Dying Is My Business

As I lay bleeding, cold and numb with shock, I heard the scuff of sneakers in the doorway. It was the boy, staring at me from just outside the threshold. A creeping blackness filled the corners of my vision as the boy took a few tentative steps toward me, and then the blackness swallowed the world.

When I opened my eyes again, I didn’t know where I was, or why I was lying on a bare, filthy floor. I didn’t know why there was a woman weeping in the corner. She was kneeling and cradling something in her arms. I lifted my head and saw what it was—the withered remains of a little boy. Her son, I figured, and then it all came back, slamming into me with the force of a stone. I’d cheated death again, but this time the thing inside me hadn’t stolen some thief or murderer’s life. It had stolen a little boy’s. An innocent’s.

The woman’s hair was as knotted and dirty as her son’s. Her nose ran as she wailed. Her lips were pale from the drug. She said, “You come in here with a gun, big man shooting up the place. It should be you who dead, not him, not my boy. He never hurt no one. He a good boy. But not you. What kind of monster steal from a child? Steal his soul?”

I stared at the dead boy in her arms. The walls felt like they were crushing me, the whole world coming down on my head.

She fixed me with a cold, hateful glare. “You gonna burn for this.”

Afterward, deep beneath the abandoned gas station with its broken HELL sign, I sat trembling in my room. Tomo had picked up where I left off and gotten the briefcase from Naschy. He didn’t say how, but if I were a betting man I’d wager the cops would find Naschy in an alley somewhere with two in the back of the head.

The others were still celebrating their score with shots of Black Label in the main room of the fallout shelter, but I didn’t feel like joining them. I didn’t see the point. I wondered if there’d ever been one.

Underwood appeared, leaning casually against the door frame of my room. “What’s the matter, Trent? You worried I’m angry because Naschy got away from you? Don’t sweat it. We got what we wanted. You’re still my go-to guy.”

“It’s not that,” I said. I told Underwood what happened with the boy. “It shouldn’t have gone down like that. He was just a kid.”

Underwood shrugged. “He lived in a fucking crack house. You really think he had a future? If he wasn’t hitting the pipe already, it was only a matter of time. So he’s dead, big whoop. You’re alive, that’s all that matters.”

“It’s not right,” I said. I didn’t feel cold, but for some reason I couldn’t stop trembling. “That kid didn’t have it coming. He didn’t deserve it.”

“The fuck do you care? It’s the law of the jungle. The lion eats the monkey, or whatever the fuck lions eat. He doesn’t do it because the monkey had it coming, he doesn’t give a fuck about the monkey. He does it because that’s what he has to do to stay alive. Just like everyone else. Just like you.”

I couldn’t shake the woman’s words. You gonna burn for this.

“Don’t go soft on me now,” Underwood said. “This is who you are. It’s your gift. This city, Trent, it’s a jungle too, and the same laws apply. Kill or be killed. So you gotta ask yourself, when the shit goes down who would you rather be, the lion or the monkey?”

* * *

I gasped air into my lungs and opened my eyes. The sunlight stung like needles. I was lying on the hard concrete floor of an outdoor courtyard, but I couldn’t remember why. Had I died again? How? Where was I?

A moment later it came rushing back, the fight, the fall, and the last thing I’d seen—

Oh God. Bethany.

I turned, expecting the worst, but she was there, kneeling beside me, looking down at me with a shocked expression on her face.

I was just as shocked as she was. “You’re alive!”

“More to the point, so are you,” she said. She stared at me like she didn’t know what she was looking at. “Except you died right in front of me. I saw it. I know you were dead.” She showed me her palms, red and wet. “Your blood is still on my hands, only you’re not even bleeding anymore. What the hell is going on here?”

I ran a hand across my throat. The cut from the shadowborn’s katana was gone, healed over. She stared at me expectantly. “I don’t stay dead,” I told her. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I don’t know how or why. It’s just the way I am.”

She wiped the blood off her hands on the cement. I stood up. She didn’t help me. I got the sense she didn’t want to touch me. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Trent. Coming back from the dead? That’s not supposed to happen. But that’s not even the worst of it.” Her eyes studied me like I was a specimen in a petri dish. “Something came out of you. When you were lying there, dead, that same energy that attacked the Black Knight came out of you again. Tendrils of it, snaking out of you like it was looking for something.”

I blinked, surprised. The power that had zapped the Black Knight was the same that kept bringing me back from the dead?

“It came right at me,” she continued. “It felt like I’d stuck my finger in an electric outlet. It tried to get inside me, the way magic does, only the sigil of the phoenix couldn’t stop it. It felt like it was draining me. I think it was trying to kill me.”

“God, Bethany…” I reached out, but she backed away. Damn. I was a monster to her now.

“When you opened your eyes, you said you were surprised to see me alive.” Her gaze bored into me, as though if she looked hard enough she could figure it all out. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you? It’s not the first time.”

“I tried to warn you, but…” I hung my head, knowing how foolish I sounded. I should have told her the truth from the start. “You stopped it,” I said finally. “How?”

“I almost didn’t,” she said. “It was strong, and it was relentless. I could barely move. It took my last ounce of strength to pull this out of my vest and put it on.” I hadn’t noticed the object dangling from a string around her neck until she lifted it to show me. It was a small, pearl-like sphere veined with a sparkling blue ore. “The charm deflected it away from me. Another second and I would have been dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know how to control it. I wish I could. I wish I knew what it was, or why it keeps happening.”

I was relieved that Bethany had survived, but I’d also learned something important. She’d deflected it with a charm. That meant the thing inside me wasn’t an unstoppable force. It meant there was a chance it could be contained or controlled, if only I could figure out what the hell it was.

A chill crept over me then. It meant something else, too, I realized. Something horrible.

“Oh, no. Bethany, if you deflected it, where did it go?” I spun in a circle, looking at all the buildings that enclosed the courtyard. There were dozens of apartments nearby. Inside any one of them could be a body crumpled lifelessly on the floor, another innocent victim.

Bethany grabbed me by the arm and turned me to face her. “Trent, stop it. I need to know if it’s going to happen again. I need to know if we’re safe.”

My heart pounded in my chest, each beat a reminder of the stolen life that surged inside me. My limbs and back weren’t broken anymore. The ache of my dislocated shoulder was gone. So was the dull throb where the gargoyle had lacerated my back. There was blood from my no-longer-slit throat on my shirt and trench coat, but other than that everything was back to normal, reset to zero, and all because someone else had died in my place.

Back to normal. That was a joke. There was nothing normal about me. According to Ingrid, I wasn’t even human.

The woman in the crack house had been right about me. I was a monster, and I would burn for this.

Bethany wanted to know if she was safe, but the truth was, no one was safe. Not from this. Not from me. She stared at me, and in her eyes I saw such fear, such disgust, that I wished I’d stayed dead this time.

Thornton’s voice called out suddenly from a distance, interrupting us. “Bethany! Bethany, you need to see this!”

She held my gaze for another second. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, then broke away and ran to the corner of the courtyard, where an alleyway connected it to the street. I followed her. When I got to the alley, I saw Thornton standing about halfway down. He was back in human form, fully dressed again, and as unharmed by the thing inside me as Bethany was. Of course, he technically wasn’t alive anymore, so he had no life force to steal,