Die and Stay Dead

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  I stepped through the doorway. “We’re here about Calliope.”

  “I don’t know any Calliope!” Yrouel shouted.

  His chair spun around and began gliding quickly down the well-lit foyer, away from me. A blur zoomed past him, and suddenly Philip was standing in his way.

  Yrouel turned back to me, his eyes widening with panic. “I told you, I don’t know who you’re talking about!”

  “You don’t know Calliope?” I asked. “That’s funny, because she was supposed to meet you here tonight. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s why you opened the door when I knocked. You thought it was her.”

  “It’s okay, Yrouel,” Bethany said, trying to calm him. “We’re not here to hurt you. We just want to ask you some questions.”

  Yrouel glided back toward us. “I really must insist you leave immediately! You’re trespassing!”

  Philip caught Yrouel by the arm and held him in place. “Did you kill Calliope, Yrouel? Because right now you’re acting guilty as hell.”

  Yrouel looked up at him in surprise. “Calliope is dead?”

  “See? You know her after all. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Philip said. “Now, here’s the thing. My friends here are good people. They’re patient. They’re willing to hear you out. But I’m not like them. I’m not a good person.”

  “You’re a vampire,” Yrouel said, swallowing nervously.

  Philip nodded. “And I don’t like when people lie to me. So how about we start over?”

  Yrouel nodded, and Philip released his arm. “I didn’t kill Calliope. But yes, I know her. Knew her. I—I didn’t know she was dead. What happened?”

  “Sometime between yesterday and today she was killed in her home,” I said. “She was cut open and her body was nailed to the ceiling.”

  “Well, there you go,” Yrouel said. “I couldn’t have killed her, could I? Does it look like I could nail someone to the ceiling?”

  “Depends,” Philip said. “How high can that chair float?”

  Yrouel scowled at him, then glided over to the door and closed it. “You’d better come inside.”

  He turned around and led the way into what appeared to be a large, luxury apartment directly beneath the alley. The foyer opened into a long, wide hallway. Hanging on the walls were paintings by Vermeer, Matisse, Cézanne, and artists even older than that—da Vinci, Raphael, Botticelli. Granted, I was no art expert, but the paintings looked authentic to me, right down to the wear and tear on the frames. The collection had to be worth a fortune.

  “You’re not police, are you?” Yrouel asked. “I won’t talk to police.”

  “Do we look like cops?” I asked.

  Yrouel laughed bitterly. “You force your way into my home, manhandle me, and accuse me of a crime I didn’t commit. That sounds like cops to me. But if you’re not, then who are you?”

  “We’re the Five-Pointed Star,” Bethany said.

  Yrouel paused a moment and glanced back at us. “You’re the Five-Pointed Star? The ones who took out Stryge up in that park in the Bronx? Huh. So you’re not police. You’re magic police.”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “But Calliope was a friend. We found your name and address in her appointment book.”

  “It stands to reason whoever killed her might have seen your name in the appointment book, too,” Bethany said. “For all we know, he’s coming for you next. Which means any help you give us would be helping yourself.”

  “That’s the first smart thing any of you have said since forcing your way in here,” Yrouel said. “Yes, if her killer knew about me, I could very well be next.”

  “Why? What were you two involved in?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t involved, exactly, but I was helping her,” he said. “Calliope was researching a topic about which I happen to have a fair amount of knowledge.”

  Calliope hadn’t let me look in her notebook. It’s a personal project. Nothing that concerns you. Was the project what had gotten her killed? The answer could be waiting for me under my mattress.

  “Have you heard of the Aeternis Tenebris?” Yrouel asked. “They were a doomsday cult here in New York City that believed the world would end when the clock struck midnight on January first, 2000.”

  “They weren’t the only ones who thought that,” Bethany pointed out.

  “True, but unlike the other millennium doomsday cults, the Aeternis Tenebris didn’t disband once they were proven wrong. They were much too stubborn for that. They decided that if the world wasn’t going to end of its own accord, they would help it along. End it themselves.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “They summoned a demon,” Yrouel said. “A powerful, terrible demon. The worst of the lot. Nahash-Dred, the Destroyer of Worlds. But once they summoned him, the fools couldn’t bind him.”

