"Get out!" I shouted, lashing my fists against the swarming Grey between us. A swollen blue arc spanned across my thrumming chest and arms, bowing outward as I raised my arms again and brought them down against the cloud of fiery creatures.
I felt as if I'd smashed my arms against a cement wall which reverberated, then dissolved to gritty, unstable brick. Two masses of force collided between us, shook and toppled with a crack of thunder and a stink of burned sewage. Then it crumbled away, the flames dying in an instant. Sergeyev's eyes glared at me though the haze and vanished. The world crashed back into its normal shape, thinly blurred at the edges.
I collapsed forward, landing half in my chair and half across the desk. My forehead smacked against the blotter. My arms and chest ached and burned and I swallowed again and again, tamping down the urge to be sick. Broken glass tinkled in the hall and outside. I forced myself to breathe in and out with care, settling myself around the dissipating ache centered in the knot of Grey between my breasts. Cool air coursed over my back from the broken window behind me. In a moment—or maybe it was ten minutes—I looked up and saw a face peeping around the edge of my shattered door glass. The receptionist from Flasch and Ikenabi. I waved a flopping hand to her.
She squeaked, "Are you OK? Sounded like an explosion out here."
"Uh… one of my clients… slammed the door pretty hard on his way out."
"Oh. OK. You sure you're all right?" She probably thought I was crazy, or that my clients were. I expected I'd see their offices up for lease inside six months.
"I'm fine. Honest. I just—I need to get the glass fixed," I finished.
She perked up at the thought of familiar action. "Oh! I know a board-up service. Should I… should I call them for you?"
I raised my eyebrows. "You would do that?"
"Well, yeah. If you want." A phone burred. She looked around. "Oh, no! Ohmigod, that's my phone!" she exclaimed, dashing away.
Alone, I slumped onto the desktop and tried to reorganize my brain. I was shaking. I felt torn apart and put back together with cheap glue and a lack of attention to detail. Everything seemed to ache or itch. My job was going straight to hell. But I didn't know what else to do, so I shut off the gibbering part of my brain and did what I'd been trained to do: I made phone calls.
I called the Danzigers and arranged to see them later—I had a lot of questions. Then I called Sarah, who said she'd talk to her brother as soon as she saw him and have him call me.
Twenty minutes later, men with plywood arrived to fix my door and window until I could get the glass replaced. The office felt close and dark without the windows.
In the new gloom, I picked up the Edward file and stared at it, resisting the work, aching all over. Unthinking, I reached up to rub the spot on my shoulder where Wygan's claws had dug into my flesh. The skin felt raw and hot as a sunburn. I winced as my stomach curdled around my lunch.
I'd been dancing in a minefield and was lucky to still have all my limbs. Alice scared me, but I understood what she wanted and how she wanted to use me to get it. As dreadful as Carlos was, I understood him a little, too. But Wygan I could no more understand than I could understand whales singing, and that frightened me most. I did not know what he wanted of me, but I suspected he was finished for a while.
He didn't think much of Alice, but I feared her ambition. I wasn't sure I could hold up against her a second time. I had to admit that challenging Sergeyev had been a mistake, and combined with the strange attack by the organ, whatever strength I had was near exhausted. I didn't know if it would return or if I wanted it to.
I knew my time was running out with Edward. Alice wouldn't hold off much longer. I had to use her agitation to my advantage and not be caught in the blast. But my ideas all assumed Edward's motivations were, essentially, human, and I knew that wasn't true. Ambition, power, and hate were the tools the vampires had lent me—all I had of my own was hope and a detective's steady plod. I didn't like my chances.
I buried myself in paper, trying to shut off my bodily aches and scratch the mental itch of almost-knowing. Much of the TPM file made no sense to me. I started looking for patterns, familiar words, oddities, pretty much anything that hooked to other information. TPM had fingers in lots of pies. It owned businesses and real estate all over Seattle and the near communities on the western side of Lake Washington, though TPM had nothing on the Eastside.
