“On my way! Thanks!” Ridenour replied.
I caught a glimpse of his companion turning and jogging into the trees, but I still didn’t know who it was.
Ridenour saw me and glared, his hands on his hips. “Miss Blaine, what the hell are you doing out here?”
“I was looking for you. Didn’t the station radio you to meet me here?” I still couldn’t quite throw off the Grey completely and saw him through a thin veil of silver where the trees around us seemed to be moving without wind, shifting in the ground and glowing with green, blue, and yellow light. Their branches appeared to reach for Ridenour, the naked alders and birches looking like bony hands among the furry greenery of the cedars. I shivered, thinking the trees were aware of me, too, in some way foreign to humans, as if they watched with incorporeal eyes. Whatever strangeness was going on farther down the road had set my imagination running in creepy directions.
“I had other business and now I’ve got some more that’s more pressing than whatever it is you want,” Ridenour said, walking the last few feet to meet me. “You should have just waited by the gate until I got back.”
“I meant to, but . . . I thought I saw something and assumed it was you.”
He snorted, heading back to his truck. “Lots of people think they see things up here. The rain forest has a lot of fog this time of year, especially out here near the hot springs. It’s too easy to misstep and fall into something, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go wandering around off the road here.” He looked at the way my Rover blocked his truck in the narrow road. “Damn it! Move this truck of yours!”
“Where are you headed in such a hurry?” I asked, walking past him to get into the Rover and digging through my pockets for my keys. Ending up with the hotel key card first, I held it in my other hand as I pulled out the truck keys and unlocked the vehicle.
“I got a tip that Willow might be up at one of our greenhouses and I’d like to catch her, if you don’t mind, since it is on park property.”
I stopped and turned back to him from the open door of the Rover, tossing the hotel key onto the passenger seat. “I’d like to go with you, then.”
“What the hell business is it of yours?”
“I’d be there if you catch Willow. I’d like to talk to her and I’m not sure how long she’ll stay in custody.”
He slammed his truck door closed again and stomped to me. “Are you implying I can’t keep a prisoner?”
“No. I’m saying she seems to be hard to hold and, if nothing else, her sister may bail her out. And when you do catch her, won’t it be better if you have an unbiased witness around? Her family seems the litigious kind.”
He glowered but gave in. “All right. You’d better come along. I called Strother for backup, but he isn’t close enough. I can’t miss this opportunity! Just hurry up!”
I got in and started the Rover while he went back to his truck and lifted the barrier on the tollbooth. I backed the Rover into the interpretative center parking area a short stretch back up the road beside the sign and got out again, locking up and running to the side of the narrow road to catch up to Ridenour.
He’d turned the pickup truck through the tollbooth’s gates and lowered them again, but he was only just getting back into the driver’s seat, so I ran around and got in on the passenger side before he could do anything about it.
He rolled his eyes and buckled up. “We have to get up to the old watchtower on Pyramid Mountain. Road’s pretty rough, and it’ll take about fifteen or twenty minutes. Hang on and pray we catch her.”
The pickup lurched and leapt along the road and out onto the highway. Ridenour pointed it northeast toward Lake Crescent. I thought now was the time to ask a few questions, while the road was still smooth.
“What’s Willow doing at a park service greenhouse?” I asked.
“Forestry service and I have no idea. Maybe checking on something she put there herself. Forestry has a few greenhouses scattered around on the ridges to grow native plants for replanting in slide areas and where we’ve had to do redevelopment and construction. That way we anchor the soil and get the ecology back on track faster. But none of us check up on them frequently in the winter and one extra planter full of something might not be noticed. I wouldn’t put it past Willow to plant something illegal or dangerous and not worry too much about the consequences.”
“So you trust your tipster to have steered you right? It sounds like those greenhouses would make a pretty good spot for an ambush.”
Ridenour snorted. “Willow is dangerous and crazy, and there’s no love lost between us, but I can’t imagine she’d go out of her way to try to kill me.”
“That’s not quite what I meant. . . .”
He turned the truck sharply off the highway and onto the road that led to Fairholm where the barge was kept. I could see it tied up at the dock as the road rose a bit and turned to the west, toward the ocean and Pyramid Mountain. And there was the same bright array of energy lines that sprang out of the water and headed south toward the hot springs. It was just as it had been on Sunday, just as I’d seen it near the springs.
Ridenour interrupted my thoughts. “I’m not much for guessing what people aren’t saying, so whatever you’re thinking, you’d better spit it out.”
“I’d imagine everyone around here knows you’re pretty hot to catch Willow. What if one of them wanted to get you out of the way? Telling you Willow is someplace isolated and dangerous where you might nab her seems to get you moving pretty fast.”
Ridenour made a growling noise. “Now you’re assuming I’ve got enemies around here who’d like to see me dead. You have one hell of an imagination, Miss Blaine. Mostly we’re all pretty friendly up here.”
