Die and Stay Dead

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  Isaac was wrong. It wasn’t Stryge’s power. Reve Azrael had told me the truth. I knew that now. The power was mine. It had been mine all along.

  “Dying isn’t what I have in mind this time,” I said. “But we’re out of options, Isaac. There’s only one way to stop Behemoth. Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

  Isaac took a deep breath, then nodded. “Just be careful.”

  I turned to go, but Bethany stopped me. “Trent, wait. If it doesn’t work…”

  “It’ll work,” I said. “It has to.”

  The ship continued its slow rise into the air above the Hudson River. Bethany grabbed the lapels of my trench coat, pulled herself up onto her toes, and kissed me. For a moment, everything stopped. I wanted it to stay like that forever. It didn’t. It never does. When she pulled away, I stared at her in surprise.

  “I know what the rest of the sentence was,” she said. “But how about when this is over, you can tell me if I’m right?”

  I touched my forehead to hers. It sounded wonderful. It sounded like everything I’d ever wanted. But I knew when this was over I would have to tell her the truth about me, and that would change everything.

  I turned away from her so she wouldn’t see the anguish in my face. I walked toward the enormous fire raging on the other end of the aircraft carrier, and the bellowing demon that waited for me within it. As I drew closer, Thornton appeared before me. His lips pulled back in a snarl. His hackles rose. Was he mad at me about something? I was confused, but I ignored him and kept walking toward the fire. I couldn’t let myself be distracted now. Thornton leapt at me. His translucent, glowing form passed through me. There was no vision this time. Instead, I only felt the hot blast of an urgent word slamming into me.

  STOP!

  Why did Thornton want me to stop? Did he think the fire would burn me? Did he think Behemoth would kill me? I was worried about those things, too, but I kept walking. I didn’t have a choice. There was no other way out of this.

  My vision shifted as I approached the curtain of fire. It wasn’t involuntary. This time it happened because I wanted it to. For the first time, I was in control of it. I knew why. I’d accepted it as part of me. I’d accepted the power as mine. In front of me, the curtain of fire became a wall of jumping, swirling, blazing atoms like tiny exploding suns that gave off ripples of streaming, red heat. I performed a simple rearrangement, and the curtain opened for me. I passed through, into the pentagram. The burning circle closed up behind me.

  And then we were alone, just Behemoth and me.

  Forty-Three

  It was unbelievably hot inside the curtain of fire. On either side of me were two angled, flaming lines of the burning pentagram. Sweat squeezed out of every pore in my body. Within seconds, my clothes were soaked.

  Behemoth towered before me, roaring in pain. The pentagram was burning him in a way that the flames couldn’t. It was a pain beyond physical agony. I knew because I felt it, too, being inside the pentagram. It took everything I had not to roar in pain with him. Slowly, Behemoth became aware of my presence. His expression changed as he looked down at me, just as it had the first time he saw me. Except now I understood why. He recognized me.

  Inside Behemoth were atoms the likes of which I’d never seen before. They were big and angular and ringed. The atoms of his dimension, not ours. Instead of being bound together by the silken threads, they were interlocked by long, curling, leathery tendrils.

  But the strangeness of Behemoth’s atoms didn’t matter. I could still manipulate them. With no more than a thought, I rearranged them—mixed them, swapped them, pulled them apart. Behemoth screamed in agony. But even though Behemoth wouldn’t have hesitated to kill everyone I cared about, I felt no satisfaction in this. No sense of triumph. Because killing Behemoth this way told me without question who I was. It showed me my true nature and forced me to embrace it.

  Behemoth screamed and screamed.

  I put him out like a dying star.

  Behemoth fell to the deck with a heavy thump. My stomach lurched as the Intrepid dropped back into the river. It hadn’t lifted very high, thankfully, but it splashed down hard. The ship rocked violently. I fell to the deck. I was lucky I didn’t break any bones or get thrown into the fire. I couldn’t see them through the flames, but I heard tidal waves crash all around us—onto the cement pier, onto Twelfth Avenue, into the river. I got to my feet again as the ship found its equilibrium.

