“Ahhhh . . . so they aren’t locals....” Ben murmured, scribbling notes on a napkin with a finger dipped in coffee. Mara clucked her tongue and plucked a yellow legal pad from her pile of junk. She tossed it onto the table with a proper pen, and Ben snatched them and wrote in rapid, spiked shorthand, nodding as he did. “Did they look different from a regular vampire?”
Quinton sent me a bemused glance. We were all used to Ben’s research obsessions and it was easier to humor him most of the time than try to restrain him to the topic at hand. Unless the topic
was
at hand, red in tooth and claw. Then things could get intense. But at least this was useful. I now knew what had driven Quinton out of his hidden home and he had a better idea of how bad these creatures we were tangling with truly were.
“The ones I saw had either white hair or streaked black and white. Their skin was pretty pale, but it’s hard to tell under the street what color ‘pale’ is. From most angles, their eyes glow orange—fiery orange—and there’s something . . . kind of snakelike about them.”
“Their skin has a faint scale pattern to it,” I put in. “Sekhmet referred to them as having ‘fine, white cobra forms,’ if I am remembering the conversation right, and they do look a little like hooded cobras when they get annoyed.”
“They hiss,” Quinton added into the silence as Mara and Ben stared at us.
I stared back. “What? You don’t think they hiss?”
Ben started, excited. “Sekhmet is the Egypt—”
I cut him off, not wanting to risk the goddess’s attention. “I know what she is.”
Mara seemed frightened more than amazed. “You . . . met her? In London?”
I bit my lip. Time to sound crazy. . . . “Yes. Sort of. Not so much in the flesh . . . in the Grey form, I guess you could say. We had a rather disturbing chat. The asetem aren’t much liked by the other vampires in London, but there’s a sort of truce . . . or there was until Wygan got Alice to kick over that apple cart. That was what caused Edward to send me to London in the first place.”
“Why ever didn’t y’say something to us if you knew there were asetem involved?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know they existed or what the problem was. I just went where I was told to go and did what I had to do. And I don’t care to repeat that conversation—it wasn’t pleasant—but it did put me onto Wygan and Alice. They were undermining Edward, partially to get to him and partially to get to me, but Alice thought it wasn’t good enough, so she kidnapped Will Novak, too, and that’s when things started to get really strange—but it doesn’t matter! The point is this: Wygan is moving forward with a plan that has something to do with Edward, and with me, and with the Grey itself. Whatever it is, I don’t want to be part of it, but more than that, I don’t want it to go ahead at all. I intend to put a stop to it, but it has to be my way.
“Wygan has been attacking my home, trying to get at me, wear me down, keep me off-balance I’m guessing. I can’t let him do that. I have to be free to move or I’ll end up doing what he wants. And I have to get some sleep so I don’t keep on making stupid mistakes because I’m too tired to think more than a single move ahead.” I was losing my cool and I knew it, but I just didn’t have the energy to be more subtle. I took a few long breaths that turned into yawns before I could continue. “That’s why we’d like to use your basement for a day or two. Lie low long enough to get some sleep and plan. We can leave the dog with you until things are less dangerous. Grendel is a great protection dog. Wygan likes to grab people and use them as leverage against others and I don’t want him to get you or any of my other friends. I know you can take care of yourselves, but ...”
Ben and Mara exchanged a worried glance, and we all stared out into the yard, watching Brian gambol with Grendel. The dog was jumping around and knocked the boy over. All of us got to our feet, poised to run to the rescue, but the pit bull just held Brian down for a moment and slobbered all over his face, making happy wuffing sounds through his nose while the boy shrilled his pleasure. Boy and dog got back to their feet and Grendel herded Brian around the yard for a while as we watched. I noticed the dog somehow kept himself between Brian and the bloodred stars of the malefic spells scattered along the fence. Maybe all animals had a touch of Grey vision, like the ferret seemed to. I hoped so.
“It won’t be for long,” I said. “Just until I can get into a better position against Wygan. I’ll have to free my father from him somehow and I’ll have to figure out what he’s doing so I can stop it. I have to take the offensive or the game is lost already. Please ...”
