On the monitors was what appeared to be a small room with bare walls. There was a table in the center of it. On it lay a human male corpse.
Gabrielle stiffened. “It’s Thornton.” Her voice hitched. Before leaving the park, we’d helped her search the grounds for Thornton’s body. We found the other bodies Reve Azrael had discarded once she didn’t need them anymore, but not Thornton’s. That one she’d kept for herself.
“Where are they?” Isaac asked, studying the monitors.
“I can’t tell yet,” Gabrielle said.
Melanthius came into view then, walking over to the table where Thornton’s body lay. His back was to us. He took off his gloves and laid them on the table. He pushed back his hood. He gripped the skull mask with both hands and pulled it off his face. He reached into a pocket of his cloak, pulled out a pair of dark sunglasses, and put them on. Then he turned around.
My breath caught in my throat. I went instantly cold, as if someone had dropped me into an ice bath.
The face I saw duplicated on all six monitors was unmistakable.
“It’s him,” I said, barely a whisper. “It’s Underwood.”
The house of cards Underwood had built so carefully fell down then. I remembered him sliding the Bersa semiautomatic across the table to me, and how often he’d repeated his Golden Rule: Never lose your gun. No revenant had hidden the homunculus on my gun. It had been there from the start, put there by Underwood himself so he could keep tabs on me. That was how he’d found me so quickly after I was teleported out of the safe house, and again after we picked up the box from Gregor. He’d gone so far as to blow up his own base at the gas station just to throw us off the trail. He’d killed Big Joe and Tomo in the same explosion because their faces had been seen at the auto body shop. Two birds with one stone. It was ruthless, monstrous, and nothing less than I expected from him.
My hands clenched into fists. On the monitors, Underwood came forward so suddenly that I took an involuntary step back. His face filled the screens. I knew he was looking at the homunculus, but it felt like he was staring directly at me.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” Underwood said. “Poor Trent. You really have no idea how far this con goes. Or how long it’s been going.” He took off his sunglasses, revealing the eyes I had never seen the whole year I worked for him. His pupils glowed with pinpoints of red light.
Oh, God. My mouth went dry. The freezing cold temperature of the fallout shelter. The gallons of cologne. Underwood was a revenant. He always had been.
“What you did today can’t go unpunished, Trent,” Underwood said. “We’ll be seeing each other again soon. Very soon. Surely you don’t think I need this two-bit homunculus to find you? It was nothing but a fail-safe. I know where you are. I always know where you are. It’s like I’ve been telling you all along. You’re my go-to guy.”
A shape came onto the screen, drifting into frame from the right-hand side. At first it was a dark blur, indistinct. Then I realized what I was seeing was hair—long, ragged black hair that fell in wisps across a thin face, and eyes so dark they looked like bottomless black pits.
Reve Azrael. She stared at me through the homunculus.
Stared at me the way she always used to back in the fallout shelter.
She waved her hand, casting a spell. There was a brief flash as the homunculus was destroyed, and then the screen went blank.
About the Author
NICHOLAS KAUFMANN is the author of General Slocum’s Gold, Chasing the Dragon, and Still Life: Nine Stories. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Thriller Award. He and his wife live in Brooklyn, New York. Visit his Web site at www.nicholaskaufmann.com.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DYING IS MY BUSINESS. Copyright © 2013 by Nicholas Kaufmann. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Ervin Serrano
Cover illustration by Chris McGrath
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request
ISBN 978-1-250-03610-0 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-03609-4 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250036094
First Edition: October 2013
Dying Is My Business Page 42
