Die and Stay Dead (6 page)

“Comfortable?” Isaac asked. We were in a high room in the northeast tower of Citadel. Through one window, I could see Citadel’s domed roof and the other three towers at the corners. Through another was a wide expanse of Central Park woodland.

I nodded, settling into the plush cushions of the wingback chair in the center of the room. “Let’s do this. Maybe we’ll find something this time.”

He lifted the Janus Endeavor off the table by the window. It was a big, heavy, bronze helmet etched on both the front and the back with the identical, stylized face of a bearded man. Isaac opened the helmet along its hinged side seam, lowered it over my head, and then closed it again, sealing me into complete darkness. There were no eyeholes to let in the light, and no airholes, which made the inside of the mask dark, stuffy, and stale. I didn’t like it, but the discomfort was a small price to pay if it gave me a chance to track down my past.

His voice came to me muffled by the heavy helmet. “Are you ready?”

“Hit it,” I said, and braced myself.

Isaac began the incantation. I was glad I couldn’t hear it clearly through the helmet. There was something eerie about the language of magic, even if no one else thought so. Something alien and cold that crept under my skin. A moment later, activated by the spell, the Janus Endeavor shrank around my head, molding itself to my features until the bronze was snug against my skin. The helmet caressed my face with invisible fingers like a blind man memorizing my features. Then, as it must have for all those Italian twins centuries ago, the darkness within the helmet burst to life with image after image, face after face. Only, these faces came from newspaper photos, magazine spreads, police reports, and obituaries. None of them was my face. Undeterred, the Janus Endeavor cast its net wider. Clips of TV news programs flashed by, followed by a Facebook timeline and a Twitter feed, then some newfangled Web site I didn’t even recognize.

Then, suddenly, I saw myself in a grainy, black-and-white photo. My heart quickened. The Janus Endeavor caught the image and held it in place. The photo was from a page deep within an issue of the
Daily News
. My face was a blur of pixels and poor focusing, likely from a cell phone camera, but I recognized myself. I was standing on top of an overturned Ford Explorer while a man in a jet-black suit of armor approached on foot with his sword drawn. Damn. The Janus Endeavor had finally found something, but it wasn’t from my forgotten past. It was from a month ago. The caption read,
YOUTUBE STUNT SPINS OUT OF CONTROL: Two unidentified actors tied up traffic in Times Square and injured several drivers.
Actors. I supposed that was easier for
Daily News
readers to swallow than calling us the Immortal Storm and the Black Knight. I shook my head, and the Janus Endeavor let the photo go. It continued zooming through more images, but it came up empty.

Eventually, the heat and airlessness inside the helmet got to be too much for me. I tapped the arm of the chair to let Isaac know I needed a break. He ended the session with another incantation. The images faded, and the Janus Endeavor loosened its hold on my face. Isaac pulled the helmet free.

“Still nothing,” I said, sucking in a lungful of fresh, cool air. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my arm.

“We were close that time,” Isaac said. “That photo from the newspaper.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Somewhere out there, there
has
to be a record of me from before.”

It wasn’t the first time the mysteries of my own face had confounded me, but I thought by now the Janus Endeavor would have found something. Even if it was just me in the background of a photo. Even just a hint, a clue, anything but this big, terrible goose egg. It felt as much a waste of time as searching for the cloaked man in the database. But magic tended to act strangely around me, like a hose on full blast that couldn’t be turned off. I’d broken a couple of Bethany’s charms trying to use them. Maybe I’d broken the Janus Endeavor, too.

No, that wasn’t it. The artifact was working fine, it just wasn’t finding my face anywhere.

Isaac put the helmet down on the table and sighed, as disappointed as I was. “Let’s take a break. We’ll start again in five.”

*   *   *

That night, I lay on my stomach on the bed, flipping through a volume of Bankoff’s annotated
Libri Arcanum
from Isaac’s library. It was part of my education in all things magic, but I was having trouble concentrating. After reading the same paragraph five times, I put the book down. I turned onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. In my head, I heard Calliope again.

I think someone has been watching me for a while now. At least a couple of weeks. Not Biddy, someone else. I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t shake the feeling.

