Labyrinth g-5

by Kat Richardson

  Carkeek Park tumbles off the top of a steep, tree-thick ridge in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Broadview and drops into Puget Sound beside the railroad tracks that run from the aircraft plant at Everett, south to Boeing Field. Expensive homes overlook the park at a distance but see little through the rolling acreage to the small lawn at the cliff edge. A mile down the coast lie the busy locks and marina at Ballad, but you can’t see a sign of them from Carkeek. On a weekday at mid-morning, few people stroll the park and even fewer cross the pedestrian bridge that spans the railroad to descend steep steel stairs to the ragged spit of sand at the bottom littered with driftwood as large as cars. It’s a landscape of tree-crowded emptiness above desolate sand, and the isolated park that used to be a sewage treatment plant has hosted more than its share of assaults and dumped bodies, even a murder or two in the steep little canyon that cradles it. It is lovely now, but it’s not a place to drive; it’s a place to walk and possibly to disappear.

  I parked the Land Rover as close to the cliffside strip of grass as I could. Then I donned my leather jacket against the chilly wind from the Sound and led Quinton down the lawn to the railroad bridge. We crossed down to the deserted swath of sand and sat on a sea-scoured tree trunk facing the cliff. Only a fish could sneak up on us from there.

  I took the black package from my pocket but I didn’t unwrap it. I let it rest in my hands between my knees; it was heavy beyond its size with my knowledge of its past. “You know Carlos,” I started, looking up from the silk wrapper to glance into Quinton’s eyes.

  He nodded. “Yeah. He was the extra crispy we stashed at the Danzigers’ after . . . what happened at the museum two years back.”

  I nodded, too. “Yeah.”

  “Scary customer. Even by bloodsucker standards.”

  I looked back down at the hidden knife. “More than you know. He’s, uh . . . well, you know how Mara and I are always a little reluctant to deal with him. He’s, well . . . literally power hungry. He’s a necromancer, which is kind of unusual for a vampire. Dangerous stuff, sucking magic out of death when you’re dead yourself. So, he’s always tricky about dark power sources and I have to approach him carefully every time.”

  “He’s kind of unpredictable.”

  “Yes and no. You can bet if there’s magical power to be gained, he’ll want it, and unless you can hold him off or persuade him not to take it, he will. I’ve seen him do it and couldn’t stop him nearly killing someone for it. But, see, there’s more to the problem—the immediate problem—than that. He’s got a . . . an issue you could say, with Edward. They aren’t friends. They used to be, about two hundred and fifty years ago. I think they might have been the very closest of friends then, but Edward did something . . . just phenomenally stupid and greedy.” I felt increasingly constrained and physically uncomfortable telling him these things, even though I’d never been bound not to. But the sounds in my head and the humming of the grid sang a spell that dragged on the words and squeezed the breath from my lungs. I labored to bring each sentence into the air. “Edward wanted power, but to get it, he had to kill a lot of other vampires. It was easier to do it in one big cataclysm, so he persuaded Carlos to help him cast a spell that would destroy the homes of his enemies. It took out most of Lisbon in an earthquake back in 1755.”

  Quinton whistled. “Hell of a spell.”

  “Well, Carlos is a necromancer. He’s good at killing people. He gets his energy from death and this needed a lot of death. About twenty people, I think he said.”

  I knew what he’d said, but it was too bad and dreadful to admit. I could hear Carlos’s voice as if he were beside me: “. . . two dozen men and women—all children of the streets, the unnoticeables, the lost—knelt on a platform, bound within the machine ...”

  “They killed them and powered the spell, but it wasn’t really enough for Edward. He wanted more. I guess there’s some kind of special magic in killing a mage or killing your lover or maybe both,” I lied. I knew well enough from Carlos that it was a vampire’s blood that was precious in this case, but that I could not say. I had promised that. “So, Edward stabbed Carlos with this, making the spell into something worse. He left him to die as the earthquake brought the building down on him. Carlos couldn’t do anything about it but hide from the sun and hope to survive.”

  Quinton blinked as I paused and looked over at him. “That’s . . . extreme. But—”

  “Why didn’t Carlos go after him?” I finished for him.

