Die and Stay Dead

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  Most people didn’t know any of this, of course, because they didn’t know magic was real. For the most part it was a willful ignorance, a strong desire to not want to know. Even after multiple witnesses had seen a giant, rampaging gargoyle turn the Cloisters into a pile of rubble, the news had chalked it up to a “freak seismic event.” Everyone just kept on lying to themselves. Maybe that was how they stayed sane.

  When the clones ahead of me in line were finished ordering their nonfat, no foam, six-pump chai lattes and whole wheat bagels with the insides scooped out, I bought myself a simple cup of coffee—black, one sugar. As I walked out of the shop, a cartoonish paper zombie taped to the door leered at me. I groaned. I’d already seen more than my share of reanimated corpses. If I never saw another one, it would be too soon.

  Back outside, I walked down the sidewalk sipping my coffee and thinking about returning to Citadel. The urgency of what Calliope said about a ghost wolf had faded. It was probably a mistake anyway. She’d been through a lot. She said herself she hadn’t slept much in three days. The wolf could have been a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep. That was probably it.

  Something on the other side of the street caught my eye, something out of place. I stopped and turned. A man stood on the opposite sidewalk, facing me. He wore a black cloak with a hood that hung down low enough to hide most of his face. All I could see was his chin, as white as snow. A crow sat on his shoulder, cocking its head at me. People passed him on the sidewalk without seeing him. A bulky Pathfinder sped north on Hudson Street, distracting me with an angry blare of its horn. When I looked across the street again, the cloaked man was gone.

  I turned to continue up the sidewalk, and nearly walked right into him. The cloaked man stood directly in front of me. As before, no one else on the sidewalk seemed to notice him. The crow on his shoulder tipped its head to one side, then the other, regarding me with both eyes.

  “Immortal Storm,” the man said. The snow-white flesh of his chin was run through with dark black veins. I still couldn’t see the rest of his face under the hood.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “Take my hand,” he said. He held out one slender, pale hand. His fingernails were black. “Take my hand and see.”

  I didn’t know what compelled me to do it. I grasped his hand like we were shaking on a deal. As soon as I did, the cloaked man turned his hand over. The skin on the back of his hand opened to reveal an eye. I felt like I was falling. Hudson Street was gone. Everything was gone.

  Images rushed at me, changing constantly. I saw the burning ruins of New York City. I saw the dead lying everywhere—corpses on the sidewalks, corpses on the street. Ash rained from the sky, and so did human bodies. They fell slowly, so slowly, as if the laws of gravity didn’t work anymore. I saw Isaac emerge from a bank of heavy smoke, only he was older, haggard-looking. One of his arms was missing, cut off below the elbow, the stump wrapped in a dirty cloth. I saw Bethany covered in blood and shouting at me, “What have you done? What have you done?” Then I was standing in an underground subway station. The platform was littered with bodies. The cloaked man stood before me.

  “What is this?” I demanded through gritted teeth.

  “The future. Your future,” he said. He smiled. His teeth were yellow. His gums were as black as night.

  A rumble came from deep within the subway tunnel, the sound of a train approaching the station. I turned and looked, but it wasn’t a train. A tidal wave of blood poured out of the tunnel, flooding the station and catching the bodies in its current.

  “Pave the way,” the cloaked man said.

  And then I was back on the sidewalk on Hudson Street, alone, with the still hot cup of coffee in my hand.

  * * *

  I didn’t know what time it was when I finally got back to Citadel. Eight a.m.? Nine? The encounter with the cloaked man had shaken me, made me lose track of everything. The images he’d shown me were still reeling in my head when Citadel appeared before me out of the morning mist. Isaac’s home and the Five-Pointed Star’s headquarters, Citadel was a small castle that stood incongruously in a secluded glen in Central Park, hidden from prying eyes by a powerful ward. Only one person had ever breached the ward and broken into Citadel: Reve Azrael, the necromancer whose disturbing fascination with me I still didn’t fully understand. But it had been over a month since she’d broken into Citadel, and she hadn’t returned. I knew she’d survived the events of Fort Tryon Park, but there’d been no sign of her since. It made me nervous. I didn’t like knowing she was still out there, still watching me. It made me wonder what she was waiting for.

