Die and Stay Dead (3 page)

“Fine,” Philip sighed, disappointed. “Humans. No sense of priorities.”

Isaac moved to the edge of the bridge, held up his hands, and chanted a few strange syllables that drew a chill up my spine. I didn’t like the language of magic. It spooked me every time I heard it, like someone walking over my grave. When Isaac was finished, a huge fireball materialized in the air before him. Like Biddy, Isaac carried magic inside him. But Isaac was a mage, which meant he was immune to magic’s infection.

He dropped the fireball into the abyss. It sailed down farther and farther, illuminating the walls of the pit as it descended, until it was nothing but a pinpoint of light in the darkness below. There was a flash as it burst, followed by a loud, bloodcurdling shriek. A moment later, the pit erupted with black tentacles, a veritable forest of lashing, groping, angry appendages.

“Damn it, the trembler’s bigger than I thought,” Isaac said.

I drew my gun, but Philip put out a hand to stop me. “I got this.”

With a throaty battle cry, he threw himself off the bridge and into the squirming mass of tentacles. They coiled around him until he was lost inside the sheer multitude of limbs. Then Philip and the trembler fell into the darkness of the pit together.

I ran to the edge of the bridge. “Philip!”

Below us, the dark pit reverberated with the sound of shrieking and thrashing, and a wet, slimy sound that brought to mind handfuls of spaghetti being thrown against a wall. Finally, there was silence.

Next to me, Isaac called out, “Philip!”

No sound came from the depths.

Then we saw him, climbing up the wall of the pit toward us. He jumped and caught the side of the bridge, then pulled himself up. He was covered with gobs of the trembler’s sticky, foul-smelling, green blood. Even his mirrored shades were coated. He wiped the lenses clean and grinned.

“Okay,” he said. “
Now
I feel better.”

Two

We left Biddy’s lair through the trapdoor at the base of the
Alice in Wonderland
statue. In the dark, the streetlights from Fifth Avenue half-illuminated Alice as she sat atop a toadstool, her arms spread in a welcoming gesture to her friends the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, and the Cheshire Cat. As someone who felt like he’d gone through the looking glass himself on a few occasions, I thought her expression was much too calm. But then, a hookah-smoking caterpillar was nothing compared to some of the things I’d seen.

Calliope still clung to me as we descended the steps from the statue. Gilded words had been etched into one of them:
MARGARITA DELACORTE MEMORIAL
. I didn’t know who that was, but someone had cared enough about her to commission the
Alice
sculpture in her memory. That gave me pause. I couldn’t imagine having someone in your life who would do that for you. It made me wonder again if I had a family or loved ones somewhere out there, and I cursed the amnesia that had taken my past from me. Everything was gone—my real name, where I lived, everything but the events of the past year. Statistically speaking, there had to be people out there who knew me, but so far no one had recognized me on the street or come looking for me. If they existed, where were they?

But until I knew the answer to that, I had another family, a new family. The Five-Pointed Star. For the first time, I felt like I belonged somewhere, with people I cared about, and who cared about me. I hadn’t trusted them at first, but I didn’t doubt their friendship anymore.

We passed the boat pond, a small, shallow pool where children sailed remote-controlled model boats during the day. It looked still and quiet now, reflecting the stars like a big mirror.

Calliope pulled my arm to get me to stop. “You said I can go home now?”

I nodded. “You’re free to go.”

But she continued to cling to me, nervously eyeing the dark woods around us. “I’m scared to go alone.”

“I can take you home if you like,” Bethany offered.

Calliope wrapped her hands tighter around my arm. “No, just Trent.” She looked up at me with her different-colored eyes. She’d bonded with me as her rescuer, but after everything she’d been through it was clear she wasn’t ready to trust anyone else yet. “Can you take me home?”

“Sure,” I said. “Where do you live?”

“Downtown,” she said. “In the Village.”

Bethany shot me a glance that said be careful. She didn’t fully trust Calliope yet. But there was something else in that glance, too. It was almost like she didn’t want me and Calliope to be alone together. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was jealous. But of course, I did know better. Bethany had already made it clear we wouldn’t be anything more than friends.