  “Yeah. Neither of them is the forgiving type.”

  “He couldn’t. Edward did something extra so Carlos couldn’t hurt him if he happened to survive the earthquake and the morning sun. Edward broke off the tip of this knife in Carlos’s heart. As long as it’s there, Carlos can’t touch him. He can’t hurt him. But he can’t help him much either. And I know the one thing that Carlos would do anything for is the chance to be free of this knife.”

  The dual memory, Carlos’s evocation and my new experience of the story, brought up the echoing sound of Edward’s cruel anticipation in the depths of the long-ago carnage as he knelt over Carlos in the pool of blood and bodies. “I shall always be in your heart....” And I shuddered with his receding laughter, feeling myself in Carlos’s battered flesh, oozing the stolen blood of the murdered and knowing despair and betrayal so dark and bitter it made me blind.

  I blinked and shivered, shaking the impression away as if it were offered poison.

  Quinton didn’t respond at once. He looked out to sea over his shoulder. Then he gazed up at the heights of the cliffs above us and along the crumbling edge. His glance came back down, studying the sand and only very slowly returned to me. “So you’re going to use that as a lever to get Carlos to help you find Edward and figure out what Wygan’s doing.”

  I nodded, making a grim smile as the pressure on my chest eased. I was done; the voices couldn’t stop me once the words were already out. They were angry, though. The noise in my head turned to rage and storm, unintelligible and violent.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to argue it to silence. It ebbed down only slowly, peeling into layers of discord that fractured and fell away in snatches of borrowed conversation.

  “You won’t be safe with him,” Quinton said. “There will be nothing to restrain him if he gets free of that.” He pointed to the black thing in my hands.

  “That may be true, but I think I can persuade him that stopping Wygan’s plans is worth suspending his revenge on Edward for a little while. Once this is over, I don’t care if he wipes out half the vampires in Seattle.”

  Quinton made a skeptical frown. “Yes, you do. You’re tough but you’re not callous, and I don’t believe you’d let whole rooms full of people—if you can call those red-handed bastards people—die if you could avoid it. Not to mention the stink it would raise with your cop friend. He already thinks you have something to do with everything freaky that happens around here.”

  “Yeah. I noticed that.”

  Quinton cracked a smile. “He’s not that far off, you know: You attract the weird.”

  I grinned pointedly at him. “Yes, I know. Lucky me.”

  His smile, though crooked, widened and he slid his nearest arm around my waist. “Better than boring, I guess.” He tagged my cheek with a lightning-quick kiss.

  I snorted. I had missed him horribly while in London. I had been too busy running for my life or someone else’s to notice most of the time, but every pause had brought it back to my mind. I hoped whatever happened next wouldn’t tear us from each other. I put my head on his shoulder a moment, resisting the insidious whispered urge to hurry, hurry, do something. . . .

  I wanted to hiss back at it, “Shut up. Leave us alone for a while. Just an hour, half an hour. Go away!” But I kept my mouth shut and shouted only in my mind.

  FOURTEEN

  There wasn’t much we could do with the long summer day that would help my crusade. We could only wait it out until the sun went down and the vampires got u
p. Until then, I tried to put my mind to the other odd little mystery my father had given me—something about keys, mazes, back doors, puzzles. . . . It was like a maze itself, trying to unwind the possible meanings of all his hints. I knew he’d tried to be clear, but he hadn’t succeeded.

  We couldn’t go back to my condo—it surely was still being watched—nor could we further endanger the Danzigers by returning there unless it was unavoidable. They were literally on danger’s doorstep and I’d put them at enough risk already. I hoped they’d take good care of the ferret and Grendel a while longer. Even my regular business routine seemed risky: Every Grey thing in Seattle knew what I did for a living, and it wouldn’t be hard for them to report back to anyone willing to pay for the information if I were spotted at the records office or my own.

  It is very hard to break yourself of routines and places. When you have nothing else to do, you fall back to the familiar. What we needed was to run forward into the unsuspected.

