Downpour

by Kat Richardson

  I couldn’t see into the building, the glass walls being steamed with moisture, but I could see the silhouette of a human shape moving around inside.

  I patted Ridenour on the shoulder and pointed him toward the shadow.

  “Do you think that’s Willow?” I whispered.

  “Hard to say.”

  He sized me up again before he said, “I feel funny asking, but would you head down there first? I’ll move around to come from the blind spot on the left of the door. Make all the noise you like. I’m thinking she’ll concentrate on you and maybe even come outside to see what you want. Then I can catch her from behind.”

  I shrugged. “It’s worth a try. If she doesn’t come out, I’ll try going in. If I don’t come back out in ten minutes, you can assume Willow’s still in there with me and make your move.”

  “I’m beginning to believe that ‘crazy’ thing,” Ridenour muttered as I started off to work my way around to the tower and walk along the exposed ground to the greenhouse. I didn’t have a pack and I didn’t look like a hiker, but I figured that anyone really suspicious wasn’t going to care. If Willow bolted, we’d have to give chase, but I thought I might be able to get inside and talk to her before Ridenour came barging in like the cavalry. Either way, I didn’t think the risk to me was that great—I was just a civilian getting into as much trouble as she was by breaking and entering the greenhouse.

  The bare, scraped rock of the mountaintop was slippery wherever there wasn’t a patch of the stubborn, nubbly ground cover that had made a few inroads on the surface chinks and pits. I had to watch where I put my feet, trying to step on the hardy little plants only enough to keep my footing as a chilly breeze rushed over the mountaintop. I hoped the greenery wasn’t some rare species of something Ridenour would have to cite me for trampling. I could see him from the corner of my eye, edging around to his own position until he disappeared behind the legs of the tower. I kept going for the door, making a little ordinary noise and swearing under my breath—as you do when you’re out walking on the top of a mountain and thinking your feet are going to slide out from under you any second.

  My angle on the greenhouse didn’t give me a view inside now, but I could see something ripple through the Grey, like the visual representation of a single sonar ping across a dead sea. Willow—or whoever was inside—had noticed me. It would have been hard not to. No one came out to evaluate me, so I stumbled up to the door and pulled on the handle.

  The door opened, making only a tiny squeak as the long rubber flap over the hinge rubbed against the glass wall beside it. The warmth of the greenhouse and the smell of mulch and cedar trees made me shiver with pleasure. I hadn’t realized how cold my walk had been until I was inside again. I rubbed my hands together and cast a glance into the Grey, looking for Willow or whoever was lurking in the greenhouse with me.

  The power lines of the Grey seemed distant here, deep in the strata of rock and dirt between me and the ocean that looked like a dark blue ink stain spreading to my right as far as I could see. But the zipping, whirring bits of energy I’d seen down closer to the lake were here, if a bit less active and numerous. In the silver mist of the Grey, a whirling column of colored threads and spinning lights, wound in a whiff of scent like incense and hot brass, hovered near the back corner of the greenhouse. It was dense enough to cast a sort of shadow onto the rolling fog of the world. “Get out,” it said.

  I adjusted my view and turned my head to look toward the corporeal source of the voice. The young woman occupying the swirling cloud of energy had to be Willow Leung. Her skin was much paler than her sister’s and she was distinctly more Asian in appearance. She also looked a lot younger—mid-twenties—and I wondered about the differences, but not for long. She moved toward me with a swift gliding motion, dodging the long tables full of seedlings like a feather on an updraft, her loose-fitting dress fluttering behind. The balls of energy around her flushed blue and green and glowed brighter as she started to thrust her arms out at me.

  I ducked and swung around under Willow, pushing on her arms so I came up behind her. She spun to face me again so fast I was barely straight when she glared up at me. I had a good six inches on her as she dug her bare feet into the ground to hold her balance. “You must be Willow,” I said before she could make another gesture.

