Die and Stay Dead (35 page)

But there was something strange about me and magic. It went haywire around me. I didn’t know why. When I touched a broken artifact or charm, it suddenly worked. When I touched a working one, it overloaded. The Prometheus Arch was clearly working. I wasn’t surprised when it began to shake and groan. Cracks tore through the stone, erupting in showers of sparks. The pain stopped. My vision shifted back to normal. I struggled to my feet, my strength slowly returning.

“I warned you this would happen,” I said.

The overload built and built inside the arch like a head of steam. The keystone at the top of the arch exploded, sending a huge fireball into the room. The fire caught on the revenants’ clothes. The old, dry cloth went up in flames. So did the revenants. The desiccated corpses flared like kindling.

The stone around my wrists loosened, releasing me. I fell back from the arch. I was still weak, but I got back on my feet quickly. I looked to the corner of the room, but I didn’t see Thornton. Had he really been here, or had I hallucinated from the pain?

I had to find a way out of the room, but it was filled with stumbling, lurching, human-sized bonfires. The revenants were just dead bodies, they couldn’t actually feel the fire, and yet they were all screaming. When I turned back to the Prometheus Arch, I saw why. Reve Azrael’s hands were still stuck inside the holes. She hadn’t been released. The fire surrounded her, catching on her clothes, her hair. I watched in horror as she struggled inside a blanket of flames.

I forced myself to move. I had to get out before the fire found me, too. I ran for the door, weaving around the screaming, flailing revenants that burned all around me. Eyeballs, the van driver, appeared before me. The fire had already taken her hair. Her skull-face screamed with Reve Azrael’s agony. I kicked her out of the way. She crumpled like burning leaves. I ran to the small table and scooped up the Codex fragment. The metal was already warm from the fire. I took my gun back, too, stuffing it in the holster at the small of my back.

Four shrieking, burning revenants stumbled toward me. I couldn’t tell one from another anymore, couldn’t tell which one was Oatmeal Face or Jawless. Their features were completely burned away. I darted past them, grabbed the hot handle of the iron door, and pulled it open. Reve Azrael’s agonized screams followed me as I ran out of the room and into the stone corridor outside. I looked up and down the torchlit hallway, trying to get my bearings. I knew there was an empty van parked nearby, but I couldn’t remember which direction led back to it. Every part of these damn catacombs looked the same to me. If I took a wrong turn, I might never find my way out.

The ghost wolf came loping toward me. My vision was back to normal, but I could still see him somehow. His body glowed as bright as a ray of sunlight. He stopped halfway down the corridor and looked at me, his tongue lolling from his open mouth.

“Calliope was right,” I said. “You
are
following me.”

Thornton turned and sprang back the way he’d come. He stopped, looked back at me, then ran again. He wanted me to follow.

I ran after him. He disappeared around a corner. I turned the corner a few seconds later and caught a glimpse of his shining haunches already turning the next corner up ahead. He was way ahead of me. All along the walls, the suspended corpses thrashed and screamed with Reve Azrael’s pain. I moved past them carefully, avoiding their kicking legs. Their eyes were open now, the red light spearing out of their pupils. Could Reve Azrael see me through them, or was she too lost in the pain? I hurried past, following Thornton around the next corner. I saw him in the distance again, turning yet another corner up ahead.

“Damn it, slow down,” I called, but Thornton was already out of sight.

This corridor, too, was lined with dead bodies that thrashed and screamed. One of the ropes snapped as I passed, dropping a revenant on top of me. She was a woman with nut-brown skin, black hair, and a blue sundress. She couldn’t have been older than her mid-twenties when she died. The three bullet holes in her chest explained what had happened to her, while the sundress and the stiffness of her limbs told me she’d been dead since the summer. She continued thrashing on top of me, clubbing me with her arms as bits of brittle, rotting skin sloughed off her bones. Her glowing red eyes looked right at me, but I couldn’t tell if there was any consciousness behind them. She just screamed and screamed.

I managed to push the shrieking revenant away and scramble out from under her. I ran. I heard her moving behind me, but I didn’t waste time turning to see if she was following me or just continuing her spastic dance of agony. Thornton came bounding back down the corridor toward me. I tried to slow down and duck out of his path, but he was too fast. Thornton leapt—

And passed through me.