  What we did was take the ferry to Bremerton—a one-hour trip across the widest part of the Sound. Vampires, I’d noticed, didn’t like crossing water—and the longer, rougher, and saltier the stretch, the less they enjoyed it—so pockets of isolated vampires or their minions weren’t too likely to be watching out for us anywhere on the Kitsap Peninsula or tiny Bainbridge Island, which hung off the northeastern corner like a bud waiting to flower.

  Off the ferry on the Kitsap side, I drove north along the rocky Soundview road from Bremerton, heading slowly for Poulsbo and the long span of the Agate Pass Bridge that crosses the rushing narrows between the peninsula and Bainbridge. The scenery along most of the route was breathtaking, and we stopped once or twice to stare at it, breathe in the salt smell of the Sound, and think. I’m not sure what Quinton thought about, though he did sometimes write frantically in a notebook he kept in his pocket. Me, I thought about my father and his riddle.

  I was sure that the key to which he’d referred was the little wire pocket puzzle I’d found in his effects. With the help of Marsden, I’d discovered it was, in fact, a kind of magical skeleton key. It didn’t seem to work on real-world doors, only on Grey ones, but it was very effective. If that was the key to use on the door, what were the mazes he’d referred to? It seemed as if he’d equated mazes and puzzles, puzzles and doors, and they all opened to a key I already had. I just had to find the mazes. He’d said to find the first maze—no, a labyrinth—and that would lead me to a back door. . . .

  So I was looking for a labyrinth. The only one I knew of was the one on the floor of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, but I was reasonably sure that wasn’t it—it would have been near impossible to open any magical device inside the cathedral without someone noticing. No matter how I may feel, personally, about any religion, wherever belief in something paranormal is strong enough, Grey things take shape or show up, and it was a sure bet the cathedral was thick with magic that would have a dampening effect on anything that didn’t belong there. There must have been other labyrinths. . . . I’d have to do some research when I got back to a computer.

  We were sitting on a bench someplace north of Illahee looking up the bay toward Agate Pass with the sun high overhead as I thought about this. The bridge in the distance looked like a long-backed dinosaur stretching its neck toward Bainbridge to take a nibble of the island’s robust greenery.

  “Do you suppose there’s a Radio Shack in Poulsbo?” Quinton asked.

  I was shaken out of my thoughts by his non sequitur. “Huh? Why?”

  “I want to make a change to the detector circuit, but I need some parts I don’t have in my pack. We could go all the way down to Renton for them, but that’s a long drive the wrong way from here.

  “Oh. Well, I guess we could look. And have lunch,” I added, noticing a pang in my belly.

  “I like that idea.”

  We killed most of the rest of the afternoon looking for parts for Quinton’s project and finding places for him to work on it and that was fine; electronic parts stores were certainly the last place any vampires would be searching for us. Quinton continued to surprise me with the things he could produce in a pinch. By the time he was satisfied with his tweaking and tuning, it was late enough to head across the bridge to the island and take the return ferry from Bainbridge back to Seattle.

  Finding Carlos without getting nabbed by any agents of the Pharaohn was going to be more of a challenge. Wygan and Goodall were probably furious with me and they’d have set every demi-vampire, minion, cat’s-paw, and informant on the alert. I tried calling the sex shop Carlos owned, but no one admitted to his presence or the likelihood that he’d turn up. I had to leave a message with Cameron, his apprentice of sorts, and hope he hadn’t disappeared or changed alliances since the last time I’d seen him.

  Cameron’s had been my first paranormal case and he my first vampire: a missing college student who’d turned up in more trouble than anyone could have imagined and with a problem beyond just being a bloodsucker. I had liked him, then. Now I didn’t know how undeath might have changed him. He’d also had reason to hate Edward, but unlike his mentor, he didn’t seem to, though time and familiarity might have altered that. I wasn’t even sure that Cameron was still under Carlos’s tutelage or, if he wasn’t, that they still were in contact: Vampire protégé is not the most stable position in the world.

  But the relationship must have been good enough. A little before ten o’clock, as Quinton and I lurked in a diner near Green Lake, watching the last of the evening joggers make their endless circuits of the walking path, Cameron called back.

  “Hi, Harper.” His voice was very soft, not whispering, just without any force.

  “Hi, Cam.”

