There was nothing sinister about it, yet as I got out of the truck, I felt a chill creeping over my skin that had nothing to do with the oncoming night or the rising chatter of the grid. In the Grey, a brilliant line of clear blue energy sizzled along the river behind the house while spikes and coils of red and yellow formed an ornate fence around the property. I’d never seen anything like it. The closest thing I could think of was the gold tracery of Mara’s perimeter spells around the house on Queen Anne Hill. This wasn’t the same shape or color: The lines and curves were much more pointed, thin, and sharp, more like barbed wire than the vinelike weaving Mara made. Although it was red, I didn’t get the same nauseous sensation from this cloud of energy that I did from vampires. It was unpleasant in a different way and I was not pleased that the puzzle ball was in the possession of whoever had raised that fence.
Quinton noticed I was looking askance at the place. “What?”
“Something magic. I don’t know if it will let us pass or not.”
“Magic like a monster, or magic like a spell?”
“Spell. Boundary markers, I think. How do you feel when you look at that house?”
Quinton turned to study the building. “Like I shouldn’t be here; this is the wrong house. Whatever I came here for is pointless and I might as well go home.” He started to turn away and caught himself. “Ah . . . I get it. It’s some kind of . . . ‘leave me alone’ spell. Must keep the kids out of the yard pretty well.”
I hummed to myself. That wasn’t quite the reading I was getting, but then I didn’t see or hear things in the normal way. The energetic border was definitely sending out a “go away” vibe, but more specifically, it was a warning to other magic users: Don’t try it. Looked as if I was in for a bit of dismantling, though I couldn’t imagine that was going to make the spell-caster pleased. I glanced around the property, searching for a place to take a shot at the magical fence without being in direct view of the street or neighbors. This was not going to be fun and I preferred not to do it in public, though it was growing dark so fast that that might not be an issue for long.
As I was staring, Quinton gave a sudden twitch and dug into one of his pockets as if it were on fire. He pulled out a mints tin and held it out to me in two fingers, as if it were hot or infected with something. “I think you want this.”
“What? Why?”
“Your ghost is giving me shocks. Maybe it doesn’t like this place, either.”
I took the tin, having momentarily forgotten about Simondson’s ghost. Flipping it open, the ghost of my killer emerged like a red-orange smog. “Earring.”
“What?” I asked, peering at his thin form.
“I don’t know. Something says ‘earring.’ You need an earring.”
“And whose errand boy are you, now?” I demanded.
He grew thick and solid, then winced and writhed away in pain, falling back to his shadowy state. “I don’t know! I just want shut of you! Of this. Something says ‘get the earring’ and I say ‘get the earring.’ I don’t care if you do or not. Go get yourself killed for all I care.”
I felt the urge to laugh at him, however nuts that sounded. “If I get killed, you’ll be stuck here forever in this candy box.”
“No, I won’t. You’ll come back, like the damned bad penny that you are.”
“Says who?” I asked, but I, too, had the feeling that I wasn’t quite up to death-the-last yet. If I was, Wygan wouldn’t have been continuing to push me; he’d have given up on me as he had on Marsden in London. But if he wasn’t there to push me, who knew what I would become in the Grey? Or what I might lose . . . ?
“Says . . . them,” Simondson replied. “Those . . . voices. They say so.”
Them. The voices in the Grey. He didn’t identify them as other ghosts, just “voices” the same as I did. I nodded. “All right. I got the message. Are you ready to go back in the box, now?”
“No! I want to leave! You said—”
“When I’m done, Todd. Not before. Now, in you go.”
I shoved his incorporeal self back into the tin and snapped it closed. I turned back to the truck for a moment, stuffing Simondson’s box into the glove compartment while I looked around the floor.
“What are you searching for?” Quinton asked, drawing close behind me. He was still rubbing his fingertips as if contact with the tin had given him a shock or a burn.
“That box of Edward’s that the knife was in. It had an earring in it. . . .”
“Why do you want that?”
I’d forgotten Quinton couldn’t hear the ghosts. “Simondson says I need it.”
