Labyrinth

by Kat Richardson

  The elevator paused at the bottom, waiting for a security code to unlock the doors. The wait dragged on. I wondered if someone was messing with me. . . .

  The doors opened after a minute and Bryson Goodall stood on the other side with his security keys and card in hand. He kept his gaze just off mine, as if he feared I’d read in it what I already knew. He looked mussed, his military bearing replaced with a more casually aggressive stance and his clothes rumpled by a long day’s wear, the tie and suit jacket missing. Even his strange indigo-blue aura had changed, going darker and more purple, like a bruise. I cocked my head to the side and peered at that strange energy; it looked like a tangle of dark blue, black, and ruby flames shying away from the burning crimson of the magical wards on the doors beyond him. Odd that I hadn’t noticed that before, or had something changed . . . ? The layers of gleaming energy that wrapped the room seemed slightly out of alignment, too, though everything was still there. Including the clinging, stomach-tilting smell of a vampire in residence.

  The next set of doors would not unlatch so long as the elevator was open, so, saying nothing, I stepped out into the luxurious lobby of Edward’s underground home. The deep carpet and soundproofed walls hadn’t changed in the ten days since I’d last seen the bunker, yet it seemed as if something was different, broken, or out of place. The lift doors closed behind me, leaving Goodall and me alone in the cottony silence of the antechamber. I turned my head side to side, openly studying the room and feeling jumpy. I saw a thin crack of light in the wall to my left—the outline of a previously hidden door that was now a little ajar.

  He noticed the direction of my gaze and shot a glance over his shoulder before turning back to me. “Monitoring room,” he said.

  “You monitor Edward’s sanctum?”

  He snorted. “No. The rest of the building, yes.”

  “So you saw me drive in.”

  “Didn’t recognize the car. Sorry.”

  I doubted that. If he’d been checking on me as I suspected, he knew I’d replaced my destroyed classic Land Rover a year ago with a newer, silver-gray version paid for with the windfall from a weird little job in Oaxaca. Oh, yeah, he was messing with me.

  “I need to see Edward,” I said, tiring of trying to analyze whatever game Goodall was playing.

  “He’s gone.”

  “I heard that. What sort of ‘gone’ are we talking here?” I moved toward the heavily warded doors to the inner sanctum, feeling the gruesome flare of the fell magic embedded in the carved metal panels set into the massive wooden portal. An impression of gaping, toothy jaws flickered a moment in the rage of blood magic that sheeted the doors.

  Goodall moved to block my way but flinched aside with a sharp-bitten yelp as he brushed the wards. He sidled in front of me, keeping his distance by inches.

  “I said he’s gone. You can report to me.”

  I offered him a cold smile. “I don’t think so. Just tell me where Edward is right now. If he’s in hiding behind those doors, I still need to talk to him. And if he isn’t,” I continued, adding a mental push to my words, “you need to tell me where he is.” I felt the spiked energy of my uncanny talent for “persuading” people to talk prickle against my skin as it pressed on him.

  He gave an unconscious shiver at the contact. “No, I don’t.”

  “But you do know.”

  “And I am not going to tell you. Your usefulness to Edward is at an end. Things didn’t work out.”

  “For whom?” I pressed harder on the Grey, on the magical compulsion I was building against him. It worked even on vampires, though only the weakest of them, and Goodall was no vampire—I’d met him in the hot sunshine at Burbank’s airport less than two weeks ago and I’d never seen a vampire that could stand the sun. “I know what happened in London. I did what Edward sent me to do. So who’s not happy with my performance?”

  He narrowed his eyes and he might have been sweating, but it was hard to tell in the eldritch flicker from the wards on the doors. “You weren’t supposed to come back.”

  “According to whom?” I was as surprised by his words as by his resistance to my push, but I shouldn’t have been; Goodall gave every indication that he’d spent some time in the hard-core military. Even in the freakish lighting, the muscles under his wrinkled shirt were solid and his stance was poised. But there was something wrong about his eyes, about the way he moved. . . . I was too tired and too focused on my own efforts to pinpoint it. I felt the sharp edges of the magical compulsion shift and scrape between us as he tried to respond to it in the most limited way, maintain his control while giving up only worthless blither.