I started reading the list of businesses and something finally jumped out at me: TPM owned Dominic's nightclub.
Steve had said he was helping out the owner the day he spotted Cameron—except TPM wouldn't have asked him to come move furniture. Steve had given me the information just when I was also snooping around TPM's business. And Cameron had claimed Steve lied about knowing Edward, who had to work for TPM. So why had Steve called? Was he assuaging a prickly conscience, or had someone told him to give me Cameron? It had certainly pulled my attention off of TPM, and if Cameron hadn't had the insane idea to hire me, I'd never have looked further.
The tickling, nascent knowledge erupted into full form. In a short burn of energy, I scrambled for the fax of the corporate structure. Wygan had said it. The real estate lawyer had gone stone silent the moment I asked for it. But it was there on the fax: Edward Kammerling was TPM's founder and chairman of the board.
I lay back in my chair, burned out, eyes closed, and put it together. Only Gwen had said anything about TPM—she'd said it was his toy. The vampires found Edward's business activities uninteresting, or boring, but they were the key to his power base. A very sweet deal Edward couldn't afford to lose: only he had power in both the daytime and nighttime worlds, and that kept the other vampires in check. And that was why Alice wanted me—a daylighter with a foot in the dark— to take him out.
In the daylight world, he was at his weakest: just a businessman who had to hide from the light. But he might as well be in a fortress for all that the vampires could do to him there. Though I had a foot in each world, I had nothing to lose in the nightside, where his strengths were greatest. I had disturbed his foothold in the dark, and now I could threaten his foothold in the light as well. His ambition had bought him enemies, and it would allow me to move Edward any direction I pleased. So long as he didn't kill me first.
And supposing that Sergeyev didn't beat him to it.
I rolled my head, glanced at my watch and knew I was running late for my date at the Danzigers'. By the time I got to the Rover, I was dragging. My whole body ached as if I had the flu, a drawing fatigue radiating from my chest and through my limbs. Driving was not fun.
Mara answered my ring of the doorbell. "Harper!" She stopped and goggled at me. "You look flailed out. What's happened?"
"I—" was all I could get out. Then I stood there with words stoppered in my throat and couldn't think of what to say.
Mara blinked at me, then dragged me through the doorway. "Oh, my. Come into the kitchen, then. And don't be telling me this is tea-sized trouble. You look like you need a drink."
I stumbled after her into the kitchen. The house was quiet, warm, and welcoming. Only when the sensations were gone did I notice that I'd been cold, my ears numbed with a distant susurration, since Saturday.
Mara scrambled through a cupboard. "Just let me find the whiskey…"
I flopped into a chair at the kitchen table while Mara uncovered a bottle of Powers and poured us each a glass. She didn't offer water.
We both sat there and sipped our whiskey in silence a while as the kitchen beamed warm energy on us. The sick knot in my chest eased a little. Mara put her drink down and looked at me.
"All right. Tell me what it is."
I looked at my drink. "I think I need about three more of these first."
"Ah, no. Drunken revelations just leave you feeling worse during the hangover. Is this about ghosts?"
I hesitated, helplessness surging under my skin. I nodded and tried to wash the feeling down with the last of the whiskey. "Ghosts, vampires… all that Grey crap
."
Mara sat still, giving me an encouraging face.
"Why are they coming to me? These monsters, these… whatever they are. My client—remember the guy with the organ?"
"Yes. You said he was Grey."
I nodded. "Some kind of ghost, I think. We had an argument in the Grey. He said he knew I could 'see the world. He was furious at me for not doing what he wanted. Why do they think I can do something for them? How did I end up with every ghostly freak in Seattle?"
"Because you're a Greywalker. I warned you they would come. They hope that you can help them because you can see them and speak to them when others can't. As you can with Albert. Your arrival in the Grey must have woken a lot of creatures."
"Woken? Some of them have been lying in wait! As if I was late to an appointment." I found myself shivering.
Mara bit her lip. "Something worse than your ghost?"
I nodded, swallowing hard. "Saturday…," I started. "Saturday night I interviewed vampires." "For Cameron."
