Die and Stay Dead

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  “That’s what I wanted to know,” I said. “We’re heading out to Battery Park now. We’re pretty sure another fragment is hidden there.”

  “Lucas, listen to me,” she said. “I—I saw a demon once. It was a couple of years ago, shortly after Pete died. My family went on a ski trip to Aspen. I guess we were trying to find a sense of normalcy again. We rented a private cabin near the woods. One night, my mother and stepfather were arguing. They did that a lot after Pete died, but this one was really bad. I couldn’t take it. I had to get out of there and clear my head, so I went out into the woods alone. I saw this—this light in the trees and went toward it. That was when I saw it. I thought it was a bear at first, but it had a head like a wolf and these big, staglike antlers. The antlers were on fire, they were burning. It was crouched over the carcass of a dead dog. It was … eating. Then it turned around and saw me. Lucas, its eyes were like fire, they burned just like its antlers. Then it—it just went back to eating the dead dog, like I didn’t matter. I know now that it must have been a lesser demon, because only the Codex Goetia can summon greater demons. I don’t know who summoned this one or why it was there, but it scared the hell out of me. It’s why I started studying demonology. I never wanted to be that scared or feel that helpless again.”

  “I had no idea,” I said. I couldn’t begin to image how terrifying that must have been for her.

  “Please be careful, Lucas. What I saw in the woods that day is nothing compared to Nahash-Dred. Check in with me as soon as you’ve got the next fragment. Promise me you’ll call.”

  “Will you pick up this time?”

  “Even the Bay Ridge Harpy couldn’t stop me,” she said.

  From outside, the car horn blared impatiently.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Then go,” she told me. “Bring me the fragments before it’s too late.”

  I ended the call. I was about to leave when my eyes fell on Calliope’s notebook, still lying open to her sketch of the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial. Something about it jumped out at me then—another difference between the sketch and the actual monument, one so subtle I hadn’t noticed it before. But now that I saw it, I wished I hadn’t. It took a moment for me to remember to breathe.

  Calliope had drawn the three figures aboard the lifeboat in their exact poses. One was reaching down for his comrade in the water. The second had his cupped hands around his mouth, shouting for help. The third was kneeling, his hands on his knees as he faced forward. But Calliope had given this last figure a different face. One I recognized instantly.

  I couldn’t believe it. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, but it didn’t change. It was there. It was real. It was unmistakable.

  She had given him Underwood’s face.

  Twenty-One

  By the time we got to Battery Park all the way at the bottom of Manhattan, it had started raining. Fat droplets drummed furiously around us. I pulled up the collar of my trench coat against the cold rain. I wished I had a hat, too, something to keep my head dry. Of course, with both a trench coat and a hat, I would look like I’d stepped out of a 1940s film noir.

  The path into the park led us past well-manicured green lawns and rows of park benches. The rain hadn’t kept the tourists away. They huddled under umbrellas and in their dollar-store plastic ponchos, exploring the park and admiring the south Manhattan skyline or New Jersey across the water. Isaac and I wore the orange construction vests. Bethany wore her usual cargo vest. I had mine on under my trench coat this time. I was sure I looked ridiculous and wasn’t fooling anyone, but no one gave us a second look. Part of me wished I’d known about the construction-vest trick back in my thieving days. It would have come in handy anytime I had to go … well, anywhere.

  A battered, twenty-five-foot, spherical bronze sculpture towered beside the path. Once, the sphere had adorned the plaza between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Now it was a memorial, still bearing the scars of that terrible day in its torn bronze. As the raindrops pinged against it, Isaac regarded the sphere with haunted eyes. He’d been at the Towers that day, I recalled, helping rescue survivors from the rubble. One of those survivors had been a vampire named Philip, who’d pledged him one hundred years of service in gratitude. That moment had marked the birth of Isaac’s little team of artifact thieves and, ultimately, the renewed Five-Pointed Star. Yet even now, twelve years on, I could still see the pain and loss in Isaac’s eyes when he thought of that day. I saw it in the eyes of all New Yorkers.

