when they said Willem Van Lente was still alive. And if I was right, he would be at Stryge’s tomb today, too.

Up front, in the passenger seat, Isaac shared his plan. “Reve Azrael will most likely have already gone underground to the tomb by the time we get there, but it’s a sure thing Melanthius will be lurking somewhere close, acting as lookout. We can use that to our advantage. Wherever Melanthius is, Reve Azrael won’t be far. He’s our signpost. Find him, and we’ll find Stryge’s tomb.”

Fort Tryon Park sat at the north end of Manhattan like a small island of green amid a vast sea of concrete, nature’s last gasp at the top of an overdeveloped urban landscape. The Cloisters loomed over the treeline in the distance as we approached, an enormous brick and stone Gothic fortress. When we reached the park, we pulled into the public parking lot.

The lot was surprisingly crowded. It took us a few minutes to find a parking spot, weaving through the cars and big white trailers before we finally found a space to pull into. A family walked by, two parents and three kids, the father pushing the smallest one in a stroller. Isaac shook his head. “Damn it. I didn’t think there would be this many people here today. We have to be careful.”

We got out of the Escalade and started toward the park entrance. Philip pulled the hood of his cloak lower over his head to keep himself protected from the sun. The people standing by their cars watched us as we passed. Their eyes went to Gabrielle’s morningstar, my staff, Philip’s cloak and sword, but instead of doing something sane like backing away and calling the cops, they just nodded and gave us the thumbs-up. I scowled at them, confused, but kept walking.

“The Cloisters are on the other side of the park from where we are now,” Isaac said. “That gives us a lot of ground to cover. Keep your eyes open and your weapons handy. Melanthius is out there somewhere, and I’m guessing the Black Knight is, too.”

“Piece of cake,” I said. “How hard can it be to spot a man in a wizard’s cloak or a knight in armor? They’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”

Then I looked up and froze.

A dense throng of people waited at the park entrance. There were men in tights and doublets, cloaks, chainmail, and full suits of armor, and women in Renaissance gowns and cone-shaped princess hats. Above them, a banner stretched from one side of the park entrance to the other. It read,
WELCOME TO THE MEDIEVAL FESTIVAL AT FORT TRYON PARK.

“Oh,” I said.

Thirty-six

We entered the park, trying not to draw attention to ourselves, but after a couple of minutes it was obvious no one was giving us a second look. There were others in the crowd drawing much more attention than we were, women in colorful, cleavage-baring satin corsets and men dressed as knights riding upon flag-draped horses. There were Renaissance noblemen chatting on cell phones, and armor-plated squires gnawing on oversized barbecued turkey legs. Children ran by with foam rubber swords, giggling with delight, followed by a handful of adults walking with poleaxes and sheathed sabers that looked a lot more real. I caught a glimpse of a man in a peaked, storybook-style wizard’s hat, a curved wooden pipe in his mouth and a whittled walking stick in his hand. He reminded me of the twins in the photo of the Five-Pointed Star. It made me wonder if there were others at the festival who were like us, walking unnoticed amid the thousands who had no idea magic was real. What would the festivalgoers think if they knew? If they understood how dangerous magic was?

When I read
The Ragana’s Revenge
, I’d scoffed at the idea that magic could be real. I wished now that I’d had the chance to finish the book before losing it in the fire. Seeing as how my life had started to mirror the novel in ways I never would have imagined, it suddenly felt very important to know whether or not it had a happy ending.

We followed the paved path deeper into the park, surrounded on either side by booths of jewelers, gamers, purveyors of period clothing, and one booth labeled, oddly,
YE OLDE LONG DISTANCE SERVICE
, where a woman wearing a velvet gown and a wreath of flowers in her hair took customers’ applications on a decidedly anachronistic laptop. So much for escapism, I thought. The path was so packed with festivalgoers that we could only move at a crawl. As I weaved my way through, I almost collided with a group of college-aged men and women in forest-green tunics and dresses. They laughed at some private joke and touched their comically big, prosthetic pointed elf ears to check that they were on straight.

Next to me, Bethany adjusted her hair self-consciously.

A flash of red caught my eye in a small field just past the booths, where the crowd was less thick. A figure in a hooded red cloak was moving swiftly across the grass, his face hidden from me. He wasn’t browsing the booths or studiously checking the festival-grounds map like the others around him. He walked with speed and purpose, definitely heading somewhere specific.

Melanthius. I took off at a sprint after him.

“Trent, wait!” Isaac shouted after me, but I wasn’t about to let Reve Azrael’s manservant get away.

I zigzagged through the crowd and ducked past a blacksmith presentation at the edge of the path. I tried to keep my eyes on Melanthius as I ran, but every time I thought I was close, I lost him in the crowd, only to catch a glimpse of his red cloak again even farther away. I ran up the grassy hill toward him. Suddenly a unicorn appeared in my way, snorting and stamping one hoof. I paused, startled, then realized it wasn’t a unicorn at all, just a white horse with a long fake horn attached to a part of the bridle that covered its forehead. The long-haired, long-gowned woman riding atop it smiled down at the children who had gathered around her, blocking my path. I went around them and kept running. Ahead, Melanthius had paused near the edge of the forest, his back to me. I ran up, grabbed him by the shoulders of his cloak, and spun him around to face me.

