Die and Stay Dead

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  I climbed silently up the forty-five-degree incline of the back of the hutch. When I reached the top, I looked down. Sure enough, there he was, crouched in front of the access door, catching his breath and looking from side to side as if deciding where to run next. He was clad in black sweats, his face hidden behind a black ski mask. There were no holes for his mouth or nose, only one single, elongated opening for his eyes. He wore a plain black glove on his left hand, but on his right he wore an armored gauntlet, as if he’d taken it right off a suit of armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  I holstered my gun and jumped off the hutch. I landed on top of him, knocking him to the floor. I tried to get my arms around him, but he wriggled away and punched a heavy, metal fist into my kidney. A streak of pain shot up my back. He scurried away, stood, and turned to face me. I found myself looking into two deep brown eyes that were almost black in the dark. He was lean, probably didn’t weigh more than a buck twenty or thirty. No wonder he was so damn spry.

  He raised the gauntlet toward me. It looked old, battered around the edges and discolored in spots. It didn’t take a genius to figure out it was also a magical artifact, the source of those deadly blasts. The high-pitched whine started, coming from the gauntlet itself. The damn thing was powering up. But I still barely had my breath back from the kidney punch. There was no way I could get out of the way in time.

  Philip came out of the dark so fast I didn’t see him until he was standing right in front of me. The gauntlet sent out its blast, hitting Philip square in the chest. The force of it blew him backward, past me. He smashed straight through the roof access door like a wrecking ball and tumbled down the steps into the building below.

  I wouldn’t get another chance if I didn’t act now. I leapt at the assassin and grabbed the gauntlet, trying to pry it off his hand. He swung hard with his other fist, connecting with my jaw and knocking me off my feet. I fell on my backside, empty-handed. He aimed the gauntlet at me again.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said. “People have tried to kill me before. Bad things happened to them.”

  He didn’t listen. They never did. I heard the whine of the gauntlet as it powered up again, saw the bright energy come bursting out of it—and then the blast seemed to hang in the air between us, crackling against a rounded, translucent green barrier that hadn’t been there a moment before. A second later, the blast dissipated, absorbed into the barrier.

  The assassin and I both looked over to see Bethany standing a few feet away. Her hand was out like she was a crossing guard stopping traffic. In her palm was a glowing emerald the size of a quarter, held in place by a leather strap around her fingers. Projecting out of the emerald was the translucent green barrier that had protected me.

  She smirked at me. “Get back to the car, he says. Call Isaac, he says. But who is it who keeps saving your ass?” She walked closer, still holding out the charm, and addressed the assassin. “That’s a Thracian Gauntlet you’re wearing. The funny thing is, there are only four of them in the world and they’re all supposed to be in England. So what are you doing with one?”

  The assassin backed away, then turned and ran for the edge of the roof. I scrambled to my feet and ran after him. Before I could stop him, he jumped. The sidewalk was fifty feet down, there was no way he would survive that fall. But as he plummeted, he threw a small charm ahead of him. It exploded in midair right beneath him, opening up into a hole in space, a vortex of flickering blue light. He fell through it and it swallowed him, closing behind him.

  Damn. A portal spell. He could be anywhere now—another block, another borough, another city. Like a lethal Boy Scout, the assassin had come prepared.

  I cursed and kicked a nearby heating vent in frustration. The small, tinny clang it gave up wasn’t satisfying at all.

  “I take it the asshole got away,” Philip said, stumbling out of the wreckage of the roof access door. He was covered in plaster dust and a few chunks of drywall. His clothes were charred and smoking, but he seemed unharmed. He brushed white dust out of his hair. “Anybody catch his name?”

  Eight

  A wise man once said that when confronted with a mystery, the easiest and least complicated solution was usually the right one. The easiest and least complicated answer to the question of who attacked us in Chinatown was Erickson Arkwright. It made sense. Arkwright would want anyone dead who could reveal his secret or try to stop him from summoning the world-destroying demon Nahash-Dred again. Yrouel had figured out Arkwright’s new identity, and Calliope had gotten too close to the truth. Arkwright had eliminated both of them.