I felt a chill, like a sudden, cutting wind, and then I was someplace else. A room with walls shrouded in black velvet curtains. A circular table stood in the center of the room, also draped in black velvet. A crystal ball on a wooden stand sat in the middle of the table. I knew this place. It was the downstairs parlor of Calliope’s row house. Calliope herself was sitting at the table, her face slack and her eyes vacant, as if she were in a trance. She was holding a pen, her hand scribbling of its own accord in a notebook open on the table in front of her. Thornton, translucent and brightly glowing, sat beside her in his human form and whispered frantically in her ear.

And then I was back in the corridor, still running. What the hell…? I shook my head clear, trying to focus on my surroundings. Behind me, I heard noises from Thornton and the revenant that I didn’t want to think about. I didn’t know what a ghost wolf could do to a magically reanimated dead body. I didn’t
want
to know.

A moment later, Thornton came bounding past me and around the corner up ahead. Following him, I found myself in another corridor, only this time there were no revenants suspended along the walls. The walls had changed from stone to metal. Pipes traced the length of the corridor along the ceiling. The floor was wet with shallow water that splashed under the soles of my boots. This was most certainly not the way back to the van.

“Where are we going?” I called after Thornton. Of course he couldn’t answer. That would have been too easy, and apparently nothing in my life was ever allowed to be easy. I could only assume he was leading me toward an exit. What choice did I have? I kept following him.

We raced down more metal hallways, each grading slightly upward toward ground level. At least we were headed in the right direction. Finally, I saw Thornton pass, immaterial, through a windowless steel door. When I reached it, I pulled it open and stepped out into a well-lit, generically institutional corridor of fluorescent lights, white walls, and a neutral, gray, tiled floor. I looked up and down the hallway and saw several other windowless steel doors like the one I’d come through. I caught a glimpse of Thornton rounding another corner and hurried after him.

The wolf jumped straight through an emergency exit door like it wasn’t even there. I hit the crash bar and shoved the door open, exiting into a parking lot by the side of a building. The rain battered my head. A sudden, high-pitched shriek made me cover my ears. Damn. Opening the emergency exit had set off an alarm. As the door closed on its hydraulic hinge, I saw an official seal affixed to it that read
OFFICE OF THE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER—THE CITY OF NEW YORK.

The city morgue. Of course. The perfect hiding place for Reve Azrael. With her lair right below, she would have access to unlimited bodies to turn into revenants—the bodies of crime and accident victims, prison inmates, and most importantly, the John Does, those unclaimed bodies that wouldn’t necessarily be missed if they disappeared. All those bodies suspended in the catacombs below—how long had she been harvesting from this place? How many had she taken?

I glanced around the parking lot but didn’t see Thornton. Was he gone again? I couldn’t hang around to find out. This was an official government building; the alarm would bring someone soon. I tucked the fragment into the interior pocket of my trench coat and ran for the parking lot exit. When I was out, I kept running until I reached the corner. Then I stopped and got my bearings. I was on Thirtieth Street and First Avenue, right next to the NYU Medical Center.

Part of me knew I should find a pay phone, call Isaac, and let him know I was okay. But there was something I needed to do first, something that felt a hell of a lot more pressing. I started walking toward the subway. If Thornton was still following me, he didn’t show himself.

*   *   *

In the reception area of Gamma Solutions, LLC, the Bay Ridge Harpy stood up indignantly from behind the reception desk. “Hey, you can’t just go in there! There’s protocol!” she shouted, pronouncing it
prota-cawl
.

I didn’t stop. I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t since I stepped off the elevator. I just walked through the reception area and into the hallway. I knew the way. Three doors down on the left. I reached the door beside the plaque that read
Jordana Pike, Systems Analyst,
and opened it.

Jordana was sitting at her desk, one finger on the speaker button of her phone. She looked up at me as I stormed into her office. The receptionist’s voice was coming through the speakerphone: “… barged right through like an asshole!”
Ayass-howall
.

