Die and Stay Dead (8 page)

“Then what are we supposed to do with her?”

Bethany arched an eyebrow at me.

“No way,” I said. “Forget it.”

“Why not? She’s just like you, Trent. All fierce on the outside, but just a big softie on the inside.”

“Oh, I’m a big softie, am I?”

“You should focus on the fierce part, for your ego’s sake,” she said. “Now for the bad news.”

“Did we skip the good news?”

“Isaac won’t want Kali running loose around Citadel, not with so many fragile and irreplaceable artifacts in his collection,” she said. “She’ll have to stay with you in your room.” I opened my mouth, but before whatever obscenity I was thinking of could spill out, she added quickly, “It would just be temporary, until we figure something else out.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” I looked into the carrier through the small metal gate. Kali looked back at me with big eyes. “Fine. As long as it’s only temporary.”

Kali let out a throaty growl and swiped at me. I regretted my decision already.

Then there was the second thing we had to do. We waited until we were in the Houston Street subway station before calling 911. I used a pay phone on the platform and said I was a neighbor concerned about a strange smell coming from 6 St. Luke’s Place. I hung up when the operator asked for my name.

*   *   *

Back in my room at Citadel, I closed the door, put Kali’s carrier on the floor, and opened the gate at the front. The cat stayed where she was, glaring at me from the door of the carrier.

“Suit yourself,” I told her.

I filled a bowl with her food and another with water, and set them against one wall. I set up her litter box in my adjoining bathroom. When I walked back into the bedroom, Kali hadn’t moved an inch. She continued to stare at me.

I pulled Calliope’s notebook from inside my coat. I was about to open it when I heard Bethany calling for me. There was no time to look at it now. I slid it under my mattress, the same place I used to hide things from Underwood and his crew back in the fallout shelter. Old habits died hard.

I turned to see Kali still glaring at me.

“Here’s the deal, cat. We’re stuck with each other, at least for now, so what do you say we try to get along?”

Kali let out a long, low growl, hissed at me, and went back inside her carrier.

Six

Chinatown at night wasn’t any less crowded than Chinatown during the day. A living sea of pedestrians flowed along the narrow sidewalks and threatened to spill into the streets. As the Escalade idled at a red light, I watched people stream across Canal Street in front of us. Bethany and I had told Isaac we wanted to question Yrouel about Calliope’s murder, and he’d insisted on sending Philip with us as protection in case things went south. Now, sitting in the driver’s seat, Philip grunted and ran a hand through his thick black hair, restless. With the sun finally down, this was his first chance to be outside since last night, but he was spending it stuck in traffic.

Philip didn’t cast a reflection in the rearview mirror. From where I sat in the backseat, all I could see in the mirror was the empty driver’s seat. It was disconcerting. I could only imagine what the other drivers on the road thought, looking in their rearviews and seeing no one behind the wheel of the Escalade.

In the passenger seat, Bethany checked the stock of charms in her vest. She was keeping it together pretty well after what we’d seen at Calliope’s house. Better than I was. It was eating me up inside. Calliope had told me she felt like someone was watching her. I should have trusted my instincts and gone back to check up on her yesterday instead of waiting. Maybe then she would still be alive. Maybe then she wouldn’t have been gutted like a fish and spiked to the ceiling of her own bedroom.

I shook my head to get the image out. The clock on the dashboard read seven forty-five. Fifteen minutes until Calliope’s scheduled appointment with Yrouel. An appointment we intended to keep in her place.

“So what’s the point of this, anyway?” Philip asked. “What do you care what happened to that girl? Just because we rescued her from Biddy doesn’t mean we’re responsible for her. Why get involved? Why not just let the police handle it?”

I watched people walking by, talking, laughing, holding hands. Happy. “Because Calliope didn’t have anyone,” I said. “No friends, no family. All she had was her cat. There’s no one out there who cares that she’s dead. No one to make sure she gets justice. We’re all she has. The police can’t do what we can do.”

I wasn’t sure if he understood. Vampires lived in clans, loose associations of families governed by groups of elders, but at heart they were solitary creatures. They hunted alone. Solitude meant nothing to them. Philip was only a part of the team because of his duty to Isaac. I often got the feeling he would prefer to work alone. It came with the territory of being a predator.