  Except we had no proof Erickson Arkwright was still alive, or that he existed at all. So far, the name was nothing more than a rumor perpetrated by a con man looking to make a quick twenty-five grand. For all we knew, Yrouel had made it up out of whole cloth. His murder might have nothing to do with Arkwright, or the doomsday cult, or Nahash-Dred. And yet, if that was the case, the timing of his death right after Calliope’s was one hell of a coincidence.

  There was something else nagging at me, too. The murders were completely different. Calliope’s had been up-close and personal, with a brutality that didn’t match the long-range sniper killing of Yrouel. If all signs pointed to Arkwright, surely it would have been a lot easier and faster for him to use the Thracian Gauntlet on Calliope, too. Why take the time to cut her open and spike her to the ceiling like that? I didn’t know, and I didn’t like not knowing. It felt like I was letting Calliope down again.

  The only thing I knew for certain was that after tonight we’d added our own names to his kill list. I didn’t doubt for a second he’d be back for us.

  After showering off Yrouel’s blood and changing into a fresh set of clothes, I sat with Philip and Bethany around the big, round table in Citadel’s main room. Isaac paced the floor in front of us.

  “If the killer has a Thracian Gauntlet, that makes him far more dangerous than we thought,” he said. “What I want to know is, how the hell did he get ahold of it? Those gauntlets are supposed to be under lock and key in England. This is the first time one has been used in centuries. More than that, it’s the first time one has ever been seen on this side of the Atlantic.”

  “Someone fill me in,” I said. “What’s the deal with these gauntlets?”

  Isaac opened the laptop on the table and tapped a few keys. The bank of monitors on the wall flickered to life. Illustrations of two lavish suits of armor filled the screens. The breastplates were encrusted with gemstones and long tubelike formations that looked almost like the ribs of an animal. The helmets were flanked with golden wings.

  “There are only four Thracian Gauntlets in existence. They’re all that remain of these two suits of armor,” Isaac said. “Have you ever heard the legend of Tulemkust and Sevastumi?”

  “No,” I said. “Who are they?”

  “Not who, what,” he said. “Tulemkust and Sevastumi were two of the hidden cities of southeast Europe, on the coast of the Black Sea in a region that was once known as Thrace. The two were constantly at war with each other. To defend themselves, Tulemkust created the Gemini Sentinels, two protectors who wore armored suits imbued with powerful magic, manufactured from armor fused with the bones of a grimleth.”

  I looked at the riblike tubing on the breastplates again. “What’s a grimleth?” I asked, but Isaac didn’t stop to answer.

  “The suits granted the Gemini Sentinels the ability to fly, and access to a host of lethal weaponry, one of which was the gauntlets themselves. But the responsibility was so enormous that Tulemkust was forced to institute a lottery draft system. Every citizen was a Gemini Sentinel at some point, and none ever wore the suit more than once. Each morning, two new people would be chosen to guard their borders from invasion. But one day the suits were given to two brothers who used them against their own people.

  “Whether the brothers were enemy agents or just insane, no one knows. Scores of innocent civilians were slaughtered in the ensuing carnage
. The attack lasted well into the night. Tulemkust was brought to the brink of destruction. When the brothers finally took off the armor to sleep, they were killed. After that, the survivors of Tulemkust had learned their lesson. The suits were dismantled. A few centuries later the gauntlets found their way to a private museum in England. The Avalonian Collection, run by the same family of mages for ten generations. And there the Thracian Gauntlets stayed. Until now.”

  “But you can’t just walk into the Avalonian Collection and steal a Thracian Gauntlet,” Bethany said. “It’s one of the most heavily guarded artifact collections in the world.”

