Dying Is My Business

Thirty-one

I took the 2 train to Brooklyn. By the time I got to Empire Boulevard, the fire had been completely extinguished. All that was left of the Shell gas station was wet, charred wood and exposed metal beams poking out of the wreckage like the ribs of some enormous dead beast. I stood across the street and watched the firefighters pull what was left of the furniture out of the station and pile it all in the parking lot. There wasn’t much. I was angry at myself for it, but I couldn’t help feeling a pang of regret. This was the only home I’d ever known, and now it was gone. Gone, too, was the list of names I’d kept inside my mattress, and the old TV that had kept me company through countless sleepless nights. Even my copy of The Ragana’s Revenge was ash now. All of it, nothing but ash.

Two ambulances were parked nearby, their lights flashing, their back doors closed and guarded by police officers.

The sight of cops made me nervous. Old habit. I backed up deeper into the big crowd of locals who’d gathered on the sidewalk to gawk at the show. But the cops weren’t the ones I had to worry about. The Black Knight had come looking for me. He’d done this, and there was a good chance he was still nearby. There was also a good chance this was a trap, that he was waiting for me to come back and walk right into his clutches. Losing myself in the mass of umbrellas and rain parkas on the sidewalk might keep me hidden from the cops, but it wouldn’t hide me from him. It was dangerous to be here, stupid even. But I had to see it with my own eyes. I had to know for sure that Underwood and his crew were gone.

I turned to the person next to me, a thin, West Indian man wearing a plastic poncho, and I put on my best innocent act. “What’s with the ambulances? I thought that old gas station was closed a long time ago.”

He crossed himself and answered in a thick Jamaican accent, “They found four bodies inside, God rest their souls.”

Four bodies. So it was true, then. Tomo, Big Joe, and Underwood were dead. The dark-haired woman, too. The one who used to stare at me all the time, silent and watchful, like a cat focusing on its prey. It occurred to me then that I’d never even learned her name.

“They found an old fallout shelter from the sixties under the station, with a bed and some furniture,” the man continued. “There must have been some homeless people in there.”

“And you can bet they’re the ones who started the fire,” an old woman in a rain hat interjected, tsking loudly. “Probably doing drugs. I heard the police say they kept a faulty generator down there. One spark and the whole thing blew up.”

Bullshit, I thought. I’d gassed up that generator myself dozens of times. Underwood always kept it in meticulous condition. He was too smart, too careful, to let an accident take him out. No, if the firefighters had traced the explosion to the generator, the Black Knight must have done something to it. Isaac was right, sneaking around and sabotaging machinery didn’t seem like the Black Knight’s style, but I’d seen the crows on the video feed myself. I knew what it meant.

“I hear they found other things down there too, bad things,” a second man said. He was tall with dark, craggy skin and a curly beard.

“What’re you talking about, Winston?” the first man scoffed, rolling his eyes. It was clear Winston was the local gossip, the busybody nobody quite liked. Every neighborhood had one. “What bad things?”

“Drugs,” the woman said with unshakable certainty.

“Guns,” Winston corrected her. “Enough for an army. Makes you think about what was going on down there. Who they were. Why they needed so many guns. Too many suspicious people in this neighborhood, you ask me.”

That was my cue to leave. I slipped away, leaving Winston and the others sharing their theories about everything from street gangs to terrorist sleeper cells, but I didn’t get far before the back of my neck started tingling. Someone was watching me. I scanned the crowd and picked him out immediately.

There are a lot of dead things in New York City, things you usually don’t see. Dead rats in the sewers. Dead roaches under floorboards. Dead squirrels in the park bushes. The dead are everywhere, and in New York you probably aren’t more than a few feet from a dead thing at any given moment. I just never expected that rule to hold true on a crowded sidewalk. Still, when you’re dealing with an entity with the power to raise and control the dead, you have to stay flexible.

The revenant stood half a block away. It wore a maroon, zippered hoodie, its gaunt, male face mostly hidden in the shadows of the hood. But even if I hadn’t been able to make out the dark patch of rot on its cheek, the red glow from its pupils, muted as it was behind tinted horn-rimmed glasses, told me everything I needed to know.

Reve Azrael was keeping tabs on me. How long had the revenant been following me? All the way from Central Park?

I waited until a group of onlookers passed between us, then made a break for it. I hurried toward the subway station, flipping open the cell phone Isaac had given me. His number was the only one in the contacts. He picked up after one ring.

