Die and Stay Dead

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  “She didn’t have any appointments this morning,” I said.

  “No, but she had one tonight. Look at this.” Bethany pointed at the eight p.m. slot, where Calliope had written Yrouel, and beneath it, an address: 84A Bayard Street.

  “Bayard Street. That’s in Chinatown,” I said. “Who’s Yrouel?”

  “I don’t know, but she was going to see him tonight.” She looked up at me. “Maybe someone didn’t want her to.”

  “Or maybe Yrouel came here instead, surprising her,” I said. “She knows him, so she lets him inside. And then…”

  “He kills her,” Bethany finished.

  I sighed. “It’s a theory, anyway.”

  “We’ve got his address. It’s a theory worth pursuing.” Bethany tucked the appointment book into a pocket in her vest and stood up. “But first, I want to take another look at Calliope’s body. We might have missed something.”

  We went back upstairs. Bethany continued up to the second floor and Calliope’s bedroom. I told her I’d be up in a moment. In the living room, Calliope’s notebook was back on the coffee table. I walked over to it. Kali peered out at me from inside the carpeted hutch of one of her cat trees and let out a low moan of warning. I ignored her. Somewhere inside that notebook was a drawing of the Ehrlendarr rune from my earliest memory. I picked it up and slid it into the inside pocket of my trench coat. Kali watched me do it, then turned around and disappeared into her hutch.

  I went upstairs to Calliope’s bedroom. Bethany had taken her boots off and was standing barefoot on the edge of the bed, careful to avoid the pool of blood on the bedspread. She was looking intently up at Calliope’s body, studying the details. Somehow she managed to remain detached from the brutality of the scene. I couldn’t. I had taken Calliope home from Biddy’s lair. I’d stayed and talked with her until she felt safe again. I’d liked her. She was an odd one, but then, we all were. I’d made a promise to come back and check up on her, only I’d come back too late. I felt accountable. And angry. Very, very angry.

  There were two nightstands flanking the bed. The one on the left held an alarm clock and a stack of paperback novels, their well-worn spines offering up names like Poppy Z. Brite, Anne Rice, and Laurell K. Hamilton. The other nightstand was bare except for a glass vase holding dried flowers and a jar full of seashells. I hadn’t seen any photographs in the house, outside of the prints in the séance room. Even the shyest wallflower in the world would have pictures of her family, friends, or lovers somewhere, but Calliope didn’t. Either she had a pathological fear of photographs or, more likely, she didn’t have anyone in her life. The second nightstand was unused, purely ornamental. She lived alone. She slept alone. Calliope had died alone in the world.

  But one very conspicuous thing was missing from the bedroom. There was no hammer or any other kind of tool here. Whoever had hammered those spikes into the ceiling had left with it. That told me this wasn’t a crime of opportunity. This was planned. Calliope’s killer had come prepared, bringing the spikes and hammer with him and taking the hammer when he was done. He must have also taken the knife he’d used to cut her open.

  This wasn’t the work of someone berserk with rage or jealousy. This was methodical.

  Bethany stepped down from the bed. “Trent, you’re taller than I am. Come take a closer look at this. I want to know if you see it, too.”

  “See what?”

  “You tell me,” she said.

  I got up on the bed, standing right under Calliope’s body. I wanted to tell her I was sorry this had happened to her, but communicating with the dead was her trick, not mine. She stared through me, both her blue eye and her gold-flecked hazel eye milky and unseeing. The diamond stud in her nose twinkled. There was very little blood on her face. Her sweater and the T-shirt beneath it, however, were soaked in it, both having been torn open by the knife. Her jeans were covered in blood, too. That made sense. She must have been standing when she was first gutted, and the blood had spilled down her body. But her hands, spread far apart on the ceiling, were positively red with gore. That stuck out for some reason. The more it itched at me as peculiar, the more it bothered me. Had she used her hands to try to stop the blood flow? No, she wouldn’t have had time. She would have died within seconds from a wound this grave.

