City. No one even looked up from their drinks when we entered. It was like a bad joke: An elf, a zombie, and a man who can’t die walk into a bar, and no one cares.
There were only a dozen customers inside, all of them sitting along the length of the bar. The cushioned booths on the other side of the room were empty. The air smelled of greasy food and spilled beer. A jukebox in the corner played the Drifters at high volume:
Magic. God, Thornton said I’d done magic. I’d
Two big flat-screen TVs hung on the wall above the bar, one showing the tail end of a baseball game and the other tuned to the local twenty-four-hour cable news channel, NY1. The sound was off on both, but the closed captioning had been turned on, white subtitles scrolling across blocky black backgrounds at the bottom of the screens. The bar’s overhead fixtures were turned down low and supplemented by multicolored chili pepper lights that had been strung up along the walls. A woman stood in the short, narrow hallway at the back of the bar, talking on a pay phone. I pointed out the phone to Bethany.
“You guys sit tight, I’m going to call Isaac,” she said. She seemed calmer. She was in her element now, taking charge of a situation.
“Wait, let me,” Thornton said. “Gabrielle’s there, too. I have to talk to her.”
Bethany shook her head. “Sorry, no. I need you to lay low right now and not draw attention.”
“How am I going to draw attention while I’m on the phone? Besides, have you seen your leg? It’s like something out of a horror movie. You’re going to draw a lot more attention than I am.”
“Unfortunately, that’s not true,” she said. “You have to trust me. There’s something that happens to people when they’re around the undead.” She paused and glanced around to make sure no one could hear her over the music. “They may not know what it is, but they’ll sense something’s wrong. Their instincts will tell them. The more they’re aware of you, the more on edge they’ll be. I need both of you to just take a seat and keep your heads down, all right?”
I remembered the feeling I’d had when Thornton sprang back to life, that urge to make him properly dead again, even if it meant caving in his skull. Bethany was right, that had come from somewhere deep inside, some primal instinct.
Thornton frowned. “Great, so I’m not just dead, I’m a pariah, too?”
“Thornton, I promise you I’ll put you on the phone with Gabrielle if I can, but first I need to report back to Isaac. It’s protocol, and we haven’t had a chance to check in since last night. He needs to know things have escalated.”
Thornton nodded, but he didn’t look happy about it. “Everything has to be by the book with you, doesn’t it,” he said bitterly. “Protocol above all else. Christ, you don’t have a heart in your chest, you’ve got fucking
If his insult stung her, she didn’t show it. “I know you do. I’ll be quick, I promise.” She made her way to the back and stood behind the woman on the phone. I watched her ask the woman to hurry, but the woman turned her back and kept gabbing. She ignored Bethany and tapped the small, yellow garbage can under the phone with the toe of her shoe.
“I need a drink,” Thornton said. “Like, now.” He leaned against the end of the bar and flagged down the bartender.
He was a beefy, bald man with a salt-and-pepper goatee and a tight black T-shirt. He did a double take when he saw Thornton. He frowned, narrowed his eyes, and said, “Look, buddy, we don’t want any trouble here.”
Thornton raised a confused eyebrow. “No trouble, I just wanted to get some drinks for me and my friend here.”
The bartender’s eyes dropped to something behind the bar. I figured it was either a baseball bat or a shotgun. I tensed, but then the bartender said, “Yeah, sure. Just keep it cool.”
“Always. So, one Guinness and…” He turned to me. “What’ll you have?”
“A shot of Jameson,” I said.
The bartender nodded, and with one last wary glance at Thornton went off to get our drinks. Thornton turned to me. “What’s his problem?”
“Bethany said this would happen,” I said.
“Yeah, well, he’s just going to have to deal. They all are. I didn’t exactly ask for this.”
The bartender came back a moment later with our drinks. He didn’t look Thornton in the eye when he set the glasses down on the bar. Thornton struggled to reach into his right pants pocket, but his broken right arm wasn’t cooperating. He tried again with his left hand but the angle was wrong. “Damn it,” he muttered. He turned to me and jutted his hip forward. “Can you just reach in there and grab my wallet?”
“Uh, that’s okay, I got it.” I pulled out my own wallet and threw some of the bills Underwood gave me onto the bar. The bartender scooped them up and left. He couldn’t get away from Thornton fast enough.
Thornton took the pint of Guinness with his left hand and started walking toward one of the booths near the back. I picked up my shot of Jameson and noticed my hand was shaking. The amber liquid threatened to spill over the rim of the shot glass. I put it down again and took a deep breath, trying to calm myself.
Something had come through me back in Times Square, something powerful that I didn’t understand. It had been strong enough to send the Black Knight packing and yet, like the nine times I’d come back from the dead, it was something I couldn’t control. The energy that came out of my hands—nothing like that had ever happened before. Suddenly the question of who I was took a backseat to the question of
I picked up the shot glass again and downed the Jameson in a single gulp. It burned on the way down and warmed my stomach. This, at least, was something familiar, something I could control. I tapped the empty shot glass and asked the bartender for another.
He filled it for me. “There’s something strange about your friend,” he said. “Something I don’t care for.”
“Don’t worry, he won’t make any trouble.”
My hand didn’t tremble as much when I picked up the second shot and carried it to the booth Thornton had chosen. In back, Bethany was standing at the phone now, cradling the handset between her ear and shoulder. The woman who’d been hogging it all this time was sitting on the bench behind her, doubled over and vomiting into the same small, yellow garbage can. She looked surprised and embarrassed, as if the sickness had come over her from out of nowhere. I wondered what Bethany had done to her to get her off the phone.
Bethany reached into a pocket of her cargo vest. At first I thought she was fishing for money to put in the coin slot, but instead she pulled out a small object that looked like scrimshaw, a fragile, round latticework of bone or ivory. She touched it to the side of the pay phone and kept her hand over it, hiding it from sight. A brief flash of blue light appeared between her fingers. Then she put the object back in its pocket and started dialing. Apparently Bethany had something in her vest for every occasion, including making a public phone work without paying. Once a thief …
I sat down across from Thornton. He was staring in frustration at the pint of Guinness on the table in front of him. He tried to reach for it with his broken right arm, but his arm wasn’t responding properly. His face looked paler, and though I couldn’t be sure in the dim light, I thought I noticed a slight green tinge to his skin that made the dark scar on his cheek even more prominent. The lights from the amulet on his chest pulsed through his shirt. He reached for his beer with his broken arm again and failed.
“Just use your other damn hand,” I said, losing patience.
“Screw that,” Thornton replied. “Now it’s the principle of the thing. Anyway, I don’t even think my arm is fully broken, just knocked out of whack. If I can just push this bone back into place…” He put his left hand on his right elbow, where it bent the wrong way. He bit his lip and pushed. I heard a loud crack that made me wince. Thornton lifted his right arm and wiggled his fingers experimentally. “There. I’d say as good as new, but we both know that would be a joke.”
