Dying Is My Business

Eighteen

In a blink, the shadowborn were gone, and just as quickly, they appeared directly in front of us. They lifted their swords, ready to strike. On instinct I pushed Bethany behind me, and accidentally touched the retooled charm she was still holding. A blast of light—a fuller, darker red this time—erupted from the end of the charm and filled the whole room, tinting everything crimson. When I yanked my hand back, the blast faded.

The shadowborn retreated, reeling and swaying as if they were dizzy. Somehow, I’d done this. I looked at my hand in shock.

Bethany stared at me. “How did you…?”

There was no time to figure it out. The shadowborn were already recovering. But had the containment spell worked? There was only one way to find out. I kicked the wooden idol off the floor and watched it sail toward them. The shadowborn, used to phasing out of the material plane whenever they felt threatened, didn’t bother moving out of the way. They tried to phase instead. The idol thumped against the chest of the closest shadowborn, then fell to the floor. In unison, the three of them looked down at it, then back up at me. Alarmed, they backed away from us and grouped together by the door, holding their katanas up defensively.

“It worked!” Bethany cried, laughing with relief. “It actually worked! They can’t phase anymore!”

“Great,” I said. “Now all we have to do is not get killed.”

Bethany pocketed the charm and grabbed her sword off the floor. “Go for their heads,” she said. “I don’t know if it will kill them, but it’s our best bet to keep them from coming after us. Thornton, you take the one on the left. Trent, the right. I’ll take the one in the mid—”

Before she finished, Thornton sprang at the shadowborn. He bowled right through them, knocking them back onto the hallway floor outside.

“That works, too,” Bethany said.

Without their ability to phase, the shadowborn were clumsy and disoriented, trying to untangle from each other and get back on their feet. Thornton didn’t give them a chance to recover. He latched his strong, lupine jaws around one shadowborn’s neck and dragged him off down the hallway.

Bethany and I charged at the remaining two while they were still down. I drove my sword straight into the first shadowborn’s chest, but my excitement at landing a blow was short lived. The shadowborn were immortal, in their own way. A sword through the chest wasn’t much more than a mild annoyance to them. Still, this one fixated on the sword piercing its chest for a moment. It had probably been centuries since the undead assassin felt anything like fear. I hoped it was feeling it now.

I pulled my sword out. The shadowborn leaped to its feet. It held its katana in front of it and backed down the hall toward Ingrid’s bedroom. It knew it no longer had the advantage.

I spun, eyeing the staircase at the far end of the hallway. On the landing, Thornton still had his jaws around his shadowborn’s neck. Then his jaws closed with a loud, grisly snap. The shadowborn went slack as its head rolled away from its body and bounced down the steps.

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 …