  “You mean like in ropes?” I asked, confused.

  “No,” Yrouel said. “Demons are dangerous creatures. You can’t just summon them and expect they’ll do your bidding. If you want to control a demon, you have to bind it to your will first. Otherwise, things can get ugly fast. That’s what happened to the cult. Nahash-Dred slipped the leash, and instead of destroying the world he butchered them instead.”

  “Why was Calliope researching a doomsday cult?” Bethany asked.

  He shrugged, his ample flesh jiggling beneath his dashiki. “She told me she’d heard things. Whispers from the other side. She was a necromancer, you know. She certainly seemed more comfortable around spirits than with the living.”

  That summed her up pretty well. For someone who had trouble looking people in the eye, the dead were probably a lot easier to deal with.

  “But it’s what the spirits told her that had her so frightened,” Yrouel said. “They warned her that Nahash-Dred was coming back to New York. Coming back to finish the job.”

  We followed him as his floating chair glided into an adjoining hallway. Here, too, the walls were covered with priceless works of art—Dalí, Picasso, O’Keeffe. Yrouel glided through an open doorway into another room. There was no furniture here, just a mound of suitcases, a pile of dashikis, a heap of books, and various other personal items strewn about. Where the left-hand wall met the ceiling, a band of narrow, barred windows ran the length of the room. Through them, I could make out a snippet of the alley floor outside.

  Philip eyed the suitcases. “You going somewhere?”

  “To Tsotha Zin,” Yrouel replied, gliding to a halt in the center of the room. “For years, there have been those who chose to live in the Nethercity to escape the growing darkness on the surface and enjoy the dragon’s protection. But it was always a minority. Now, it’s a full-fledged exodus. There are hundreds of us, thousands of us fleeing to Tsotha Zin before it’s too late.”

  “Something scared you,” Bethany said.

  Yrouel nodded. “Surely you feel it as well? Something is coming. Something terrible. Worse than you can possibly imagine.”

  Bethany and I exchanged glances. Biddy had said the same thing. Something was coming, something he thought in his madness the trembler could protect him from so long as he fed it enough women.

  “This thing that’s coming,” I said. “You think it’s the demon. Nahash-Dred.”

  “After what Calliope told me, I have no doubt of it,” Yrouel replied.

  I remembered my vision—the ruined city, the bodies, the blood. Was this what the cloaked man had been trying to show me? Was this what would happen if Nahash-Dred returned? New York City in ruins? Countless dead?

  Sometimes it felt like there were crosshairs over this city. Sometimes it felt like New York would never stop being a target.

  “I plan to remain down in Tsotha Zin until this all blows over, or until the Destroyer of Worlds, well, destroys the world, whichever comes first,” Yrouel said. He looked up at the ceiling. “Either way, I don’t think I’ll miss the constant stink of fish from those accursed shops outside.”

  I looked around the room again. None of his suitcases looked big e
nough to carry a painting. “What about your art collection? Aren’t you taking that, too?”

  Yrouel waved a hand dismissively. “Forgeries. I can always make more if I need to. Observe.”

  He gestured absently, and a thick stripe of blue appeared on the white wall. I went over to it. It looked like paint, right down to the brushstrokes. Painting by magic. I shook my head in amazement.

  “It’s easy for my kind to do,” Yrouel said. “We were artists for millennia. Which more often than not meant we were starving and poor. I simply found a way to monetize my natural talent, that’s all.”

  With another gesture, a small letter Y appeared in the paint. The same as I’d seen in the Magritte painting in Calliope’s living room. Now I understood what it meant.

  “That’s how you and Calliope met,” I said. “You sold her a painting.”

  “Quite right,” Yrouel said. “She bought one of my paintings—a Magritte, if I recall—and we got to talking about our interests. When she found out I knew something about the Aeternis Tenebris cult, we made an appointment to talk some more. That’s why she was coming here tonight.”