  “And that’s how we’ll catch him,” Isaac said. “The gauntlet can’t have gone missing without being noticed. Nor can it have traveled across the Atlantic without someone seeing something. If we follow the gauntlet’s trail, it’ll lead us to our man, I’m sure of it. I’ll contact the Avalonian Collection and see what they know. Philip, I need you to scour the black market message boards online for any mentions of the gauntlet.”

  “I’m on it,” Philip said.

  “Bethany, Trent, it’s best for us to operate under the assumption that Calliope was right and this demon is about to make a return engagement. I’m going to see if I can find any information on Nahash-Dred, but we don’t have a lot of time. We’re going to need help, anything that can give us a leg up. Tomorrow, I want the two of you to go see the oracles.”

  * * *

  After the meeting, I went back upstairs to my room for the night. I found Kali lying on my bed. She was sleeping on her back with each leg pointed in a different direction, her furry stomach exposed. Looking at her lying there so peacefully, I could almost forget I’d seen two murder victims today, one of them killed right in front of me. Suddenly I had an inkling why someone might actually want to live with one of these absurd little creatures. They made everything seem okay somehow.

  Had I owned a cat once, back in the before time? Was I a cat person? Only one way to find out.

  I reached out and gently petted Kali’s stomach. Her eyes opened immediately. She hissed and swiped angrily at me, her claws drawing blood from the back of my hand. The scratch stung like I’d been burned. As I stood there cursing and shaking my hand in pain, Kali sprang off the bed and disappeared into her carrier.

  Goddamn cat. I should have taken her to the pound myself. But at least now I had my answer. Definitely not a cat person.

  I went into the bathroom, washed the wound clean, and returned to the bedroom. I knelt by the bed and pulled Calliope’s spiral-bound notebook out from under the mattress. I glanced at the door, but no one was coming tonight. Bethany had offered to stop by for another game of gin rummy, but I told her I wasn’t in the mood. She couldn’t hide the surprise and disappointment in her eyes. It was the first time I’d ever turned her down. But tonight I had more important things to do.

  I sat on the bed and opened the notebook. The urge to know why it included the same Ehrlendarr rune from my earliest memory spurred me on. Did Calliope know something about me? About my past?

  I was surprised to find the first half of the notebook was filled with what appeared to be random words and phrases repeated over and over again. Some pages had only one or two on them, while others were cramped so tight that everything flowed together. Some phrases were circled emphatically. There were arrows pointing from one phrase to another, sometimes from one page to another. None of it made sense. It was like the scribblings of a madwoman. The only thing I recognized was the name Nahash-Dred. It was written over several pages, in letters both big and small, sometimes scrawled again over where it had been already written, as if for emphasis.

  The second half of the book was filled with notes about the first half, as if she were trying to figure out what the hell she’d written. It felt like reading something by two different authors. Except both halves of the notebook were in the same handwriting. Calliope’s.

  There were pencil sketches throughout the notebook, too, rough drawings of people and animals and, in one instance, a woman with wings. And then, turning a page, I came across the Ehrlendarr rune. A jolt of adrenaline surged through me. I had woken up in front of a brick wall with this rune etched upon it. All around me the aftereffects of a spell had lingered in the air. Someone had been there with me but was gone when I woke. That was all I knew. Not knowing anything else was like an itch I couldn’t scratch. Frustrating. Maddening.

  Below the sketch of the rune, Calliope had written something, two short questions in a rushed, cramped script.

  Where is the eighth Guardian?

  Did they meet?

  The Guardians. Bethany had told me about them. The story went that at the dawn of time eight beings had been granted immortality and dominion over each of the eight natural elements: air, water, fire, earth, metal, wood, time, and magic. Some called them gods; others thought they were something more than that, cosmic and unknowable entities. It was said they lived at the center of all things, in a place called the Radiant Lands, where their job was to watch over the world and maintain the balance of light and dark. Only, one of them had disappeared a long time ago—the eighth Guardian, the Guardian of Magic, who was represented by the same Ehrlendarr rune that appeared in both the notebook and my earliest memory. The eighth Guardian’s absence had caused the Shift, throwing off the balance of magic, transforming it into something dark and dangerous.

