I felt Big Joe’s fist hit my cheek before I even saw him swing. I fell to my hands and knees on the thinly carpeted floor of the vestibule. “Know your fucking place, T-Bag!”
Underwood crouched down next to me. “Trent, Trent, Trent. When did you become such a disappointment? How did a simple job like this become too much for you to handle?”
I spat on the floor, my saliva tinged with blood. “Walk away from this one, Underwood. Whatever’s in that box, it’s not worth what’ll come after you once you’ve got it.”
“Walk away? Do you know how much money is on the line? Come on, Trent, enough with the bullshit. I’ll tell you what, just bring me the box and all will be forgiven. We can pretend we never had this conversation. I want it in my hands by tonight. Don’t make me come looking for you again. Am I clear?”
I shook my head. “It’s not just gargoyles, man, there’s this thing in black armor.”
“Okay. Give us a minute, guys,” Underwood said. Tomo and Big Joe left the vestibule to stand guard outside the door, leaving us alone. Underwood held his hand out to me. I looked at it like it was a dog ready to bite me. Finally, I took it and he helped me to my feet. His hand was ice cold, as though he’d absorbed all the air-conditioning from the fallout shelter. “I’ve always tried to do right by you, haven’t I, Trent? I gave you a job and a place to sleep. I made certain inquiries into your past, like I promised. Do you remember what I told you last night? I think you’re going to be very happy with what I found. Very happy.”
I studied Underwood’s face, but behind his sunglasses his expression was inscrutable.
“My name?” I whispered.
He nodded. My chest went tight. Underwood knew my name. He knew it and I didn’t. It was almost too much to handle.
“Tell me,” I begged. “Just tell me my name. Please. Just tell me that one thing.”
“I’m wondering if you’re ready,” he said. “Maybe you don’t want it as badly as I thought. After all, I told you what you had to do first and you still haven’t done it.”
“Please,” I said again.
“The terms of our deal are quite clear,” he said. “Bring me the box. Leave no witnesses. Hold up your end of the bargain and I’ll hold up mine.”
I swallowed hard. I was so close to the truth I could almost taste it, but what Underwood was asking me to do …
I’d made a terrible mistake, aligning myself with this monster. I knew that now. Hell, I’d known it ever since the little boy in the crack house, only I hadn’t done a thing about it, hadn’t even tried, and now it was coming back to bite me.
Underwood sighed. “I blame myself. This is my fault. I thought you could handle this one on your own, but I see now I was wrong. That’s why I’m sending Tomo and Big Joe with you.”
My chest squeezed tight. “What? No, Underwood—”
He raised a hand to shush me. “No, it’s okay, it’s good that they’ll go with you. The job will go a lot faster.” He turned to call Tomo and Big Joe back in.
“Wait,” I said quickly. Underwood faced me again. “There’s no need to get them involved. I can do this.”
“Are you sure?” Underwood asked. “They could be a big help. They’re not squeamish about torture, or killing. To tell you the truth, I think the crazy bastards actually get a kick out of it. I once saw Tomo gun down a man’s grandmother just to get him talking.”
“I’ll handle it myself,” I insisted.
Underwood bared his teeth. It took me a moment to understand that he was smiling. “There’s the Trent I know. Good dog.”
He clapped me on the cheek, harder than usual. There was nothing remotely friendly about it.
In that moment, I knew he was lying. He hadn’t found anything, and he never intended to. He’d lied to me from the start, used me, manipulated me into doing terrible things while he filled my head with empty promises. I’d wanted so badly to believe he would help me find the answers that I’d gone along with it willingly, ignoring any second thoughts. What a fool I was. What a goddamn fool.
Outside, sunlight swept down the street from where the sun crested the horizon. Dawn. Time had run out. I had to go now.
“I’ll have it for you by tonight,” I said again, hoping he wouldn’t see through the lie. I moved to get past him. “But I have to go—”
“Stay a moment,” Underwood said.
Damn. Why wouldn’t he let me go? “If you want the box, I have to go now.”
“Stay,” Underwood repeated. The tone of his voice told me I didn’t have a choice. “Did I ever tell you about Gibbons?”
“No,” I said quickly. The street continued to brighten. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. Each beat of my heart felt like the ticking of a clock.
