Dying Is My Business

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  “It’s obvious you haven’t been honest with us,” she said. “It’s time to come clean.”

  My heart thumped like a tin drum in my chest. How much had she figured out? I glanced at the closed door directly behind her. Standing between it and me, her message was clear. There was no way out, not until she got an answer.

  “The Anubis Hand, the Black Knight,” she continued. “The things you did shouldn’t have been possible.”

  I very nearly sighed with relief. She didn’t know anything. “I told you before, Bethany, I don’t know how I did those things. I was as surprised as you were.”

  “Huh,” she said. The word dripped with skepticism. “See, I keep going over it in my head, but your story doesn’t add up. You weren’t just passing by that warehouse tonight, were you? You said you heard me scream and came looking, only I didn’t scream. I don’t scream, Trent. Ever.”

  “I don’t know, maybe it was a gargoyle I heard,” I said. “Whatever it was, it was enough that I thought I should investigate. Anyway, what’s with the third degree? If I’d decided to ignore it and keep moving, you’d be dead right now.”

  “But you weren’t just investigating, you were expecting trouble. You walked into that warehouse with your gun already drawn.”

  “I always carry a gun,” I said. “New York’s a dangerous city.”

  She arched an eyebrow, not buying it. “Enough games. I want the truth. Who are you? For real?”

  “Bethany, come on.” I shook my head.

  “Because here’s the thing, Trent,” she said. “The reason your story doesn’t add up? I put a ward around that warehouse. It didn’t work on the gargoyles because they already knew we were there, but the ward was still active. That means even if it couldn’t stop the gargoyles, it still should have kept the warehouse hidden from everyone else. It should have been hidden from you, Trent. Unless you already knew it was there. Unless you meant to come to the warehouse. So do you still want to insist you were just passing by, or do you want to tell me the truth?”

  I remembered the peculiar feeling of the little hands pushing me back as I drew closer to the warehouse. At the time, I thought it was just a manifestation of my own reluctance about the job, but now I understood it was more than that. Without knowing it, I’d walked right through Bethany’s ward. No wonder I’d felt the same thing on the front steps of the safe house.

  Bethany’s sky-blue eyes bore into me. I looked away. She had me dead to rights, and like a cornered animal I felt the need to protect myself. My leather jacket was still draped over the desk chair. The grip of my Bersa semiautomatic peeked out from the pocket. It was so close I could draw it in a second. Less than a second.

  But if I did, there would be no going back. I would cross the threshold to cold-blooded killer. Was that what I was? Or was that what Underwood wanted to turn me into?

  I hated this tug-of-war inside me. How could I know what kind of a man I was when I didn’t even know who I was?

  “Everyone has their secrets, Trent,” Bethany said. “I get that. But if I’m going to keep you around, I need to know if I can trust you. So I’ll ask you again, who are you really?”

  I blew out my breath and whispered, “I don’t know.” I said it so softly I didn’t know if Bethany could even hear me.

  “I don’t believe that for a second,” she said. I should have known nothing got past those pointed ears of hers. “I have charms in my vest that can make you tell the truth, but they’ll also cause you a lot of pain. I don’t want to have to use them, but I will if you keep lying to me.”

  “I’m not lying,” I said. “I don’t know who I am.”

  She furrowed her brow. “What do you mean? How can you not know?”

  “For the past year, I’ve been living without any memories. Who I am, where I’m from, everything about myself, it’s all just a big blank.” I fidgeted in my seat, wondering if I was doing the right thing. Aside from Underwood, I’d never told my story to anyone. There hadn’t been anyone else to tell, frankly, and keeping it to myself for so long had buried it deep enough that after a while it felt like something that needed to be protected. Trusting Bethany with the truth made me uncomfortably vulnerable, but it also felt oddly freeing, like shrugging off heavy chains.

  She narrowed her eyes, wondering whether to believe me or not. “You’re talking about amnesia?”

