Nicholas Kaufmann - Dying Is My Business

Isaac raised his hands, Gabrielle raised her morningstar, and Bethany pulled the mirrored charm from her vest. From each of them burst a bright light. Stryge reeled back with another loud howl, and covered his eyes with his arms. He unfolded his wings and started flapping. We began to rise off the ground.

“Trent, get down from there!” Bethany cried.

“No,” I shouted back. “We can’t let him get away! He’ll unmake the whole damn city!”

With great beats of his enormous wings, Stryge tried to lift himself higher, but couldn’t. The light and pain were distracting him, and my added weight kept him off balance. But these were only temporary diversions. It wouldn’t be much longer before he found a way to take flight for real.

“Come down!” Bethany shouted again. “There’s nothing you can do up there!”

She was wrong. There was something I could do. The one thing I was good at. The one thing I’d always been able to do.

I called to Bethany, “The gun! Use the gun!”

She looked down at my gun on the ground, then back up at me. “Bullets won’t kill him!”

“Not him!” I yelled back. “Me! It’s the only way to stop him!”

“What?” She’d heard me, she just couldn’t believe what I was saying.

Carefully letting go of the hilt with one hand, I reached into my shirt and pulled the amulet she’d made for me from around my neck. I hated to take it off, especially now that I knew it worked, but just this once I needed it not to.

Stryge swatted at me again, trying to knock me off of him. I held onto the hilt, swinging my body out of the way of his claws, but as I did the amulet slipped from my fingers and dropped. It tumbled down to the grass below. I hoped it survived the fall, but there was no time to worry about it now.

“Now, Bethany, before it’s too late!” I called to her. “Then run as far from here as you can! All of you!”

Bethany slowly picked up my gun. Damn it, I needed her to move faster. Every second she wasted, Stryge brought me farther out of range. She aimed the gun me. I couldn’t make out her features anymore, we were too high up, but I heard her voice.

“I’m sorry!” she cried, and she pulled the trigger.

She was a good shot, even at long range, though I already knew she would be. The bullet hit me square in the chest. The pain ripped through me like a scalpel, but it was mercifully brief. I died almost instantly, but not before I saw Isaac, Gabrielle, Philip, and Bethany start running, the smoking Bersa semiautomatic still in her hand.

For a moment, there was only blackness, an empty void. Was this the dark that separated the worlds of the living and the dead, some part of me wondered? Were the dead watching me even now? Then, suddenly, there was light again. Way too much light. Even before I sucked the first gulp of air into my lungs, I knew something was wrong. I opened my eyes, and what came out of them was a coldly burning white fire, the same fire that had burned in Stryge’s eyes. The fire of the Ancients. I exhaled, and more of it erupted from my mouth and nose.

I felt like I’d swallowed a nuclear reactor. It flowed like lava through my veins, burned inside me like the heart of the sun. I felt … altered. Changed.

It is a combination of elements that were never meant to be combined.

I got to my feet, but I couldn’t stand for long. I dropped to my hands and knees, vomiting up more gouts of cold white fire. It just kept coming. There was more of it in me than my body could hold.

It is a danger to all who live.

Had the oracles foreseen this? Had they been trying to warn me?

As long as it walks upon this world, as long as it dwells among us, it puts us all in peril.

The fire burned and burned and felt like it would never stop.

Bethany’s voice came from a distance. “Trent? Are you okay? What’s happening?”

She’d come back to check up on me. I squeezed my burning eyes shut and turned away from her. “Stay back! I don’t know what’s happening to me!” I heard her footsteps running toward me, and shouted, “Damn it, stay away!” Something powerful coursed through me, something frightening and building in pressure. “The plan worked, but something’s wrong, it’s different this time.” Then I couldn’t contain it anymore. I leaned back and screamed, the white fire jetting from my eyes, nose, and mouth. Before I knew what was happening, I was floating into the air, as though I were being lifted. I stopped myself somehow, hovering a dozen feet above the ground.

Above, the red and black clouds Stryge had summoned were gone, replaced with a far more normal-looking gray cloud cover. The warring factions of gargoyles were gone, too, probably frightened off by Stryge. In the near distance was the wreckage of the Cloisters, its broken stones littering the hillside. The bits of trees and rocks and body parts had fallen to the ground as well, the laws of physics restored with Stryge’s death.

As for Stryge himself, the once mighty creature lay on his back below me where he’d fallen to the ground. A thirty-foot-tall mummy, shriveled to bone and dried tissue. Once again, I’d done the impossible. I’d killed an Ancient.

Out of habit, I added his name to my mental list.

11. Stryge.

Eleven names. Eleven lives I’d stolen. God. My heart felt heavy at the number, and even heavier when I thought about how many more had died over the last couple of days. More than I could count, and most of them had died because of me. It felt like there was so much blood on my hands they would never be clean. The oracles were right. I was a threat.

Bethany stared up at me in awe, which angered me. Didn’t she know what a monster I was? What an abomination?

But of course she did. She’d seen it firsthand. The thing inside me had almost killed her. I had almost killed her.

My anger boiled inside me. Everything around me changed, as if a filter had been put over my eyes. Suddenly I didn’t see Bethany, or the park grounds, or the wreckage. I saw through them, into them. I saw the millions of silken threads that bound their atoms together, and the more I looked at them, the more I understood how easy it would be to sever those threads, to break those atoms apart. As an experiment, I chose one of the threads in the ground directly below me. I plucked it with my mind. It was a gentle pluck, not even a break, and the ground crumbled. A sinkhole formed as the dirt poured into the darkness below. It was so easy. I could make it bigger, I thought, and plucked again. The sinkhole grew into a crevasse that cut through the ground like a wound. I laughed at how easy it was. I could pluck all the strings if I wanted, even break them and bring everything crashing down, and it would hardly take any effort at all. Perhaps I ought to. Maybe that was what I was meant to do. I could unmake everything and start over from scratch. Or maybe skip starting over altogether. Maybe I would just float in the void I’d created, endless, deathless, until I was as old as Stryge.

Bethany stepped back as the expanding crevasse crept toward her. “Trent, what are you doing?”

“Fulfilling my destiny,” I told her. “You heard what the oracles said, you were there. I’m a threat to all life.” I looked at the Bethany-shaped silhouette where she stood, filled with a thousand silken strings connecting all the little sunbursts of atoms inside her. It looked like she was made of comets and stars. It would be so easy to stop them cold, to just sever the threads inside her. The urge to do it shocked me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. “They said I was an abomination. They were right. I always was. And now this abomination has the power to unmake everything.”