Die and Stay Dead (25 page)

Damn. Why couldn’t it be easy, just this once? I wanted to get back to Jordana and tell her we’d found the first fragment. No, what I really wanted was to kiss her again. The thought made me glow inside. What a fool Lucas West had been—what a fool
I’d
been—to let her slip away the first time. It made me wonder again just how different I’d been as Lucas West. Who was he? What was he like? The answer lay locked away in my memories. Memories Jordana held the key to.

But when I got those memories back, would I still be me? Or would I be him?

“You’re doing it again,” Bethany said, interrupting my thoughts. She was on her knees, feeling around the base of the pedestal. “Why did you bother coming if you’re going to make me do this by myself? You need to get your head in the game.”

She was right, but how the hell was I supposed to concentrate when I was closer than ever to knowing who I was? Closer than ever to the past I’d forgotten? Family. Friends. Loved ones. Lucas West’s life might have been different from mine, but that was what I liked about it. He was normal. Lucas West wouldn’t find himself poking around an old statue before the sun was even up, looking for a secret door. He had his own ambitions, his own routines, his own worries. All of which had come to an end when—

When something happened to him. When something turned him into me. But what?

At the foot of the pedestal, Bethany bent forward. Her hair shifted to reveal a pointed ear. Bethany’s past was as much a mystery as mine. No wonder she was upset. I was getting answers while she was still in the dark.

“Do you remember anything about your family?” I asked. I figured if we had something this enormous in common, we should be talking about it, not giving each other the silent treatment.

Bethany looked up at me sharply. “Let’s just focus on the task at hand,” she said. The edge in her voice could cut the marble walls around us.

Fine. I squatted down and started examining the opposite corner of the pedestal from her, forcing myself to concentrate. The edge of the pedestal had been carved in the form of a horn of plenty, its mouth spilling forth a selection of marble fruit. I ran my fingers down the widening shape of the horn, feeling for anything out of the ordinary like a seam or a loose part. I stopped when I came across a single ram’s head carved amid the apples and grapes. That was odd. What was it doing there? It was hidden in the design, but didn’t fit with the rest of it. I poked at the ram’s head, thinking it might be some kind of button or switch, but nothing happened.

Bethany looked over at me. “Did you find something?”

“Maybe.”

I changed tactics. Instead of pressing it like a button, I tried spinning it like a dial. The ram’s head turned easily, shifting clockwise. A soft groan came from the back wall of the alcove. I turned around to see a section of the wall slide aside. Beyond it was a narrow, empty space. There was no floor, only steps leading down into a thick darkness.

I gawked at it, astonished. A hidden staircase inside the wall of the New York Public Library. The secret parts of this city never ceased to amaze me.

I moved toward the steps, but Bethany stopped me. “Hold on, Trent, let me go first.”

She fished the small, mirrored charm from her vest and muttered a spell. The charm blazed into light and she started down the steps. I followed her. When we were a few steps down, the door in the wall slid back into place, cutting off all light from outside.

“You keep calling me Trent,” I said as we descended. “I told you, my name is Lucas.”

She sighed in exasperation. Even though I couldn’t see her face, I was pretty sure she was rolling her eyes. God, she was infuriating.

At the bottom of the steps, the stairwell opened into an enormous, pitch-black chamber. The air was as musty, cold, and stale as a tomb. Bethany held her glowing charm as high as she could, but the space was so immense the light barely penetrated its depths.

“This must run under the entire library,” she said.

“What the hell is this place?” I asked.

We walked deeper into the darkness, our boots echoing on the smooth, stone floor. Up ahead, strange rectangular shapes seemed to float in the darkness. As we got closer and the light reached them, I saw they were actually huge cages. They hung from the darkness above us on thick chains. Inside them were the bones of creatures I couldn’t identify. In one cage, a bearlike skull tapered into the long, coiled spine of a serpent. In another was a six-foot insect carapace with an elongated, toothy, gatorlike skull and multiple limbs that ended in humanlike hands. In other cages were a winged giant with three heads, each of a different animal, and a goat as big as a horse, its tailbones ending with another, smaller goat skull. The skeletons were grotesque and utterly alien. I’d never seen anything like them.

