Will blanched. "Oh, God, I'd go crazy if anything happened to Michael, if he just disappeared someday… If somebody took him, I'd—I'd lose it. Do you think someone took this kid?"
I reached over and touched his arm. "No. I think he went for a reason and I'm getting an idea of where he might be. But I've got to admit, I'd really like to know why. That's what's bothering me. When I know why someone's vanished, I can make a good guess of where, but the why often turns out to be the most important question. I wouldn't want to have to approach someone in, say, a crack house, without knowing what I was getting into first."
He nodded. "I can understand that." He played with his glass. "You've got a dangerous job," he added, trying to steer the conversation back to my lane. I accepted the transfer, for the time being.
"It's not so bad. A lot of what I do is hunting down paperwork, filing forms, and waiting around. But it beats milking cows."
He grinned and raised his eyebrows. "Cows?"
I nodded. "Yeah. When I was little, I went to visit my Mom's family in Montana. They lived on a cattle ranch, but they kept a few milk cows for themselves. One morning—about four thirty—my cousin got me up to help him milk the cows. I think it was supposed to be fun. But I am not a cow person—my favorite cow comes on a bun. I was sleepy and the cows were large, smelly, and scary. And milking is nasty—which is the real reason they invented automatic milking machines."
Will chuckled. We chatted on about inconsequential things. Around the time our dinners were served, I was starting to have a strange, queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. The feeling was familiar. I looked around out of the corner of my eye as I bent over my fish.
I saw a face flicker in the edge of my vision like one of those persistence-of-vision tricks you can only see when you look away. I pretended to remove a fine bone from my boneless fish, lowering my head and breathing slowly until I could settle the Grey and look without falling in.
A ghost, staring at me with a long and dour face, stood against the wall beside the prosaic RESTROOMS sign. He was thin and weedy, dressed in a suit long out of fashion.
I stared and whispered, "Albert?"
He beckoned to me with an impatient gesture.
I looked up at Will, who was frowning down at me. "Excuse me. I've just remembered a client I needed to call. I'll only be a minute."
Curiosity quirked the corner of his mouth, but he didn't ask. "OK. I'll wait right here."
I smiled and slid out of the booth, grabbing my purse, and headed for the restrooms.
As I walked down the hallway across the back of the building, I looked for Albert.
What was the Danzigers' ghostly housemate doing here? My stomach was flipping and roiling as if the fish I'd eaten had come back to life, but I forced my concentration toward looking for Albert without being sucked into the Grey completely.
I spotted him stopped ahead in a doorway of dragon smoke. I didn't want to go in there, but he motioned me forward. I gritted my teeth and caught myself hyperventilating. Then I stepped across into the cold and the smell of the Grey.
I staggered and Albert flickered solid, then rain-thin, beckoning impatiently. I felt the fluttering edge of the Grey nearby. The world seemed darker and overlaid with a wavering silver projection on fog. I groped after Albert, pushing through smoke doors and down stair-cases built of dry-cold mist, holding myself as close to the normal world as I could. Albert was a flickering match light in the down-drawing darkness ahead.
I must have left the restaurant, because the space sounded like a tunnel now—wet and dank and lit only by ghost lights that came and went. There was noise ahead of me, a distant, raucous clamor and a roar of music.
Reality wavered and pitched. I hesitated and my concentration stumbled. Couldn't panic now. I had to keep going, had to keep chasing Albert, concentrating only on Albert, because it was the only thing
I could think of to do. I didn't know what would happen if I jolted out of the Grey into some unknown place: the middle of a wall or three inches from a speeding truck. And I hoped that the presence of a ghost—a creature who belonged here—would keep that dark beast away. I held on to the idea of Albert and kept going, quivering inside and wet with ice-water sweat.
I followed a flight of twisted steps down a dim shaft to a heavy door and along a short, narrow tunnel. I trudged on, tight with fear.
The dim flicker ahead winked out. The sounds died.
"Albert? Where are you?" My ears throbbed in the silence.
"Albert!" I howled, whipping around. I lost my balance in the shifting world and yelled, falling…
And crashed into a solid wall. I tumbled and sat down hard. I huddled on the cold ground and panted and held back tears of relief and exhaustion, and a desire to throw up.
Finally I looked up and around. I was in a basement storage area. There was a sound now, one I had been ignoring for a while: a burglar alarm going off.
I swore and promised under my breath, "Albert, I'm going to get you for this."
I crashed around in the dark for a minute or two before someone opened the exterior door to the basement. I breathed a thankful sigh and moved toward the shaft of streetlight illumination striping the floor. A body cut off most of the light and I slowed my steps.
"Police. Stop where you are and leave your hands in plain sight."
My relief soured to resignation and I raised my hands to shoulder level, open and empty.
The arresting officers were quite polite until they found my gun. Then the chill came on. They drove me to the downtown police station for processing, without a word beyond Miranda. The booking officers weren't happy, either, but they did concede that I had all the proper paperwork. They still put the gun in an evidence bag before they would let me use the phone, though.
It took only moments for the restaurant to find Will, who was still sitting at the table.