I couldn’t go anywhere without feeling like someone was following me.

I’d asked her if she knew who it was. She’d shrugged. But she hadn’t said no.

A knock sounded at my door. I sat up, swinging my feet onto the floor. “Come in.”

Bethany opened the door. She was carrying a deck of playing cards, shuffling them idly as she walked into the room. “So,” she said, “you ready for a rematch?”

I grinned and slid off the bed to sit on the floor. “Definitely. But I’m warning you, I’m becoming quite the gin rummy master.”

“Prove it.” She sat down across from me, shuffled the cards, and started dealing them out.

“You don’t have to keep doing this, you know,” I said.

She looked up at me. “But if I don’t deal the cards, how am I supposed to beat you so bad that you cry like a baby?”

“Good luck with that. But that’s not what I mean. You don’t have to keep me company every night just because I don’t sleep. Don’t
you
want to get some sleep?”

“I don’t mind doing this,” she said. “Do you want me to stop?”

No. No, I didn’t want her to stop. But part of me thought I should say yes. Seeing her in my room every night wasn’t helping me move on.

“I can go if you want me to,” she said.

“No, stay,” I said, surprising myself. But what else was there to do to pass the time? Go back to slogging my way through the
Libri Arcanum
? “Besides, I’m feeling lucky this time.”

She laughed as she finished the deal. “There’s a first time for everything.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Oh, that’s how it’s going to be, is it? You think you can take me?”

“I
know
I can take you,” she said.

Bethany teased and ribbed me as we played, talking smack through the game the way we always did, but this time it was one-sided. The longer we played, the less I felt like laughing. After winning her fourth hand in a row, she scribbled our scores in the notepad next to her.

“All the pictures on the cards must be confusing you,” she said. “The guy with the beard is the king.”

I was lost in my thoughts again and didn’t reply. She looked up at me sharply, her sky blue eyes flashing.

“What’s wrong? You’ve barely said anything all night. It’s not like you.”

I sighed. “Let’s just keep playing.”

“No. Your neck is turning all red again.”

It was my turn to deal. I took the deck out of her hands. My fingers brushed hers. I tried to ignore the feeling of her skin on mine and shuffled the deck.

She tucked her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around them. “I know you’re not big on opening up, but you can talk to me. You know that, right?”

I started dealing the cards.

“Is it about Calliope?” she asked.

“Partially,” I said. “I meant to go check on her today, even though she asked me to give her a couple of days. I had more questions for her, but more than that, I keep thinking about how scared she was. But then I got caught up with Isaac and the Janus Endeavor all day and lost track of time.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Bethany said. “Let’s go see her tomorrow. We’ll go together.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

Bethany studied her cards. “You said it was only partially about Calliope. Is there something else?”

I thought back to the Janus Endeavor. I’d sat in that chair all damn day, enduring session after endless session, and all for nothing. The artifact’s constant failure to find my face anywhere was crushing me. The search for my identity was starting to feel hopeless, but I didn’t know how to confide in her. She was right, I wasn’t good at opening up.

“No, it’s nothing,” I said. “I misspoke.”

She looked at me skeptically, but she didn’t press the matter. I could only imagine what color my neck was.

I looked at my cards. “Whose turn is it, again?”

“Mine.” Bethany put her cards down on the floor, faceup. “Oh, look at that. Gin.”

She beamed. I groaned.

*   *   *

At noon, Bethany and I climbed the front stoop of 6 St. Luke’s Place. I rang the doorbell.

Beside me, Bethany adjusted her cargo vest. As usual, its plentiful pockets were filled with magic charms, most of which she’d engineered herself. I’d never seen Bethany as happy as when she was engineering charms. She’d taught herself to make them in order to stay sane and focused during her childhood. She’d been abandoned at a young age by parents she never knew, and shuttled from one foster home to another. Small, quiet, withdrawn, and with unusually pointed ears, no prospective parents had wanted her, so she’d stayed in the system until she turned eighteen. Then, no longer their responsibility, they’d kicked her out onto the street. I didn’t know what happened to her in the ten years before Isaac found her and got her back on her feet. She never spoke of it. All I knew was that the only constant in her life had been engineering charms.

