Carlos frowned like storm clouds. “Is there more?”
“I’ve seen those threads around a few other places lately. The soft ones. At the site of a recently dead body and hanging on another. Neither of those bodies stood up.”
Carlos glowered as he thought. Cameron looked at me and shrugged, waiting, but still unearthly pale, even for a vampire.
“Were the soft threads in the same shape?” Carlos asked. “Like a net, as you said.”
“No. The threads were just there.”
“Ah. An unusual creation. Not truly a zombie, but the term will do, for now. Your threads trapped the spirit in the flesh so it could not rest.”
“Not my threads,” I objected, “and how do you know it’s not a regular zombie—if there is such a thing?”
Carlos rumbled a chuckle and sat back. “There are several kinds. True zombies are forced into form—spirit forced into dead flesh—but their binding is energetic. This binding you describe wasn’t. Only because the body was decayed were you able to remove the animating spirit from the shell of flesh. You destroyed the net that bound the body together when you reached into the body. So long as the body retained the shape of life, the spirit in the flesh could not leave. The soft material of the net is the casting of some creature that captured and killed the man.”
“So it’s a spell of some kind?”
“No, it’s a remnant, like a spider’s silk that wraps a fly. It has no energy of its own and draws none. It is dead material, not living magic. A true zombie can be bound only in a recently dead body.”
Carlos’s voice wove a dim image before me of a dark man kneeling in a cemetery, muttering words that shook him with bleak magic and brought corpses stumbling to their feet from shattered crypts and desecrated graves. I had to shake myself free of an uncanny lethargy as he spoke, as if I might fall asleep and tumble into one of the empty graves myself. I caught myself and shivered.
Carlos continued. “Were the body so decayed, it should have fallen apart on its own. The casting held it, otherwise you would not have had so easy a time removing the energy forms but would have had to rend the body apart.” Carlos frowned again and the room seemed to grow dimmer. “The second spirit, though—that disturbs me. It should not happen. There is a third party using this for their own ends.”
I shook off the last of my daze. “Using what to their ends?” I asked. “I’m not sure what’s going on.”
“These walking dead, these strands of material come from some magical creature that kills men. I don’t know what its purpose is and can’t be sure that the castings don’t linger past its own death. If they do, then whatever zombies are created will remain even after the creature is destroyed.”
“But there won’t be more zombies without this . . . thing making them?”
“Correct. At least not this kind of zombie. And those that remain must be destroyed as you did this one—by removing the energy form trapped within the body by the threads. Some spirits may flee on their own once the net of the casting is destroyed, but that can’t be certain. Removing the energy strand is the only sure way.”
I shuddered and Cameron looked grim.
Carlos smiled a little. “It is magical entanglement. You know that the shapes of magic tend to linger,” he said. “Destroying them requires dismantling their lingering shape. Were it a necromantic zombie, or a vampiric turning gone wrong, the case would be different. But this is neither of those. It seems to be random. The creature does not do it deliberately, consistently, or both your other bodies would have risen also.”
“Then I suppose I’m grateful for that or the city might have more than cold and power outages to worry about. There’ve been at least four deaths and possibly more among the homeless in Pioneer Square. Do you have any idea what the creature is that’s killing people and leaving these threads?”
“No.”
“Could it have been the creature that brought me the zombie? He—it was a sort of hairy man.”
“A shaggyman, I suspect.”
“What’s a shaggyman?”
He flicked his hand dismissively. “They are the old people— the creatures in between the native animal people of legend and the living people of the normal world. The legends of Sasquatch are tales of a giant among the shaggymen. They aren’t very intelligent or dangerous.”
“That’s bull. The first time I met one it wanted to make me ‘a little more dead’ because Wygan told it to.”
That obviously intrigued Carlos and I regretted mentioning Wygan or the shaggyman. “Did Wygan send it this time?”
“No. The shaggyman seemed to be on the outs with Wygan for not harming me the first time. It was scarred and it said I owed it for those scars, which it apparently got from Wygan. Destroying the zombie was what it wanted as recompense.”
Cameron leaned forward, looking worried. “You haven’t seen any other . . . weird things, have you?”
“What sort of weird things?” I asked back. “Aside from vampires and zombies and ghosts and shaggymen.”
“Not—” Carlos shot him a warning glance, but Cam went on. “Not us. Other creatures that prey on men . . . and other things.”
“Are you saying there’s something that eats vampires out there?” That idea sent my stomach to the floor in a rush. I didn’t want to find out what was worse than Wygan and Carlos. “What? Werewolves? Demons from hell? How much worse does this get?”
