Dying Is My Business (20 page)

The bedroom door burst open, and an enormous timber wolf bounded out. Two of the shadowborn above me disappeared just as Thornton was about to pounce on them. He crashed into the wall instead. The third shadowborn stayed where it was, bringing its katana down toward me in a swift chop.

With a loud
clang,
the blade stopped an inch from my chest, blocked by a thick steel sword that had come out of nowhere. I looked up and saw Bethany standing above me, holding one of the swords from the smashed display case downstairs.

“Where the hell have you been?” she asked.

I grinned, relieved to see her. “It’s a long story.”

But the shadowborn had no intention of giving us time to catch up. It swung its katana at Bethany, and she parried the blow. They fought, their blades clashing and ringing. I got back on my feet. On the floor of the bedroom Bethany had come out of, I saw another sword identical to hers lying beside a pile of Thornton’s discarded clothing. I scrambled into the room and picked up the sword. It was heavier than I expected, its handle slightly too long for my hand. But then, it had been crafted for the six-armed war god of the Pharrenim, not for me. I hoped I’d be able to handle it. There was no guarantee a sword would be any better than a gun against the shadowborn, but at least it would give me something to defend myself with.

I rushed back into the hallway. Bethany was still fighting, wielding her sword like someone who’d been in her share of swordfights before. But every time she managed a thrust or jab that should have crippled her opponent, the shadowborn simply disappeared to avoid her blade, then reappeared and attacked again.

Down the hall, Thornton was keeping the other two shadowborn busy. Every time he lunged at them, snapping his massive lupine jaws, they winked out of sight and reappeared nearby. They tried to stick him with their katanas, but on four legs he was too fast for them.

One of them noticed me. It vanished and reappeared right in front of me. Its sword was already coming my way by the time I realized what was happening. I brought my own sword up and blocked its attack. It lunged. I blocked its blade again, and again after that, marveling at how well I was doing. As far as I knew, this was the first time I’d ever held a sword, and yet my hands were acting like they knew exactly what to do with it.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been surprised by how well I could fight, though before now it had always been hand-to-hand combat. Somehow, I could fight like I’d been trained by the best. It was something that came over me, like instinct or muscle memory, and more than once I’d wondered if I was a boxer in my previous life.

Now this. Who the hell was I that I knew how to handle a fucking
sword
?

But in my excitement I got cocky, and the shadowborn managed to get the tip of its katana under my cross guard. With a flick of its wrist, it sent the sword flying out of my hand and clattering to the floor.

The shadowborn came at me quickly. I grabbed both its arms, trying to force the katana blade back as it inched closer to my neck. The shadowborn pushed forward with a strength that belied its slender frame, forcing me back against the wall and pinning me there. I struggled to hold the blade at bay, my own warped reflection staring back at me from the shadowborn’s blank steel mask.

How hard was that steel, I wondered? Only one way to find out. I snapped my head forward, butting the hard bone of my forehead against the mask. It hurt like hell, but I hoped the blow would stun the shadowborn long enough for me slip out of its grasp.

It didn’t work. The shadowborn didn’t seem affected at all, though its mask loosened, slipped off, and fell to the floor.

What lay beneath the mask wasn’t a face, at least not anymore. It was a skull, mossy and brown and caked with dirt. Indistinct fleshy masses wriggled in the empty eye sockets. It took me a moment to recognize them as worms.

I got my boot up against the shadowborn’s stomach and shoved it back. It bent to pick up its mask, and I took the opportunity to grab my sword again. Not that there was much I could do with it. Even if I got lucky and landed a blow, I couldn’t kill what was obviously already dead.

The odds just kept getting worse.

The wolf bolted past me. Thornton was making a break for the stairs. Bethany broke away from the shadowborn she was fighting and ran with him. “Trent, let’s go!” she shouted.

I followed them, risking a glance back over my shoulder. All three shadowborn vanished. They reappeared on the landing before us, cutting us off from the staircase.

We were trapped.

The shadowborn lifted their katanas, the sharp edges of their blades gleaming like razors.

