Die and Stay Dead (4 page)

“Oh, my poor Kali,” Calliope said. “I’ve been gone so long. She needs to be fed. It’ll only take a moment.” She picked up the cat and started walking down the long hallway toward the kitchen. She nodded at an open archway on her left. “Make yourself comfortable in the living room.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, but she just continued into the kitchen.

I walked into the living room, surprised to find myself amid more furniture for cats than humans. Cat toys, cat trees, and scratching posts took up most of the room. Definitely not the house I’d broken into back in the day. There was a fireplace against the far wall. Above it was a painting of a man in a gray overcoat and bowler cap, standing before the sea. The man’s face was entirely obscured by a floating green apple. In one corner it was signed with the artist’s name, René Magritte. I’d heard the name before, enough to know his paintings were enormously valuable. First the house, and now this. Calliope definitely wasn’t hurting for cash. Still, in a room full of cat trees and scratching posts, an authentic Magritte seemed absurdly out of place.

I looked closer, noticing something in the brushstrokes of the cloudy sky over the sea. It was faint, but it was definitely the letter Y. Strange.

“Do you like it?” Calliope asked from the doorway. “It’s new. I just bought it a couple of weeks ago. Cost me an arm and a leg, but it’s worth it. It’s my favorite painting. There’s something about the way you can’t see the man’s face. The artist said everything we see hides something else, and we always want to see what’s hidden. In the painting, he’s not letting us. It’s like he’s saying sometimes it’s better not to know.”

Without warning, the cat ran into the room and darted under the couch.

“Don’t mind Kali. She’ll probably hide the whole time you’re here.” She gestured to the couch. “Please, take a seat. I hope you’ll stay for a little while. I just need someone to be here while I decompress, you know? And maybe check all the closets, just to be sure.” She laughed, but I had a feeling she wasn’t kidding.

I sat down on the couch. The upholstery of the sofa’s arms had been shredded to ribbons. So had much of the rug. Apparently, Kali was having no trouble living up to her namesake, the Hindu goddess of destruction.

“Sorry about all the stuff in here,” Calliope said. “You know what they say, you own a dog, but you only rent space from a cat.”

She sat all the way on the other end of the couch from me, still wary. If there’d been a chair on the other side of the room I was certain she would have sat there instead.

A spiral-bound, six-by-nine notebook sat open on the coffee table in front of us. The page it was open to showed an image sketched in pencil. An image I recognized immediately.

An eye inside a circle.

An electric charge went through me. In Ehrlendarr, the language of the Ancients, an eye inside a circle was the rune for magic. It also happened to be a big part of my earliest memory, coming to consciousness in front of a plain brick wall with that same rune etched into one of the bricks. I still didn’t know where that wall was or why the rune had been there. Seeing it again now made me nearly jump out of my seat. Instead, I leaned forward for a better view.

“What is this?” I asked.

Calliope frowned at the notebook, as if she’d forgotten it was there. She closed it and pulled it away from me. “Sorry. This place is kind of messy. Like I said, I don’t usually have people over without an appointment. Gives me a chance to tidy up.”

“It’s Ehrlendarr, isn’t it?” I pressed. “The rune for magic.”

Calliope studied me with her different-colored eyes, surprised I knew that. “It’s not just magic. It also means change. Transcendence.”

“Why do you have a drawing of it?”

“It’s for a personal project,” she said, growing defensive. “It’s nothing that concerns you.”

There was definitely more to Calliope than met the eye. I needed to know what it was.

“Does this personal project have something to do with why you were in the park the night Biddy kidnapped you?” I asked.

She hid behind her hair, not answering me.

“All the women Biddy kidnapped were joggers,” I continued. “You’re not dressed like a jogger. And you had a knife with you. So what were you doing there?”

“We all have our secrets, remember? Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s been three days since I’ve seen a real bathroom.”

She stood up and left the living room, taking the notebook with her. I waited a few seconds, then got up and followed her into the hallway. I watched her place the notebook on the kitchen counter and then go through a door into the bathroom. I started down the hallway toward the kitchen. I had to see what was in that notebook. What “project” was Calliope working on? What did it have to do with that damn rune?

