Authors: Nicholas Kaufmann
“Please do,” Isaac said. “You should have told us you were coming. We would have…” He turned off the computer. The monitors on the wall went black.
“You would have what, not shown the world’s scariest filmstrip?” Gabrielle sat down. “Sorry to barge in. I had to get out of the apartment. I was going stir-crazy. If I don’t keep busy, I’m going to lose my mind. I thought taking some time off after Thornton died would help, but there are reminders of him everywhere in that damn apartment. Don’t get me wrong—sometimes,
most
of the time, that’s a good thing, but other times…” She shook her head. “Other times it’s more than I can bear.”
She fiddled with something in her hands, a circular, brown object she turned over and over. It was Thornton’s leather bracelet. She’d given it to him a long time ago as a token of her love. He’d cherished it so much he never took it off. He never even let anyone else touch it.
Gabrielle caught me looking at the bracelet and laughed, embarrassed. “I know, right? Here I am talking about too many reminders of Thornton, and I can’t seem to leave this silly thing alone. I found it on my bedside table this morning. I must have taken it out of the drawer and put it there at some point, but I don’t remember doing it.” She smiled wistfully and shook her head. “See? Like I said, I’m going stir-crazy. If I don’t find something to occupy my mind, I’m going to lose it entirely.”
Isaac put his hand over hers. His pale skin looked like snow against hers. “It’s all right. You know you’re always welcome here.”
She nodded. “I do know that. But sometimes it’s good to hear it, too. Anyway, enough of this.” She waved her hands like frantic birds, as if to clear the emotions out of the air. “Whatever that thing on the monitors was, it looked pretty damn nasty. What can I do to help?”
We brought Gabrielle up to speed. It felt good to have all five of us together again. We pored over Calliope’s notebook, lifting out the phrases repeated throughout. Bethany brought out a whiteboard on a tripod and wrote them down in black marker. In the end, we had seven phrases in all:
Eternal voice and inward word
Arching towers kirk
Hidden mariner lost at sea
Beneath the three monuments
Look to the Trefoil pieces
The Angel of the Waters
Codex Goetia
“Arching towers kirk? What does that mean?” I asked. “Is it a place?”
Isaac studied the whiteboard. “I don’t know, but I’ve heard of that last one. The Codex Goetia. It’s a book for summoning demons. I’m guessing that’s what the cult used to summon Nahash-Dred all those years ago. I wish I knew more about demonology, but it was never part of my studies.”
Gabrielle leaned forward in her chair. “I may be able to help. I have a friend who’s studying demonology. Her name is Jordana Pike. Do you know her?”
Isaac shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t. Can you put us in touch?”
“For something this important? Please. I can do better than that.” Gabrielle pulled out her cell phone, scrolled to a number in her contacts, and put the phone to her ear. “I can get us a face-to-face with her today.”
Ten
I steered the Escalade across the Brooklyn Bridge toward Downtown Brooklyn, where Gabrielle’s friend, Jordana Pike, worked in an office building near Borough Hall. As I pulled off the bridge onto Cadman Plaza West, I began to feel on edge. I didn’t like being back in Brooklyn. The whole damn borough reminded me of the year I’d spent as Underwood’s collector, and those were memories I didn’t enjoy reliving. Funny, for a man with no past, I already had one I hated. I put it out of my mind by listening to Bethany and Gabrielle catching up with each other in the backseat.
“So you won’t return my calls, but a
demonologist
you’ll hang out with?” Bethany teased.
In the rearview mirror, I saw Gabrielle smile sheepishly. “Sorry about that. I met Jordana at the 92nd Street Y’s grief support group. She lost both her mother
and
her brother recently, poor thing. We’ve been hanging out a little after the meetings, just going for coffee or a quick drink. I accidentally let it slip early on that I know about magic, and it turned out she did, too. I guess we bonded over that and became friends. I haven’t been avoiding you, Bethany, I just haven’t been feeling all that social lately.”
“I remind you of him,” Bethany said. “Of Thornton.”
“You all do,” Gabrielle said. “That’s not a bad thing. It’s just … sometimes it’s overwhelming. It’s so easy to forget that not much time has passed since he died. Some days it feels like yesterday. Other days it feels like
years
without him. The weird thing is, I—I keep seeing him. In the support group they say it’s a perfectly natural form of wish fulfillment. ‘A common state of bereavement’ is how they put it. But sometimes it feels like something else to me. Like he’s always in the corner of my eye. It’s worse when I’m thinking about him, or thinking about all the plans we had. All the things we were still going to do. Then I see his face everywhere.”
“I’m sure it’ll pass in time,” Bethany said.
“That’s the thing,” Gabrielle said. “I’m not sure I want it to.”
Court Street was the major thoroughfare of Downtown Brooklyn, the artery of its business district, which made finding a parking space impossible. There were already cars, vans, and delivery trucks double- and triple-parked along the street. I turned onto a shaded, treelined side street. Court Street’s fast-food joints and chain drugstores abruptly gave way to organic greengrocers and meticulously restored carriage houses. If Brooklyn did one thing well, it was making your head spin with its sudden pockets of upscale gentrification. Parking was impossible to find here, too, so I wound up pulling into a garage in a repurposed old factory warehouse. A sign on the wall informed us we would be paying through the nose for just one hour. Stenciled on the cement wall beside the sign was the illustration of a man with a monocle and top hat sitting in an old Model T. The smoke from the car’s exhaust pipe spelled out
WELCOME!