“It’ll be all right,” I told Bethany. “I’ll meet you back at Citadel.”

She studied Calliope’s face. I knew Bethany well enough to know she wasn’t entirely comfortable with this, but she nodded. “Fine. But be sure to come right back, and call me if there’s any trouble. Okay?”

“Got it,” I said.

“Thank you, all of you,” Calliope said. “I don’t know how to repay you. If you hadn’t come, I—I think he would have eventually fed me to that creature, too.”

“There’s no need to repay us,” Isaac said. “This is who we are. It’s what we do.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. Biddy was the fifth Infected we’d put out of commission since the events of Fort Tryon Park last month, when we stepped out of the shadows as the Five-Pointed Star. There was a darkness growing out there, spreading with magic’s infection, turning more and more people into dangerous creatures like Biddy. Someone had to take a stand. Someone had to fight back. That was us.

“Take care of yourself, kid,” Philip said to Calliope. “Think of us the next time you order calamari.”

She looked away from the vampire, down at her shoes. “Yeah, sure. It’s going to be a while.”

I escorted Calliope out of the park to the subway. At this hour of the night, the platform for the downtown 1 train was mostly empty, except for a couple of drunk twentysomethings passed out on a bench and a few mangy rats sniffing at the garbage cans. We waited in silence for a train to show up. Calliope didn’t say a word. I figured if she didn’t want to talk I would let her have some peace and quiet. But she jumped at every little sound and clutched my arm again. Eventually, a train came and we got on. The twentysomethings and the rats stayed behind.

The subway car rocked me gently back and forth in my seat as it sped through the tunnels, stopping occasionally at empty stations. The doors opened and closed, but no one got on or off, not at this hour. The only other person in our train car was a dirt-crusted man sleeping in the far corner seat. He was encased in two bulky down coats and surrounded by numerous garbage bags filled with what appeared to be everything he owned. His scent—a mix of body odor, cheap liquor, and a few other things I didn’t want to think about—permeated the entire car. A matted, gray beard poked out of his drawn-up hood. I hoped he didn’t wake up. There was a part of me that still liked not being seen. Of course, it was especially helpful to go unnoticed when I had this much blood on my shirt.

Calliope sat close to me, but not too close. “Your friend Philip, is he just a psycho, or…?” They were the first words she’d said since we left the park.

“He’s a vampire,” I said. “Though maybe there isn’t that much of a difference between the two.”

“I’ve never seen a vampire work with humans before,” she said. “Usually they stay with their own clans.”

“Isaac saved Philip’s life once,” I explained.

“The, um, older guy with the red hair is Isaac?” she asked. I nodded. “I saw the way Philip ran over to help him. I’ve never seen a vampire act so concerned about humans, either.”

“Philip owes Isaac a hundred years of servitude in return for saving his life,” I explained. “I guess it’s a custom among vampires. So Philip gave up being a predator and now he’s—well, he’s more than just part of the team. He’s kind of like Isaac’s bodyguard. Presumably he’s not quite as psycho as he used to be, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

“So he’s good now?”

I shrugged. “The jury’s still out on that one.”

She was quiet for a while as the train continued rocketing through the tunnels. Then she said, “You said you were the one who killed Biddy. What did you do to him? The way he looked … I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

I looked away from her, at the sleeping man in the corner. “Biddy’s dead. That’s all that matters.”

She nodded. “I guess we all have our secrets, huh? Like how your shirt’s all bloody and torn but you seem to be fine.”

“It’s not my blood,” I lied.

“Right,” she said, unconvinced. “You’re not human, either, are you?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. There was still so much I didn’t know about myself. “Jury’s still out on that one, too,” I said. I smiled at her, but it was even less convincing.

We got out at Houston Street just as the sun was starting to scale the horizon. Calliope led me uptown on Seventh Avenue a few blocks. She glanced nervously around the street.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “Biddy’s dead. He won’t come after you.”

She looked at me and nodded, but her demeanor didn’t change. Calliope was terrified.

We turned left onto Leroy Street, then St. Luke’s Place, a quiet, leafy road of beautiful row houses. All the houses were lined up on one side of the street, facing a fenced-in playground and park on the other. It was like something out of a glossy magazine spread.

