Die and Stay Dead (40 page)

I turned to her. “How?”

“Watch me.” She launched herself straight up into the air and flew off into the night, out of sight before I could protest.

I looked at Isaac. “Fine. We’ll get Arkwright. You drive.”

*   *   *

The Escalade sped north on the Henry Hudson Parkway to Bronxville. I leaned forward in the passenger seat and opened the glove compartment. I ejected the spent magazine from my gun and tossed it in.

“How the hell did Arkwright find us?” I asked. “That’s three times now he’s been waiting to ambush us.”

Isaac said, “He must have been following us.”

“Or the light from the sphere,” Bethany said from the backseat. “You said yourself it was an alarm system.”

“But Arkwright can’t be the one who hid the fragments,” I said. “He told me he couldn’t open the sarcophagi.”

Bethany shook her head. “I don’t get it. In his condition, how can he be the same person who came after us with the Thracian Gauntlet?”

“It had to be one of his henchmen,” I said. I rooted around the glove compartment until I found a fresh magazine of bullets. “One of them must have bid remotely for him at the auction, too, so there would appear to be two different bidders for the gauntlet.”

“He’s been one step ahead of us the whole time,” Bethany said.

“Well, the son of a bitch forgot something,” I said, slamming the new magazine into the butt of my gun. “We know where he lives.”

When we pulled into the driveway of Arkwright’s mansion in Bronxville, I expected to be greeted with a hail of gunfire or a blast from the Thracian Gauntlet. Instead, we didn’t meet any resistance at all. The grounds were empty. The only sign of life was the light in the windows. Someone was home. We pulled up to the columned portico entrance and got out. I stalked up to the front door, gun in hand. Yesterday, I’d stood right here talking with a murderer and hadn’t even realized it. I’d shaken his goddamn hand.

My phone sat silent in my pocket. Gabrielle hadn’t called yet to tell me she and Jordana were safe. What the hell was taking so long?

I waved Isaac and Bethany behind me, then tried the door. It was locked. No surprise there. I kicked it open and stepped inside, my gun raised in front of me. I didn’t hear an alarm, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t tripped a silent one. I led Bethany and Isaac through the entrance hallway, past the hanging portraits and cabinets filled with finery.

I kept my gun in front of me as we moved deeper into the house. I was ready for Arkwright’s goons to come blasting out of every door we passed, but it never happened. I didn’t see
anyone
. The whole house was eerily quiet. I led us toward the three-story library at the center of the mansion. No one was there, either. In the ceiling, the stained-glass angel stared down at us indifferently.

I made a beeline for the door to Arkwright’s private artifact gallery. If he were holed up anywhere, it would be in there. With its extensive collection of deadly artifacts, it was the safest place in the house. I tried the handle. It was locked. I gave the door a few hard kicks. Unlike the front door, this one refused to budge. Bethany took a door-buster charm from her vest and fixed it to the doorknob. She motioned for us to get back. The charm exploded with light, followed by the sound of rending metal and the stench of burning. When it was done, Bethany put her hand in the hole where the doorknob used to be and opened the door.

The gallery was empty. Completely empty. Not only was Arkwright not there, all the artifacts had been cleared out. Damn. Arkwright’s collection was the most important thing in the world to him. It was the only thing he would never leave behind. If it was gone, then he was gone, too. He’d probably started packing the moment we left yesterday. But where had he gone? Another residence? A safe house?

The only object left in the room was the painting on the wall, still covered with a heavy curtain. I grabbed the curtain and yanked. It fell, pulling the curtain rod down with it to thump and clatter to the floor. Behind the curtain, painted right onto the marble wall, was a landscape of two seaside cities. They were built on the side of a mountain range, and separated by a long, winding wall. In the foreground, two small figures flew over the water toward the cities. They were wearing suits of armor.

The Gemini Sentinels. It was a painting of Tulemkust and Sevastumi, the cities where the Thracian Gauntlets originated. Supposedly the home of the Codex Goetia, too. The true cause of the war between them.

Something in the bottom right corner of the painting stood out amid the aqua blue brushstrokes of the water. It was just a flourish, barely noticeable if you weren’t looking for it, but it was there. The letter Y. I’d seen it before. The signature of an artist too egotistical not to leave his mark, even on forgeries.

Yrouel.

