Die and Stay Dead

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  According to Bankoff’s annotated Libri Arcanum, the king of the demons was named Leviathan. He and his queen, Lamia, had two sons together. The firstborn, and crown prince, was Behemoth. The second was Nahash-Dred. Apparently, the two brothers had a frosty relationship that spread to the rest of demonkind. Their kingdom had split into two camps: those loyal to Behemoth, and those loyal to Nahash-Dred. None of the rest of the royal family shared Nahash-Dred’s ability to change his shape. Apparently, the demon would use his power to move undetected through worlds before destroying them. Why he did this or what, if anything, he was looking for was not mentioned.

  I thought of the Mad Affliction again, the last of the greater demons Arkwright’s cult had accidentally summoned. He belonged to a culture that was a lot more advanced, a lot more complex than I thought. I felt a pang of guilt. I hated that we’d left him in that cage under the library, all alone. Demon or not, it didn’t sit right with me. There should have been another way.

  If Isaac’s library didn’t have much on demons, it had even less on the Codex Goetia. In a yellowing old tome called De Sacra Artificialia Caradras, I found only one small chapter on it. The book hinted at mysterious, otherworldly origins for the artifact and warned it should never be used improperly, though it refused to offer any instructions on the proper way to use it. I flipped through the pages, hoping to find information on the Codex Goetia’s banishing spell, but there was nothing, just more useless warnings to leave the Codex alone. I slammed the book closed in frustration, causing a cloud of dust to billow out from between its pages.

  “Listen to this,” Gabrielle said. She was reading a musty, leather-bound volume titled The Book of Eibon. “It says once a demon is bound to someone, if that person dies the demon returns to its own dimension.”

  “So Arkwright has to die,” I said.

  She looked up at me from the book. “You don’t sound too upset about that.”

  I met her eye, but I didn’t say anything.

  “You have a terrible poker face,” she said. “I saw it in your eyes when you couldn’t save Jordana. You want Arkwright dead. I don’t blame you. Jordana was my friend, too. He messed with her head and took my friend from me. I want him dead just as much as you do. But he also said he recognized you. He may know who you are, Trent. Don’t you want to know?”

  “Lots of people claimed to know who I am,” I said. “They were all lying.”

  “What if Arkwright isn’t?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that, so I let the question hang in the air.

  I did want Arkwright dead. Not just because of what he did to Jordana, although that was a big part of it. But also because of what he’d done to me. He’d dangled a life in front of me, a good life I’d been made to believe was mine. And then he’d cruelly yanked it away. He hadn’t just lied to me, he’d shown me that I would never, could never have that life. For that, too, I wanted to make him pay.

  * * *

  I let the shower’s hot water run over me, unwinding my muscles and washing away the day’s dirt. Bethany was still asleep in my room and I hadn’t wanted to disturb her, so I’d helped myself to Isaac’s shower instead. My jaw had dropped at the sight of a bathroom that was bigger than some of the apartments I’d seen. In one corner stood the marble-lined, glass-doored shower stall I was currently occupying.

  The sun had crossed the sky and gone down again. There’d been no sign of Isaac all day. He never came out of his study, not even to join me and Gabrielle for meals. Deciphering the scroll was taking all his time. I wished I could help somehow. I felt useless just waiting around, but translating Elvish wasn’t part of my limited skill set. Not unless you could translate scrolls by punching them.

  I adjusted the gold-plated temperature-control knobs until the water was so hot I could barely see through the steam. I lathered soap over my torso, thinking about how I’d been stabbed to death with swords twice already this week. Once in the stomach and once in the chest. For anyone else, that would be some kind of record. For me, it was business as usual. There were no scars to show for it, of course. Looking at myself, I looked like a perfectly normal man. You’d never know I had died thirteen times already. You’d never know I could see through the skin of the world and pluck its threads.

  How could I have ever believed I was Lucas West from Norristown, Pennsylvania? Who was I kidding? Myself, apparently.

