Dying Is My Business

have to keep moving,” I said.

Bethany cursed, annoyed that I hadn’t answered her question, but when I ran, she ran too. We headed away from the trapdoor and across the roof, skirting around a big metal air-conditioning vent and satellite dish in our path. We jumped over the low wall to the adjacent roof and kept running, moving from rooftop to rooftop. On each one I searched for a door that could lead us inside, but they all had trapdoors like the safe house, locked from below with no way for us to pry them open. I slowed down to look back and saw that the shadowborn had smashed through the trapdoor and were pulling themselves up onto the roof. I turned and kept running. Up ahead, Bethany and Thornton had come to a stop. Directly in front of them, the wall of a tall apartment building towered into the sky like a windowless brick cliff face. There was nowhere left to run.

I saw the top of a fire escape ladder hanging off the back edge of the roof we were on, leading down to the interior courtyard. “There!” I said, pointing.

We ran for the ladder. The shadowborn had almost caught up already, sprinting unbelievably quickly across the rooftops. For what were essentially corpses in leather jumpsuits, they were a hell of a lot more agile than they had any right to be. At this rate, we’d never make it down the fire escape in time.

I stood in front of the ladder and held my sword ready. Beside me, Bethany did the same. “Go,” I said. “I’ll hold them off.”

“Forget it. You can’t handle both of them on your own.”

“Bethany, go!” I said, but she didn’t budge. I shook my head. “You are infuriating.”

“So are you,” she said.

The two shadowborn leapt nimbly over the last low wall and landed a few yards away from us. Thornton sprang at them. They split up, and Thornton landed in the empty spot between them. They were already running past him as he skidded to a halt, lost his footing, and fell over. The shadowborn advanced on Bethany and me.

I intercepted the first one, while the second went for Bethany. Free from the narrow confines of the hallway, I found myself better able to use a sword. Unfortunately, so did the shadowborn, who attacked so viciously and swiftly that it was all I could do to make sure I didn’t get cut to ribbons. I backed up. The shadowborn attacked again and again so fast that its blade would have been invisible if the metal hadn’t flashed in the sunlight.

The relentless onslaught forced me back against the top of the fire escape ladder. I tried to push my way forward again, but the shadowborn didn’t yield. Neither did I. I couldn’t. There was no place to go but the four- story fall to the courtyard below.

The first shadowborn swung its katana in a swift arc. The blow knocked the sword out of my hand. The shadowborn swung the katana back again quickly, and sliced open my throat.

The skin of my neck felt like it was on fire. I couldn’t breathe. My throat, mouth, and lungs filled with blood. I put my hands over my neck, trying to stanch the bleeding, but it didn’t help. The blood kept flowing out over my fingers. I wobbled on my feet, light-headed. My vision grew gray and fuzzy around the edges.

“Trent!” Bethany shouted. She sounded a thousand miles away, but I saw her, a blurry, Bethany-shaped blob running toward me. Behind her, the wolf was tearing the second shadowborn to pieces.

The first shadowborn was still standing in front of me, taking satisfaction in watching me die. I heard the swish of a sword cutting the air, saw the shadowborn’s head fly off its shoulders, and then there was only Bethany and the wolf staring at me. Bethany said, “Oh God, Trent, your throat…”

She reached for me, but my legs buckled and I fell backward. Then everything tipped away and I was falling.

I twisted my head to look down. The hard concrete floor of the courtyard rushed up to meet me. This one was going to suck.

When I hit, the impact broke my back, both legs, and one arm. Maybe my neck, too. It was hard to tell because I couldn’t feel anything anymore. But I knew from the impossibly odd angles in which my limbs were arranged and the glistening pool of blood spreading out from my head that it was bad. I heard a deep, echoing thunderclap in the distance, followed by another and another, growing softer and further apart each time, and realized it was my own heartbeat.

My vision clouded and blurred for a moment, and suddenly Bethany was crouching over me, her hands on my neck, trying to stop the bleeding. It was futile. Even if the blood loss didn’t kill me, my other injuries would. Bethany’s lips were moving, she was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her over the slowing thunder of my heart.

The familiar feeling of dying came over me—the cold emptiness, the sense of falling without movement. I had only a few seconds left. I had to warn Bethany. If she was this close to me when I died—

Get away! I shouted, or thought I did, but the shadowborn’s blade had taken my voice from me.

You have to run, Bethany! You have to get away from me! I tried again, but all that came out of my mouth was a wet gurgle. The gray at the edges of my vision turned black and crept across my eyes, slowly dimming everything around me to nothing. Please …

The last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed me whole was Bethany’s face, too close, still too close …

Nineteen

What do you care who dies, as long as you get to keep living?

They were Underwood’s words, spoken some two months before. The day things started to change.

My mark was a crooked antiquities dealer called Naschy. It was supposed to be an easy job, at least according to Underwood, but I’d already been his collector long enough to know things were never really that easy. There were always complications. In this case, the complication took the form of Naschy seeing me coming and gaining a few minutes’ head start. By the time I followed him into a crack house on a desolate stretch of Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, he could have already been anywhere inside. With no electricity in the old, abandoned building, the darkness only helped him hide.

I moved through the rooms with my gun out. Skinny, hollow-eyed crackheads sat on filthy mattresses along the walls, taking drags off their glass pipes and picking at their soiled rags. Some of them bolted when they saw my gun. Some didn’t bother.

In a nearly lightless hallway deep inside the house, a shape came out of the darkness in front of me. I raised my gun, but it wasn’t Naschy, it was a young boy dressed in filthy clothes, with his hair all tangled in knots. He couldn’t have been more than ten years old.

I lowered my gun and asked him if he’d seen anyone matching Naschy’s description. The boy pointed at a closed door at the far end of the hall. I walked cautiously toward it. The boy followed me. “Beat it, kid,” I whispered. The boy just stared. “Go on, get out of here. Go home.”

The boy didn’t move. He gave me a confused look, and I realized my mistake. This was his home.

“You don’t want be anywhere near here, kid.” I gave him a hard shove. The boy ran off, ducking around the far corner of the hallway. I watched him go, then kicked open the door. Naschy was waiting inside, a briefcase in one hand, a gun in the other.

“Back off,” he snarled.

“That’s not going to happen,” I told him. “Hand over the briefcase and we can both walk out of here, Naschy. This doesn’t have to end badly. Underwood just wants what’s his.”

Naschy shook his head. “This isn’t his to take.”

“I’m told otherwise.”

“You have no idea what kind of man Underwood is, what he’s capable of,” Naschy said. Sweat dotted his brow. “Whatever he told you about me, about what’s in this briefcase, it’s a lie.”

“I don’t particularly care,” I said.

Naschy fired, cutting our conversation short. The bullet hit me in the chest and I dropped like a sack of bricks. Naschy ran out of the room, his footsteps tracing a path toward the front door.