“Because after the Tulemkust massacre, there are records of the Codex Goetia in the hands of Sevastumi clerics. Unfortunately for Sevastumi, it’s much easier to summon a demon, or even banish one, than it is to bind one. They learned that the hard way. Whatever terror they brought upon Tulemkust was nothing compared to what they brought upon themselves. Thousands died. Even the mountain their city was built on was leveled.”
“That’s remarkably similar to what happened to the Aeternis Tenebris,” Bethany said.
Jordana gave her a puzzled look. “Who?”
“A doomsday cult,” Bethany explained. “They wanted to bring about the end of the world, so they summoned a demon named Nahash-Dred. But they couldn’t bind him, and the demon killed them.”
Jordana leaned forward, alarmed. “Did you say Nahash-Dred?”
“I take it you know the name,” I said.
“Anyone who studies demonology would know that name,” she said. “Nahash-Dred is not just a greater demon, he’s royalty. He’s the son of Leviathan, their king. He’s a prince, and for demonkind that’s not just a title. It means he’s one of the most powerful demons there are. In his dimension, Nahash-Dred is charged with putting out dying stars when their time has come. He dismantles them, takes them apart somehow. In our dimension, he has dismantled—utterly wiped out—entire civilizations. Nahash-Dred has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe millions.”
“It gets worse,” I told her. “There’s a possibility Nahash-Dred didn’t kill everyone in the cult. One of them may have survived, a man by the name of Erickson Arkwright. We have reason to believe he’s going to try to summon Nahash-Dred again. Only now he’s had over a decade to figure out what went wrong the first time. He’ll be sure to bind the demon properly this time. And if he does…”
“Then we’re all in danger,” Jordana said. “Everyone. The whole world. Is this why you wanted to know about the Codex Goetia? Do you think Erickson Arkwright has found it?”
“What do you mean found it?” I said.
“The Codex is gone,” she said. “I thought you knew that. It’s been missing for years now. All anyone knows is that before it disappeared, the Codex was broken into three fragments, and the fragments were hidden in three secret locations. The Codex is the key to all of this. It’s the only way Arkwright can summon and bind Nahash-Dred. You can’t let him find it.”
“How do we know he doesn’t have it already?” Bethany asked.
“We don’t, but the fact that we’re still alive is a good indication,” Jordana said. She sat forward again, clasping her hands on the desk before her. She gave me another funny look. A knowing look, as though she and I shared a secret. Something was going on behind her eyes, but before I could figure it out she broke eye contact and addressed the three of us. “Find the three fragments of the Codex. Find them before Arkwright does. It’s your only chance of stopping this.”
“It sounds like he doesn’t need all three fragments to summon Nahash-Dred,” I said. “He just needs the one with Nahash-Dred’s name on it.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Jordana said. “The Codex is a lot more complicated than that. It’s more than just a list of names on a piece of metal. It’s an artifact. It’s got a spell inside it that opens a passage between dimensions, a doorway between our world and theirs. If Arkwright wants to open that doorway, he’ll need all three fragments. The Codex has to be made whole again, or it won’t work.” She leaned back in her chair and sighed. “There’s one more thing, and you’re not going to like it. There are certain places and times of the year when it’s easier to open the doorway. Most of the times align with the old, pagan calendars: the solstices, the New Year, certainly planetary alignments. The next one is midnight on All Hallows’ Eve. That’s when the skin between worlds is at its thinnest.”
“Halloween,” Bethany said. “That’s just two days from now. That’s not a lot of time to find all three fragments.”
“I told you you wouldn’t like it,” Jordana said.
I wasn’t following any of this. “The skin between worlds?”
Again Jordana looked at me funny. Was she flirting with me? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have a lot of practice with flirting. Also, it seemed like an odd time for it. No, this was something else, something more. It was like she wanted me to see something, to acknowledge something right in front of me, but I had no idea what.
“Different dimensions exist side by side,” she explained. “Think of them as apartments in a condo. They’re separated by walls, only these walls can’t be knocked down. All you can do is make a temporary doorway between them. At certain times of the year, the wall is thinnest and a doorway can be made more easily.” She glanced at the watch on her wrist and groaned. “Shit. I’m sorry, I have to go. I have a meeting in five minutes, and I can’t be late again. The coders say if I keep making them wait they’re going to start calling me Zelda.” She paused a moment, as if expecting us to laugh. “Not big video game players, huh? Tough crowd.” She pushed her chair back and stood up, smoothing her skirt with her palms. “Anyway, I hope I was helpful.”
“You were, absolutely,” Gabrielle said, giving her a hug.
“Good luck finding the fragments,” Jordana said. “Keep me in the loop and call me as soon as you find them.”
Bethany shook Jordana’s hand. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” she replied. “If you need anything else, just ask.”
“If you come across any clues to where these fragments might be, let us know,” I said. I shook her hand.
I tried to turn to leave, but Jordana refused to let go of my hand. “Can I talk to you for a second?” She pulled me over to the window, away from Bethany and Gabrielle, who waited by the door. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” she whispered.
I frowned. “Should I?”