  When I finished showering, I stepped out of the stall into the steam-filled bathroom. A granite counter ran along one wall, embedded with a large, enamel sink. Above it was a wall-length mirror. I wiped the steam away and studied my reflection. Despite all my strange abilities, despite all the mysteries of my identity, I looked human enough.

  That was an odd way to put it, I thought. Human enough for what?

  My shirt lay crumpled on the bathroom floor, torn and bloodstained from the lesser demon’s sword. My black jeans lay beside it, also spattered with blood. More casualties in the ongoing war on my clothing. Outside, in Isaac’s sprawling bedroom, I found an enormous, walk-in closet. I took out a new shirt and pants, both black and pristine. Would he mind my taking them? Probably. But all my clothes were in my room and I didn’t want to wake Bethany. I needed something to wear. Besides, his closet looked like it had enough clothes for months on end. He wouldn’t even notice the shirt and pants were missing. It wasn’t like I was taking his favorite hunter green duster, right?

  When I was done dressing, I checked my reflection in the antique, oval-framed mirror on the bedroom wall. I cleaned up well, I thought, though part of me wondered why I was bothering. If the world didn’t end tonight at midnight, odds were I’d just be covered in blood and dirt again, with yet another destroyed shirt. So why had I cleaned myself and dressed in nicer clothes? For Bethany? God, what was I doing? It wasn’t that long ago that I’d been a lowlife stealing artifacts for a crime boss in Brooklyn. Did I really think I was good enough for her? There I went, kidding myself again.

  Movement in the mirror’s reflection caught my eye. A shape appeared behind me. He wore a familiar black, hooded cloak that covered most of his face, leaving only his mouth and chin visible. His paper-white flesh was veined with black. The crow on his shoulder cocked its head and stared at me with beady eyes. The cloaked man grinned, revealing yellow teeth and black gums.

  “Pave the way,” he said, his voice rumbling like thunder.

  I pulled my gun from its holster and spun around. The room was empty. He was gone.

  * * *

  I barreled down the stairs, yelling for Gabrielle. I nearly collided with Bethany. She was finally awake and just leaving my bedroom, a white terry cloth robe over her nightgown. She and Gabrielle sat me down at the big table in the main room, asking questions and trying to calm me down.

  “What you’re saying is impossible,” Bethany said. “No one can get into Citadel.”

  “The ward has been breached before,” I pointed out.

  “That was different,” Gabrielle said. “That time, Reve Azrael followed you here.”

  “Who’s to say this guy didn’t follow me, too?”

  “Tell us again who it was?” Bethany asked.

  “I don’t know his name. It was the same hooded man I saw before, in the Village near Calliope’s house.”

  “The one who showed you the vision?”

  Bodies everywhere. Ruined buildings. A tidal wave of blood crashing through the subway tunnel. A haggard, one-armed Isaac. Bethany covered in blood, screaming in my face, What have you done? What have you done? I shook the images out of my head.

  “What the hell was he doing here?” I demanded. “How did he get in? Where did he go?”

  “I didn’t see him,” Gabrielle said.

  “Neither did I,” Bethany said. “If he was here, he would have had to pass both of us.”

  “I’m not crazy,” I said. “He was here.”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy, but I don’t think he was necessarily here, either,” Bethany said. “Whoeve
r this man is, he obviously has magic.”

  “He showed me the future,” I said.

  “A future,” she corrected me. “I told you before, nothing is set in stone. But if he has magic powerful enough to do that, who’s to say he doesn’t have other spells, too? He could appear in the mirror without having to be in Citadel at all.”

  “It’s true,” Gabrielle said. “The ward would have no effect on that kind of spell.”

  That didn’t make me feel any better. “What does he want from me?”

  It was a rhetorical question. I knew neither of them could answer it. Only the cloaked man could. If he was a man.

  It occurred to me that all this time we’d been looking for Nahash-Dred, the demon might have already made himself known to us.

  So where the hell was he? Where was this goddamn demon? Not knowing was driving me crazy.

  A door slammed closed upstairs. I twisted around in my chair. I half expected the cloaked man to come creeping down the stairs. Or maybe floating down, which struck me as more appropriate. Instead, it was Isaac. He held up the scroll in triumph.

