We huddled in the dark together before the stove with blankets around our shoulders and sock-clad feet propped on a stool just out of scorching range. A couple of fat little candles provided enough light to see, but we hoped not enough to attract attention if a vagrant flicker fell through the storm shutters and onto the water outside. It was still too tense and soggy to be romantic, but the scene had potential.
“So,” I started, teasing, “where’s the ferret?”
“I left her with Brian Danziger. Oh, that reminds me: Ben gave me something for you.” He scrabbled around in his backpack and handed me a small package swaddled in plastic wrap—not quite what I’d had in mind.... “I guess he was expecting you to come by on Monday, so when I showed up this morning, he gave it to me. Did he tell you about the book?”
I’d forgotten completely to go visit the Danzigers. I winced in shame. “Book?” I looked at the package—it wasn’t big enough for a paperback.... “No.”
“That’s not the book. He’s writing a book. Ben is.”
“Yes, I know—a paranormal field guide. He’s been working on it for a while.”
“He got a publication deal. Some small press, but they’re excited. Mara’s taking a sabbatical at the end of the quarter and they’re going to Europe and Asia for a year to finish up some research for it. She’s going to write something about sacred rocks while they’re out—petroglyphs and dolmens . . . I think.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling odd. I’d never thought about the book seriously or how it might change their lives—and mine. The Danzigers had been my lifeline through the Grey so many times that I couldn’t imagine my life without them nearby. That was silly and selfish of me, and I didn’t realize how much I’d taken them for granted—I’d taken most of my small number of friends for granted, really. . . . I rubbed the plastic-covered packet in my hand and began to unwrap it. “So . . . what’s this?”
Quinton sat back down and snuggled into the blanket beside me, but his body was tense. Even in the dim light from a handful of candles, I didn’t have to look at his aura to know he was nervous about something. “Ben said it’s a spell to banish demons. Or a demon—I’m kind of unclear on how many. . . .”
It wasn’t demons that worried Quinton, though. I suspected he didn’t want to talk about why he was really here and why he’d cut his hair, at least not yet. I gave him some time while I removed the plastic and an inner wrapper of brown paper to reveal an intricately folded piece of yellow silk a little larger than my palm. A Chinese character had been inked on one side in red. I remembered what Ben had said about banishing demons, and I guessed this soft little fabric flower was a spell to do just that. It was small enough to shove into a yaoguai’s mouth—if you didn’t mind the risk of losing a hand.
“Ben doesn’t write Chinese,” I said, putting the bundle back into its wrappers and tucking it into my shirt for the time being. “I wonder where he got it.”
“He said some colleague of his made it.”
I wondered what sort of colleague he meant, since I couldn’t imagine the college professors he knew suddenly changing their minds about how weird and silly Ben’s interest in the paranormal was. “Ah,” was all I said.
Quinton tucked me against his side, putting his arm around my waist and pulling the blankets close. I leaned my head against his shoulder. Silence fell between us, deep enough to hear the muffled hiss of the damp sticks burning in the stove.
“Why—” I started, choking off as I realized the question hurt as I tried to say it; it hurt worse than tearing apart a ghost or a god.
Quinton pulled me tighter against him, up into his lap so he could wrap his arms all the way around me. And he suddenly wasn’t so wary, as if I’d broken the tension by finally asking the stupid damned question that had been hanging there like Damocles’ sword.
“Is that, ‘Why have I been avoiding you’ or ‘Why have I been preoccupied’ or ‘Why am I suddenly here’?”
“All of those.”
“Because I screwed up and I had to fix it and I didn’t want you sucked into my mess. That’s why I cut my hair off and shaved and why I look like a total dork from IT. And now it’s over—mostly over—and I—I just need to be here.”
I felt the edge of tears under my eyelids and I hiccuped over them in my throat. “You—you don’t look like a dork.”
“Then I failed,” he said with a sigh, “because I’m supposed to look like the jerk no one notices around the office until he comes in one day with a clanking duffel bag and a long memory.”
“Why?”
“Because I owed the FBI a favor.”
I sat up so fast and far that I almost burned my back on the stove. “What?”
Quinton shook his head. “I knew you wouldn’t like it.”
“Like is not a factor. I just . . . Just tell me what you did and why you had to do it for the feds.”
He looked up sideways with an anticipatory wince. “You’re going to hate me.”
I gaped at him for a moment. Then I leaned forward and kissed him. “I will never hate you. I love you. So talk.”
He sighed as I settled back on the seat next to him and stole part of the blanket back for myself.
“I love you, too, you know. And that’s why I gave myself up.”
TWENTY-SIX
I wanted to question him, shake him until he told me what the hell he was talking about, but I knew Quinton wasn’t having an easy time telling me his story, so I sat still and held my peace.
“Back . . . back when you were trying to find Edward, you remember I unearthed the video files and I took them to the police.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t look at me but stared at the stove. “Well . . . you didn’t want me to go because of the trouble I’d had with the NSA and the cops, and I argued that I was the only person who could convince them the videos were legit and important. But that wasn’t entirely why I went. I thought . . . that I could save you. That I could convince them to pick up Goodall and the whole plan would fall apart without him. Then you’d be safe and we could find another way to deal with Wygan that didn’t require you to walk into a trap and”—he swallowed hard—“and die.”
