“No, you’re lying!” I yelled. “God damn it, if you know what I am, tell me!”
“We have answered your question.”
“Like hell you have!”
“Then seek out the Mistress of the Dead,” the first voice said.
“The Mother of Wraiths,” the second said.
“She knows,” the third said. “She knows all who have passed through the dark that separates the cities of the living from the cities of the dead.”
“You mean Reve Azrael?” I said. “How does she know what I am? What’s the connection between us?”
“We have answered your question.”
“Tell me!” They remained silent, which only made my blood boil more. “Tell me, God damn it! You think I’m dangerous now? Keep pissing me off and you’ll see just how dangerous I can be!”
Bethany grabbed me by the arm. “Don’t,” she said. “You’ve got to keep it together. This isn’t why we’re here.”
I was beginning to understand why the vampire clan elder had wanted to kill the oracles. I wanted to wring their necks myself, but Bethany was right. This was getting us nowhere, and we didn’t have the time to waste. “They’re wrong about me,” I told her, but doubts were already starting to sneak into my mind. How could I be so sure? Everything about me was wrong, my aura, my scent, my memories. I was so wrong even death wouldn’t take me. What if the oracles were right? What if I really was something awful?
Bethany let go of my arm and looked up into the darkness. “I’m sorry about my friend. He didn’t mean it. Please, we need your help.”
“It is too late,” the first voice said. “The sands have run out.”
I looked over at the table. The sands of the hourglass had emptied into the lower half.
“No, wait, please,” she begged them. “If Willem Van Lente is still alive, you’ve got to tell us where to find him. He’s the only one who can stop Stryge.”
“Your time is up.”
“Your questions have been answered.”
The candles extinguished, plunging us into darkness. Behind us, the doors swung open on their own.
“Please, you’re our last chance!” Bethany cried into the dark. “You have to help us!”
No one answered.
Thirty-five
“Did the oracles help?” Philip asked as Bethany and I returned to the Escalade.
I crawled into the backseat. “It was a colossal waste of time.”
“I figured,” Philip said.
“They weren’t exactly forthcoming, but I wouldn’t call it a waste of time,” Bethany said from the front passenger seat. She was more optimistic than I was, but I didn’t see any reason for it. The oracles hadn’t given us anything but gibberish and bad attitude. “They said Stryge’s body was in a tomb somewhere to the north.” She gave him the five names the oracle had supplied, but he’d never heard of them.
She pulled out her cell and got Isaac on speakerphone. She ran the names by him, too. “Do they mean anything to you?” she asked. “Were they in any of the books?”
“No, but hold on a moment, let me get to my computer,” Isaac said. The sound of tapping keys came over the speaker. “I put the names into a search engine, but it’s weird, none of them have anything to do with New York City. Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa is a Benedictine abbey in the Pyrenees. Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert is a medieval abbey outside Montpellier. Trie-en-Bigorre is a Carmelite convent near Toulouse. They’re all religious sites in France.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Bethany said. “Stryge’s body has to be here. The Lenape Indians hid it somewhere after the battle.”
“Maybe they shipped the body to France instead,” I said. “It’s a lot harder to join the head and body when they’re on two separate continents.”
“Impossible,” she said.
I leaned back in my seat and crossed my arms. “Fine. Here’s something that’s more possible: the oracles don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”
She ignored me, turning back to the phone sitting open in her hand. “Are you sure there’s no connection between those names, nothing that applies to New York?”
We heard Isaac’s fingers on the keyboard again. “This might be something. It’s from a Web site of New York City walking tours. Listen to this. ‘Throughout the grounds, visitors will find the authentic hallways, chapels, and gardens that once stood in such famous French cathedrals and abbeys as Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, and Bonnefont-en-Comminges. Each structure was disassembled brick by brick before being shipped to New York and reassembled in the 1930s as a public museum.’”
“Where is this?” Bethany asked.
“Fort Tryon Park, up in Washington Heights,” Isaac said. “It’s the Cloisters. That’s where Stryge’s body is. They built the Cloisters right on top of his tomb.”
Bethany nodded. “Of course, Washington Heights. That must be where the battle took place. ‘To the north.’ The oracles were right.”
“Lucky guess,” I said. Even to my own ears I sounded as petulant as I felt. Even if it meant the end of New York City, part of me didn’t want the oracles to be right, because if they were right about this, it meant they were also right about me.
“How many millions of people visit the Cloisters every year, completely unaware of what’s sleeping right under their feet?” Isaac said. “Good work, guys. Get back to Citadel, we’ve got work to do. And Trent?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got something you need to see,” Isaac said.
I leaned forward in the backseat. “What?”
“Get here now, guys,” he said, ignoring my question. “We don’t have a lot of time. The equinox is coming.”
Bethany ended the call. Philip started the engine and pulled the Escalade into traffic.
I watched the New York Marble Cemetery grow farther away in the rear window, and heard the oracles’ voices in my head again. I couldn’t help harping on the things they said about me.
A threat.
A danger.
An abomination.
They weren’t all that different from the things I’d wondered about myself in the dark of my room during all those sleepless nights when my thoughts got tangled in knots and turned on themselves like rabid dogs. But even if the oracles were right and I was some kind of menace, it still didn’t answer the big questions hanging over me.
Why couldn’t I die?
How did I know how to fight as if I’d been doing it all my life?
Why couldn’t I remember anything from before?
I put it from my mind. If I hadn’t been able to answer those questions in the past year, I wasn’t going to do it now. Besides, something else the oracles said had stuck with me too, something more pressing.
Willem Van Lente yet lives.
That Van Lente was still alive after all this time was impossible. It was insane. But by now I was willing to believe a lot of crazy things I wouldn’t have thought twice about before. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more sense it suddenly made, and pieces of the puzzle began to slip into place.
When we got back to Citadel, Isaac took me up to the second floor. At the end of a hallway lined with marble busts and draped with heavy, red cloth panels was a simple wooden door. He took me inside to a small, cluttered study. Crowded bookshelves lined one wall and a leather couch covered with loose papers stood against another. An Oriental rug covered most of the hardwood floor. The morning light filtered through a stained-glass window on the far side of the study and fell on the cluttered desk, illuminating two objects resting on the blotter. The first was a big, empty, glass Erlenmeyer flask stopped with a thick cork. The other was my Bersa semiautomatic.