Dying Is My Business

The oracles were right.”

“Lucky guess,” I said. Even to my own ears I sounded as petulant as I felt. Even if it meant the end of New York City, part of me didn’t want the oracles to be right, because if they were right about this, it meant they were also right about me.

“How many millions of people visit the Cloisters every year, completely unaware of what’s sleeping right under their feet?” Isaac said. “Good work, guys. Get back to Citadel, we’ve got work to do. And Trent?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got something you need to see,” Isaac said.

I leaned forward in the backseat. “What?”

“Get here now, guys,” he said, ignoring my question. “We don’t have a lot of time. The equinox is coming.”

Bethany ended the call. Philip started the engine and pulled the Escalade into traffic.

I watched the New York Marble Cemetery grow farther away in the rear window, and heard the oracles’ voices in my head again. I couldn’t help harping on the things they said about me.

A threat.

A danger.

An abomination.

They weren’t all that different from the things I’d wondered about myself in the dark of my room during all those sleepless nights when my thoughts got tangled in knots and turned on themselves like rabid dogs. But even if the oracles were right and I was some kind of menace, it still didn’t answer the big questions hanging over me.

Why couldn’t I die?

How did I know how to fight as if I’d been doing it all my life?

Why couldn’t I remember anything from before?

I put it from my mind. If I hadn’t been able to answer those questions in the past year, I wasn’t going to do it now. Besides, something else the oracles said had stuck with me too, something more pressing.

Willem Van Lente yet lives.

That Van Lente was still alive after all this time was impossible. It was insane. But by now I was willing to believe a lot of crazy things I wouldn’t have thought twice about before. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more sense it suddenly made, and pieces of the puzzle began to slip into place.

When we got back to Citadel, Isaac took me up to the second floor. At the end of a hallway lined with marble busts and draped with heavy, red cloth panels was a simple wooden door. He took me inside to a small, cluttered study. Crowded bookshelves lined one wall and a leather couch covered with loose papers stood against another. An Oriental rug covered most of the hardwood floor. The morning light filtered through a stained-glass window on the far side of the study and fell on the cluttered desk, illuminating two objects resting on the blotter. The first was a big, empty, glass Erlenmeyer flask stopped with a thick cork. The other was my Bersa semiautomatic.

“My gun!” I said, as excited as if I were seeing an old friend for the first time in years. I picked it up off the desk. Even with an empty clip, it was remarkable how much better I felt with it back in my hand.

“You left it here last night,” he said. “But the moment I touched it, I knew something was wrong with it.”

I looked at it, inspecting the grip and the barrel. “It looks fine to me.”

“It is, now,” he said. He pulled over a standing magnifying glass on a brass stand, and positioned it in front of the Erlenmeyer flask. “This is what I wanted to show you. Look inside the flask.”

“It’s empty,” I said.

“Use the magnifying glass.”

I tucked the gun in the back of my pants and bent closer, putting my eye to the magnifying glass. The flask wasn’t empty after all. Inside it, a tiny shape flittered around on thin, batlike wings. I blinked, surprised, certain I was imagining it, but when I looked again, the winged shape was still there. Somehow, it was aware I was watching it because suddenly it stopped flying, clung to the wall of the flask, and turned its head toward me. I sucked in my breath. It resembled a tiny naked man, albeit horned, tailed, and winged like a child’s idea of what the Devil looked like. Its skin was the color of mud or clay, and it seemed to be coated in clear, slick goo. Instead of hands and feet it had barbed suction cups at the ends of its limbs. The creature flicked its forked tongue at me disdainfully.

I turned to Isaac, amazed. “What is it?”

“A homunculus,” he explained. “It’s a very advanced, very special kind of spell. It acts as the eyes and ears of its creator. It’s a way to spy on someone without being detected. I found it attached to the grip of your gun. It’s so small it’s no wonder you never knew it was there.” He bent down to look at the Erlenmeyer flask. “I believe this is how Reve Azrael found you at the safe house, and how she found Citadel.”

I took a quick step back from the desk. “Then she can see us right now?”

“Don’t worry, the psychic link has been severed,” Isaac said. “Without it, Reve Azrael is flying blind. She won’t know where you are or what you’re doing, not anymore.”

I looked at the flask again. With only my naked eye, I couldn’t even see the homunculus inside. How could something so small have caused so much trouble?

“How did it get on my gun?” I asked. How many times had I held the Bersa without knowing the homunculus was right there on the grip, stuck there like glue just centimeters from my hand? Even right under my hand, so small I wouldn’t have felt it?

“One of her revenants must have put it there,” Isaac answered. “Bennett, I’m guessing. That’s the only revenant who could have gotten close enough.”

Isaac’s theory sounded good on the surface, but it didn’t hold up under scrutiny. Reve Azrael had already found me at the safe house before she could have gotten close enough in Bennett’s guise to slip the homunculus onto my gun. No, I was convinced there was something we weren’t seeing. Something we’d overlooked.

I studied the homunculus through the magnifying glass again. Inside the flask, it flitted back and forth like a restless mosquito. “You said it was a spell, but it looks alive.”

“It’s not,” a voice said from the study door. I looked up. Gabrielle walked into the room. She had one arm in a sling, but otherwise she looked pretty good for someone who’d been shot just last night. Whatever was in the Sanare moss they’d put on her wounds had worked wonders. “The homunculus is made of paper, clay, and magic, nothing more. Think of it as a machine. And like a machine, it can be reprogrammed.”

“How?” I asked.

She picked up the flask with her good arm. “Reve Azrael can’t use the homunculus anymore, but with just a few tweaks to the existing spell, we can.” She walked back to the door. “Give me five minutes and I’ll have it ready, Isaac.”

“Be quick,” he said. “The others are gearing up downstairs. We’re leaving in ten.”

When Gabrielle was gone, I said, “Why do I get the feeling you’ve got something up your sleeve?”

“It’s always good to have a Plan B.” He led me back out into the hallway, then closed and locked the door to the study. “Trent, after everything you’ve already done for us, I hesitate to ask you this. It’s a lot to ask of someone I’ve only just met, but we need all the help we can get.”

“You’re asking if I’m coming with you,” I said.

“Are you?”

I nodded. “But she’ll know I’m with you. She’ll know you’re coming.”

“Not anymore. Not without her homunculus.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” I said. “I don’t think we’re seeing the whole picture. Reve Azrael could just as easily have used the homunculus to track Bethany or Thornton, right? But she chose me. She knows things about me that a homunculus can’t explain. The oracles said she knows who I am. I want to know how.”

“She’s not going to sit still for an interrogation if that’s what you’re thinking,” Isaac said.

“I know, but I aim to get the truth out of her, one way or another.”

He shook his head. “Let it go, Trent. Reve Azrael is dangerous. Not just to us, but to this whole city. If we have the chance to put her down once and for all, we can’t risk waiting around. We have to take it. You would be smart to do the same.”