SIX
I
t took a little more talking before the Danzigers felt they knew enough to let me head for bed in the basement guest room. Grendel, the fuzzy bodyguard, turned out to be our ace in the hole: Brian’s immediate response to the idea that we might go and take his playmate away was to throw his arms around the pit bull’s neck and literally dig in his heels. “No! Doggie stay!” he insisted. The plight of adults being a bit too abstract for even the brightest three-year-old, he went for the most important thing to himself: the pet. Ben and Mara exchanged a rueful glance and gave in, which earned a delighted squeal from their offspring. Rick was going to have a hard time getting his dog back.
Quinton had gotten a lot more sleep the previous night than I had and elected to stay up for a while and help the Danzigers out with some household projects. I suspected he wanted to pick their brains a bit more about the situation we were getting into, and Ben had looked more than happy for the opportunity to do some picking of his own, too. Whatever work Quinton did for the Danzigers would mitigate some of the obligation we both felt for the safety and quiet they had extended to us. Some, not all. I knew I was probably dragging them into the enemy’s sights and I didn’t like it, no matter how much they protested that they wanted to help. Quinton, too, come to that. It seemed that this had become his fight as well, whether I liked it or not.
I fell toward sleep wondering why Simondson had ended up in Georgetown. . . .
As I slept, I dreamed I was sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool, trying to make sense of conversations going on at a party above the surface. Distant, burbling sounds that were almost words floated in and out of my ears, and I could see them darting through the water like glittering, colored fish. My dead cousin Jill swam by, her long hair forming a blond cloud as she paused to look at me.
“This time, we’ll use the back door,” she bubbled. In the drowned light, her pale, dead skin looked blue. She swam away, dissolving into a school of neon-bright tadpoles that broke into sudden shapes and began spiraling around a single, flame-filled bubble. When the gleaming creatures reached the middle, they doubled back and swam out again: an endless gyre of brilliant flecks going in and out, round and round. . . .
A randomly bobbing conversation bubble popped, releasing the words “phone box” to rise to the surface and burst into the air as a disjointed gasp of sound. An effervescence of englobed words rushed past, swirling through the tangled net of light that the waves cast onto the bottom of the pool. A few bubbles collapsed, letting their syllables out into the water: “rosaceae,” “polyphony,” “etrier,” and “fur.” The glimmering tadpoles darted apart and away, fleeing the sudden voices and dispersing the dream into blank sleep.
In spite of the weirdness, I slept well once the dream left and woke feeling more clearheaded than I had in a while.
Quinton had stretched out on the bed beside me while I slept, still dressed and dozing only lightly. As I started to sit up, he rolled over and looked at me, propping himself up on one elbow. “Hey, how are you feeling?”
“Well enough to go hunting for ghosts.”
“Should we grab the dog? If we can separate him from Brian, that is.”
“I’m sure Ben and Mara have the parental equivalent of a crowbar somewhere. It can’t hurt to take the fur-covered assault weapon along. If nothing else we can always tell any busybodies that we’re taking Grendel for a walk. And who’d argue with that?”
“Only the suicidal.”
As if she knew we were talking about some other trouble-making animal, the ferret began to rattle her temporary cage’s door. We both looked at her and she gave us the imploring ferret look.
I let Chaos out to romp while I put on fresh clothes. “That reminds me. While I was in London, Marsden told me ferrets seem to have an affinity for the Grey. How, I don’t know, but it would explain her craziness around the vampires and ghosts.”
“Then we’ll take the carpet shark, too.”
It wasn’t too hard to get the dog to ourselves: we just had to wait until Brian went to bed. We took a lot of precautions as we left, looking for observers and tails, checking for tracking devices both technological and magical, and paying attention to the reactions of the animals—just in case.
