Dying Is My Business

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  Topsiders? The equinox? Just when I thought I was getting a decent handle on things, I was confused again. I felt like a preschooler sitting in on a Ph.D.-level class.

  Thornton stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to Bethany. Pedestrians, annoyed to find someone standing in their way, mumbled to themselves about stupid tourists, but when they looked up and saw his face they blanched and skirted around him quickly. “I have to see Gabrielle,” he said. “Bethany, I’m fucking dying!”

  “You’re already dead,” she said. He winced at the harshness of her words. “If we don’t secure that box, there’s a damn good chance everyone else is going to die, too. I can’t let that happen, even if it means not getting you back in time. This is bigger than you, Thornton. It’s bigger than all of us.”

  He glared at her, his eyes like steel. I saw the muscles of his jaw clench under his waxy, pale skin. “You really are a bitch, Bethany. Do you know that?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He sighed. “Fine, I’ll take you there. Let’s just get this over with.” He walked back in the direction we’d come from, purposely knocking into Bethany’s shoulder as he passed. The pearl-like charm around her neck jangled.

  She shook her head. “I don’t have a choice,” she said, but I didn’t know if she was talking to me or herself.

  “You can take off that charm now,” I said. “The danger’s passed.”

  She glared me. “I’m not taking any chances,” she said.

  I followed then as they walked single file down the sidewalk. They didn’t speak or look at each other. Silence filled the space between us like poison gas. I didn’t like it. For a while there, being with Bethany and Thornton had felt like the closest thing to friendship I’d ever known, but whatever bond of trust and camaraderie that had developed between us was broken now, maybe irreparably.

  One thing still nagged at me, something Bethany had brought up but couldn’t answer. Whoever had sent Bennett and the shadowborn knew where we were. But there was a ward around the safe house, and Bethany had told me how wards worked. Nobody should have been able to find us unless they already knew our location.

  Ingrid was right. Someone had betrayed us. Someone who knew exactly where we would be last night.

  Someone had turned Bennett’s corpse into a revenant in order to get me out of the way before the shadowborn came. Why? And why use Bennett, of all people? That was no accident. It implied that whoever was behind it knew me—or at least enough about me to know Bennett and I had crossed paths before. There were very few people with that kind of information.

  Put together, all the clues pointed to someone on the inside.

  But who? It couldn’t be Bethany or Thornton. Fear wasn’t something you could fake, and they’d both been genuinely frightened of the shadowborn. What about the colleagues Bethany and Thornton had mentioned—Isaac, Gabrielle, and Philip? Any one of them could have sold us out to get the box for themselves.

  All roads led back to that fucking box. Underwood was holding it over my head as leverage and forcing me into an impossible position. It was putting Bethany and Thornton in constant danger. It was getting people killed, good people like Ingrid. I was starting to hate the damn thing.

  And just like that, I knew what I had to do about it.

  I quickened my pace to catch up to Bethany. Thornton continued walking briskly ahead of us, not looking back and doing his best to stay upright.

  “You mentioned the equinox before,” I said. “What does that have to do with the box?”

  “The equinox is when what’s inside the box becomes incredibly powerful,” she said. “More powerful than you can imagine.”

  “It still sounds like some kind of weapon to me,” I said. She didn’t answer. “I guess I’m finally going to see it for myself, huh?”

  “I guess so,” she said, “provided Gregor gives it back to us. He’s a hoarder. He’s not exactly known for sharing.”

  “He’ll give it back. We’ll make him if we have to.”

  She arched an eyebrow at me. I still hadn’t decided if I found it endearing or annoying. “Good luck with that,” she said.

  “Trust me, I can be very persuasive when I want to be,” I told her. “So how far away is Gregor’s apartment?”

  “He doesn’t live in an apartment.”

  “House, then. Whatever.”

  She smirked and shook her head. She pointed at the street corner, where a sewer grate sat at the curb. “He lives down there somewhere. Through the sewers.”

  “Seriously?” I asked. “Thornton gave the box to a homeless man?”

  “Gregor’s not a man, Trent,” she said. “Gregor’s a dragon.”

  I stopped, staring slack jawed at her as she walked ahead. “He’s a what now?”

  Twenty

  The ruins stood on the far side of the West Side Highway, directly across from the lush greenery of DeWitt Clinton Park, with its manicured grass and impeccable swing set. The ruins looked out of place, a reminder of a much older New York City, before the relentless tentacles of gentrification had strangled it. Once an apartment building, time and decay had turned it into little more than an empty, crumbling, graffiti-covered façade. With no walls and no roof, it stood open to the elements.

  Thornton led us through the hole where the front door should have been. Beyond it, where the interior of the building once stood, was a field of overgrown grass and weeds. He led the way through the field and past a low, broken brick wall that marked the rear corner of the building. There, he cleared away some trash and twigs to reveal a thick metal door in the ground, inscribed with the words N.Y.C. SEWER. A padlock sat hooked, but not locked, through the door’s latch. Thornton removed the lock and pulled the handle, but the door slipped from his fingers and clanged shut again. He stared at it as if he couldn’t understand what had just happened.