The pieces were starting to fall into place. Clarence Bergeron had hired Yrouel to come paint this for him. Yrouel must have seen something that made him realize Bergeron was really Erickson Arkwright, the sole surviving member of the Aeternis Tenebris doomsday cult. Yrouel had then tried to sell that information to Calliope, but Arkwright got to her first. Then he’d killed Yrouel, too. No loose ends, or so he thought.

What I didn’t understand was, why
this
painting? Why Tulemkust and Sevastumi? What did the legend mean to Arkwright?

I looked up from the painting, up to the ceiling and the little black cameras embedded in it. I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. I ran out of the gallery and back through the house. I stopped in front of the security office where we’d reviewed the doctored footage of the gauntlet’s “theft” yesterday.

“Stay back,” I told Bethany and Isaac as they came running up behind me.

I kicked the door open and went inside, gun first.

LaValle leapt up from where he was sitting in front of the surveillance equipment. He reached for the pistol at his hip, but I pointed my Bersa semiautomatic at his face. His hand froze on the grip of his gun.

“Don’t,” I said. “Where’s Arkwright, LaValle?”

LaValle grinned smugly. “Someplace you’ll never find him. You can’t stop him. Nothing can stop him now.”

He drew his gun. I put three bullets in him, center mass, before he could fire. He fell back against the far wall, then slid down to the floor. He looked pretty damn dead to me, but I kicked his gun away from his hand anyway. I wasn’t taking any chances.

“You shouldn’t have killed him,” Isaac said. “He might have had information.”

“He said everything he was going to say.” I holstered my gun. I went to the bank of surveillance equipment, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of all the buttons and dials in front of me. “Can you operate this thing? There might be footage that tells us where Arkwright went.”

Bethany and Isaac went to work on the equipment, but after a minute they stopped.

“It’s been erased, all of it,” Isaac said. “There’s nothing saved on the hard drives. LaValle was keeping an eye on us. These are live feeds from all over the house, but nothing’s being recorded. Arkwright wasn’t taking any chances.”

“Now what?” Bethany asked. “Arkwright could be anywhere. We’re no closer to finding him than we were before.”

I looked at the monitors, the various rooms under surveillance around the house—the living room, a den, the master bedroom, the gallery, guest rooms, hallways. There had to be something here, something that could tell us where Arkwright was.

“We should split up and search the house,” I said. “Nobody takes off this quickly without leaving something behind. Papers, a receipt, a Post-it note with a phone number,
something
.”

Bethany looked down at LaValle’s dead body. “Be careful. LaValle was part of Arkwright’s security detail. If he’s still here, he was guarding something. Or someone.”

We split up, searching different parts of the house. I took a carpeted stairway to the top floor, three stories up, keeping the gun in front of me. I checked behind door after door—a bathroom, a linen closet, a laundry room—but there was nothing to tell me where Arkwright had gone. Finally, I found a study. It was a big room with an antique wooden desk, a plush, leather couch, and a marble-topped, wrought iron coffee table. I searched the desk but didn’t find anything except for a few stray pens and pencils rolling around its drawers.

A fireplace stood on the wall opposite the door. Several framed photographs had been arranged on the stone mantel. I studied them closely, hoping to find a clue. The photos were all of Arkwright at various landmarks around the world, the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall. The man certainly got around. Maybe it was his farewell tour, one last hurrah before he commanded Nahash-Dred to destroy it all.

The picture at the far end of the mantel caught my eye. It showed Arkwright standing beside a woman about his age. She was wearing a red parka, matching knit cap, and yellow, buglike goggles. They were standing at the bottom of a ski slope. Above them, part of a banner had been captured in the photograph. It read
ASPEN SN
.

I picked it up. I’d seen the woman before. I’d seen this
picture
before, but … different. I turned the frame over and started to undo the back.

My phone went off. Gabrielle’s name flashed on the screen. I put the photograph down and answered the call.

“Gabrielle, where are you? Do you have Jordana?”

“Trent,” she said, her voice shaking. “Jordana never told me where she lives, so I—I came to her office first. I thought she might still be here, or that I’d find her home address.”

“Do you
have
her?” I asked again.

“When I got here, they were—they were all dead,” she said. “Everyone in the office. They were murdered. Their bodies are burnt. There are burn marks all over the walls. It—it had to be the Thracian Gauntlet. It had to be Arkwright.”