  My thoughts went back to Gabrielle. I couldn’t help it. Her absence felt like a lost limb. Why couldn’t we reach her? Where was she? Was she avoiding us, purposely not answering our calls? I couldn’t help thinking about what she’d said after the Fetch attacked us, how she didn’t think she was cut out for this kind of life anymore. But damn it, didn’t she know how much was at stake?

  We reached the far end of the park, where Castle Clinton stood near the water. A castle in name only, it was actually a circular, brownstone fortress that dated back to the War of 1812. We walked into Castle Clinton to find an open-air courtyard. At its center was a ticket booth for boat tours to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. We left the fortress through the opposite side, exiting onto a cement walkway along the river’s edge. Off to our right, in the shadow of the clock tower of the abandoned City Pier A, was the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial.

  The monument stood several yards out from the shore. Rain pelted the surface of the Hudson River like bullets. Waves churned against the monument’s base, slapping at the bronze figure half-submerged in the water. Up close, the desperate grimace on its face was even more harrowing than the online pictures conveyed. Only a few small inches separated his outstretched fingers from those of his comrade on the boat above him. I glanced at the kneeling figure at the far end of the monument, worried he would have Underwood’s face like in Calliope’s sketch. To my relief, he did not.

  Why had she drawn Underwood? What did it mean? It felt like a message, one meant specifically for me, but how was that possible? Calliope hadn’t met me yet when she drew it. If she’d used automatic writing, then technically the spirits had drawn it, not her. But why?

  A short, concrete bridge led across the water to the monument, but it was blocked by a chain-link fence. A heavy padlock secured its gate. The fence was only eight feet high and there was no barbed wire across the top.

  “We can climb it,” I said.

  Isaac took the padlock in one hand. “No need. Just make sure no one is watching.”

  I looked to see if the coast was clear. The rain had picked up in the last few minutes, turning into one of those lashing monsoons New York got in the summer and fall. Throughout the park, people were dashing madly toward the street or under trees to get out of the rain. No one was paying attention to us.

  A flash of black caught my eye. In the distance, a figure in a black, hooded cloak stood watching us. A crow was perched on his shoulder. A shiver went through me as I remembered our encounter in the Village. What was he doing here? Why was he watching us?

  A small flame flared in Isaac’s palm, drawing my attention. The padlock went up like flash paper. He brushed the ashes off his hand, glancing quickly over his shoulder to make sure we were still in the clear, then pulled the gate open. I glanced back at the cloaked figure. He was gone. Had he really been there? Or was it just a trick of the rain? Isaac and Bethany strode quickly across the bridge to the monument. I hurried after them.

  Standing on the monument’s pier, the artist’s tricks became evident, like the forced perspective of the sinking lifeboat, which was actually just a diagonally positioned slab of metal. There was more detail to be found in the figures’ faces and clothing, but there was something eerie about them, too. Something almost inhuman about the weathered green of their faces and the black, empty holes of their eyes. They looked like corpses.

  What I didn’t see, even up close, was any way of getting inside the monument. There was no doo
r. No visible seams that could mark a hidden entrance. The rainwater rolled straight off the long, metal slab of the lifeboat, not disappearing into any secret crevices or hatches.

  “How did you find your way into the last one?” Isaac asked.

  “We searched every inch of that statue,” Bethany said, squinting against the rain. “Trent found a secret button hidden in its base.”

  “Lucas,” I corrected her. She didn’t reply, which I supposed was better than another one of her wisecracks. It was progress, anyway.

  I wiped the rainwater from my face and bent to inspect the bronze figure closest to me. He lay prone across the width of the lifeboat, reaching down to help his fallen comrade in the water. I swept my hands over his back and legs, the wet metal cold against my palms, but I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. I reached into the figure’s empty eye sockets and mouth, hoping to find a switch or lever, but there wasn’t one. Isaac and Bethany searched the other two figures and came up just as empty-handed as I did. Damn. How the hell were we supposed to get inside? If only we had some clue …

  But there was a clue, I realized. Calliope had already provided it, and as usual we hadn’t seen it for what it was. In her notebook, she’d written, Mariner lost at sea. Not mariners, plural. Just mariner. Just one.