We scrabbled in the accumulation of bags and belongings stowed in the back until we found the carton I’d slit open outside the FedEx building. I extracted the earring from the collection with care, feeling a bitter pain as I touched it. I tucked it into my pocket with its twin from the puzzle ball and turned back to the house.
I started back along the property line toward the river. Quinton followed saying, “What are you thinking?”
“That I need to find a way past this magic fence and then I can do whatever it is I’m supposed to do with this earring. . . . I have a bad feeling that just walking through is not as easy as all that. And once I do break the fence, whoever made it is not going to be pleased.”
“Maybe you don’t have to break it. Could you bypass it?”
I turned back under a weeping willow tree and frowned at him. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Magic seems to be a bit like electricity. Electrical circuits can be bypassed—jumpered—in some places. You run a piece of wire from one part of the circuit directly to another, which cuts part of the circuit out without the rest of the system noticing since current is still flowing and all other parts are functioning. So long as the bit you bypass doesn’t set off an alarm on its absence, you can go right through the circuit at that point. That’s how burglars used to get through simple wired perimeters: Just make a jumper wire long enough to slide under, connect your wire from one side to the other of the hole you need, cut the original wire, and go through the hole while the electricity keeps on flowing through the system as if nothing happened. Most magic things seem to be pretty simple circuits, so maybe some kind of bypass would work without disrupting the spell enough to set off an alarm.”
“If it were that easy, I think witches and mages would do it all the time,” I replied.
“Maybe it’s not easy for them. Magic users have to address the system through the interface they have; they don’t just grab hold of the system itself. But that’s not the way
you
see it. You see magic in the raw, as it were.”
“But you’re not talking about seeing; you’re talking about manipulating. I don’t do that.”
“Why not? If you can pull magical things apart like you did with that alarm spell outside the Danzigers’, why not this? It doesn’t make you a mage,” he hastened to add, cutting short my objection, “but it seems to be in line with other things you’ve done recently.”
That startled me. The idea was dangerously close to the one advanced by Carlos: that I could potentially bend the fabric of magic itself. “I . . . really don’t want that power.”
“You don’t seem to have a choice, sweetheart.” He pulled me into a loose embrace under the willow with its long strands of leaves like a curtain between us and the world. “I know you’re afraid—”
“Not afraid, more like horrified. I don’t want to be Wygan’s tool for . . . whatever it is he’s got planned.”
“I understand that. But he’s going to keep pushing until you’re his or you’re dead. I don’t want you dead, not even hurt. It’s hard for me to see the things that happen to you, the things that are happening, but—and I never thought I’d say this—Carlos may be right: The only way to stop Wygan is to take the power and use it against him. If you understand it and control it before he has a chance to control
you
, it’s not his power or his choice anymore: It’s yours.” Even in the gloom, I spotted a suspicious moist shine in his eyes. Quinton cry? Surely the world had turned upside down.
I didn’t get to reply since a voice from the other side of the willow arras cut into our conversation. “Touching. So touching, in fact, I may be sick. I thought that sort of sentimental dribbling went out of style when Andy Jackson was elected.”
The hanging fronds of the willow parted and the magic perimeter line wavered and flashed a moment, curling toward us as the speaker stepped through. She was about five foot five, neither round nor thin, with a heavy mass of silver-streaked ringlets piled on her head with a plastic clip. In the thin light from over the mountain, it was hard to guess her age. Her posture said thirty, but her hair and the powdery quality of her skin said sixty—or a hundred. I couldn’t guess at the color of her eyes; the darkness masked all but a ruby gleam of magic in their depths.
She continued her comments as we blinked at her, the arms of red and yellow energy that branched from the Grey fence circling us as she spoke. “Still, it was an edifying conversation to eavesdrop on, my little burglars. I shall have to make some changes to my spell next time to keep out people like you,” she added, glaring at me.
“We’re not burglars,” Quinton objected; his voice sounded a little strained and I noticed that the tendrils of red had twined around his legs. They must have been exerting something—pain or pressure at least.
“Callers ring the bell.”
“You don’t seem to have one,” he retorted.
“Indeed. Possibly because I don’t
want
any callers in the first place! And especially not those of your sort.”
“Pardon me, ma’am,” I cut in. “What sort do you mean?”
