“Are you sure we can trust him?” Isaac asked.
“He’s a thief,” Bethany interrupted angrily. “He tried to steal the box, remember? He pulled a gun on me, for God’s sake! As far as I’m concerned, he can rot in that chair.”
“Underwood was manipulating him, he knows that now,” Gabrielle explained. “As strange as it sounds, he really was trying to protect you, Bethany. He likes you.” Gabrielle smirked at me. “Also, he likes your tattoo.”
Crap. What other memories had she seen in my head?
Bethany blanched. “He what?”
“Trent made some really stupid choices, I won’t argue that, but he never would have hurt you. He’s kind of sweet on you.”
Oh God, could this get any worse?
“He’s got a funny way of showing it,” Bethany said.
“Can I just say something?” I interjected.
“No!” Bethany snapped.
Gabrielle turned to Isaac. “There’s no need to keep him bound. Let him go.”
Isaac took a deep breath. Then he did something I didn’t expect. He freed me. With a wave of his hand, the magical bonds around my wrists vanished. I pulled my arms forward from behind the chair and rubbed my wrists and sore shoulders.
Bethany crossed her arms and turned away.
“You’re going to have to trust me, Trent,” Isaac said.
“You’re going to have to trust me, too,” I told him.
“I trust Gabrielle,” he said. “She vouched for you, and that’s good enough for me. But I’ll be keeping a very close eye on you, Trent. Don’t prove her wrong.”
I turned to Gabrielle. “Thanks. I owe you one.”
She shook her head. “You’ve had so many second chances, Trent. Most people don’t even get one. Maybe it’s time you started putting them to good use. You can start by stopping all the lies. And you, Isaac, instead of tying people up and using my abilities to satisfy your own curiosity, don’t you think you should make sure the box is secured before the equinox gets here?” She walked back to the tub, knelt down beside it, and reached into the water to take Thornton’s hand again. “Thornton went through hell to help you both get to this point. The least you can do is stop this pissing contest and make sure the sacrifice he made was worth it.”
Isaac nodded, his jaw tight. With a quick, final glance at me, he walked to the desk at the far end of the room. Philip went with him, leaving me alone with Bethany. She still had her back to me. I couldn’t blame her for being furious.
I stood up out of the chair. “Bethany, I’m sorry—”
She turned around and slapped me hard across the cheek. “If you ever point a gun at me again…”
I rubbed my cheek. It stung like a bastard. The others stared at us, the slap catching their attention, but they didn’t interfere. I supposed they thought this was something we needed to hash out ourselves. I also supposed they were right.
“Okay, I had that coming,” I said. “I’m trying to apologize, Bethany. I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to do. I just—I didn’t know how to tell you about Underwood. I didn’t want you to…” I trailed off, feeling foolish. What was the point? She would never forgive me. Why should she?
“You didn’t want me to what?” she demanded, her hands on her hips.
I struggled for the words. They didn’t come easily. “If I told you the truth about who I worked for and the real reason I was at that warehouse…” I trailed off and started over. “You and Thornton are the only friends I’ve got, Bethany. I don’t think I could have handled it if you turned your back on me.”
“So you thought it would be better to pull a gun on me instead? How crazy are you?”
I sighed. “I wanted to get the box away from you before it was too late, before Underwood’s enforcers showed up. That’s who those two men were. It was clear you weren’t going to just let me take it, so yeah, welcome to the way my brain works. It’s kind of messed up in there. Just ask Gabrielle. She had a front-row seat.”
“You really thought I’d turn my back on you? You didn’t think I would help you?”
I shrugged. “It’s not like anyone’s ever given a damn about me.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but then crouched down instead and took a tissue from her pants pocket. She used it to dab up the blood-tinged saliva I’d spat on the carpet. That was Bethany in a nutshell, I thought. Everything had to be just so. “You’ve got some on your face, too,” she said, not looking up at me.
I touched under my nose and my fingers came back tipped in red. I wiped the blood off with my sleeve. “Thanks. I don’t know what happened, only that it hurt like hell when Gabrielle tried to force her way into the parts of my life I can’t remember.”