“Reve Azrael is tailing me again,” I told him. “I just saw one of her revenants in a crowd here in Brooklyn.”

“Damn. Can you lose it?” he asked.

I glanced back at the crowd. I didn’t see the revenant anywhere, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still following me.

“You don’t get it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if I shake this one. It doesn’t matter where I am or how many wards I’m behind, it won’t stop her.”

“Come back, Trent, we can protect you—”

“I can’t, Isaac. I’m the fly on the battlefield, remember? The only way your plan is going to work is if you’ve got the element of surprise. If I’m with you, she’ll know what you’re doing. She’ll see you coming. You won’t stand a chance.”

“Trent,” Isaac started.

I reached the subway steps. “Look, it’s me she’s got a bead on, not you. I can draw her away and buy you some time. Use it. Get to Stryge’s body before she does.”

“No, Trent, I don’t want you doing this alone—”

I snapped the phone shut, ending the call, and hurried down the steps to the subway platform. A plan was already forming in my head. If Reve Azrael insisted on shadowing me, I would lead her as far away as I could. I’d lead her out of the city entirely, and give Isaac and the others enough time to figure out where Stryge’s body was. But if I was going to do that I would need a car. The Explorer was already ancient history, probably sitting in some impound lot or Staten Island junkyard. What I needed was another car.

Luckily, I knew just where to find one.

I took the subway north, back into Manhattan, then transferred at Times Square to the R train to Queens. It was already standing-room only when I got on, but the closer we got to Queens the more it filled up with twentysomething hipsters returning to their trendy neighborhoods. They were boisterous and remarkably carefree, all unkempt hair, neck beards, and moth-eaten flannel over ironic 1980’s T-shirts. I watched them and wondered if they had any idea what kind of danger they were in, how close they were to death. I wondered if it mattered to them.

To get away from the crowd, I moved all the way to the end of the subway car. I could see into the next car through the rear window, and caught a glimpse of the revenant in the maroon hoodie again. It must have followed me from Empire Boulevard, keeping out of sight even when I changed trains. Good. As long as Reve Azrael’s attention was on me, it wasn’t on the others.

At my stop, I got off the train amid a teeming throng of passengers. As the rest of them swarmed up the steps, I slowed down on the platform to give the revenant a chance to catch up. If I was going to lead Reve Azrael on a wild-goose chase, I had to make sure her revenant didn’t get left behind. But I didn’t see it anywhere, not on the platform, and not through the train windows as it pulled out of the station. That made me nervous. I didn’t like not knowing where it went. I climbed the steps quickly and exited the station.

I turned off the main streets and soon found myself on a desolate stretch of old, vacant apartment buildings. In the middle of the block, the buildings gave way to a small, abandoned playground. Maddock’s body had been taken away, I saw, and the front gate taped off with yellow police tape. I lingered a moment, watching the dragon spring rider wobble gently back and forth on the wind, gazing back at me with its big, painted eyes that were nothing like Gregor’s. The world had grown so much larger since I’d last been here.

Bennett’s black Porsche was still parked where he’d left it around the corner. A sopping wet parking ticket lay beneath one of the windshield wipers, and a neon-yellow sticker on the passenger’s side window proclaimed that the vehicle had violated parking regulations and the street couldn’t be cleaned properly. I was lucky it hadn’t been towed away yet. I walked to the Dumpster near the car, got down on my hands and knees, and looked under it. Bennett’s key chain was still there. I fished it out and hit the unlock button. The Porsche’s doors unlatched with a satisfying ka-thunk. I peeled the orange parking ticket off the windshield, tossed it aside, and got in. The car started without an argument.

There was no GPS system in the car, so I drove around looking for signs for the 695, which would take me north to Westchester. As the rain began to taper off, I found myself alone on a barren stretch of road far from the residential neighborhoods. It was a part of Queens I wasn’t familiar with. There wasn’t much to see but trees, overgrown fields, and the occasional streetlamp lit up against the dark.

Was this what it felt like to be free, I wondered? Truly and completely free? Part of me wanted to just keep driving and leave everything behind. What would it feel like to aim this stolen Porsche for the horizon and never look back? I was surprised to find the thought didn’t appeal to me.

I touched my cheek. I could still feel her kiss there.

I shook my head. What the hell was wrong with me? When had I become so goddamn sentimental?