  Part of me was skeptical that the Guardians actually existed. There was so much pain, suffering, and injustice in the world they were supposed to be looking after that if they did exist, they must be unbelievably bad at their job. I would have been perfectly happy to call them a myth and nothing more, except after the battle in Fort Tryon Park I’d seen something. For just a moment, maybe even half a moment, I’d seen seven towering figures standing somehow behind the visible world, shrouded in a sizzling bright light that hid their features from me. Seven figures, and an empty space for the missing eighth. I’d only caught a glimpse, and then they were gone.

  What did Calliope’s investigation have to do with the Guardians? In particular, the AWOL eighth Guardian? It didn’t seem to fit.

  And then there was the second question she’d scrawled on the page, even more perplexing than the first.

  Did they meet?

  Did who meet, exactly? The eighth Guardian and … who?

  I closed the notebook in frustration. It angered me that I couldn’t figure this out. It also terrified me. Because suddenly the mystery of my identity felt much bigger than me. Much more complicated.

  Something fluttered out from between the notebook pages and fell on the bed. It was a rectangular piece of heavy stock paper the size of a business card. I picked it up. It was an appointment card. Across the top it read: CALLIOPE GIANNOPOULOS, PSYCHIC MEDIUM. Beneath it, on the line marked DATE, was written an early morning appointment for just over a year ago. Below that was a line marked NAME.

  The name written there was Ingrid Bannion.

  I blinked in surprise.

  The last time I’d seen Ingrid Bannion, she was lying dead in a pool of her own blood, murdered by the shadowborn after she tried to protect us. How did Calliope know Ingrid? I turned the card over and saw Calliope had scribbled the name Morbius on the back. I put the card back inside the notebook, piecing it together in my head. Ingrid must have gone to see Calliope in order to contact the spirit of Morbius, who had died years ago. Ingrid probably recognized Calliope as an authentic necromancer, and thus a true line of communication across the dark to the man she’d loved.

  But her appointment had been over a year ago. Why had Calliope kept the card all this time? Why stash it with her notes? What did Ingrid have to do with any of this?

  I tucked the notebook back under my mattress and lay down, staring at the ceiling. I was hoping for answers, but all I’d found were more questions. Yet I was sure of one thing now. Yrouel hadn’t made up Nahash-Dred. If he hadn’t invented that part of the story, did that mean the rest of it was true, too?
Erickson Arkwright? The end of the world?

  * * *

  I met Bethany the next morning in front of the Provenzano Lanza Funeral Home on Second Avenue, in the East Village. She was waiting with a birdcage. On the perch inside it sat two small, nearly identical finches. Our payment for the oracles’ time, should they deign to see us. Birds were the oracles’ favorite food.

  Bethany didn’t look any happier to be here than I was. We both had our issues with the oracles. The last time we were here, they’d made it abundantly clear that Bethany didn’t matter to them in the slightest. As for me, they’d called me an abomination, among other choice words. I wished Philip could go in our place, but vampires weren’t allowed inside the oracles’ chamber. Not since long ago, when a vampire clan elder had tried to have the oracles killed after receiving some bad news. In retaliation, the oracles had wiped out the entire clan.

  “Are you ready for this?” Bethany asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “I can’t wait to hear what colorful new insults they have for me this time.”

  I took the birdcage from her. Using a key from her pocket, she unlocked the gate in a tall, wrought iron fence next to the funeral home. Beyond it was the New York Marble Cemetery, an enclosed yard of grass, shrubs, and the occasional small tree. There were no visible graves in this cemetery, only columns of tablets affixed to the walls to indicate who was buried in the vaults beneath the grass.

  As she locked the gate behind us, I nodded at the key in her hand. “You went back to the Library of Keys without me?”

  She put the key back in her pocket. “I didn’t have to. I kept meaning to return the key after we were here last time, but it slipped my mind. I promise I’ll bring you with me when I go back. You can pay my late fee.”