Dying Is My Business

Six

The four remaining creatures hovered in the air above the short woman. They glanced at the charred remains of their companion at the foot of the wall, then glared at me. They looked pissed, but they also looked wary of the staff in my hands.

I shook it at them threateningly. “Anyone else want a piece of this?”

Yellow Eye shrieked angrily at me, then flew up through the gaping hole in the ceiling. The other three followed, and they disappeared into the dark night sky.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” I said.

Now that the creatures were gone, I went to see if the woman was all right. If she was injured, she didn’t show it. She began frantically tossing aside the old crates and debris that stood between her and the wolf that had come out of nowhere.

“They’re gone,” I told her.

She glanced over her shoulder at me. “Help me. I can’t leave Thornton here.”

“Look, lady, I’m sorry about your dog, but those things could come back at any moment,” I said. “We have to get out of here.”

“He’s not a dog,” she said. She gritted her teeth as she pushed a half-smashed crate out of her way. “Just help me.”

If she wanted to stay here to find her pet, she was crazy. Which probably meant I was, too. We’d both seen the same impossible things, fought off the same creatures that couldn’t be real. And yet, she didn’t seem fazed by it at all. Maybe she was used to being crazy. I could always ask her for tips.

With a heavy sigh, I put down the staff and helped her lift away the heavier bits of furniture and junk. “What were those things?”

“Gargoyles,” she said, grunting as she pulled another crate clear of the mess. “They must have followed us here from the cathedral. I cast a ward around this place, but I guess it was too late. They must have already seen us come here.”

I didn’t understand half of what she said. I looked up at the gaping hole in the ceiling again. “Gargoyles? For real? Like, off of buildings…?”

She glared at me. “Do they look like they came off of buildings?” She sighed and gazed up at the hole. “They waited until I was alone, and then they broke through.” I understood that part, at least. It was the gargoyles who’d put the hole in the roof. “I should have known better. This is all my fault.” She picked up an old metal folding chair from the pile and threw it aside in frustration. It clattered loudly on the floor. I decided to hold off on any more questions for a while.

Between the two of us the job went quickly. A few minutes later we finally cleared away the last of the debris.

“Thornton!” she said.

But the body on the floor wasn’t Thornton. Thornton was a big gray timber wolf, but what lay on the floor was a naked man, curled on his side in the fetal position. He wasn’t breathing. The floor around his body was slick with blood from the long, deep scratches in his chest and stomach. Bits of something red and meaty poked out of the wounds.

Then I noticed a leather bracelet around his right wrist, in the same place I’d seen it on the wolf’s leg. It had the same intricate, interwoven design in the leather and thin strands of gold. How was that possible? I was sure I’d seen a wolf.

I thought of the old movies I’d seen on the TV in the fallout shelter, ones where Henry Hull and Lon Chaney Jr. played men who became wolves. There was a word for it, but it was impossible. I didn’t even want to think it.

She knelt beside the naked man and felt his neck for a pulse. “Oh no,” she said.

“He’s dead,” I said. It wasn’t a question so much as confirmation. There was no way Thornton couldn’t be dead with his body torn open like that, but sometimes people didn’t believe it until they saw for themselves. They had to touch the body with their own hands because the enormity of it was too much to process otherwise. The mother of the little boy, number eight on my list, had done that. She’d put her hands on the boy’s cheeks like she was checking him for a fever. The memory turned into a rock in my stomach. Suddenly I felt useless and stupid standing there watching yet another woman mourn her loss.

She leaned back on her haunches and shook her head. “Oh, Thornton.”

“We should go,” I said. I took her arm to help her up, but she yanked it away.

“I told you, I’m not leaving him here.”

I knelt down across the body from her. “Look, those things, those gargoyles aren’t going to stay away for long. We need to move now, before this place is crawling with them.”

She looked over her shoulder at the empty warehouse. “They’ve gone to get help. I’d say we’ve got about fifteen minutes before they come back with twice their number. That should give us plenty of time.”

“Plenty of time for what?”

She didn’t answer. She reached into another pocket of her cargo vest and pulled out a long, thick, golden chain. Dangling from its end was a pendant in the shape of a starburst. Four small red gems were arranged in a diamond formation at its center.

I looked up at the hole in the ceiling. We didn’t have time to play with jewelry. The sooner I left, the better. But I couldn’t leave her behind. If those creatures came back and caught her alone, she was as good as dead.

She rolled Thornton gently onto his back. Then she depressed the center of the starburst pendant with her thumbs. A long, sharp spike popped out of its back with a metallic snik. She held it over Thornton and chanted some words I didn’t understand. They were in some other language, one I’d never heard before, but there was something eerie about it that drew a shiver down my spine.