A roar came from behind, startling me. In the side mirror, I saw a flame-red Ferrari speeding toward me. If the damn fool didn’t slow down, he would crash right into me. I moved to the side to let this moron pass. The sports car accelerated to come up alongside me, but instead of passing it stayed beside me. I glanced over to see who was behind the wheel. The revenant in the maroon hoodie returned my glance, a twisted grin on its face. A mess of exposed wires sat on its lap like noodles, spilling out from the bottom of the dash where the car had been hotwired.

A corpse driving a Ferrari. Even with amnesia, I was pretty sure now I’d seen everything.

I sped up, but so did the revenant. It steered its car into mine. The sound of metal scraping against metal made me grit my teeth. I pulled my seat belt on, floored the accelerator, and yanked the steering wheel to the side, slamming into the Ferrari and nudging it to the opposite side of the road. It came back a moment later to sideswipe me again. This time I made a hard turn, driving right into it, and before I knew it we were both spinning out of control.

I thought I heard the sound of a car hitting a tree, but since I was still moving, I assumed it was the revenant. A second later, my car hit something I couldn’t see. I crashed through it with the sound of rending metal. The impact jolted me, the seat belt biting into my chest as it strained to keep me in place. I heard the sound of breaking glass as both my headlights went out. I hit the brake, and the car finally screeched to a stop. I leaned forward, resting my forehead against the wheel and tried to catch my breath. In the side mirror, I saw that I had crashed through a tall, wrought-iron fence. I’d taken down an entire panel. It lay on the ground behind me, its spiked tips pointing my way like accusing fingers.

I undid the seat belt, opened the car door, and stepped out onto the wet, spongy grass. I was still dizzy from the accident and had to lean against the car to pull myself together. The Porsche was totaled, its hood crumpled like scrap paper, the engine block battered and steaming. It wouldn’t take me anywhere now. As the dizziness passed, I looked up from the car to get my bearings. A crowded field of graves, headstones, monuments, and crypts stretched over gently sloping hills all the way to the horizon.

Shit. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of cemeteries in Queens, and it was just my luck to end up in one with a goddamn necromancer on my tail.

I turned and ran for hole in the fence and the road beyond it, but the revenant in the maroon hoodie was already crawling through it toward me. It was legless now from the crash, trailing thick black ooze as it pulled itself along the ground with grim determination. The red glow from its pupils speared the dark.

Slow and low to the ground, it didn’t pose much of a threat. Its friends, on the other hand, were a different matter. Behind the crawling revenant, three more pairs of red, glowing eyes appeared in the dark and moved closer.

I had a flash of my gun lying empty on the floor back at Citadel. Damn. Like a fool, I’d gone into this completely unprepared.

I backed away from the approaching revenants, retreated up a shallow hill, and bumped into something. I turned around. A winged skull grinned back at me, and my heart jumped in my chest before I realized it was only an etching on an old granite headstone. I turned back to the revenants. They crept closer. In another few seconds I’d be within their reach.

I took off through the maze of headstones, running deeper into the cemetery. This was Reve Azrael’s turf, not mine, but I didn’t see any other choice. I was weaponless, and though the revenants were tireless and supernaturally strong, I did have one advantage over them. I was faster. I ran as fast I could toward the fence that surrounded the cemetery. There had to be a gate in it somewhere, or a hole that hadn’t been fixed yet. Some way out.

Hands burst up out of the ground, snagging my feet and ankles. I fell, eating a mouthful of dirt. I rolled onto my back and kicked at the hands, but it was no use, revenants were coming out of the ground everywhere around me, vomited forth from the earth. Ragged and vile, they clawed their way up from beneath headstones, or pushed their way through the rusted gates of family crypts. By the time I got back on my feet, I was surrounded.

They grabbed me and pushed me forward up a small hill. We stopped in front of a stone monument shaped like a sarcophagus. Standing on top of it was the emaciated corpse of an old woman. She wore a torn and dirty white gown, and her long, thin white hair blew around her head like a halo in the breeze. She fixed me with her red-glowing eyes and said, “Hello, little fly.”

“Reve Azrael,” I said. “We have to stop meeting like this. People will talk.”

“I told you, there is no place you are safe from me.”

“Is that so? So tell me, how do you keep finding me?”

The corpse smirked, not the prettiest sight in the world. “You may as well ask how I am able to speak with the dead, or raise them from their graves and fill their empty husks with my will. It is in my nature to do so.”