  Even with her clothes on, she was still easy to connect to the quickmoving woman I’d seen trying to snatch a ghost on the highway with Jin a few nights earlier. The round little wads of energy were exactly the same. I wondered if she always went barefoot, or if she had just dropped her shoes someplace in the greenhouse for the pleasure of digging her toes into the warm, feathery cedar mulch on the floor.

  She reared back a bit and tilted her head to look at me, her loose ponytail of long black hair brushing at the nearest tiny treetops. I imagined she was very rarely surprised, but she widened her eyes and raised her eyebrows as if she were. “Who are you?” she asked.

  I gave her a thin smile, but not my name. “Your dad asked me to come find out who killed him. Your sister wants me to run the rest of you wizards and sorcerers out of town. While I can get behind that idea, I’m not sure I want to do it her way. So I guess that makes me the monkey wrench in the works.”

  While I’d been talking, I could see the glowing orbs of energy brightening; Willow was gathering power to do something. I wasn’t ready for her to leave, so I reached out and scooped the nearest energy ball out of the air, closing my fist over it. It felt hard as a knot of rope and it hurt like hell; I may have contained it, but it hadn’t gone out like a candle flame deprived of air.

  Willow took a hasty step back from me, taking the rest of her glowing energy globes out of my immediate reach. “That’s a nice trick. What do you do for an encore?”

  “I break things.”

  She narrowed her gaze. “I’m not that easy to break.”

  “Maybe it’s not you I’m interested in breaking. See, I’m a stranger in town, and though I’m not sure of all the rules or all the players, I can see things aren’t as they ought to be. . . .”

  “So, you won’t kill me if I pay you better than Jewel?”

  I shook my head. “You have the wrong impression. I’m not here to kill anyone. I’m just not quite sure which bit of trash needs to be thrown out to make this place clean again. I’m still trying to figure out how the system works, though I think I have a loose idea.” The way she’d reacted to losing one of the spheres of energy had given me a clue: Although there were huge lines of power in the area, they were too deep for anyone on the surface to use easily—or almost anyone, I amended, thinking of the strange lines flowing out of the lake at Fairholm and taking on weird shapes near Sol Duc. That should have made the lakes the only source of power, and that should have been limited and difficult to draw on without care and effort. But something had happened: Somehow, the magic had gone wild and rambled loose like Saint Elmo’s fire, seeping up to the surface like the tears of the lightning fish. The power lines still burned me when I touched them, just as her energy ball had, so my guess was that the orbs were extensions or encapsulations expelled from the grid. Of course, I still didn’t understand what was going on at the hot springs, but it had to be related.

  Willow pushed her face toward me, still keeping her body and the gathered energy globes back. “There is no system. Once upon a time, there was order. But when I was a girl, something broke. I didn’t break it,” she hastened to add, “but I’m not going to let a gift go to waste, nor am I willing to play handmaiden to one of the cardinals. And no one else would, either. If they weren’t all such pigs, we could get along, but some people are greedy. Four parts would do—one better still, as it used to be—but no one is going to volunteer to give up the power. So I do what I want, and I do what I must to keep myself out from under my sister’s heel. Or anyone else’s thumb. You really should think twice about taking her money.”

  “I already have. And I’m still thinking. I’d rather straighten this mes
s out than make a new one.”

  “Then you’ll have to restore the quarters. Or the center. And good luck with that.”

  Outside I could hear a commotion and angry voices. Willow turned her head toward the sound, letting one of the balls of energy spin away through the wall, trailing an unraveling skein of light behind it.

  “I’d bet that’s Strother,” I said.

  Willow gave me a sharp look from the corner of her eye. “Alan Strother?”

  I nodded. “Probably talking to Ridenour. You might consider running right about now.”

  She flashed a tiny, mean smile and whipped one of the glowing spheres of energy toward me. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  I ducked the orb and Willow vaulted over me with a diving roll that slammed the door open.

  Someone shouted. Shots rang off the hard peak of the mountain and a few shattered the glass near me. I spun and bolted for the door, too.

  “Hey! Hey, you idiots! I’m still in here!” I yelled, dashing after Willow.