"Hi, Will, it's Harper. Look, I'm sorry. Something work related came up and I had to go. I didn't mean to leave you in the lurch like that."
"Something work related," he repeated.
"Yes. What? Do you think I just ran out on you? It was something I couldn't control."
"All right," he said, but it didn't sound all right.
"Will. Don't be angry. My job is like this. Weird stuff comes out of nowhere and I have to chase it down when the opportunity arises. If I hadn't wanted to have dinner with you, I wouldn't have called you back." There was a lot of silence at the other end of the line. "Will, I'm at the police station, so I can't stay on the phone. I don't know how much longer this is going to take. I'll have to call you later. OK?"
"All right," he said again. "If you call me later, we can talk about it." Then he hung up.
Great. Well, there went that romance. This was not turning into the sort of evening I'd had in mind.
I'd been booked and fingerprinted and had gone through a carefully edited version of my story once. The owners of the property weren't home when the alarm went off, and when they arrived to press charges, they wanted to hear what they'd missed.
I lied. I told them, as I had the cops, that I had been tailing an insurance fraud suspect from the restaurant and had stumbled through the remains of an old bootlegger's run into their basement. The owners of the house—now a bed-and-breakfast—were kind of charmed by the idea that their house might have a secret past as a speakeasy. The cops, on the other hand, were not charmed by the discovery of a rotting tunnel behind a bit of broken plaster, but that thin evidence was a lot more comfortable than explaining that I'd somehow managed to get into a basement which was still locked from the outside.
It was after eleven p.m. when they decided they couldn't hold me.
The cops returned my stuff, including the pistol, and I went downstairs to call a cab and get my car back.
When I paid off the cab, I was relieved to see that Will's truck was gone from Dan's parking lot, and then I got angry with myself for feeling relieved. I damned Albert with catholic breadth as
I slammed the truck door behind myself. I sat still for a good two minutes, calming down before starting the drive home.
I pounded up the back stairs to burn off my lingering fury. I slammed out of the stairwell onto my floor to see my front door standing open. I stopped and gaped, then bent down and snatched up the ferret as she tried to scamper past me.
I stared into my living room. Chaos dove out of my arms and raced across the floor in wild, ferret delight. She danced across the face of disaster. The burglar alarm was off and the living room was a wreck. The ferret's cage was tilted on its side, the door hanging open. The surgeons' cabinet had been knocked over and the chair was dribbling stuffing from the underside of the cushion. Books and paperwork drifted around like autumn leaves.
I caught the ferret one more time and stuffed her into my jacket before going to knock on my neighbors' door. I left the place just as it was. It couldn't get much worse, after all.
"May I use your phone?"
He let me in and I called the police, asking for a detective I knew, but was told he was off duty. I'd have to take potluck.
I slammed the phone down and waited for the cops while watching my neighbor's half-breed pit bull sniff and whine in the direction of the lump of ferret moving around under my jacket. Once they showed up, my neighbor Rick let me wait in his living room eating cold pizza while the evidence crew found nothing. Once they were gone, I thanked Rick and his dog and went straight back to my place. I slammed the door, locked up, and headed to bed. And threw my damned, silly loafers against the bedroom door hard enough to dent it.
In the morning, I called Mara, my mood very little improved.
She answered the phone herself.
I started straight in. "Mara, I don't know what's going on, but Albert popped in to see me last night and I got arrested following him. What the hell was he doing?"
"You were following Albert… through the Grey?"
"Yes! And I ended up in someone's basement with their alarm going off like a teenage girl at a Hanson concert."
I heard her smother a giggle. "As bad as that?"
"Not funny. I got arrested, got dumped by my date, and had an interesting time fending off the blandishments of a beer-and-pizza-addled neighbor."
"I shouldn't laugh, it's just the image… But there is a problem and I'm afraid Albert has made a bags of the situation."
"What situation? A 'bags'?"
"A mess. I'd rather discuss it in person. Can you drop by? I've a geology lecture to give at one, so if you can come before eleven…."
"Geology?"
Mara sounded harried. "Yes. I also teach at the U. Can you come up?"
I growled. "All right."
I rushed my routine and drove up to Queen Anne. I was barely through the Danzigers' front door when Albert showed his shadowy face in a swirl of snow-threat Grey.
I jabbed a finger at him, too furious to consider how utterly stupid it was. "You! You are so lucky you're dead."
Mara blinked surprise at me as Albert blinked out. "It does no good to be threatening a ghost."
"It's not a threat. It's a fact. If I hadn't been following his incorporeal ass, I wouldn't have gotten arrested. Normally I'd take that sort of thing out of his hide. If he had one."
"Then it's me you should be angry with. Not Albert. It's my fault he showed up and acted badly."
"Is it? Why? What did you do?"
"I sent him looking for the source of the problem, but he came up with you!"
I threw my hands into the air in frustration. "What problem?" "There's something wrong with magic."
Chapter 15
"Something wrong with magic?" I echoed. "There's a lot wrong with it from my point of view. But I assume that's not what you mean." Mara made a sour face. "Not hardly. I know you've still some trouble with all this, but it is a serious problem. The house has its own nexus, but outside, things are running a bit slow, as if the power is dammed up. So I sent Albert out to find the source of the blockage, but he somehow followed it to you—he says you're a knot in the thread."
