Labyrinth

by Kat Richardson

  She huffed in surprise, blinking. “You are. Well.” She stood up. “Next time we’ll know better. You should be after a wash and brush-up. Y’still look like you’ve been run down on the road.”

  “I doubt I look that good,” I replied, heaving myself to my naked feet and heading, still unsteadily and stabbed by sudden knives of pain, to the bathroom.

  She left me to it and I stepped under the flow of hot water, relieved by the warmth and the sense that water washed away the horror as well as blood and physical discomfort. As the character of my pain shifted from uncanny agonies of fire and cold to ordinary aches of aftermath and injury, sleep nudged at the edges of my mind. I felt soft and dopey by the time I got out of the tiny shower.

  Quinton was sitting on the bed, dressed in a clean T-shirt and baggy pajama bottoms, when I came back into the basement bedroom.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  “You look better than I thought you would.”

  I made a face at him. “Thanks.”

  “No. I mean that I thought you were in pretty bad shape, but looks like I was wrong.”

  “No, you weren’t. Mara said I looked like I’d been hit by a truck.”

  He got up and put his arms around me, squeezing gently. “You look great.” He kissed my neck and worked his way up toward my ear. “You feel better.”

  “Then you forgive me for barfing on you?”

  “It washed off. You only ralph on the one you love, right?”

  “Or the one who’s crazy enough to put me over his shoulder like a sack of flour.”

  “You are much sexier than a sack of flour.” He went back to nuzzling my neck.

  “And you are big, goofy geek-boy.”

  He raised his head and grinned at me. “Yes, but a goofy geek-boy with taste. And excellent timing.”

  “It was pretty good.”

  “Only pretty good?”

  I shrugged. “You could have come a little sooner.”

  “It’s hard to detect gunshots from a soundproof booth. What were you shooting at anyway? It was dark as the inside of a whale in there.”

  “Lightbulbs. To let in the Guardian Beast.” I wasn’t sure that made sense, but it came out anyhow.

  Quinton looked puzzled. “How would that work?”

  “Colored light confuses it. I shot out the bulbs and it got in. It doesn’t like Wygan or whatever he’s up to, so it attacked him. I think. I didn’t stay to watch.” I yawned and felt my legs go weak.

  Quinton kept me upright. “Ah-hah. I see. So what did you get?”

  “Hints and clues. Talked to Dad. And got a headache that mutters.”

  “Interesting collection. Was it worth it?”

  “Mara asked that. Some hints from Dad about how to get back to him. And some kind of . . . knowledge I can’t process. That’s what I got. I know it’s in my head but I don’t know what it is. Except it makes me bleed light. Or that’s what I think. ’Cause I wasn’t weeping lumens when I went in....” I was just mumbling, blurting out whatever came to mind. I was too tired to filter it. “It’s loud in here, in my head. I know that’s something . . . and the light thing. Must be related....”

  “Wha—?”

  I shook my heavy head. “I don’t know either. I healed up on my own. But it’s creepy. Like little eyes all over....” I couldn’t help but shudder. “It’s just little hints and clues, little bits and pieces. About Dad and Wygan and something magic. . . . I need more. I need to know about Edward—I never saw a sign of him, or what Wygan wants him for, but he must be around....” Something more than the oceanic whispering in my ears was growing in my mind. Some idea . . . something about bits and pieces . . .

  “Quinton, what happened to the boxes I sent from England?”

  “They should have come to the condo, but I was out picking you up at the airport and the FedEx guy left a note. They must be at the depot.”

  “We—” I started, yawning myself silent. “We’ll go get them. There might be a clue there.”

  He shut me up with a kiss. “In the morning, sweetheart. They aren’t open and you aren’t dressed for more burglary.”

  “I could be.”

  “Sleepwalking doesn’t become you. And I don’t think there are a lot of vampires working the day shift at FedEx, so it might be safer to wait.”

  “You think?”