“What are they?” I asked.

Bethany shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“What’s with the cages?”

She shone the light into another cage as we passed. Inside were the remains of something that looked like the love child of a giant spider and a komodo dragon. “I have a bad feeling about this place. Let’s just get what we came for and get the hell out of here. The fragment has to be down here somewhere.”

She led the way deeper into the chamber. More cages full of enormous, misshapen skeletons loomed out of the darkness. A bird with thick, crablike claws instead of wings. A gigantic, rusted warrior’s helmet with hoofed legs and a spiny tail coming out of it. Eventually we came to an open, circular area about fifty feet in diameter. In the center of it lay a stone sarcophagus. Its surface was polished smooth and ornately patterned in gold leaf.

“A coffin?” I said. “What the hell is a coffin doing here?”

“And whose is it?” Bethany added.

Situated roughly in the center of its lid was the shallow imprint of a hand. The gold leaf pattern seemed to focus there, with separate, gilded strands coming together in the palm. Curious, I put my own hand inside the imprint.

“Trent, don’t!” Bethany yelled.

Her warning came too late. Something sharp darted out of the stone under the tip of my index finger and pricked the skin. “Ah! Son of a bitch!” I yanked my hand back. In the light of the charm, I saw something small and needle-sharp retract into the stone. I shook my hand until the stinging subsided. “What the hell was that?”

“Let me see it,” Bethany insisted. I held out my hand. She inspected my finger in the light. A small bubble of blood sat perched on my fingertip. “It doesn’t look infected. Do you feel dizzy? Light-headed? Does your hand feel hot?”

I shook my head and pulled my hand back. “I’m fine. It barely hurt. It took me by surprise, that’s all.”

She breathed a sigh of relief even as she glared at me sternly. “How many times have I told you not to touch things you don’t know anything about? You could have been poisoned, or put under a blood spell. Either one could have killed you in an instant.”

“I told you I’m fine.”

“It’s not just about
you,
” she pointed out. “You know what happens when you die, and I’m the one standing closest to you.”

Shit. She was right. I hadn’t been thinking. I’d been distracted and reckless.

I started to apologize but was cut off by a sudden, loud
ka-thunk
from inside the sarcophagus. The lid began to open on its own. Bethany shone her light into it. I expected to see a dead body inside, but there wasn’t one. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed about that. And yet, the sarcophagus wasn’t empty. A short, obsidian pedestal stood inside it, and on the pedestal was a piece of metal. Brass or some other copper alloy, it was roughly triangular in shape, with one side perfectly rounded and the other two jagged and broken. I moved closer for a better view.

“Be careful,” she said. “This thing already got you once.”

Strange patterns had been etched on the surface of the metal, crisscrossing each other at haphazard angles. There were words on it, too, written in a language I couldn’t read. Then it hit me. They weren’t words, they were names. Demon names.

“It’s the fragment,” I said. “Putting your hand on the lid must be the key to opening the sarcophagus. But why prick me first?” I looked down at the drying blood on my fingertip.

Bethany shrugged. “The equivalent of a blood sacrifice, maybe? Some kind of trade where you have to give up something important first before it lets you inside? I’m not sure.”

“Usually you know everything,” I said. “When you don’t, I get nervous.”

“That makes two of us.” She leaned in to study the fragment. “Calliope was right. The fragment was right where she said it would be, under the monument.
Eternal voice and inward word.
”

I cleared my throat loudly.

“Okay, fine,” she said, unimpressed. “You were right, too. The fragment was still in New York City. There’s no need to be smug about it.”

“I do sometimes get things right, you know.”

“Says the man who doesn’t know better than to go sticking his hand where it doesn’t belong,” she said. “Anyway, all we really know is that
this
fragment is here. The other two could still be anywhere.”

“No, they’re all in New York. I’m sure of it,” I said. “Look at this place. It’s not a garbage dump, it’s a stash house.”

“You think whoever hid this fragment meant to come back for it?”

