Dying Is My Business

“I’m sorry,” Bethany said.

Ingrid took a deep breath, collecting herself. “It was a long time ago. But now it seems the Black Knight is after you, and I can guess why. Isaac told me what you found. I’m begging you to be careful. I don’t know what happened just now, why the Black Knight flew off like that, but we got lucky. He’ll keep coming for you. I wish I knew how to stop him, but don’t I think he can be stopped.”

“Trent did a pretty good job of it earlier tonight when he kicked the Black Knight’s ass,” Thornton said.

“What?” Ingrid looked at me, surprised. “You fought the Black Knight and survived?”

I took another cookie off the plate and bit smugly into it. “I didn’t just survive, I sent him packing.”

Ingrid’s mouth fell open. Unexpectedly, her face reddened with anger. “You should have killed him when you had the chance.”

There was so much fury in her voice, a fury that had built up for decades, that my smugness wilted. She peppered me with question after question about my encounter with the Black Knight. I told her everything I knew. When I was finished, she nodded to herself like something finally made sense. “You’re the reason he backed off outside. You hurt him once. He doesn’t know what else you’re capable of.”

“That makes two of us,” I said.

“But you hurt him,” Ingrid repeated. “He may find you unpredictable, but he’ll be back. You can count on it. You’ve got his attention now. You’re going to need help, and I think I have just the thing.” She walked over to the bookshelves and started scanning the spines, tapping her finger against her chin. “Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of information available about the Black Knight. No one knows where he came from or the extent of his powers. Just about all anyone knows is that he’s the king of the gargoyles, though he wasn’t their first king, and he’s not a gargoyle himself.”

So that was why the Anubis Hand hadn’t worked on him, I thought. It only worked on gargoyles. Good to know. “So what is he then?” I asked.

Ingrid ran her finger along the hardcovers crammed into the shelves. “Good question. I’ve been researching the Black Knight for years, ever since he killed Morbius. I tried to find out anything I could—where he came from, what he is, if he has a base of operations, any weaknesses or vulnerabilities, anything —but I hit dead end after dead end. And then I found something interesting in Bankoff’s annotated Libri Arcanum. A connection I hadn’t noticed before. Ah, here it is.” She pulled a thick, hide-bound tome off the shelf, put her reading glasses on again, and flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for. “There’s a story of an alchemist who came to the New World from Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century. His name and likeness have been lost to time, but he’s widely considered to be the first known European magician to come over. Supposedly, he lived for a few months in a Dutch trading settlement called Fort Verhulst on the southern tip of Manhattan. Then one day, for reasons unknown, he ventured out into the wilderness and was never seen again. Everyone figured he was either killed by the Lenape Indians who lived in the area and weren’t exactly friendly with the Dutch, or that he died from starvation or exposure.” She flipped ahead again, moving whole chunks of pages until she stopped near the end of the book. “Now, listen to this. The first known sighting of the Black Knight was in the mid-seventeenth century, shortly after Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians. That was around the same time that Stryge, the first king of the gargoyles, died. No one knows where the Black Knight came from or how he became the gargoyles’ king, but here’s where things get really interesting. The very first sighting of the Black Knight was at Fort Verhulst, the same settlement the alchemist used to live in.”

“What happened?” Bethany asked.

“He came with gargoyles. They killed fourteen people that night. Fourteen seemingly random people— shopkeepers, traders, trappers, farmers, a bartender. The strange thing is that according to firsthand accounts, the gargoyles left Fort Verhulst long before sunrise, and they left the rest of the settlers alive.” She looked up from the book, peering at us over the reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. “You know how bloodthirsty gargoyles are. They revel in violence and carnage. For them to leave the other settlers alive, to show that kind of restraint, just doesn’t make sense. So it got me thinking. If this was the same settlement the alchemist lived in, maybe the victims weren’t chosen at random. Maybe they had a connection after all, one no one thought to look into.”

“The alchemist himself,” Bethany said.

Ingrid nodded. “Precisely. Look at the timeline. The alchemist disappears from Fort Verhulst. Not long after, the Black Knight makes his first appearance at the same fort, and orders the gargoyles to kill fourteen specific people. It can’t just be a coincidence. I think the alchemist and the Black Knight are the same person.”

“But that would make him over four hundred years old,” I said.

“Obviously he’s not human anymore,” Ingrid explained. “But what if he was once? And what if the first thing he did after becoming the … the thing he is now was to eliminate everyone in the settlement who knew his true identity?”

“But why bother?” I asked. “What would be the point? They already thought he was dead and probably would have gone on thinking it.”

“Exactly. Why bother? Unless those fourteen people knew something about him that he didn’t want them knowing. Something that was dangerous to him, that would leave him vulnerable.”

“But even if that’s the case, everyone who knew the Black Knight’s secret died four hundred years ago,” Bethany said.

Ingrid closed the book. “True. It’s just a theory I’m working on. I hadn’t given it much weight before because I assumed, as everyone did, that the Black Knight was simply invulnerable. But then Trent came along, and now more than ever I’m convinced.”

“Convinced of what?” I asked.

She leveled her gaze at me. “If we discover what the Black Knight’s secret is, we can kill the son of a bitch.”

Thirteen

As the clock ticked toward 2:30 a.m., Ingrid led us upstairs, to the top floor of the safe house. There, we found a long hallway lined with doors, two on each side and two in the far wall.

“I’ve got plenty of room for all of you,” she said. “There are more bedrooms up here than I know what to do with.”

“You live alone?” Bethany asked. She was walking better, no longer favoring her right leg now that her knee was bandaged and wrapped tight with gauze. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said of Thornton, who was supporting himself against the roof access ladder in the corner of the landing. I’d assumed he would walk better now that he’d been stitched up and didn’t have to worry about his insides spilling out, but instead his movements had become even stiffer than before. The greenish discoloration of his skin had spread, and he’d started to give off a pungent, sickly sweet odor. I’d been around enough dead bodies to recognize the smell.

“I’ve got the whole place to myself, I have for years,” Ingrid was saying. “I suppose if I had one regret about my time with the Five-Pointed Star, it’s that I never had time for anything else. After Morbius died and the team broke up, I kept the house. I thought I’d just live a quiet, normal life like everyone else, but by then it was too late to start a family.”

She pointed to one of the doors at the end of the hall and told us it was the bathroom, but I wasn’t listening anymore. An old-fashioned black Bakelite telephone sat atop a small round table against the wall. As soon as I saw it, I thought of Underwood. Since I hadn’t come straight back with the box, he would be waiting for my call.

A thousand-pound weight pressed on my shoulders. The truth was, I liked Bethany, Thornton, and Ingrid. They were good people. They didn’t slap my cheek and call me a dog the way Underwood did. They hadn’t tried to kill me or lie to me. They welcomed me, took me in, fed me, and tended to my wounds. They treated me as an equal, as a friend.

But Underwood was waiting, and so were the answers he’d promised. I felt like I was standing on thin ice,