  I let myself in. The enormous main room on the first floor of Citadel was empty. After the night we’d had, Isaac was probably still sleeping. Philip was wherever Philip went when the sun was up. Bethany must have gotten tired of waiting for me and gone home to her own apartment. I wasn’t used to Citadel being so quiet. I climbed the steps to the second floor and stopped halfway up to look at the new portrait of Thornton mounted on the wall. He was posing in a crisp suit, framed in ornately carved wood, and mounted on the wall with several other paintings. It made him look larger than life, just as his personality had been. His fiancée, Gabrielle Duchamp, had commissioned the portrait in his memory. None of us had objected when she asked to hang it in Citadel.

  If Thornton hadn’t died, they would be married by now. Gabrielle had taken a leave of absence to mourn. I missed her as much as I missed Thornton. The Five-Pointed Star with only four members didn’t feel right.

  That’s the problem. It’s not a person. It’s a wolf.

  I put Calliope’s words from my mind. Whatever she’d seen, it wasn’t Thornton. It couldn’t be.

  I continued up the stairs to the second floor. Down a hallway lined with marble busts and heavy red drapes, past Isaac’s study and the storeroom where Bethany kept her arsenal of charms, was the room I now called home. With nowhere else for me to go, Isaac had allowed me to stay at Citadel in one of the many unused guest rooms. It was part of the deal we’d made. I worked for him, and in return he gave me a place to stay and helped me find out who I was. Mostly that help had come in the form of an artifact called the Janus Endeavor—essentially the magical equivalent of facial recognition software—but so far we weren’t any closer to an answer. Isaac remained hopeful. I was skeptical but trying to keep an open mind. Sometimes I wondered if we would have better luck taping my picture to lampposts. HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

  My room was small, but it was still a hell of a lot better than my old cement room in the fallout shelter. There was just enough space for a full-sized bed, a shallow closet, and a dresser. The adjoining bathroom had a shower. I didn’t need much more than that. I opened the door and found Bethany asleep on my bed.

  It wasn’t unusual to find her in my room. Ever since she learned I didn’t sleep, she’d been helping me pass the time at night, usually with a game of gin rummy. I was pretty good at reading people. For a thief, it came with the territory. But it was hard to get a read on her. Most of the time she was all business, as tough as a battle-axe and constantly berating me for not doing things by the book. Other times there was a deeper well of feeling between the two of us. But for all the times I caught her absently brushing her hair out of her face or knitting her brows in concentration and was stunned by how beautiful she was, she never gave any indication she felt anything but friendship for me. And yet, she came to my room every night just to keep me company. The signals were so mixed they made my head spin. Finding her curled up on my bed didn’t help.

  She stirred and blinked at me. She sat up and tucked her hair behind one pointed ear. Normally she was self-conscious about her ears and kept them hidden, but she didn’t seem to care right now. I wondered if that meant she was growing more comfortable around me.

  “How did it go?” she asked, still groggy with sleep. “Did she tell you anything?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re tired. You should go home.”

  She
rubbed her eyes. “No, I’m fine. Did you find out anything?”

  “She thinks someone has been following her,” I said. “Not Biddy, someone else, someone still out there. She asked me to go back and check on her in a couple of days.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “Who knows, it might be nothing, but she seemed pretty worked up about it. It couldn’t hurt just to make sure she’s doing okay.”

  “I guess not,” Bethany said. “But be careful. I feel like she’s holding something back. Something important.”

  Bethany’s instincts were usually spot-on. I had the same feeling. Calliope was hiding something, and it had to do with that notebook. I thought again about the Ehrlendarr rune sketched on one of the pages. I had to know why it was there. Did it hold the same importance to her that it did to me? Did we share a connection through the rune somehow? I planned to ask her when I went back. She’d asked for a couple of days to recuperate first, but I didn’t know if I could wait that long. Maybe she wouldn’t mind if I showed up a little sooner.

  Bethany squinted at me. “You’re holding something back, too. I can tell when you do that, you know.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Your neck turns all red like you swallowed something bad. Right now your neck is about as red as a chili pepper. So what aren’t you telling me?”

  I sat down on the bed with a sigh. “Something happened. Something weird. A man in a cloak approached me on the street, only I’m not sure he was actually human. I don’t think anyone else saw him, either. Just me.”

  I told her about the vision of a ruined city and dead bodies everywhere. I left out the part about Isaac missing an arm. I didn’t tell her that I’d seen her, too, all covered in blood. I didn’t want to scare her. It was foolish, I knew, but even after seeing time and again how strong Bethany was, there was still a part of me that wanted to protect her.

  When I was finished, Bethany was quiet, taking it all in. Finally, she said, “The future isn’t written in stone. Whoever this person was, what he showed you was a future, at best. Not the future. Not necessarily.”