  “Uh-huh,” he murmured, brushing another kiss onto my lips as he scooped me up. This time he didn’t throw me over his shoulder, just snuggled me into his chest for the short walk to the bed. . . .

  THIRTEEN

  Seattle’s FedEx World Service Center is deep in the industrial district, just north of the train yards from Georgetown and a short drive from both airfields. The bland, two-tone gray structure that looks like a collection of giant shoe boxes, featureless except for the huge purple-and-orange logo on one end. I figured any building that determined to be boring was probably full of troublemaking gremlins or some other supernatural pest equally determined to play havoc with the system from sheer perversity. I didn’t see any, but it seemed like their kind of haunt.

  Probably because they’d been sitting for several days, the boxes took a few extra minutes to locate and extract from the delicate architecture of shipping crates into which they’d drifted. Once I had them, I didn’t want to wait to open them any longer than it took to haul them to the Land Rover.

  “What’s in these?” Quinton asked as we carried them across the parking lot.

  “Stuff of Edward’s. Mostly paperwork and files, but there are some loose things in one of the boxes that might be useful....”

  I’d mailed the two boxes from England before I left. They weren’t mine, but I thought Edward wouldn’t mind if I scoured them for tools or clues since I meant to use whatever I found to get him away from Wygan. And me back to see my father so I could stop the Pharaohn-ankh-astet permanently.

  Inside the truck, safe behind its locked doors, I slit open the packing tape on the smaller box. The contents had shifted since I’d packed them, and the collection of animal teeth and bones had drifted to the top of the other, heavier bits, tangled in the loops of a black silk scarf. Maybe it was the luminosity of the fabric or just the way it lay, but Quinton and I both paused and stared into the carton, disquieted.

  “It looks like a cat,” he muttered.

  “It almost looks like it’s breathing, the way the light moves on the silk,” I added. The thin filigree of smoke-colored power that lay over it all only added to the unsettling display in my eyes. Just because it was there and kind of creeped me out, I reached out and tapped the thing lightly, giving it a tiny stroke about where the top of its head would have been. “Good kitty. No biting.”

  Quinton shivered. “That’s really disturbing.” He bumped the box with the edge of his hand, and most of the bones slid across the slick surface of the scarf, scattering again into the depths of the junk. The skull lodged in a corner and directed its empty eye sockets at us, as if waiting for another pat or a treat. Probably a finger.

  I felt a touch queasy reaching into the box past that bony remnant. I half expected the thing of bones and mist to knit back together and attack me. But it didn’t. I lifted the skull and scarf out with care and settled it on the dashboard in the sun with a few of the bones. As I dug through the container, I found more bones and put them onto the scarf with the rest. Don’t ask why; it just seemed the right thing to do. I added some teeth as I found them, too. More than enough bits to make a cat and a half at the very least, though the teeth clearly hadn’t come from anything as small as a domestic house cat. Meat eater? Yes. House cat? Not on your life.

  “You’re giving me the creeps, which I do not say lightly,” Quinton commented, watching me.

  “Why? What’s so creepy? It’s just a bunch of bones.”

  “It doesn’t seem that way when you touch them. And did you notice you’ve laid them out in a skeleton? Kind of a freaky one, but, still ...”


  I looked at the pile and saw he was right. “Ah. I don’t know. It just . . . seemed the right thing to do.”

  He peered at me. “That’s an odd thing to say. How do you get that impression? I mean you don’t usually do that sort of thing.”

  I caught an annoyed sigh—I wasn’t put out with Quinton, but something was digging at me, and that scratched at my short temper. “Wygan said he was going to give me knowledge and ever since it seems like there’s something lurking, just at the edge of my understanding it. Like a shadow at the corner of a building, but I can’t see what’s making it. I have an urge to make order out of things. I keep thinking I can figure out what it is if I just clear away everything it isn’t. Does that make sense?”

  “Mostly. But can you stop with the bones? There really is something . . . unsettling about that thing.”