“Sorry about that. Everything’s okay. There’s no need to call security,” Jordana replied, then released the button. She looked at my wet, bloodstained clothes and the bruises and dried blood on my face. “Oh my God, what happened to you, Lucas? Are you all right?”

I closed the door behind me. She got up out of her chair and tried to put her arms around me. I backed away from her.

“Is my name really Lucas West?” I said.

She froze. She looked confused and hurt, and for a moment my heart broke that I was the one who’d put such a pained expression on her face. I forced the feeling away. I couldn’t trust my feelings right now. I couldn’t trust anything.

“I don’t understand. What’s going on?” Jordana asked.

“I want the truth,” I said. “How can I be a normal guy from Pennsylvania when there’s this—this
thing
inside me—”

“Lucas, stop.” She stepped closer and put her hands on my chest. Her touch instantly calmed me. “Tell me what happened. Did you find another fragment?”

“Jordana, please, I have to know,” I insisted. “What am I? Where does this power come from? Is it—is it mine?”

“I told you, you’re Lucas West,” she said.

She gripped the lapels of my trench coat, pulled herself up onto her toes, and kissed me. The moment our lips touched all my questions evaporated, as ephemeral as steam. Jordana pulled away and touched a cool, comforting hand to my face.

“I’ve been looking for you for years, Lucas, and now that I’ve finally found you, I’m not letting you slip away from me again.”

I pulled her to me, crushing her so tightly I thought she might break. We kissed again, fiercely, and the next thing I knew we were in the small, cramped supply room around the corner from her office. My fingers worked the buttons of her blouse. I kissed her neck while she gasped and tangled her fingers in my hair. I didn’t want to think about the destructive power locked inside me. I didn’t want to think about Reve Azrael or Nahash-Dred or Erickson Arkwright or the end of the world. Let the world take care of itself for once—or let it burn if it had to, I didn’t care. I just wanted to be normal, even if only for a moment. I wanted to not care about anything. I wanted to be human.

Twenty-Six

When the fire inside us had burned itself out, we lay on my trench coat spread open on the bare supply room floor. I held Jordana for a while. She rested her head on my chest. My fingers traced lazy lines up and down her back through the thin material of her blouse.

“Tell me more about your brother,” I said.

She looked up at me. “Pete?”

“It sounds like he was my closest friend,” I said. My closest friend until I disappeared on him, anyway. Until I disappeared on them both. I wished I knew why.

Something passed through her eyes. I could feel her pulling away, as if a wall had come down between us. “I don’t want to talk about Pete right now,” she said, her voice hitching with emotion. She put her head on my chest again. “I—I can’t.”

“It’s okay,” I said apologetically. Clearly, I needed to work on my pillow talk. I didn’t mean to touch a nerve. She was still mourning Pete’s loss, and her mother’s, too. The world had taken a lot from Jordana. She’d told me how much family meant to her. To suddenly be without her brother and mother, to lose everyone but the stepfather she barely got along with, I couldn’t even imagine that.

She put a hand on my chest, still not looking at me. “I have nightmares every night, but in the morning I don’t remember them. I’m just left with this strange feeling that it had something to do with Pete and my mother. Like they want to tell me something important, but when I try to remember, it’s gone.”

I stroked her hair. The gesture felt feeble, but I didn’t know how else to comfort her.

“Do you ever—do you ever feel like you’re not in control sometimes?” she asked. “Like you’re falling toward something and can’t stop?” She stiffened almost imperceptibly, but I felt it through her body. She looked up at me, her eyes guarded. “I—I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know why I did.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I want to know things about you. I want to know everything about you.”

She smiled, but there was something missing. I felt like I was looking at a completely different person now. She rolled away from me, putting her back against me. She looked at the pointed edge of the Codex fragment peeking out from my coat’s interior pocket.

“Is that the fragment?” she asked.

“Yeah. It was in Battery Park, just like we thought. Arkwright didn’t get it from us this time, but he sure as hell tried.”

I didn’t mention what else we’d found there, the underground complex and the brick wall with the Ehrlendarr rune from my first memory. I didn’t want to scare her. I also didn’t know what to make of it yet. What was that place? What had happened to me there? What had brought Lucas West, just a normal guy from Pennsylvania, to a place like that?