The attendant admired the car as we got out. “An Escalade, huh? Haven’t seen one of these in a while. She’s a beaut.” He handed me a ticket stamped with today’s date and time. “Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of her while she’s with us.”
This was definitely not the part of Brooklyn I knew from my criminal days.
Jordana Pike worked on a high floor of a towering brick-and-limestone office building overlooking the plaza of courthouses that gave Court Street its name. We took an old, brass-detailed elevator up. When the doors opened, Gabrielle led us into a glassed-in reception area. On the wall behind the receptionist’s desk was one of those blandly nonspecific corporate names written in big, colorful, expensively designed letters—
Gamma Solutions, LLC
. The receptionist was also big, colorful, and expensively designed, a mannequin comprised of equal parts plastic surgery, hairspray, and too-tight clothing. She tore her eyes away from the open
New York Post
on her desk and looked up at us with undisguised disdain, annoyed that we’d interrupted her. The heavy black liner around her eyes made her look like an owl. Her sneering glare moved from Gabrielle to Bethany, and then to me, at which point the sneer left her face and was replaced by the look of someone who wished they were carrying a can of Mace.
“We’re here to see Jordana Pike,” Gabrielle told her. “She’s expecting us.”
The receptionist picked up the phone on her desk. She used one long, formidable nail to press a few buttons, and then spoke indifferently into the handset, “Visitors here to see you.” In her thick Brooklyn accent, she pronounced it
visituhs
. She hung up. “Down the hall. Third door on the left.”
Do-wah
. She blinked her owl eyes at us to tell us we weren’t clearing out fast enough.
Down the hall and three doors in, we came to a sleek black door with a plaque beside it that read
JORDANA PIKE, SYSTEMS ANALYST.
Gabrielle knocked on the door. “Jordana?”
The door opened. Standing behind it with an expectant smile was a woman I guessed to be in her mid-thirties, just a few years younger than me. Or younger than I appeared to be, anyway. When you’ve lost your memories and can’t die, it’s hard to know for sure how old you are. Jordana Pike was pretty, with thick brown hair that reached just past her shoulders, deep brown eyes, and an olive, Mediterranean complexion. Gabrielle introduced her to Bethany, and then to me. When Jordana looked at me, something seemed to change in her. It was small—a subtle, knowing look in her eye, a slight knitting of her brow, and then it was gone, replaced with impeccable composure as she shook my hand.
“It’s nice to meet you … Trent, is it?”
“That’s right,” I said. “How’s it going?”
She invited us into her office and closed the door. Then she turned the lock.
“Sorry for the dramatics,” she said. “My boss already thinks I’m crazy because I actually do my job instead of hanging out on Facebook all day like everyone else here; he doesn’t need to hear me talking about demons, too. I take it you met our friendly receptionist? I call her the Bay Ridge Harpy. She’s the CEO’s niece—surprise, surprise. Anyway, I’m guessing she didn’t offer you anything to drink, so can I get you something? One of the vending machines in the break room actually still dispenses cans of soda and iced tea instead of just stealing your money.”
“We’re fine, thanks,” Gabrielle said. “And thanks for taking the time to see us, too. I know they keep you pretty busy around here.”
Jordana sat down in a black rolling chair behind her desk. “You asked me about the Codex Goetia on the phone. First of all, even though the word
codex
technically means
book,
it’s not actually a book. I’ve never seen it myself, but according to what I’ve read it’s more like a metal tablet or a disc. Written on its face are the names of all nine hundred and ninety-nine greater demons.”
“What makes them so great?” I asked.
Jordana’s gaze lingered on me. For the brief moment our eyes met, the air felt charged, like she was trying to communicate something to me.
“Greater demons are basically the nobility of demonkind,” she said. “Lesser demons are their servants, their army. Most of the time, lesser demons aren’t even given names. Greater demons, on the other hand, have names and titles. Sometimes their name
is
their title. It’s fascinating, really. The pecking order is not all that different from the hierarchy of medieval nobility, and yet it’s a completely different kind of culture from what we know, one where the peasants—or serfs might be a closer analogy—are so far beneath them that they’re not even granted names.” She couldn’t hide her excitement as she spoke. Clearly, demonology was her passion and she didn’t get the chance to share it with others often. “As for the Codex, it was created by the magicians of a city called Tulemkust specifically for the purpose of summoning, binding, and banishing greater demons. Do you know the story of Tulemkust and Sevastumi?”
I nodded. “It’s come up.”
“Good,” Jordana said. “Then you know all about the two brothers who betrayed Tulemkust. There are a lot of scholars in my field who believe they were Sevastumi agents, and that the killings were only a distraction. Their real mission was to steal the Codex Goetia from Tulemkust’s Great Library.”
“Why do they think that?” Bethany asked.
“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.”