"What does that mean?"
"That you're connected to the problem, though you aren't the problem yourself. And that's a relief. When Albert found you, he got confused and tried to bring you straight to me. Unfortunately, Albert's idea of straight seems to mean straight through the Grey. Can't say I'm pleased with him for that. Whatever this is, I do need your help to find it and fix it. Can you see that you're the only person who can help me?"
I sighed and shook my head. "I'm not sure about that, but I can try." "You'll find this much easier if you can accept what you are." My annoyance had dropped, but it was starting to notch back up. "What I am able to accept is that most people in my situation wake up every morning in a padded room."
It was Mara's turn to sigh now. She took a few steps away from the door and sat on a wooden bench in the hall, tired and frustrated with me. "It's fighting it that will drive you mad. That's why you slip and stumble and why Albert couldn't stay with you. You burn up energy needlessly fighting to do something you'd find so much easier if you accept and relax into the Grey."
I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the doorframe. "A couple of days ago you were trying to show me how to push it back, now you want me to let it in. Which is it?"
"That's access-control, not denial. The normal and the Grey are different states, and you can't go on struggling against that fact once you're in the Grey. You'll exhaust yourself, and you'll not be able to protect yourself or concentrate or do any work. You must connect to it to control it."
"And how do you suggest I do that without ending up like your friend?"
Mara gave me a look which must have quelled rooms full of rowdy undergraduates without raising her voice. "Sit down, Harper."
I considered it. What did I lose by giving in?
I sat down on the bench.
"Are you going to help me?"
"Yes."
"Then you shall have to learn to relax into the Grey. It's not so bad as you think. It's not hard. But it's only in the Grey that you'll be able to understand the problem and track it down—as you would a missing person or a stolen object, here."
I turned and peered at her. "You want me to try this, right now?"
"Yes. It's simple. Do what you did before, but once you're in the Grey, just relax. Don't fight."
I had strong reservations, but I tried it.
It wasn't too bad, at first. I'd had enough practice last night to have a feel for the edge of the Grey pretty well, though it rippled and moved like a flag snapping in a stiff breeze. Each time I approached it, a wash of nausea flooded over me and my heart raced.
Albert crept in and I yelled at him, "Don't help me!" The break dumped me back into the hall with my head ringing. A combination of fear and fury left me shaking.
I settled myself back down and tried again. The writhing curtain wall of the Grey flooded up very fast and I pushed across the edge before I could change my mind. The snowstorm light twisted and heaved around me with a blizzard howl. I clapped my hands over my ears and staggered as the steamed-mirror world budded with the suggestion of monsters and armies of formless dead. The cold pushed through my skin, trying to touch me someplace deeper, frosting my flesh with ice.
"No!" I yelled and yanked myself backward, away from the rain-mist wall, crashing back to the floor of the Danzigers' front hall on my knees.
Horrified, Mara was on her feet, reaching down to me. "Harper!"
I pushed her hands aside. "No. Don't touch me." I smacked my hands onto the plain, solid wood of the bench and shoved myself up to my feet. "There's something in there. I cannot go in there and let it at me."
"That's your fear. You're fighting so hard, you only see what you expect to see. You have to let go." "I can't."
She glared at me. "You mean you won't."
I snapped back. "All right. I won't."
"You must. You're just afraid and it won't—"
"Damned stra
ight! Damned. Straight." I shoved a hand through my recently chopped hair and almost cried when the hair ended too soon. I swallowed a vile lump in my throat.
I bit my lip and grabbed my bag. "I can't do this. I can't. I won't. Whatever word you want to use. I—"
I wrenched around and reached for the door. Albert, looking solid as a plank, intruded.
Behind me, Mara was saying, "Harper, don't bolt. You have to try or your fear will eat you!"
I shot her a look over my shoulder which sent her a step back with wide eyes. "I. Can't. Do. What you want me to do! I can't!"
I felt hot with terror-fed fury. I whipped back to Albert and hissed through clenched teeth, "Get out of my way or I swear I will find a way to hurt you."
He slipped away. I slammed out the door and ran.
I drove and I didn't know where or why I wasn't arrested. I couldn't see anything but flooding, pressing Grey around the windows for minute-eternities. Shock-cold chilled my nerves. I pulled to the curb until I stopped shaking.
I couldn't remember ever saying that before: "I can't." Even as a kid being pushed to perform, the phrase never came from my lips. "I don't know how," "I'm afraid," "I'm not good enough," all kinds of propitiations and excuses, but not that one. Not "I can't." I felt sick.
I closed my eyes and took slow breaths until my chest and throat stopped aching. I was tired, but I pulled the Rover away from the curb and headed to the office, where I left it in the parking lot.
I didn't want to sit in the middle of the routine haunting, so I started walking.
I walked up Third for a while, paying very little attention to where I was going, trying to ignore the flitter of Grey in the corners of my eyes. I looked up when I reached the Bon Marche and realized I was only a few blocks from the address Sarah had given me for Edward's condo. I'd nearly forgotten. Good, old-fashioned work.
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