I had a sudden feeling of déjà vu, but this was no trick of the mind. I’d been on this street before, back in the bad old days when I was working for Underwood. He’d ordered me to break into one of these same row houses and steal a marble-and-gold urn that was supposed to be worth a fortune. I remembered the job vividly. I had walked from roof to roof and climbed into the house through the attic window. All these old row houses had attic windows with latches that turned brittle and easy to break after a few decades’ exposure to the elements. The owners never knew how vulnerable their homes were because they never thought to check. Most people didn’t go into their attics past the day they filled it with all the crap they never use. Out of sight, out of mind. One quick tug at the window was all it took, and I slipped right inside. The rest of the job didn’t go so easily. The window wasn’t alarmed, but the urn was, and as soon as I lifted it off its base a piercing electronic shriek permeated every corner of the house. I sprinted back up the stairs to the attic with the urn under my arm. Behind me, I heard a woman scream and a man threaten to wring my neck. Then I was outside and running into the cover of night.

I looked at the row houses in front of me again. I didn’t remember anymore which house it had been, but suddenly I hoped like hell it wasn’t Calliope’s.

She stopped in front of 6 St. Luke’s Place, a four-story, brick row house half hidden behind a wisteria vine rooted in the tiny, gated front courtyard. Next to the tree was an old-style gas streetlamp, though the tap had been replaced with an electric bulb. Well-manicured shrubs twined around the wrought iron banisters on either side of the stoop. At the top of the steps, a black-painted door stood inside a molded arch beneath a peaked cornice.

Calliope looked up and down the street nervously. I wanted to calm her, but it was clear there was nothing I could do. She was deeply traumatized. It would take time before she felt secure again. Her eyes met mine for a moment, and then she looked away quickly, focusing on her feet. She crossed her arms in front of her, her hands hidden inside her sweater sleeves like turtles withdrawn into their shells.

“Would you mind coming inside?” she asked. “Just for a second? Just until I feel safe?”

“Of course,” I said.

“I’m not—I’m not keeping you up too late, am I?”

I shrugged. “I don’t sleep.” I wasn’t just being polite. I didn’t sleep. Not ever. The same thing that kept bringing me back to life also didn’t let me sleep. It was as if my body no longer needed it.

Calliope looked past me suddenly, as if noticing someone on the sidewalk behind me. The hairs on my neck prickled. I turned around, but the sidewalk was empty.

“Let’s go inside,” she said.

I followed her up the stoop. She stopped at the door and fished in her jeans pocket for the key. She looked at me again, but only for a second before looking away once more. I got the impression she wasn’t very comfortable around people. After being kidnapped and held in an underground lair for three days by a homicidal maniac, finding herself alone with a strange man, even one she’d asked to come with her, was likely putting her more on edge than she thought it would. I decided not to make it any worse. I would see her safely inside, and then be on my way.

“It’s—it’s funny,” she stammered. “I don’t normally let anyone inside without an appointment. I only ever see people by appointment. You know, for my job. I—I don’t usually have guests over.”

“What do you do?” I asked.

She pulled a key ring out of her pocket, slid a key into the lock. “I’m a medium. It’s the logical career choice for a necromancer, I guess.”

I looked up at the house again. If being a medium meant you could afford a beautiful home in a tony neighborhood like this, I was in the wrong line of work.

She opened the door. We stepped into a vestibule that smelled of dust and incense. No alarm sounded. She closed the door and turned the dead bolt.

“You should think about getting an alarm system,” I said. “These old houses are surprisingly easy to break into.”

She rubbed her sleeve-shrouded hands up and down her face. “Are you trying to scare me? Because I’m already plenty scared. What made you think I wanted to hear that right now?”

“Sorry,” I said. I’d screwed up, spoken without thinking. It was hardly the first time, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. “Maybe I should go—”

I was interrupted by a loud meowing. An orange-and-gray calico ran down the entrance hallway toward us and began twining itself around Calliope’s feet. She squatted down and scratched the top of the cat’s head. The cat purred happily.