  I looked at it again, tilting my head to a better angle on the Grey without slipping in. The two-headed cat hissed at me from its disparate mouths. “Ugh,” I coughed, sweeping the bones into a single pile and shuddering as I touched them. “All right. No more skeletons right now.” I turned back to the box, more mindful of what I touched and how I laid it aside after that.

  The carton yielded up a small trove of broken or orphaned jewelry—including a single garnet earring with an aura of outright malevolence clinging to it—a scatter of antique tarot and playing cards that didn’t make up a full deck of either, a few small cloth bags of plant matter that had dried to unidentifiable dust long ago, keys singly and in bunches, a stained leather glove so old and dry it had cracked across the knuckles, three knives of various materials and types, a tiny silver mirror in a carved mother-of-pearl frame, broken sticks of colored chalk, various candle stumps, a book no larger than my palm that had rotted into a lump and crumbled at the edges, and a leather bag containing a few old gold and silver coins whose origin I couldn’t guess from the misshapen portraits on the front.

  “Any bells going off?” Quinton asked, watching me.

  I slumped a bit, disappointed. “No. The bones, the knives, and that earring are the only things sending off anything I can pick out from the general clutter of Grey coming off this box in the first place. This stuff ’s been sitting around, going quiet or mixing with the rest for a long time. If it were just one or two objects, or if they’d been isolated from one another, the auras would be stronger. I could tell more about them. But this is like . . . soup. It’s been cooking together so long it’s hard to figure out which flavor came from what ingredient.”

  “But it’s all got some magic remnant?”

  “Seems that way.”

  “So maybe it’s a box of tools and supplies for some kind of magic. Maybe someone cleaned them off before they packed them up originally.”

  “They’re all dirty now.” I paused to think. “But someone might have tossed something else in the box, later, that infected the rest....”

  I began picking up each item and trying to feel or scry some information from them.

  Quinton put his hand on my arm. “That’s going to take a while. What can we eliminate? Anything too old or rotten to have been added late is probably not the thing you’re after. What was on top the first time you saw the box?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to conjure a picture in my mind. The insistent muttering of the grid complicated the process, intruding as static yelps and stutters as I concentrated on remembering the box as it lay in its vault below London. “Shut up,” I muttered, pushing the sounds aside with a will and dredged the memory into my mind’s view. “Umm . . . the scarf. The garnet earring. A couple of teeth. A knife. The scarf covered everything below it and those few items were on top of the scarf.”

  “Start with those. The scarf seems to be the dividing layer. Whoever packed the box may have used it to protect the lower contents.”

  “So what’s on top is most likely to have been added later,” I finished for him. We didn’t think alike—his different perspective was one of the many invaluable things about Quinton—but we did understand each other’s way of thinking. It circumvented a lot of confusion and argument. When we didn’t want to argue, that is; we didn’t agree on everything, after all. Who does?

  I did not wish to pick up the earring. I’d touched it once already and that had been unpleasant, but concentrating on it sounded like a bad idea. I put it aside for last and began with the teeth, picking them out from the pile of bones and disturbing as little else as possible.

  They weren’t human teeth, so at least I wouldn’t fall prey to whatever intelligent horror might have held the creature when it died. I curled the half-dozen bits of rough ivory and enamel in my fist and closed my eyes for a moment, trying to settle my noisy mind before attempting to “read” them. I opened my eyes and my hand again and stared at the hard white objects.

  There were five of them and they shone in each of the primary colors, plus one blue-green and one pink. Not black as I’d half expected. I didn’t know for certain what the colors represented, but they didn’t seem sick or warped. They didn’t send off much feeling either, at least not as a collection. If I separated them and concentrated on just one at a time, they sent out varying sensations of chill or warmth, sharp tingles or smooth hums, but that was all. Someday I was going to have to make a better study of the colors I saw in the Grey and figure out what they meant. I guessed most of the time based on how I felt or on other clues, but that was the best I could do.

  I put the teeth back down.

