Die and Stay Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

shouldn’t say tomorrow. Tomorrow is already today,” she said. Then she yawned, covering her mouth with her sleeve-shrouded hand. “God, I’ve barely slept for three days. I feel like I’m going to sleep for a week now. Maybe you should give me a couple of days to recuperate, and then come back.”
    “Okay,” I said. “You’ll be home?”
    “I don’t think I’ll ever leave the house again.” She smiled to show me she was joking. I suspected she wasn’t.
    Calliope led me back to the front door. Kali licked her nose and watched me go, satisfied that she’d successfully protected her territory from the invader. Before I stepped outside, I glanced down the hallway one last time at the notebook on the kitchen counter.
    “Thank you, Trent,” Calliope said. “Thank you for everything. I—I really don’t know how to repay you.” She paused a moment, then quickly kissed me on the cheek. She turned bright red.
    “I’ll see you in a couple of days,” I said, stepping out onto the stoop.
    I thought Calliope would say goodbye then, or even just close the door without a word, but instead she leaned against the doorframe, the blue band of hair hanging diagonally across her face like a painter’s brushstroke.
    “Hey, um, I don’t know if you know this already, or if it matters to you, but you’re being followed, too.”
    “What?” I turned around and scanned the sleepy little street, but all I saw were men and women in business attire walking down their stoops and heading for the subway station.
    “It’s a spirit from the other side,” she said. “It came back across the dark for some reason, and it’s following you.”
    I was skeptical, until I remembered the way she’d stared past me on the sidewalk earlier. “Who is it? What does it want?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s hard to say.”
    “But as a necromancer you can see it, right?” I asked. “At least tell me what it looks like. Male, female, tall, short, anything.”
    “That’s the problem,” Calliope said, rubbing her nose with her sleeve. “It’s not a person. It’s a wolf.”

 
    Three
     
    I didn’t go back to Citadel right away. Instead, I walked around the Village to clear my head, occasionally looking over my shoulder. Calliope said I was being followed by a spirit in the form of a wolf. Why? What did it want from me? Part of me thought Calliope was out of her mind. She had to be, right? I mean, a ghost wolf? But another part of me thought— hoped —that maybe it was Thornton Redler.
    I missed Thornton. Missed him like mad. He and Bethany had been the first members of the Five-Pointed Star I’d met. In fact, when I first met Thornton, he’d been a big, gray timber wolf. Only later did I learn he was a lycanthrope, able to change back and forth between human and wolf at will. Inherently good, heroically brave, and with a razor-sharp wit, he quickly became a good friend. And then he died. Right in front of me, with nothing I could do to save him. For reasons I would never understand, I could cheat death but someone like him, someone good and decent and with so much to live for, could not.
    I glanced behind me again. If this ghost wolf really was following me, I couldn’t see it.
    On Hudson Street, I found a little neighborhood coffee shop and decided to grab a cup. I got in line behind an army of businessmen in identical London Fog trench coats and Kenneth Cole briefcases. They looked like clones who’d all walked off the same page of Esquire, as if they were here solely to rub it in that you couldn’t afford to live in this neighborhood unless you made at least six figures. I was out of place among them. I was like a crack in an otherwise flawless piece of crystal.
    A paper witch had been taped to the wall of the shop, wart-nosed and riding a broomstick. A Halloween decoration. I’d forgotten it was almost Halloween. There were other decorations taped up all over the shop: a black cat with its mouth open and its