  A mariner lost at sea.

  Only one of the figures fit that description.

  I got down on my stomach on the cold, wet monument and looked over the edge at the figure in the water. He was reaching up to the boat. The back of his hand lay flat against the wall, leaving his palm exposed. From this angle, it almost looked as though he were reaching up for me. Maybe he was.

  I reached down toward his hand, but it was farther than I thought. My fingers barely grazed his. I stretched my arm as far as I could until I touched his palm. With a metallic creak, his cold, bronze fingers began to move on hidden hinges. They closed around mine, as if the drowning mariner were holding on for dear life. The grip tightened, crushing my hand. I gritted my teeth against the pain. Had I made a mistake and tripped a booby trap? Was this thing going to crush my hand into ground chuck? But the grip loosened then, and the sound of a metal door springing came from the other side of the monument. I pulled my hand free and got to my feet.

  At the farthest end of the bronze lifeboat, where it was tipped the highest, a trapdoor had opened. I wiped the rain out of my eyes. First a secret chamber under the New York Public Library; now another one under a monument in the Hudson River. I would never get tired of this city.

  We looked down into the opening. Metal stairs descended into darkness.

  “Stay behind me,” Isaac said, starting down the stairs. “We don’t know what’s down there.”

  We descended in silence. I took up the rear, stepping carefully. The stairs were metal and already slippery from the rain. The stairwell went down so deep I was sure we were descending far below the surface of the river. Behind us, the doorway slid closed again, cutting off the rain, but also cutting off the daylight and enveloping us in absolute darkness. Isaac pronounced a quick incantation, and a ball of fire appeared in the air above his fingers. It didn’t give off any heat—though, shivering from the cold rain, I wished it did—but it radiated enough light to see by.

  The stairs terminated at a wall, but on our left was an open archway. We stepped through into a chamber considerably smaller than the enormous sanctum under the library. This one was probably five or six hundred square feet in total, with walls decorated in arcane patterns and designs. There were no hanging cages; no bones or trapped demons. There was only one object here, right in the center of the room. Another gilded sarcophagus. It was identical to the first, right down to the shallow imprint of a hand on its lid.

  Isaac snapped his wrist. The fireball leapt from his fingertips into the air, where it hovered above us, a tiny sun keeping the room lit.

  “The sarcophagus is just as you described,” he said, walking a circle around it. He stopped at the hand-shaped imprint. “This is how you opened the other one?”

  I nodded. “Be careful. It likes to bite.”

  He placed his hand in the shallow imprint. A second later he yelped in surprise and yanked his hand away. I caught a glimpse of the needle as it retracted into the stone.

  “You weren’t kidding,” he said.

  “You’ll be all right,” I said. “It’s some kind of blood offering to get the lid to open, that’s all.”

  He shook his hand and stuck his finger in his mouth. We waited, but the lid stayed closed.

  “Did I do it wrong?” Isaac asked.

  “Let me try,” Bethany said.

  Isaac stepped back. Bethany put her hand where his had been. Hers was much smaller, but she positioned her fingers so that they filled as much of the imprint’s fingers as they could. She winced as the needle pricked her, but unlike Isaac—or me, for that matter—she didn’t cry out or pull her hand away. Even so, nothing happened.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Is this one different somehow?”

  I walked over to it. “I don’t know. What else would it want us to do?”

  I put my hand in the imprint. Instantly, I felt a sharp prick to the tip of my index finger.

  “God damn it!” I cried out, yanking my hand away. Even expecting it, the damn thing still hurt like hell. A dollop of blood clung to my fingertip.

  A loud ka-thunk came from inside the sarcophagus as it unlocked. The lid began to open.

  “Apparently, it likes your blood better than ours,” Isaac said. “Why is that?”

  “Guess I’m just lucky,” I said, sucking on my fingertip. One more thing to add to the list of my abnormalities. Special blood, the kind preferred by vampiric sarcophagi. Was there anything about me that was normal?