My fingers tightened on the phone so hard I thought it might break.

“God damn it,” I said. “Why were they still at the office at this hour? What were they doing there?”

“That’s the thing,” Gabrielle said. “I don’t think they stayed late. They’re already cold. They’ve been dead for hours.”

It felt like the floor dropped out from under me. “Did you see Jordana? Is she there, too?”

“I don’t know. Her—her office is empty. I didn’t see any burn marks in there, but that doesn’t mean … God, Trent, I don’t know how she could have gotten out if she was here when Arkwright came. He was thorough. It’s—it’s like he was enjoying himself. He didn’t spare anyone. There are bodies huddled together in the break room like they were hiding from him, but—but they…”

She trailed off, unable to continue. I picked up the photograph again in my other hand. I smashed it against the corner of the mantel, shattering the glass. I pulled the picture out of the frame. It had been folded to show only part of the photograph. I unfolded it, making the image complete. The banner at the top now read, in full,
ASPEN SNOWMASS 2011
. Standing next to the older woman was Jordana. It was the same picture I’d seen on Jordana’s desk at work.

My family went on a ski trip to Aspen …

“I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” Jordana said behind me.

I dropped the photograph, dropped the phone, and spun around, pulling my gun. She was standing partially in the doorway. I could only see her head and one shoulder.

“Jordana,” I said. “There are easier ways to quit your job.”

“But none quite so satisfying,” she said. “Luckily, I wasn’t looking for a reference.”

She stepped fully into the doorway. She was holding Bethany by the arm, pulling her along. On Jordana’s other hand was the Thracian Gauntlet, its palm pressed to the side of Bethany’s head.

“Put your gun on the floor,” Jordana said. “Now.”

Thirty

“Put the gun down,” Jordana repeated, keeping Bethany between herself and me as a human shield. “You know what this gauntlet is capable of.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. Keeping my hands where she could see them, I bent down to put the gun on the floor.

“Don’t do it, Trent,” Bethany said. “Don’t you dare put that gun down!”

Jordana shook her. “Shut up, unless you want those to be your last words.”

I put the gun on the floor. I didn’t have a choice. Even if I had a clear shot at Jordana, there was no guarantee she wouldn’t blast Bethany’s head off her shoulders first.

“Now kick the gun away,” Jordana said.

I did. It slid across the polished hardwood and didn’t stop until it hit the leg of the desk.

“You’re why LaValle was here. You’re what he was guarding,” I said. “You were in this with Arkwright all along.”

“Gold star,” Jordana said. “And now you’re going to give me safe passage out of this house. Unless, of course, you want to see what the gauntlet can do to someone at point-blank range.”

Bethany’s eyes stayed hard and focused. If she was afraid, she wasn’t showing it. Where the hell was Isaac? Did he know what was happening? Or had Jordana already killed him?

Jordana narrowed her eyes at me. “Isaac? Someone
else
is here, too?”

“You’re a mind reader?” I asked, surprised.

“I’m a lot of things,” she said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter that you’re not alone. It’s a big house, and I’ll be long gone before Isaac finds me. Right?”

She backed toward the door, staying behind Bethany. I glanced at the gun on the floor.

“I said,
right
?” Jordana snapped.

“Right,” I said. “Safe passage.”

“Then you’re coming with me, too,” she said. “Try anything and I’ll kill both of you.”

She backed out the door and into the hallway. I followed, leaving the gun on the floor behind me. I hated abandoning it, but I didn’t have a choice. I already knew what Jordana was capable of. I followed her and Bethany into the hallway.

“Stay back,” Jordana warned.

I kept my hands up. “You were the second bidder at the Ghost Market,” I said. “You killed Yrouel in Chinatown.”

“That fat piece of garbage brought it on himself,” she spat. “Yrouel wasn’t even supposed to be here that day, but he came in to put some finishing touches on that stupid painting in the gallery. He overheard Erickson and me talking in the library. He was right on the other side of the door. He heard
everything
. The cult. The demon. I told Erickson that damn painting would be nothing but trouble, but he wouldn’t listen. He said it was ‘important family history.’ He said it was his heritage, proof that the Codex Goetia rightfully belonged to him. He should have listened to me. That painting compromised us. Yrouel had to be taken out.”