"Yes. And one of them—one of them dragged me into the Grey. He was—something worse." I couldn't get any more words out as I drowned in memory.
I sat at the kitchen table, pushing back an upwelling wail, gulping down air to force back the hard lump in my throat. It wrenched down into my chest and dissolved at a slow trickle when I caught my breath at last. My left hand hurt. I looked down and found Mara clutching it, staring at me and whispering curling blue charms under her breath. I tried to pull my hand away, but she wouldn't let go.
"What are you doing?" I demanded.
"Just holding on. Helping you hold on. You're doing much better now, aren't you? You look better."
I shuddered. "I'm all right."
"No, you're not. But you don't have to live through it again right now. Once was quite enough."
"Yes, but you don't know—"
"I don't need to," Mara stated. "Let's go find Ben. You'll not want to tell this story twice, and he needs to know."
She started to pull me up with her, but I winced in pain.
"You're hurt?"
"My skin feels roasted and I think I'm…. broken somewhere."
"How did that happen?"
"I'm not sure. But I guess I need to talk to Ben about that, too."
I got to my feet, stiff as an arthritic spider, and crept after Mara. We went upstairs to beard the scholar in his den. Ben bustled about moving papers and books and getting us settled on the sofa, which sent up a puff of dusty book-scent as we sat down. Then he retired behind his desk and looked at us like an owl.
"Harper, you don't look so good," he said.
I nodded in slow motion. "I know."
If I'd felt better, I'd have laughed at the concerned look he gave me. "What's happened?"
I couldn't get an answer together at first. Ben looked at his wife with alarm. She shook her head.
"Is this a ghost thing?" he asked. "This problem? There is a problem, isn't there?"
"Yes," I said. "Yes. Something's wrong. The Grey isn't quite what we thought. And—and now there is a piece of it inside me."
They both jerked forward. Ben's desk restrained him, but Mara grabbed my hand again and drove an intense stare into me. I felt the track of her eyes.
"There is something there," she murmured. "But it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be like that."
Ben rose from his seat. "What is it?"
"It's sort of a knot," she answered, hesitating, then shaking her head in frustration. "I can't tell more. It isn't easy to look at. And I'm not really good at this sort of scrying." She leaned back and frowned into my face, still holding my hand. "Harper, how did this happen? What is this?"
I bit my lip. Ben teetered on the edge of moving forward, waiting. Mara squeezed my hand a little. She was doing it again and I wished it irritated me, but I was grateful.
I began again, feeling a bit anesthetized. "Saturday. I was working Cameron's case. Talking to vampires. One of them was—something I can't describe. Something beyond vampires and ghosts. Something worse. He shoved me into the Grey. He wants something from me and he called this a present. He tore me open and he put this thing inside me." I covered the ache with my free hand. "All tied up and tangled all over me. And the Grey things crawled all through me, ate me, t-touched—" I covered my face, shuddering at the remembered feel of the cold, hungry things sucking away everything. "They ripped me up, but I'm still here, and now I can't turn it off!"
Ben fell back into his seat and hung his head. "Harper. I—oh, God, is this my fault?"
Mara gave him a sharp look. "Oh, do shut up, Ben. Of course it's not your fault." She turned her eyes back to me. "And the other client, too. I told Ben about the dark artifact."
I nodded. I no longer felt like howling in pain and grief. "I went to look at it again today. It's gotten worse. It extruded some kind of tentacle toward me and I felt so sick I couldn't stand it. There's a set of red lines all around it now. It hurts to be in the same room with it. My client wants it. He threatened me if I couldn't get it for him, and he backed it up by trying to throw something at me in the Grey. And I—this thing inside me—batted it back and I screamed at him. There was sort of an explosion and then he was gone. Just gone. But not forever. He'll come back."
Mara raised her hand and started to bring it toward my chest. I shied from her, curling my shoulders forward.
"I shan't hurt you."