  Behemoth was still alive, but dying. I could hear his heart beating in the massive cavern of his chest, slowing with each thunderous stroke. He’d fallen with his head right beside me. His gigantic eyes were already glazing over as they fixed on me.

  And then he spoke.

  “There are more coming through the doorway behind me, brother.”

  “Don’t,” I said. I shook my head, fighting back tears of anguish. “Don’t call me that.”

  “The Selenian Legion,” Behemoth continued. His breath rattled in his chest. Blood dripped from his mouth. “My personal guard. I have thrown open the gates of Nimon and freed them from Tellenor, where you imprisoned them so long ago.”

  I looked up at the rift in the sky.

  “You are too late,” Behemoth said. “The doorway cannot be closed. I have seen to that. When the Selenian Legion finds you, my brother, they will take their vengeance upon you.”

  I shook my head. “Stop calling me that.”

  “Why do you continue to wear the face of these ridiculous creatures?” Behemoth asked. “You should have destroyed them when you had the chance. Or was this your plan all along? Was this how you plotted to steal Father’s throne from me? Well played, brother. Such cold-minded treachery. You are indeed our father’s son. I think he must have foreseen this day when he named you. Even when you were a child, he knew of your temper and the havoc that spread in your wake. It is why he named you Nahash-Dred. In the old tongue, it means the Storm Without End.”

  The Storm Without End. The Immortal Storm. Suddenly it all made sense. A bitter, terrible sense.

  Tears streamed down my cheeks. “No, no, this isn’t me…” But it was pointless. I knew Behemoth was telling the truth. Deep down, I knew. I’d known since I figured out Arkwright’s riddle.

  Who else besides the cult had been there the night Nahash-Dred was summoned? It was a trick question. The answer was right there in the wording. The night Nahash-Dred was summoned … Nahash-Dred was there.

  The Destroyer of Worlds. He Who Puts Out the Stars. The Burning Hand.

  The Wearer of Many Faces.

  The clues had been right in front of me, but I’d refused to see them. Before she died, Ingrid had seen something in my aura that terrified her, something that wasn’t human. The oracles had called me a mighty warrior in the guise of a man, a man who wasn’t a man. They said that as long as I walked upon this world, I was a danger to everyone. Erickson Arkwright had recognized me because he’d seen the human form Nahash-Dred had taken upon leaving the sanctum. My form. And then there were the sarcophagi where Nahash-Dred had hidden the three fragments of the Codex Goetia. Each time they pricked my finger, they hadn’t been taking a sacrifice. They’d been taking a blood test. Because only my blood could open them. My fingerprints, my retinas, every physical feature that could be used for identification could change as easily as my face. But my blood would stay the same. My blood was the key.

  The Guardians had warned me that Nahash-Dred would be revealed tonight. They’d asked me if I was prepared for it. Like a fool, I’d said yes.

  I thought of all those pictures of ruined civilizations. Of the enormous, terrible creature towering above the trees in the film from 1950s Africa. Me. It was me.

  “I don’t remember,” I told Behemoth. “I don’t remember any of it. Why can’t I remember?”

  But Behemoth was already dead. His eyes stared sightlessly at me. This was the moment Arkwright would have bound me, I realized. In order to kill Behemoth, I’d had to embrace the truth about myself. I’d had to
accept who I was. If Arkwright were still alive, he would have taken the opportunity to bind me with the Codex Goetia. He would have forced me to destroy the world for him. To kill everyone I cared about. He was right, it would have been the perfect revenge.

  I touched Behemoth’s cheek. His skin was tough and leathery and warm—from the fire, not from life. The atoms inside him hung cold and still. My brother. I’d killed my own brother. Another victim of Nahash-Dred, like the thousands of ghosts I’d imagined watching me earlier. Or maybe I hadn’t imagined them. Maybe they really were watching, waiting to avenge what I’d done to them. Wasn’t that what I deserved? With all the blood on my hands, didn’t I deserve to die, too?