  “The plan was to get you out of the way. Make Edward feel safe....”

  “So you could kidnap him?”

  “Wygan took him,” he growled. “Not me.”

  “Right. And how did Wygan get ahold of him? Judging by the way you’re cringing, the spells on the doors are still intact, so he didn’t go through them to get Edward.” I was pretty sure no one knew exactly what I could or couldn’t see in the Grey, and if Wygan and his cronies thought I was more Greyblind than I was, that was fine. “You held the doors for him, didn’t you?”

  I pushed as hard as I dared, feeling the cold black needles of energy that formed the compulsion pierce into me as well. It felt terrible, like icicles that cut into bone and froze the body from the inside out. Goodall made a subvocal growl, grinding his teeth as he glared at me. I was getting the impression the charming bodyguard didn’t like me much. “You let him in,” I said. “I guessed you were the mole, but I still don’t know how you got into Edward’s graces.”

  “Things change,” Goodall whispered.

  “Not that fast. You didn’t just decide out of the blue to be Wygan’s spy. Tell me where Edward is.” I already knew that Wygan, the ruler—they called him the Pharaohn—of an ancient Egyptian strain of vampire called the asetem-ankh-astet, was behind the problems that I’d gone to London to solve for Edward. I also knew that Wygan had plans for me, too—something unpleasant to do with the Grey itself, that strange intersection of the here and the not-quite—and that he’d been moving toward this plan for a long time. He’d tried to force other Greywalkers to become the tool he needed, but he’d never succeeded until he got to me. I still wasn’t quite what he wanted, but I suspected I was closer than I’d like.

  Wygan had a pattern: He used other people as cat’s-paws and leverage to get what he wanted—he almost never got his own hands directly in the dirt. Goodall must have been another of his manipulations and that must be the source of the wrongness I was picking up. I wasn’t sure what Wygan wanted or needed Edward for, only that he hated him for something done long ago. But revenge alone didn’t make sense of the long, complex game he’d been playing. I still didn’t know Wygan’s plans—didn’t know him, come to that—and I’d have to figure them out if I was going to beat him.

  Goodall moved his right hand between us, reaching toward me with the keys between his fingers like claws. “I could kill you.”

  “The Pharaohn wouldn’t like that. Other people have had that idea; they aren’t with us anymore.”

  Goodall winced at my use of Wygan’s title. He could make of that what he wanted: threat or warning. I’d disposed of most of the London problem, but I’d also seen how awful Wygan’s retribution was on those who disappointed him.

  “Just tell me where Wygan has Edward.”

  “I can’t. And I wouldn’t if I could.”

  “Don’t make me hurt you, first,” I warned him, sliding my pistol from its holster at my back. I didn’t intend to use it unless I had no choice; a gun should never be an idle threat but the promise of death. I didn’t want to kill Goodall—or anyone. When someone dies near me, I feel it, like a blow that drives me down and tears me open. But I survive it. And I would shoot him if I had to.

  I did have other alternatives, but they would tip my hand to Wygan. I wouldn’t tangle my fingers into the magical grid of the Grey until I had
to.

  I felt Goodall shift, preparing to move in spite of the magical weight on him. I dropped the compulsion at once, surprising him. Then I rammed my knee into the side of his and slammed an elbow into his chest. I pushed him back as I spun aside, out of line with the doors.

  Off-balance, he lurched back into the ensorcelled doors and then bounded away from them with a shout and a jingle of dropped keys as the magic screamed and bit at him. While he reacted, I stepped in again. I grabbed him by his left wrist, yanked it up between his shoulder blades, and put the pistol to the back of his neck. He could outmuscle me, but he didn’t want to argue with a nine-millimeter bullet as I twisted his arm up behind his back. I turned him to face the doors.