The sun was still up but starting to slant a bit, lengthening the shadows around the old brewery as we passed it. Where the southern brewery building had stood until a few years ago, there was now a neatly paved parking lot, devoid of the chain-link that had once held back the rubble from the street. I’d read that the old building, not originally built for cold storage, had chilled the ground enough to form a ball of filthy ice as large as a house. The current owners’ plans for redevelopment of the lot into shops and apartments had come to a standstill while the site was dug out and thawed. The remaining walls of the stock and brew houses had been shored up with cement blocks and steel posts, leaving two walls of the shell standing empty, boarded doors and windows gaping in the upper stories between brick scars where the floors had once been. The ghost-shape of the original building flickered in the Grey, silver-touched with persistent lines of blue energy as if the magical grid had risen into the walls and was crumbling back to ground at a glacial pace. I shivered as I saw it and drove on, looking for a less exposed place to leave the truck.
I wanted to walk the neighborhood a little. If Simondson had been dumped at the brewery rather than killed there, I suspected he hadn’t been moved far. Wygan couldn’t have thought I’d miss the news that my assailant had died by violence, so chances were good that the location wasn’t a fluke.
We parked a few blocks away near an off-ramp and a playfield that sprouted artificial grass. A row of old-fashioned clapboard-sided houses in varying states of refurbishment or decay faced the field. A swaybacked house in the middle of the block hosted an elderly man with a Santa Claus beard and crow-sharp eyes who sat on the dilapidated porch. He didn’t stare at us as we got out of the truck, but the curious, blue-green energy around his head reached out, as if scenting us, then pulled back once satisfied we had no interest in him.
Grendel wanted to investigate the playfield but lost interest once he realized that only the grass near the bleachers was the real thing. Instead, he peed on the leg of a bench and then looked up at us, satisfied and ready to walk on. Chaos was happier to ride in my purse with her head sticking out the top. We passed under the freeway ramp and across two sets of railroad tracks within a block. Except for the cars parked at the curbs, the street we walked on looked like something straight out of the Old West: Buildings of corrugated tin, clinker brick, and horizontal boards crowded the narrow sidewalk leading toward the long brick-and-sandstone wall of the brewery’s late-Victorian buildings. Even with the sun still up in the long summer twilight, I could see wisps of ghost-stuff and bright scribe-lines of energy that chattered like squirrels. The Grey was as noisy as a train yard in this low-lying stretch of ground between the bluffs and the river. The animals seemed unaffected, except that they glanced around more than usual—like kids in a new neighborhood. This all struck me as odd, but I didn’t comment—it would do no good to discuss the strange degree of activity until I had a little more information, and it might be nothing more than the residue of a still-busy settlement that hadn’t been buried and remade like much of Seattle had over the years.
We stepped out onto Airport Way at the north end of the former brewery complex and turned south to reach the partially demolished buildings Solis had mentioned. I thought I heard something muttering in my ear, but there was nothing nearby, even in the Grey, besides Quinton and the animals.
Ghosts grew thicker as we moved along the sidewalk on the brewery side, mostly men in work clothes and teams of horses pulling wagons piled with grain, hops, or barrels. I could smell the horse dung and sweat, the sharp, bitter memory of fresh hops, and the sweet odor of boiling grain mash. The weird muttering was drowned in the harsher, louder cries of workers, the snort and whinny of horses, and the heavy roll and thump of barrels being loaded.
Quinton’s hand closed on my upper arm. “Harper?”
I shook myself. “What?”
“Just making sure you’re still here.”
I felt my brows pinch down in a scowl. It wasn’t quite a slip, but I shouldn’t have been sliding into the Grey like that. I wasn’t tired, so that wasn’t the cause now, but I didn’t see any other reason I would have gone a bit ghostly. I concentrated a little harder as we walked on.
The long buildings were pierced by recessed, black-painted doors and windows with sparkling-new glass, and odd ramps to old loading doors swooped here and there. Finally we reached the end of a building with two walls of soaring, arched windows and impressive double doors that faced a driveway and another building on the other side. A covered iron walkway crossed the driveway at the third story and a gate stood closed across the passage. Through the chain-link gate we could see a huge brick chimney near the train tracks on the far side.