Carlos shook his head and hushed Cameron with another glower. Then he turned back to me. “You have nothing to fear from the shaggyman. It did not succeed in harming you,” he reminded me. “And they cannot wield things like the thread you describe. It brought the zombie to you for dissolution. It could not have made it, but it wanted to free the spirit. If it was, indeed, one of the natives, the shaggyman would have felt pain over the spirit’s plight, since the two have long been bound together here. Since the very beginning.”
“That doesn’t help me with the problem of zombies and dead homeless people who might or might not be getting chewed on by some kind of giant, man-eating, paranormal spider,” I sputtered. Christ, there really was a monster in the sewer! “I can’t let it go on!”
“Agreed. You cannot. But we are not the ones to help you,” Carlos stated. He seemed anxious to cut the conversation short, which struck me as sinister. Carlos was not easy to disturb or discomfit, and if he didn’t want to talk he had no compunction to find an excuse. But now he stood and made it plain that he intended to leave. “This is not a necromantic matter, nor does it belong to the realm of vampires. I do not know what creature is causing this, nor how it makes its web nor why it casts it as it does. It falls to you to discover it and to destroy it.”
He walked past me and left the den, heading for the exit. Cameron started to follow him.
“What the hell, Cameron?” I asked.
He stopped and glanced down at me. “I’m sorry, Harper. There’s literally no power we can use on this . . . whatever it is. It’s not even making enough of a stir in the Grey to bother any of us. We’ve got no power other than the physical in this situation, and that won’t help you now. If you find this thing and need some muscle, that’s another story, but this isn’t something we’re any help on.”
“What are you afraid of ? I can’t believe you’re scared.”
“I can’t tell you. But it’s not your monster—whatever that is. Believe me. And don’t ask about the . . . others. Please. Carlos is going to make me hurt for that one as it is, and you really truly don’t want to know more.”
Cameron slipped past and followed his master.
Dumbfounded, I sat and stared at the untouched wine and the spilled martini. I bolted my whiskey and left, knowing I would never catch them. Even if there was more they could tell me, they wouldn’t, and it was pointless to waste what remained of my evening in that hope.
But what in hell or out of it had made them clam up? I sent silent prayers to any god who might listen that I wouldn’t regret the lack
of that knowledge.
NINE
I don’t get hysterical at the sight of a spider, but I admit, even the hint of something arachnoid prowling the tunnels under Pioneer Square and snaring its victims like flies sent a frisson skittering down my spine. Carlos hadn’t confirmed the idea of a monstrous spider, but the image was strong in my mind.
I cursed Edward for planting the idea in my mind, but I still wanted to ask a few questions of Quinton. He’d said enough about his reasons for going underground that my sudden suspicions of him earlier had been allayed, but Edward’s hints bugged me. I thought Edward was just throwing shadows, but I needed to know for sure. And it wasn’t yet so late that Quinton would be unavailable.
Not knowing where he might be, I paged him and he called me back as I was returning the Rover to its customary slot in the “sinking ship”—the tilted triangular parking structure across the street from my office building, which reared from the block like the prow of a doomed liner.
“Hi, Harper. What’s up?”
“I’m done with Edward—and Carlos and Cameron, too. I need to talk to you.”
“I’m at the Double Header with Rosa and Tall Grass—he’s a bit freaked about Jenny. . . .” He paused. “Where should I meet you?”
“Not a bar.”
“Only place still open is Starbucks. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I doubted the conversation would go well, but it wouldn’t be any better in private and at least I’d have a hot drink. I trudged down the street to the coffeehouse and ordered a very large drip coffee “with room” for cream. You have to be specific, or the baristas fill the cup to the rim with the crude oil they call coffee. I’d just gotten my drink doctored with cream and sugar when Quinton joined me.
“Do you want coffee?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“It’s cold outside.”
He blinked at me. “Yeah, it’s twenty degrees out there.”
“Do you want to talk about this business in here?” I tipped my head toward one of the patrons reading a newspaper in the front window corner. To my view he was cloaked in a swirl of blackness, and I knew he was a vampire without even seeing the fangs. “Some people have friends everywhere.”
He sighed and shrugged. “OK, I’ll get some coffee and we’ll go to your office.”
My turn to shrug. I waited while he collected a cup of something hot and then we crunched along the frosty sidewalk to my office building. I had to use my key on the outer door since none of the ground floor businesses were open after six. As I unlocked, I noticed that the shadows nearby moved and reshaped themselves around furtive watchers. It appeared that Edward was keeping an eye on me, though it seemed he didn’t realize I could see his minions even when they thought they were hidden.