I made it halfway to the kitchen before Kali appeared on the counter. The little goddess of destruction sat right on top of the notebook. She stared at me with her tail swishing back and forth, as if daring me to risk the clawing of a lifetime if I tried to take it.

“Bad kitty,” I muttered.

My smartphone chirped in my coat pocket. The screen showed me it was Bethany calling. I went back into the living room and answered it. “You know, if you keep calling me at other women’s homes, people will get the wrong idea.”

“I was just checking to see if everything was all right,” she said. “I thought you’d be back by now.”

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Calliope is just freaked out and needs some company. I get the feeling she doesn’t have a lot of friends.”

“Well, while you two are becoming besties, see if you can find out why she was in the park,” Bethany said. “Her clothes tell me she wasn’t out jogging, and I can’t stop thinking about that knife she had. Something’s not adding up.”

“Great minds think alike,” I said. “I already asked, but so far she’s not telling me anything.”

“Do you think Calliope is dangerous?”

“No, I don’t get the sense she wants to hurt anyone. I think she’s telling the truth about why Biddy kept her alive and let her keep the knife. She’s just scared and on edge.”

At that moment, Kali jumped up on the couch and screeched at me. Not so much a hiss as a long moan of exasperation, as if my simply being there was making her crazy.

“By the way, there’s a cat here you would really get along with,” I said. “You have a lot in common.”

“I’m going to pretend you meant that as a compliment, even though I suspect you didn’t,” she said. “Just see what you can find out. I’ll meet you back at Citadel.”

“Wouldn’t you rather get some sleep? You’ve been up all night.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

I ended the call. Kali watched me carefully from the sofa, in case I made any sudden moves. When Calliope came back into the living room, I noticed she wasn’t carrying the notebook.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I didn’t mean to get upset with you. You’ve been so nice, and I’m grateful for everything you’ve done. Really, I am. It’s just … there are some things I’d like to keep private.”

“I understand,” I said. “There are things I don’t like to talk about, either. I just want to make sure you’re all right.”

She groaned and rubbed her face. “I’m not. I’m not all right. I don’t even know where to start.”

“Give it time, you’ve been through a lot,” I said.

She shook her head. “It’s not just what happened in the park. That was awful, but there’s more. I think—I think someone has been watching me for a while now. At least a couple of weeks. Not Biddy, someone else. I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t shake the feeling. I don’t go outside very often, I don’t like crowds, but when I have to go out I’m certain someone is following me.”

“Did you get a look at them?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. But before everything with Biddy happened, it was getting worse. I couldn’t go anywhere without feeling like someone was following me. Watching me. I even started to feel like I wasn’t safe in my own home. Which is ridiculous, right? If you’re not safe in your own home, where
are
you safe?” She hid her hands in her sleeves again and hugged herself.

I’d misread her nervousness on the street. I thought she was scared that Biddy might still come for her. Instead, she was scared about something else entirely.

“Do you have any idea who it might be?”

She shrugged. “I hate to even ask, but do you think you could come back tomorrow? Just to check up on me? It’s probably nothing, but it would make me feel a whole lot better if I knew you were coming back.”

“Sure,” I said. “I can do that.”

She smiled, relieved that I didn’t think she was crazy. She looked out the window at the brightening morning.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say tomorrow. Tomorrow is already today,” she said. Then she yawned, covering her mouth with her sleeve-shrouded hand. “God, I’ve barely slept for three days. I feel like I’m going to sleep for a week now. Maybe you should give me a couple of days to recuperate, and then come back.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’ll be home?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever leave the house again.” She smiled to show me she was joking. I suspected she wasn’t.

Calliope led me back to the front door. Kali licked her nose and watched me go, satisfied that she’d successfully protected her territory from the invader. Before I stepped outside, I glanced down the hallway one last time at the notebook on the kitchen counter.

“Thank you, Trent,” Calliope said. “Thank you for everything. I—I really don’t know how to repay you.” She paused a moment, then quickly kissed me on the cheek. She turned bright red.