“Gibbons was my collector, like you, only way back in the day,” Underwood said. “I sent him to collect a diamond shipment headed for a Diamond Row merchant who’d crossed me. Only Gibbons never came back from the job. See, he thought he could just take the diamonds and run. He forgot who he was messing with. He forgot I’ve got eyes and ears all over this city. I caught up with him in a bar in Harlem, some cheap, off-the-grid joint where he thought he’d be safe. I walked out of that bar half an hour later, but he didn’t. Neither did his girlfriend, or his brother, or any of the others who helped him take what was rightfully mine. The dumb son of a bitch honestly thought he could run from me. But nobody can run from me, Trent. Nobody can be protected from me. I always get what I want. I always take what’s mine. I always win. Funny I never told you that story. It’s one of my favorites.” He grinned the way I imagined a mad dog did when it was about to take a chunk out of you. “Now you can go.”
We walked out of the vestibule together. As Tomo and Big Joe stepped aside to let us through, a sleek black sedan pulled up to the curb and idled there, engine purring.
Underwood took my gun back from Big Joe. “You remember how to use this, right?” He tossed me the gun. I thought about putting a bullet in him and just ending the charade right then and there, but it would only bring Tomo and Big Joe down on me and I didn’t have time for that. Instead, I slipped the gun into the pocket of my trench coat. Underwood winked at me and said, “I knew you were my go-to guy.”
From behind the steering wheel, the black-haired woman stared at me the way she always did. Her dark eyes looked like bottomless black pits.
It seemed to take forever for Underwood, Tomo, and Big Joe to get in the car. As soon as they drove away, I took off down the block, running as fast as I could. My shadow grew with each passing moment as the sun inched its way up. I tried not to think about what might be happening back at the safe house. Were they fighting for their lives? Were they already dead?
I thought of the list of names, crumpled and hidden inside my mattress. In my mind, I saw the little dead boy in the crack house again, his tiny, shriveled corpse cradled by his shrieking, grieving mother. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to make the image go away, but it stayed, stuck there like glue. What if I was already in too deep to ever get out? Some people didn’t deserve redemption. It terrified me to think I might be one of them.
I turned onto Ingrid’s block and crashed directly into a man walking toward me. I tripped, but the man reached out and steadied me.
“Yo, I got you, pal,” he said. He looked homeless, dirty and foul-smelling with long hair and a knotted beard. His fingernails were rimmed with dirt. The words CHILD OF FIRE were written across the chest of his stained, ratty T-shirt in flaming letters. “Spare some change, pal? Can you help me get something to eat?”
I shook him off without a word and kept running. In the middle of the block I spotted the safe house and prayed I wasn’t too late. When I ran up the stoop, I could still feel the powerful ward pushing against me. For a moment I thought that meant everything was okay, that they’d fixed the ward and were still safe inside—until I reached the double doors at the top of the steps.
The right-hand door was open a crack. That was wrong. Ingrid wo
uldn’t have left it open. Even with the ward protecting the house, she’d still locked the doors last night. I’d seen her do it. It’s something ingrained in all New Yorkers, as deep as any primal instinct. No matter how safe your neighborhood is, you always lock your door.
I pulled out my gun and carefully pushed the door open. The entrance hallway was in shambles. The umbrella stand and shoe rack had been overturned. The Hummel figurines had been knocked off the top of the credenza and lay broken in dusty shards on the floor.
I looked to the staircase at the far end of the hallway, and my heart dropped into my gut like a chunk of ice.
Halfway up the steps, Ingrid Bannion lay on her back in a pool of her own blood.
Sixteen
I put my gun away and ran to the stairs. Judging by the defensive wounds on Ingrid’s arms and the smoking black scorch marks on the wall, she hadn’t gone down without a fight. She was bleeding heavily from multiple stab wounds, but she was still breathing. She was still alive. I knelt over her. Whoever did this had come looking for me. This was my fault. I should have been here.
“Ingrid,” I said.
Her eyelids fluttered at the sound of her name. “Trent?” She opened her eyes, focusing on me. She winced in pain. “They came right through the ward … I couldn’t stop them…”
“Who were they?” I said.
“Shadowborn,” she said.
I shook my head. “I don’t know who that is.”
“Trent, listen to me.” She sounded winded, a wet rattle at the end of each breath. “Something’s wrong. They never should have found us … not with the ward up … they must have had help … someone told them … someone betrayed us.…”
“I have to get you to a hospital.” I started to slip my hands under her as gently as I could, but she stopped me.