Seventeen

The shadowborn advanced on us, blocking our one exit. I grabbed Bethany by the hand and pulled her into the nearest bedroom. Thornton bounded in after us. Inside, I let go of Bethany and kicked the door shut. Then I hit the lock button in the center of the doorknob, more from habit than because I thought it would actually help. There was no way that flimsy lock would stop the shadowborn. Neither would the door for that matter, not if they could pop up wherever they wanted. We needed a better way to keep them out.

I turned from the door and saw that we were in the room I’d stayed in last night, Morbius’s room. It, too, had been searched by the shadowborn. The bed was overturned, the love seat smashed to pieces, the dresser drawers dumped, clothes from the closet torn off their hangers and heaped on the floor. What the hell had they been looking for?

Bethany pulled a small object out of her vest and slapped it onto the wall next to the door. It stuck in place, a wooden disc with a round, obsidian stone at its center. As the stone gave a brief flash, the charm sent a glowing latticework of light across the entire wall and door before it faded.

“What is that thing?” I asked.

“An Avasthi phalanx,” she said. “It’ll keep the shadowborn from phasing through the wall, but it won’t hold them for long. It’s only a matter of time before they just break down the door instead. But I have no intention of making it easy for them.” She glanced quickly around the room. Her gaze settled on the dresser near the window on the far side of the room. Its drawers had been pulled out and the pictures of Morbius and the Five-Pointed Star had been swept off it onto the carpet. “Trent, bring that dresser over here.”

I hurried to it, kicking the empty drawers and their contents out of my way. I grabbed the top corners of the dresser, but a sudden movement outside the window caught my eye. A sliver of the street below was visible through a gap in the curtains. On the sidewalk across from the house, a shape in a hooded, blood-red cloak moved toward the mouth of an alley between two buildings, an alley that glowed with a flickering blue light. The shape stopped and turned toward me, as if somehow it knew I was watching. Inside the hood was a skull, not of bone but of polished, gleaming gold. The flickering light from the alley reflected off its hollow eyes and rictus grin.

The shadowborn thumped angrily on the other side of the door, and Bethany shouted, “Trent, the dresser!” I turned to look at her, then the door, then back to the window. Below, the sidewalk was empty. The shape was gone. So was the strange flickering light.

“I thought I saw…” I started to say, then stopped. What did I think I’d seen? The Grim Reaper? Death finally coming for me? Had someone really been there, or was I seeing things?

I slid the dresser across the floor and propped it in front of the door as a barricade. The shadowborn continued banging from the other side. It sounded like they were throwing their shoulders into it, trying to force it open. The dresser rocked away from the door. Without its drawers, it wasn’t heavy enough to do the job, but there was no time to gather them and put them back in. Instead, I put my back to the dresser and dug my boots into the carpet.

Another heavy thump. The door rattled in its frame and the dresser bucked behind me. “We need to get out of here, fast,” I said. “It’s too far down to jump out the window. We’d never make it without breaking our legs on the sidewalk, and then we’d be sitting ducks. You got anything else in that vest of yours that can help? Like maybe a rope ladder?”

Bethany shook her head. “Besides, we can’t leave without Ingrid.”

“Ingrid’s dead,” I said. It came out with all the delicacy of a blunt object to the head, but I had to break the news to her and we didn’t exactly have time for tact.

Bethany’s shoulders slumped. “Oh God. She insisted on staying downstairs and holding them off so we could find a place to hide. I told her it was too dangerous, but…”

The shadowborn battered the door. The dresser lurched against my back. I dug my boots deeper into the carpet and hoped the door would hold.

Thornton paced back and forth across the floor, limping on stiff legs. The decomposition that plagued him in his human form had transferred to his wolf form as well. His gray pelt was mangy, knotted, and in places thin enough to show the discolored, rotting skin beneath. The stench of decay came off him even more pungently than before, caught and amplified by all the hair. The amulet’s lights pulsed rhythmically from where it sat embedded in the fur of his chest, above the dark zigzag of stitches along his underbelly.