  Except … I couldn’t.

  There was no doubt who I was anymore. I was Nahash-Dred, a shape-shifting demon who had lost his memories and gotten stuck in the shape of a man. I looked at Behemoth, lying dead before me. Demons could die. The Book of Eibon said they could die. Behemoth did die. So why couldn’t I?

  I’d peeled back one mystery only to find more waiting, unanswered.

  I extinguished the fires of the pentagram, mentally putting out each of its burning atoms. With the pentagram gone, the pain left me, too. I let my vision return to normal. I stood on the scorched flight deck of the half-destroyed Intrepid amid the ruins of its antique aircraft collection, next to the dead body of a gigantic greater demon who used to be my brother. Just another day on the job. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  Bethany came running up to me and jumped into my arms. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She kissed me again, but all I could think about was the shame of who I was, and the horror she would feel when I told her. I gently lowered her back down to her feet. I didn’t want to tell her. I never wanted to tell her.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I am now,” I said.

  She looked at Behemoth’s body within the charred remains of the pentagram. “What happened in there?”

  “I took his insides apart,” I said. “The same way I took apart Arkwright’s library. It was the only way to stop him.”

  Gabrielle came up then, helping to support a woozy-looking Isaac. “Was that Thornton I saw?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “He tried to stop me from going inside the pentagram. I don’t know why. Maybe he was trying to protect me. Where is he now?”

  “He’s gone. Again,” she said sadly. “He keeps … not staying.”

  Philip’s booming voice came from one side of the ship. “Looks like I missed the party.”

  Soaking wet, he pulled himself over the railing and onto the flight deck. His torn, sopping clothes trailed river water behind him as he walked over to us. Yet somehow his mirrored shades were still perched over his eyes. They weren’t even scratched.

  “Heads up,” Philip said. “This isn’t over yet. Shit’s about to get a hundred times crazier.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, but there’s about a hundred revenants standing at the bottom of the river,” he said. “They’re not doing anything. They’re just standing there, like they’re waiting.”

  Revenants? I ran to the railing and looked down at the water lapping at the hull below. I couldn’t see anything in the river, it was too dark. But if there were revenants down there, it could only mean one thing. Reve Azrael was still alive. She’d survived the fire. Damn it, would I never be free of her? What did she want? Why send her revenants here?

  I stiffened as the answer came to me. Oh, God. Thornton had tried to warn me. It was why he’d wanted me to stop. It wasn’t because he thought I was in danger. It was because he knew what would happen if I killed Behemoth.

  I started running back toward the others. “Get away from him! Get away from the body!”

  But it was already too late. Behemoth’s enormous pupils filled with red light. The dead demon stood, rising onto his enormous centipede legs. Bethany and the others scattered, running past me. I stayed where I was. I knew what Reve Azrael wanted. Me.

  “At last,” she said through Behemoth’s mouth. “A body worthy of me. Thank you, little fly. I knew I could count on you.”

  “You survived,” I said.

  “Barely,” she replied. “You could call that pathetic, half-burnt thing in my lair alive if you choose, but as a body it is useless. It always was. As you can see, I have a better one now. Stronger. Brimming with power. Such unimaginable power.”

  She extended one hand. Caught in a gravity field, I began to float off the deck. I didn’t bother struggling. I knew I couldn’t fight Behemoth’s power. Her power, now. She lifted me until I floated before her.

  “This is a thousand times better than Stryge’s power would have been,” she said. “And I owe it all to you. You are so easy to manipulate. All I had to do was leave a message to get your attention.”

  “What message?”

  “The woman you rescued from the lunatic in the park,” she said.

  “Calliope?” I went cold. A pit opened in my stomach. “You killed her. You gutted her and nailed her up like that.”

