Die and Stay Dead

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  “There are late fees for keys?” I asked.

  She looked at me like I was a dolt, then shook her head. “You may be the most gullible person I know.”

  “I’m still new to all this, remember?”

  “Trent, you stopped the Black Knight, released the gargoyles from slavery, and killed an unkillable Ancient. I don’t think you get to call yourself new to this anymore.”

  Maybe she had a point, but it didn’t feel that way to me. Every day some new revelation about magic and the world we lived in surprised me. I doubted I would ever stop feeling like the new kid in school.

  At the back of the cemetery, what looked like the tower of a sunken castle jutted up from the grass, draped in moss and vines. I opened its heavy iron door to reveal a spiral staircase winding down into the darkness. With a muttered incantation, Bethany lit up her mirrored charm. Using it as a flashlight, she led the way down the staircase and through the subterranean tunnels below. I followed Bethany’s glowing light. Everything else was pitch black.

  “You want to talk about it?” Bethany asked as we walked.

  “Talk about what?”

  She glanced back at me over her shoulder. “I saw your face when we found Calliope, Trent. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you like that. You knew her better than I did.”

  “But I didn’t know her. I only met her the one time,” I said. All I could see in my mind were her eyes, open and staring down at me from the ceiling, one blue and one hazel. It was like a mountain on my shoulders, crushing me under its weight. “I keep thinking about how she was so sure someone was watching her.”

  “You think it was the same person who killed Yrouel?” Bethany said.

  “I think this project of hers got them both killed,” I said. “I shouldn’t have left her there alone. I should have gone back sooner. If I’d been there…”

  “If you’d been there, what? You might have saved her?” Bethany stopped and turned to me. “Trent, you don’t even know when it happened. Even if you’d gone back sooner, there’s no way to know if it would have changed anything. Don’t torture yourself like this. You can’t save everyone.”

  Bethany didn’t understand. I couldn’t save Ingrid. I couldn’t save Thornton. I couldn’t save Calliope. I didn’t know how to explain it to her, this sense that I’d failed somehow. But even if she was right that I couldn’t save everyone, I could still find Calliope’s killer and make him pay. I could give him a taste of the pain and terror he’d put her through. But in order to do that, I needed to find him first. I hoped the oracles could help me with that.

  “Let’s just keep moving, okay?” I said. “It isn’t far now.”

  We walked the rest of the way in silence, until we reached the twenty-foot-tall doors to the oracles’ chamber. I reached for one of the heavy bronze knockers. Bethany hissed my name, stopping me. I hadn’t noticed that the doors were already slightly ajar.

  “Something’s wrong,” Bethany said. She stepped closer with the light and shone it into the opening between the doors, but inside there was only darkness. “The oracles wouldn’t leave the doors open like this.”

  I pushed them open the rest of the way. They swung inward without resistance, the loud creak of their hinges amplified by the silence. We walked into the chamber. The last time we’d been here, the doors had closed behind us of their own volition. This time they stayed open. Something was definitely off.

  “Hello?” I called. No one answered.

  “They’re gone,” Bethany said, her voice hollow with shock.

  She shone her light around the chamber. Once, the darkness in this room had swallowed all light, but now Bethany’s makeshift flashlight cut right through it, illuminating the bare brick walls and ceiling. Everything was right where I remembered it—the circle of tall candelabras, the dozens of birdcages hanging on long chains from the ceiling, the carpet of feathers and bones on the floor. Everything but the oracles themselves. They were gone, but they’d left everything behind.

  Bethany looked at me, alarmed. “I don’t understand. The oracles have been here for centuries. For as long as anyone can remember. Why would they just up and leave?”

  Biddy and Yrouel had both sensed something terrible coming. Something worse than you can imagine. Biddy had sought protection from it. Yrouel had wanted to run away from it to the Nethercity.

