Underground (Greywalker, Book 3)

by Kat Richardson

  “He’ll avoid the open. He’ll dive for the sewer.”

  “He’ll be pushed toward the bay,” I gasped.

  “Right!” Quinton yelled, and jerked me in that direction, up Madison on the other side of the federal block, and then body checked me to the left onto Post. We pounded along for one block before pausing.

  “We lose him?” Quinton panted.

  I couldn’t hear the roaring of Sisiutl’s curses so well, but they weren’t gone and they seemed to be getting closer under the street. “No,” I gasped back.

  Quinton nodded and dragged me out of Post Alley and up Spring Street to the door under McCormick and Schmick’s side entrance without even checking for observers. He wrenched the faked lock open and shoved me through the door, pausing only long enough to close the door properly behind us before we were pelting down the ghost-thick passage under First Avenue to the last wall at Seneca—the wooden wall between Quinton’s lair and the rest of the underground.

  Quinton grabbed something from his pocket and pointed it at the wall, which twitched and sagged a little as we dashed closer. Quinton dug his hand into a crack in the wooden structure and heaved his back door open, throwing me through and following just as fast before slamming the door closed again and slapping at a few bolts and switches to secure it.

  My knee started to fold and Quinton slipped one arm around my waist, drawing me close as he leaned against the wall and stared at his security monitor.

  Both our chests were heaving as we panted for breath, trying to keep our noise low and not alert the monster if it should find the passage. Quinton kept me pulled to his chest and I noticed one or both of us were shaking. I kept my ears cocked and my sight tuned to the Grey—just in case.

  But the roaring and multilingual cursing had moved away and was fading toward the waters of Elliot Bay.

  “He’s not coming,” I panted.

  “Looks like you’re right,” Quinton replied, pulling his gaze away from the monitor. He leaned his head back against the wall, his chest still heaving. “I thought we were gonna buy it. Holy crap . . .” He looked back at my face and wrapped both arms around my shoulders like he didn’t plan to let go for a long time. “I thought he had you. I thought that thing was going to eat you. You kept pushing me out of the way and I thought you were too worried about saving me to get out of its way.”

  “You had to save me at the end. Let’s not get stupid here,” I admonished, at least as much to me as to him. I was trembling and it wasn’t all from flight adrenaline and imminent chill. Some people get a rush of excitement from surviving a near brush with death. I’d never been one before, but this time I was sweating and restless and throbbing with heat.

  Quinton’s eyes in the dim safety lights of his refuge looked smoky and hooded as he looked at me, still breathing too fast. “Oh, no. Let’s,” he said, and brought his mouth hard against mine.

  I clutched him and pushed into him, kissing back and feeling the quickening of desire between us and some tiny voice telling me to stop stop stop. . . .

  “Stop,” I panted, pushing back.

  “What?”

  I looked him in the eye, terrified I wouldn’t see the mate to my own emotion, and tried not to laugh with delight. “I want to be sure this time. . . .”

  “I was sure the minute I met you.”

  Catherine wheels of pink and gold sparks spun off of him, lighting my world with the glow of his affection and desire. I laughed and dropped my mouth back onto his, pulling and shoving at his wet clothes and warm body, wanting him against me and in me and right now, damn it!

  We staggered as my knees gave out and tumbled onto the narrow pallet of his bed under the stairs, tearing each other’s damp clothes off and scattering the pieces everywhere as we fought our way to bare flesh. We tangled together roughly at first in demanding sexual frenzy, relieved to be alive and frantic to be together. Crying out and laughing ran one into the other as we gentled, finally, into making love, coming to a shattering peak, and falling, finally, against each other, exhausted and wet.

  Then we rolled apart and blinked at each other, my sight filled with the afterimages of flashbulbs and fireflies. Before I could get cerebral about it, I stumbled off the bed and grabbed his clothes, throwing them to him. Then I started snatching and donning my own, grinning like a maniac, even as I fought to stay upright on my abused knee.

  “Let’s do that again. At my place,” I said.

  Quinton dropped the wet things I’d thrown on the floor and yanked on dry jeans from a pile by the bed. He grabbed me by the shoulders as I went by, a blaze of gold and pink around his sweat-gleaming body.

  “What?” he asked, shaking his head, bemused.

  I leaned over and kissed him. “I want to take you home and ravish you, idiot.”

  “When?”

  “Now!”

  I did not care that my clothes were damp, torn, and dirty, that I ached all over, or that the drive to West Seattle was long enough to restart the chill on my skin. Quinton didn’t let me keep the wet things on once we were inside my condo and I heartily approved of his methods of warming me back up. The electricity of our coupling lit my world in giddy swirls of hot pink and gold light until we both curled into my devastated bed, quivering with happy exhaustion that dropped us into deep, contented sleep.