  “I suppose I have always had a flair for the dramatic,” she said. “When my revenants and I broke into her attic and entered her home, she surprised us on the stairs. I cast a quick spell. I meant only to incapacitate her. I wanted to enjoy her suffering before killing her, you see, but the wretched woman fell back and struck her head on the steps. There was so much blood. She was dead before she even knew what hit her. I found her death much too quick for my liking, and hardly enough of a spectacle to get your attention. So I took over her dead body and … played with it awhile. A woman has to have her fun, don’t you think? And this was very, very fun. With a knife, I made it cut itself open and play with its own innards. Then, when I grew tired of it, I had my revenants nail the body to the ceiling.”

  Now I understood why there’d been such an excessive amount of blood on Calliope’s hands. Except for a bare, rectangular patch on her right palm. The size and shape of a knife’s handle.

  “I am disappointed you did not recognize my message to you,” Reve Azrael said. “I stretched out her innards to make her look like a fly caught in a spider’s web, just for you. You are my little fly, are you not?”

  I felt sick. Calliope wasn’t dead because she’d gotten too close to Arkwright’s secret. She was dead because of me. Because Reve Azrael wanted to send a message. She must have been spying on me the night I brought Calliope home. The guilt sat like a stone in my chest.

  “She had nothing to do with you and me,” I said. “She didn’t deserve that.”

  Reve Azrael cocked Behemoth’s head at me. “What does deserving have to do with it? I wanted her to die, and so I made her die. Her death led you where I needed you to go. It led you to this very spot. Led both of us to this moment, where I would have a body worthy of my ambitions, and you would discover the truth of who you are.”

  “So you knew,” I said. “You knew who I was all along.”

  “From the moment of your first death, I knew,” she said. “I know all who cross the dark. Though why you refuse to stay dead remains a mystery to me. You confound me and fascinate me in equal measure. That is why even though I have the power to crush you with a thought, or release you from gravity’s pull to float up into the cold, airless wastes, I know you would only continue to plague me.”

  Bethany’s voice came from below. “Put him down.”

  I looked down. She was standing beneath us. The sword blade sprang out of her bracelet like a warning.

  Reve Azrael laughed. “Ah. The tiny woman. She is never far from you, is she? Shall I make you watch as I crush her bones to dust? Would that be fitting enough punishment for everything you have done to me? The pain you have caused me?”

  “You’re going to have to get through the rest of us first,” Isaac said.

  I looked down again. They were all there—Isaac, Philip, Gabrielle, and Bethany. They’d come back for me. Th
ey shouldn’t have.

  “Go!” I shouted down to them. “Get out of here while you can!”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Bethany said. “Not without you.”

  “Let Trent go,” Isaac said. “We defeated Behemoth once. We can defeat him again.”

  Reve Azrael looked at me, amused. “He called you Trent. They do not know, do they? You have not told them.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Surely they have the right to know for whom they are risking their lives?” she said.

  “Trent, what is she talking about?” Isaac asked.

  “Don’t,” I begged Reve Azrael. “I’ll do whatever you want, just don’t.”

  The dead demon’s face split into a wide smile. Reve Azrael laughed and released me. I dropped to the deck. My ankle flared with pain. I collapsed onto my side. Bethany rushed over to me, the blade retracting into her bracelet. She knelt down and cradled me against her knees.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Go,” I said, tears squeezing out of my eyes. “Get away from here.”

  “I am talking about his true name, mage,” Reve Azrael answered Isaac. “He has not told you his true name.”

  Bethany glared angrily up at her. “He doesn’t know his name, you know that!”

  “He knows it now,” Reve Azrael said. “Behold the demon. Behold Nahash-Dred in the form he took in which to hide. The form he took so he could forget.”

  I could feel their eyes on me. Staring at me. Wondering how this could be true.

  I lifted myself off Bethany’s legs and onto my knees. “I didn’t know,” I said, looking at each of them. “Please, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t know until now.”

  “This was not how I wanted you to find out, little fly,” Reve Azrael said. “Not at first. But I promised you your defiance would not go unpunished, remember? I cannot kill you, we both know that. But I can destroy you. I can crush your spirit. And how better than with the truth you have been looking so hard for?”