Die and Stay Dead (46 page)

“I’ve lived with it this long. If I have to go on not knowing, then I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

I finished applying the Sanare moss. I stood and put the bowl back on the table at the foot of the bed.

“You should get some rest,” I said.

She slipped the nightgown back on over her head, then turned on the bed to face me. “Thank you.”

I shrugged. “It was nothing. You’re an easy patient to treat.”

“Not just for the Sanare moss, that’s not what I mean,” she said. “For still being my friend after I acted like an ass. For listening to me go on about my parents. For talking to me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you open up like that before.”

“A friend once told me I needed to open up more,” I said. “I guess this is me trying to do that.”

“Well, I like it,” she said. “This friend of yours must be extremely smart.”

“Yeah, she’s annoying that way,” I said. “Now get some rest.”

“I’ll be all right soon,” she said. “The Sanare moss works fast. Promise me you’ll come get me as soon as Isaac translates the scroll. Don’t go after Arkwright without me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

She lay down on her side and pulled the blanket up to her chin again. I walked to the door.

“Trent?”

I looked back at her.

“He was no Picard, but Sisko was okay, too,” she said.

Thirty-Five

I left Bethany to her rest and started down the stairs to the first floor. I ran into Gabrielle on the landing halfway down. She was staring at the portrait of Thornton mounted on the wall, lost in her thoughts.

“You okay?” I said.

“I miss him, Trent. I miss him so much,” she said. “He still hasn’t shown himself to me. Not like he did to you.”

“I haven’t seen him since.”

“Do you think he … went back?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I have a hard time believing he would come all the way here without seeing you, even if just to say goodbye.”

She looked up at the portrait again. “You never know how much time you’re going to have with someone. It’s not fair, but it’s the way life is. Time isn’t on anyone’s side.”

She winced suddenly and doubled over, clutching her stomach. Sweat beaded on her forehead.

“Are you okay?” I asked, reaching for her.

She backed away. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine,” I said. “It’s the magic inside you. It’s infecting you. You shouldn’t have done it, Gabrielle. You should have left it alone.”

“I can make my own decisions,” she snapped. “We’re not all like you, Trent. We don’t all have the luxury of coming back to life. When people like me die, we
stay
dead. So we either die, or we find some way to even the odds. We all make the choices we have to.”

“I didn’t choose to be like this,” I said. “I didn’t choose any of it. I’d give it up in a second to be normal. You know that.”

She laughed bitterly. “What’s normal, Trent? In this world, what exactly does
normal
mean?”

She winced again and doubled over, gritting her teeth. This attack seemed stronger than the last. She groaned in pain, but she still wouldn’t let me touch her. When it passed, she straightened up again.

“I just need some air,” she said. She started down the stairs to the first floor.

I followed her. “I’ll go with you.”

“I don’t need a chaperone,” she said.

“I could use some air, too,” I said.

She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

I followed her out of Citadel and into Central Park. The sun was rising in the east, silhouetting the tall buildings of the Fifth Avenue skyline. With the sun behind them, they looked like featureless, monolithic stones in a prehistoric landscape. For a moment, the world felt new and unspoiled. The autumn morning was crisp and invigorating. After all the rain yesterday, it was good to see the sun again. We walked across the grass and into the nearby trees, our boots crunching the dead leaves that carpeted the forest floor. Not all the leaves had fallen yet. Some still clung stubbornly to their branches, red and gold and burnt umber, all of them ablaze with the morning sun. Everything felt right. Everything was in its place. There was no indication at all that the world could end tonight at midnight.

“You never really notice how beautiful something is until you realize it could go away,” I said.

Gabrielle nodded, looking around her. She seemed calmer now. “The world is a beautiful place when the sun is up, and sometimes even when it’s down. But it wasn’t always like this. Before the Guardians came, the world was very different. Hot and barren, with nothing but rocks and fire and lakes of molten lava from one pole to the other. Back then, the world belonged to a race called the Voyavold. In Ehrlendarr, their name means Suneaters. They loved the dark so much they tried to eat the sun right out of the sky.”