“Definitely,” I said. “Maybe someone was after him, the cops, or another cult, or maybe Nahash-Dred himself. He would need a safe place to stash the Codex Goetia for a while, until everything blew over. Maybe he thought it would be safer in pieces. But why go through all that trouble unless he was going to come back for them? If you wanted to get rid of the Codex for good, why not just bury it in cement at the bottom of the ocean or the Grand Canyon? No, my gut says this guy was planning to pick up the fragments again. Maybe even put the Codex back together. That means he was keeping them close by.”

“But if Erickson Arkwright didn’t hide them, who did?” she asked. “He was the only survivor of the cult. There
was
no one else.”

As much as I wished I had an answer for that, I didn’t.

I tried to lift the fragment off its pedestal, but it wouldn’t budge. I examined its edges for brackets or nails that might be fastening to the pedestal, but I didn’t see any. It was just … stuck. I dug my fingernails under the fragment’s edges and strained to pull it free. Finally, it came loose with a snap. I stumbled backward, fumbling it like a clumsy drunk about to drop his bottle.

Bethany sucked in a nervous breath. “Don’t drop it! We need it in one piece!”

“What the hell do you think I’m trying to do?” Still stumbling backward from the momentum, I finally managed to get a good, stable grip on the fragment. “There. See? I’m not as clumsy as you think, Bethany.”

And with that, I backed into one of the hanging cages behind me. It jangled on its chains. Something inside it rustled and stirred slowly, as if waking from a long slumber. Hot breath touched the back of my neck, reeking of sulfur.

A voice behind me said, “You have come at last, my lord. I knew you would.”

I leapt away, tossing the fragment to Bethany. She caught it with her free hand and clutched it protectively to her chest. I spun around to face the cage, pulling the Bersa semiautomatic from the back of my pants. Within the cage sat a gaunt shape whose shriveled skin was pulled tight over his bones. Wings drooped from his shoulder blades. His face looked almost human, though his eyes were too big and his nose was nearly a foot long, hanging off his face like a deli window sausage. Sharply pointed ears poked out of his messy gray mop of hair. Two long horns swept back from his temples like dull, twisted swords. As his enormous eyes focused on me, his face fell in disappointment. He stroked the small, bristly gray beard on his chin.

“You are not the one I expected,” he said.

I kept my gun trained on the creature. He blinked at me, clearly not threatened.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

He took a deep breath through his tumescent nose. He straightened up, squaring his bony shoulders. “Do you not know me, wretch? There was a time when you would have. I am the Mad Affliction. Once, I commanded legions and drove whole villages from the clutches of sanity. My name alone was enough to loosen the bowels of the fiercest warrior. But now…” He paused, and seemed to deflate. “Now I am caged like an animal. Caged and starving. I have not tasted flesh in so long. Even the rats have eluded me. There are so many of them, plump and juicy, some as big as cats—but they’re smart. They know to stay away from me.” He moved closer to the bars, his big eyes gleaming with hunger. “Let me taste you. Just one finger. One finger is all I ask.”

He reeled back and threw himself against the bars, rocking the cage on its chains. I took a step back, keeping my gun on him.

“Surely you won’t miss one finger!” he implored.

“What is this place?” Bethany asked him.

The Mad Affliction looked at her, his lip curling in revulsion. He turned away. “Ugh. A female. Awful thing. Get it away!”

“Sounds like he’s met you before,” I said.

Bethany glared at me. “Don’t encourage him.”

The Mad Affliction harrumphed and spat in disgust. “The females of your species taste so bland, like flavorless pudding. Disgusting things! But the males … the males taste like the richest sweets.” He threw himself against the bars again, grasping for me. “One finger for my stomach! Just one! To the first knuckle only!”

“Hey!” Bethany shone the light in his face to attract his attention. He lifted a bony, emaciated hand to shield his eyes. “I asked you what this place is.”

“Surely the answer is obvious. This is a place of punishment. What other explanation can there be?” the Mad Affliction said. “I was summoned here, through the door between realms. We all were, all those you see caged here. The Walker in Nightmares. The Cruxshadow. The Dread Torment. The Queen of Tombs. He Who Strides Beneath the Waves. So many of us. One by one we were pulled through the doorway, only to be locked away forever.”

“By who?” I asked.