by Ben Zackheim
Lucas and I shared another glance. He smiled.
“See what happens when you dig deeper?” the demon asked her.
“It’s the third scroll piece,” I said.
I took it from her hand before she could snatch it away.
The parchment’s familiar tan hide was torn around the edges. That would make it tough to place it in the ever-growing puzzle. But worrying was for later. I willed my Vault Portal open and it did my bidding instantly. Maybe it was behaving because I was focused. Maybe the fucking thing did have a mind of it own.
Or a plan of its own.
I shook off the doubt and reached in for the other two scroll pieces.
“Lay them down here,” Lucas said, gesturing to a small table. He pulled a stool up and leaned forward as I carefully slid the three scroll fragments onto the wood surface. Lucas lifted a finger and the tip lit up with a small flame.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” I said, temporarily forgetting the weight of the moment.
“I have many skills you don’t know about,” he said. His eyebrows danced around his forehead. Was the demon being a pervert? Ronin answered that question for me.
“Can you hold off on that shit until I don’t have anything in my stomach to barf up?”
Lucas shrugged. “May I?” He gestured to the puzzle pieces below his outstretched fingers. I gestured for him to proceed. The little demon grabbed the tip of his nose and bent it back so he could get his eyes close to the parchment. After a moment, he mumbled something.
“Speak up, demon,” Ronin said, with a slight growl at the end.
He ignored her and bent his nose back further. It made a cracking sound as if the cartilage was breaking.
“Lucas, watch it,” I said, cringing. “You’re going to break that thing.”
“Hm? What are you… Oh, you mean my nose?” The demon frowned. “Kane Arkwright, I thought you, of all humans would know that demons’ noses are a continuation of our spine. You people like to crack your backs.” He put his hands on both sides of his nose and jerked it to the left with a loud snap. His grin of pleasure was terrifying. “We like to pop our noses.” He cleared his throat and bent back down. Ronin and I shared a moment of mutual disgust.
Lucas moved the pieces around carefully. His long fingers barely touched the delicate material. We were watching a master antiquarian at work. Even Ronin knew it. I could tell because she let Lucas alone for a good five minutes before she started fidgeting like a toddler again.
He moved the shards so that a cluster of Egyptian hieroglyphs were arranged in the middle.
Finally, Lucas knelt on the chair. He faced away from us, mumbling. Ronin was about to bark something unhelpful. I put a hand on her shoulder. She slapped it off. But it bought me time to handle things my way. “What is it, Lucas?” I asked, quietly.
He turned to me. “Hm?”
“The scroll pieces.”
He nodded and mumbled, “Yes, yes,” and left it at that. You ever hear of words hanging? Those words hung low and long, like a Siberian Centaur.
Ronin stepped toward Lucas, leading with her pointing finger. “Demon, I swear to…”
“You said you were charged to find five scroll pieces, sir?”
“I wouldn’t say, ‘charged’, no. But Skyler told me what I was looking for.”
“You were charged. Don’t split hairs with me, please.” I answered him with fuming silence. “Curious.”
“Why is it curious?” Ronin asked, with an unhealthy dose of venom. I was starting to get frustrated, too. We waited for him to remember we were in the damn room.
He ignored the hostile vibe and leaned over the table again. He delicately pushed the scroll pieces toward me, preserving their formation.
For the first time, I could see the markings that had, just moments before, seemed scattered. Now they made some kind of sense, visually. I didn’t know what they meant, of course. But I could see a symmetry to the markings on the parchment.
The shapes were centered on the otherwise bare parchment puzzle. The message, or clue, or whatever it was, was etched into the ancient skin. They filled the center of the puzzle.
But the edges were blank.
I think the shock that went through my gut and heated up my face was clear. Lucas looked at me and smirked.
“Why are you two looking at each other like that? You need a room? I can step out if…”
I interrupted her. “The message on the scroll pieces is complete?”
Lucas nodded.
That shut Ronin up.
Chapter 23
Lucas’ chicklet-toothed grin spread across his face.
The slow, steady opening his mouth made reminded me of a surgeon’s scalpel cutting into flesh.
“Damn it,” Ronin said with a nauseated grunt. “Put that fucking smile back where you found it, demon, and tell us what the message says!”
Lucas and I frowned.
“What are you looking at me for? Don’t you want him to read it, Arkwright?”
“Did your parents never let you out of the house?”
Ronin matched my glare, and upped it by an “I’m going to tear your face off” grimace. I couldn’t match that, so I did what any other alpha male would do.
I turned and looked at Lucas. “What’s the scroll say, Lucas?”
“All together, my best read is the following.” He hopped off his stool and shuffled his way around the table. He slowly ran his finger over the markings as he spoke.
“This hieroglyph here means opposites. Historically, it’s ambiguous. Kind of a version of irony. But it can be literal as well if given the proper context.”
I leaned over the puzzle. “Opposite of what?”
He sighed. “That’s unclear, but let’s talk it through.”
“You look like you don’t want to tell us something,” Ronin said. I had to agree. I wasn’t a pro at reading demon body language. But he knew something, and he was cautious, calculating, over-thinking.