  I looked closer. Her right hand had a strangely unbloodied patch, long and rectangular, running from one side of her palm to the other, as if she’d been holding something in her fist when the blood had run over her hand.

  “Do you see it?” Bethany asked.

  “The clean spot on her hand,” I said. “What was she holding?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s gone now,” she said. “It makes me wonder if the killer took something from her.”

  “You mean, not just a killer but a thief?” I climbed down off the bed, careful to avoid stepping in the pool of blood under the body. Then I froze. A thief. Of course. How stupid of me. I’d had the answer all along. “I know how they got in the house,” I said. I ran out of the room and up the stairs to the top floor.

  Bethany followed behind me. “How? Trent, how do you know?”

  At the top of the steps was a closed door. I tried the handle. As I expected, it was unlocked. I burst through into the attic. It was dark inside, the neglected, dust-caked windows filtering the sunlight down to practically nothing. I groped my way into the dark, bumped into the hard, pointy corner of a sheet-covered table, and cursed. I heard Bethany mutter a spell, and a bright light flared to life behind me.

  “Slow down, Trent. Tell me what’s going on.” Bethany was holding her small, mirrored charm aloft, using its bright light as a flashlight.

  “Over here,” I said, indicating the window at the rear of the attic. I crouched down in front of it. Bethany knelt opposite me. I pointed at the old, corroded window latch. It was snapped in half. “See? It’s broken. This is how they got in. I bet it’s how they got back out again, too. That’s why the front door was still locked.”

  She looked at me incredulously. “How did you know about the window?”

  “It’s how I used to break into houses like this.”

  Her expression changed. She didn’t like being reminded of what I used to do. What I used to be. It reminded her that once upon a time I’d pulled my gun on her. She turned away from me to inspect the latch, though I suspected that wasn’t her entire reason for turning away.

  “So Calliope didn’t let her killer into the house,” she said.

  “They still might have known each other,” I said. “What he did to her, you don’t do that to a stranger. There’s a motive behind that kind of brutality.”

  She looked at me again. “But what does it all mean?”

  “I don’t know.” I nodded at the appointment book poking out of her vest pocket. “Let’s ask someone who might.”

  * * *

  But there were two things we had to do first.

  Bethany refused to leave Kali in the house. She was convinced if we left her, the cat would wind up taken to a pound and put down. While I found that a tempting thought, in the end she persuaded me we should take the little monster with us instead. It didn’t take much effort to coax Kali into the molded plastic carrier we found in one corner of the living room. As soon as she was inside she began mewling, so I threw in a few of her smaller toys to keep her quiet. In the kitchen I found a bag of her kibble, a bag of cat litter, and her food and water bowls. I dumped out her litter box, and then put everything in an oversized blue IKEA shopping bag I found under the sink.

  “We’re going to have to find a new home for her,” Bethany said.

  “I thought you were taking her.” I held the carrier out toward her.

  She put up her hands and shook her head. “I can’t. My landlord doesn’t allow pets.”

  “Then what are we supposed to do with her?”

  Bethany arched an eyebrow at me.

  “No way,” I said. “Forget it.”

  “Why not? She’s just like you, Tren
t. All fierce on the outside, but just a big softie on the inside.”

  “Oh, I’m a big softie, am I?”

  “You should focus on the fierce part, for your ego’s sake,” she said. “Now for the bad news.”

  “Did we skip the good news?”

  “Isaac won’t want Kali running loose around Citadel, not with so many fragile and irreplaceable artifacts in his collection,” she said. “She’ll have to stay with you in your room.” I opened my mouth, but before whatever obscenity I was thinking of could spill out, she added quickly, “It would just be temporary, until we figure something else out.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” I looked into the carrier through the small metal gate. Kali looked back at me with big eyes. “Fine. As long as it’s only temporary.”

  Kali let out a throaty growl and swiped at me. I regretted my decision already.