“I thought the Ancients were the first creatures on earth,” I said.

“The first in recorded history,” Gabrielle said. “Legend says the Voyavold were here before them, when the world was young. We only know about the Voyavold from stories and books that were locked away from the public long ago. They were supposed to be violent, monstrous creatures. The Guardians drove them out and tamed the earth.”

It was hard to imagine the Guardians getting off their asses to drive a race of monsters from the world. It was hard to imagine them getting off their asses to do
anything
.

“Where did the Voyavold go?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Somewhere else.”

“Ah,” I said. “Another apartment in the cosmic condo.”

“Something like that,” she said. “But they say the Voyavold are always trying to come back. Always trying to take back what was theirs. You see, Trent? Even monsters miss things when they’re gone. Even monsters know all too well that nothing lasts forever.”

The sound of snapping twigs froze us in our tracks. Gabrielle grabbed my arm and pulled me down behind a thick bush. She peeked over the top.

“Look,” she whispered.

I peered over the bush. A dense copse of trees stood in front of us. As I watched, humanoid forms peeled themselves off the bark along the thick, upper branches. They looked almost two-dimensional as they pulled free of the wood, but when they dropped to the ground they were as three-dimensional as the trees themselves. All of them were female, and all of them were unclothed, their skin the same color and texture as the bark, their hair matching every shade of the autumn leaves. They didn’t see us. Their expressions were somber as they walked single file away from the trees.

“Dryads,” Gabrielle said. “Where are they going?”

“It’s the exodus,” I said. “Yrouel told us about it before he died. He said he could sense something terrible was about to happen, and that others could, too. He said they were moving down to the Nethercity while there was still time, to be under Gregor’s protection.” I watched more dryads pull free of the trees and join the others in their slow, melancholy march. “Do you think they’ll be safe from Nahash-Dred down there?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Gabrielle said. “But it’s safer than being up here when the shit hits the fan.”

The last of the dryads disappeared from view. The forest felt strangely empty, though nothing had visibly changed. The trees, the grass, the leaves, it all looked the same. But there was a sense of loneliness to it now, as if the dryads had taken something essential with them when they left. We stood up again.

“I’m sorry about what I said back there,” Gabrielle said. “I was out of line. There’s a lot of anger in me right now. I know that. It’s getting harder and harder to keep it under control. It’s just…” She paused and shook her head. “You can’t imagine how alone I am now. How alone I
feel
without Thornton.”

“But you’re not alone,” I said. “The rest of us are still here.”

“That’s different. You know that,” she said. “You don’t know how lucky you are. We don’t all have someone who’ll stay up all night with us playing cards just so we don’t get lonely.”

“That’s different, too,” I said.

“Is it? She loves you, Trent. She has from the start. She just doesn’t know how to say it, or what to do with it. She hasn’t had an easy life. She hasn’t let herself feel anything in a very long time. I guess for a long time it was safer not to let herself get close to anyone. But things are different now. I know you have feelings for her, too. I would know it even if I hadn’t crawled inside your head once upon a time. I saw the way you tore that library apart to get her back.”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t think she feels that way. She told me—”

“I know what she told you,” Gabrielle interrupted. “What, you think she and I don’t talk? Please. You two need to stop dancing around this and talk it out. Because what I said before is true. You don’t know how much time you have left together. You know what’s coming. It could all end tonight.”

*   *   *

While Bethany slept, Gabrielle and I spent the rest of the day scouring Isaac’s library for demonology books. The library was extensive, taking up most of Citadel’s third story. The unfinished birch floor and row after row of maple bookshelves made the whole room smell like wood. But Isaac was right when he said his collection was woefully lacking in information on demons. We didn’t find much. Sitting at a table amid the library’s overstuffed bookshelves, Gabrielle and I pored over what little we found.

