Die and Stay Dead (54 page)

By now, it was clear Behemoth had had enough of us. He brought his hands together over his head. A new, tiny black hole began to form between them. Behemoth glared down at us. He knew there was nothing we could do to stop him now. Bethany and Gabrielle knew it, too. I could see it in their faces. They knew this time the black hole would grow bigger and bigger, unchecked until it tore the world to pieces. They knew this time they wouldn’t be able to stop it.

The pentagram-shaped burn in my palm began to ache again. I looked at it, swollen and red on my skin. Then I remembered the pentagram at the center of the Codex Goetia, and an idea formed in my head.

There was still one final chance to stop Behemoth. Something only I could do.

There was more than one way to bind a demon.

Normally this was something I would have asked Isaac to help me with, but the mage was unconscious. Gabrielle, however, was not. She wasn’t as adept at magic as Isaac was, but she was all I had. I told her what I had in mind.

“We can’t banish him without the Codex, but we can snare him,” I explained. “All we need is a pentagram. A big one. It won’t kill him, but it’ll keep him trapped.”

“How big does it need to be?” she asked.

“As big as you can make it,” I said.

“Give me the fire sword,” she said.

I handed her the hilt. She lit it up and threw it with all her might, shouting a spell. The fire sword stayed lit and flew like a torpedo down the length of the flight deck. Then it swerved, circling around Behemoth. Its blade pointed down to the floor, tracing fire in its path. Like the crossbow bolts, this fire was magical. It didn’t require fuel to catch. The sword drew a burning circle around the demon, then zipped quickly back and forth under him until it had formed a burning Five-Pointed Star within the circle. Then the fire sword extinguished and dropped to the floor.

The entire aft section of the ship had become one giant pentagram of fire. The flames leapt into the air, growing taller, shooting upward to form a curtain around Behemoth. It had all happened too fast for the demon to stop it. Now he found himself trapped. He screamed in agony, but not from the flames. It was the pentagram itself that was burning him. The black hole forming above him collapsed in on itself like a closing iris.

Gabrielle and Bethany let out a loud cheer of relief. But it wasn’t over. Not yet. Behemoth was trapped, but he wasn’t dead. He was still dangerous. As if to show us just how dangerous, the aircraft carrier began to rise up out of the water and into the air. The ship tilted suddenly to one side as the thick, woven anchoring lines fastening the
Intrepid
to the pier went taut. Some of them snapped, others pulled their mooring posts right out of the cement, and the ship leveled off, continuing to rise. Behemoth wanted us dead. He would do whatever it took, even if it meant levitating the whole damn ship so high we suffocated from lack of oxygen, or dropping us so that we were crushed on impact.

“The only way this is going to end is if Behemoth dies,” I said.

“How?” Bethany demanded. “We don’t have Nightclaw anymore.”

“I know a way,” I said. “There’s something I can do. But only me.”

“No,” Isaac interrupted. He was awake again. He wrapped his good arm around the railing and pulled himself up to his feet. Some color had returned to his face, but he still looked the worse for wear. His voice was scratchy and hoarse. “I’m not going to let you sacrifice your life so you can take Behemoth’s. You lost control when you tried that with Stryge, remember? His power was so immense it overwhelmed you. You wound up nearly killing the rest of us. What do you think is going to happen if you absorb the life force of a greater demon?”

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?”