Dying Is My Business by Nicholas Kaufmann Read Free Book Online

I said. “We have to get out of here.”
    “He’s not a dog,” she said. She gritted her teeth as she pushed a half-smashed crate out of her way. “Just help me.”
    If she wanted to stay here to find her pet, she was crazy. Which probably meant I was, too. We’d both seen the same impossible things, fought off the same creatures that couldn’t be real. And yet, she didn’t seem fazed by it at all. Maybe she was used to being crazy. I could always ask her for tips.
    With a heavy sigh, I put down the staff and helped her lift away the heavier bits of furniture and junk. “What were those things?”
    “Gargoyles,” she said, grunting as she pulled another crate clear of the mess. “They must have followed us here from the cathedral. I cast a ward around this place, but I guess it was too late. They must have already seen us come here.”
    I didn’t understand half of what she said. I looked up at the gaping hole in the ceiling again. “Gargoyles? For real? Like, off of buildings…?”
    She glared at me. “Do they look like they came off of buildings?” She sighed and gazed up at the hole. “They waited until I was alone, and then they broke through.” I understood that part, at least. It was the gargoyles who’d put the hole in the roof. “I should have known better. This is all my fault.” She picked up an old metal folding chair from the pile and threw it aside in frustration. It clattered loudly on the floor. I decided to hold off on any more questions for a while.
    Between the two of us the job went quickly. A few minutes later we finally cleared away the last of the debris.
    “Thornton!” she said.
    But the body on the floor wasn’t Thornton. Thornton was a big gray timber wolf, but what lay on the floor was a naked man, curled on his side in the fetal position. He wasn’t breathing. The floor around his body was slick with blood from the long, deep scratches in his chest and stomach. Bits of something red and meaty poked out of the wounds.
    Then I noticed a leather bracelet around his right wrist, in the same place I’d seen it on the wolf’s leg. It had the same intricate, interwoven design in the leather and thin strands of gold. How was that possible? I was sure I’d seen a wolf.
    I thought of the old movies I’d seen on the TV in the fallout shelter, ones where Henry Hull and Lon Chaney Jr. played men who became wolves. There was a word for it, but it was impossible. I didn’t even want to think it.
    She knelt beside the naked man and felt his neck for a pulse. “Oh no,” she said.
    “He’s dead,” I said. It wasn’t a question so much as confirmation. There was no way Thornton couldn’t be dead with his body torn open like that, but sometimes people didn’t believe it until they saw for themselves. They had to touch the body with their own hands because the enormity of it was too much to process otherwise. The mother of the little boy, number eight on my list, had done that. She’d put her hands on the boy’s cheeks like she was checking him for a fever. The memory turned into a rock in my stomach. Suddenly I felt useless and stupid standing there watching yet another woman mourn her loss.
    She leaned back on her haunches and shook her head. “Oh, Thornton.”
    “We should go,” I said. I took her arm to help her up, but she yanked it away.
    “I told you, I’m not leaving him here.”
    I knelt down across the body from her. “Look, those things, those gargoyles aren’t going to stay away for long. We need to move now, before this place is crawling with them.”
    She looked over her shoulder at the empty warehouse. “They’ve gone to get help. I’d say we’ve got about fifteen minutes before they come back with twice their number. That should give us plenty of time.”
    “Plenty of time for what?”
    She didn’t answer. She reached into another pocket of her cargo vest and pulled out a long, thick, golden chain. Dangling from its end was a pendant in the shape of a