The partial shell of a building on the other side of the driveway had a sandstone foundation that had been eaten away at the corners and mortar joints until it looked like rotting teeth holding up the charming brick edifice with carved stone signs above the big, boarded-up doors and windows that read “Brew House” and “Stock—” Just beyond the truncated stock house sign, the wall ended abruptly and the black expanse of the asphalt parking lot stretched to the south nearly another block to run up against the former brewery office building that now stood alone under the pylons of yet another freeway ramp. We’d arrived and, naturally, it was the spot with the aberrant lines of Grey energy that had given me the willies on first sight.
We stepped around the broken wall, over a parking bumper so new it gleamed white, and turned to look into the gutted remains of the stock building. A chill cut through me as we crossed the gleaming Grey power lines in the memories of walls that had once stood there, but the feeling faded as we left the ghostly walls behind.
A bit of tattered yellow crime scene tape still fluttered from one of the massive iron pipes that had been erected to brace up the remaining front wall. Sand, scrub grass, and tumbled bits of stone and garbage were the only floor the old stock house had. The brew house still had one complete room, but the jagged edges of more rooms that had once stood beyond the front one ran like raw wounds in the towering brick walls. Ivy and grass had rooted in the back wall of the brew house along a jerry-rigged plastic downspout that had broken apart halfway down. The stock house walls grew a thick coat of some horrid yellow spray foam at the second floor, but nothing else. Straight down from the foam and in the corner of the last standing walls, I could see a thin red smear of remnant energy—not a ghost but the mute energetic residue of something angry and violent.
The noise of the grid increased as I got closer, whining and rattling like blues guitar feedback on a cheap amp. I’d never heard so much local disturbance from the Grey’s power grid before. I wondered if it was an artifact of the asetem’s involvement, but I didn’t recall any such thing from London. . . .
There was no roil of vampires, nor the gut-blow of death lingering over the site, not that I’d expected it, but it might have explained the spine-crawling racket of the grid at this spot. I stepped up onto the sand mounded where the building’s floor must have been. Chaos made a chuckling noise in my purse. Grendel watched me with his ears pricked up and his shoulders a little hunched, as if his hackles might start rising in a moment. Pretty strange body language for a dog, I thought. Quinton held on to the leash and followed several paces behind.
I looked toward the yellow scrap of crime scene tape and guided my gaze along the line from pole to pole, searching for another bit of yellow or some indication of exactly where the body had lain. A second tag on the boarded doorway to the brew house and a small dark patch on the sand near the smear of red energy led me deeper into the site. I didn’t have to look hard for signs once I got close; the red haze resolved itself into the misty wire-frame shape of a human curled on the ground in a semi-fetal position. The dark patch, predictably, was blood, though very little and mostly smeared on the sand, not soaked in, where the body had lain, battered but not bleeding out. Either he hadn’t bled much at all, or, as I’d suspected, he’d been dumped on the sand after he was too dead to do more than ooze a bit.
I crouched down and put my hand on the bloodstain. The world seemed to drain away into silver mist and the screech of metal tearing apart under massive strain. I hadn’t meant to sink into the Grey, but the bloodstain had drawn me in. I started to back out, afraid for a moment that I had fallen into some kind of magical trap, but the Grey was no less fluid than usual. I wasn’t imprisoned, just sucked in. I took a few deep breaths and let myself fall all the way in.
My heart caught on a barb of sudden pain as I went and my breathing faltered as if I were feeling the distant echo of Simondson’s death but not the man himself. “Where did you come from?” I muttered as I looked around in the fog-built world, trying to pick up and follow with my gaze the miserable red thread of energy that marked Simondson’s temporary resting place. I concentrated on it and it got a little brighter, a weak tendril raveling toward the south until it broke off and died out. I dug my hand harder into the ground, a little frustrated that I couldn’t pick up more, and felt a piercing electric thrill in my palm, as if the dormant line of energy had suddenly gone live. I gasped a startled breath and heard the ferret chitter in alarm.
I shot a glance over my shoulder, staring down the length of the vanishing red thread, and saw a faint ghost resolving out of the Grey mist, walking toward me in jerks and starts, the thread seeming to haul it along. I grabbed onto the thread and reeled it in, yanking the reluctant ghost closer. He stopped on top of the spot where he had lain dead and glared at me in resentful silence.