As vague as his image was, I could see that his jaw was still square, his hair still blond, even though it was showing some gray at the temples. But he wasn’t looking as sleek as the last time I’d seen him; his residual self-image seemed to have skewed into an ugly awareness of what his greed had lost him. He looked like a stockbroker who hadn’t weathered the crash. Angry self-pity rolled off him in sickening waves. I stood up and hooked my fingers into his substance before he could escape. “Hi, Simondson. Remember me?”
Someone growled, but I wasn’t sure whether it was the ghost or Grendel. I shook Simondson a little. “C’mon, I know you can talk. How did you end up here?”
“Fuck off.”
“Nice. You haven’t gotten any sweeter now that you’re dead.”
“Which is your fault, you nosy bitch.”
“It’s my fault you’re a foulmouthed ass with a bad temper?”
He tried to spit, but it’s not an impressive gesture from a weak phantom. “I died because of you.”
“Like I haven’t heard that one before,” I muttered. “Why does it always have to be someone else’s fault with you, Simondson? It was your dead wife’s fault you robbed her daughter’s inheritance. Now it’s my fault you’re dead. Me, I’m betting on greed, vanity, and plain old-fashioned stupidity—your usual motives.”
He started to object and I rattled his vague substance in an offhand way while rolling my eyes. “Oh, please. Try something new. The truth would be good. Let’s start with the woman who convinced you to beat the living hell out of me two years ago.”
“Claire?”
Interesting: I knew her as Alice—I was pretty sure we were talking about the same female. “Petite thing, ruby-red hair, sharp teeth, smokes like a silent film star . . . ?”
The ghost nodded. He looked tired, as if whatever had befallen him at the end of his life had been exhausting and death wasn’t any more restful. But, of course, I had come along and made him wake up from whatever brand of eternal sleep he might have been enjoying. Or not. I felt no shame: This man had beaten me to death and I felt he didn’t deserve much respect from me now that he’d joined the post-life crowd himself. “You didn’t know me from a hole in the ground, so how did your Claire talk you into knocking my head in?”
The ghost wavered and blinked, seeming to cringe and fold into a smaller shape. “Can’t think,” he moaned.
“Try harder. How did she compel you to attack me? Who killed you? How? Tell me. Tell me any of it and I’ll let you off the hook.” I needed everything I could get to fight Wygan. . . .
I yanked Simondson a little closer, studying the thickening mist of his form as he tried to remember. When he seemed nearly corporeal, he began shaking, a choked squeal of pain singing out of his mouth in a red cloud. I sank deeper into the Grey, looking at the tangled skein of energy that was Simondson’s ghost. Red, a hot red that deepened to a bloody claret color at the core. I touched one of the swirling strands of his energy, hooked it with my finger, and pulled with a firm pressure.
The hot color leapt off him, running up my own arm like flame and nerve gas. The wretched arc of agony made me buckle and cry out. I nearly let go completely. Voices from everywhere and nowhere shrieked and gibbered in my head. I backed away from the deep level of the Grey, shaking. Simondson panted, a remembered response to surcease, and trembled.
I kept one hand on him, but I relaxed my grip, pushing him just a bit away from me in the depth of the Grey, letting him drift into a less corporeal state. He shuddered and breathed a blue gust, almost sexual in the quality of its release. Repelled, I had to force myself to keep him present.
He caught a breath he didn’t need and sagged a bit in his respite. “Let me go,” he murmured. “I can’t help you and it’s torture when I try to remember....”
“I can see that.” I didn’t want to investigate the how of it—I knew I’d have to eventually, but not this second. For now it was enough that I thought I had the principle of it. I guessed that this was something akin to whatever torment Wygan had my father tied up in: The Grey was in large part memory in various forms; when the memory was strong, the spirits were more corporeal, but as they became stronger and more “there,” they were also more subject to pain. Wygan had done something . . . horrible. A spell or binding of some kind that looped back through memory as agony.
Ghosts didn’t experience sensations like a live person, but they remembered them as if they were real and that was what Wygan had tied him to, somehow. As Simondson—or my father—tried to remember anything or act, he became more solid . . . and so it went in spirals of suffering: remember and be tormented, move toward presence and become engulfed in pain. It was better to fade down to the merest whisper of what you had been, to a shade and a shadow, and remain mute, stupid, and inactive. Unable to help anyone or even yourself until Wygan was ready to use you for his own purpose. Best, by far, to go away forever, if you only could.
Simondson groaned again, almost crying. “Let me out of this. Please.”