  I pulled the door open for him. Beneath it was a hole in the ground—dark, rectangular, and lined with concrete. A ladder stood bolted to the side, running deep into the darkness below. Behind me, Thornton was still staring at his hands.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He looked up at me, and said only, “We should hurry.” They were the first words he’d spoken to either of us in nearly half an hour.

  Bethany started down the ladder first. When she’d descended a dozen feet or so, I went next. It grew darker the deeper down I went. The sunlight from the doorway above me dissipated in the murk. After a moment Thornton began his descent, closing the door above him and casting us in complete darkness. With no way to see how far down the ladder went, I couldn’t tell where I was on the rungs. I felt like I was floating in outer space. By the time I reached the bottom, I figured we had to be a good forty or fifty feet down. I expected to step off the ladder into a knee-deep river of sewage. The idea of walking through human excrement wasn’t the most enticing prospect, but walking through New York City’s seemed exponentially worse somehow. I was happily surprised when my boots hit dry metal instead. In the darkness I heard Bethany digging around in her vest. She mumbled a creepy incantation, and a moment later there was light, emanating from the same round, mirrored charm I’d seen at the warehouse. She held it in front of her like a flashlight to illuminate the cement tunnel around us.

  I wiped the grime from the ladder off my hands. “You can’t seriously tell me there’s a dragon living under New York City.”

  “Is it really so hard to believe?” she asked. “You’ve probably heard him moving underground at night, or seen the smoke of his breath coming up through manholes all over the city.”

  “I thought that was just the subway, and steam,” I said.

  “Sometimes. Other times it’s Gregor, out looking for more treasure to hoard.”

  Treasure? My mind swelled with images of a room full of gold, and chests overflowing with silver and jewels. It made my fingers tingle. I could buy my freedom from Underwood with that kind of money. Grease enough palms to get the answers I needed. How
much would it take? I wondered. How much could I carry?

  Once Thornton reached the bottom of the ladder, he held onto the rungs an extra moment for balance. He didn’t make eye contact with either of us. Bethany shone the light one way, then the other. The tunnel extended deep into the distance on either side. The walls and ceiling were curved to form an almost perfectly round tube, arcing down to meet the flat metal platform of the floor.

  “Which way?” she asked.

  Thornton didn’t reply. He just started walking, following the thick iron pipes that snaked along the ceiling.

  “I guess we’re going this way,” Bethany said. We started walking after him.

  “There’s something I don’t get,” I said. “There must be sewer workers down here all the time, Con Ed guys fixing the underground transformers, phone company workers checking the lines. You’re telling me in all this time no one has noticed a dragon living down here?”

  “Maybe they just don’t know where to look,” she said. “Gregor has lived down here a long time. My guess is, he knows how to stay out of sight.”

  “How long is a long time?”

  She shrugged. “Who can say? Gregor is an Ancient, one of the first creatures to walk the Earth. Before civilization, before recorded history, before there was anyone or anything else here, this world belonged to them.”

  “You’re fucking with me,” I said, but her expression was serious. “That would make him millions of years old.”

  “Plenty of time to learn how not to get caught,” she said.

  “How can anything live that long?”

  “If I knew the answer to that,” she said, “I’d be a very rich woman.”

  The air grew more humid the farther we went. I heard the faint trickling of water up ahead. The tunnel opened out onto another that ran perpendicular to it, an older tunnel whose walls and ceiling were fashioned from stone bricks instead of cement. A stream of something pungent ran through a narrow trench at the center of the floor. Suddenly I envied Thornton the loss of his sense of smell.

  The farther we walked the more I sensed we were descending deeper beneath the city. I heard the flow of water through tunnels above us, the distant sound of subway wheels far overhead, and wondered just how deep we were. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been walking, and after turning down numerous branching tunnels I was pretty sure I was lost. Thornton knew where he was going, but if something happened to him, or if his amulet ran out of juice before we got back to the surface, we were screwed. There was no way we’d find our way out again.

  Thornton stopped halfway down a tunnel and ran his hands over the bricks in the wall. “There’s a door here. It’ll open if you push.”

  I inspected the wall. It looked solid, without any seams to indicate where a door might be hidden. “Are you sure this is the right spot?” Thornton gave me an impatient look. “Okay, I believe you, I just don’t see any door.”

  “Just push,” Thornton insisted.

  I braced my legs and pushed against the wall. The bricks were slick with condensation, which made it hard to grip, but surprisingly, they gave a little under my weight. I pushed harder, and a large, square slab of the wall slid inward. After a moment a hidden mechanism took over, and the slab withdrew on its own, pulling in and sliding aside until there was an enormous opening in the tunnel wall. Big enough, I noticed, for something much, much larger than us to pass through.

  Beyond the doorway was another tunnel, this one illuminated by burning torches set in iron sconces along the walls. Bethany extinguished the glowing charm with another muttered incantation, and put it away in her vest. We stepped through the doorway and started walking. The wall slid back into place behind us.