  Bloodred flames of cold magic roared up over the warded doors as I pushed him closer. “Open it,” I demanded. Through the pall of furious magic on the door, I could just make out the entry control pad with its uncanny eye above and the jagged line of invisible teeth below.

  He stiffened and I tightened my grip so his arm strained in the socket and the pistol’s front sight dug into the base of his skull. He raised his right hand slowly, holding his card key in white fingers. He should have been sweating, but though the tension in his body was right, not a drop of moisture rose to his skin, just an odor like burned lilies and cheap hamburger. I shoved him and his wrist flattened against the wall below the pad. The ghostly eye above it flashed wide open, but this time the sharp little teeth bit deep into his wrist. Goodall shrieked and yanked himself backward, knocking us both down as the card went tumbling away and the doors stayed locked.

  We rolled apart, him clutching his unbleeding, ripped wrist, me holding tight to the gun. I was panting. Goodall just looked murderous, crouching between me and the spell-locked doors.

  “You’re not going to live through this,” he muttered. “Just give up. It’ll be easier.”

  “Nothing is—”

  Goodall snapped his bitten arm toward my face, slapping me hard between the eyes with his limp hand. The fingertips cracked across my skin like tiny whips. I jerked back. Then he spun and bolted for the monitoring room’s door.

  Shaking my head clear, I turned and yelled, “Stop!” It was more a reflex than an expectation as I brought the pistol up in both hands. If he stopped, I didn’t have to kill him—and believe me, I didn’t want to.

  He didn’t even slow but slammed the white door backward on its hinges and vaulted over the mess.

  I squeezed on the trigger—three fast shots at his retreating back.

  Goodall jerked, stumbled, and kept going as three burned holes marred the back of his shirt. He wasn’t bleeding that I could see.

  I swore one sharp word as I took off after him, more angry with myself than at him. Bryson Goodall might have been human when we met, but he sure as hell wasn’t now. How could I have missed it? I didn’t think he was a vampire—any queasiness or the usual stink seemed to be a residue of Edward’s—but I really should have put some pieces together earlier.

  I jumped over the broken door and chased Goodall across the small room full of monitors. He was heading for another door on the far side. Fire stairs. He hit the bar and streaked up the steep concrete steps. He wasn’t any faster than a very fit human—at least not yet—but he was still pretty fast.

  No fire alarm went off as I followed him through the door. I didn’t put much thought into why the alarm was dead; I just chased after Goodall. Adrenaline doesn’t compensate for lack of sleep, though, so I was falling behind. In a few minutes, I lost sight of him up the cement stairwell. I was still going up, but his footsteps were fading. Then a metal door rattled and clanged, and the sound of Goodall’s escape was cut off in the echo of it slamming shut.

  I kept going, hoping I might catch sight of him once I reached the door, but when I got there, he was long gone. I looked out into an obscure corner of the alley behind TPM’s big glass behemoth of a building with no one else in sight.

  I let out a string of annoyed curses and started retracing my steps to the bunker and from there—I hoped—to the garage.

  My cell phone rang. The number was my own home. Frowning, I answered, out of breath.

  Quinton yelled from the phone over a pall of background noise, “Harper! Something is trying to break down your door!”

  TWO

  “Fantastic,” I muttered. Now what? “Did you say something?” “Yes, I did. Chaos is bouncing around the door and the new Grey detector is making noise—it’s not calibrated yet, so I don’t know what the signal strength is, but something not normal is trying to get in here.”

  I could make out the steady banging on the condo door through the phone and the electronic ping of Quinton’s latest project.

  “Can you see anyone out there?”

  “Yeah, there’s a couple of people at the door and one downstairs outside the balcony. They look mostly normal, but the detector gets louder when I point it at them.”

  “Do they know you’re there?” I asked as I started back to the garage.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure they do ....”