I wanted to reach out and hold on to him, but his posture told me not to. I bit my lip and waited for him to continue.
“I knew I couldn’t just walk in and not have to take the consequences. The paperwork said I was dead, but . . . you know there are only half as many dead spies in the world as there are papers to prove it. The only thing I wanted was to make sure you were safe, and the Feebs just wanted to argue with me about who I was and how I’d slipped off their chain. It was taking too long and I was running out of time. So I called my father.”
“The spy? The jerk who ‘loaned’ you to the NSA in the first place?”
He nodded, but he still didn’t look at me. “Yeah. James the First. The big spook himself. I made them call him, actually. If you drop the right code words, they’ll check it. I wasn’t sure Dad would go along. I mean . . . we’re not exactly buddies these days, and the way I dropped out made him look bad. But I didn’t care. I . . . just wanted to help you.
“Dad, was . . . well, he was a prick about it, but he came through and put the word in for them to take me seriously and start moving.” He began babbling a little, talking very fast. “I had to agree to do some work for the FBI and they’d keep me off the books and not let the NSA know I wasn’t dead. But they just weren’t doing enough and it wasn’t fast enough and they wanted to plan an assault and get everything in place and do it all right and I just wanted to get to you! So I ditched them—Solis and Carol helped me get out—and then I went after you. I didn’t care what it took to get to you, and I didn’t care if I screwed up the plans they were making—all I could think of was you.”
His face went pale and slack as if he were seeing something terrible hanging in the air. “And it was too late. I got there and I got in. I went looking for you, down the stairs. There was so much
noise and light and . . . it was like walking through hell. These sounds . . . these feelings came up like the tide and I—I almost couldn’t go. It was as if every nightmare I’d ever had as a kid was pouring up the staircase, every monster that lived under the bed, every bad dream where I could see the horrors happening but couldn’t move, couldn’t do a damned thing to stop them, where the voices kept whispering in my head what a useless, loveless failure I was.... But I could see you and I went forward.
“And it all stopped. You stopped it. The noise, the light, the horror; it all just . . . went away. And you were there and you were fine and I ran toward you. And that bastard shot you!” He clenched his fists and ground his teeth. “I wanted to kill him. I wanted to rip him apart, but you were there, bleeding, and I wanted you alive more than I wanted him dead, so . . . I left him to Carlos.
“I don’t know what happened after that. I don’t remember anything but holding on to you, and there was nothing I could do but watch you—watch you die. They said you were all right, but I saw it: I saw the lights go out and I hadn’t helped you. I hadn’t saved you at all.” There was something familiar and terrible about those words.
He turned toward me suddenly and he seemed to burn from the inside. “I never want to do that again. I never want to see you die again.” His body was strung tight and he quivered as if he couldn’t move either forward or back from the tension pulling on his bones.
I didn’t know if he was going to reach for me or push me away; if he wanted me more than he was afraid of me, so I reached for him instead, praying he wouldn’t pull away. I touched his face and he squeezed his eyes closed. I stroked his cheek and his neck, his shoulder, his arm. I took hold of both his arms and stared into his face, waiting for him to open his eyes.
“I’m not going to leave you,” I whispered. “I’m sorry I hurt you and let you think you’d failed to save me. You’ve never failed me. Without you, I would have given up and fallen away forever. But I love you—”
He didn’t let me finish, pulling me into his embrace so fast and hard that we were tangled instantly, limbs curling around each other and pressing tight as his mouth closed on mine. Gasping and kissing, we rolled against the edge of the old couch behind us. A rush of hot tears swept down my face and I cried a moment, feeling his own breath catch and shake as he let out a single hard sob of pent-up pain and sudden relief against my neck. Then we melted together and kissed each other breathless, tasting salt and forgiveness.
We would have gone a lot further if something hadn’t thudded against the lakeside wall. Then the something groaned and scrabbled at the door, sending skittering shivers through the Grey.
I bolted up to a crouch and reached to the sofa for my pistol while Quinton rolled aside and crawled across the floor toward the shotgun Steven Leung had left behind the kitchen door. I snuffed out the nearest candles. I inched toward the exterior door and Quinton caught up to me on near-silent feet, breaking open the double-barreled shotgun to check it.
“No shells,” he whispered.
“Kitchen cabinet with the canned goods,” I murmured back. I’d seen the box when we’d unloaded our purchases on arrival.
“What’s out there?”
We couldn’t see anything except slices of moving shadows from the other side of the shutters, but we couldn’t open them from inside. I peered out through the Grey, looking for the shape of the thing outside.
Things—and not human, either. There was only one on the deck so far, but I could see other shapes moving in the water and around the edge of the shore. The energy shapes, shrouded in something dull and inanimate, were pathetic tangles not complex or strong enough to be living humans, but there were at least a dozen of them.
“Not sure,” I whispered, “but not people. Twelve lakeside.” I turned and looked up, through the gleaming lines of the house, deeper into the Grey toward the hill on the back side of the house and the short wooden walkway that led to the upstairs door. “Nothing landside.”