“I’ll see you in a couple of days,” I said, stepping out onto the stoop.

I thought Calliope would say goodbye then, or even just close the door without a word, but instead she leaned against the doorframe, the blue band of hair hanging diagonally across her face like a painter’s brushstroke.

“Hey, um, I don’t know if you know this already, or if it matters to you, but you’re being followed, too.”

“What?” I turned around and scanned the sleepy little street, but all I saw were men and women in business attire walking down their stoops and heading for the subway station.

“It’s a spirit from the other side,” she said. “It came back across the dark for some reason, and it’s following you.”

I was skeptical, until I remembered the way she’d stared past me on the sidewalk earlier. “Who is it? What does it want?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s hard to say.”

“But as a necromancer you can see it, right?” I asked. “At least tell me what it looks like. Male, female, tall, short, anything.”

“That’s the problem,” Calliope said, rubbing her nose with her sleeve. “It’s not a person. It’s a wolf.”

Three

I didn’t go back to Citadel right away. Instead, I walked around the Village to clear my head, occasionally looking over my shoulder. Calliope said I was being followed by a spirit in the form of a wolf. Why? What did it want from me? Part of me thought Calliope was out of her mind. She had to be, right? I mean, a ghost wolf? But another part of me thought—
hoped
—that maybe it was Thornton Redler.

I missed Thornton. Missed him like mad. He and Bethany had been the first members of the Five-Pointed Star I’d met. In fact, when I first met Thornton, he’d been a big, gray timber wolf. Only later did I learn he was a lycanthrope, able to change back and forth between human and wolf at will. Inherently good, heroically brave, and with a razor-sharp wit, he quickly became a good friend. And then he died. Right in front of me, with nothing I could do to save him. For reasons I would never understand, I could cheat death but someone like him, someone good and decent and with so much to live for, could not.

I glanced behind me again. If this ghost wolf really was following me, I couldn’t see it.

On Hudson Street, I found a little neighborhood coffee shop and decided to grab a cup. I got in line behind an army of businessmen in identical London Fog trench coats and Kenneth Cole briefcases. They looked like clones who’d all walked off the same page of
Esquire,
as if they were here solely to rub it in that you couldn’t afford to live in this neighborhood unless you made at least six figures. I was out of place among them. I was like a crack in an otherwise flawless piece of crystal.

A paper witch had been taped to the wall of the shop, wart-nosed and riding a broomstick. A Halloween decoration. I’d forgotten it was almost Halloween. There were other decorations taped up all over the shop: a black cat with its mouth open and its back arched, a groping mummy trailing strands of gauze, a knobby-kneed skeleton, and another witch, this one stirring a boiling cauldron, one crooked, green, outstretched finger shooting off a small lightning bolt. I shook my head. That was how most people thought of magic, as something out of fairy tales. They didn’t know the truth. They didn’t know how dangerous it really was.

Magic was a natural element, no different from any other. It could be manipulated, used as a tool or weapon if you knew how. But a thousand years ago the Shift had occurred, radically tipping the balance of light and dark. Ever since, magic had grown increasingly darker and more dangerous. If it got inside you, if you carried it within yourself instead of in a charm or an artifact, it corrupted you. Infected you. It twisted your mind and drove you mad. Often it mutated your body as well, transforming you into something deformed and horrible, like it did to Biddy. The only people who could carry magic inside themselves safely, without becoming infected, were mages like Isaac who had reached that level through decades of study and dedication. But the world was filled with greedy, impatient people who wanted power
now,
and the ranks of the Infected had quickly swollen to the point where there were a whole lot more of them than us.

Most people didn’t know any of this, of course, because they didn’t know magic was real. For the most part it was a willful ignorance, a strong desire to not
want
to know. Even after multiple witnesses had seen a giant, rampaging gargoyle turn the Cloisters into a pile of rubble, the news had chalked it up to a “freak seismic event.” Everyone just kept on lying to themselves. Maybe that was how they stayed sane.