A startled man with fat, ruddy cheeks and a patchy beard gaped back at me from inside the hood.

I let him go. “Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

“The fuck is wrong with you, dude?” He walked off cursing as the others came running up behind me.

“It wasn’t Melanthius,” I said.

“I can see that,” Isaac replied angrily. “Don’t go running off like that again. We need to stick together.”

I scanned the crowd, only half listening. I saw red cloaks everywhere—on a teenage boy walking by, on a young woman buying something at a jewelry booth, on an older woman standing near the path and singing madrigals. “We’re never going to find him in this crowd,” I said.

A loud scream startled us. We took off running, following the commotion to the side of the park grounds, where a low stone wall overlooked the Hudson River. A crowd had gathered by the wall, pointing at the Palisades cliffs across the water. A thick, dark gray column billowed out of a cave in the cliffside and drifted across the river toward the park.

“Is that smoke?” Isaac asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s gargoyles.”

There were hundreds of them, all pouring out of the cave en masse and stretching like a ribbon across the sky. They followed the path of the river northward, flying inside a thick cloudlike cover of steam. It took me a moment to realize what the steam was. Their flesh was burning in the sunlight. They must have been in immense pain, but they had their orders direct from their king, and from what Jibril-khan had told me, if they didn’t obey they would end up dead. This was the Black Knight’s endgame, his final push to acquire Stryge’s power for himself, and he wasn’t the kind to let a tiny detail like his subjects’ painful aversion to sunlight stop him.

“We have to get everyone out of the park, right now,” Isaac said. “Philip, Gabrielle, you’re with me. Bethany and Trent, you follow the gargoyles, find out where they’re going. If I’m right, we won’t need Melanthius after all. The gargoyles will lead us right to Stryge’s tomb.”

The three of them took off, shouting at everyone they saw to evacuate the park. Bethany and I ran north with the gargoyles. In the distance, the single tower of the Cloisters peeked over the trees like the battlements of a mighty castle. The gargoyles were making a beeline right for it.

We ran past the tournament field, a long meadow of grass and dirt enclosed by a semicircle of portable bleachers on one end and a small picket fence on the other. I caught a glimpse of the jousting tournament inside, a man in an armored breastplate and plumed cap atop a chestnut stallion. He was holding a lance in front of him and galloping toward his opponent. The bleachers were filled with hundreds of cheering festivalgoers, oblivious to the gargoyle army flying past. I hoped like hell the gargoyles stayed over the river and didn’t come inland. The people here were sitting ducks, locked in by the bleachers and the fence with only a handful of narrow exits. If the gargoyles chose to attack, it would be a massacre.

But they ignored the tournament field and kept flying. Finally, they turned inland, sailing over the forest that surrounded the Cloisters. Bethany and I followed them, running into the woods and up a hill. At the top of the hill, Bethany stifled a cry of surprise, and we both skidded to a halt.

Below, the woods were filled with revenants, more than I’d ever seen in one place. There had to be a hundred of them, all shambling toward the Cloisters. They wore leather sheaths on their backs, and as one they stopped and turned their ragged forms toward us, until we were looking out upon a field of glowing red eyes. I reached for my gun, but as a great shadow fell over them, I realized it wasn’t us that had caught their attention.

Overhead, a pack of gargoyles had broken away from the others. They swooped down through the treetops and attacked the revenants with their claws, teeth, and tusks. Undeterred, the revenants fought back, pulling machetes from the sheaths on their backs and hacking at the gargoyles.

Bethany grabbed my arm and started pulling me away. “Come on! Back this way!”

I looked up. The sky was filled with gargoyles flying toward the Cloisters. The ones at the head of group had already reached the tower and were circling it like a funnel cloud. “But the tomb, we must be close,” I said.

“We’ll never make it,” she insisted. “You saw all those people back there in the bleachers. It’s only a matter of time before the fight spills over to where they are. You think either side cares how many humans get caught in the crossfire? We have to get them out of there before it’s too late.”

I took one last look at the battlefield below, already running with gargoyle blood and littered with chunks of mangled revenants, then ran with Bethany back to the tournament field. We squeezed through the narrow gaps between bleachers to get inside. There were three hundred people in those seats, at the very least. There was no way the two of us could get them all out of there as fast as we needed to.

Bethany looked overwhelmed. “What are we going to do?”

On the other side of the field was a dais where a man dressed as a medieval king was announcing the tournament standings into a microphone. “There,” I said, pointing. “That mic is the only way we’re going to reach everyone.”

“But what are you going to—?” she started to ask, but I was already running out onto the field. I darted between the horses as they galloped toward each other, the chestnut stallion rearing in surprise and throwing its rider. The other horse, a black mare, whinnied and slid to a quick stop. I kept running. Security guards appeared from the sidelines, chasing after me. I broke for the dais, raced up the stairs beside it, and hip-checked the announcer away from the microphone.