Wary, I let her touch me. I gasped when her fingertips pressed against me, pushing prongs of dense stillness into the center of the hard Grey knot. She looked at me a while, blank and thoughtful. When she sat back, pulling both her hands into her lap, her withdrawal left a void in the ache.
"It feels… heavy, but elastic and smooth, like some kind of muscle— a diaphragm, perhaps. It bends if I push gently, but it won't yield to me, and the harder I push, the more it resists. It seems benign, if a little weak at the moment, but who knows what it does? It doesn't like to be probed."
Ben gave us both an incredulous look. "'Doesn't like'? How can you say what it likes?"
"I don't know," Mara replied.
But I did. "It's alive in some way. I can feel it full of the things that live in the Grey."
Ben shuddered.
I shook my head. "I can't do this. I can't live with this. This is a nightmare. Cameron's case… it's only going to get worse and I am not sure I can stand it. I believed he was a good guy, in spite of this. But he's a monster. They are all monsters. Inhuman, vile…"
Ben spoke up. "Not vile. But the rest goes without saying, doesn't it? They're ghosts. They're vampires. But they look like us, so we think they are like us. And then they do something horrible, because they aren't like us. Ghosts are much closer to us, because they remember what it was like. Memory is all they are, really. And memory can hurt."
"But a vampire, I imagine, must learn to forget," Mara added. "Or surely they'll go mad. How could they live with themselves if they didn't change?"
"And Cameron is one," I said.
"Yes, but he's at the beginning," Mara reminded me. "He's still a nice boy who has a problem. You were right about that. He'll change, but you will probably never have to see it. Someday, when he's as old and twisted up with his new culture as those others, then he will be a monster. But do you want to make the decision to let him die now, confused and miserable? That's your choice."
"That's not fair," I said.
"No, it's not. You'll have to work that one out for yourself, I'm afraid. Can't put the apple back on the tree. So, what are we going to do now? That's the question."
"It's my problem," I said. "Not yours. I'm drowning. I've felt like something's sucking me dry ever since my client—ex-client, ghost, whatever—came to the office."
Ben perked up with a scholar's zeal for a puzzle. "Really? Before or after your argument?"
"After."
"Let me think, let me think…." He began shuffling through his papers and riffling books. "His attraction to the organ… physical manifesta
tions and volition… action…. Hmm." He glanced up at me from the pages of a thick tome and cringed a bit. "I'd say this guy's some kind of high-level willful spirit—that's a ghost who has volition and exercise of will—so he must be a revenant."
I shrugged, tired and wishing I had another glass of whiskey. "You'll have to explain that."
"Well, for instance, Albert's a sort of garden-variety willful spirit— some volition, but very limited will and action. But a revenant is literally that which survives. Most ghosts are kind of like etheric recordings. They don't have any will or personality—they just keep going through the motions of their lives or their message until they are released, or run down like clockwork. They're just shadows and echoes. A lot of them are just retrocognates."
I peered at him and interrupted. "Retro whats?"
"It means to know or be aware of something from the past. A medium can also retrocognate, under the right conditions. Some of them actually retrocognate when attempting psychometry."
"Ben," Mara broke in, "I'm sure Harper'd appreciate the layman's version, if you don't mind."
He looked sheepish. "Oh. Umm… Psychometry—well, I guess I'll get to that another time. But retrocognition… if you see a ghost walking through a place that no longer exists in this time and space, you're probably retrocognating, seeing stuff from the past. Do you ever experience that?" His eyes glittered.
"Sometimes," I responded, feeling more drained every second.
He nodded, then shook himself and continued. "All right, so the right medium could study the object and attempt retrocognition to tell you exactly what the connection is between your client and the parlor organ, but it would be very dangerous if it is as powerful a dark artifact as you two think."
"It's tangled up in the Grey and it seems to be drawing energy from the nexus nearby, like a battery charging up or something."
"Yes, Mara told me about it." He stopped to look at his wife, who smiled a tight smile and nodded for him to go on. "I wonder what the things purpose was."
"Not nice," I said. "It's black and red and very unfriendly. I think it sucks the energy out of everything that comes near it."
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