Possession

by Kat Richardson

  I felt exhausted by this skulduggery and closed my eyes, tamping down my anger at Purlis, Quinton, and the whole damned situation.

  Carlos spoke into my protracted silence. “You see the difficulty I faced.”

  I opened my eyes and looked at him, steeling myself against the effects of his gaze. “I do, but you shouldn’t have hesitated. Neither of us supports his father’s project. Or his ambitions. He’s been trying to drag Quinton in for a year, but it’s a no-go. Quinton won’t do it.”

  “Because of you?”

  “Because his father is a psychotic with an agenda that gets innocent people killed.”

  Carlos nodded. “I see. I’m sorry that we hesitated—that I hesitated to come to you. But we should talk to Cameron. This changes the situation.”

  He rose and expected me to come along, but I held my place, not least because I still felt disoriented and ill from the swift passage of events. “Wait. I have concerns of my own here. I can’t just abandon my inquiry to accommodate Cameron. Time is short on this one.”

  He arched a brow. “You require something in return.”

  “I will, yes.”

  “What will you demand?”

  “A favor—when I’m ready for it.”

  Carlos chuckled, a rumbling that shook my chest and skull. “One to be named at another time. You well know that we owe you many times over.”

  “Can you speak for Cameron in this?”

  “No, but I doubt he’ll balk. Come, we’ll go to him.”

  And this time I didn’t have a choice. I got up and followed Carlos. He went straight to my Land Rover and leaned against the side with a sardonic smile. “I prefer not to walk, as would you.” Which let me know Cameron wasn’t in downtown Seattle as his predecessor had preferred to be. Interesting . . .

  I don’t like to transport vampires. Their presence makes me queasy under the best of circumstances, and the filtering effect of the big truck’s glass and steel doesn’t work on things already inside it. This was not going to be a pleasant drive . . . wherever we were going.

  At Carlos’s direction, I drove out of the market and up through downtown and the University District to Laurelhurst—a neighborhood filled with sprawling, well-appointed houses that rolls along the lakeshore between Union Bay and Wolf Bay. Carlos sent me up a twisty street that terminated in a long private drive and a solid gate. I wasn’t surprised that he had a keycard for the gate. Nor was I entirely surprised that the gate didn’t open immediately. An athletic young woman with a swirling aura of crimson and indigo stepped out from behind a bit of landscaping and paused to look us over. She wasn’t wearing a uniform, but something about her outfit hinted at an organization. What she was wearing was a gun—something bigger than a handgun and smaller than a rifle that I didn’t get a good look at—on a quick-deploy sling. I guess the vampires were finally giving up arrogance in favor of safety, since even a top-level predator is only as good as his combat reach. Carlos turned a baleful glare on the guard but she didn’t flinch. Once she’d satisfied her curiosity, she keyed a radio resting on her collar like a cop’s and said something into it. Her energy corona flared and sparked as she spoke and I wasn’t able to understand her, though I knew she was speaking English. I was almost glad my left eye was still stubbornly seeing only in the Grey or I might have missed the spell in action. I wondered who’d cast it—the woman or someone else?

  The gate opened and I ceased speculating and drove through. I cruised the truck down the long driveway to a dark gray house that stretched along a bit of the hill crest overlooking the Laurelhurst Beach Club and Wolf Bay. The view was spectacular even from the wrong side of the building.

  The interior was equally impressive. An eclectic collection of art was casually arranged throughout the rooms in the way most people would display curios and family photos. The carpet in the living room was white—a rather daring choice for a vampire. The furniture was more traditional: black and arranged to face the floor-to-ceiling vista of the bay. Cameron was standing in front of the windows, tall and slim and blond as a young lion. He would always appear to be twenty-one—his age when we’d met a few weeks after his death—but he seemed older. He gazed out at the view with a melancholy posture.

  “Don’t you find that a bit disturbing?” I asked, recalling that vampires and water don’t get along well.