  The oracles would have sensed it, too. Foreseen it. And it had frightened them. The same oracles who had once wiped out an entire vampire clan in the blink of an eye. The same oracles no one threatened or questioned because no one dared.

  They’d seen what was coming, and it had sent them running.

  Nine

  Bethany paced back and forth on the sidewalk outside the gates of the New York Marble Cemetery, cradling my cell phone against her ear. She had Isaac on the other end. “I don’t know where the oracles went. Back to wherever they came from, maybe, or down to the Nethercity. The point is, they’re not here. They can’t help. And if the oracles can’t help, I don’t know who can.” It took a lot to make Bethany this nervous. She ran a hand through her hair, front to back, a nervous tic. I caught a glimpse of her unusually pointed ears, and then they were gone again, hidden behind her locks.

  I put the birdcage down on the sidewalk. If we weren’t going to give the finches to the oracles, I saw no reason to keep them. I opened the cage door to let them go. Both finches hopped off their perch and paused on the lip of the opening.

  “What are you waiting for?” I said, tapping the side of the cage with my boot. They took off but didn’t go far before perching on an air conditioner poking out of an apartment window above my head. “You better fly farther than that. Haven’t you heard? Everyone’s leaving. Even the oracles are gone.” The birds ignored me, cocking their heads to one side in unison like creepy twins.

  I wondered if the oracles had seen the same things I did in my vision—the city in ruins, the streets littered with bodies. Or had they seen something even worse, something about the demon himself? I wished we knew more about Nahash-Dred. If Calliope was right, time was running out, and we were still spinning our damn wheels.

  I tried to put what I did know into order. Calliope was a necromancer, able to commune with the spirits. Those spirits had warned her about Nahash-Dred’s return, presumably so she could stop it. But how was she supposed to do that? She couldn’t have been planning to go after the demon herself. She was a necromancer, not a mage. She wouldn’t be powerful enough to stop a demon they called the Destroyer of Worlds on her own. So what was her plan? Go to the cops? That was a laugh. She had to have something else in mind. She didn’t seem the type to go into something like this half-cocked.

  And then there was the appointment card I’d found tucked into her notebook …

  Overhead, the finches took off, flying away side by side into the sky. My heart grew heavier as I watched them go. It wasn’t that I wanted to leave, too. I wasn’t one to run from a challenge. But watching them fly so gracefully, so effortlessly, tugged at something in me. These birds were doing what they were meant to do. They were being true to themselves in a way I never could be. My true self had been taken from me.

  As the emotions swelled in my chest, my field of vision suddenly shifted. I didn’t see the finches anymore, or buildings or the cars speeding past—instead I saw the elements they were made from, atoms that burned as brightly as stars. Running between those atoms, all around me, were the silken threads that bound everything together. Above, the finches flew like sparks into a sky where spheres patterned with mystical designs rotated around each other, the titanic gears of the universe.

  I panicked, my breath coming in sharp rasps. How could this be happening? This was Stryge’s power, the ability to see the inner workings of things. He had used it to unmake his victims, to take them apart like paper dolls. I had absorbed that power along with his life force at Fort Tryon Park, and it had nearly driven me mad. I’d almost killed Bethany and the others before getting a grip on mysel
f. In the month since then, it hadn’t come back. Why now? How was it even still inside me? Stryge’s power had been inextricably tied to his life force, but I had died and absorbed a new life force since then—Biddy’s. Stryge’s power shouldn’t still be with me. So why was it? What did it mean?

  Just then everything broke apart. Behind it all, behind the skin of the world, I saw seven figures, seven towering, dazzling entities all looking at me, looking right at me—

  I blinked, and just like that they were gone. Everything was back to normal. In the distance, the two finches were tiny dots against the clouds. The power receded inside me, shrinking down to a small flame at my core, out of my reach once again. I shook my head, trying to clear it. What just happened?

  I sat down on the sidewalk and caught my breath. I looked over at Bethany. She was still on the phone.