  I nodded. “I can’t remember anything before a year ago. Not my friends, my family, my job. It’s like I didn’t exist at all before then. As far as I can tell, no one’s even looking for me. Amnesia is supposed to be temporary. I hoped I would remember eventually—hell, I try to make myself remember all the time—but it’s been a year and the memories haven’t come back.” I looked up into her eyes. “Bethany, I know I shouldn’t be able to do the things I did. I don’t know how I did them. I didn’t have any control over it, I swear. They just happened.”

  She shook her head. “People can’t cast spells without knowing how, Trent. There’s no such thing as involuntary magic.”

  I shrugged. “There is now.”

  She crossed the room so quickly that I froze in surprise when she pulled open my collar and put her hand down the back of my shirt.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I demanded.

  I tried to get up from the sofa, but she pushed me back down. “Sit!” I felt something sticky peel off my back and thought she’d removed one of the bandages. But when she pulled away from me, I caught a glimpse of what was in her hand. My skin crawled. It wasn’t a bandage. It was moving. Alive.

  I leapt off the sofa for a closer look. At first I mistook it for a spider, but then I saw there were no legs attached to its fat, ridged thorax, only round, slimy, saucerlike suction cups. Whatever it was, it was small, roughly the size of a nickel. It fit snugly in the center of her palm and glowed a bright neon green.

  I shivered. How long had that thing been stuck on my skin? “What is that?”

  She studied the creature. “It’s green.”

  “I can see it’s green, Bethany, but what the hell is it?”

  “A Collodi tick,” she explained. “It’s a rare interdimensional insect that feeds by absorbing a harmless amount of its host’s psychic energy. But they’re also remarkably sensitive to their host’s psychological state. They actually change colors when exposed to different psychic stimuli. It makes them the perfect lie detector. They turn yellow if the subject is lying, and green if the subject is telling the truth. Yours is green. That’s good.”

  My jaw dropped. “Wait a minute. You put it on me? Downstairs, when you were bandaging me up, you put that thing on me?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to be sure.”

  I stared at her, taken aback not just by what she’d done, but also by what a close call it’d been. More than anything else, it drove home the fact that I was walking a very thin line. “You had no right, Bethany!”

  She pulled a small, clear plastic box from a pocket in her cargo vest, dropped the Collodi tick into it, and replaced it in the pocket. “Try to see it from my perspective, Trent. You come out of nowhere, a complete stranger who claims to have no knowledge of magic whatsoever, and then you start killing gargoyles like a pro and fending off the Black Knight with powers no one else possesses. You can see how that might make me suspicious. I had to be sure I could trust you.”

  “And what if that thing was yellow instead? What would you have done?”

  “This.” She extended her arm. A wooden wand shot out of her sleeve and into her hand.

  I blinked. “A magic wand? Seriously?”

  “Scoff all you want, but the Endymion wand is stronger than you think,” she said. “It would put you into a deep sleep before you knew what hit you.”

  I doubted that. I don’t sleep, and I was pretty sure no wand would change that. “You had that thing all along but you didn’t think to use it on the gargoyles, or the Black Knight?”

  “It only works on humans. Against anything else it�
��s just a pointy stick.” She tucked the wand back into her sleeve. “Look, I don’t expect you to understand, but this mission Thornton and I are on is too important. If the box falls into the wrong hands, a lot of people will die. I can’t let anything get in our way, or anyone.”

  I sighed and sat down on the love seat again. “The box. Everything comes back to that damn box. What’s in it that’s so important?”

  “Something ancient, and powerful, and extremely dangerous under the right conditions. You’re safer not knowing any more than that. Anyway, right now I’m a lot more interested in talking about you. A man with no memory of who he is. It takes a lot to surprise me, but I honestly didn’t see that one coming. It could explain a few things, though.”

  “Like what?”