I could let Simondson go. I was sure of that, though the process of tearing his shape apart and out of the weave of the Grey would be miserable for us both. But I needed him. I needed his knowledge and I thought I might need him just because he was connected to me and what might happen next. But keeping him in this state—as I had no doubt my dad was also kept by Wygan—was cruel. Letting it go on sickened me, left me feeling like I was collaborating in the horror.
But still, I said, “No.”
SEVEN
I
wavered when Simondson howled in rage at me. I wasn’t intending to torture him, but I couldn’t let him go yet. There were still too many answers missing. I had an idea and I hoped I could make it work. He clutched at me with incorporeal hands that still had the power to do me hurt. His fury and pain were a whirlwind around me, tearing and pulling at my own substance as if he could rend me to pieces and scatter me to the etheric winds of the Grey.
Faint and distant noises intruded and became recognizable : Grendel growling and barking, Quinton calling to me, Chaos chuckling like something demented. The thread of their familiarity kept me anchored against the storm of noise and emotion. I backed further out of the Grey, not quite gone—still present enough to keep a hand on Simondson but much harder for him to harm. I needed a container, silvered if possible. . . .
“Stop, Simondson!” I yelled, crouching. “I’ll let you go, but you need to do a few things for me, first.”
“No! Why should I?”
“Because I can let you go and no one else who can will. I’ll set you free when I’m done.”
“How can I trust you? Why would you do it later if you won’t do it now?”
I put out my hand, slipping it into the tangle of his angry energy. I ached like the bones of my arm were burning, but I did it, working into the weft of his shape and pushing a bit of it aside, loosening his form for a moment. Then I just held still as long as I could stand it, letting him sigh and dim in relief. Something of his mind brushed against mine and I shivered, gagging a little at the sensation, but it should have been enough for him to know what I was thinking. Ghosts aren’t psychic, but if they can crawl inside your skin for a while, they can seem that way. I concentrated on my intentions and hoped he was picking it up.
“I will let you go,” I said between clenched teeth. The red storm of his emotions was tearing across my nerves. “I swear. But you’ll have to come with me. I swear it,” I repeated, feeling my legs tremble with the effort of remaining upright.
He eased back, the ire of his presence draining away. I crouched down, putting my hands to the ground as I slipped back toward the normal. I clenched the bloody sand beneath my palms into my fists, feeling Simondson’s presence as a dull heat in the compressed grains.
As soon as I was back in a more visible state, Quinton and the animals converged on me. “Stop!” I yelled. “Don’t touch me yet. I need a metallic container, a shiny one. Any size.”
Quinton scrabbled through his pockets, displacing the ferret, and dumping a handful of mints out of an Altoids tin. He buffed the interior quickly with a handkerchief and held the tin out to me, open.
I dumped the handful of stained sand into the tin. Then I reached back into Simondson’s tangled, dim form, and twisted off a thread of his energy, which I shut into the tin with the sand. As long as it stayed closed, I should have a way to call on Simondson’s spirit for a little while at least. Simondson and I both breathed easier then. I slipped the tin into my pocket, careful to keep it closed.
Quinton helped me to my feet. I shook my head before he could start asking questions. I still had a few things to do while we were here. The rest could wait, but not this.
“Simondson,” I started, “show me where you died.” He grew hotter and the humming pain around him increased. “No. No, don’t think of it. Just go there. Go slow enough for me to follow. Don’t think, don’t remember, just move.”
The ghost drifted back the way he had come originally, south, across the parking lot that was now pitch-black between the scattered bars of light falling from the freeway and the cones from rare streetlamps. His color flushed and faded again and again as he moved, as if he couldn’t stop the sparks of memory that haunted him with pain. Stumbling a little on my still-trembling legs, I followed him. Quinton and Grendel stayed by my side while Chaos crawled up into my collar, as if she meant to comfort me by her presence. Or just lick the sweat off my neck—who knows?
At last, Simondson stopped and flared bloody red before his shape darted through the brick and glass of the nearest building. I could see that he’d stopped inside, but he was fading now, his energy ebbing. Even ghosts need rest. “All right,” I murmured to his thin shade. “I’ll take it from here.” He dimmed into the raw sparkle of the Grey.
As soon as he was gone, I plopped down onto the steps of the building he’d led us to. It had a covered porch with a short set of marble stairs on each side. The brick-and-stone porch led to three arched windows with French doors in two of them. I wasn’t quite high enough up the steps to look through the glass. I hung my head a moment while I caught my breath.
Quinton must have been studying the building. “It’s the old brewery office.”
