scabbard.
“You want your sword?” I asked. He shook his helmet ever so slightly. “You want me to use it?” He tried to nod, then struck the gauntleted fist of his good hand against his chest, over his heart.
I knew what he was asking me to do, and I shook my head. “No, I won’t. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Your armor—your
He pointed at the sword again, more emphatically this time, and I understood. Jibril-khan had said Van Lente carried with him the only spell that could kill him. I realized now the gargoyle had meant the sword. Strong enough to cut off an Ancient’s head, it was also strong enough to penetrate Van Lente’s shell, to pierce his heart, his one vulnerable spot.
I looked down at his mangled form. “But you can fix yourself, can’t you? You have magic.”
Van Lente shook his head again, then tapped his chest plate once more. The infection had turned him into this. It had remade him as a monster and kept him alive for centuries. It would likely continue to keep him alive, even now, broken and in agony. He wanted me to put him out of his misery. He’d been a hero once. He’d sacrificed everything, even his own humanity, to save the city he loved. Didn’t he deserve some peace at last? How could I deny him that?
With a heavy heart, I picked up the sword. “I’m sorry, Willem,” I said. He shook his head as if to tell me I shouldn’t be. I took a deep breath, lifted the sword high, and then drove it into his heart.
Van Lente’s form erupted in a fountain of fire, smoke, and crackling, strobing lights. I backed away from the blaze, a hand in front of my face to shield me from the heat. Within the flames I saw his silhouette, the stag horns of his helmet burning like lightning-struck trees, his tattered cape going up like flash paper, his black form now glowing orange from the intense heat. And then all I could see was the burning fountain of fire.
The flames died down almost immediately, fading to a blackened circle of glowing embers and charred grass on the ground. In the middle of the circle, a bearded, middle-aged man lay naked and still, his eyes closed, his face peaceful beneath close-cropped white hair. Willem Van Lente in his true form. I knelt down beside him and reached out to touch his face, but he faded like an apparition before I could, leaving nothing behind but a patch of burnt earth.
And his sword.
I picked up it up, and stood. I turned around to face Stryge.
He was walking away from me, toward the south end of the park, as though Van Lente and I had been nothing but minor distractions. With each step he took, rocks, plants, and trees lifted off the ground and broke apart in the air. Great columns of water exploded out of the Hudson River alongside the park and hung shimmering in the air. Stryge was unmaking everything.
“Hey, asshole,” I called.
He kept walking.
“Stryge!” I shouted.
That got his attention. He turned around, snarling with rage. My courage dropped into my belly. Shit. Now that I had his attention, what the hell was I going to do?
A peculiar feeling came over me then, a sense that I wasn’t alone. I felt others behind me—Morbius, Ingrid, Thornton, even Willem Van Lente—all those who had made a stand against evil before me. They stood with me now as if to say, for better or worse, I was a part of something bigger. Bigger than me, bigger than Isaac’s team, bigger even than Stryge. It was what Ingrid had called the good fight, what she’d begged with her dying breath not to let end with her. It was the mantle she’d asked Isaac to take up, and by extension all of us to take up. And then, like an answer to my question, I knew what I had to do.
No matter what, no matter how this turned out or what happened to me, I had to keep fighting the good fight.
I ran at Stryge, the sword held out high in front of me. I rose off the ground as Stryge’s magic caught me up again, but my momentum kept me moving forward, too. He tried to unmake me—I felt my joints stretching, weakening—but before he could, I plunged the sword into his stomach. Stryge howled in pain. As formidable as Van Lente’s magic sword was, I knew it couldn’t kill the Ancient, but it hurt him a lot and that felt pretty damn satisfying in its own right. Stryge stopped, releasing me from his spell. I would have fallen nearly twenty feet to the ground if I hadn’t held onto the sword hilt like a mountain climber dangling from a piton.
Stryge swatted at me, his claws tearing open one side of my trench coat, but I managed to hang on. From the ripped pocket of my coat, my gun fell out and tumbled to the ground. Damn. I knew bullets couldn’t hurt Stryge, but I didn’t like losing my gun. Underwood had done too good a job drumming that damn Golden Rule into my head.
“Trent!” a voice called from below.
I looked down and saw Bethany standing near the tree line. Then Isaac, Gabrielle, and Philip came through the branches behind her. They were bruised and bloodied, but they were alive. I felt a surge of relief. Then Stryge swatted at me again, tearing off the rest of my coat as I struggled to keep my grip on the hilt.
“Little help here?” I shouted.
Isaac raised his hands, Gabrielle raised her morningstar, and Bethany pulled the mirrored charm from her vest. From each of them burst a bright light. Stryge reeled back with another loud howl, and covered his eyes with his arms. He unfolded his wings and started flapping. We began to rise off the ground.
“Trent, get down from there!” Bethany cried.
“No,” I shouted back. “We can’t let him get away! He’ll unmake the whole damn city!”
With great beats of his enormous wings, Stryge tried to lift himself higher, but couldn’t. The light and pain were distracting him, and my added weight kept him off balance. But these were only temporary diversions. It wouldn’t be much longer before he found a way to take flight for real.
“Come down!” Bethany shouted again. “There’s nothing you can do up there!”
She was wrong. There was something I could do. The one thing I was good at. The one thing I’d always been able to do.
I called to Bethany, “The gun! Use the gun!”
She looked down at my gun on the ground, then back up at me. “Bullets won’t kill him!”
“Not him!” I yelled back. “Me! It’s the only way to stop him!”
“What?” She’d heard me, she just couldn’t believe what I was saying.
Carefully letting go of the hilt with one hand, I reached into my shirt and pulled the amulet she’d made for me from around my neck. I hated to take it off, especially now that I knew it worked, but just this once I needed it not to.
Stryge swatted at me again, trying to knock me off of him. I held onto the hilt, swinging my body out of the way of his claws, but as I did the amulet slipped from my fingers and dropped. It tumbled down to the grass below. I hoped it survived the fall, but there was no time to worry about it now.
“Now, Bethany, before it’s too late!” I called to her. “Then run as far from here as you can! All of you!”
Bethany slowly picked up my gun. Damn it, I needed her to move faster. Every second she wasted, Stryge brought me farther out of range. She aimed the gun me. I couldn’t make out her features anymore, we were too high up, but I heard her voice.
“I’m sorry!” she cried, and she pulled the trigger.
She was a good shot, even at long range, though I already knew she would be. The bullet hit me square in the chest. The pain ripped through me like a scalpel, but it was mercifully brief. I died almost instantly, but not before I saw Isaac, Gabrielle, Philip, and Bethany start running, the smoking Bersa semiautomatic still in her hand.
Forty
For a moment, there was only blackness, an empty void. Was this the dark that separated the worlds of the living and the dead, some part of me wondered? Were the dead watching me even now? Then, suddenly, there was light again. Way too much light. Even before I sucked the first gulp of air into my lungs, I knew something was wrong. I opened my eyes, and what came out of them was a coldly burning white fire, the same fire that had