“Upstairs, then—more options.”
I wasn’t sure the thing on the deck couldn’t break in eventually, but Quinton was right: The upstairs gave us a better location to either counterattack or run. Downstairs, all we could do was defend. And it’s generally better to be uphill than down in a fight. I didn’t know what the things were or how they knew we were here, but I wasn’t going to sit still and let them trap us in the house. I headed up the stairs while Quinton fetched the shotgun shells and blew out the last candle.
It was still pouring and even with our boots and coats back on, the rain felt sharp and surreally wet with an odor like lightning. The loosely pooled energy on the ground seemed to reach up and pull the rain down, flashing colors and sizzling as it hit. Quinton had paused under the porch roof to load the shotgun and I wanted to tell him this rain wasn’t natural, but I feared to make a sound that might attract the creatures now crawling out of the water and stumbling along the shore. The mist of the Grey curled around them, rising like ground fog in my view and gleaming with bright streaks of wild magic that powered the things moving toward the house.
We stepped away from the building for a clearer view and even in the wet night, the monstrosities’ shapes and shambling movements gave them away. An odor of putrefaction and campfire smoke wafted off them from the lake.
“Those look familiar,” Quinton whispered.
I started to reply, but even his quiet voice and our slow-moving presence were enough to draw their attention. The things nearest us turned and showed us rotting faces and death-blinded eyes. Then they started moving our way and the rest followed.
Silence was no longer helpful, so I aimed at the nearest zombie and shot it in the face.
The decomposing flesh tore away, giving no resistance to the projectile. The shambling, undead thing stopped and swayed, the reel of colored light around it dimming for a moment with a high whining sound. Then it continued coming forward with half a head.
Quinton fired the shotgun. The boom of the first barrel going off so close by deafened me. Normal sounds fled, leaving only the ringing of the shot and the whining crackle of the grid as the rain struck into the pools of light on the ground. The monstrosity, barely recognizable as once human, staggered but continued onward. I glanced past it to the shapes coming up the hill from the water and saw that most were the walking corpses of animals, not people. We both fired again, hoping to break the creatures down too much to continue moving, but they kept coming.
In the emptiness of the rain-swept night, no one came to see what we were shooting at; there was no one nearby to hear or care. We’d have to deal with them ourselves, one by one.
I shoved the pistol into my coat pocket and ran to the nearest dead thing. Plunging my hands into the putrid flesh, I groped for the thread of energy that animated it and yanked it out. Two more things had closed in on me and I grabbed for one while the other swiped at me with decaying paws. My ears still rang and I struggled in the buzzing, disorienting silence of the Grey-haunted night to tear the next creature apart while the claws of the other ripped loose and struck through the thick fabric of my coat.
I broke the first one down and turned to take on the ghastly mountain lion corpse that tried to maul me with its dripping fangs. Shuddering, I rammed my hand into its mouth and tore its jaw loose from its half-fleshed skull. I could barely see through its reeking hide to locate the knot of magic that animated it, but I was afraid to drop too deeply into the Grey where I couldn’t see the shapes of the things at all and risk being hit or bitten while I was blind to their normal aspect as well as deaf to their scraping approach.
More of the stinking corpse-puppets reached me, and I had to fend them off by feel with elbows and feet while I tore the second one apart. But they still managed to grab me and rip at my clothes, sending bits of cloth fluttering to the muddy ground. There was a flash of yellow silk, but I couldn’t spare it my attention as it fell from my torn shirt.
I could smell the gun smoke and see the fl
ashes from the shotgun’s muzzle as Quinton slowed the mob down, but he had to reload every two shots and the things were focusing more on me than on him. I was in danger of being overwhelmed if I couldn’t clear them off faster. I didn’t know what they were going to do to me if they pulled me down, but I didn’t want to find out and I knew Quinton wouldn’t shoot at anything that was within two yards of me.
I shoved the pressing dead back and cleared a temporary circle by making a fast series of sweeping kicks that knocked the nearest ones into the ones behind. I followed up by shoving hard on the Grey with the sharp, concussive thrust I’d learned could disperse a ghost or topple a demon.
The shambling carcasses fell down around me in a circle about eight feet wide. It was nice to know how far and how hard the effect hit, but I didn’t have time to admire it. I tore off my tattered coat and threw it toward Quinton, hoping he’d take the HK and the spare magazines out of the pockets and use those for a while. It didn’t do as much damage as the shotgun, but the 9mm pistol was a lot faster.
There were too many on me to bother trying to see their individual shapes anymore, so I let myself fall into the Grey, concentrating only on the shining skeins of energy that pushed the dead things onward. Knocking them down wasn’t good enough, and I didn’t know if I could push on them from here or not. I needed to break them permanently.
In the mist-world, the zombies looked like tiny blue lightbulbs wrapped in violet clouds that stretched and deformed as the nightmare things staggered forward. The smell was nauseating. I snatched at the nearest light and felt the creature that contained it tear open like rotten fruit. The process was easier in the Grey, but just as exhausting. The creatures still managed to tear my clothes and pull my hair, and there were so many. . . . There had to be a faster way to deal with them....
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