“That’s probably what made the defense mechanism kick in,” she said. “Are you okay now?” The question came out robotically, a matter of courtesy, not concern. Maybe the chasm between us was too wide for a simple apology to bridge.
“I’m fine,” I said. I crouched down next to her on the carpet, glanced over my shoulder at the others, and lowered my voice. “Bethany, whatever you think of me right now—and I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me—I need you put it aside for a moment and listen very carefully. You can’t trust Isaac. He’s dangerous.”
She kept dabbing the tissue over the stain on the rug and moving it in tight circles.
“Think about it,” I continued. “He knew we were at Ingrid’s house. He sent us there. You said yourself the enemy knows our every move. It could only have been an inside job, and Isaac is the only one who could have pulled it off.”
She put the wadded-up tissue in her pocket and finally looked at me. “I know.”
My eyebrows shot upward in surprise. “You know?”
“You’re right that it could only have been an inside job, but you’re wrong about Isaac. I know him a lot better than you do, Trent. He’s a good man. He’s done a lot for me. I spent my whole childhood being shuffled from one foster home to another, and after I turned eighteen they kicked me out onto the street. It was another ten years before Isaac found me. He cleaned me up and gave me a job. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a father. What you said before about no one ever giving a damn? That’s how I felt my whole life, until I met him. He wouldn’t betray us. I trust him with my life. I trust all of them with my life. I can’t imagine any of them betraying us.”
“But someone did,” I said. “It’s the only explanation.”
She nodded. “Here’s the problem, Trent. Someone tried to kill us at the safe house, someone who must have told the shadowborn we were there, but I know these people. It couldn’t be any of them. There’s only one wild card in the deck. Only one person it could be. You.”
I blinked. “It wasn’t, I swear.”
“I know it wasn’t,” she said, standing up again. “But now you see the problem.”
I did, and it was made all the more vexing by the fact that Bethany had an annoying habit of always being right. Frankly, she hadn’t been wrong about anything yet. Which meant I probably owed Isaac an apology. I wasn’t looking forward to that.
Still, if the traitor wasn’t any of the others, and it wasn’t me, who was left?
Twenty-five
At the table under the stained-glass windows, Isaac and Philip inspected the box. The windows flashed with a sudden bright light, followed by the distant boom of thunder. A heavy rain began to patter the glass, then wash down it in sheets as the storm clouds that had been gathering all day finally opened.
Isaac glanced up at me. He still didn’t fully trust me. I couldn’t blame him. It was going to take a long time to earn his trust. The question was, would I stick around long enough for that to happen? What was my plan, exactly? I didn’t know. On the one hand, part of me wanted to stay. These people were freaks like me. I felt like I belonged with them, like I was a part of something in a way I never felt before. On the other hand, there were answers out there I needed to find, and I had unfinished busine
ss with Underwood.
Isaac ran his hand reverentially over the box lid, his fingertips tracing the words written along the metal crest. “In de eenheid, sterkte,” he read aloud. “Dutch for in unity, strength. It’s the family crest of Willem Van Lente. The box is authentic, the same one Van Lente hid away four centuries ago. The question is, is it still inside? Because if it’s not, we’re all still in danger.” He took a deep breath. “We’re going to have to open it.”
Bethany glanced nervously at the box. “Is it safe?”
“It should be. The equinox isn’t until tomorrow.” Isaac bent to inspect the lock. It was bulky and hinged, the kind of lock you’d see on a steamer trunk, but instead of a keyhole there were three rotating cylinders. A combination lock, only there weren’t any numbers, just strange, blocky symbols. Isaac tapped the lock with his finger, then narrowed his eyes and rubbed his tightly cropped beard in concentration. “It’s hexlocked. The box can’t be opened by force or by magic. Willem Van Lente didn’t want anyone finding it, and he certainly didn’t want anyone opening it. I should have known he wasn’t going to make it easy.”
Philip nodded, the box’s reflection bouncing in his mirrored sunglasses. “So what’s the combination? His birthday?”