  Then there was the second thing we had to do. We waited until we were in the Houston Street subway station before calling 911. I used a pay phone on the platform and said I was a neighbor concerned about a strange smell coming from 6 St. Luke’s Place. I hung up when the operator asked for my name.

  * * *

  Back in my room at Citadel, I closed the door, put Kali’s carrier on the floor, and opened the gate at the front. The cat stayed where she was, glaring at me from the door of the carrier.

  “Suit yourself,” I told her.

  I filled a bowl with her food and another with water, and set them against one wall. I set up her litter box in my adjoining bathroom. When I walked back into the bedroom, Kali hadn’t moved an inch. She continued to stare at me.

  I pulled Calliope’s notebook from inside my coat. I was about to open it when I heard Bethany calling for me. There was no time to look at it now. I slid it under my mattress, the same place I used to hide things from Underwood and his crew back in the fallout shelter. Old habits died hard.

  I turned to see Kali still glaring at me.

  “Here’s the deal, cat. We’re stuck with each other, at least for now, so what do you say we try to get along?”

  Kali let out a long, low growl, hissed at me, and went back inside her carrier.

  Six

  Chinatown at night wasn’t any less crowded than Chinatown during the day. A living sea of pedestrians flowed along the narrow sidewalks and threatened to spill into the streets. As the Escalade idled at a red light, I watched people stream across Canal Street in front of us. Bethany and I had told Isaac we wanted to question Yrouel about Calliope’s murder, and he’d insisted on sending Philip with us as protection in case things went south. Now, sitting in the driver’s seat, Philip grunted and ran a hand through his thick black hair, restless. With the sun finally down, this was his first chance to be outside since last night, but he was spending it stuck in traffic.

  Philip didn’t cast a reflection in the rearview mirror. From where I sat in the backseat, all I could see in the mirror was the empty driver’s seat. It was disconcerting. I could only imagine what the other drivers on the road thought, looking in their rearviews and seeing no one behind the wheel of the Escalade.

  In the passenger seat, Bethany checked the stock of charms in her vest. She was keeping it together pretty well after what we’d seen at Calliope’s house. Better than I was. It was eating me up inside. Calliope had told me she felt like someone was watching her. I should have trusted my instincts and gone back to check up on her yesterday instead of waiting. Maybe then she would still be alive. Maybe then she wouldn’t have been gutted like a fish and spiked to the ceiling of her own bedroom.

  I shook my head to get the image out. The clock on the dashboard read seven forty-five. Fifteen minutes until Calliope’s scheduled appointment with Yrouel. An appointment we intended to keep in her place.

  “So what’s the point of this, anyway?” Philip asked. “What do you care what happened to that girl? Just because we rescued her from Biddy doesn’t mean we’re responsible for her. Why get involved? Why not just let the police handle it?”

  I watched people walking by, talking, laughing, holding hands. Happy. “Because Calliope didn’t have anyone,” I said. “No friends, no family. All she had was her cat. There’s no one out there who cares that she’s dead. No one to make sure she gets justice. We’re all she has. The police can’t do what we can do.”

  I wasn’t sure if he understood. Vampires lived in clans, loose associations of families governed by groups of elders, but at heart they were solitary creatures. They hunted alone. Solitude meant nothing to them. Philip was only a part of the team because of his duty to Isaac. I often got the feeling he would prefer to work alone. It came with the territory of being a predator.

  But Philip didn’t argue. The light turned green, and we navigated through the maze of short, curved streets just south of Canal. On either side of the road, narrow tenement buildings crowded shoulder to shoulder on top of restaurants, jewelry stores, storefronts selling knockoff perfumes and handbags, and the occasional Eastern medicine supply store with its bamboo shades drawn. Signs and banners hung from every fire escape and flagpole, printed with big hanzi characters I couldn’t read. Every corner seemed to have its own fresh fish shop in the process of closing for the night. Men and women in white smocks retrieved buckets of shrimp and crab off the sidewalk and rolled down their metal gates. We turned the corner at a large restaurant with a string of red paper lanterns dangling from its eaves, and found Bayard Street. On the north side of the street were buildings marked 84 and 86, but there was no 84A. There was, however, a narrow alley between the two buildings. So, 84A Bayard Street was either the alley itself or, more likely, a building whose entrance was inside it. Philip managed to find parking on the street, which in Chinatown was nothing short of a miracle. We got out of the Escalade and crossed into the alley.

