Vanished

by Kat Richardson

  Quinton and I both stared at the box.

  “What,” the box croaked. “You.” The bright rope of energy faded with every word. “Think. Why—” But there the message stopped in a fizz of sparks and the stink of burning wires as the rope flared and blinked out, leaving me coiled in Quinton’s arms, naked in the darkness from which even the gleam of ghosts and the bright lines of the Grey power grid had momentarily faded as if all energy had been exhausted in the area. I could feel Quinton shuddering.

  “You OK?” I asked.

  “Yeah . . . for pretty loose values of OK. That felt . . . really nasty.”

  “I—I think your machine is toast.” I’d almost apologized, but I hadn’t done anything—had I?

  “Probably.” He squeezed me closer. “But I can make another one. How ’bout you? Are you all right?”

  “As right as I ever am.”

  “Your skin feels cold.” He kissed my cheek. “You want to get back in bed and warm up?” I could feel him smiling and a pink glow radiated from his body as the room’s normal Grey presence began twinkling back.

  “You are an adorable lunatic.”

  “I can go for adorable.”

  “Not so much the lunatic?”

  “I think I prefer techno-geek. I know I prefer the bed over standing on this cold-ass floor.”

  The glimmer and gleam of the grid hummed back to normal as we scampered across the chilly floor to huddle under the blankets again.

  Quinton kissed my temple. “That was pretty freaky.”

  “And I have no idea what it was in service to.”

  “That’s the same message your dead boyfriend delivered: It’s not what you think. Isn’t it?”

  I called that memory up. “Yeah, it is. But that . . . mob wasn’t Cary.”

  “Someone wants you to get that message pretty desperately.”

  “Oh, I get it. But it’s not very helpful. What is not what it seems? Me? Edward? His little business trip? That wasn’t even on the table when Cary got in touch.” The more I thought of it, the madder I got at the whole cipher-wrapped-in-an-enigma thing. “I’m not going to back out of this trip, even if that is what the ghosts are warning me about. I think I stand a better chance of finding answers in England than staying here and chasing my tail, not knowing which questions to ask whom and pissing Edward off in the bargain. I have a plane to catch in five hours and I’m not planning on wasting what’s left of that time puzzling over the energetic missives of cryptic specters,” I snapped.

  “Hey, sweetheart . . . It’s just me here now.”

  I closed my eyes, chagrined at my anger. “I’m sorry. I feel like I’m being played in some way. It makes me . . . short-tempered.”

  “Played by Edward?”

  I shrugged dismissal. “Not really. Manipulation is Edward’s stock-in-trade. There’s something else. Ever since this started there’s been something . . . lurking. I just have a bad feeling. . . .”

  “I know.”

  I sighed. “I don’t mean to take it out on you.”

  “I don’t mind being your sounding board. Or your backup or whatever you need.” He hesitated. “That’s—you know . . . what you do for someone you love.”

  Something ridiculous and giddy swelled through me at the word. I could feel the fizz of it bursting out of my skin and igniting sparks in the writhing platinum mist, bouncing off the living, glowing streams of energy that powered magic, and the rippling knife edge of the Grey. After the devastation Cary had wreaked on the remnants of my juvenile romanticism, the gleaming evidence of Quinton’s sincerity was intoxicating.

  “Want me to prove it?” he whispered into my ear. His grip tightened just a little as his body temperature kicked up.

  “You don’t need to prove—”

  He nipped at my neck below the ear. “I want to,” he breathed against my skin. His hands slid up toward my breasts.

  I turned in his arms and met his mouth with mine, passion heating the air until it baffled our lungs and fused us together, flesh to flesh. I forgot to say the words, but I did my best to show him that I felt the same way.

  EIGHTEEN

  Edward’s idea of long-distance air travel for daylighters started at business class. Since he had, in his weird way, damn near begged me to take the job, I got first-class treatment—literally. Not the corporate jet—the opposition would catch on to me soon enough without that sort of red flag—but the cushiest seating British Airways offered to commercial travelers nonstop from Seattle to Heathrow. Nine hours in transit. It was the first time I’d ever slept comfortably on a plane and arrived feeling reasonably alert and uncramped.