  Strother and Ridenour were both too far back to get a good line of fire at the fleeing Willow, but that wasn’t stopping them from shooting at her as they ran forward to draw a better bead on her.

  Running while shooting is stupid. You can’t get a decent sight picture, and unless you’re a damned good instinct shooter and your target does just what you expect, you stand no chance of hitting them except by pure luck. Ridenour had finally stopped and braced himself to take a better shot. So I rammed a shoulder into him and took us both down in a heap.

  Willow zigzagged across the last of the open space and dove down into a copse of trees and bracken that seemed to close behind her like a door in a wall. I could hear her tumbling and scrambling down the slope, gaining distance vertically as she went. I tried to run forward and get a look to see if she was somehow flying or falling majestically downward like an actor in a Hong Kong fantasy film, but I was too tangled up with Ridenour. The plants that Willow had passed over so lightly tangled our feet and tripped us as we scurried to the edge of the cliff. By the time any of us got to it, there was nothing to see but the waving of branches in Willow’s wake. Only the startled scream of a mountain lion halfway down the slope gave us any idea where she was.

  “I hope the damn cat eats her,” Ridenour muttered. Then he turned and glared at me. “What the hell were you doing in there? Why’d she bolt off like that? Did you tell her we were out here?”

  I gave him an incredulous stare. “You must be kidding. You two are about as quiet as a band of five-year-olds with a set of cookware and metal spoons. Next time you open up shooting, make sure there’s no one in the way. One of you guys nearly shot me! What the hell!”

  I wasn’t quite as upset as I sounded, but I really disliked the idea of getting shot again. And I was puzzled by the gunfire to begin with. Why had they opened fire on Willow? So far as I knew, neither had any reason to.

  They both had the grace to look sheepish. I took a couple of deep breaths and closed my eyes for a moment before I glanced back at the greenhouse. “Maybe we should see if we can figure out what Willow wanted up here,” I suggested.

  Strother shrugged, but Ridenour lit up and hurried toward the greenhouse door to investigate. We all trooped inside with Ridenour in the lead.

  It took a while to figure it out, but eventually Ridenour found a pot that had been ruthlessly plundered, the small, shrubby plant within ripped in half and lying dry and limp on top of the soil. Strother and I both gave him curious looks.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Kinnikinnik. It’s a ground-hugging evergreen shrub. It grows pretty quick and they use it for securing soil in slide areas or where they’ve had to replant a hillside due to construction or damage. The natives used to smoke the leaves mixed in with some other stuff such as willow bark and blackberry. Some people say it gives you visions. While I can understand being kind of fascinated by this stuff when you’re a kid, it’s not something a grown woman should be fooling with.”

  “Is it dangerous?” I asked.

  “Not unless you have asthma. It’s also called bearberry because the bears love the little red fruit it puts out in early spring. But I can’t imagine why anyone’d smoke the damned stuff these days unless they were so broke they couldn’t afford a pack of cigarettes.”

  Strother made a noise through his nose. “With the way the economy is, plenty of people can’t afford a pack of smokes. But I can’t see why they’d come up here to steal this stuff.”

  “Does Willow smoke?” I asked.

  The men glanced at each other, as if each sought the answer in the other’s face. “Probably not tobacco . . .” Ridenour said.

  Strother’s face hardened a moment as he frowned at the ranger. Then he shook his head. “No idea. But who knows what habits she might have picked up, living rough out here?”

  I suspected there was something else to it. The odor around her hadn’t been that of a smoker of any kind and she hadn’t taken a lot of the plant—only about half the small growth from the planter, which would have fit nicely in her pocket. I didn’t think she was stealing it to ease a nicotine fit. Though why steal it at all when it literally grew wild? I guessed I’d have to find her again and ask her.

  “Does anything else look tampered with?” I asked, but neither Ridenour nor Strother could see anything more that had been disturbed.