  Quinton raised his eyebrows. “Nothing?”

  “Nothing interesting. I think they’re some kind of elemental icons. You know: earth, air, fire, water ...”

  “That’s only four.”

  “Yeah. Well. They could be emotional icons instead. That pink one, that’s . . . love.” I felt a little nervous saying it. I’m not a romantic, moony person and I’ve never looked good in pink. “But I’m not sure. They aren’t giving off much. No clues. Let’s try something else.”

  Quinton started to reach for the earring. I pushed his hand aside.

  “Not that. Not yet. Hand me the knives.”

  “Which one do you want first?”

  My eye fell on the one with a missing tip. I recognized the odd shape of it from the first time I’d looked into the box, like a long leaf with a dark channel down the middle, and it was made of a curiously dull and heavy metal or some cold, homogenous stone that shone with a frigid darkness. The handle was wrapped in stained leather, bound on with gold wire. “That one—with the broken tip.”

  He handed it over, giving a slight, unconscious shudder. I closed my hand on the knife and felt a shock through my whole body, like I’d been stabbed in the chest with lightning.

  I must have gasped aloud and started to crumple in my seat; Quinton grabbed onto my shoulders to hold me upright, then jerked as if he’d touched a live wire. I dropped the knife to the floorboard and batted him away, breaking the connection between us, between the scene rapid-spooling forward in my mind and the remembered horror of the first time I’d encountered it. Only this time it hadn’t been at a storyteller’s remove but first person and intimately dreadful. I gagged and gasped for breath; only the fact I hadn’t eaten in a day kept me from throwing up again.

  “What the hell—?”

  “That’s Carlos’s knife,” I gasped.

  “What? What are you talking about? What happened?”

  I drew several long breaths, trying to steady myself and doing a halfassed job as the voices of the dead shrieked in my ears. I raised my head and looked him in the eye. “Quinton, did you see something? Did you feel anything? What did you just experience?”

  “To hell with me. What about you?”

  I caught his reaching hands and pulled them down to the console between us. My heart wouldn’t stop racing, but I tried to pretend I was calm, that I hadn’t just experienced the deaths of a score of innocents, hadn’t felt the very knife I’d held plunge into my chest and shatter. . . . I kept my grip on his hands, co
mforted by the touch, and hoping he felt that reassurance too. “I’ll tell you in a minute, but I need to know what just happened to you. How bad is it?”

  “Just painful, just . . . confusing. It was as if I’d grabbed onto an ungrounded electric cable when I touched you. And I thought—I swear I heard half the world screaming in my head. Jesus . . . what happened?”

  “It’s over. It was more than two hundred and fifty years ago. Those voices are just ghosts. Just ghosts in my head.”

  “Harper!” He put his hands back on my arms and I let him. Without the knife in my grip, I thought it was as safe as it was ever likely to be. I still heard them, the voices of the two dozen men, women, and children, dead and crying out as they were murdered a second time, their spirits ripped from the vessel they’d poured into at the instant their lifeblood flowed out. I thought Quinton would not also hear them, now. They screamed their shock only in the memory forced into my mind by the knife and by a tale I’d heard two years before. Quinton wasn’t psychic, didn’t share my mind. Thank the gods.

  I caught him gently once more, putting my hands over his. “It’s all right. I’ve met them before. They’ll stop in a minute. It’s just a memory.”

  He was aghast. “But of what? Do you go through this all the time? Is this what it’s like?”

  I shook my head. “No. This is different. It’s . . . unusual. That knife, though. That’s what I need. I think that’s what the scarf was for—to wrap the knife so it could be handled by someone who could see what it had done.”

  Quinton glared down at the fallen blade, his head wreathed in furious red and orange spikes: he loathed it.

  “It’s just a thing, sweetheart. It’s not bad or dangerous on its own, but it can help me and I need it. There’s a paper bag in the glove compartment. Put the bones in that and then give me the scarf so I can pick up the knife.”