  “I’ve got it,” he said. He unrolled the scroll on the table, pinning it open with a heavy book on either end. “It took me a long time to translate. Elvish isn’t as simple as most other languages. It’s read horizontally and vertically. See this column here? Those aren’t words, they’re numbers. And this column here? They’re constellations. Aquarius, Cepheus, Pegasus.”

  “They’re coordinates,” Bethany said.

  “Precisely. Only, there’s one small problem.” Isaac opened his laptop. He typed the coordinates into a Web site, then turned the computer around so it faced us. On the monitor was a map of the western edge of Midtown Manhattan, between Forty-Second and Fifty-Seventh Streets. A small star sat on the map, marking the coordinates Isaac had typed in. I saw the problem right away.

  “It’s in the middle of the Hudson River,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “At first I thought it might be one of the piers in that area, but the coordinates are farther out in the water than the piers go. There’s nothing there. According to the map, it’s just water. Either Arkwright is planning to use the Codex at the bottom of the Hudson, which I doubt, or there is something there, just something that’s not on the map.”

  “But what?” Gabrielle asked. “There are no islands or reefs in the Hudson. So what is it?”

  “Let’s find out,” Isaac said. He turned the laptop toward himself again and started typing furiously on the keyboard. “There must be some traffic cameras or security cameras I can hack into. With any luck, one of them will have a clear view of … Ah!” He paused, his face freezing in surprise. “Oh. Oh, of course. Stupid of me.”

  Bethany, Gabrielle, and I got up and looked over his shoulder. Isaac had hacked into a traffic camera across the street from the waterfront. I saw a footbridge spanning Twelfth Avenue and traffic speeding past the piers. Men and women walked by in their Halloween costumes, ghouls and witches and zombies on their way to parties, bars, and the Halloween Parade downtown. I thought of the dryads again on their exodus to the Nethercity. What better night for supernatural creatures to be out in the open than Halloween, when they could blend in?

  But on the water just past Twelfth Avenue was what had taken Isaac’s breath away. A hulking, gray World War II–era aircraft carrier extended into the river from the pier. I recognized it right away. Any New Yorker would. The USS Intrepid. Decommissioned and turned into a floating museum, its nearly nine-hundred-foot-long flight deck was now home to a collection of various historical aircraft.

  “It’s perfect,” Isaac said. “One giant altar for Arkwright’s ritual.”

  “The Guardians said this spot is where the wall between dimensions would be thinnest at midnight tonight,” I said. “But there’s something we’re missing. Nahash-Dred is already in New York City. Why bother opening the doorway at all? It’s like taking the time to reload when you’ve still got a full magazine.”

  “Maybe he’s not taking any chances,” Bethany said. “If something goes wrong with Nahash-Dred, the Codex Goetia gives him nearly a thousand other greater demons to choose from.”

  That could be it, but something still didn’t feel right. There was something important we still didn’t know. I hated not knowing things. Everything we didn’t know was another thing we weren’t prepared for.

  “Let’s not give Arkwright the chance to call for backup,” Isaac said. He rolled up the scroll again. “Get ready. We leave in ten minutes.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for Philip?” I asked.

  Isaac looked at his watch and shook his head. “If he hasn’t come back with Nightclaw yet, something must have gone wrong. It’s almost ten now. That only gives us two hours to stop Arkwright. We can’t wait for Philip. Not when we’re looking down the barrel of a gun this big.” He paused and looked at each of us. “The last time we faced something this catastrophic, I asked you to make a stand with me. Since then, I know I’ve had my doubts, I know I’ve had my moments of weakness, but I also know we’ve made a dent. We’ve beaten back the darkness, even if only by inches. What I’m asking you to do now is help me stand our ground. Defend the advances we’ve made. No matter what happens, no matter the sacrifices we have to make, we do not cede an inch. Not to Arkwright. Not to Nahash-Dred. Not to anyone. We’ve fought too hard and lost too many to let it all be in vain.”