  “She told me the painting cost a fortune,” I said, growing angry. “She didn’t know it was a forgery, did she? How much did you bilk her for?”

  “Come now, don’t be so judgmental,” Yrouel said. “Do I look like I can work in a Wall Street office, or slinging burgers at a restaurant? We all make a living how we can, and the information trade is feast or famine.”

  I shook my head in disgust. My past wasn’t exactly squeaky clean and I wasn’t one for throwing stones in glass houses, but the fact that Calliope had died without ever knowing this son of a bitch had cheated her out of her money infuriated me. My hands balled into fists, but luckily Bethany changed the subject before I did something I would have regretted.

  “Calliope was coming here for information,” she said. “What was it?”

  Yrouel smirked, feeling smug that he knew something we didn’t. I’d seen his type before, two-bit players who got a taste of money or power and thought it made them something. In the end, most of them had wound up floating facedown in the Gowanus Canal.

  “Information is the most valuable commodity one can trade in, don’t you think?” Yrouel said. “Every once in a while, something good comes my way. In this case, it was something very good. What would you say if I told you Nahash-Dred didn’t kill all the cult members after all? One of them survived, a man who might just be planning to summon Nahash-Dred and try to end the world again. Calliope was coming here tonight so I could tell her how to find him.”

  “How about you tell us instead?” Bethany pressed.

  Yrouel arched a fleshy, hairless eyebrow. “She was going to pay me twenty-five thousand dollars for the information. Are you prepared to meet that price?”

  I glared at him.

  “The more dangerous the information is, the more valuable it is,” Yrouel explained, “and as you might imagine, this was a dangerous line of inquiry. The sole remaining cult member would no doubt kill anyone who got too close. Apparently he’s already done so. Poor girl.”

  The urge to do grievous bodily harm to Yrouel resurfaced. It was all I could do not to follow through on it. Calliope had put her life on the line, but all this bastard cared about was getting paid.

  “Calliope was convinced time was of the essence,” Yrouel continued. “She believed Nahash-Dred would return soon. And when I say soon, understand I don’t mean a matter of months, or even weeks. Calliope thought it was days.”

  “If she was right, we have to have that information,” Bethany said. “We can stop the remaining cultist from summoning Nahash-Dred before it’s too late.”

  “I told you my price,” Yrouel said.

  “But you’re in danger, too,” she insisted. “You said so yourself. If you know so much about him, he’ll come after you just like he did Calliope.”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars could buy me a lot of protection.”

  I’d had enough. “The way I see it, Calliope already paid for that information when you swindled her. Unless of course you’d like us to reach out to your other art customers and tell them they’ve been swindled, too?”

  “You wouldn’t,” Yrouel said.

  “You’re right, it’ll take too long,” Philip said. “How about we just break your hands so you can’t make any more forgeries?” He started toward Yrouel.

  Yrouel nervously backed his floating chair away from him. “Okay, okay! The surviving member of the Aeternis Tenebris is a man by the name of Erickson Arkwright, though obviously that’s not the name he uses anymore. That name came with a lifetime behind bars attached to it—racketeering, blackmail, murder. So after the rest of the cult was massacred, he allowed the world to think he was dead, too. He found a new name, a new identity that allowed him—”

  One of the windows up by the ceiling exploded suddenly as something bright and crackling crashed through the glass. The blast struck Yrouel. He burst like a water balloon in an explosion of flesh and gore.

  Blood and chunks of rubbery flesh rained over me. I stood frozen a moment, stunned. The floating chair dropped to the floor with a loud crash. Next to me, Bethany looked like Sissy Spacek at the end of Carrie, her hair, face, clothes, and cargo vest slick with blood. Her mouth hung open in shock.

  “You have got to be kidding!” she cried.

  I turned to run for the door, but Philip was already ahead of me, running like a blur to the alley outside, where the blast had come from.

  Seven

  I raced up the ramp from Yrouel’s apartment to the alley outside. Philip was already there, looking up at the buildings that surrounded us.