  “The only thing we can do is go back to Calliope’s house and look for anything we missed,” she was saying. “We can get around the police somehow, if we have to. But there must be something there we overlooked.” She glanced at me. Something in my face froze her in her tracks. “Isaac, I’m going to have to call you back.”

  She ended the call and held my phone out to me. The screen was already flickering and emitting a low buzz, even though she hadn’t been holding it for long. Prolonged exposure to the magic charms in Bethany’s vest fried electronics for some reason. It shorted out their batteries or played havoc with their microchips. It was why Bethany couldn’t carry her own cell phone, or any other electronic equipment. She couldn’t even wear a watch.

  I stared at the phone in her hand for a moment, still in shock.

  “Earth to Trent,” she said.

  I snapped out of it and took the phone from her.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “It’s still inside me,” I croaked. My throat was dry.

  “What is?”

  “Stryge’s power. Somehow, it’s still there. I had some kind of flare-up just now. It was just like last time. I could—I could see the threads that bind everything together. If I’d wanted to, I could have unwound them, taken it all apart in the blink of an eye. Bethany, this power, it’s—it’s too much. Why do I still have it? It’s like it won’t let go.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Are you okay?”

  I rubbed my hands over my face. “Everything would make sense if I just knew who the hell I am. What I am. I know it would.”

  “Right now I’d settle for an instruction manual,” Bethany said.

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. That, at least, felt good. Normal, even.

  “Come on, we have to go back to Calliope’s,” Bethany said.

  I stood up with a sigh. It was time to come clean. I wasn’t looking forward to how she would take this. “I, um, heard what you said about there being something you missed at Calliope’s house. You’re right, there was, except it’s not at her house anymore.”

  She knit her brow. “Where is it?”

  “You’re not going to like this,” I said. “It’s under my mattress.”

  * * *

  I put Calliope’s spiral-bound notebook on the round table in the main room of Citadel. Isaac, Philip, and Bethany looked down at the notebook, then up at me.

  “Let me get this straight,” Isaac said. “You took this from Calliope’s home without telling anyone?”

  I nodded. I hated how disappointed in me he sounded.

  “I thought we’d earned your trust by now,” he said. “I thought we were a team.”

  “We are, I just…” I trailed off miserably. I didn’t know how to explain what I felt.

  “Once a thief,” Philip said. I glared at the vampire. He shrugged. “Why deny what you are? Embrace it.”

  “Guys, give him a chance to explain,” Bethany said. “You do have an explanation, don’t you?”

  “I know I should have told you about it sooner, but there was a reason I kept it to myself,” I said. “When I took Calliope home the other night, this notebook was lying open on her coffee table. I saw something in it, something I thought had to do with me. With who I was before.” I opened the book to the sketch of the Ehrlendarr rune, the eye inside the circle, and showed it to them. “After I lost my memories, this was the first thing I saw. This rune, on a plain brick wall. It’s the Ehrlendarr rune for magic. I know I shouldn’t have kept the book from you, but I needed time to study it. I needed to know if there was anything else in here that sparked a memory. Anything else that might be about me.”

  “I don’t understand,” Isaac said. “Why couldn’t you share that with us? We could have helped.”

  I sighed. “I didn’t know what I would find.”

  “You were afraid of what it might say about you,” Bethany said.

  I nodded. “If it was something bad…”

  “You thought we would reject you,” Isaac said.

  I nodded again. I felt like a kid called to the principal’s office.

  “You know we wouldn’t do that,” Bethany said.

  “No, I don’t know that,” I said. “There haven’t been a lot of clues about who I am, but so far what we do know isn’t exactly encouraging.”

  “You’re talking about the prophecy,” Isaac said. “The one that says the Immortal Storm will bring about the end of everything. But we still don’t know how valid the prophecy is, Trent, or if it means something other than what you think. Sometimes these things aren’t what they seem.”

  I nodded, but I doubted the prophecy meant anything other than what it said. I was a threat to everyone—mortal, Ancient, and Guardian alike. Or so everyone kept telling me.