The revenants crowded closer. I could smell their sickly sweet rot all around me. I ignored them. They were a sideshow. Reve Azrael was trying to intimidate me and I wasn’t going to let that happen. “I see you’ve got yourself a new body. Did you get tired of Thornton’s already? Because I know someone who’d like it back.”

“Your flippancy does a bad job of hiding your true feelings,” she said. “You are not used to being afraid, are you? But you are wise to fear me. Had I no need of you, little fly, I would have my revenants tear you limb from limb, just to see how your body would resurrect from that.”

Revenants brushed their rotting, skeletal hands across my arms, my chest. I suppressed a shudder of disgust. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. “What do you want with me? I told you before, I’m not big on being your pet.”

“We could not be more different, you and I,” she said. “I am death, and you are deathless. Can you not see how you confound me? I cannot kill a man who refuses to die, nor can I make into a revenant a man who won’t stay dead. And yet, for all the challenges you pose, I have need of you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The dead speak of you. Did you know that?” she asked. “Beyond the veil of darkness that separates our world from theirs, they gather in plains of mist and seas of ash, and they see you, each time you die, like a fly trapped in amber, floating there in the darkness. You fascinate them. They even have a name for you. They call you the Visitor, because you come but never stay.”

A chill crept its way up my back. The dead spoke about me? They saw me?

“But do you know what I call you?” Reve Azrael continued. “An omen. A sign that the end of all things has finally come. A glorious end, to which you are the key.”

“I’m not a sign of anything,” I said. “And if you think I’m going to help you, you’re even crazier than I thought.”

“Ah, but when the time comes, you will not have a choice.”

The revenants began to drag me away. I dug my boots into the ground, but it didn’t do any good. There were too many of them, and they were too strong.

“Where are you taking me?” I demanded.

“Sometimes you find your destiny,” Reve Azrael said with a wry smile, “and sometimes your destiny finds you.”

Her host body jerked suddenly, as if something had hit it from behind. The blade of a long black sword burst through its chest. Reve Azrael looked down at it in anger. “No, this one is mine. He is mine!”

The sword sliced upward through her host body. The corpse broke apart, shattering in a mist of blood, and falling to the ground in chunks. The Black Knight stepped forward out of the darkness, his curved and barbed black sword coated with blood and tissue.

My heart crowded into my throat. I tried to yank my arms free from the revenants’ grasp, but their immense strength held me fast. There’d been no interruption in Reve Azrael’s control this time. She must have transferred her consciousness to another host body before the Black Knight destroyed the first.

The Black Knight jumped off the sarcophagus onto the ground. The revenants swarmed him immediately, but he didn’t seem deterred in the slightest. He chopped the closest one in half, then grabbed another around the neck with his gauntlet. It laughed at him, and Reve Azrael spoke through its ruined mouth, “Wretched thing, there is no life in these bodies for you to suck out!” The Black Knight swung his sword and cut the laughing corpse’s head from its body with a single blow.

A moment later, something big fell out of the sky and landed amid the revenants with a heavy thud. It was followed by another, and another. Gargoyles, half a dozen of them, dropping out of the sky like paratroopers from a plane. They laid into the revenants with their sharp claws, one after another, shredding them to pieces. It would have been a massacre if the victims weren’t already dead.

Two more gargoyles landed directly in front of me. I recognized one of them from the warehouse—Yellow Eye, with its withered, battle-scarred eye. The second had an elongated, almost horselike face, and together the two of them made short work of the revenants holding me. The moment I was free I started running, but Yellow Eye and Long Face hadn’t freed me out of the kindness of their hearts. They flew after me, scooped me up in their claws, and carried me into the sky. I struggled to get free, but they were strong, even stronger than the revenants. Within seconds we were up so high that it became safer not to struggle. Below, more revenants streamed out of their graves and crypts like a tidal wave, a sea of glowing red eyes that lit the darkness crimson. The last thing I saw before the cemetery dropped out of view was the revenants surrounding the Black Knight, and the Black Knight cutting them down on every side.

Yellow Eye and Long Face carried me across the East River, then the northern tip of Manhattan, and the Hudson River. Finally, as we passed over the white steel hulk of the George Washington Bridge with its stream of headlights far below, I saw where we were headed—the enormous, stony cliffs of the Palisades.

The other gargoyles from the cemetery soared past us, followed by a flock of crows. They all flew into a gaping black cave mouth in the cliffside. I was carried inside after them.