  Edward had run the reservations through a couple of corporate blinds so only an insider would know I was in London under TPM’s aegis. The financial distance made for sufficient security to arrange for a car to pick me up and take me to my hotel without recourse to the Tube or my paying for a common cab myself. But the luxury of the car service—it was a huge step up from a cab, but you couldn’t quite call it a limo—set me on edge; conspicuous consumption is just that: conspicuous. As I sat in the back of the black sedan cruising away from Heathrow on the freeway—no, motorway—I put my mind into undercover mode and thought about what I was heading into.

  A tourist is one among thousands, but a first-class traveler is one of a hundred and, like any other undercover job, I’d had to look the part. Now I had to act it as well until I could shift into the next physical and mental disguise. I suspected that most of my investigations in London would require a less-affluent wardrobe and an attitude that wasn’t as hard as my usual street armor. I already missed the convenience of my old, wrecked Rover with its cache of clothes and tools. The hotel would have to be my base of operations, so, first thing, I’d need to find an unobtrusive way in and out, or risk attracting attention. Vampires are a paranoid lot and if some local faction had moved against Edward as he seemed to suspect, they’d be on the alert for anything that indicated his eye was on them. Eventually, they’d connect me to Edward, but the longer I could keep that from happening, the better.

  The car had just passed some kind of light industrial or office complex and the wide, multilane road descended from its protected cement embankments to run at street level as a highway when the preternatural world flooded over me. I hadn’t noticed the Grey much before that; the area west of London along the M4 was a little more rural than the suburban mix between Seattle and our own airport at Sea-Tac and not quite as haunted—which isn’t much to begin with. But leaving the motorway and entering the streetscape of western London was like stepping into a deep and turbulent sea of the Grey, even inside the damping barrier of the car’s steel and chrome. I don’t know why I hadn’t given much thought to the weight and chaos of the unseen that would grow up along with a city over the course of two millennia, but it was as thick and opaque as a one of London’s famous Victorian fogs and I shuddered with cold, although the sunny afternoon was pleasantly warm—hot by native standards.

  “Would you like the air turned off?” the driver asked.

  “Huh?” I coughed, the centuries choking and slamming through me.

  “The air-conditioning. Would you like it turned down? You seem cold.” His speech wasn’t strict BBC bland but it was carefully correct. I suspected he spoke with a broader accent at home but was supposed to present a bit more polish on the job.

  “Yes. Please.” If it would help me warm back up after the shock of sudden immersion in the icy sea of the past, I was in favor of it. I would have to gain some control and equilibrium before we reached the hotel or I might be completely useless—or at the least as sick and punch-drunk as I’d been the first few times I’d stepped into the Grey.

  “Where are we?” I asked, groping for something to orient myself by.

  “Just coming into Hammersmith. Not much farther.”

  “How much longer to London, then?”

  He laughed. “Sorry, miss. We’ve been in Greater London since we left Heathrow. It
’s all London.”

  “But you said Hammersmith. . . .”

  “It’s one of the outer boroughs. London’s like . . . a lot of little cities that grew together. I’ve a cousin in Queens, New York, says it’s the same sort of thing there. One vast city made of a lot of bits. What you probably think of as London, that’s really just a couple of the old cities—the City of London, and the City of Westminster—and the inner boroughs.”

  “Like most people think New York is just Manhattan,” I suggested.

  “That’s what my cousin said!”

  “So . . . how big is London?” I asked, realizing I’d bitten off a lot more than I’d imagined in agreeing to come with no idea which part to look in for Edward’s answers or my own.

  “Huge! But not to worry. Your hotel’s central. You’re almost in the Square Mile.”

  “What’s that—the Square Mile?”

  “Used to be the old City of London. Now it’s business offices, banks, stock exchange, the Old Bailey, the Inns of Court, and the like. When your business associates say ‘the City,’ that’s what they mean. Westminster is right next door. That’s where the cathedral and the abbey and parliament are. You know: Big Ben and that sort of thing. Lots of sightseers round about, lots of one-way roads, narrow bits, alleys . . . Traffic’ll be a bit thick. Far more agreeable to walk in than drive.”