A mischievous grin grew on her face as if she thought I was joking. Still whispering, she asked, “What are you playing at? What’s all this ‘Trent’ business?”
“Excuse me?” I said. The tone of my voice caught Bethany and Gabrielle’s attention. They turned to see what was going on.
“It is you, isn’t it? Lucas West?” Jordana sounded like she was on the verge of laughing, only I didn’t know what the joke was.
I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why are you calling me that?”
“It’s your name.” A moment of doubt flashed in her eyes. “Or … I thought … I’m sorry, I must have made a mistake.”
I blinked at her. “Who is Lucas West?”
“What’s going on?” Bethany asked, coming over.
Gabrielle followed her. “Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, no, it’s fine,” Jordana said. “I—I thought Trent was someone else, that’s all. Someone I used to know.” She studied my face. “I could have sworn you were Lucas. The likeness is uncanny. You could be twins.”
No wonder she’d been giving me funny looks this whole time. She recognized me. I had to know more.
“Who is he?” I took an urgent, insistent step toward her. “Who is Lucas West?”
Alarmed, she stepped back. She looked nervously from me to Bethany to Gabrielle and back. “What—what exactly is going on here?”
I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. The truth is, I don’t know who I am. I can’t remember. I don’t remember anything before about a year ago. Not my name, or where I lived, or the people I knew. It’s all a blank.”
“But you told me your name is Trent,” she said, confused.
“It’s a name someone gave me,” I said. “I don’t know my real name.”
Her eyes softened with concern. “Then you are Lucas West. Oh, I knew it. I knew it the moment I saw you. I’d know that face anywhere. Oh God, you poor man, to lose yourself like that.”
She put her hand on my chest. The phone on her desk buzzed loudly, and she yanked her hand back with a small, anguished cry. She
rushed back to her desk and pressed a button on the phone. An irritated voice came through the speaker: “Jordana, where are you? The meeting’s about to start!”
“I’ll be right there.” She hit the button to turn off the speakerphone. She opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a business card. She quickly wrote something on it, then came over and put it in my hand. “Please call me. There’s so much to tell you. Call anytime, okay? Whenever you want to talk.”
I took the card from her. She put her hand on mine warmly. Familiarly.
“It’s so good to see you again, Lucas. I always wondered what happened to you. I still think of you often.”
“You … remember me?” I stammered. Then I winced at how much I sounded like Karloff doing his Frankenstein monster. I looked at the card. Under the bold, italicized letters of her name, Jordana Pike, was the address of the building we were in, her office phone number, and her work e-mail. Scrawled in her handwriting at the bottom was another phone number.
“That’s my personal cell phone number,” she said. “You’ll call, won’t you, Lucas?”
I nodded, unable to speak, and put the card in my pocket. Lucas West? Was that really my name?
Jordana opened her office door and walked quickly into the hallway. “I’m so sorry I have to go. You can show yourself out, can’t you?” She paused and glanced back at me. “Call me, Lucas. I mean it.” Then, like a tornado, she was gone, leaving everything in her path forever changed.
Eleven
Gabrielle was standing by the doorway of Jordana’s office, grinning at me. “Holy shit! Did she just tell you your real name?”
“I—I don’t know,” I said. I rubbed my forehead. This was a lot to take in.
Bethany, as usual, was more practical. “Do you think she’s telling the truth?”
“You don’t?” I asked.
“I don’t know, she could be,” she said. “But what are the odds that someone we’ve never heard of before, someone we’re introduced to out of the blue, just happens to recognize you?”
“It was bound to happen at some point,” I said. “Someone had to eventually recognize me.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But I would trust it a lot more if it had happened before word got around that you’re the Immortal Storm. Now anyone can do a little digging, find out about your amnesia, and use it against you.”
“Why would she?” I asked.
Bethany shook her head. “I’m not saying she did. I’m just saying be careful. You’re famous now. Sometimes that’s all the reason people need.”
“I don’t think Jordana’s like that,” Gabrielle said. “I’ve only known her a few weeks, but she seems pretty genuine to me. She wouldn’t lead Trent on like that. Especially after taking the time to help us with information about the Codex Goetia.” She turned to me with a smirk. “Besides, I think Trent was enjoying the attention she was giving him. She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
“What? No,” I stammered, glancing quickly at Bethany. “I mean—I don’t mean she’s not pretty—I just mean that’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Gabrielle said.
I rubbed my face, exasperated. “Look, you two take the Escalade and go back to Citadel. Tell Isaac about the Codex. Maybe he has an idea where the fragments are hidden. There isn’t a lot of time.” I handed the garage ticket to Gabrielle.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “If Jordana really does know who I am, I have a lot of questions for her.”
“Trent, this isn’t the right place for it,” Bethany said. “This is where she works—”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I repeated.
She sighed and shook her head. She knew this was something she couldn’t talk me out of. “Fine, just be careful, okay? You don’t know her. You don’t know anything about her.”
“I can take care of myself,” I said. “And I might know her. We might know each other. That’s the whole point.”
Gabrielle started steering Bethany toward the door. “Come on. Let’s give them some time alone. For what it’s worth, Trent, I think it would be great if it turned out you two know each other.”
“Be careful,” Bethany warned again.