“I doubt it’s anything so mundane,” Isaac said. “The symbols are a kind of puzzle. All we need to do is figure it out.”
“Like in Gregor’s tunnel,” I said. “Could it be Ehrlendarr again?”
“It’s not,” Isaac said, “but it’s definitely an older language. Hold on a moment.” He took a hand mirror out of one of the table drawers and held it up to the combination lock. “Ah! I thought so! Look at this.” All I saw in the mirror were the same symbols backward. Isaac, on the other hand, saw an epiphany. “It’s so simple I should have known. They’re Egyptian hieroglyphs, only reversed. Van Lente studied magic in Egypt with the Order of Horus before he relocated to New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century.” He spun the cylinders, examining each of the hieroglyphs. Then he grinned. “Oh, you clever, clever magician. It’s perfect.”
“What is?” I asked.
“The combination,” he said. “Back then, very few people would have known the password to the Order of Horus’s inner sanctum, especially in the New World. That’s how Van Lente ensured that even if the box were found, no one would be able to open it. Lucky for us, I’ve been to the inner sanctum myself. Now, let’s see. It’s been a while.” He started turning the cylinders one at a time. “First is life, the ankh. Then growth, the papyrus stem. And finally Horus, the falcon.”
The lock sprang open with a sharp clank. I moved closer. I wasn’t going to miss this. So many people wanted what was inside it, were willing to kill or die for it, that I had to see with my own eyes what could possibly be worth all the trouble.
Isaac opened another drawer in the desk, took out a box of thin latex gloves, and pulled a pair over his hands. Then he gently opened the lid of the box. White wisps of steam drifted out and dissipated in the air around him, as if the box were full of dry ice. He squinted into it. Then he tipped the box over.
Something big, round, and as gray as gunmetal rolled out, landing on the table with a heavy thud. Tendrils of steam clung to its every fold, crease, and tip. My mouth dropped open in surprise.
It was a severed head. A gargoyle head, to be precise, only it looked a hell of a lot bigger than the head of any gargoyle I’d seen. Its eyes were closed but its mouth was open, frozen in a silent roar that revealed rows of sharp teeth. Its tusks had been broken off, though whether from injury or simply to make the enormous gargoyle’s head fit within the confines of the box I couldn’t guess. At the stump of its neck, bone and dried gray muscle tissue were still visible where a clean, precise cut had severed the head from its body.
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to see, but this wasn’t it. Not the head of a giant, dead gargoyle. It didn’t make sense. How could all the danger we’d faced, all the deaths, have been over this? Why would anyone want it?
Isaac lifted the head in his gloved hands and inspected it, as excited as an appraiser evaluating a rare, lost antique. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are in the presence of royalty. Meet Stryge, the first king of the gargoyles. It looks like he hasn’t aged a day since Willem Van Lente cut off his head four hundred years ago.”
Ingrid had mentioned Stryge was the king of the gargoyles before the Black Knight came along, I remembered, but that was all she’d said about him. “What happened?” I asked.
“For millennia, Stryge was the scourge of Europe,” Isaac explained. “He viewed all human life as vermin, an infestation deserving nothing short of extermination. Finally, in the eleventh century, the magicians of Europe banded together and banished Stryge and his gargoyles across the ocean to North America. Stryge continued his reign of terror here, leading the gargoyles in attacks on the natives and, later, the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam. By the time Willem Van Lente came to New Amsterdam in 1660, the gargoyles were regularly ambushing the trade routes between settlements. It was one massacre after another. No one came back alive. Some of the victims disappeared. Others were found in pieces, as if they’d been torn limb from limb.
“The authorities blamed the local Lenape Indians, but Van Lente suspected it wasn’t the work of anything human. He decided to run his own covert investigation and learned from the Lenape elders that the attacks were perpetrated by creatures they called Mhuwe, man-eaters. Van Lente recognized them for what they were: gargoyles from the old country. He knew the only way to stop the slaughter was to cut off the head of the snake, as it were. Kill Stryge and leave the gargoyles powerless and in disarray without their leader. So he made a deal with the Lenape to fight Stryge together.