I raised my head, shaking it a little to dispel the tinnitus that had started up—my descent into the Grey after Simondson seemed to have muffled my hearing, as if I’d gone swimming and now had water stuck in my ears. Quinton was looking past me into the darkened building.
“Looks like the tenant left in a hurry; the carpet’s been torn out. I don’t think that’s the latest in corporate decor, though it looks like someone’s been using it for something.”
“How can you tell?”
“Footprints in the dust and lots of power cables on the floor.”
I put one hand on the brick wall beside me so I could stand up and then jerked away from the building as the energy streams running through it snapped at me like static. I peered at it, glancing sideways into the Grey to see what was going on.
Coils of red power encircled the base of the building, crosshatched in blue, as if someone had erected a kind of magical insulation between the interior and the rest of the world. I couldn’t be sure of the magical nature of whatever had been going on without more information, but the gory crimson lines gave me the impression vampires had been involved. Not too surprising, since Simondson had died inside. Taking care not to touch the walls again, I walked up the short flight of steps and looked through the glass panes of the nearest window.
Squiggles of industrial glue and motes of sand and sawdust defaced the once-gleaming marble floor. Black and orange snakes of electrical cable ran across the mess, disappearing through the doorways in the white-plastered walls. Glancing up, I could see a chandelier that had captured shreds of translucent plastic and white gauze on its curled arms. I would have bet the missing carpet had a hell of a bloodstain on it and more than minor traces of Simondson’s DNA. Solis hadn’t mentioned the office building. I guessed the police were still trying to get a search warrant, even though an office wouldn’t seem much like the site of a hit-and-run, and Solis hadn’t been entirely sold on that idea anyhow. The right kind of beating might look a lot like a car accident until the autopsy report was in. . . .
A year or two earlier, I might have been perversely mollified by the manner of Simondson’s death, if my idea was correct. Back when the damage he’d inflicted on me was still fresh and seemed to be nothing but mindless fury unleashed on my undeserving self, it might have seemed poetic justice. Now it left me stunned and angry. Yeah, he’d killed me, but he hadn’t done it strictly from his own desire; he’d been led to it, tricked and used like everyone else Wygan had touched in his scheme. Not that I was feeling sorry for Simondson; I just didn’t feel the need to cause him any additional hurt anymore.
“I should go in there,” I mumbled, trying to convince myself.
Grendel whined and shifted to stare toward the street. The ferret was more interested in the building as she wormed her way back up to my shoulder. The scrape of footsteps on the gritty sidewalk pulled my attention around in the same direction as the dog’s.
A police officer on foot, his light-blue uniform shirt glowing under a moving shaft of light from the freeway, strolled toward us. He checked his radio on his shoulder and I spotted his partner coming across the street from the direction of Nine-pound Hammer. Both cops kept their hands in sight, not worried about us, just keeping an eye on things.
The first one called out as he came close. “Evening, folks. How y’doing?” He might have thought we were drunks who’d left the club to get some air, except for the dog. Quinton twitched the leash and the dog sat down to his whispered command as the two cops got within talking range.
I knew Quinton didn’t want to chat with them. I didn’t either, but chances were good they’d make a note of our presence and Solis would see it, so I leaned out the nearest arch in the front of the dark office porch and returned the greeting.
“Hi, guys.” I didn’t recognize either of them and they didn’t seem to know me, which was fine.
The first cop noticed Grendel, who was cocking his head and looking at the dark legs of his uniform trousers with some speculation. “Nice dog.”
“Yeah, except for all the peeing,” I replied. “I swear he has to sniff everything and leave a puddle every fifty feet.”
The second cop laughed, casually hitching his thumbs into his equipment belt. “Mine’s the same way. Gotta read his pee-mail and leave a reply, I guess.”
The first officer was looking us over but seemed satisfied we were just a couple out walking their dog. I was grateful Chaos was keeping still in the darkness under my collar—no one would believe we were out walking the ferret. We needed to keep up the illusion and negate their interest by moving along. Investigating the site of Simondson’s death would have to wait.
I glanced at Quinton as if I were irritated by the delay. “Is he ready to go?”
“I think he’s done for now.”
I nodded and walked down the other set of steps, the one farthest from the cops and more shadowed by the freeway ramp overhead. “All right, then. Let’s go.”
Quinton shrugged and twitched the leash again. Grendel stood up, wagging his tail at the prospect of moving; his doggy grin broke out and he panted in excitement. Quinton just nodded to the cops and walked past to catch up to me, the dog trotting alongside. We strolled off under the freeway as the patrolmen gave us one last look and dismissed us from their minds to go back to their beat.