  “So don’t rent a car.”

  “Absolutely not. Stick to your feet when you can, cabs when you have to—even the Tube, buses, and so on, though they can be nasty—and you’ll get round much quicker and slicker. A bicycle is useful if you have one, but walking’s generally the thing.”

  I nodded, making vague noises of agreement as the car wormed its way deeper into the thick of London and its ghosts. I tightened my focus to the deepest levels of the Grey, where the magical energy grid of London blazed in polychrome lines and labyrinthine whorls that darted in and out of the earth we passed over. I hadn’t been a good student of history, but I had heard that modern London was built on the wrack and ruin of earlier settlements and prior incarnations that had burned, or sunk, or been knocked down, and been built over again and again, rising higher on the delta of mud and memory. I concentrated on the hard power lines until I had a solid feel for the magical bones of the city and its layers of history before I let myself swim back up to a more normal level of vision.

  As I drew a long, steadying breath and blinked around at the busy world of London’s reality overlaid with the riotous layers of its ghosts, the driver pulled to a halt in a narrow road.

  “Here you are, miss.”

  My hotel proved to be a modern, glass-and-steel-fronted tower on a tiny street just across a big road and a wide park from the Thames. I took a look up and down the lane from behind the sedan’s tinted glass, trying to set the scene and location in my mind. There was a low Victorian stone building just across from the hotel with a strip of bright blue signage that identified it as TEMPLE STATION. A pair of other buildings flanked the hotel but faced the roads to each side, like bodyguards. No sign of a service or employees’ entrance from the front of the elegantly stark facade, so I assumed there would be one on the side or a back alley where the public couldn’t see the unglamor ous aspects of hotel service without going out of their way. The small street wasn’t very busy except for the people going in and out of the Underground station, but the wide boulevard running along the riverside was aswarm with all sorts of people from immaculately dressed men and women in business suits to tourists in jeans and T-shirts with sunglasses and hats protecting their eyes from the glitter of light off the waters of the Thames. Surging through it, layer on layer of ghosts. The mix, so close at hand, reassured me that I wouldn’t find it hard to slip away from my glamorous pad and become anonymous.

  A dark-coated doorman stood at the curb, wearing a top hat in defiance of the wind off the river. He stepped forward and opened my door as the driver fetched my suitcase from the trunk.

  “Welcome to the Howard, miss.”

  I barely got out a “thank you,” before I and my bags were whisked into the lobby. As I turned from the car, something near the Underground station gave a fractured glitter through the Grey like light tripping off a broken mirror. I turned around to catch it but saw only a white streak of movement that vanished into the shade of the station’s doorway to roost among the steam-shapes of the Grey.

  From my room I had a view of the Thames and the street below. The room was a bit too high for me to see the inside of the Underground station’s doorway, but I could see the sidewalk in front of it. The layers of glass between me and the exterior filtered the Grey to a dim soup of mist and Saint Elmo’s fire, but I could still detect something near the station’s entrance that was more like a faceted void of Grey than the usual lingering energy colors. I observed it for about twenty minutes before it drifted deeper into the Tube station and disappeared. Something that wasn’t quite there was watching my hotel.

  NINETEEN

  My hotel proved to have a rear courtyard and several service doors. As soon as I was sure there were no more watchers—at least none I could detect—I changed into more casual clothes and snuck off to the streets. I felt a little naked without my usual paraphernalia, but guns and my pocketknife were blatantly illegal in England for someone like me, and I’d left them in Seattle. I was at a distinct disadvantage against anything corporeal since I didn’t know the lay of the land or have anything but my brains and my fists if I got into a jam. The wiser course was to case the streets and find routes in and out of the area as well as places I could disappear to if the hotel became untenable.