  His voice faded away as I stepped into the stairwell, the concrete and steel of the fire stairs cutting off the cell signal. I stepped back up to the door and opened it. “Tell them I’m not there. I’ll be there as fast as I can, but don’t tell them I’m coming. Can’t use the phone until I’m closer.”

  I didn’t hear his response as I rushed down to get back to my truck. It was almost as difficult to get out of Edward’s bunker and back to the parking garage as it had been to get in the first time. As I went back out, I recovered Goodall’s keys and card from beside the warded doors—though not without a shudder as the blood magic whined and snapped at me. Without them, I don’t know if I would have gotten out.

  I drove fast toward home in West Seattle. The thought of strange visitors gave me the creeps after everything else that had happened. These weren’t ghosts—not like the last time—or Quinton wouldn’t have been able to see them. They might be some kind of vampire or something else entirely. Had they tried knocking first and asking to come in or had they just stormed my home? And if they had come on so strong and without warning, why?

  From the moment I’d died, I’d been moved like a chess piece toward some hidden goal of Wygan’s. I hadn’t known it until my trip to London. Every step of the way things had pushed me. I wondered if this was more of Wygan’s doing. Goodall had said I wasn’t supposed to come back—at least not under my own power—and I was pretty sure no one had known exactly when I’d return. So if this was something of Wygan’s, it had come together at the last minute, once Goodall let him know I was back in town. Of course, it could be something else. My father’s ghost seemed to be involved in all this and there were always plenty of other spirits and monstrosities trying to get my attention on any given day. Where one aspect of the Grey became active, others tended to also.

  I left the truck on the street and approached the condo building on foot from the western, downhill side—I live near High Point, the tallest but least trendy hill in Seattle. There used to be some wretched public housing nearby until the city bulldozed it for condo development. The neighborhood on the east side of Thirty-fifth Avenue Southwest has improved a lot since the time when I moved in on the west side. People don’t shoot one another as often, and the neighbors have gotten to like their peace and quiet enough to call the cops sooner than they used to when a ruckus starts. Whatever was going on at my place needed to end quickly or I’d be up to my butt in policemen and there was one in particular to whom I really didn’t want to explain anything. There was already a dog barking somewhere and someone complaining, so an outbreak of Seattle’s finest might be imminent.

  I saw two or three human figures in the bushes below my balcony—the shrubs made an accurate count difficult from a distance—and one near the street door. Big red-and-black auras marked them as vampires or high-level demi-vamps. I would have bet there were a couple more in the driveway or inside the garage. Crap. I
paused in a shadow and dialed my home phone.

  “That you?” Quinton asked, not wanting to use my name, I guessed.

  “Yeah. I see three or four down here, guessing two more in the garage. How many upstairs?”

  “Two that I can make out. There could be someone farther down the hall, but I don’t know.”

  “Pretty heavy crowd. Did they say anything to you when you told them I wasn’t home?”

  “No. They just keep pounding on the door.” I could hear it through the phone, steady as a dance beat.

  The figure near my front door turned, looking for me, I thought. My breath caught in my chest as the figure rotated toward me: Its eyes, even at a distance, gleamed with an orange hellfire light. Asete. I peered into the darkness, hoping to see if any of the others had the telltale ember eyes. Given the weirdness of the situation, I couldn’t be sure it was just one sort of monster prowling my place. It was difficult to be sure, but I didn’t think all of them were asetem.

  “Either of your knockers have kind of glowing eyes?” I asked, trying to fade back into heat blur from the truck’s engine. I wasn’t sure they could pick out my body heat, especially with the asphalt road still radiant from the long spring day, but I didn’t want to take that risk.

  “Yeah.”

  Two asetem at least. Wygan’s people. I didn’t want another fight. We just had to get out, somehow. Minimal physical contact, break through, and run. . . .

  “And here’s the bad news,” Quinton added. “The stunners don’t take that kind out. I upped the voltage, so they might go down, but they don’t stay there.”

  I breathed out. “Shit.”

  “On the other hand, they seem a little slower than the regular kind.”