  FIFTEEN

  I tend to wake up grumpy. I am not a morning person in spite of years of rolling out of bed early to hit the gym or practice hall or to pound out a few miles of calorie-burn on the street before breakfast. Tuesday, I woke up downright effervescent—even if I did have to ice my knee and take pills to relieve the swelling. I’d never “done” bubbly before that I could remember—not since being a little kid bouncing out of bed in anticipation of holidays and Christmas packages—not even with Will. Warm, mellow, glowing, yes, but not, as my uncle put it, “bright eyed and bushy tailed”—which I always thought sounded a lot like a squirrel, and considering my uncle’s .22-caliber reaction to squirrels, I found the phrase horrifyingly ironic.

  I let Quinton get up at his own speed while I started coffee and took a shower. Chaos had been irascible, dancing around in fury and then throwing herself on the floor like a bratty child pitching a fit. She was bouncing around, trying to get a bite of my bare toes, when Quinton emerged from the bathroom, pulling his shirt on over his shower-wet hair.

  “Hey there—” I started, but he put a finger to his lips and then leaned in to whisper in my ear.

  “Ignore me.”

  Puzzled, I bent down to pick up the ferret before she could get too badly underfoot. Chaos bit my thumb. “Ow!” I yelped. “What was that for?”

  Chaos made a high-pitched barking sound and fought to escape my hand. Quinton stopped rummaging in his backpack and turned an expression of mixed concern and curiosity on us. I loosened my hold on the ferret a little but didn’t let her go, and she settled down a bit, but still wanted out of my hand. I put her down again and she darted for her cage.

  I followed and bent down beside the cage to look in at her while Quinton began to walk around the room with some kind of electronic device in his hand.

  “Hey, ferret-butt,” I cajoled my pet. “What’s up with you?”

  She poked her head back out of her nest of old sweatshirts and heaved a ferret sigh. I reached out a finger and stroked her ears and she rubbed against my hand, but as soon as I tried to pick her up, she squirmed away.

  “What a contrarian you’re being today. Are you sick or something? You don’t look sick. . . .”

  Quinton put his things down and joined me on the floor, peering into the ferret’s cage. “How old is she?”

  “Six.”

  “Huh. That’s getting kind of old for a ferret. Maybe she needs a checkup.”

  “She’s due for shots in a couple of weeks. If she keeps acting up, I may take her in early,” I said. Then I looked him over and asked, “You done with whatever you were up to?”

  “Yup. No bugs in here,” he a
nswered, keeping his voice low. “There’s always a possibility of passive bugging through the phones, tapping at the central station, or using parabolic devices at a distance, but they’re a pain, so it looks like Fern’s either not too interested in your home life or she’s on very short rations. We should check your office, too. Has your alarm called the cell phone since she turned up?”

  “Oh, damn it—my cell phone!”

  I got up and found my purse and dug for the phone, tossing other things out as I hunted: keys, feather, spare pistol clip, wallet. . . .

  Quinton knelt down in front of me and picked up the feather, and then offered it from his kneeling position with teasing reverence. “Your spear, m’lady zombie-slayer.”

  I laughed and he grinned, encircled instantly in little pink and gold sparks with the feel of champagne bubbles as they crackled through the air. Wow, pink sparks . . . My face felt hot and my fingertips were trembling from the sudden flush of giddiness.

  I turned away, putting the feather back in the bag, and tried to resume my hunt for the phone, but Quinton wasn’t having it. He stood up behind me and touched my shoulders very lightly.

  “Harper. I don’t want to make you nervous. Last night was wonderful—well, after the sheer terror—but it doesn’t have to mean—”

  “Shut up,” I suggested. “Don’t say it doesn’t have to mean anything. ” I turned around and faced him, standing very close, and the small difference in our height in bare feet let me look hard into his eyes without having to tilt my head down much. “I didn’t drag you into my bed just because I was scared or excited about being alive or . . . rebounding or whatever. I like you. I trust you—with my life. And I don’t have to lie to you. I love being with someone who knows! I think it’s better than the sex—which was damned fine.”

  He started to smile, but it kept on spreading wider until he grinned and laughed and gave me a fast kiss on the lips. I thought my blush would set us both on fire and had to look back down at my purse and make busy to keep from babbling like a fool.

  I got the phone out—still sealed in its crushed can. Quinton put his hands over mine, stopping me from unpackaging the phone.

  “Hang on. As soon as the battery is back in, the phone can be tracked and used as a bug. Right now, you’re the only lead to me and the cell phone is the best lead to you. Fern’s friends will definitely be monitoring it for her. For now, let’s assume the office is bugged until we can check the phone from someplace other than here.”

