Die and Stay Dead (11 page)

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.”

“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 myself. 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.