According to Bankoff’s annotated
Libri Arcanum,
the king of the demons was named Leviathan. He and his queen, Lamia, had two sons together. The firstborn, and crown prince, was Behemoth. The second was Nahash-Dred. Apparently, the two brothers had a frosty relationship that spread to the rest of demonkind. Their kingdom had split into two camps: those loyal to Behemoth, and those loyal to Nahash-Dred. None of the rest of the royal family shared Nahash-Dred’s ability to change his shape. Apparently, the demon would use his power to move undetected through worlds before destroying them. Why he did this or what, if anything, he was looking for was not mentioned.

I thought of the Mad Affliction again, the last of the greater demons Arkwright’s cult had accidentally summoned. He belonged to a culture that was a lot more advanced, a lot more complex than I thought. I felt a pang of guilt. I hated that we’d left him in that cage under the library, all alone. Demon or not, it didn’t sit right with me. There should have been another way.

If Isaac’s library didn’t have much on demons, it had even less on the Codex Goetia. In a yellowing old tome called
De Sacra Artificialia Caradras,
I found only one small chapter on it. The book hinted at mysterious, otherworldly origins for the artifact and warned it should never be used improperly, though it refused to offer any instructions on the proper way to use it. I flipped through the pages, hoping to find information on the Codex Goetia’s banishing spell, but there was nothing, just more useless warnings to leave the Codex alone. I slammed the book closed in frustration, causing a cloud of dust to billow out from between its pages.

“Listen to this,” Gabrielle said. She was reading a musty, leather-bound volume titled
The Book of Eibon
. “It says once a demon is bound to someone, if that person dies the demon returns to its own dimension.”

“So Arkwright has to die,” I said.

She looked up at me from the book. “You don’t sound too upset about that.”

I met her eye, but I didn’t say anything.

“You have a terrible poker face,” she said. “I saw it in your eyes when you couldn’t save Jordana. You want Arkwright dead. I don’t blame you. Jordana was my friend, too. He messed with her head and took my friend from me. I want him dead just as much as you do. But he also said he recognized you. He may know who you are, Trent. Don’t you want to know?”

“Lots of people claimed to know who I am,” I said. “They were all lying.”

“What if Arkwright isn’t?”

I didn’t have an answer for that, so I let the question hang in the air.

I did want Arkwright dead. Not just because of what he did to Jordana, although that was a big part of it. But also because of what he’d done to me. He’d dangled a life in front of me, a good life I’d been made to believe was mine. And then he’d cruelly yanked it away. He hadn’t just lied to me, he’d shown me that I would never,
could
never have that life. For that, too, I wanted to make him pay.

*   *   *

I let the shower’s hot water run over me, unwinding my muscles and washing away the day’s dirt. Bethany was still asleep in my room and I hadn’t wanted to disturb her, so I’d helped myself to Isaac’s shower instead. My jaw had dropped at the sight of a bathroom that was bigger than some of the apartments I’d seen. In one corner stood the marble-lined, glass-doored shower stall I was currently occupying.

The sun had crossed the sky and gone down again. There’d been no sign of Isaac all day. He never came out of his study, not even to join me and Gabrielle for meals. Deciphering the scroll was taking all his time. I wished I could help somehow. I felt useless just waiting around, but translating Elvish wasn’t part of my limited skill set. Not unless you could translate scrolls by punching them.

I adjusted the gold-plated temperature-control knobs until the water was so hot I could barely see through the steam. I lathered soap over my torso, thinking about how I’d been stabbed to death with swords twice already this week. Once in the stomach and once in the chest. For anyone else, that would be some kind of record. For me, it was business as usual. There were no scars to show for it, of course. Looking at myself, I looked like a perfectly normal man. You’d never know I had died thirteen times already. You’d never know I could see through the skin of the world and pluck its threads.

How could I have ever believed I was Lucas West from Norristown, Pennsylvania? Who was I kidding? Myself, apparently.

When I finished showering, I stepped out of the stall into the steam-filled bathroom. A granite counter ran along one wall, embedded with a large, enamel sink. Above it was a wall-length mirror. I wiped the steam away and studied my reflection. Despite all my strange abilities, despite all the mysteries of my identity, I looked human enough.