Dying Is My Business

Sixteen

I put my gun away and ran to the stairs. Judging by the defensive wounds on Ingrid’s arms and the smoking black scorch marks on the wall, she hadn’t gone down without a fight. She was bleeding heavily from multiple stab wounds, but she was still breathing. She was still alive. I knelt over her. Whoever did this had come looking for me. This was my fault. I should have been here.

“Ingrid,” I said.

Her eyelids fluttered at the sound of her name. “Trent?” She opened her eyes, focusing on me. She winced in pain. “They came right through the ward … I couldn’t stop them…”

“Who were they?” I said.

“Shadowborn,” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know who that is.”

“Trent, listen to me.” She sounded winded, a wet rattle at the end of each breath. “Something’s wrong. They never should have found us … not with the ward up … they must have had help … someone told them … someone betrayed us.…”

“I have to get you to a hospital.” I started to slip my hands under her as gently as I could, but she stopped me.

“No. Leave me … there’s nothing you can do. Find the others. Help them.” Ingrid coughed, and blood sluiced out from between her lips. “I was wrong, Trent. You have to tell Isaac—tell him I was wrong. It can’t end like this … everything Morbius believed in … everything the Five-Pointed Star stood for. Promise me you’ll tell Isaac to keep fighting … keep fighting the darkness … Promise me.” She touched my face with her bare right hand. Her fingers were sticky with blood. And then her eyes filled with sudden terror, and she shook her head violently. “Oh God, Trent, your aura … it can’t be…”

She looked so frightened of me, of what she saw in me, that I felt a sudden surge of shame, like a monster confronted with its own reflection. But I had to know. I had to. I put my hand over hers, pressing her palm to my cheek. “What do you see? Who am I?”

Her voice wavered. “No. Your aura … it’s—it’s not human … Oh God…” She coughed blood again, her whole body racking with the effort. She turned away, as if she couldn’t bear to look at me any more.

A chill went up my spine. “Ingrid, please tell me. Tell me what I am. Ingrid…” She didn’t answer. It was only when her hand slipped limply off my cheek that I realized she was dead. I reached down and closed her eyes.

What had she seen that terrified her so much?

What the hell was I?

A sudden crash from upstairs startled me. I reached for my gun. Whoever the shadowborn were, they were still in the house. I raced up the steps. On the second floor, I found the living room in shambles. Furniture had been overturned, and more broken figurines littered the floor. The glass display case above the mantelpiece had been smashed, leaving a heap of fallen antique swords beneath it. A round, silver object was half-buried in the wall at shoulder height. It took me a moment to realize it was the serving tray Ingrid had used last night. Someone had thrown it with such force that it had embedded itself in the plaster.

But the room was empty, the only movement the motes of dust swirling in the columns of morning light from the windows.

Another crash came from overhead, the sound of a door being kicked open. Shit, the bedrooms. I hurried up the steps to the third floor, my finger on the trigger of the gun, but when I reached the top, the hallway was empty. All the doors were closed except one. The door to Bethany’s bedroom. From where I stood on the landing I couldn’t see inside, but a sliver of the wall was visible. So were the shadows that moved across it. Someone was in there—multiple someones, it looked like—and from the sound of it they were tossing the room. Why? Wasn’t it me they were after? Did they really think I’d be hiding under a bed? I inched toward the open doorway, keeping my finger on the trigger.

I only made it a couple of steps before a figure walked out of the room and into the hall. It wore a sleek, black leather jumpsuit that extended up over its neck to form a tight, seamless hood around its head. Its face was hidden behind an oval steel mask, plain and featureless. There weren’t even any eyeholes, though apparently it didn’t need any to know I was there. It turned to face me right away.

So this was a shadowborn. It didn’t look so tough. In fact, it looked pretty scrawny under all that leather.

I leveled the Bersa semiautomatic at it, but had to stop myself from emptying the clip into its chest. This thing had killed Ingrid and I wanted it dead for that—hell, I wanted it to suffer for that—but I needed information first. “Where are the others? What have you done with them?”

By way of an answer, the shadowborn drew a katana from the sheath on its back. The sword’s long, thin, single-edged blade glinted in the light of the hallway.

“I was kind of hoping you’d say that.” I pulled the trigger, but as soon as the shot rang out the shadowborn was gone. The bullet punched a hole in the wall on the far side of the hallway. A moment later, the shadowborn reappeared in the same spot, blinking back into existence as quickly as it had vanished.

I lowered my gun. “What the hell…?”

It occurred to me this was why Ingrid hadn’t been able to stop them downstairs, not even with her fire magic. If they could vanish into thin air like that, faster than a bullet, then Bennett was right. They really were unstoppable.

Keeping Underwood’s Golden Rule in mind, I dropped the gun into my coat pocket. I wanted my hands free.