  “So what did the notebook have to say about you?” Bethany asked.

  “As far as I could tell, nothing. To be honest, I can’t make heads or tails out of it. The whole notebook is gibberish. It’s just page after page of random words and phrases, repeated over and over again.” I turned to a page at random. “Here’s a perfect example. On this page she only wrote one thing, and circled it about a hundred times. Eternal voice and inward word. I have no idea what that means. It almost sounds like part of a spell to me.”

  Isaac shook his head. “None that I’ve ever heard. May I?” I handed him the notebook. He flipped through the pages and frowned. “I see what you mean. She circled this phrase, too: Hidden mariner lost at sea. Could it be some kind of code, in case her notes fell into the wrong hands?”

  “I thought the same thing,” I said. “But how could it be a code if she didn’t understand it herself? The whole back of the notebook is her trying to figure it out.”

  Isaac turned to the back of the notebook and started flipping through the pages.

  “There’s more,” I said. “Calliope knew she was putting her life in danger. She probably felt like she couldn’t confide in anyone, though ultimately she would have to. She couldn’t handle this demon by herself. She would need help from someone who not only believed her story, but was powerful enough or connected enough to do something about it. I think once she had what she was looking for, she was going to ask Ingrid Bannion for help.”

  Isaac looked up at me from the notebook, surprised. “Ingrid?”

  I showed them the appointment card I’d found inside the notebook. “According to this, Ingrid came to Calliope a little over a year ago, presumably to contact Morbius on the other side. Calliope must have known Ingrid was the last surviving member of the original Five-Pointed Star. She knew Ingrid was someone who could help her when the time came.”

  “But Ingrid is dead,” Isaac pointed out.

  “I don’t think Calliope knew that. Right up until the end, she was still hoping Ingrid would help her. It’s why she held onto the appointment card. But first she needed to crack this code.”

  “I’m not so sure it’s just a code,” Isaac said, scratching his beard as he flipped through the pages. “All this repetition, words written over words in a mad jumble. It reminds me of automatic writ
ing.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a technique necromancers have been using for centuries. They go into a trance, allowing the spirits to take over their bodies for a short time. The spirits manipulate the necromancer’s hand to write out messages. Looking at this notebook, I can’t help wondering if that’s what this is. If so, it’s possible even Calliope hadn’t deciphered it yet.”

  Now I understood why it looked like different people had written the notes, despite it all being in the same handwriting. In a way, it had been different people. Calliope and the spirits.

  “I think that’s what she was trying to work out in these back pages,” Isaac said. “The meaning of it all.”

  “I don’t know how far she got, but I’m pretty sure something in this notebook got her killed,” I said. “Yrouel, too.”

  Bethany knit her brow the way she did whenever she was deep in thought. “Trent, where was the notebook when you took it?”

  “It was still on the coffee table,” I said, my cheeks starting to burn with embarrassment. “I, um, kind of waited until you weren’t looking, and then…”

  Bethany shook her head. “We’ll have words about that later. But that’s not why I asked. You’re saying the notebook was out in the open. But if it was sitting right there, why didn’t the killer take it with him? Wouldn’t he want to know how much she’d discovered, or if she’d contacted anyone else beside Yrouel? Wouldn’t he want to destroy it if it contained evidence against him?”

  That hadn’t occurred to me, but she was right. If the notebook was the repository of everything the spirits had warned Calliope about, everything she was subsequently investigating, then surely the killer would have turned the place upside down trying to find it. But there was no indication the house had been searched, and the notebook had been out in plain sight in the living room.

  Isaac stood up and walked to the front of the table. “I spoke to a representative from the Avalonian Collection today. All she would tell me was that a recently hired custodian had stolen the Thracian Gauntlet from the gallery and sold it to a black market dealer in New York City for quick cash. Unfortunately, the custodian has since died, making it impossible to get any information out of him.”