  Cameron gave me an address near Northwest Eighty-fifth Street and Greenwood Avenue North. Northwest of the zoo and our current location, it was a place I wasn’t familiar with off the commercial streets nearby. “Carlos will be there in ten minutes. He says you should be alone.” The destination seemed close enough to make it in time, but I’d have to get moving.

  Invitation issued in the third person morose. It was disquieting.

  “Why?”

  Cameron paused almost thirty seconds. I wasn’t even sure he was still there and nearly hung up. Answering my question, his voice took on a slight tone of anxiety. “He’s . . . nervous. About someone.”

  “Me?”

  “No. No, no. Someone worthy of distrust. No friend of yours.”

  “Ah. Well, then I’ll see him soon.” I assumed that meant not Quinton.

  “Will you call me afterward?”

  “If you want.”

  “I do. And . . . be careful, Harper.” Then he disconnected without another word, as if someone might overhear him if he lingered.

  I put my phone away and turned to Quinton. “Mysteries on top of enigmas. Apparently I’m to meet Carlos alone. He doesn’t feel safe otherwise.”

  Quinton frowned. “Don’t like the sound of that. What freaks out a vampire necromancer?”

  “Wygan, I’m guessing. Hoping at least.”

  Quinton chewed his lower lip. “Where?”

  I paused before I answered. “This time, I think it would be better if I didn’t say. But I trust Carlos’s paranoia to make sure the place is safe. I’ll be all right.”

  “I’m less worried about the place than Carlos. People don’t act rationally when they’re scared. I don’t imagine vampires are better about that.”

  On consideration, I imagined they were so rarely afraid of anything, that fear might be a bit of a thrill to some vampires: the undead equivalent of adrenaline junkies. Carlos didn’t strike me as the type for it, but I hadn’t thought he’d take pleasure in driving anyone insane, either. Maybe I should have.

  “I will be all right,” I repeated. I culled my memory for a safe meeting place unlikely to be on any vampire’s rounds. “I’ll meet you in the bar at Louie’s when I’m done. If the bar closes and I don’t show, call me.” There couldn’t have been much less likely
to hold attraction for the undead than Louie’s Cuisine of China in Ballard—a nice working-class neighborhood’s idea of a nice family night out since back when there were still beavers along the shore of Piper’s Creek.

  “What if you don’t answer?”

  “Then you should take the ferret and run like hell.”

  “Harper,” he started, reaching forward as if he meant to grab me.

  The whispering in my head got loud and ran along my spine and into my brain with nasty spike-heeled fears and incomprehensible gabble. I gave him a wary look. For a moment, I thought he was going to get all stupid, macho male on me and tell me not to go. In which case I’d have to deck him. Or start screaming to make the noise quit.

  He didn’t stop reaching, but he just put his hands on my upper arms and stroked lightly down until he caught my hands in his. “I’m an impatient bastard now that I’ve got you, and I don’t want to stand here and wait like a navy wife on the shore. I don’t care for the idea of taking out the whole vampire community of Seattle by myself, but—I’m sorry—if you don’t come back, I’m not running. I did that once: It kind of sucks. And didn’t I already tell you I’ll always come after you? Day later doesn’t change that.”

  I blinked at him, mentally shoving the voices down, though they fought and made sounds like feedback in my head. “Oh. Yeah.” I smiled, a quivering expression that threatened to fail at any second. Why was I so afraid? I was not a weak and cowardly creature, yet the past few days had left me with a sense of growing horror for no reason I could name. It hadn’t been that bad . . . had it? Maybe it was the cacophony in my head, those unending babbling voices, just below hearing. . . . “I’ll be all right. I don’t think I’ll need the cavalry this time.”

  He tipped my chin a little and kissed me on the lips. “Get going. I’ll meet you at Louie’s.”

  The crazy tangle of streets around the lake made it faster to separate than for me to drop Quinton off and double back. I headed back to the Rover while Quinton walked south toward the bus line on Forty-fifth. The drive up to Greenwood wasn’t far, but without knowing exactly where I was headed, and with no time to scout, I had to move quickly and hope for the best. With such a short lead time to get there, no one could reconnoiter and prep any surprises except Carlos, and I suppose that was the point.