The shadowborn’s katana cut through the air with a high-pitched whistle. I jumped back, narrowly avoiding the blade. No way was I going to let this shirt get ruined, too. Or anything worse. Bennett had said they could take me apart in ways I couldn’t come back from. I didn’t want to find out what that meant.

Just then, two more shadowborn, identical to the first, walked into the hallway from the bedroom. They drew their katanas in unison.

Three against one. The odds had already been pretty bad, but they’d just gotten worse. I backed up, keeping my eyes on the shadowborn. All three of them winked out of sight. A moment later, they reappeared right in front of me. Startled, I fell backward, landing on the floor in front of one of the closed bedroom doors. The shadowborn raised their katanas. I closed my eyes, waiting to be skewered like shish kabob.

The bedroom door burst open, and an enormous timber wolf bounded out. Two of the shadowborn above me disappeared just as Thornton was about to pounce on them. He crashed into the wall instead. The third shadowborn stayed where it was, bringing its katana down toward me in a swift chop.

With a loud clang, the blade stopped an inch from my chest, blocked by a thick steel sword that had come out of nowhere. I looked up and saw Bethany standing above me, holding one of the swords from the smashed display case downstairs.

“Where the hell have you been?” she asked.

I grinned, relieved to see her. “It’s a long story.”

But the shadowborn had no intention of giving us time to catch up. It swung its katana at Bethany, and she parried the blow. They fought, their blades clashing and ringing. I got back on my feet. On the floor of the bedroom Bethany had come out of, I saw another sword identical to hers lying beside a pile of Thornton’s discarded clothing. I scrambled into the room and picked up the sword. It was heavier than I expected, its handle slightly too long for my hand. But then, it had been crafted for the six-armed war god of the Pharrenim, not for me. I hoped I’d be able to handle it. There was no guarantee a sword would be any better than a gun against the shadowborn, but at least it would give me something to defend myself with.

I rushed back into the hallway. Bethany was still fighting, wielding her sword like someone who’d been in her share of swordfights before. But every time she managed a thrust or jab that should have crippled her opponent, the shadowborn simply disappeared to avoid her blade, then reappeared and attacked again.

Down the hall, Thornton was keeping the other two shadowborn busy. Every time he lunged at them, snapping his massive lupine jaws, they winked out of sight and reappeared nearby. They tried to stick him with their katanas, but on four legs he was too fast for them.

One of them noticed me. It vanished and reappeared right in front of me. Its sword was already coming my way by the time I realized what was happening. I brought my own sword up and blocked its attack. It lunged. I blocked its blade again, and again after that, marveling at how well I was doing. As far as I knew, this was the first time I’d ever held a sword, and yet my hands were acting like they knew exactly what to do with it.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been surprised by how well I could fight, though before now it had always been hand-to-hand combat. Somehow, I could fight like I’d been trained by the best. It was something that came over me, like instinct or muscle memory, and more than once I’d wondered if I was a boxer in my previous life.

Now this. Who the hell was I that I knew how to handle a fucking sword?

But in my excitement I got cocky, and the shadowborn managed to get the tip of its katana under my cross guard. With a flick of its wrist, it sent the sword flying out of my hand and clattering to the floor.

The shadowborn came at me quickly. I grabbed both its arms, trying to force the katana blade back as it inched closer to my neck. The shadowborn pushed forward with a strength that belied its slender frame, forcing me back against the wall and pinning me there. I struggled to hold the blade at bay, my own warped reflection staring back at me from the shadowborn’s blank steel mask.

How hard was that steel, I wondered? Only one way to find out. I snapped my head forward, butting the hard bone of my forehead against the mask. It hurt like hell, but I hoped the blow would stun the shadowborn long enough for me slip out of its grasp.

It didn’t work. The shadowborn didn’t seem affected at all, though its mask loosened, slipped off, and fell to the floor.

What lay beneath the mask wasn’t a face, at least not anymore. It was a skull, mossy and brown and caked with dirt. Indistinct fleshy masses wriggled in the empty eye sockets. It took me a moment to recognize them as worms.

I got my boot up against the shadowborn’s stomach and shoved it back. It bent to pick up its mask, and I took the opportunity to grab my sword again. Not that there was much I could do with it. Even if I got lucky and landed a blow, I couldn’t kill what was obviously already dead.

The odds just kept getting worse.

The wolf bolted past me. Thornton was making a break for the stairs. Bethany broke away from the shadowborn she was fighting and ran with him. “Trent, let’s go!” she shouted.

I followed them, risking a glance back over my shoulder. All three shadowborn vanished. They reappeared on the landing before us, cutting us off from the staircase.

We were trapped.

The shadowborn lifted their katanas, the sharp edges of their blades gleaming like razors.