  I bit my lip and looked at him, taking a long, bracing breath before I said, “I think I need to know a little more about Fern Laguire’s motives. You’ve said several things that make me think this is personal between you two.”

  “Oh, it’s personal,” he replied, nodding, the colors around him fading down to a constrained amber glow, “in an impersonal sort of way.” His tone verged on amused. “We only met a handful of times, but I know her pretty well by observation—better than she does me—and she hates me. I am the huge black blot on Fern’s otherwise stellar career. I was on loan from another agency to do some work for Fern’s group at the NSA—my previous supervisor wanted to hide the embarrassing evidence of the project I’d been working on once it blew up. I had the right mix of odd skills, so they seconded me to Laguire’s group. The NSA’s nickname around Fort Meade is ‘Never Say Anything.’ It’s a great place to hide someone with tech skills from prying investigators.” Quinton paused and looked around. “This is going to take a while. Let’s sit down.”

  We parked ourselves on the sofa, leaning into opposite corners so we could see each other without one of us having to resort to sitting on my coffee table.

  “All right,” Quinton resumed. “I ended up at Fort Meade because the guys I had been working for were an embarrassment—it was their project that first got me started looking at the cracks in reality—and the agency wanted to keep it quiet, but I was already starting to think I was in the wrong working world. I’m just not of the mind they are—well, you know that. But working for Fern Laguire was not the best place to nurture a sense of the rightness of big central government and its actions.

  “You know about the NSA . . . ?”

  I nodded. “Crypto specialists, intelligence gathering by electronic eavesdropping. Supposedly, they don’t work on domestic systems or run covert ops.”

  Quinton snorted. “Yeah, and if you believe that there’s a pointy leftover from the World’s Fair up in Queen Anne I’d like to sell you. Mathematicians and their algorithms don’t care about political boundaries. The crypto-geeks at the server farms of Fort Meade do it because they love the game—the intellectual challenge of breaking the system—and very few of them know the source or final disposition of the intelligence they decode. But I did and so does Fern.

  “I had an attack of conscience over it and I wanted out. But there was no way Fern would let me go, because her idea of freedom and mine were not even in the same philosophical universe.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You’re not going to say they retire people to six-foot dirt apartments, are you? Because I have a hard time buying that.”

  Quinton shook his head. “No. Fern’s not homicidal as far as I know, but retiring from intelligence or any classified service comes with monitors and strings. They don’t just let you walk out and go your way and that’s what I craved. Fern didn’t want to let me go at all and she’s very good at finding ways to make people stay. It’s a big key to her success within the agency—people work for Fern until they drop. But I left. I didn’t say I was going, because I knew how she worked. I just made myself disappear, in spite of their security measures, and they didn’t know how. I think they still don’t. That alone must just boil Fern’s brain, but that I slipped the chain completely is even worse. I proved her fallible. She’s never going to forgive me. If she can get me back, then she saves face—which is all-important to Fern at this stage in the game. She’s nearing retirement and she has to be totally nonstick armored on her way out the door or she’ll get the same treatment she’s given plenty of others.”

  “Ugh,” I said with a shudder. “Sounds like she wouldn’t mind if you did get killed.”

  Quinton shrugged. “So long as she could show I’d never compromised her, she’d be good with it.”

  “I wonder if she could be persuaded that she’s hunting for a dead man. . . .”

  “It’s a remote possibility I could switch records with one of the missing undergrounders—I know most of them well enough to get at the right records—but she’d never buy it without a body.”

  “And you don’t really match up to any of the bodies that have turned up, so far.”

  “True. Nice thought though—never had a woman offer to kill me off before.”

  “Well . . . they say friends help you move and good friends help you move bodies. Just a different kind of body.”

  That got a laugh out of him, which pulled a smile from me, in spite of the subject matter. He sobered and looked at me with a tinge of blue in his energy corona.

  “Harper, you don’t have to be in the crush between me and Fern Laguire. You can roll over on me. I’d only ask that you tell me ahead of time, so I have a head start on her. I can disappear again and she’d leave you alone.”

  I gave my head an adamant shake. “No way. I’m sick of being left. I’m not throwing you to the dogs like a bone to save my own skin. I wouldn’t even if— And I need your help, because I’m not going to abandon the dead, either,” I added, letting my eyes turn aside as I felt a hot blush on my cheeks.

  “Umm . . . yeah,” Quinton said, looking pleased before his expression sobered with the subject. “There’s still our three-faced friend in the sewer,” he added with a shudder.

  “Not to mention Detective Solis—so long as we’re on the topic of people of interest.”