“It’s not a secret,” he said. “It’s just that this phrase here means something very distinct to me. I’m afraid when I first read it, it made me jump to conclusions. I’m trying to think of a way to translate the meaning without being corrupted by my bias. It may yield a different perspective.”
“You are such a librarian,” Ronin said, disgusted.
“Isn’t he great?” I patted my buddy on the shoulder. “Lead our brains, my friend. Mine’s ready.”
“These hieroglyphs mean the dead, or death.”
“Opposite of death is life,” Ronin said. “Puzzle solved.”
“These here represent the capturing of essence,” the demon librarian said, ignoring her.
“Capturing of essence,” I repeated, thinking. “That could be a spell. A curse, maybe.”
“It could also mean that death captures the essence of life. Or life captures the essence of death.”
“Yes,” Lucas said. “Yes, that is a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.” Ronin and I let him chew on that for a moment. He smacked his lips and looked up at us. “Anything else?”
“Capturing essence could mean documentation,” I said.
His grin came back. I knew it meant I’d made him happy, but his glee freaked me out every single time. “That brings us to the final phrase.” His spindly finger hovered over the parchment slowly, and made a circle around a set of markings.
“It took me a while to understand what I was looking at. I’ve never seen the hieroglyph represented this way. This is the ‘Book of Coming Forth By Day’, otherwise known as the ‘Book of the Dead’.” Lucas studied our responses. Whatever he interpreted in our faces did not impress him. At all.
I needed to settle my brain down. “So we have a message that literally says, ‘death, opposite, capture essence, and the Book of the Dead.’” I hoped someone would jump in with a big eureka moment. No such luck. “Wait, you said, you’d never seen Book of the Dead written this way. What’s special about it?”
“It’s written backwards.”
“Sounds like a bullshit riddle to me,” Ronin said.
“Thanks for your contribution,” I mumbled. “If Skyler is right about these scroll pieces giving us an upper hand, then we need to think about it from that angle. The Book of the Dead is a funerary text. It has a couple of hundred spells to help the dead find a place in the afterlife.”
Ronin sat on a stone bench and crossed her legs. “Let’s go find it, then.”
I shook my head. “There is no single book. It was a document that was part of the burial tradition. It could be customized to include spells that would help the specific individual get what they wanted from the afterlife.”
“There is no single book, no,” Lucas added. “But there are a couple of examples that are held up as the standards. One is in London.”
“One’s in New York City,” I said.
“What does that look on your face mean?” Lucas asked me.
“Hm? Oh, nothing. It’s just, I met Tabitha at the New York Metropolitan Museum.”
“Tabitha? You mean to tell me you met Isis at the location of Imhotep’s version of the Book of the Dead?”
I shrugged. “Could be a coincidence.”
Lucas put his hands on his hips, annoyed. “Could not be a coincidence.”
“Back off, demon. She was fawning over her childhood toy.”
“And she was sizing you up,” Ronin said.
“That too, yeah.”
Lucas leaned on the table. “What childhood toy are you referring to, sir?”
“The Horus statue was on display. I found her there alone. She might have been speaking to it.”
“What the hell is a Horus?”
“It’s a statue of a bird,” I said. “A protector. Meant to guard families. Kings and princes, especially.”
Ronin sneered. “She played with a stone bird when she was a girl?”
“Everyone has a stone bird when they’re a kid, Ronin,” I said. She gave me a look somewhere between annoyance and doubt. She couldn’t tell if I was being serious. Her brain wandered off to wonder whether kids really did play with stone birds all the time.
I focused on the night I met Tabitha, otherwise known as Isis, otherwise known as Queen of the Vampires.
Finally, my brain found the memory it was desperately searching for. “She told me later that the Horus statue is what keeps Set’s Wound in existence.”
“Set’s Wound,” Lucas murmured. “You mean the astral plane found within Set’s corpse.” I nodded. “You had a bit of an adventure there, if the stories are correct.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I got the sceptre there.”
“You got your hand back there, too,” Lucas added.
I’d forgotten that detail.
Ronin looked confused. “Wait. Set’s dead? Since when?”
Lucas shook his head. “No. He’s died many times. He’ll die many more, I’m sure.”
Ronin yanked a Ruger from her holster and aimed it at an imaginary Set on the other side of the room. “Line him up. I want my turn.”
I shook my head. “You should have written bad action movies.”
“Screw you, Kane. I’m passionate.”
“That’s what psychiatrists are calling it these days?”
“Can we please focus, you two?” the demon asked. “What did you and Tabitha talk about, sir?”
“The statue. She said it was powerful. That it was hidden in plain sight at the museum. She said it was in constant pain. When I asked why she didn’t liberate it, she got pissed. She basically said it didn’t want to be saved. Its suffering had a purpose.”
“To keep Set’s Wound alive.”
“Yeah, I guess. Convenient that she uses the realm to store an arsenal of her own.”
We both noticed Ronin’s silence. It was the kind of silence that wanted to say something. She blinked at us, her mouth slightly open. “I guess I’ve missed a lot.”