  He shrugged without turning. “I like to keep an eye on things that can easily kill me. It just seems like a good idea.” His voice now silvered the air with small charms of comfort and relaxation when he spoke. It appeared an effortless performance, though the deep red-and-black energy around him flickered very slightly as I noticed it. He was certainly being more thorough than his predecessor in controlling his environment—right down to how his visitors felt about him. It was masterly, but I didn’t like it.

  He turned then, flashing a smile that went a long way to dispelling the roiling discomfort that I usually detected pouring off of vampires. His eyes were a deeper violet color than I’d remembered—or maybe that, too, went with the glamour from his smile. I shot Carlos a glance, but saw no magical workings on his part.

  “Your former student has come along nicely,” I said.

  He gave me a small nod of satisfied acknowledgment. “He comes into his own.”

  I looked back to Cameron. “Very impressive.”

  “I had the best teacher death could buy.” Cameron made a show of taking a deep breath—he’d stopped breathing about five years earlier, so it was strictly for effect—and changed the subject. “It’s a pleasure to see you, Harper.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. I like you. I owe you . . . pretty much everything.”

  “That doesn’t always lead to joyful reunions and fond remembrances,” I said.

  “Not for some people, but I’m not exactly some people. Am I?”

  “No.”

  He almost smiled. “Since you’re in Carlos’s company, can I assume this visit has to do with our sudden loss of membership?”

  “A bit. Carlos seems to think we have things to discuss.”

  “If he thinks so, then it’s so. Please sit down. Make yourself comfortable.”

  I’m rarely comfortable around vampires, but with these two I’d do my best to fake it. Nevertheless, I was careful to sit where I could watch them both, which I knew they knew. Cameron’s mouth quirked a bit at one corner, but that was all the notice my caution warranted.

  Vampires don’t have the same sense of time pressure that living humans have. But in this case, they had an immediate problem and I wasn’t yet sure if it was more or less urgent than my case in hand, so I kept a bland expression and waited them out.

  Cameron sat down at last, in a chair at an angle to mine so he wasn’t in my space but still close enough to talk without raising his voice. Carlos kept to his feet, staying within a degree or two of Cameron’s shoulder. Cam leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees, the light reflected off the water illuminating one side of his face with wavering blue light.

  “In the past month or so, several of my people have disappeared. It isn’t unusual for the weaker members of such a tribe as ours to move on or to fall away. Even we die, and accidents do happen. There have been other indications that something’s been a bit . . . off with some of our associates. Carlos said he saw signs of interference with magic—small things, but of interest and possibly dangerous to us. And I began to notice fewer homeless people on the streets.”

  “You watch the homeless?” I asked, my cynicism coming through, while some other part of my brain wondered if he knew anything about Twitcher and if his death was part of the pattern Cam had detected.

  Cameron met my eyes and looked disappointed. “Yes. While it’s true that the people who fall through your society’s cracks may become prey to the desperate and unscrupulous of mine, they aren’t cattle. They are human beings, as we were once human beings. We must coexist without drawing attention to ourselves and that means using every resource wis
ely. Something Edward didn’t always appreciate.”

  He put one hand up as if warding off a comment he knew was coming. “Yes, I said ‘resource.’” His eyes narrowed a little and his face hardened with a touch of cold anger I’d never before seen in him. “The past few years have been a hard education for me. Ours is not a society apart from yours. We’re predators, but we’re also parasites. We are dependent on normal humans and creatures of magic to maintain us and to keep our existence secret. Unless human society changes in vast and significant ways, we’ll always be things that live in the shadows—nightmares, dreams, things half seen by moonlight. Phantom lovers who melt away at dawn,” he added, scoffing. “That is the fairy tale we perpetuate for our own interests—thank the gods for the pliant imaginations of Bram Stoker and Stephenie Meyer.”

  He paused with a rueful half smile and made a slight change to his position in the chair—more for my sake than his, I thought—before he went on, his expression growing harder. “Because there are few of us, we’re ruthless. Because we’re long-lived, we’re acquisitive. And if we’re not clever and tricky about it, we’re dead. We have to tread lightly on the earth and we have to maintain the balance by husbanding resources, by being careful, abstemious, and—when warranted—manipulative, underhanded bastards. So, yes, I keep watch on the homeless, the transient, and the insane. They’re like a pack of idiot cousins—an obnoxious, smelly, drooling horde most of the time, but a few are quite likable. A decent custodian doesn’t just stand aside and let them all jump off cliffs. Or push them.”

