“Do the cops know who you are? Do they know your faces? Have your fingerprints?”
“No,” Bethany said. “We’re careful. Always. We don’t leave a trail.”
“You left enough of a trail for the gargoyles to find you,” I said. “The Black Knight, too.”
“There’s a world of difference between the Black Knight and the NYPD,” she insisted.
That didn’t make me feel any better, but it would have to do. “Can you walk?” I asked.
“I’m going to need a minute.” She bent over to inspect the gash in her leg.
I was antsy and wanted to keep moving. The more sidewalk we could put between us and the cops, the better. I turned to Thornton and for the first time noticed a long strip of skin had been scraped off his cheek in the car crash and was now dangling from his cheek. I could see the striations of the pale, bloodless muscle beneath. “You should fix your face. It’ll attract attention like that.”
Thornton frowned like he thought I’d just insulted him. Then he raised a hand to his cheek and felt the flap of skin hanging loose there. “Ew.” He pressed the skin back into place until it stuck. Now it just looked like he had two big, ugly scars on his cheek that came to a point under his eye. “Better?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure
“Are you—are you an elf?” I blurted. Hearing it out loud like that, I immediately cringed at how stupid I sounded.
She looked up at me, her sky-blue eyes flashing with indignation. Then she straightened up and quickly brushed her hair over her ear again. “Don’t be absurd,” she snapped. “No one’s even seen an elf since World War Two.” She said it as if I should have known something so obvious.
“Oh,” I said.
“Trent, what was that back there?” she asked. “That energy that came out of you, how did you do that?”
I looked at my hands. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see, but they didn’t look any different to me. “I don’t know. It just sort of happened.”
“Bullshit,” Thornton said. “You did magic, Trent. Magic doesn’t just
“What?” I scoffed. “Come on, give me a break. There’s no such thing as magic.”
Thornton rolled his eyes. “No such thing as magic, he says. You might as well say there’s no such thing as gravity.”
Granted, there shouldn’t have been any such thing as gargoyles, werewolves, amulets that raised the dead, or knights who turned into crows, either. Maybe Thornton was right and magic was real after all. Hell, maybe
“No one has ever fought the Black Knight and survived,” Bethany said. “Not until you.”
“Fess up, Trent,” Thornton said. “First you turn the Anubis Hand into a freaking cannon, then you zap the Black Knight back to whatever hole he crawled out of. You’ve been holding out on us. What are you? A magician? Thaumaturge? No, let me guess, a mage?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I honestly don’t know what happened back there. All I did was touch him.” A noise from the street caught my attention. The cops were trying to get the Explorer’s doors open. “We don’t have time for this. We have to keep moving or they’ll find us.”
“Fine,” Bethany said. She took my hand and started limping determinedly up the street, leading me like a dog on a leash toward Eighth Avenue. Thornton followed with his broken arm swinging loosely at his side. “Come on, magician,” she said. “Forget what I said about going our separate ways. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
And just like that, I was in.
Ten
We continued making our way toward Eighth Avenue, but we moved maddeningly slowly. The cut on Bethany’s knee had stopped bleeding, but her jeans leg was slick with blood and she was still limping. Thornton walked stiffly, hugging his broken arm close to his side. The car crash had done a number on me, too, reopening the scratches on my back and adding new, small ones on my face that itched more than they hurt. I was pretty sure the Black Knight had left finger-shaped bruises on my neck, too. We were a sorry bunch. As we hobbled our way up the sidewalk, I glanced back every few steps, hoping the cops hadn’t noticed us. So far, they hadn’t.
“It’s not the police we need to worry about,” Bethany said, huffing with exertion. “Ten to one the gargoyles are still on our trail. We might have gotten away, but that’s only a temporary setback for them. They won’t stop until they get what they want.”
“Shh,” Thornton hissed, stopping. Bethany and I stopped too. Thornton scanned the sky quickly. “I thought I heard something.”
I looked up, glancing at the rooftops and fire escapes. There were no gargoyles in sight, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close by.
“Keep moving,” Bethany said.
We rounded the corner onto Eighth Avenue. The sidewalks were busy with pedestrians and people milling outside the bars smoking cigarettes. I felt myself relax a bit. Maybe there was safety in numbers. But then, gargoyles didn’t seem like the type to care if any innocent bystanders got between them and their prey.
Bethany finally released my hand. She’d been keeping a tight grip on it the whole way up the block from Seventh Avenue, as if she were worried I’d run away. Her palm had felt warm against mine, much warmer than I’d expected it to, like there was a tiny furnace burning inside her. Probably it was just adrenaline, or maybe women with pointy, elflike ears ran naturally higher body temperatures. When she let go, I felt a confusing mix of relief and disappointment not to be holding her hand anymore. I reminded myself it was better not to think of her as a person. She was a mark, someone I intended to steal from at the soonest opportunity, nothing more. I couldn’t afford to slip up again, not when so much was riding on delivering that box to Underwood.
Bethany slowed down to catch her breath. She turned to Thornton. “Do you still have your phone? I have to call Isaac and let him know what happened.”
There was that name again: Isaac. Who was he? Their boss, it sounded like. If they were thieves like me, Isaac was their version of Underwood.
With his good arm, Thornton pulled a cell phone out of his pants pocket, but the crash had turned it into junk. Its casing was broken open and a deep crack bisected its blank screen. He fiddled with the power key, but the screen stayed dark. “This phone’s deader than I am,” he said and stuffed it back into his pocket.
Bethany turned to me. “What about you? Have you got a phone?”
“Sorry, no.” Underwood didn’t let me carry a cell phone. The calls were too easy to intercept, he said, even from the anonymous pay-as-you-go phones. Even worse, the authorities could use the array of cell towers all over the city to triangulate your physical location in seconds. When I was out on a job, like now, I was on my own. Sink or swim. “You don’t carry one?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I can’t. There’s too much interference from all the charms in my vest. Every cell phone I’ve ever owned has gotten fried.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, what we need is to get out of the open and find someplace where we can think, preferably someplace with a public phone.”
A public phone was a tall order in this day and age, but Thornton spotted a neighborhood bar up the block. A sign above the door read CELTIC PUB in big white letters and a neon four-leaf clover lit up the window. “Bars usually have phones. I don’t know about you two, but I could use a drink anyway.”
“I wouldn’t say no to that,” I said. After everything that had happened, a drink to take the edge off was just what I needed.
Walking into the bar in our torn and bloody clothes, we were quite the sight. If we wanted to look inconspicuous enough to blend casually into the crowd, we failed miserably. But then again, this was New York
