Dying Is My Business

the carpet. I turned my chair around and leaned forward with my back exposed. “You should save the bandages for yourself. You’ll just be wasting them on me.”

“You don’t have a very high opinion of yourself, do you?” Bethany asked. She circled around behind me, and a moment later I felt her unusually warm hands on my back as she inspected my wounds. Her touch on my bare skin made me uneasy. I felt vulnerable, like I’d left myself open to a knife between the ribs. I was pretty sure Bethany wasn’t the knifing type, but after a year among the criminals of Brooklyn, old habits were hard to shake.

Her hands felt good on me. Too good. I didn’t like that, either.

“You’re tense,” she said.

I grunted in reply, which only proved her right.

“Looks like the gargoyle didn’t cut you too deep. The bleeding’s not too bad,” Bethany said. “You got lucky. One good swipe from a gargoyle can cut clean through bone. About an inch to the right and an ounce more force and it would have severed your spinal column.”

“Told you I was fine,” I said.

“You’ve been mauled by a gargoyle,” she said. “I think we have different definitions of fine.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“Funny, you don’t have any scars to show for it.”

Of course I didn’t. “They’re on the inside,” I quipped.

“I’m going to have to clean out your wounds.” Bethany retrieved a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a few cotton balls from the first-aid kit. “This might sting a bit.”

“I think I’ll be okay.”

“Your tough-guy act isn’t as convincing as you think it is.” She dabbed an alcohol-soaked cotton ball against my back. I bucked in the chair, loudly sucking air through my teeth. “See? Not so convincing.”

“It was just cold,” I insisted, clenching my jaw as the burning alcohol cleansed my wounds.

Ingrid laughed. “I never thought I’d say it, but I kind of miss this. Being part of a team, I mean, like you three and Isaac.”

“We’re not exactly a team,” Bethany said. “We’re more like freelancers. Isaac hires us when he needs us to secure an artifact.”

“It’s a living,” Thornton said. “When Isaac found me and offered me a job, I jumped at it. I was at a low point in my life, probably the lowest I’ve ever been. I felt like I had nothing to live for back then. Now I do.” He looked down at the amulet on his chest. “How’s that for irony?”

Ingrid tsked and shook her head as she continued her stitch work. “Freelancers. It was different back in my day. We were together all the time. We would eat together, drink together, and on occasion we even lived together, right here in this house. It was a bond that lasted a lifetime.”

“Who’s we?” Thornton asked.

“There were five of us back then, fighting the good fight,” she said. “We called ourselves the Five-Pointed Star.”

Bethany froze in the middle of attaching a self-adhesive bandage to my back. “Wait, you were part of the Five-Pointed Star?”

“Oh yes,” Ingrid said with a grin. “You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, but I could mix it up in my day.”

“I thought I recognized the name Morbius,” Bethany said. “He was the Five-Pointed Star’s leader, wasn’t he? I’ve heard stories about them—about you, the things you did back in the day. You were legendary.”

Ingrid blushed and shook her head. “Sometimes I forget four decades have passed since Morbius brought us together. Time has a way of sneaking up on you. The others are all gone now. I’m the only one left to remember it all, and there’s so much to remember. Fighting trolls under the Kosciusko Bridge. Vampires in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Sirens off the coast of Coney Island…”

As she spoke, I noticed a framed photograph on the end table near my chair. I picked it up for a closer look. Five people stood in the same room we were in now, three men and two women. This was the Five-Pointed Star, I realized. I almost didn’t recognize the woman on the far right in the batik-print caftan dress until I noticed the white glove on her left hand. Ingrid, some forty years younger. She’d been strikingly beautiful back then, with long, chestnut-brown hair parted in the middle, and sharp, chiseled features that hadn’t yet softened with age. The other woman in the photo wore a long, black, wool knit dress, a small star tattoo at the center of her forehead peeking out from beneath her black bangs. Her skin was as red as brick, and her eyes burned yellow like two miniature suns. Two men stood side by side between the women, both with long stringy gray hair, lengthy knotted beards, and matching dark blue robes embroidered with strange gold symbols. They looked like twin wizards right out of a storybook; all they were missing were big pointed caps on their heads. And standing at the center of the group was the man I figured had to be Morbius, their leader. He stood tall in a wide-lapelled herringbone jacket, black iridescent necktie, and bell-bottomed trousers. His arms were crossed in front of his chest. His square, lightly stubbled jaw jutted forward as if he were daring the world to take a swing.

They were freaks, just like me, each with their own strange abilities. But more than that, they’d found a place where they belonged. With each other.

I put the picture back on the end table. It was a lot to take in at once. The world was nothing like I’d imagined all those times I lay awake in my room in the fallout shelter. It was so much bigger. Worlds within worlds, just like Elena De Voe had written in The Ragana’s Revenge. There was so much I didn’t know, so much more I needed to learn. The weight of it felt staggering.

“Back then, you couldn’t walk two feet in Bushwick without tripping over a portal to some other dimension,” Ingrid was saying. “That was how Maalrok, the war god of the Pharrenim, found his way into our world. Oh, he was a nasty one, let me tell you. Half man, half lizard, ten feet tall with six arms.” She gestured at the glass case over the mantelpiece, where the six antique swords were displayed. “Those were his. I kept them as a souvenir. Of course, we never could have stopped him and closed off the portal to his world without the help of a talented young man from the neighborhood by the name of Isaac Keene.”

“So that’s how you know Isaac,” Bethany said. “He talks about the Five-Pointed Star a lot. They were his inspiration.”

Ingrid nodded, but the smile faded from her face. “I remember the way he looked at us that day. His eyes were so wide. There was such innocence in them. Such wonder.”

Bethany dabbed an alcohol-soaked cotton ball on a small cut on my forehead, but I waved her away. “I’m fine, really. You’ve done enough.”

“Suit yourself. You can put your shirt back on.” She sat down on a nearby chair and began cleaning her wounded knee through the hole in her jeans leg.

I bent to pick my shirt up off the floor, half expecting the pain in my back to flare up. It didn’t. Bethany had fixed me up like an expert. Somehow that didn’t surprise me. She struck me as the kind of person who strived to be an expert at everything.

“After Morbius died, Isaac wanted to take his place on the team,” Ingrid continued. “I wouldn’t let him. It was too dangerous. You don’t need me to tell you what it’s like out there, and it’s only getting worse, not better. I told him the best thing he could do was keep his head down and not draw attention to himself. I made him promise—no, I made him swear to leave it alone, but it wasn’t easy. Morbius had filled that boy’s head with the same grandiose nonsense he put in mine back when he first asked me to join his grand experiment. Morbius believed that burying your head in the sand wasn’t the answer. It didn’t make you any safer. He said there comes a time when you have to take a stand, even if no one stands with you. He knew damn well there was no safe way to fight the darkness that’s spreading through the world, but he was convinced it had to be done no matter what the risk. And it cost him his life.”

“What happened?” I asked.

She frowned, her lips pressed tight. “The Black Knight happened. With a touch, he sucked the life right out of Morbius. That’s all it took, just one touch. It was so fast, it was horrible. After Morbius died, we couldn’t go on without him. He was the glue that held us together, he and his dream of a better world. The darkness was too strong for us to fight. If it could kill Morbius, it could kill anyone.” She looked down at her hands. “I didn’t want that to happen to Isaac, so I told him to do exactly what Morbius said not to. I told him to hide.”