“The battle lasted weeks. The sacrifices Van Lente made were unbelievable. He cut off his own hand to create the Anubis Hand, the only weapon that could hurt Stryge, though even that wasn’t enough. In the end, it took the combined might of all his magic and the entire Lenape nation to bring Stryge down.”
I looked at the black, mummified fist of the Anubis Hand poking out of Thornton’s coat pocket on the floor. Willem Van Lente’s own hand. It was a crazy story. Completely unbelievable. But something itched in my mind, a kernel of a thought. Something about the Lenape Indians. I’d heard the name before.
“There are no records of Van Lente after the battle,” Isaac went on. “He must have died from his wounds shortly after he hid the box. He gave his life to save New Amsterdam, but it was all in vain. Not long after, the Black Knight came out of nowhere, stepping in to fill the void as the gargoyles’ new king and leading them in further acts of evil to this very day. Nothing changed. Willem Van Lente fought and died for nothing.”
“Why did he bother hiding the head?” I asked. “I mean, we’re talking about someone who cut off his own hand to make a magical weapon, right? If Van Lente was half the badass he sounds like, you’d think he would have stuck the head on a pike or something as a warning to the gargoyles not to mess with them anymore.” Bethany and Isaac arched their eyebrows at me. “What? I’m not saying that’s what I would do, but…”
Unlike the others, Philip smiled at me. “Nasty. I like the way you think.”
I sighed. “Look, forget all that, you know what I mean. Why go through the trouble of a puzzle box and a hiding place? Why didn’t he want anyone finding Stryge’s head?”
Isaac gently replaced the head inside the box, closed the lid, and locked it again. “Lenape legend has it that if Stryge’s head is reunited with his body during the equinox, he will awaken. Stryge has immense power, enough to destroy New York City and everyone in it. With his hatred of all humanity, I have no doubt that’s exactly what he would do.”
“Hold on, I thought you said Stryge was dead,” I said.
“Not dead, exactly,” Isaac replied. “Just dormant. Stryge is an Ancient. No one knows the full extent of their powers. Their magic is as alien to us as ours would be to the simplest single-celled organisms. The e
quinox, the precise moment when the Earth and the sun are perfectly aligned, is when the Ancients’ powers are at their height. If Stryge’s head and body are reunited at that moment, there’s no telling what could happen. That’s why we had to get this box to safety first.”
“So Stryge’s an Ancient like Gregor,” I said.
“Only a hundred times worse,” Bethany said. “Stryge was the most violent and hateful of the Ancients. If he were to wake up, he would be a destructive force the likes of which this city has never seen.”
“But Ancient or not, how can he still be alive without his head? That doesn’t make sense.”
Philip pointed his thumb at me. “I agree with Mr. Head-on-a-Pike here. I’ve seen firsthand what taking off someone’s head can do. You don’t come back from that.” I didn’t want to know what he meant about seeing it firsthand.
“The shadowborn at the safe house weren’t dead when we found them, were they? Not even after their heads were cut off,” Isaac said. “The barrier between life and death isn’t as easily definable as you think, and it only gets harder to define when magic is involved. Consider this. Gargoyles don’t honor their dead or have burial rituals. They don’t give their dead much thought at all, except to cannibalize them for food during the lean hunting seasons. If they’re this keen on reclaiming Stryge’s head, it can only be for one reason: The Lenape legend is true. But what’s really got me concerned is that gargoyles don’t do anything without orders from their king. That means the Black Knight himself must want it. The only question is why. The Black Knight has ruled over the gargoyles for four hundred years. Why would he want to bring Stryge back? The gargoyles won’t serve two kings.”
“What if you’ve got it all wrong?” I said. “What if the Black Knight wants the head to make sure no one brings Stryge back?”
Isaac nodded. “I thought about that. If that’s the case, it’s the first time the Black Knight and I have ever seen eye to eye. But I suspect there’s more to it. Frankly, I’ll be happy if the equinox comes and goes without us ever finding out.”
Dying Is My Business Page 24