  “He said it was my future,” I said. “Why come to me? What does he want?”

  “You’re sure you’ve never seen him before?”

  “Never,” I said. “I would remember this guy.”

  “But there’s a lot you don’t remember,” she pointed out. “He might know you, even if you don’t remember him.”

  “You mean from my life before?” That piqued my interest. If I did know him from the time before I lost my memories, he might know who I was. He might know my real name. That made him someone I wanted to talk to again. “How do we find out who he is?”

  “Isaac’s database,” she said.

  The database was Isaac’s pet project, a compilation of all known dark or infected magicians in the area. By his own admission it was far from complete, but if I wanted to know more about the cloaked man the database was the best place to start.

  “I’ll go set it up,” she said. “Why don’t you change out of those bloody clothes and meet me downstairs?”

  * * *

  I was in and out of the shower so fast it must have been a world record, but it still felt like it took forever for me to clean myself, dress in fresh, unbloodied clothes, and get downstairs. At the big table in the main room, Bethany had connected Isaac’s laptop to the bank of six video monitors on the wall. Two mugs of coffee sat steaming on the table.

  “Look at you, you almost look human again,” Bethany said.

  I took one of the coffee mugs and sat down at the table. “Thanks. I almost feel human again.”

  She took a sip from the other mug. “Are you ready to start?”

  “Let’s do this.”

  She began typing on the laptop’s keyboard, her face illuminated by the light from the screen. In that moment, it occurred to me she had no idea how beautiful she was. And in that same moment, I knew I had to let it go. I couldn’t keep hoping she would change her mind about us. I had to move on.

  The monitors on the wall flickered to life. Six different faces appeared, each on its own screen. I scanned them quickly, but none of them was the cloaked man. Only one of them looked remotely human, but she was a woman and her skin was green and scaly, not white with black veins. The other five looked like things that sprang from nightmares—lumpy, misshapen, inhuman faces. They disappeared and were replaced with six more.

  “Just let me know if you recognize any of them as your mystery man and we’ll see if the database has any information,” she said.

  “I know, I’ve done this before,” I snapped. I immediately felt like a heel for talking to her that way. She was only trying to help. “Sorry. I’m just kind of wound up. I want to know who this guy is.”

  “It’s okay, I get it,” she said. “But if you hadn’t apologized, I probably would have poured this hot coffee in your lap.”

  I sat there for thirty minutes watching faces flip past, human and nonhuman alike, but none of them was the cloaked man. I hadn’t gotten a good look at his face. All I’d seen were his mouth and chin under the low-hanging hood of his cloak. But I figured that was a start, and if his face was in the database I would at least feel a twinge of recognition. Or if it showed his hands. How many people had eyes on the backs of their hands? But the longer it took, the more my frustration grew. By the time we exhausted the database, my frustration had turned to anger.

  “Damn it, who is he?” I demanded. “What does he want? Why did he show me those things?”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out,” Bethany said.

  She sounded confident, but I wasn’t convinced. There was something not right about the cloaked man. Something that just felt off. No one else on the street had seen him. He wasn’t in Isaac’s database. What if—

  I hung my head and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. I didn’t want to think it, but I had to face the possibility that the cloaked man didn’t exist. That I was seeing things. That after everything I’d experienced over the past month my mind had simply had enough and broken somehow.

  Four

  The way Isaac told it, the Janus Endeavor was an artifact that dated back to twelfth-century Italy, a time of pervasive superstition among the peasants of the countryside. They believed, among other things, that identical twins were an evil omen, a sure sign that the family would come to ruin. Routinely, twins were separated at birth, with one staying with the birth parents and the other usually sold into slavery, or if the kid were lucky, to a childless family that might give him or her a good home. The slavers paid better, of course, and soon word got around that there was money to be made. Children who weren’t even twins were stolen from their homes and sold under false pretenses. Eventually, a law was passed that ended the practice altogether, but by then entire generations of families had been torn apart. The Janus Endeavor had been created to reunite them. It could match a subject’s face to that of their identical twin, no matter how far away, provided the twin was still alive. Hundreds of adults who’d never even known they had a twin suddenly had undeniable proof that they hadn’t been born alone, that the haunting feeling that some part of them was missing wasn’t just their imagination. Of course, for our purposes, Isaac had altered the Janus Endeavor’s scope to something quite different. There was a lot more visual media now than there was in twelfth-century Italy, and while I didn’t have a twin—at least not that I knew of—the artifact could still search for my face.

  “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 hel
met 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.