  I found his use of “our” and “your” startling and unsettling, but it was an eloquent speech and not at all what I would have expected of the chief vampire of Seattle. I had not given much thought to how much the terrified and confused living-dead college student I’d once rescued from a parking garage would be forced to change by taking the reins. I was pleased to detect a touch of student-activist-style passion there. Some things are, apparently, not exclusive to the living.

  I bowed my head a little. “I hadn’t given it that kind of thought. But . . . much as I don’t like to sound petty, could we focus on the more immediate problem? I do understand the larger context, but for now, we both seem to have pieces of a larger puzzle and I’d like to put them together.”

  Cameron chuckled. “Yes. I’m sorry. I get carried away on this topic lately. As I said, people have gone missing. Among the homeless it’s not uncommon for them to move on and we can’t always track what becomes of them. I didn’t pay that much attention at first, but when a few of my people disappeared, I began to worry. Initially it was our support people—catspaws, blood-bound, day servants—then a few demi-vampires and the ascending. Those are always dangerous stages, when it’s very easy for something to go wrong—you remember what I was like. But the apparent mortality rate was a little too high and then I started to notice that no one could positively say that any of these missing had died—it was just assumed. There should have been bodies, but there weren’t. No funerals, no rise in suspicious deaths reported to the coroner’s office. They were just gone. Like they’d been taken. But there was a lot more ghost activity—according to Carlos.” He indicated the other vampire with a small gesture. “I don’t have his acuity, so I can’t confirm it, but I’d assume you can.”

  “I have noticed more ghosts, but only in some areas,” I said. “And I can’t be sure it’s really more activity so much as my spending too little time some places and not being familiar with the normal activity levels any longer.”

  “Are you sure? Carlos seems to think there’s a profound disturbance. . . .”

  Carlos took a step forward. “It’s not what I think. It’s an observation.”

  I gave it a moment’s consideration, mentally cursing James Purlis but holding back my ire. “When did this start? This rise in activity? And did you notice a geographic pattern?”

  “Near the end of the year there was a change,” said Carlos. “It has surged twice since then. There are a greater number of animate ghosts active in Seattle now than last year, and yet there has been no significant rise in deaths to account for it. There has been no great cataclysm or disaster here in the right time frame. The activities of your lover’s father have also had an effect on the weft and warp of magic. He draws the things of magic to him through mechanical contrivance and he has drawn our own away from us—as he did with Inman.”

  Of course Carlos would know what the normal death rate was in Seattle and what effect Purlis’s activities were having on the local Grey power grid. “Are you certain that he’s responsible for the disappearance of the demi-vampires and others like that?” I didn’t want to overlook some factor, though I also thought that Purlis was behind the changes Carlos was describing. It fit with what I knew of his project through Quinton.

  “I have cast spells and questioned the dead and I am sure of it.”

  Cameron rejoined the conversation. “We would have brought this to you much earlier, but when Carlos discovered that Quinton was involved, I thought it would be better if we didn’t mix in family politics.”

  I gave a harsh laugh. “James Purlis is not the sort of person I consider ‘family.’”

  “But he is your . . .” He hesitated and cast a glance at Carlos.

  “He is the blood father of your spouse-in-soul. That is a complex relationship in matters magical.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, the man could die unseen and become food for crows without my shedding a single tear. Except that his corpse might poison the poor crows.”

  “Not if he were to die by magic or by the hand of creatures bound to you. As Cameron and I are.”

  I scowled in confusion. “I don’t understand. We have no bond.”