“No. Leave me … there’s nothing you can do. Find the others. Help them.” Ingrid coughed, and blood sluiced out from between her lips. “I was wrong, Trent. You have to tell Isaac—tell him I was wrong. It can’t end like this … everything Morbius believed in … everything the Five-Pointed Star stood for. Promise me you’ll tell Isaac to keep fighting … keep fighting the darkness … Promise me.” She touched my face with her bare right hand. Her fingers were sticky with blood. And then her eyes filled with sudden terror, and she shook her head violently. “Oh God, Trent, your aura … it can’t be…”
She looked so frightened of me, of what she saw in me, that I felt a sudden surge of shame, like a monster confronted with its own reflection. But I had to know. I had to. I put my hand over hers, pressing her palm to my cheek. “What do you see? Who am I?”
Her voice wavered. “No. Your aura … it’s—it’s not human … Oh God…” She coughed blood again, her whole body racking with the effort. She turned away, as if she couldn’t bear to look at me any more.
A chill went up my spine. “Ingrid, please tell me. Tell me what I am. Ingrid…” She didn’t answer. It was only when her hand slipped limply off my cheek that I realized she was dead. I reached down and closed her eyes.
What had she seen that terrified her so much?
What the hell was I?
A sudden crash from upstairs startled me. I reached for my gun. Whoever the shadowborn were, they were still in the house. I raced up the steps. On the second floor, I found the living room in shambles. Furniture had been overturned, and more broken figurines littered the floor. The glass display case above the mantelpiece had been smashed, leaving a heap of fallen antique swords beneath it. A round, silver object was half-buried in the wall at shoulder height. It took me a moment to realize it was the serving tray Ingrid had used last night. Someone had thrown it with such force that it had embedded itself in the plaster.
But the room was empty, the only movement the motes of dust swirling in the columns of morning light from the windows.
Another crash came from overhead, the sound of a door being kicked open. Shit, the bedrooms. I hurried up the steps to the third floor, my finger on the trigger of the gun, but when I reached the top, the hallway was empty. All the doors were closed except one. The door to Bethany’s bedroom. From where I stood on the landing I couldn’t see inside, but a sliver of the wall was visible. So were the shadows that moved across it. Someone was in there—multiple someones, it looked like—and from the sound of it they were tossing the room. Why? Wasn’t it me they were after? Did they really think I’d be hiding under a bed? I inched toward the open doorway, keeping my finger on the trigger.
I only made it a couple of steps before a figure walked out of the room and into the hall. It wore a sleek, black leather jumpsuit that extended up over its neck to form a tight, seamless hood around its head. Its face was hidden behind an oval steel mask, plain and featureless. There weren’t even any eyeholes, though apparently it didn’t need any to know I was there. It turned to face me right away.
So this was a shadowborn. It didn’t look so tough. In fact, it looked pretty scrawny under all that leather.
I leveled the Bersa semiautomatic at it, but had to stop myself from emptying the clip into its chest. This thing had killed Ingrid and I wanted it dead for that—hell, I wanted it to suffer for that—but I needed information first. “Where are the others? What have you done with them?”
By way of an answer, the shadowborn drew a katana from the sheath on its back. The sword’s long, thin, single-edged blade glinted in the light of the hallway.
“I was kind of hoping you’d say that.” I pulled the trigger, but as soon as the shot rang out the shadowborn was gone. The bullet punched a hole in the wall on the far side of the hallway. A moment later, the shadowborn reappeared in the same spot, blinking back into existence as quickly as it had vanished.
I lowered my gun. “What the hell…?”
It occurred to me this was why Ingrid hadn’t been able to stop them downstairs, not even with her fire magic. If they could vanish into thin air like that, faster than a bullet, then Bennett was right. They really were unstoppable.
Keeping Underwood’s Golden Rule in mind, I dropped the gun into my coat pocket. I wanted my hands free.
The shadowborn’s katana cut through the air with a high-pitched whistle. I jumped back, narrowly avoiding the blade. No way was I going to let this shirt get ruined, too. Or anything worse. Bennett had said they could take me apart in ways I couldn’t come back from. I didn’t want to find out what that meant.
Just then, two more shadowborn, identical to the first, walked into the hallway from the bedroom. They drew their katanas in unison.
Three against one. The odds had already been pretty bad, but they’d just gotten worse. I backed up, keeping my eyes on the shadowborn. All three of them winked out of sight. A moment later, they reappeared right in front of me. Startled, I fell backward, landing on the floor in front of one of the closed bedroom doors. The shadowborn raised their katanas. I closed my eyes, waiting to be skewered like shish kabob.
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.
Dying Is My Business Page 15