  I moved away from the open areas along the river where dallying crowds were not always enough to hide in. A couple of blocks up I crossed the Strand, pausing on a curious island in the stream of traffic where a small church of weathered white stone stood under a rippling canopy of leafy branches. There was a sign with something on it about the RAF, but I didn’t pause to read it so much as to catch my breath before I plunged back into the press of early summer tourists. An incredible range of voices and accents rang a complex peal on the air, and I was a little startled to notice how ethnically mixed the busy business folks and goggling tourists were. I had that American expectation that England was mainly peopled by white Anglo-Saxons, but London at least was more in the melting-pot mode. The city—its sounds, sights, smells—and the rippling effect of a thousand years’ worth of ghosts made me dizzy and I had to concentrate to stay on task.

  It took a bit of looking to find a newsagent. The shops were narrow and varied wildly, from specialists in arcane materials and curious arts that had been in business since William and Mary, to bustling little food stands selling everything from spicy kebabs and curry to bacon sandwiches and cups of steaming tea. There were also lots of pubs with contingents of smokers relegated to the sidewalks with their cigarettes in one hand and their pints in the other, talking nonstop and blocking the pavement, unable to hear my “excuse me” over the roar of traffic and the babble of voices.

  I finally found what I was looking for. The small shop sat next to a post office and advertised newspapers, magazines, books, and maps on its sign. Like many of the small, street-level businesses I’d already passed, it was more like a deep stall than anything else and empty of people except me and the cashier. Local maps and other aids for travelers were prominently racked near the front, so I went in and bought several as well as a small bottle of water and an energy bar. I asked the very young woman behind the counter about the address Edward had given me for his missing agent, John Purcell.

  She squinted, her brow creasing crookedly where a piercing had been removed, and tilted her mouth to one side as she thought. Her hair was patchwork brown over a previous dye job that had left it a bit brittle. Green and blue glints shot through her aura like tiny shy fish. If someone had asked, I’d have guessed she was coming out of a broken relationship with a bad boy and a bad crowd. Her accent was decidedly less posh than those I’d hear
d at my hotel and her demeanor a little nervous.

  “Jerusalem Passage? Not sure. Here, let’s look.” She flipped open the map book I’d just purchased and riffled through the street index until she found it. Then she flipped back to the appropriate page. “Oh, that’s Clerkenwell. Must be just north of the old priory gate. See,” she added, pointing to a convoluted quirk of streets near Clerkenwell Road and St. John Street, about half a mile northeast of where we stood.

  I peered at the page and had difficulty picking out the narrow wiggling line of Jerusalem Passage. “It must be a very narrow street,” I thought aloud.

  “It’s not a proper street,” the shopgirl said. “It’s a passage.”

  I didn’t know the difference. “Is that like an alley?” I asked.

  “Sort of, but not. It’s, umm . . . it’s a walkway. Not a promenade—not wide like that—and not like a regular pavement on the edge of a road. Just a footpath, not very wide, say . . . three people wide—or two fat German tourists.” She looked startled at what she’d said and lowered her head back to the map with a blush.

  She studied the book for a moment and flipped it over to the Underground system map on the back before adding, “Not sure about the bus. The closest Tube station would be Farringdon, but you’d have to take the Circle line all the way round past Aldgate. Bloody pain that is.” She winced a little and glanced at me to see if I’d noticed before going on. “Much shorter to walk if you don’t mind it.”

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  “Good. Weather’s nice for it. Here, now . . . what’s the best way . . . ?” she pondered.

  Between us we worked out a route that was easy but not too ugly. “If you’ve a mind to, you could go up Hatton Garden to Clerkenwell Road instead of Charterhouse to St. John’s. It’s not so direct, but the jewelers are worth a glance.”

  I looked at the map again. Purcell’s home was within a few minutes’ walk of a lot of “points of interest,” according to the map. Of course that was true for a lot of London addresses, but this one was old and close to a lot of economically important businesses that had been around since the city was young: the jewelers, the meat markets, the old business districts for cloth makers and brewers, and the hospital and medical school at St. Bartholomew’s among others. An ideal place for a vampire who managed the long-term investments of other vampires.