Dying Is My Business

“It’s all right,” Bethany said. “Don’t move. Just try to relax.”

Gabrielle groaned as the pain of the gunshot wound finally sank in. “At least tell me you stopped them.”

Bethany scooped more of the Sanare moss onto Gabrielle’s bullet wound. “I wish I could, but they got away. They took Stryge’s head with them.”

“They took Thornton, too,” I said.

Tears welled in Gabrielle’s eyes, and she turned away. “So that monster is still walking around in Thornton’s body, doing God knows what with it?” She choked back a sob, but then she couldn’t hold it in anymore and her body shook as she wept.

“I need you to keep still,” Bethany said.

“Keep still?” Gabrielle demanded, her sadness shifting to anger. “How the fuck am I supposed to keep still? She has his body, Bethany. She’s wearing him like a fucking dress. We have to go after her.”

“Opening that bullet wound again isn’t going to get Thornton back,” I said. “Let them fix you up.”

“While she takes him farther and farther away?” Gabrielle raged. “How can you say that? You know what he was to me. You fucking saw it!”

“It doesn’t change anything,” I said. “You’re not in any shape to go running after her.”

“What is she talking about?” Bethany asked me. “What did you see?”

“Something happened when she was inside my mind,” I explained. “Somehow, I got inside hers too for a second, and I saw … something.” I stopped myself there. It didn’t feel right that it should come from me.

“He saw that Thornton and I were engaged,” Gabrielle said, closing her eyes. I couldn’t imagine how hard it was for her to say the words out loud. How much it hurt. But she braced herself, opened her eyes again, and said, “It happened a few days ago. He wanted to tell you all right away, but then the new job came up. Securing the box. Thornton only took the job so we’d have money for the wedding.” She closed her eyes again, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “It was my idea to wait until after the job was over to tell you, so we could celebrate properly. I thought we had time.”

“Oh, Gabrielle,” Bethany said, stroking her hair. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Isaac said.

“You want Stryge’s head back. I want Thornton back,” Gabrielle said. “We have to go after them.”

Isaac didn’t answer.

“I won’t let her use Thornton like this,” she insisted. “I won’t let her desecrate his body. He deserves better than that. Isaac, we have to go after them!”

Isaac looked down at the floor. I could see in his eyes that he was wrestling with something inside. A promise he’d made long ago.

“She said to tell you she was wrong,” I said.

Isaac looked up at me. “What?”

“Ingrid,” I said. “She was still hurting from Morbius’s death when she told you to keep your head down and not get involved, but she regretted it. Right before she died, she asked me to tell you to keep fighting the good fight. To not let Morbius’s dream die with her. She said she was wrong. She wanted you to know that.”

Isaac nodded and closed his eyes, as though a great weight had been taken off his shoulders. When he opened them again, he said, “I spent so much time worrying about drawing attention to myself that I asked others to risk their lives for me, and all the while I stayed hidden away here in Citadel. Thornton paid the price for that. No more. It ends today. Reve Azrael brought the fight to us. Now we’re going to bring it to her. Together.” He started pacing the floor, thinking out loud. “She’s crazy if she thinks she can just wake Stryge up and make him do her bidding. He’ll kill her the moment he opens his eyes.”

“So why don’t we let him?” Philip asked, coming over from the couch. He’d taken off his black turtleneck and draped it over his shoulder like a towel. Remarkably, the wound had already closed and scabbed over, leaving only a thin white scar across his hairless, dirt-smeared chest. Apparently dirt helped vampires heal faster. Good to know. I filed it away with the hundred other ridiculous and impossible things I’d learned over the past twenty-four hours.

“And then what?” Isaac asked. “Once Stryge is awake, there’s no way to stop him.”

“Willem Van Lente did it four hundred years ago, right?” I pointed out. “We could do it again.”

“How? No one knows how Van Lente brought Stryge down, and he didn’t leave any clues behind.”

“Reve Azrael’s plan doesn’t make any sense,” Bethany said. “There’s no way to control an Ancient.”

“Maybe she found a way,” I said. “Maybe there’s a spell no one knew about.”

“It’s possible,” Isaac said. He sighed and brushed his hands through his cropped red hair. “Reve Azrael craves control. It’s why she surrounds herself with revenants. All that nonsense about the city being too loud, that’s just a symptom of her madness. It’s life she hates. Life is messy and loud, and she can’t control it the way she controls the dead. She wants to snuff it out.”

From the start, Bethany had insisted that if the box fell into the wrong hands it could be used as a weapon. I couldn’t think of any worse hands for it to be in than Reve Azrael’s. She was planning the full-scale destruction of New York City. I couldn’t even fathom it. I had as strong a love-hate relationship with New York City as anyone else who lived here, but no matter how many times I cursed this city while sardined into an overcrowded subway train or stuck in endless Midtown traffic, actually trying to destroy it never crossed my mind. You’d have to be completely insane. The people who’d tried to destroy this city before—and even with my limited memories I knew about that; you couldn’t live in New York without knowing—only proved the point. Now Reve Azrael was proving it again. She was even more unhinged than I thought.

“She makes revenants from the dead,” Bethany said. “The more people she kills, the larger her forces grow. If she wakes Stryge up and really can control him somehow, the death toll would be astronomical. She’ll have an army of the dead, with each new revenant another weapon in her arsenal. The slaughter would spread exponentially, until eventually there wouldn’t be anyone left alive in New York City but her and Melanthius. Reve Azrael and her servants in five boroughs of rubble.”

“My guess is, once she gets a taste for destruction on that scale she won’t stop with just New York City,” Isaac said.

“All the more reason to go after her,” Gabrielle insisted.

“She could be anywhere. No one has seen her true form. No one knows anything about her, including where her lair is. We’ll never find her in time,” Isaac said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t stop her. We just have to beat her to the punch.”

“I’m not following,” Bethany said.

Isaac began pacing again, thinking out loud. “If she’s going to make Stryge whole again, she has to join the head to the body at the moment of the equinox. The exact moment. And that’s tomorrow at … Philip?”

“Eleven twenty a.m.,” Philip answered.

“Tomorrow morning, eleven twenty. She won’t miss that window. If we’re going to stop her, our best chance is to get to Stryge’s body before she does.”

“Fine, so where’s the body?” Gabrielle asked.

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Isaac said. “It’s got to be somewhere in the city. Come on, Keene, think. After the battle, Willem Van Lente tried to destroy Stryge’s head, but he couldn’t, it kept putting itself back together again. So he hid it instead, and while he was doing that the Lenape Indians hid Stryge’s body. They knew what would happen if the two were brought together again, so to be safe neither party told the other where they were hidden. They didn’t tell anyone. To this day, there are no historical documents, no scrolls, not even any oral histories that give away the locations. Reve Azrael must have some clue where the body is, or she wouldn’t go through all this trouble to steal the head this close to the equinox.” He stopped pacing and took a deep breath. “For four hundred years, magicians, researchers, and scholars have tried to find Stryge’s body and failed. We have until eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“And how exactly are we going to pull that off?” Bethany asked.

Isaac tented his fingers under his chin. “Over time I’ve amassed the most extensive library of arcane and secret knowledge in the city. If there are clues anywhere, it’s there. We’ll search every book, front to back. We’ll start with the major works, The Libri Arcanum, The Book of Eibon, then work our way down from there. It’s got to be there somewhere.”