  “Indeed we do, Greywalker.” He put his hand out into the air between us, whispering, and touched one finger to a barely glimmering thread of energy. It flared bright, revealing a gossamer-thin line of perfect whiteness that made a web uniting the three of us, with two more tendrils vanishing into distance and darkness beyond the room. Then he let it go and the line faded back to being near-invisible. His expression when he spoke again was solemn. “You were witness to our bond of fealty. You made it so, and so you are tied to us. Were either of us or anyone we controlled to kill your father-in-law—for lack of an easier term—there would be consequences. As the Hands of the Guardian, your family weighs on the fabric of magic—not so heavily as you do, but they are not insignificant. They cannot be wiped off the face of the earth casually.”

  “My family? I have a mother—who drives me crazy—and Quinton. And that’s all.”

  Carlos laughed at me. “I think you don’t quite understand what a family is.”

  It shouldn’t have disturbed me, but his statement seemed to set a weight on my chest and I felt suffocated as a swarm of icy chills prickled my flesh. I didn’t see magic at work, but something I had pushed away in a dark closet of my mind was breaking out. . . .

  FOURTEEN

  Carlos stepped closer to me and I flinched as he raised a hand to touch the side of my face. “I won’t hurt you, ghost girl.” From him, that was very nearly an endearment. But I still loathed his touch—there’s nothing like the sickening in-flooding of history, death, and emotion that comes with the touch of a necromancer—and wanted none of it, nor of whatever my brain was trying to serve up. He settled back. “What have you done to your eye?”

  The distraction relieved my panic and I was able to reply in a dry voice, “I got paint in it.”

  He stroked the air over my shoulders and arms but he didn’t actually touch me. “You have been in the company of dangerous things.”

  “I’m in the company of dangerous things right now.”

  He grunted and looked me over, ignoring my flippancy. “Their ties and remnants complicate my view, but I can’t clear them off now.” I didn’t know what he was referring to and it seemed a bad time to ask. His hand rose again, toward the center of my chest, and stopped, hovering over my sternum.
“I should have known you’d have a romantic streak,” he said, rubbing the tips of his fingers against his thumb as if he were balling up some tiny filament, muttering more words that dripped into the air.

  From his fingers a tiny glowing strand of pink light emerged and stretched away, reaching for the window, and splitting in two as it spun out. It was so thin that it was hard to see. Carlos blew on the strand and it fluttered brighter for a moment, lighting into a spreading spiderweb with me at the center, radiating unevenly in several directions. I imagined I would see more if I turned around, but I didn’t want to put my back to Carlos and Cameron.

  Carlos held up his other hand, a small blade gleaming in it. “If you would oblige me, I can show you more.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him in suspicion. I knew what his knives were capable of.

  “Only one drop.”

  “No sucking up my soul or anything like that.”

  “I would find it a particularly sweet token, but no. I have no need for that. Today.” I had the distinct impression he was teasing me and I had to give it some thought before I held up my left hand and offered him a finger—one particular finger, which he found amusing, but he still pricked it quickly with the tip of the knife.

  A tiny drop of blood welled on my fingertip. He caught it on the edge of the knife’s blade, whispering to it, and touched the blood to the dulling gleam of the web he had drawn from my chest.

  The web flared bright, glittering with sparks of rose and gold that raced into the distance of the reaching splines. More than I would have thought, yet so few, and stretching in so many directions. . . .

  “That is family.” Carlos said. He pointed his finger at the pink strands. “These are ties of affection. And these,” he added, pointing to rare thinner, darker strands that wove among the brighter ones, “are ties of blood. You have tried to cut these, but some persist. They are not like the ones you forge yourself but they are as strong, and each binds you, flows from you and back to you. That is family, this web, this complexity. This binding. Yours burns with the power of what you are, and cutting those strands sends shocks throughout that web and everything it touches, calling darkness to fill the voids. There are always forces opposed to order and control, opposed to the Guardian and to you. They will revel in that darkness and use it for their own ends.” He moved his hand with care, not touching any of the complicated, twisted threads of light, until he pointed to one that was brighter than the rest, hot pink, glittering, twisted with other parts that spun away in perpendicular and obtuse directions, fading faster than the rest as they stretched away from me. “There is your beloved and the filaments of his own family, his blood kin, that bind to him and through him to you. You see the intricacy of it all. How twined and knotted as it grows closer to you. How beautiful and terrible.”