  I watched the flames gutter on the torches. Torches didn’t just light themselves, which meant someone had to have lit them. But a dragon? Was I really supposed to swallow that?

  This tunnel was much taller and wider than the others. The walls were hewn from a peculiar reddish-brown rock that had been worn smooth over time, as though it had been eroded by an underground river that long since dried up. Every inch of the walls and ceiling was decorated with carved symbols—pictographs, sigils, emblems, and figures, all flickering in the guttering torchlight. Whatever they were, they looked old. Really old. How long had this tunnel been hidden down here?

  Abruptly, the tunnel came to a dead end where a massive, round stone slab had been set into the center of the wall. It was carved in bas-relief with eight human-shaped figures, as featureless as silhouettes, except for the chiseled auroras of light around each of them and the strange symbols etched on their torsos.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Thornton studied the figures. “A puzzle. We can’t go any farther until we solve it.”

  “You’ve been down here before, you must know the answer,” Bethany said.

  “It’s different each time,” he said. “That’s how Gregor keeps everyone out. Especially thieves.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” I asked. “It doesn’t even look like a puzzle.”

  “I think we’re supposed to choose one of these eight figures,” he said. “But what’s the criteria here? Why select one over the others? Who are they supposed to be?”

  “It must have something to do with those symbols,” Bethany said. “If we can decipher what they are, maybe we can figure out the rest.”

  Thornton moved closer to study the designs etched onto the figures. “They’re not symbols,” he said. “They’re pictograms. Runes. It’s Ehrlendarr, the language of the Ancients.”

  “Can you read it?” I asked.

  Thornton sighed. “Gregor taught me to how to speak it a little, but reading it was never my forte. This first one looks like it means breath. Wind? Damn, I’m just not sure.”

  I examined the figures. Other than the different runes on each one, they were identical. I didn’t see any other clues as to who they might represent. I reached out to touch one of them, but Thornton batted my hand away. It felt like being hit with a slab of cold meat.

  “Don’t,” he snapped. “Not until we’re sure. If you choose the wrong one, valves open in the walls and this whole chamber gets flooded with fire.”

  I pulled my hand back. Apparently Gregor took his security seriously. Anyone who made the wrong choice was toast. Literally.

  I studied the figures again, making sure to keep a safe distance. “If the first word is breath, or wind, maybe they’re not people. What else comes in groups of eight?”

  Thornton hung his head and chuckled to himself. “I’m an idiot. I was so focused on the runes it didn’t even occur to me to wonder why there were eight of them. Bethany, look at these other markings around them, like each one is giving off energy or power.”

  Bethany’s whole face lit up. “It’s them.”

  “It’s got to be,” Thornton agreed. “That first word isn’t breath or wind, it’s air. These runes represent the eight elements.”

  “Eight? Aren’t there only four?” I asked.

  “No, there are eight,” he said. He pointed to each one of the figures. “Air, earth, water, fire, metal, wood, time, and magic.”

  “So these figures are the elements,” I said.

  “No,” Bethany said. “They’re the Guardians.”

  “The who now?” I felt like I was lagging about a hundred miles behind them.

  “They have other names you may have heard of,” she explained. “The Athanasians. The Everlasting. Those Who Dwell Between. They’re ageless and omniscient beings who live at the center of all things, in a place called the Radiant Lands. It’s said that at the dawn of time, these eight beings were granted eternal life and dominion over the elements, one for each of them. They’ve always been there, watching over the world, maintaining the balance. Some say they’re gods and that they created the Ancients, and from the Ancients came the mortals and all life on Earth.”

  “You buy any of that?” I asked. It sounded pretty crazy to me. But then, everything wa
s sounding crazy to me.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been very religious.”

  “If they’re supposed to be watching over us and maintaining the balance, they’re doing a piss-poor job of it,” Thornton said. “All the suffering and misery in the world, all the darkness and evil, and the Guardians don’t do a damn thing. It’s like they’re above it all, happy to just sit back and watch while everything falls to shit.”

  Something occurred to me. I turned to Thornton. “In the bar last night, you told me there were forces that were supposed to keep everything in balance. You meant them, didn’t you? The Guardians?” He nodded. “But you also said something went wrong.”

  “It did,” he said. “Centuries ago, one of the Guardians disappeared. Left. Just gave the world the finger and took off to who knows where. It threw off the balance, and everything changed. Guess which element this Guardian had dominion over.”

  That one was easy. “Magic,” I said, and a piece of the puzzle slid into place. “That’s what caused the Shift.”

  “You got it in one,” Thornton said.

  “So when Morbius created the Five-Pointed Star, he was trying to restore the balance that had been changed by the Shift.”

  “Except it got him killed, and the balance is still screwed up,” Thornton said. “I’m not surprised no one took up the mantle after him. Who’s going to risk their lives to put things right when even the Guardians don’t have your back? When they can just leave their posts whenever they want and let everything come crashing down?”

  I looked at the figures again. “So if there are only seven Guardians left,” I asked, “how come there are eight of them here?”