But Philip didn’t argue. The light turned green, and we navigated through the maze of short, curved streets just south of Canal. On either side of the road, narrow tenement buildings crowded shoulder to shoulder on top of restaurants, jewelry stores, storefronts selling knockoff perfumes and handbags, and the occasional Eastern medicine supply store with its bamboo shades drawn. Signs and banners hung from every fire escape and flagpole, printed with big
hanzi
characters I couldn’t read. Every corner seemed to have its own fresh fish shop in the process of closing for the night. Men and women in white smocks retrieved buckets of shrimp and crab off the sidewalk and rolled down their metal gates. We turned the corner at a large restaurant with a string of red paper lanterns dangling from its eaves, and found Bayard Street. On the north side of the street were buildings marked 84 and 86, but there was no 84A. There was, however, a narrow alley between the two buildings. So, 84A Bayard Street was either the alley itself or, more likely, a building whose entrance was inside it. Philip managed to find parking on the street, which in Chinatown was nothing short of a miracle. We got out of the Escalade and crossed into the alley.

Clouds of steam billowed out of vents from the surrounding buildings and drifted like phantoms through the alley ahead of us. Beneath the rusted fire escapes, feral cats rummaged through overturned garbage cans and open Dumpsters. When they spotted Philip, they yowled in terror and ran off to their secret hiding places. Smart cats.

A wooden door was set in the brick wall at the far end of the alley. There was no number, but it had to be 84A Bayard Street. There was nothing else here. A strange glyph had been carved into the door. Not a
hanzi
character like the others, it was something else, a rune that reminded me of the magical symbols I’d seen etched along the tunnels to the Nethercity. Whoever Yrouel was, it was clear he was no stranger to magic.

Bethany traced the glyph with her finger. “It’s a protection spell. It’s supposed to keep out evil.”

Philip tried the knob, found it unlocked, and pulled the door open. “Well, look at that, it let me right in. Guess the spell doesn’t work.”

Inside, we descended a plain cement ramp that came to an end about a dozen feet below street level. At the bottom of the ramp was a small, concrete antechamber. A circular, steel door with a big, wheel-shaped handle in its center stood in the wall. It was the kind of door you’d expect to see on a bank vault or in a submarine, not hidden under a Chinatown alley. I looked to either side of the door but didn’t see a doorbell.

“I guess Yrouel doesn’t like visitors,” Philip said.

“Too bad. We’re not leaving until we talk to him.” I banged a few times on the steel door with my fist.

Philip chuckled. “Knocking. You humans are adorable. I could pull this door out of the wall in two seconds.”

Bethany looked up at him. “Maybe you’d better let us take the lead. I think this situation is going to require some finesse. Tearing doors out of walls isn’t liable to get Yrouel talking.”

Philip shrugged. “Just say the word and I’ll get him to talk.”

Bethany rolled her eyes. “One of these days, I’m going to have to teach you about subtlety.”

“Come on, open this damn door,” I muttered. I raised my fist to pound on it again, but Bethany caught my arm, stopping me.

“I guess I’m going to have to teach you, too,” she said. “He’s expecting Calliope, right? I don’t think she was the type to bang on his door like a maniac. Just give it a second.”

I heard a lock disengage. The round handle in the middle of the door began to spin, turned from the other side.

“See?” Bethany said.

“Nobody likes a know-it-all,” I grumbled.

The door swung inward, revealing a floating form on the other side. My jaw dropped. The first thing I noticed was the big, metal chair, which had no legs and hovered a good six inches above the floor. But as strange as the floating chair was, the creature inside it was even stranger. He was vaguely humanoid in form, but unbelievably obese, the swollen bulges of his body shrouded within a big, shapeless dashiki. Where it was exposed, his flabby, charcoal gray skin was creased with folds and stretch marks. While the chair looked wide enough for two people of average girth, he appeared to be stuffed into it, with rolls of flesh drooping over the edges and armrests. He didn’t have any legs. His body was turnip shaped, flat on the bottom. He didn’t have a neck, either. His head rested right on his shoulders. The sheer size of his cranium was astonishing. I’d never seen a head so big. It swelled up and back from his brow, extending halfway down the back of the chair. His wide, toothy mouth dropped open in surprise when he saw us. He tried to slam the door shut again.