Calliope didn’t answer the door. I rang the doorbell again.

“That’s weird,” I said. “She knew I was coming by today. She asked me to.”

“Maybe she went out?”

Remembering her half-joke about never leaving the house again, I shook my head. “Not likely.” I rang the bell a third time. Calliope didn’t come.

I leaned over and peered into the window next to the door. It was too dark to see anything, especially with the glass reflecting the bright noontime daylight behind me. I got closer and cupped my hands around my face until I could make out the irregular shapes of Kali’s cat furniture in the dark living room. I didn’t see anyone inside. Then I noticed one of the taller cat trees had tipped over and was leaning against the couch. That was odd. Calliope didn’t seem like the kind of person who would just leave it tipped over like that.

“I don’t like this,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”

Bethany tried the handle, but the door was locked from the inside. She rapped on it and called Calliope’s name, but by then we both knew no one was coming to open the door.

Bethany looked at me. “It’s your call. What do you want to do?”

I kicked the front door with all my strength. It crashed open, the locked dead bolt tearing out chunks of wood with it. Bethany glanced back at the street to make sure no one had seen us, then nodded at me. I pushed my trench coat back, drew my gun from the holster at the small of my back, and led the way inside. A broken front door hanging open would draw attention, so Bethany quietly closed it behind us.

We crept into the dimly lit living room. The springs and feathers attached to Kali’s cat furniture swayed gently with the changes in the air. We moved deeper into the house, entering the large kitchen at the back. An island with a butcher-block countertop stood in the middle of the kitchen, arranged with vases, decorative bowls, and glass jars filled with sugar and flour. A rack of stainless steel pots and pans hung directly above it. The sink was set into a granite countertop, filled with a few dirty dishes and a wineglass. There were no signs of a struggle. Nothing seemed out of place. Even Kali’s food and water bowls down by the baseboard hadn’t been disturbed. We walked through a set of swinging doors and found the dining room, but there was nothing out of the ordinary here, either.

Bethany looked at me and shrugged.

I glanced around again, then backed out of the dining room. Everything was in its place, and yet my instincts wouldn’t stop telling me something was wrong.

Something wailed loudly upstairs. We ran for the stairs and rattled up them two at a time. I noticed a bloodstain on the beige carpet runner, but I didn’t stop running until I reached the second-floor landing.

A long, low moan came from behind a door to my right. The desperate sound raised goose bumps on my skin. I kicked open the door.

It was a bathroom. There were small spots of blood on the floor. Another moan, a truly miserable sound, came from behind the shower curtain. Bethany and I approached the tub cautiously. She gripped the edge of the curtain and looked at me. I lifted my gun and nodded at her. She yanked the shower curtain aside.

The cat sat curled against the wall of the bathtub, trying to make herself as small as possible. Kali’s paws were red. She’d left a pattern of small, bloody paw prints all over the white porcelain. There was a splotch of red on the fur over her ribs, but she didn’t appear to be injured. The blood was someone else’s. Between pitiful mewls and wails, Kali desperately tried to lick herself clean.

“Oh, God,” Bethany said. She picked Kali up out of the tub. To my surprise, the cat didn’t fight her or try to run. Instead, she allowed Bethany to pick her up and immediately surrendered to her embrace.

“That’s Kali,” I said. “Calliope’s cat.”

She held Kali close and looked at me, her eyes brimming with worry. “Trent, all this blood…”

“I know.”

I looked out through the open bathroom door. Blood drops and smears led from the stairs to about halfway down the hall before fading. Kali’s little red paw prints filled in the missing information. They led out of a room at the far end of the hall and into the bathroom.

“Wait here,” I said. I edged out of the bathroom, holding my gun ready.

“You can’t be serious,” she whispered.

“I mean it, stay there, Bethany,” I said.

I walked as quietly as I could toward the door, trying not to step in the blood on the floor. I paused outside the door and put my ear to it. I didn’t hear anyone inside. Of course, that didn’t mean someone wasn’t waiting for me with a weapon. I took a deep breath, turned the knob, and threw the door open, keeping the gun in front of me.