Dying Is My Business

Forty-two

“What will you do now?” Isaac asked. We were in his study on the second floor of Citadel. He sat at his desk, sunlight streaming through the stained-glass window behind him and casting him in a multicolored glow. On the desk between us, the empty Erlenmeyer flask caught the light from the window and refracted it in pretty fragments that scattered in every direction.

“I told the gargoyles to go make their own destiny,” I said. “I suppose it’s time I did the same. It’s just…” I paused, “I’m still carrying Stryge’s magic inside me. Does that mean I’m infected?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I could tell you, but the Ancients’ magic is too different from ours. It’s never been studied or tested. I don’t know what it means, or what’s going to happen.”

“Great,” I muttered. “So for all anyone knows, I could be a walking time bomb.”

He tented his fingers under his chin. “What would you say if I were to offer you a job and a place to live?”

“I’d say I’ve heard that one before.”

“We worked well together as team,” Isaac said. “And now that we’ve stepped out of the shadows, we’ve been noticed. Not just by Reve Azrael, but by other Infecteds all over the city. If we’re going to make this work, if we’re going to keep up the fight, we need all the help we can get. Specifically, we need someone to take Thornton’s place.”

I frowned. “I don’t think anyone can really replace Thornton.”

He nodded. “Truer words. But what do you think, Trent? A new Five-Pointed Star. We could use your help.”

It was a tempting offer. I liked these people, and he was right, we worked well together. At least, we worked well together when I wasn’t using the stolen power of an Ancient to knock them around like rag dolls. I sighed. “Isaac, I don’t know who I am, or what I am. After today, I don’t know what I’m becoming. Jibril-khan said I was the Immortal Storm, but I don’t know what that means. All I know is that it could be bad.”

Isaac stood up and came around the desk. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told Philip the day we met. No matter who you are, or what you are, everyone deserves a second chance. What we choose to do with it is up to us, no one else. Nothing is set in stone. Not even prophecies.”

“Tell that to the oracles,” I said. I rubbed my face. “God, I don’t know. Maybe it’s better not to know what I am.”

“It’s always better to know the truth,” Isaac said. “And if you’ll let me, I’d like to help you find it.”

He held out his hand. I looked at it for a long moment. It was the same deal I’d made with Underwood, a job, a place to stay, and an offer to help me find the answers. Did I want to go down that road again? But it wasn’t really a fair comparison. Isaac wasn’t Underwood. He was a lot more trustworthy, and I got the sense he really did want to help me. I took his hand and shook it.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s see how this goes.”

“Glad to have you aboard,” he said.

The study door opened, and Bethany poked her head inside. “Oh, excuse me, Your Majesty,” she said. I was never going to live this down. “I thought you two might want to know that Gabrielle is starting to get a signal from the homunculus.”

Bethany went back out into the hall, and Isaac went with her. I turned to follow them, but a small, circular object on a table by the door caught my eye. I recognized it right away. It was Thornton’s leather bracelet, the one Gabrielle had given him as a token of her love. They must have taken it off his body after he died. I missed him, I realized, missed his quick humor and bravery, and my heart broke a little to see his bracelet sitting there on the table, alone and empty. I remembered how sentimental he’d been about it, how he’d never let anyone else touch it.

What had Thornton said when I asked if he was afraid to die? That nothing was ever what it seemed. Death wasn’t the end, just another plane of existence. I remembered hoping he was right. I still did.

I reached out to touch the bracelet. It moved, sliding away from me. I yanked my hand back. What the hell? I looked around the empty office. There were no open windows, no breeze that could explain it moving like that. It was almost as though the bracelet had moved on its own.

Goose bumps lifted the hair on my arms. I whispered, “Thornton?”

Isaac called my name from downstairs. I took one last look around, decided I was being foolish, and went downstairs to the main room.

Philip lay on the couch, covered in fresh dirt and bandages. “What are you looking at?” he groused at me.

“Boris Karloff as Imhotep?” I answered. If Philip got the reference, he only growled in reply. Same old crabby vampire. He was going to be fine.

Gabrielle was at the desk, huddled over the laptop. She hit a button and the wall of monitors flickered to life. “I used a transfer charm to patch the homunculus’s psychic link into the computer so we could all see it,” she explained. “It’s coming through now.”

“If I’m right, Melanthius will have gone right back to Reve Azrael’s lair,” Isaac said. “Whatever we see now will be our best chance of finding her. Maybe our only chance.”

The screens of all six video monitors flickered and jumped. An image appeared, accompanied by ambient noise through their speakers, but everything was shaking, making it hard to decipher what I was looking at. The image spun, shook again, and then stabilized. Gabrielle explained the homunculus had jumped off Melanthius’s cloak and was clinging to a wall, granting us a much better view.

On the monitors was what appeared to be a small room with bare walls. There was a table in the center of it. On it lay a human male corpse.

Gabrielle stiffened. “It’s Thornton.” Her voice hitched. Before leaving the park, we’d helped her search the grounds for Thornton’s body. We found the other bodies Reve Azrael had discarded once she didn’t need them anymore, but not Thornton’s. That one she’d kept for herself.

“Where are they?” Isaac asked, studying the monitors.

“I can’t tell yet,” Gabrielle said.

Melanthius came into view then, walking over to the table where Thornton’s body lay. His back was to us. He took off his gloves and laid them on the table. He pushed back his hood. He gripped the skull mask with both hands and pulled it off his face. He reached into a pocket of his cloak, pulled out a pair of dark sunglasses, and put them on. Then he turned around.

My breath caught in my throat. I went instantly cold, as if someone had dropped me into an ice bath.

The face I saw duplicated on all six monitors was unmistakable.

“It’s him,” I said, barely a whisper. “It’s Underwood.”

The house of cards Underwood had built so carefully fell down then. I remembered him sliding the Bersa semiautomatic across the table to me, and how often he’d repeated his Golden Rule: Never lose your gun. No revenant had hidden the homunculus on my gun. It had been there from the start, put there by Underwood himself so he could keep tabs on me. That was how he’d found me so quickly after I was teleported out of the safe house, and again after we picked up the box from Gregor. He’d gone so far as to blow up his own base at the gas station just to throw us off the trail. He’d killed Big Joe and Tomo in the same explosion because their faces had been seen at the auto body shop. Two birds with one stone. It was ruthless, monstrous, and nothing less than I expected from him.

My hands clenched into fists. On the monitors, Underwood came forward so suddenly that I took an involuntary step back. His face filled the screens. I knew he was looking at the homunculus, but it felt like he was staring directly at me.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” Underwood said. “Poor Trent. You really have no idea how far this con goes. Or how long it’s been going.” He took off his sunglasses, revealing the eyes I had never seen the whole year I worked for him. His pupils glowed with pinpoints of red light.

Oh, God. My mouth went dry. The freezing cold temperature of the fallout shelter. The gallons of cologne. Underwood was a revenant. He always had been.

“What you did today can’t go unpunished, Trent,” Underwood said. “We’ll be seeing each other again soon. Very soon. Surely you don’t think I need this two-bit homunculus to find you? It was nothing but a fail-safe. I know where you are. I always know where you are. It’s like I’ve been telling you all along. You’re my go-to guy.”

A shape came onto the screen, drifting into frame from the right-hand side. At first it was a dark blur, indistinct. Then I realized what I was seeing was hair—long, ragged black hair that fell in wisps across a thin face, and eyes so dark they looked like bottomless black pits.

Reve Azrael. She stared at me through the homunculus.

Stared at me the way she always used to back in the fallout shelter.

She waved her hand, casting a spell. There was a brief flash as the homunculus was destroyed, and then the screen went blank.