  “I’ve got your back,” I said.

  “We all do,” Bethany said.

  “Good.” Isaac climbed the stairs, the scroll in his hand. “Ten minutes.”

  Bethany got out of her chair and started toward the stairs.

  “Bethany, wait,” I said, going over to her. I’d been thinking about what Gabrielle said, how you never know how much time you’ll have with someone. There were things I wanted to tell Bethany, things I thought she should know, things we needed to talk about before time ran out.

  “I’m fine, Trent,” she said before I could continue. “Don’t worry, I’m up for this. My back doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

  “No, that’s not what…” I started to say, but she was already hurrying up the stairs to get dressed. I sighed. “Damn it.”

  At the table, Gabrielle shook her head at me. “Smooth operator.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, we were in the Escalade. Isaac and Bethany sat up front. I sat in back with Gabrielle.

  I thought about Arkwright. I thought about my hands around his throat. But I knew that would never happen. Arkwright wouldn’t be alone at the Intrepid. Given how important this moment was to him, how close he was to his goal, he wouldn’t want anything to interrupt him. He would likely have summoned another horde of lesser demons to guard him, probably even more than he’d brought with him to Bethesda Fountain. There was no way I could get close enough to take him out. No way, that was, except one. I’d been giving it a lot of thought. Thinking about it all day, in fact. It wasn’t the safest plan. It probably wasn’t even the smartest plan. And it would take a hell of a lot to convince the others to go along with it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was my only shot. Isaac always said it was important to have a Plan B. This was mine.

  I leaned forward in the backseat. “There’s someplace we need to go first. Something we need to pick up.”

  Thirty-Six

  A short time later, we parked the Escalade in the small pedestrian plaza in front of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum’s Welcome Center on Twelfth Avenue. I opened the door and jumped out in front of the NO PARKING sign. Whatever. A parking ticket was the least of our worries.

  The Welcome Center was a square, two-story building at the foot of the cement pier. Just past it, the USS Intrepid sat moored by thick, knotted anchor lines. The first thing I noticed was that the Welcome Center’s glass front doors hung shattered and crooked from their hinges. I waved the others behind me, pulled my gun, and nudged one of the doors open. I stepped inside cautiously. On the floor,
the bodies of five uniformed security guards had been piled on top of each other. From what I could tell, they’d been stabbed to death, their bodies marred by long slashes and deep puncture wounds. Their clothes were soaked in blood, with more pooling on the floor around them. Two had their guns out. If they’d managed to fire any shots, it hadn’t made a difference.

  My anger flared. These men had families. People who cared about them, who relied on them. But to Arkwright they were nothing but an obstacle. That was how Arkwright thought of everyone. They were either tools to be used or obstacles to be eliminated.

  Isaac pulled me away from the bodies. “Come on. It’s too late to do anything for them. We need to get to the ship, and there’s no way to board it from in here.”

  We hurried back outside and continued along the pier toward a tower of stairs that led up to the Intrepid’s flight deck. A bright shaft of ice-blue light shot suddenly into the night sky from the ship’s deck. It pooled against the low clouds like a search beam. But this was no ordinary light. An ordinary light wouldn’t make every hair on my body stand on end.

  “It’s started,” Bethany said. “Arkwright is opening the doorway. We’re running out of time.”

  We raced up the stairs and across the short bridge onto the Intrepid’s flight deck. Immediately on our right was a bank of helicopters on display. We climbed over the safety rail and crouched down behind the bulky cabin of a red-and-white Sikorsky Sea Guardian Coast Guard chopper. The shaft of light was emanating from a spot somewhere in front of us, near the ship’s stern.

  I saw Arkwright. He stood in front of the wide pavilion where the decommissioned space shuttle Enterprise was housed. I could see its huge white tail and rounded engine modules inside. Arkwright’s shadow flickered and danced behind him on the wall of the island, the hundred-and-fifty-foot superstructure that housed the aircraft carrier’s bridges and control tower. At its top stood a tall array of radar dishes and communication antennas.