“We’ll see you back at Citadel,” Gabrielle said. She took Bethany by the arm and pulled her down the hallway toward the elevators.
I felt like I was vibrating out of my skin. I closed the office door and went over to Jordana’s desk. It was remarkably tidy, with only a few small piles of papers, a neatly trimmed spider plant in one corner, a white, porcelain coffee mug drained of its contents, a desktop computer, and a single framed photo. I picked up the photo. It showed Jordana and an older woman posing at the bottom of a ski slope. Jordana wore a puffy, light blue parka with the hood down to let the breeze blow her hair away from her face. The older woman wore a red parka with a matching red knit cap. Her yellow ski goggles made her eyes look almost buglike. Jordana’s late mother, I presumed. Above them, a banner read OWMASS 2011. Only when I saw that partial word did I realize that the photo was oddly cropped, as if part of it had been cut out to fit inside the frame. There was even a sliver of the older woman missing, on the opposite side from where Jordana stood. It looked like the woman had her arm around someone else, too. Someone not in the picture. I put the photo down again.
I sat in front of the computer and wiggled the mouse until the monitor came to life. I launched the browser, went to an Internet search site, and typed in Lucas West. I paused with my finger hovering over the enter key, suddenly nervous. I’d always thought my real identity would be my salvation, my redemption, but what if I didn’t like what I found? What if Lucas West was a thief? A con man? A killer?
What if Lucas West was no better than me?
But I had to know. After all this time, I had to know no matter what. It was the biggest question of my life, the question that had dogged me for as long as I could remember: Who was I?
I hit enter.
The results came up quickly, but the name Lucas West didn’t get very many hits. There was a teenage cancer survivor who had started his own prosthetics company, a hypnotherapist offering online lessons on how to “get a woman every time” (a classic scam if I ever saw one), a high school–aged boy who’d died in a car crash in the 1990s, a project manager at a construction company in San Antonio, and a logistics operator—whatever that was—in the U.K. Judging by their photos, none of them was me. I spent the next thirty minutes scouring the Internet for any missing persons reports for Lucas West, but I didn’t find any. I didn’t find any articles, blogs, or Web sites by or about him, either. No wonder the Janus Endeavor had failed to find a match for me. If I really was Lucas West, I had disappeared without a trace.
What were the odds of that? How many people left absolutely no footprints online? It didn’t seem possible. Either Lucas West had somehow erased all references to himself, or someone else had. There was a third possibility, of course, but I wasn’t ready to doubt Jordana yet. Not when I might be so close to the answers I’d been looking for. I had to know what else she could tell me.
I cleared the history and closed the browser. I got up from the desk and walked to the window. Below, people moved through the plaza between the courthouses, tiny as ants. Each of them knew who they were. Each of them was secure in their name. Did they know how lucky that made them?
I heard Jordana’s voice outside the door, chatting with a coworker on her way back from her meeting. A moment later, the door opened and Jordana came in. She stared at me in surprise.
“You’re still here?” she asked. I thought she would be angry to find me waiting in her office, but she wasn’t.
“I couldn’t leave. I have to know more about Lucas West.”
She smiled and closed the door. “I was kind of hoping you’d still be here when I got back. Seeing you again after all this time, Lucas, I—I almost can’t believe it.”
“So we’ve known each other a lo
ng time?” I asked.
She came over to stand beside me at the window. Her deep, brown eyes sparkled when the sun hit them. “You could say that.”
“Tell me how you know me.”
“You were a friend of my brother’s when we were growing up, just a couple years above me in high school,” she said. “You were this big, strapping football player, but you weren’t like the others. You weren’t a bully. You didn’t pick on anyone or treat the girls like garbage. You were sweet and smart. I couldn’t tell you at the time, but … I looked up to you so much.”
She took my hand in hers. Her fingers felt cool as they wrapped around mine.
“If we grew up together, you must know my family,” I said. “Can you tell me about them? Who are they?”
She nodded. “I met them more times than I can count. Your father was a chemistry teacher at the local community college. Your mother managed an organic grocery shop. They were both so proud of you, especially after you got into college.”
“Was this in New York City?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Norristown.” She saw the confusion in my face and clarified, “It’s a small town outside Philadelphia.”
I was from Pennsylvania? That was unexpected. I’d always imagined I was a native New Yorker. Apparently not. My home was Norristown. My parents were a teacher and a store manager. What were they like? Why hadn’t they come looking for me? Or filed a missing persons report? There’d been nothing online. Did that mean…?
“Are my parents still alive?” I asked.
“I assume so. I haven’t been back to Norristown in years,” she said. “What else can I tell you about your family? You didn’t have any brothers or sisters. You were an only child, but you and Pete were like brothers in your own way. You went everywhere together. You were inseparable.”
“Pete?” I asked.
“My brother.” She sighed heavily. “You don’t remember any of this, do you?”
I shook my head. Part of me had hoped hearing stories about Lucas West would awaken the memories I’d lost, but he still felt like a stranger to me. Was he really me? Lucas West sounded so normal. I liked that. I wanted to be normal. But there was nothing normal about me.
Die and Stay Dead Page 11