“I don’t understand,” Bethany said, pulling my attention back to her. “This house was supposed to be safe. How did the shadowborn get in? Did the ward fail?”

“No,” I said, “the ward is still up. I felt it downstairs, just as strong as before.”

“Then how the hell did they find us?” she demanded.

“They’re not the only ones,” I said. “Someone else got inside. Last night, when you were asleep.”

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. “What? Who?”

“His name is Bennett.
Was
Bennett. He’s dead now.”

She blinked. “You killed him?”

“Complicated question, but no, when he stopped by he was already dead. He was all … messed up.”

“You should have told me someone got in,” Bethany said angrily.

“I didn’t have a chance. He gave me something, a charm I think, and the next thing I knew it zapped me across town to Columbus Circle. But first Bennett warned me. He said something was coming for me. Bethany, this is all my fault. It’s me they’re looking for.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “They’re not looking for you, they’ve been turning this place upside down looking for the box. That’s the only reason Thornton and I are still in one piece. They were too busy trying to find the box to look for us.”

“That doesn’t make sense. The box isn’t even here. You said it was with Gregor.”

“
They
don’t know that.” She chewed her bottom lip as she thought. “Whoever summoned them gave them the wrong information. But it still doesn’t explain how they got past the ward.”

Ingrid had wondered the same thing. She’d said someone had betrayed us.

And then it hit me. God, how could I have been so stupid? I’d wondered why Bennett was bothering to help me, but I should have trusted my instincts. When I’d come back to the house, the front door was unlocked. Someone had to have done that from the inside, and there was only one person who would have.

Bennett. He’d led the shadowborn right into the safe house.

If I saw that dead son of a bitch again, I would put a stake through his fucking heart.

“It was Bennett,” I told Bethany. “He lied to me. He played me like a damn fool.” But if Bennett and the shadowborn were working together, why give me advance warning? Why get me out of the house before they came? What was he up to?

The dresser bucked hard against me, as if all three shadowborn had thrown themselves against the door at once.

“You said he gave you a charm?” Bethany asked. “Let me see it.”

Bracing my legs, I pulled the small, bean-shaped object out of my pocket and tossed it to her quickly.

Bethany studied the charm a moment, turning it over in her hand. “It’s a displacer, a limited range teleportation charm. They’re almost impossible to come by and extremely difficult to engineer. Dead or not, this Bennett has some impressive skills.”

“I doubt he made that thing,” I said. “That’s what keeps sticking in my head. If Bennett had access to something like this, he would still be alive.”

She frowned. “You should have told me. It’s never a good sign when the dead are up and walking.”

Thornton growled at her.

“Present company excluded,” she added.

“But that’s the weird thing, he wasn’t like Thornton,” I said. “He didn’t have an amulet. He was just … walking and talking.”

“That’s impossible,” she said. “Spirits of the dead can only possess the living, they can’t possess dead bodies, not even their own. At least, not without the help of a charm like the Breath of Itzamna. And to even get a dead body to rise at all is…” She paused. “Wait. Did you see anything in his eyes, like a light that didn’t belong there?”

I nodded, gritting my teeth as I pushed back against the lurching dresser. “A red light.”

Thornton stopped pacing. He turned to Bethany and whined.

“Trent, that wasn’t the man you knew,” she said. “That was a revenant, a dead body controlled by magic. It’s a puppet, nothing more.”

“But he
knew
me,” I said. “He mentioned things only he would know.”

“Whoever created the revenant would have access to his memories as long as his brain was still fresh enough. But to even create a revenant, you’d have to be an extremely powerful necromancer…” She trailed off, chewing her lip again. “I don’t like this. Something’s going on. Revenants, the shadowborn … this is much bigger than we thought.”

There was another thump on the door. This time, the sharp tip of a katana broke through the wood. I flinched away from the blade but kept my back against the dresser.

“We’re running out of time,” I said. “Tell me you’ve figured out a way to get past the three zombie musketeers out there.”

She sighed. “We can’t, that’s the problem. We’re trapped here. The Avasthi phalanx is the only thing keeping us safe. The minute we leave this room, we’re dead.”