I smiled. “You could say that. If we think the Met Museum’s Book of the Dead is a good next step, then let’s get rolling, guys. You mind if I swap some New York City vampires into your old home, Ronin?”
“I hate the place, but yeah, I do mind, actually. We’ll need to hit the village streets before we swap.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Lucas? Sound good?”
My friend was deep in thought. “Hm? Oh. Yes. Yes, let’s go. New York City is beautiful this time of year.”
“It’s a barren wasteland, Lucas.”
“Yes, exactly. What could be more perfect than the desolation of a once-inhabited civilization?”
Fucking demons.
Chapter 24
The French village felt empty.
Ronin smirked and nodded as she surveyed the streets with both hands on her hips. “You scared the shit out of them, Arkwright. How about you hand that sceptre over to me for a while and let me put it to good use?”
“That’s the best idea I’ve heard in never.”
She shrugged. “Open that Swap Portal wide, bitch.”
I shot her a frown, but that only made her happy. I closed my eyes and focused on the Swap Portal. It opened quickly, but glowed weakly. We knew better than to wait around. The thing could close again in an instant. For the first time since I’d inherited the Swap Portal, I wondered if it would slice me in two if it snapped shut before I entered completely.
With that thought in my head, I stepped from the fresh air of France to the almost-as-fresh-air of Manhattan. It was an odd feeling to see the Metropolitan Museum so desolate. It had always been swarming with people. Now it was sitting there like a pile of stone. It wasn’t an abandoned building. It was more like an abandoned being.
“Behind you,” I said, casually. I pointed over Ronin’s shoulder. She turned and shot the vampire in one smooth move. She was a better shot than her sister. Or she was a luckier shot.
“Any more of them?” she asked, glancing around, trigger finger gleefully ready.
Lucas sniffed the air. “I smell a few nearby, but it’s faint.”
“They’re probably in Central Park,” I said. “Come on. Let’s get inside. I don’t want to make a scene. You hear me, Ronin?”
“Get off my case, Arkwright. I’m not making as much noise as the nose on that friend of yours. Why don’t you tell the bookworm to harness that thing?”
“How did you ever run the biggest supernatural organization in the world?” Lucas mumbled, shaking his head and walking past her.
She followed him, holstering her weapon as she walked. “By being the best tactician in the world, asshole.”
“Which world? Disney World?”
“Oh, do they hand out a sense of humor in Hell? Or do they just make your faces hilarious?”
Their bickering faded as I let them walk ahead. There was no use telling them to keep it down. Someone had heard us by that point. We’d just have to take on the hemogoblins as they came.
What a hopeless team we were.
We walked up the wide steps of the museum and pushed through the rotating glass doors. The lobby was lit by the dim blue glow of the moon. The rays of night light slashed through the dark space, barely illuminating the massive marble columns and floors that centuries of human progress had built, and millions had enjoyed.
I felt the sadness of the building now.
I felt the loss of that history. It was like a game well-played for ten thousand years that suddenly ended with a curt whistle-blow from the gods. Game Over. Victory, Set. Match.
“Fuck that,” I said. Out loud. Again, my thoughts were having a hard time staying put in my head. I wondered if I was about to have another one of my out-of-body-out-of-self episodes.
“What did you say?” Ronin whispered over her shoulder.
“Nothing. Oral fart.”
“So that’s why you always smell. Which way to the Book of the Dead?”
I pointed at the steps headed to the second floor on the west side of the lobby. “It’s a lon
g scroll. The museum kept… keeps it behind a wall of glass at the end of a long hallway.” I told her this because I wanted her to move on and get ahead of us. It worked. She quickened her pace. I watched her loose black hair, lit blue by the moon, jump up and down as she broke into a jog and then ran up the stairs.
Beautiful woman. Asshole woman.
“Is it a good idea to let her get there first, sir?”
“Probably not, but I need you to do something for me.”
“Kill her? Oh, sir. I thought you’d never ask.”
“No,” I said pointing at him like I was scolding a dog. “I want you to keep an eye on me.”
“An eye on you? How do you mean?”
“I’ve been feeling… off.”
“Oh, really. I would have never known.”
“It’s like I lose control of my perceptions, Lucas. My reality. One of the signs that it might be coming is…” I was embarrassed. It was like I had to admit I couldn’t control my bladder.
“You speak your thoughts out loud without intending to?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You really don’t know your real name then? You weren’t lying back in the village?”
“My name is Kane Arkwright, Lucas. That won’t change.”
The demon sighed. “There’s a name, sir. And then there’s a name.”
“Thanks for the riddle, demon. I don’t have enough of them in my life. Why don’t you tell me my real name? Cut through the bullshit.”
“I do not know who you are, sir. If I did, I would certainly tell you.”
We started walking again.
“I will keep an eye on you, sir. What do you want me to do if you start acting oddly?”
“Wing it,” I said.
A gunshot from somewhere on the second floor shattered the heavy quiet of the museum.
Chapter 25
I knew the Metropolitan Museum well enough to call it a second home.
I’d spent a lot of time there as a kid, wandering the halls, getting lost on purpose in hopes of finding a new wing with new treasures.