“Stalkers or supplicants from that enclave of fools in Seattle. Since I heard your dislike for the Pharaohn, I assume you’re with Kammerling’s party. I’ve done quite enough for that spendthrift fool. Tell him to go to hell and shut the door behind him.”
“I’m not here on anyone’s behalf but my own,” I replied.
She snorted in derision. “You’re a Greywalker and it’s clear that you haven’t gone completely insane yet, so you must have someone’s help. Which means you’re someone’s slave.”
I snapped at the haughty bitch. “I’m not anyone’s anything and I want to keep it that way. Is it a fair guess that you’re Chris Drew?”
“Did you imagine I would be anyone else? And you’re backward. It’s Drusilla Cristoffer.”
“What I
imagined
was that you bought a puzzle ball from Charlie Rice because it came from an old house out here that you had some attachment to.”
She barked a laugh. “Quite an attachment: It was
my
house! You go away for a few years and someone tears your house down! I had to move into this common shack until I could make arrangements to remove my stakes and leave more permanently.”
“Your house. Then you know how the puzzles work and where the maze is.”
Her eyes grew narrow and cunning. “Oh, so that’s what you want.” I could tell she was thinking very hard: The red threads around Quinton’s legs drew back and slithered toward her, as if offering their substance to fuel her mental process. Finally she spoke, dropping each word on me with careful deliberation. “I made it to protect Kammerling. I should have taken more care with it. It was never meant for a prison.” She spat the word.
My breath caught in my throat as I understood she was confirming that the puzzles somehow led to my father’s arcane cell. It wasn’t what they were meant for, but it was what they did now.
“When the labyrinth is gone, my last tie here will be broken, but for this.” She put out her left hand and closed her eyes a moment. Blood welled in the palm of her hand though she had no cuts there. She murmured and a whiffling noise rose and rushed toward us. The other puzzle ball slammed into Cristoffer’s hand as if thrown from a great height, but she didn’t move from its impact. She let her breath out through her nose in a gust and opened her eyes.
“And what would you give for it, Greywalker? I can see your desire for it, see the mark of its twin upon you. What will you give . . . ?” Her hand made a lazy turn toward Quinton, curling inward. . . .
He shivered, rooted to the spot.
I plucked the first, quiet earring from my pocket. “I think I have something of yours.” I held the garnet drop up so it swung, sparkling in the river’s light that crept and darted through the willows.
Cristoffer cast an assessing glance at me and the bauble that dangled from my fingers. “That—But of course you’ve opened the other door. I wondered where it had gone. . . . Edward’s doing, I’m sure. Overly clever of him. He always was. But it’s of no moment. Just an ornament. Do you suppose me moved by sentiment?” Her laughter made the river falter in its banks. Quinton ground his teeth and shut his eyes until she gave him a glance and then looked back to me. “More.”
I dug into my pocket and held up the second earring, its gem gleaming with unnatural light the color of dark venous blood. Brought together in the free air, the earrings sang a chord that made the grid thrum and spark.
Cristoffer’s eyes shone as hard and glittering as the facets on the garnets. I could see her breath accelerate and she leaned, just a hair, toward the chiming earrings. “Oh . . .”
“Do you want them back?” I asked. Of course they were hers: her puzzles, her jewels, her labyrinth—wherever it was. I could see her hunger for them reaching out like discorporate hands. As I stared at them the garnets seemed to run, turning to liquid blood that dripped slowly toward the ground, vanishing into red mist and river fog before it struck. I shook them, making the earrings cry and bleed. “Make up your mind.”
“You think I care for such baubles . . . ?” But her voice quivered. The red creepers of her power scrolled across the ground toward me and an answering glow reached out from the earrings.
I threw the live earring down and put my foot over it, pushing it into the mud with my boot until I felt the unyielding rock below. “I think you do.”
I shifted my weight down, a bit at a time, feeling the frangible gem grind and groan against the riverbed rock. Dru Cristoffer’s face tightened in pain and she seemed to suck her chest in as if I’d struck her in the center of her rib cage. The words came up through the muttering in my mind: “I could crush this more easily than your heart. . . .”