  Inside the sarcophagus, resting on a short, obsidian pedestal, was another fragment of the Codex Goetia. It was identical in shape to the first one, a thick triangle with one side rounded and smooth and the other two jagged and broken. Its surface was covered with etched patterns at odd angles, plus three hundred and thirty-three more demon names, all in a language only Jordana could read. I wished she were here. Not just to translate, but so she could see this. I wanted to share the thrill of discovery with her.

  Isaac struggled to pull the fragment out of the sarcophagus. Finally, it released with a snap, and he stumbled back a few steps.

  I turned to Bethany as if to say, See, it’s not just me. She rolled her eyes.

  “Two down,” I said, “one to go.”

  “It makes you wonder,” Isaac said, looking around the chamber. “Who’s responsible for all this? Who broke the Codex Goetia and hid the pieces? And what about this chamber? Was it here already? Where did the sarcophagus come from? What does it mean?”

  “Whoever did this would have to be very powerful,” Bethany said. “The Mad Affliction said Nahash-Dred took the Codex with him after he massacred the cult. Whoever’s responsible for hiding the fragments would have had to get it back from Nahash-Dred first. But I can’t imagine the demon handing it over without a fight.”

  Neither could I. How could anyone get the Codex from Nahash-Dred without being turned into body-part stew like the cultists?

  The answers, if there were any, would have to wait. We walked back to the stairs. I started up the steps first. Far above us, the door in the monument slid open again. A shape appeared silhouetted in the doorway, too far away to see clearly. He pointed down the stairs at us. As soon as I heard the high-pitched whine, I knew exactly who it was.

  “Get back!” I shouted to the others.

  We raced down the stairs and back into the chamber just as the blast from the Thracian Gauntlet came crackling down. It struck the wall at the bottom of the stairs. A section of the wall exploded in a cloud of dust and rubble, leaving a big, scorched divot in the concrete. A long crack tore through the floor to the center of the chamber, beneath the sarcophagus.

  I drew my gun and aimed up the stairs at Arkwright, but before
I could squeeze off a shot Isaac pushed past me. He motioned like a pitcher throwing a fastball, only what came out of his hand was a sizzling red torpedo that arrowed up toward Arkwright. Arkwright jumped aside. Isaac’s spell struck the doorway, obliterating a chunk of it and the top stairs. Arkwright reappeared in the opening, his gauntlet powering up again. I grabbed Isaac and threw both of us out of the way.

  The second blast struck the wall in the same spot as the first, tearing through the concrete. A big hole opened into the depths of the Hudson. Torrents of freezing cold, silty river water rushed into the chamber. The crack in the floor widened and deepened. We backed up to the far end of the chamber as the water splashed violently across the floor. It was a small space, and it filled fast. The icy water was up to my thighs before I knew it. It smelled terrible, the stench of centuries of garbage and industrial waste dumped into the Hudson.

  Bethany pulled a charm out of her vest, the same emerald she’d used to shield me from the Thracian Gauntlet in Chinatown. She affixed it to her hand with the leather strap, then pointed it toward the archway that separated us from the stairwell. The charm projected its translucent green barrier over it. The river water smashed against it but couldn’t pass. With nowhere else to go, the water began to fill up the stairwell instead. We’d kept the flood out, but in the process we’d cut off our only exit.

  Blast after blast from the Thracian Gauntlet hit the chamber wall from the other side. Arkwright was trying to break his way through to us. He knew we had the Codex. The wall shuddered and cracked. It wouldn’t hold him, or the water, out for long.

  “We have to hurry!” Bethany cried. The translucent green barrier over the archway was already starting to flicker. The emerald strapped to her palm glowed so brightly it looked hot. “The spell won’t last much longer! If we don’t find another way out soon, we’ll all drown!”

  I waded forward, sloshing quickly around the chamber. I inspected the walls, but there was no other way out. I looked back at the others and shook my head. “There’s nothing. We’re trapped.”