  I heaved a sigh and headed for the door, buttoning up my coat. “Then I guess we’re done here. I’m going to walk down and see if I can pick out Willow’s path. If I can figure out where she went, maybe we can find her again.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Ridenour said. “After all, you’re no woodsman and you don’t know your way around the area.”

  I gave him a hard look and leaned into it through the Grey. “You need to drive back down to the bottom and start at that end. There are two trucks here and I can’t drive either of them, since they’re official vehicles. And we need to start while the sun’s still up. I don’t want to be scrambling down that trail in the dark.”

  Both men looked at me as if I’d gone insane. They argued with me for a while, but I finally talked them into heading down the mountain on their own before we lost any more light. I had a gun and some brains; if they gave me my purse, I’d also have my flashlight and other useful things. I was the obvious choice to follow the trail down since I didn’t have to drive.

  And I wanted to get a better idea of how Willow had made it down the mountain. If I was lucky, I’d be able to see where she’d headed long before I got there—or either of the men did.

  EIGHTEEN

  I wasn’t halfway down when I wished I’d ridden back to the lake instead of hiking by myself. Surely I could have figured out where Willow was headed without having to stumble along in the brush.... There was a trail, but it was steep and treacherous with loose scree. I couldn’t see where I was headed half the time and only the fading glimmer of Willow’s energetic trail told me I was on the right path. Here and there, I lost it and had to take a recon in the Grey to find the steadily fading sign of her passage—a hint of dimming colors on the silver mist. It was also growing dark a lot faster than I’d expected and I realized I’d lost track of time. It was past noon and the winter sun was heading for the notch in the mountains before it sank into the sea. Yet another meal missed . . . For a moment, I thought I should have started carrying protein bars or some kind of snacks in my bag. Then I remembered the bears and cougars prowling in the hills and was glad I hadn’t.

  I continued, hoping I would make it to the populated levels soon. After a while, I came around a switchback on the trail and suddenly had a view toward the lake. I was lower than I’d thought, with maybe thirty feet of elevation yet to lose before I’d be down on the dirt road that connected the houses and campgrounds along the northwestern shore with Fairholm on the far west and Piedmont on the north.

  The trail had brought me out closer to the Piedmont end, and I found myself looking down toward the hook
at the lake’s most northern end on my left and a deep, round miniature bay on my right. A delicate-looking bridge crossed the tiny bay from arm to arm. A rambling log building stood just northwest of it. I stared at the odd hole in the shoreline, thinking I knew something about it, but not quite bringing it to mind. I started walking again, knowing the information was more likely to pop into the front of my head if I didn’t work so hard at it. With only four switchbacks to go, the information came: The hole must be Devil’s Punch Bowl.

  Strother had said Costigan—no fan of the Newmans—lived there. I wondered if he was a friend of Willow’s, since the trail she’d taken down the mountain seemed to end just a quarter mile from his house. And did he have anything to do with the lurching thing that had come up from the lake a week ago while I’d watched at a distance? I’d have been willing to bet he did. That made him the fourth magic flinger I’d found around the lake—if I counted whoever was making the Grey do strange things near the hot springs.

  I stopped and thought about the location. Jewel’s house lay in the mouth of the dragon-shaped lake, to the east and slightly north, with Lake Sutherland farther east behind it. Turning, I could see Fairholm down to the extreme west and a couple of miles south of Devil’s Punch Bowl. The lake wasn’t actually very long from north to south and had, in effect, two north shores, the top of the dragon’s head being the more northern and eastern shore where I’d found Leung’s ghost the first time; and the dragon’s back stretching nearly level from just below my position at the back of the dragon’s head to Fairholm at the tip of the dragon’s tail on the extreme west. The only landmark on the south shore—which wasn’t very far south—was Barnes Point, where the Lake Crescent Lodge and Storm King ranger station sat, the rest of the southern shore—the dragon’s belly—being steep and mostly barren next to Highway 101 all the way to Fairholm. The bright lines that ran toward Sol Duc were barely threads seen from here, but I could tell they were pointing south, exactly as I’d expected.