I nodded. “Why’d you make Brian break it?”
“Because I didn’t want the witch to use it on me. I didn’t like seeing that other one in there and it didn’t like being in there. It wanted out and it said it would help me get the boy. But you killed it before it could help me.”
“What do you mean, ‘get the boy’?” I asked, and leaned on the black needles of the compulsion until Albert winced, feeling them against my own skin as burning cold that spread into my flesh.
“The witch’s son,” he babbled. “He listens to me. Since I’ve gotten stronger, I can talk to him—his mind’s more like yours— but he’s pliable. Even if I can’t have him, he can help me find a body I can have. He’ll be powerful when he’s older. Don’t look at me like that. It’s her own fault. She made the house stronger. She made me stronger. It’s only fair! I was robbed of my life!”
Mara made an angry, snatching gesture, shouting, “Take yerself off, y’toad!” and a string of furious epithets I didn’t understand. Startled by Mara’s outburst, I jerked back from Albert, ripping the black threads that lay between us and feeling the cold flood away. Then the net that contained Albert flushed furious red and collapsed into a hard knot of magic that was flung up through the ceiling, dragging the ghost, screeching, into the ether. Mara muttered after him for a minute, glaring up at the ceiling where he’d disappeared. “Y ’scheming gobshite! Shaggin’ bastard!”
I slumped into the couch, gulping warm air into my frosted lungs and shivering until the chill faded. Without thinking, I rubbed at my stiff knee. I felt drained and the injured joint ached, but I got better as I warmed up.
A clatter sounded on the stairs and Mara swallowed her curses before a befuddled Ben trotted into the living room blinking and wondering what had happened.
“Something came through the floor upstairs and went out the roof! I couldn’t see it but it felt like acid on the wind it made. What have you been doing down here? Are you OK, Mara? Harper?” He took a good look at his wife’s face and leaned back. “Uh-oh . . . What did I do?”
“Nothing!” Then she bit her lip and stood up, sighing. “Oh, love, I’m sorry. Nothing you’ve done. ’Tis that wretched Albert. He’s—well, I’ve made a terrible mistake letting him stay. He’s not a good thing to have about. I’ve sent him off for a while until I can collect what to do with him.”
“What to do with him?”
“I think I may need Carlos, after all. . . .”
Ben and I stared at her. “I don’t think that’s the best idea . . .” Ben started.
“That foul thing has designs on our son! And it’s my fault! My fault for not probing deeper to find his true nature. That—that—” Mara nearly choked on her re-stoked fury.
Ben closed the distance between them and rolled her into an encompassing embrace whose comfort I envied. “Shhh . . . Don’t feed the gobshites.”
Mara hiccuped a laugh and punched him weakly on the side— which was all she could reach. “You!”
“Yes, me. I get that you’re mad and that Albert has been up to no good with Brian. So, what’s he been up to and have you stopped him?”
Aside from the riot of her hair, I couldn’t see Mara over the tops of Ben’s shoulders even as I got a little unsteadily to my feet—I felt like I’d run ten miles in snow. Her voice seemed to come from his chest. “I’ve corked him up for a while,” she said, “but it shan’t last. I’ll have to find a way to send him away permanently. I’ve been so foolish. I let him stay and he used the magic I poured into the house to protect us to plot vile things and grow strong enough to attempt them. We can’t allow that to go on. And he won’t give up his plots if he remains, even if I can limit his ability to execute them.”
“Then that’s why you thought of Carlos,” Ben concluded.
“Yes,” she sighed. “I know, I know—it would be bad to call upon him. I may simply have to imprison Albert until I can find a solution. Though I can’t say I fancy being a prison warden.”
“How long can you leave him where he is?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s spiked on the roof now. I suppose I can throw a dome of the Tender’s Lace over him and keep him in his little hole a week or so.”
“Can you come up with a solution to him in a week?” Ben asked.
“I can come up with something. . . .”
“Good. We’ll put him in his box for a while and not worry about it this second. Tomorrow will be soon enough if he’s no threat to Brian tonight. You’re too upset, Mara, to do the best you can do right now.”
“Hark at you. Voice of reason.”
“I learn from exposure. What about you, Harper? Get what you came for?”
“Yes, I’m sorry to say.”
Ben shrugged.
“I should go,” I added, making myself walk forward without any show of the wobbliness I felt. It wasn’t pain so much as shock and exertion.
Mara started to object, pushing herself free from her husband’s embrace, but I knew pro forma when I heard it and I got out of the house as fast as decent manners would allow. I’d really tipped over the Danzigers’ apple cart. I felt bad about it, especially since I’d been right about Albert. There is, sometimes, more solace in being wrong, and I had to leave them to grapple with the problem of Albert alone for the time being.
I didn’t want to inflict my bad feeling on anyone else, so I didn’t call Quinton or drop in at Phoebe’s place but went home to the ferret who ignored me in favor of her squeaky eggplant.
THIRTEEN
The temperature was up to thirty degrees when I rolled out of bed Monday morning. The snow was still sticking, but it didn’t look so impressive once it had been plowed and shoveled into dirty piles only a few inches high at the curbs with the rough shapes of shrubs and grass poking through in the fields and yards. It was still too cold for most of the schools, though—some still operating without electricity or heat—and kids would be loose on the remaining snow before noon. Otherwise, it was an average Monday. I did the morning routine, working on my knee and shoulder for a while before heading to my office to dive into neglected work for Nan Grover.