I’d assumed all vampires understood the Grey at least as well as I did—certainly Carlos and Wygan seemed to know a lot more— but it occurred to me that Cameron had once been surprised he was unable to hide from me by sliding into the Grey. Maybe most vampires didn’t know what I did. . . . It was an interesting thought and it distracted me enough that Quinton had to elbow me and remind me to get inside out of the cold. I locked the door behind us and we went upstairs to my office.
It was chilly, but the space was small and would warm up quickly enough. I put my coffee on the desk and sat down behind it while Quinton took the better of the two client chairs and leaned back in it with his steaming cup cradled in both hands. He looked tired, the aura around him reduced to a small blue glow. I studied him for a few moments, wondering.
He returned a bland gaze and said nothing. Quinton was always good at silence.
Well, I thought, might as well get it over with. “Are you a werewolf, Quinton?”
He snorted a laugh, frowning at the same time. “No! Werewolves don’t exist. What would give you that idea?”
I ticked them off on my fingers. “Vampires, ghosts, monsters in the sewer, why not werewolves, too? And the mutual dislike between you and Edward—who refers to you as a ‘lone wolf ’ and warns me to check into your ‘oddities.’”
He sipped his coffee and remained reclined in the chair. “You’ve been reading too many bad horror novels. Or playing dumb-ass RPGs if you buy the idea of a deep-seated, traditional animosity between vampires and werewolves. It’s fantasy. Werewolves don’t exist,” he repeated.
“So you say, but a year ago I’d have said ghosts and vampires didn’t exist, either. Do you have proof?”
“I have logic. And I’ve never found any evidence of real lycanthropy. Vampires, magic . . . yeah. Weres? No. It’s not possible. At least I think not, from observation. Maybe I missed something, but so far, no evidence to the contrary.”
I picked up my own coffee. “OK, then. Elucidate.”
“All right. Everything I’ve seen tells me that magic tends to respect the laws of physics—kind of freaky physics, but lawful physics. For total form-shifting to happen in less than, say, a couple of days, max, it would have to break conservation of mass, conservation of energy, and the laws of thermodynamics at the very least. If shape-shifting does exist, then it’s an illusion, not an actual form change—unless it happens very slowly, which doesn’t seem to be the case. If someone were to change from human to wolf, he’d have to make a whole lot of physical changes very rapidly, shedding or gaining mass and using up a ton of energy. There just isn’t enough elasticity in the system to allow it—he’d burst into flames from the heat of the energetic change alone.
“I’ve never burst into flame that I’m aware of. Besides, you’ve been out with me plenty of times when the moon was full and I don’t even get hairy palms. QED, not a werewolf.”
He drank more coffee and gave me his bland look again.
I had to chuckle at the perverse sanity of it—and at Quinton’s expression. There was a hint of merriment in his eyes that made me feel a touch foolish but not enough to mind. It was kind of sweet, in a way, to be gently teased after the emotional whirlwind of my failed love affair. I smiled a little as I asked, “All right, but why does Edward call you the lone wolf?”
Quinton shrugged. “You’re the one who calls him the leader of the pack. Early on he discovered I was useful, but Edward doesn’t like contractors. If you’re not one of his kind, he prefers you to be either cattle or chattel, and I won’t play that game. I’m the stranger with teeth who won’t roll over and show my belly. Since I know how to hurt him, he can’t come at me directly. So he makes a show of being unworried and immune. It raises his stock with the rest of the pack and we have a sort of uneasy truce. That doesn’t stop him from making attempts to control me, and he’s not above making trouble for me if it’s not out of his way—which is what he’s doing with you. His time scale is much longer than mine, so he doesn’t try very often, but he does try.”
“He’s persistent,” I agreed.
“Yeah.” He paused and looked at me, a half smile turning into a small, thoughtful frown. “So what about you? He’d consider you a useful piece to control. How do you keep him at bay?”
“Mostly by seeing the traps ahead of time. So far, he’s been predictable, but he’ll try harder eventually. He tried tonight and I backed him off, but it was the last card I had to play. Next time will be worse unless I learn some new tricks. It’s possible I know things about the way magic works that he doesn’t, but I’m not sure yet.”
His gaze on me was quizzical. “I know you know things—see things—I don’t, but I don’t have any idea what your life is like, how you manage this knowledge. It must be strange.”
I nodded. “It’s not easy to explain. Ben gave me a theory once, but it’s not entirely correct. But the upshot is I don’t just see ghosts, I interact with them. I see magic—the sort of energetic stuff magic comes from. . . .” I found myself unable to go further with that thought. Someday I’d figure out why. I shook my head, frustrated, but resigned for now. “Anyhow. There’s a lot of freaky between the here and the there and I see most of it.
I can even walk around in it and do a few things with it, but it’s not as impressive as it sounds.”
Underground (Greywalker, Book 3) Page 14
