Nicholas Kaufmann: Dying Is My Business

What had Thornton said when I asked if he was afraid to die? That nothing was ever what it seemed. Death wasn’t the end, just another plane of existence. I remembered hoping he was right. I still did.

I reached out to touch the bracelet. It moved, sliding away from me. I yanked my hand back. What the hell? I looked around the empty office. There were no open windows, no breeze that could explain it moving like that. It was almost as though the bracelet had moved on its own.

Goose bumps lifted the hair on my arms. I whispered, “Thornton?”

Isaac called my name from downstairs. I took one last look around, decided I was being foolish, and went downstairs to the main room.

Philip lay on the couch, covered in fresh dirt and bandages. “What are you looking at?” he groused at me.

“Boris Karloff as Imhotep?” I answered. If Philip got the reference, he only growled in reply. Same old crabby vampire. He was going to be fine.

Gabrielle was at the desk, huddled over the laptop. She hit a button and the wall of monitors flickered to life. “I used a transfer charm to patch the homunculus’s psychic link into the computer so we could all see it,” she explained. “It’s coming through now.”

“If I’m right, Melanthius will have gone right back to Reve Azrael’s lair,” Isaac said. “Whatever we see now will be our best chance of finding her. Maybe our only chance.”

The screens of all six video monitors flickered and jumped. An image appeared, accompanied by ambient noise through their speakers, but everything was shaking, making it hard to decipher what I was looking at. The image spun, shook again, and then stabilized. Gabrielle explained the homunculus had jumped off Melanthius’s cloak and was clinging to a wall, granting us a much better view.

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.

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.

An enormous amount of thanks are due to Daniel Braum, M.M. De Voe, Ben Francisco, Sarah Langan, and David Wellington for their invaluable help. Many thanks as well to Richard Curtis and Michael Homler for making this happen. And, as always, to Mongo Bettina for lighting the way.

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