At twelve minutes past eleven the door alarm Quinton had installed months ago pinged me and a matronly woman walked into my office, followed by two men with the look of guided missiles. The woman had chin-length gray hair naturally streaked with white and looked about fifty. She wore a charcoal gray suit with black running shoes and a black wool swing coat under an aura the color of battlefield smoke lit by gunfire. The men didn’t match: both fit and thirtyish, cloaked in rain-colored energy coronas, one wore a pair of slacks and a sport coat under an East Coast-style overcoat; the other had on jeans and a padded stadium jacket. They sent off a cool psychic stink of no personal stake in whatever had brought the woman to my office. They came to follow her orders.
All three had their coats undone over the telltale lumps and wrinkles of concealed pistols. I thought I’d seen damn near every variation and rip-off of this group that existed, but never one headed by a grand-old-lady type before. The disconnect between the woman’s appearance and her energy bugged me—not to mention the gun. I didn’t bother asking if I could help them and stayed put behind my desk where my own pistol and the panic button on the alarm were a handbreadth away.
“Are you Harper Blaine?” the woman asked. Her tone was bored, as if she really didn’t need my answer but she would stick to the form.
I didn’t see a point in skirmishing over it. I gave her a bland look back as her attack dogs stationed themselves on each side of my door. “Yes, I am. And who are you?”
She didn’t carry a purse, so she brought a leather ID folder from her coat pocket. She flipped the folder open, saying, “I’m Fern Laguire. I’m with the NSA.” She closed the distance between the door and the desk and stood so close she loomed over me as if it was just an accident of my cramped office space. Then she flapped the folder closed before I could read it properly. I’d done that a few times myself, so I looked up at her and put out my hand.
“May I see that again, please—a bit slower? I don’t speed-read.”
Laguire clucked her tongue and showed me the ID again, not releasing the folder but just holding it open in front of me, as if I was kid with ADD and she a harried teacher. She did seem a little teacherlike, in a smile-and-yardstick sort of way, but I noticed she narrowed her eyes as she held the folder for me. The washed-blue irises gleamed like ice chips.
The ID wasn’t helpful. It did have her name and the agency name, seal—an eagle standing on a key—and office address in Maryland, but it didn’t have any indication of rank or deployment beyond the words “Field Liaison.” She could have been a secretary or the director for all the card said, though I guessed she was probably as close to an actual spook as “No Such Agency” had. The great mystery of intelligence agencies: a cryptology unit with more tentacles than a school of squid and more pull than anyone wants to admit. I’d have bet even money that the backup were on loan from the CIA or FBI because they certainly didn’t look like mathematicians or computer geeks.
I let the card go and Laguire flipped it closed, dropping it back into her pocket. Her New England schoolmarm personality seemed a perversely appropriate choice for an NSA field operative, but it didn’t really go with the glacial eyes and the disturbing energy cloud around her—the effect was creepy, like seeing your grandmother whip out a flick knife and dispatch the cat for spitting up a hairball.
“I don’t do wiretaps or foreign data transmissions,” I said, “so I doubt I’m going to be much use to you.”
“We’re not interested in you, dear. Not in any professional capacity, at least,” Laguire replied. “We want James Jason Purlis.”
“Who?” I wasn’t faking ignorance; I’d never heard the name before in my life.
Her voice was soft and refined, but it left a hard wake in the Grey that would have caused most people to toe her line. “Oh, but you do know him, Ms. Blaine. You were in his company yesterday. Caucasian, brown hair, brown eyes, thirty-five years old.”
I’d been in a lot of people’s company Sunday and about half answered that description. “You have a photo?” I asked.
Laguire pulled a five-by-seven black-and-white from her pocket and put it on my desk, pushing it across the blotter to me with both index fingers. It was a blowup of an ID photo, grainy and bland. Judging by the clothes, it was about ten years old. The young man in the photo was a generic white-bread nerd—as if he’d tried to be unmemorable—short hair, clean shaven, overweight, slightly sullen or just bored. Aside from everyone else, I’d talked to Fish, Quinton, and the Danzigers, as well as a few waitstaff, librarians, and a gas station attendant yesterday, and many of them could have been the man in that photo, given different hair, weight, glasses, whatever. I knew who she wanted, but I wasn’t going to turn.
I shoved the photo back across my desk. “I spent all day tracking witnesses and evidence for investigations and for cases going to trial. I spent a lot of that time with some homeless people who don’t exactly hand over their business cards, and the rest of it in a glorified trash dump. Which one of the hundred or so people I talked to or stood next to do you think I should recognize from that picture?”
“Only J.J. Purlis. He went to ground years ago and we’ve been waiting patiently for him to show up on our radar ever since. Yesterday he did. Now he’s vanished again, but you were IDed and here you are.” She seemed to imply I soon might not be.
“Who told you I was with this Purlis, and where?” I asked. “You give me a clue and I might give you your man.”
She shook her head with a disappointed smile. “I won’t name our source. That would be ill-advised. Purlis is a danger to national security and to the health and safety of people like you. He has knowledge, skills, and the mind to cause harm. You have a duty to turn him over.”