  Clouds of steam billowed out of vents from the surrounding buildings and drifted like phantoms through the alley ahead of us. Beneath the rusted fire escapes, feral cats rummaged through overturned garbage cans and open Dumpsters. When they spotted Philip, they yowled in terror and ran off to their secret hiding places. Smart cats.

  A wooden door was set in the brick wall at the far end of the alley. There was no number, but it had to be 84A Bayard Street. There was nothing else here. A strange glyph had been carved into the door. Not a hanzi character like the others, it was something else, a rune that reminded me of the magical symbols I’d seen etched along the tunnels to the Nethercity. Whoever Yrouel was, it was clear he was no stranger to magic.

  Bethany traced the glyph with her finger. “It’s a protection spell. It’s supposed to keep out evil.”

  Philip tried the knob, found it unlocked, and pulled the door open. “Well, look at that, it let me right in. Guess the spell doesn’t work.”

  Inside, we descended a plain cement ramp that came to an end about a dozen feet below street level. At the bottom of the ramp was a small, concrete antechamber. A circular, steel door with a big, wheel-shaped handle in its center stood in the wall. It was the kind of door you’d expect to see on a bank vault or in a submarine, not hidden under a Chinatown alley. I looked to either side of the door but didn’t see a doorbell.

  “I guess Yrouel doesn’t like visitors,” Philip said.

  “Too bad. We’re not leaving until we talk to him.” I banged a few times on the steel door with my fist.

  Philip chuckled. “Knocking. You humans are adorable. I could pull this door out of the wall in two seconds.”

  Bethany looked up at him. “Maybe you’d better let us take the lead. I think this situation is going to require some finesse. Tearing doors out of walls isn’t liable to get Yrouel talking.”

  Philip shrugged. “Just say the word and I’ll get him to talk.”

  Bethany rolled her eyes. “One of these days, I’m going to have to teach you about subtlety.”

  “Come on, open this damn door,” I muttered. I raised my fist to pound on it again, but Bethany caught my arm, stopping me.


  “I guess I’m going to have to teach you, too,” she said. “He’s expecting Calliope, right? I don’t think she was the type to bang on his door like a maniac. Just give it a second.”

  I heard a lock disengage. The round handle in the middle of the door began to spin, turned from the other side.

  “See?” Bethany said.

  “Nobody likes a know-it-all,” I grumbled.

  The door swung inward, revealing a floating form on the other side. My jaw dropped. The first thing I noticed was the big, metal chair, which had no legs and hovered a good six inches above the floor. But as strange as the floating chair was, the creature inside it was even stranger. He was vaguely humanoid in form, but unbelievably obese, the swollen bulges of his body shrouded within a big, shapeless dashiki. Where it was exposed, his flabby, charcoal gray skin was creased with folds and stretch marks. While the chair looked wide enough for two people of average girth, he appeared to be stuffed into it, with rolls of flesh drooping over the edges and armrests. He didn’t have any legs. His body was turnip shaped, flat on the bottom. He didn’t have a neck, either. His head rested right on his shoulders. The sheer size of his cranium was astonishing. I’d never seen a head so big. It swelled up and back from his brow, extending halfway down the back of the chair. His wide, toothy mouth dropped open in surprise when he saw us. He tried to slam the door shut again.

  Philip caught it with one arm and held it open. “Surprise.”

  “Yrouel, I presume?” I asked.

  Unable to close the door, Yrouel retreated, his chair gliding quickly back from us. “Who are you? What do you want? This is private property!”