Dying Is My Business Read Online Free Page A

apostrophes—all except for the heroine, Armelle, and the villain, the Ragana. Armelle befriended a magical, telepathic horse (or rather, a Q’horse, only the Q and the apostrophe were silent), fell in love with the pointy-eared elf prince Ch’aqrath, and discovered she wasn’t a peasant at all but an orphaned princess who was prophesied to save the kingdom from the Ragana.
    “There are worlds within worlds,” Ch’aqrath declared, petting the Q’horse’s soft, snowy mane. “The Ragana plans to tear this world asunder and reveal the true world that lies beneath its mask.”
    “And what world would that be?” Armelle queried bravely, though her full, rosy lips quivered with the foreboding fear that overcame her.
    Ch’aqrath set his handsome jaw, alerting her that what he was about to tell her was knowledge known only to Elfkind. “It is a world of wonders and terrors the likes of which you could never believe,” he replied. “Your kind is so fragile, my beautiful companion. Were they to behold the truth, they would surely fall into fits of madness.”
    I grunted, annoyed. Elena De Voe had gotten it wrong. You didn’t need a secret, hidden world to scare people. The real world was awful enough. I continued reading, but by then the spell the story had cast over me was broken. As the Ragana unleashed an army of dragons upon the royal palace, I stopped, closed the book, and put it aside.
    Dragons, magic, worlds within worlds—it was all preposterous. There was no magic to protect you from the rich and powerful; if you didn’t learn to lie, cheat, and steal, you were ground down. There were no ancient prophecies that guided people toward their destiny; everyone just muddled along as best they could. There were no poor peasants who were secretly wealthy royalty; the poor stayed poor under the heels of the rich, and they always would. It was the way of the world. In this world, the real world, there were only cold cement walls and dangerous men who patted you on the cheek and smiled as they called you a dog.
    And there was death. Death was everywhere. It lurked in the barrels of the countless guns that had been pointed in my direction, and behind black doors in rooms with drains in their floors. Death was a constant, the only constant—and yet even death had rejected me. For reasons it refused to explain, death didn’t want me any more than the world of the living did.
    It brought me back to the same question I asked myself every day: Who was I? Like Armelle, did I have a family somewhere I didn’t know about? Parents, siblings, a wife and kids? If I did, then why was no one looking for me? I’d walked every inch of this city on jobs for Underwood and hadn’t seen a single missing-person flyer with my picture. Why had no one ever recognized me on the street, stopped me, called me by my real name?
    Maybe I was more like the Ragana, who rose fully formed from the Sea of Miseries, a self-contained force that existed only to bring evil and suffering. A freak, just like Bennett had called me.
    Or maybe there were no answers.
    No, I couldn’t accept that. There had to be answers. They were waiting for me in a past I couldn’t remember. But every time I tried, every time I forced my mind to reach back beyond the previous year, I came up empty.
    I lay back on the bed, folding my arms under my head. I stared at the cracks in the ceiling and the cobwebs that gathered in the corners. I tried to put my thoughts in order so I could make sense out of them. So much was lost to me, but these, at least, were the things I knew to be true:
    One. I was a man. Okay, that one wasn’t too hard to figure out, but it was as good a place to start as any. Judging by my reflection, I was in my mid to late thirties, with dark eyes and dark hair, though that wasn’t much to go on. I’d spent hours memorizing my features, studying my hairline, the cut of my jaw and shape of my nose, every crease around my eyes and fold in my ears, but