“What are you doing?”

She ignored me. When she was done chanting, she took a deep breath and slammed the pendant down on Thornton’s chest, driving the spike into his heart like a dagger blade.

“No!” I shouted, reaching to stop her, but it was already too late. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

She lifted Thornton’s head gently and slid the chain around his neck. “Now we just have to wait and give the Breath of Itzamna time to work.”

I stared at her, wondering if I ought to leave her behind after all. She was clearly out of her mind. Or maybe the whole damn world had gone mad. After all, I’d died nine times already but was still here, alive and kicking. In what kind of sane world did that happen?

She saw the confusion in my face and said, “That’s what the amulet’s called, the Breath of Itzamna. It was given to me by a nine-hundred-year-old Mayan shaman in a tattoo parlor in Los Angeles. Let’s hope it works as well as he said it would.”

Ridiculously, I felt a pang of disappointment that someone so beautiful and brave could also be batshit crazy.

Against my better judgment, I asked, “Do you really expect me to believe there are nine-hundred-year-old Mayan shamans living in L.A.?”

“Just one,” she corrected me. “The others are in San Diego these days, mostly. They share an apartment complex near the zoo.”

Of course. I should have guessed as much. “That’s insane,” I told her.

“Not really,” she said. “It’s nice there and the rents are cheap.” She turned to me, her brow knitting with sudden confusion, as if it had only just occurred to her that I was a complete stranger. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Trent.”

“Trent.” She shook my hand. Hers was so small it practically disappeared in my grip. “I’m Bethany. Thank you, Trent. If you hadn’t come along when you did, I don’t know what would have happened. I guess I owe you my life. I don’t think I could have held off six gargoyles on my own, even with the Anubis Hand.”

I raised my eyebrows. “The what now?”

Bethany nodded at the staff on the floor with the mummified human fist. “Only two things in the world can hurt a gargoyle. Sunlight—or any bright light, really—and the Anubis Hand.” She looked at the pile of ashes by the wall that had once been Harelip. “But maybe you can help me out, Trent, because the thing is, I’ve never seen the Anubis Hand do that before. It can hurt gargoyles, it can knock them unconscious, but it’s never burned them to cinders before.”

I shrugged. “Maybe you can only knock them out, but I’m, what, three times your body mass? No disrespect, but I gave that gargoyle a pretty good smack.”

She looked at me skeptically. “Well, whatever you did, it saved my life. Probably yours, too.”

Not likely, I thought. I turned away from her, and Bethany gasped in alarm. “Trent, you’re injured!”

The adrenaline from the fight had numbed the pain so much that I’d forgotten about the wounds on my back. So much for getting through the night without ruining another shirt. “I’ll be okay,” I told her. “I’m tougher than I look.”

“It’s not every day someone walks away from a gargoyle attack,” she said. “You should count yourself lucky.”

“I guess so.” I still didn’t fully understand what had happened. Gargoyles, a staff called the Anubis Hand, an amulet named the Breath of Itzamna, a man who just a few minutes before had been a wolf … If the door had opened just then and a magical, telepathic Q’horse had trotted in, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“Come on, Thornton,” Bethany whispered.

“What exactly are you expecting to happen here?” I pressed.

She ignored me and continued talking to the dead body. “We need you. You’re the only one who knows where it is now.”

“Where what is?”

Finally, she acknowledged my presence again. She shook her head and said, “A box. It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

Oh God. In all the chaos, I’d forgotten about the box. My stomach dropped. Bethany was one of the squatters Underwood had mentioned. I’d made a serious mistake. I saw that now. I’d gotten carried away in the moment and let my guard down. I never should have told her my name, or found out hers. That was only going to make it harder to do my job.

“Tell me about the box,” I said. She didn’t answer. She kept her eyes on Thornton.

I’d saved her life, only to have to kill her myself. Because she didn’t just know my name, she’d seen my face. She could identify me, trace me right back to Underwood, which was exactly what he didn’t want. I reached behind my back for the gun in my waistband. My mouth went as dry as sand. My heart lurched into my throat. My fingers grazed the gun’s handle. This was important, I told myself. There was too much riding on this.

When the box is in my hands, and the ones you’ve taken it from are dead, then I’ll tell you everything you want to know.

I wrapped my fingers around the grip of the gun. My index finger touched the trigger guard.

“Bethany, where is the box?”

I started to pull the gun free.

Between us, Thornton sat up suddenly, gasping air into his lungs.