  “It came from up there, on the rooftop,” Philip said, pointing. He swept his finger down toward the shattered window at the base of the far wall. “A straight angle through the window to hit Yrouel. Whoever he is, he’s a hell of a shot. And damn it, I had him for a moment, too. I could see his body heat up there, and then suddenly it was gone. He must be hiding behind something iron, or—wait, there!” He pointed up at a figure lurking on the roof of a five-story building that backed up onto the alley, little more than a dark silhouette against the night sky. I would have missed him if Philip hadn’t pointed him out. But of course Philip was a vampire, a nocturnal predator. Night vision was natural to him, even through those mirrored shades he never took off.

  The figure on the roof ducked away from the edge, disappearing from sight. Philip moved fast, effortlessly jumping ten feet onto the lowest landing of the building’s fire escape. He didn’t bother climbing the narrow iron staircase at its center. Instead, he began scaling the landings toward the roof, moving as quickly and smoothly as a jungle cat stalking its prey.

  “Philip, wait!” I shouted, but it was too late, he was already halfway up. We needed Yrouel’s assassin alive if we wanted any answers, but he was as good as dead if Philip caught him first. “Shit!”

  I reached for my cell phone, only to find my pocket empty. The phone must have slipped out in the car on the way here. Just then, Bethany came bursting out of Yrouel’s apartment.

  “My cell phone is in the Escalade,” I told her. “Get it and call Isaac. Tell him what happened.”

  She started to protest. “But—”

  “Go!” I shouted.

  I jumped for the ladder hanging off the fire escape and managed to grab hold of the bottom rung. Sharp flakes of rusted metal bit into my palms. While Bethany ran out of the alley toward the car, I started climbing up the ladder to the first landing, feeling a thousand times clumsier than Philip. I threw myself over the railing onto the landing, then ran up the narrow staircase to the roof.

  By the time I got there, Philip was already in the distance, racing across the rooftops. In the glow of the streetlights, I could just barely make out the figure Philip was chasing. Philip closed the distance between them with his supernatural speed. Just as it looked like Philip was about to overtake him, the figure twisted a
round to point one hand at him. There was a high-pitched whine, building in tone and volume, and then a sudden explosion of light. A blast of crackling energy like the one that had killed Yrouel arced out of the assassin’s hand. I smelled the bitter ozone of an electrical discharge on the wind. Philip dove aside as the roof exploded into rubble and smoke where he’d been standing a moment before. The assassin kept running, gaining ground before Philip was able to start chasing him again.

  I kept running, too. A few moments later I found the charred, smoking hole the blast had put in the roof. Sprinting past it, I found myself on the last roof of the block, looking down onto Bayard Street. Philip and the assassin had turned the corner and were now racing across the rooftops of a side street. I took off after them.

  They were both so far ahead of me that I had to push myself to run faster or risk losing them. I ran through an obstacle course of satellite dishes and heating vents, nearly got tangled in lines of drying laundry, skirted around boxed-in rooftop gardens, and hurdled over the low walls between adjoining rooftops. But each time I looked up, Philip and the assassin seemed farther away.

  Another high-pitched whine hit my ears. Another bright blast erupted from the assassin’s outstretched hand. Philip leapt aside, and a brick chimney behind him shattered to pieces. I ducked as I ran, protecting my head against the shower of mortar pebbles and brick chips. Before I could get my bearings, the whine came again. Another blast obliterated the edge of the roof under Philip’s feet. He fell toward the street below, but at the last moment he managed to grab hold of a fire escape railing. The fire escape’s bolts popped out of the brick and the whole structure pulled a few inches away from the building, but it held. Philip started scrambling back up.

  I ran past him, taking the lead. I drew my gun and shouted, “Stop!” but the dark figure kept running. Every time I thought I had a clean shot, he would zig or zag and put a laundry line or chimney between us. I willed my protesting legs to keep moving.

  And then, just like that, he was gone. I’d lost him. I slowed a bit, catching my breath. He couldn’t have gone far. Probably, he was as tired as I was and needed a place to rest and plan his next move. I scanned the rooftop in front of me. If it were me, where would I hide? My gaze settled on the slanted concrete hutch of a roof access door, facing away from me. Bingo.