Dying Is My Business

directly behind her. Standing between it and me, her message was clear. There was no way out, not until she got an answer.

“The Anubis Hand, the Black Knight,” she continued. “The things you did shouldn’t have been possible.”

I very nearly sighed with relief. She didn’t know anything. “I told you before, Bethany, I don’t know how I did those things. I was as surprised as you were.”

“Huh,” she said. The word dripped with skepticism. “See, I keep going over it in my head, but your story doesn’t add up. You weren’t just passing by that warehouse tonight, were you? You said you heard me scream and came looking, only I didn’t scream. I don’t scream, Trent. Ever.”

“I don’t know, maybe it was a gargoyle I heard,” I said. “Whatever it was, it was enough that I thought I should investigate. Anyway, what’s with the third degree? If I’d decided to ignore it and keep moving, you’d be dead right now.”

“But you weren’t just investigating, you were expecting trouble. You walked into that warehouse with your gun already drawn.”

“I always carry a gun,” I said. “New York’s a dangerous city.”

She arched an eyebrow, not buying it. “Enough games. I want the truth. Who are you? For real?”

“Bethany, come on.” I shook my head.

“Because here’s the thing, Trent,” she said. “The reason your story doesn’t add up? I put a ward around that warehouse. It didn’t work on the gargoyles because they already knew we were there, but the ward was still active. That means even if it couldn’t stop the gargoyles, it still should have kept the warehouse hidden from everyone else. It should have been hidden from you, Trent. Unless you already knew it was there. Unless you meant to come to the warehouse. So do you still want to insist you were just passing by, or do you want to tell me the truth?”

I remembered the peculiar feeling of the little hands pushing me back as I drew closer to the warehouse. At the time, I thought it was just a manifestation of my own reluctance about the job, but now I understood it was more than that. Without knowing it, I’d walked right through Bethany’s ward. No wonder I’d felt the same thing on the front steps of the safe house.

Bethany’s sky-blue eyes bore into me. I looked away. She had me dead to rights, and like a cornered animal I felt the need to protect myself. My leather jacket was still draped over the desk chair. The grip of my Bersa semiautomatic peeked out from the pocket. It was so close I could draw it in a second. Less than a second.

But if I did, there would be no going back. I would cross the threshold to cold-blooded killer. Was that what I was? Or was that what Underwood wanted to turn me into?

I hated this tug-of-war inside me. How could I know what kind of a man I was when I didn’t even know who I was?

“Everyone has their secrets, Trent,” Bethany said. “I get that. But if I’m going to keep you around, I need to know if I can trust you. So I’ll ask you again, who are you really?”

I blew out my breath and whispered, “I don’t know.” I said it so softly I didn’t know if Bethany could even hear me.

“I don’t believe that for a second,” she said. I should have known nothing got past those pointed ears of hers. “I have charms in my vest that can make you tell the truth, but they’ll also cause you a lot of pain. I don’t want to have to use them, but I will if you keep lying to me.”

“I’m not lying,” I said. “I don’t know who I am.”

She furrowed her brow. “What do you mean? How can you not know?”

“For the past year, I’ve been living without any memories. Who I am, where I’m from, everything about myself, it’s all just a big blank.” I fidgeted in my seat, wondering if I was doing the right thing. Aside from Underwood, I’d never told my story to anyone. There hadn’t been anyone else to tell, frankly, and keeping it to myself for so long had buried it deep enough that after a while it felt like something that needed to be protected. Trusting Bethany with the truth made me uncomfortably vulnerable, but it also felt oddly freeing, like shrugging off heavy chains.

She narrowed her eyes, wondering whether to believe me or not. “You’re talking about amnesia?”

I nodded. “I can’t remember anything before a year ago. Not my friends, my family, my job. It’s like I didn’t exist at all before then. As far as I can tell, no one’s even looking for me. Amnesia is supposed to be temporary. I hoped I would remember eventually—hell, I try to make myself remember all the time —but it’s been a year and the memories haven’t come back.” I looked up into her eyes. “Bethany, I know I shouldn’t be able to do the things I did. I don’t know how I did them. I didn’t have any control over it, I swear. They just happened.”

She shook her head. “People can’t cast spells without knowing how, Trent. There’s no such thing as involuntary magic.”

I shrugged. “There is now.”

She crossed the room so quickly that I froze in surprise when she pulled open my collar and put her hand down the back of my shirt.

“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded.

I tried to get up from the sofa, but she pushed me back down. “Sit!” I felt something sticky peel off my back and thought she’d removed one of the bandages. But when she pulled away from me, I caught a glimpse of what was in her hand. My skin crawled. It wasn’t a bandage. It was moving. Alive.

I leapt off the sofa for a closer look. At first I mistook it for a spider, but then I saw there were no legs attached to its fat, ridged thorax, only round, slimy, saucerlike suction cups. Whatever it was, it was small, roughly the size of a nickel. It fit snugly in the center of her palm and glowed a bright neon green.

I shivered. How long had that thing been stuck on my skin? “What is that?”

She studied the creature. “It’s green.”

“I can see it’s green, Bethany, but what the hell is it?”

“A Collodi tick,” she explained. “It’s a rare interdimensional insect that feeds by absorbing a harmless amount of its host’s psychic energy. But they’re also remarkably sensitive to their host’s psychological state. They actually change colors when exposed to different psychic stimuli. It makes them the perfect lie detector. They turn yellow if the subject is lying, and green if the subject is telling the truth. Yours is green. That’s good.”

My jaw dropped. “Wait a minute. You put it on me? Downstairs, when you were bandaging me up, you put that thing on me?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to be sure.”

I stared at her, taken aback not just by what she’d done, but also by what a close call it’d been. More than anything else, it drove home the fact that I was walking a very thin line. “You had no right, Bethany!”

She pulled a small, clear plastic box from a pocket in her cargo vest, dropped the Collodi tick into it, and replaced it in the pocket. “Try to see it from my perspective, Trent. You come out of nowhere, a complete stranger who claims to have no knowledge of magic whatsoever, and then you start killing gargoyles like a pro and fending off the Black Knight with powers no one else possesses. You can see how that might make me suspicious. I had to be sure I could trust you.”

“And what if that thing was yellow instead? What would you have done?”

“This.” She extended her arm. A wooden wand shot out of her sleeve and into her hand.

I blinked. “A magic wand? Seriously?”

“Scoff all you want, but the Endymion wand is stronger than you think,” she said. “It would put you into a deep sleep before you knew what hit you.”

I doubted that. I don’t sleep, and I was pretty sure no wand would change that. “You had that thing all along but you didn’t think to use it on the gargoyles, or the Black Knight?”

“It only works on humans. Against anything else it’s just a pointy stick.” She tucked the wand back into her sleeve. “Look, I don’t expect you to understand, but this mission Thornton and I are on is too important. If the box falls into the wrong hands, a lot of people will die. I can’t let anything get in our way, or anyone.”

I sighed and sat down on the love seat again. “The box. Everything comes back to that damn box. What’s in it that’s so important?”

“Something ancient, and powerful, and extremely dangerous under the right conditions. You’re safer not knowing any more than that. Anyway, right now I’m a lot more interested in talking about you. A man with no memory of who he is. It takes a lot to surprise me, but I honestly didn’t see that one coming. It could explain a few