Dying Is My Business

As he reached for his pint glass, I noticed that the leather bracelet on his wrist had twisted. The clasp had caught his skin and was starting to tear it.

“Whoa, let me help you with that,” I said. I reached for the bracelet. Thornton yanked his arm back.

“Don’t touch it,” he snapped. “It was a gift from Gabrielle. No one touches it but me.”

I put up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry, I was just trying to help. It looked like it hurt.”

Thornton adjusted the bracelet and released the caught flap of skin. “It doesn’t. Nothing hurts. I can’t feel a thing. I didn’t even feel anything when the car flipped over. It was like I was watching it on TV instead of actually being there.” He lifted his pint glass and took a deep gulp. Then he grimaced and slammed the glass down on the table. A dollop of foamy stout sloshed over the side and ran down the glass. He pushed the beer away in frustration. “And I can’t taste anything, either. I should have known. Even in human form I normally have a heightened sense of smell, but that’s gone now. Makes sense I wouldn’t be able to taste anything, either. That only leaves me with two senses, and who knows how long those are going to stick around?”

In human form? Damn, I’d nearly forgotten he was a wolf when I first saw him. I turned the shot glass around and around between my thumb and forefinger. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“You’re—you’re a werewolf.” It didn’t come out as a question, though I meant it to.

He smiled. His lips looked so pale I almost couldn’t tell where they ended and his teeth began. “Werewolf is such a vulgar term. It makes me think of Lon Chaney Jr. in an Afro wig and big plastic teeth. Not to get all formal on you, but lycanthrope is the proper term for what we are.”

I picked up the glass and downed the second shot a little too fast. I had to suck air into my mouth to dull the burn. “We? There are more of you?”

He shrugged. “Of course. There are hundreds of us in the U.S. alone, thousands around the world. We’re as thriving and vibrant a culture as any other. You should see our holiday parties. Or on second thought, scratch that. Lycanthropes aren’t exactly known for their table manners, and most of the time we don’t bother cooking the meat. Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s actually kind of a disaster.”

“Is Bethany a were—a lycanthrope, too?”

“Oh God, no,” he said. “Though sometimes I wish she was. She could stand to ease up a bit, lose that stick up her butt and get in touch with her wild side. But no, she’s human, I guess. Though sometimes I wonder.”

“The ears,” I said.

“Yeah. That and the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever seen her laugh,” Thornton said. “So, quid pro quo time. Now I get to ask you something.”

I squirmed in my seat, uncomfortable with the spotlight suddenly being turned on me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t used to lying, I lied all the time on these collection jobs; it was that for some reason, just then, I didn’t want to. Against my better judgment, I was starting to like Thornton. “Shoot,” I said.

“The Black Knight,” he said. Funny, his question didn’t come out as one, either.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I’m not a magician or a mage or … whatever that other word was.”

“Thaumaturge,” he said. “Someone who works miracles.”

“Yeah, well, I’m definitely not that. I can’t explain what happened. As soon as the Black Knight touched me it felt like my strength was draining right out of me. I felt tired, weak, and cold, like the temperature dropped thirty degrees in a second.”

Thornton nodded. “That’s what he does. One touch and the Black Knight sucks the life right out of you. It’s why no one has ever survived a fight with him. No one until you. I’m sure you can understand why I’m interested in how you managed that, exactly.”

I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better, actually. Right now, nothing is making any sense. I didn’t do anything, it just … happened.”

He looked skeptical. “You really don’t know?”

“It feels like this is all a practical joke and I’m still waiting for the punch line.”

“Huh,” Thornton said. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a newbie. The way you handled yourself, I would have thought you’d been working magic for a long time.”

“Magic.” I shook my head. “I’m losing my damn mind.”

“It’s not so bad,” Thornton said. “The first time I got my wolf on, I felt pretty much the same way you do now. I almost lost my shit.”

“Did you get bitten?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes. “Please. Forget all that bullshit from the movies. You’re born into lycanthropy. You don’t need to get bitten, and you sure as hell don’t need a full moon to change. My first time happened in ninth grade when the school bullies decided to chase me home from school. I was terrified. I thought they were going to kill me. The next thing I knew, I was running on all fours. Maybe it’s the same for you. Your life was in danger back there, and you tapped into a power you didn’t know you had. A survival mechanism. But it’s nothing to worry about. Take it from me, these things get easier to control after the first time.”

“You’re saying what happened back there could happen again?” I looked at my shot glass and wished it weren’t empty.

“You’ll get used to it. People get used to all kinds of weird stuff.”

He had a point there, said the man who kept coming back from the dead. But I was barely used to that, how was I supposed to get used to this new ability, too? What other surprises were lurking beneath the surface, waiting to show themselves? It felt like too much to think about.

I glanced at the TV showing NY1, and my heart jumped. On the screen, a reporter in Times Square was standing in front of my upside-down Explorer, which was walled off by yellow police tape. Thornton caught my expression and turned to see for himself. The reporter’s lips moved in a silent pantomime of speech while the closed-captioning subtitles scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

… LEFT THREE OFFICERS INJURED, ONE CRITICALLY, IN WHAT WITNESSES ARE CALLING A YOUTUBE STUNT GONE DISASTROUSLY WRONG …

“I don’t get it,” I said. “How can they just brush it off like that? Those witnesses saw the Black Knight. They saw us fighting.”

Thornton shrugged. “People see what they want to see. It’s human nature. They barely glance at strangers’ faces. Their minds fill in the blanks, and unless they know differently they just see what they expect. It’s the same when it comes to magic or the supernatural. People just see what they want to see.” I threw him a skeptical look. “You don’t believe me? Okay, tell me then, what did you see when you first went into the warehouse? Was it gargoyles?”

I thought back. I had entered the warehouse with my gun drawn, seen the hole in the ceiling first, and then Bethany, and facing off against her—

I’d seen exactly what I expected to see.

“Men in trench coats,” I answered. Thornton nodded as if he’d proven his case. “Did the gargoyles make me see that?”

“Nope, that was all you. But don’t feel bad about it, it could have been worse. A lot of people don’t see gargoyles coming until it’s too late. All those stories you hear about people disappearing off of cruise ships or kids vanishing from school trips without a trace…”

“That’s gargoyles, too?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s other things. Gargoyles aren’t the worst of what’s out there.”

There were worse things? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “Okay, but what about the Black Knight? Everyone saw him. How can they just explain him away as some lunatic making a YouTube video?”

Thornton leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Most people think that all they see is all there is. Sometimes they don’t even know what they’re really seeing. Look around, look at the people in this bar. Any one of them could be a lycanthrope, or a vampire, or a shape-shifting demon in human form. If you didn’t know those things were real, how could you tell?”

I looked at the drinkers lined up at the bar, studied their faces, but everyone looked normal to me. “I can’t,” I conceded.

“Exactly,” Thornton said. “Magic exists, but it’s a shadow world. It flourishes in the places people don’t look,