Die and Stay Dead Read online

  “Get back!” she shouted, not just for my sake but to warn the people on the other side of the door, too.

  We ran clear to the other side of the cave. The charm erupted with a bright light. There was the sound of rending metal, and the smell of something burning. A moment later the light faded. The doorknob lay on the floor, leaving a smooth, perfectly round hole in the door. Bethany’s hand was small enough to fit in the hole, so she reached in and pulled the door open.

  Inside was a dark cell. The air smelled stale and terrible. I could only imagine how many women Biddy had kept in here, waiting in terror to be fed to his god. Bethany pulled out another charm, a small, mirrored disc that glowed in her hand like a flashlight. She cast its light on the two prisoners in front of us.

  Isaac Keene, our leader, sat on the floor with his hands bound behind his back. He looked up at us, his lip and cheek bloody from when Biddy had beaten him into unconsciousness. His red, close-cropped hair and beard were matted with dirt and sweat.

  “Where’s Biddy?” he asked.

  “Dead,” Bethany replied, kneeling to untie him. “Unfortunately, the thing in the pit is still alive. And still hungry.”

  I turned my attention to the second person in the room: Philip Chen, our resident vampire. His skinny form was wrapped in so many silver chains he couldn’t move. All that silver had to be sapping his strength and burning his skin like a branding iron, but his face didn’t register any pain. Instead, he wore his usual scowl beneath the mirrored sunglasses he never took off.

  “Get these chains off of me,” he snarled.

  Philip grimaced as I unwrapped the chains as gently as I could. The silver left angry red marks on his forearms, neck, and anywhere else his skin wasn’t covered by his tight black T-shirt. I winced at how painful it looked. I didn’t know how he did it. He should have been screaming.

  When I finally got all the silver chains off of him, he said, “You should have left Biddy to me. The son of a bitch puts me in silver? I would have made him beg before he died. I would have made him wish he’d never met me.” He rubbed at the red, blistered marks on his skin.

  “I didn’t exactly have a choice,” I said.

  Philip looked at the blood-rimmed hole in my shirt, noticing it for the first time. “So it happened again, huh?”

  I didn’t answer him. I didn’t like talking about it.

  “While you’re at it, you might also want to look after our friend there,” Philip added, nodding behind me.

  I turned around. A woman crouched in the corner of the room, hidden in the shadows. I hadn’t noticed her when I came in. She was trembling and holding a knife in my direction. I held my hands up and walked slowly toward her. She panicked. She started breathing heavily and jabbed the knife at the air between us.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re here to help you. You’re free now. Biddy’s dead.”

  She gritted her teeth, her eyes darting quickly from me to the others and then back.

  “Biddy’s dead,” I said again. I knelt in front of her.

  Her face was streaked with dirt and sweat, but there was something striking about her, the way she looked both youthfully innocent and world-weary at the same time. There was a maturity to the lines of her face, but her cheeks were as full and round as a teenager’s. She wore jeans that were torn at the knees, and a ratty old black sweater with holes in the cuffs and elbows. Her hair was cut into a messy black bob with a narrow band of blue running down one side. She had a diamond stud in the side of her nose.

  I kept my hands where she could see them, one eye on the knife. It was a folding knife. I could see the groove in the handle where the blade fit inside. It was strange that Biddy had let her keep a knife, but I put the thought aside for now. I knew better than to touch her or try to take the knife away. She was so frightened she would slash me to ribbons before she knew what she was doing.

  “My name is Trent,” I said, keeping my voice calm and even. “What’s your name?”

  She looked at me for a long moment. She had two different-colored eyes, one blue and one a gold-flecked hazel. Like two people inhabiting the same body.

  “C-Calliope,” she stammered.

  “Hi, Calliope,” I said. “Would you like to go home now?”

  Her eyes welled with tears. She nodded. She folded the knife and put it back in her jeans pocket. I helped her to her feet. She trembled in my hands like a frightened animal. As I introduced her to the others, she began to calm down.

  “From what Bethany told me, the thing in the pit sounds like a trembler,” Isaac said. “It’s kind of like a land kraken. They don’t have much in the way of intelligence or cunning, they mostly just eat and sleep. We can burn it out.”

  “Biddy said it was his—his god,” Calliope said.

  “It’s true,” I said. “He even had a name for it: Mab-Akarr.”

  “Biddy was insane from the infection,” Isaac pointed out. “I have no doubt he really thought the trembler was speaking to him, ordering him to feed it, but I can assure you it wasn’t.”

  “He also said it was protecting him from something,” I said. “Something nasty that was coming our way.”

  “Likely more delusions,” Isaac said. He tipped back suddenly, losing his balance and stumbling to regain it.

  Philip rushed to his side to help him. “You all right, old man?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Isaac said. “Just still a little woozy. Now how about we get out of this damn cell?”

  We walked out into the cave. Calliope gripped my arm like a vise, as if she thought letting go would bring all the horror back.

  “Where’d you get that knife, Calliope?” I asked.

  “I had it with me when he—when he brought me here.” She looked around the cave nervously, as though she expected Biddy to jump out at any moment.

  “And Biddy let you keep it?” I was skeptical.

  Her jaw tightened at the mention of his name. “I tried to stab him with it. It didn’t do anything. Didn’t even break the skin. He thought it was funny that I tried to hurt him. That’s why he let me keep it. It amused him.”

  We started back across the natural stone bridge.

  “And yet he didn’t feed you to the trembler, even though you attacked him?”

  She shook her head. “I’m—I’m different. I can see the spirits of the dead, even talk to them sometimes. He liked that. He kept me around so I could tell him about the other women he fed to that thing. He made me watch. He got off on killing them, and he got off again on me telling him how angry or sad their spirits were. I guess for him it was like killing them twice. It amused him. Everything about me amused him.”

  “You’re a necromancer?” I asked, surprised. I hadn’t had good experiences with necromancers. Of course, maybe not all of them were like Reve Azrael. Calliope certainly seemed different.

  She turned to me sharply. “Wait! What day is it?”

  When I told her, she was stunned.

  “Three days. I’ve been here three days. I—I’ve lost so much time!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  I didn’t get an answer. Calliope spied Biddy’s desiccated husk on the bridge and clung to me with a shriek.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “He’s dead, just like I said. I killed him myself.”

  “But—but look at him…” She shook her head, her eyes wide with alarm. It was all too much for her. She choked back a sob, and then she wept, openly and unashamed. She buried her face in my shirt.

  Not knowing what else to do, I put my arms around her awkwardly. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s over.”

  She looked up at me, wiped her eyes with her sweater sleeve, and nodded.

  Philip went over to Biddy’s body and brought his boot down hard on the misshapen skull, crushing it.

  “Feel better?” I asked.

  “Ask me again after I stomp the rest of this bastard into dust.” He turned to Calliope. “You want a turn, kid?”

&nbs
p; Calliope just shook her head and dug her fingernails into my arm. It occurred to me she wasn’t just scared of Biddy. She was scared of Philip, too.

  “Leave it, Philip,” Isaac said. “We don’t have time. The trembler is still down there, and it’s awake and hungry.”

  “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.