“You’re saying what happened back there could happen again?” I looked at my shot glass and wished it weren’t empty.
“You’ll get used to it. People get used to all kinds of weird stuff.”
He had a point there, said the man who kept coming back from the dead. But I was barely used to that, how was I supposed to get used to this new ability, too? What other surprises were lurking beneath the surface, waiting to show themselves? It felt like too much to think about.
I glanced at the TV showing NY1, and my heart jumped. On the screen, a reporter in Times Square was standing in front of my upside-down Explorer, which was walled off by yellow police tape. Thornton caught my expression and turned to see for himself. The reporter’s lips moved in a silent pantomime of speech while the closed-captioning subtitles scrolled across the bottom of the screen.
… LEFT THREE OFFICERS INJURED, ONE CRITICALLY, IN WHAT WITNESSES ARE CALLING A YOUTUBE STUNT GONE DISASTROUSLY WRONG …
“I don’t get it,” I said. “How can they just brush it off like that? Those witnesses saw the Black Knight. They saw us fighting.”
Thornton shrugged. “People see what they want to see. It’s human nature. They barely glance at strangers’ faces. Their minds fill in the blanks, and unless they know differently they just see what they expect. It’s the same when it comes to magic or the supernatural. People just see what they want to see.” I threw him a skeptical look. “You don’t believe me? Okay, tell me then, what did you see when you first went into the warehouse? Was it gargoyles?”
I thought back. I had entered the warehouse with my gun drawn, seen the hole in the ceiling first, and then Bethany, and facing off against her—
I’d seen exactly what I expected to see.
“Men in trench coats,” I answered. Thornton nodded as if he’d proven his case. “Did the gargoyles make me see that?”
“Nope, that was all you. But don’t feel bad about it, it could have been worse. A lot of people don’t see gargoyles coming until it’s too late. All those stories you hear about people disappearing off of cruise ships or kids vanishing from school trips without a trace…”
“That’s gargoyles, too?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s other things. Gargoyles aren’t the worst of what’s out there.”
There were worse things? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “Okay, but what about the Black Knight? Everyone saw him. How can they just explain him away as some lunatic making a YouTube video?”
Thornton leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Most people think that all they see is all there is. Sometimes they don’t even know what they’re really seeing. Look around, look at the people in this bar. Any one of them could be a lycanthrope, or a vampire, or a shape-shifting demon in human form. If you didn’t know those things were real, how could you tell?”
I looked at the drinkers lined up at the bar, studied their faces, but everyone looked normal to me. “I can’t,” I conceded.
“Exactly,” Thornton said. “Magic exists, but it’s a shadow world. It flourishes in the places people don’t look, the streets they don’t go down at night. Sometimes it’s right under your nose, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re not going to see it.”
I kept looking at the drinkers. A few must have felt my eyes on them because they turned in my direction. But it wasn’t me they were looking at, I realized quickly. It was Thornton. They leaned toward each other, murmuring something under the jukebox music and glaring at him with the intensity of a hawk hunting a mouse.
Thornton, oblivious to the men staring at him, kept talking. “Trust me, it’s better this way. If people knew the truth about what’s really out there, they’d go looking for it and get themselves killed. Or worse.”
I turned back to him. “Worse? What would be worse?”
He ignored my question. “It’s not safe out there, and it’s getting worse by the day. There are forces at work that are supposed to keep everything in balance, but I’ll be damned if they’re doing their job anymore. Sure, once upon a time everything was supposedly in perfect balance, the light and the dark. Then the Shift happened, and everything went to hell.”
“The Shift?”
“Something happened that tipped the balance. The darkness got stronger, and the light got weaker. Over time, magic grew darker and darker. You can’t carry it inside you anymore the way magicians used to. If magic gets inside you it infects you, corrupts you, turns you dark. It changes you into something wrong. The only safe way to handle magic now is with artifacts, objects that are infused with spells. Charms, amulets, weapons.”
“Like the Anubis Hand,” I said.
Thornton tapped a finger against the amulet on his chest. “And this.”
I thought of the energy that had come out of my hands, and all the times I’d woken up from being dead. Did I have magic inside me? Was that what gave me these abilities? If I did, would it corrupt me, turn me into something wrong?
Had it already?
“There are hundreds of the Infected out there,” Thornton continued. “They’ve either embraced the darkness inside them or been subsumed by it, and their numbers are growing every day. The things that thrive in the dark have crept into the abandoned and forgotten places of the world and spread like a disease. It’s an avalanche, growing stronger from its own momentum. I don’t even know if it can be stopped anymore, or if things can be put back to rights. We do what we can. We secure magical artifacts before they can do any harm or fall into the wrong hands, but we keep our heads down. We don’t draw attention to ourselves, and we don’t take anyone on outright.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a lighter and a pack of Marlboro reds. He stuck a cigarette between his lips and lit it. “Maybe you think we’re cowards, but it’s the only way we can survive when we’re this outnumbered.”
“I don’t think you’re cowards,” I said. “But I think you’re a fool if you think you can change the world. It is what it is. It’s never going to change.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” He took a drag off his cigarette. He couldn’t taste it any more than he could the Guinness, but it seemed to calm him. He let the smoke out in a long, leisurely exhalation, a gray cloud that swirled up toward the light fixture above the table. More smoke wafted out from between the buttons of his shirt, exiting his body through the deep gashes in his torso. I decided it was better not to mention it to him.
“Oi, you can’t smoke in here!” the bartender shouted over the music. “Take it outside!”
The men at the bar who’d stared at Thornton earlier turned to glare at him again. A grizzled old man in a porkpie hat added, “You shouldn’t smoke anyway. Bloody things’ll kill you.”
“Too late for that,” Thornton muttered. He dropped the cigarette into his beer, where it sizzled out.
I watched Thornton closely. “Are you scared?” I asked.
“Scared of what?”
“Dying.”
“Nah, dying’s easy,” he said. “Comedy is hard.”
“I’m serious.”
His gaze was steady as it met mine. “I’m already dead, Trent. What’s there to be scared of?”