Philip caught it with one arm and held it open. “Surprise.”

“Yrouel, I presume?” I asked.

Unable to close the door, Yrouel retreated, his chair gliding quickly back from us. “Who are you? What do you want? This is private property!”

I stepped through the doorway. “We’re here about Calliope.”

“I don’t know any Calliope!” Yrouel shouted.

His chair spun around and began gliding quickly down the well-lit foyer, away from me. A blur zoomed past him, and suddenly Philip was standing in his way.

Yrouel turned back to me, his eyes widening with panic. “I told you, I don’t know who you’re talking about!”

“You don’t know Calliope?” I asked. “That’s funny, because she was supposed to meet you here tonight. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s why you opened the door when I knocked. You thought it was her.”

“It’s okay, Yrouel,” Bethany said, trying to calm him. “We’re not here to hurt you. We just want to ask you some questions.”

Yrouel glided back toward us. “I really must insist you leave immediately! You’re trespassing!”

Philip caught Yrouel by the arm and held him in place. “Did you kill Calliope, Yrouel? Because right now you’re acting guilty as hell.”

Yrouel looked up at him in surprise. “Calliope is dead?”

“See? You know her after all. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Philip said. “Now, here’s the thing. My friends here are good people. They’re patient. They’re willing to hear you out. But I’m not like them. I’m not a good person.”

“You’re a vampire,” Yrouel said, swallowing nervously.

Philip nodded. “And I don’t like when people lie to me. So how about we start over?”

Yrouel nodded, and Philip released his arm. “I didn’t kill Calliope. But yes, I know her.
Knew
her. I—I didn’t know she was dead. What happened?”

“Sometime between yesterday and today she was killed in her home,” I said. “She was cut open and her body was nailed to the ceiling.”

“Well, there you go,” Yrouel said. “I couldn’t have killed her, could I? Does it look like I could nail someone to the ceiling?”

“Depends,” Philip said. “How high can that chair float?”

Yrouel scowled at him, then glided over to the door and closed it. “You’d better come inside.”

He turned around and led the way into what appeared to be a large, luxury apartment directly beneath the alley. The foyer opened into a long, wide hallway. Hanging on the walls were paintings by Vermeer, Matisse, Cézanne, and artists even older than that—da Vinci, Raphael, Botticelli. Granted, I was no art expert, but the paintings looked authentic to me, right down to the wear and tear on the frames. The collection had to be worth a fortune.

“You’re not police, are you?” Yrouel asked. “I won’t talk to police.”

“Do we look like cops?” I asked.

Yrouel laughed bitterly. “You force your way into my home, manhandle me, and accuse me of a crime I didn’t commit. That sounds like cops to me. But if you’re not, then who are you?”

“We’re the Five-Pointed Star,” Bethany said.

Yrouel paused a moment and glanced back at us. “
You’re
the Five-Pointed Star? The ones who took out Stryge up in that park in the Bronx? Huh. So you’re not police. You’re
magic
police.”

“Not exactly,” I said. “But Calliope was a friend. We found your name and address in her appointment book.”

“It stands to reason whoever killed her might have seen your name in the appointment book, too,” Bethany said. “For all we know, he’s coming for you next. Which means any help you give us would be helping yourself.”

“That’s the first smart thing any of you have said since forcing your way in here,” Yrouel said. “Yes, if her killer knew about me, I could very well be next.”

“Why? What were you two involved in?” I asked.

“I wasn’t involved, exactly, but I was helping her,” he said. “Calliope was researching a topic about which I happen to have a fair amount of knowledge.”

Calliope hadn’t let me look in her notebook.
It’s a personal project. Nothing that concerns you.
Was the project what had gotten her killed? The answer could be waiting for me under my mattress.

“Have you heard of the Aeternis Tenebris?” Yrouel asked. “They were a doomsday cult here in New York City that believed the world would end when the clock struck midnight on January first, 2000.”

“They weren’t the only ones who thought that,” Bethany pointed out.

“True, but unlike the other millennium doomsday cults, the Aeternis Tenebris didn’t disband once they were proven wrong. They were much too stubborn for that. They decided that if the world wasn’t going to end of its own accord, they would help it along. End it themselves.”