  “Why the ward around the warehouse didn’t affect you, for one,” she said. “There are a small handful of immensely powerful magicians in the world called mages. They’re the only ones who can carry magic inside themselves without becoming infected. They’re powerful enough that certain spells don’t work on them—illusion spells mostly, like wards. They can see right through them. Given the things I’ve seen you do, it makes me wonder. What if you were a mage before you lost your memories? If you were that powerful, there might be some kind of subconscious connection with the magic inside you, almost like muscle memory or a survival instinct that kicks in when it’s needed.” She sighed then and shook her head. “But no, mages are much older. You can’t be a mage without decades of advanced study. Frankly, you don’t look old enough to be one.”

  “Maybe I’m older than I look,” I said. “I could have lived a healthy lifestyle. Lots of vegetables and jogging.”

  Bethany smirked. “Somehow I doubt that’s the answer. But when this is all done and we’ve got the box back safe and sound, I can ask Isaac to look into any reports of magicians or mages who went missing a year ago. Who knows, maybe he’ll find something.”

  I stared at her dumbly for a moment, not sure what to say. I hadn’t expected her to want to help, especially without asking for something in return. I wasn’t used to anyone giving a damn. When I finally found my tongue, I said, “You’d do that for me?”

  “We’re not so different,” she said. “I don’t know much about myself, either. I never knew my parents, or where I came from. I spent my whole childhood being passed from one foster home to another, waiting to be adopted, but it never happened…” She paused, absently touching the thick hair over her pointed ear. I could only imagine what it must have been like for her, passed over time and again for adoption because she was different. She must have felt like as much of a freak as I did. When she spoke again, she wouldn’t meet my eye. I could tell she wasn’t used to opening up like this. “I learned pretty fast not to get attached to anyone. Either they’d get adopted away or I’d get shipped off to another home. I spent a lot of time alone, looking for ways to pass the time. That’s how I discovered I had a natural aptitude for engineering charms. It’s funny how boredom and self-preservation can bring out your hidden talents, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not everyone who would help out someone they don’t know,” I said. “Thank you.”

  She opened the door and smiled at me. “You saved my life twice now, Trent. The least I can do is help you get yours back.”

  I watched her walk out of the room and close the door behind her. Bethany kept surprising me. One minute she was an icy battle-axe, interrogating me like a cop and hiding gross, lie-detecting bugs on my body, and the next she acted like a friend, like she actually cared and wanted to help. The former I could handle, I was used to adversity, but the latter left me feeling conflicted and unsure of myself. I didn’t know how to deal with the sudden surge of warmth I felt toward her.

  I looked at the photos on the dresser again. Morbius stared back at me through unknown years, strong, sure of himself, a natural-born leader. Ingrid had referred to him as mage. Could I be a mage, too, I wondered? Was it possible I was a mage so powerful I’d found a way to cheat death? But then, what had happened to me? How had I lost my memories? Bethany didn’t think being a mage was the answer, but I held onto it like a drowning man. Because if I was a mage it meant I wasn’t a freak of nature. It meant I wasn’t alone.

  I felt like I was soaring inside. There was so much more to tell Bethany. So much more I hoped she could help me discover. For the first time I could remember, I felt like I’d found a place where I belonged, where I could be happy. For the first time, I felt truly alive, which was an odd thought for a man who can’t die. I felt like I was a part of the world around me. A world that suddenly felt wide open.

  The grip of my gun peeked out at me from the pocket of my leather jacket. Damn. How was I going to tell her about Underwood? If I told her the truth about why I came to the warehouse, there was no way she’d still want to help me. Worse, I would be drawing her deeper into my own mess, putting her in more danger than she already was. There were consequences to knowing about men like Underwood.

  He was still waiting for me to come back with the box. Probably, he was already wondering what was taking so long. It was only a matter of time before he sent Tomo and Big Joe to come looking.

  What the hell was I going to do?

  Fourteen

  The bathroom at the end of the hallway was filled with pink bottles of hand lotion, baby-blue tubes of facial cleansers, and hanging sponges that looked like great puffs of lace webbing on a string. As I washed the last of the blood and dirt from my hands and face, I noticed the shower curtain was decorated with images of giant sunflowers. The whole room smelled of perfume and powder. It was hard for me to imagine it belonged to the same woman who had once fought and defeated a giant six-armed lizard-man from another dimension. And yet, despite the strangeness of it, it was also oddly comforting. This was a home, a real home, and a far cry from the cold cement walls of the fallout shelter. This was how people were supposed to live.

  Walking back to my bedroom, a flash of light in the darkened hallway caught my eye. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the door to Bethany’s room was slightly ajar. Through the sliver of open space between the door and the frame, I caught a glimpse of her moving through the room. She’d taken off her cargo vest. I’d grown so used to seeing its bulky form covering her that I was surprised at how slim she was without it.

  She turned her back to me and pulled her shirt off over her head, revealing a tattoo of a fiery bird that covered her entire back. Its burning wings reached across her shoulder blades, its talons framed the base of her spine. Was this the work of the nine-hundred-year-old shaman with the L.A. tattoo parlor, I wondered? The ink work was so vivid that even from where I stood I thought I could make out the shape of each feather.

  I caught myself staring and continued the rest of the way into my room. I closed the door as quietly as I could behind me.

  As the hours passed and the moon traveled across the night sky, I lay alone in my room and tried not to think about her. I didn’t know many women. It wasn’t like I had the opportunity to meet them through work like a normal person. The criminal underworld was still mostly a man’s world, and the few women I’d crossed paths with would just as soon stick a knife between your ribs as look at you. The only woman I saw with any regularity was the creepy, dark-haired woman who was always with Underwood, and I really, really didn’t want to think about her just then.

  Bethany was different. I’d felt a connection with her from the moment we met, and yet we came from completely different worlds. Bethany risked her life on a regular basis trying to do good. Me, I was a thief. I stole things. Sometimes I stole lives. She was about rules and protocol. I was dumb muscle, paid to do, not think. We couldn’t be more different if we tried.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw her pull her shirt up over her head again, saw the fiery bird inked on her back …

  Annoyed at where my thoughts were headed, I got up from the bed. The night was creeping by at a snail’s pace and I needed something to distract m
yself. Things were complicated enough as it was, I didn’t need to add any more wrinkles by wondering what other parts of Bethany’s body might be covered in tattoos.

  I didn’t have The Ragana’s Revenge with me to read, so I decided to rummage through the wall closet instead, hoping I’d find some clothes to replace my ruined shirt and jeans. Like most New York City closets, this one seemed to have been added as an afterthought to the already cramped living quarters. It was just a foot and a half deep. The shelf up top was cluttered with dusty old hats, a stack of ashtrays, a battered suitcase, and an awkwardly shaped object I couldn’t make out at first. I pulled it off the shelf for a closer look. It was a primitive wooden idol shaped like a man, but with hundreds of iron nails hammered into it from top to bottom. I shuddered and put it back on the shelf quickly. I didn’t know what it was. With some things, I figured it was just as well not to know.

  Hanging from the wooden bar under the shelf were Morbius’s old clothes. I tried on a variety of the shirts and pants, but he must have been more broadly muscled than I was. They were all slightly too big for me. I was about to give up when I finally found a shirt that fit, and shortly after, a pair of pants. Hidden under some folded bedsheets I found a box containing a pair of black leather boots. I grabbed a coat as a replacement for my ruined leather jacket. Once I had them all on, I looked at myself in the mirror on the back of the closet door.

  Black linen shirt. Black jeans. Leather boots. Long brown trench coat.

  Now that’s more like it, I thought, beaming at my reflection.

  A sudden creak of the floorboards outside my door made me freeze. Dim light from the hallway spilled through the crack under the door, along with the shadows of two legs. Someone was standing right outside my room.

  Bethany? No, my instincts told me right away it wasn’t her, or any of the others. But that was impossible. No one else—nothing else—could get into the safe house. I kept my eyes on the shadows under the door and didn’t make a sound.