I reserved judgment on that. I’d garnered the impression that the Newmans weren’t great friends of Ridenour’s, and certainly Strother didn’t think as well of him as Ridenour might imagine. According to Strother, the Newmans didn’t get along with their lakeshore neighbor Elias Costigan, and no one seemed to trust Willow Leung, who probably returned the sentiment in spades. Even if Jewel Newman hadn’t said so, the strange things I’d already seen around the lake had convinced me there were other magic workers in the area. It was a safe bet there were rivalries and grudges galore between them, and I knew they’d be downright thrilled if Ranger Ridenour stopped keeping such a close eye on “his” park and let them get on with their casting and calling without needing to be discreet and sneaky about it. Not that any of them seemed overly concerned with being sussed out, so far as I could see. The lack of population gave them a fairly open field most of the winter.
Ridenour changed the subject. “So what the hell did you think you’d seen out at the springs to make you go wandering round like a pie-eyed idiot?”
“I’m really not sure,” I replied. “It’s a little strange out there, if you don’t mind my saying so, and once I was walking around, the place seemed a little spooky. It doesn’t have a reputation for being haunted or anything, does it?” The weird effects of the energy lines I’d seen could just as easily be written off to some generic ghost story as to magic, though I knew the difference.
Ridenour turned the truck onto a dirt road that headed up the steep slopes that ringed the west side of Lake Crescent, and I had to hold on to the armrest as the surface got rougher.
“Not haunted as such, though you could say it’s got its share of spirits. Used to be a fancy resort there in the early nineteen hundreds. It burned down after a couple of years and then it was just a ruin for a while. Then it was rebuilt and the water went bad. The new buildings were built in the seventies and the filter problems were fixed, so it’s been back in seasonal business since. Before that, the hot springs used to be a special place for the local Indians—maybe that’s why the resorts have always had such hard luck there. People claim to see all sorts of crazy stuff out that way: Indian ghosts, walking trees, lightning fish—”
I interrupted him, puzzled. “What’s a lightning fis
h?”
“Sort of a Native American dragon,” he said, not slackening the truck’s pace much over the rutted dirt track. “They fly around in the clouds and spit lightning during storms. The Quileute claim the red fulgurites that show up in the ground at the site of lightning strikes are bits of the lightning fish’s tongue. They also say the hot springs are made of the tears of two lightning fish who fought over which one owned the mountains and lakes here. They battled for days on end, tearing off each other’s skin that dropped to earth to make the tree ridges, but neither one could win, so they hid in caves under the mountain in their frustration and cried hot tears that worked up through the ground. Really it’s volcanic seeps coming up through the sandstone around the springs, but, hey, that’s nowhere near as entertaining a story.
“Anyway, related geologic phenomena are what makes the nitrogen level in Lake Crescent so low—that’s what keeps it so clear and colorful. It’s also the reason animal remains that sink to the bottom saponify and float back up sometimes. The Indians claimed that white whales would swim into the lake once in a while through an underground river from the ocean, but I think it was probably dead elk or bears resurfacing. People imagine a lot of wild things when they don’t know the real cause.”
I gave a show of thinking it over. “The soap bodies I can sort of understand. But do people really think they see lightning fish flying around?” Had I seen one during the night? I remembered a shadowshape in the wind that looked like a flying lizard, but maybe that had been my imagination....
We were jouncing around a little more violently as the road dipped and rolled over the ridges, climbing toward the top of the triangular mountain that overlooked Lake Crescent from the west. I thought I spied a building on stilts ahead, but it was hard to get a look as the pickup lurched along.
Ridenour huffed. “When there’s a storm, some of them do. People can get a little cabin-crazy up here during the winter. It’s not so bad at the lake elevation, but it’s a lot worse when you get up in the snow line around Hurricane Ridge and the tops of the mountains here, like this one.”
“How about the walking trees?”
“You’d be surprised what some people think they’ve seen when they’ve been indulging in various substances. We get plenty of folks up here who seem to think nature is less scary with the application of medicinal herbs and alcohol. And there’s always someone willing to supply it,” he added in a grim undertone.
“Maybe Willow Leung?”
“I’m hoping not, but we’ll have to see what she’s up to with the greenhouse.”
He spun the truck onto an even smaller dirt track that cut away at an angle to the mountaintop, keeping us hidden from the crest. Ridenour pulled the pickup under a stand of trees and set the hand brake. He was panting a little as he turned to me. “You should probably stay here with the truck—it’ll be safer.”
I shook my head. “I’d rather come along. Besides, if you need backup, I’ll be right there, not way out here.”
He looked me over. “Strother said you’ve got a hell of a rep with the Seattle PD.”
“Good, I hope.”
“Fella he talked to seemed to think you’re a good hand—if a little crazy.”
I nodded. That would be Solis’s opinion.
Ridenour sucked on his teeth a second, thinking. “Maybe Willow won’t bolt so fast if she sees a woman.... Got a piece on you?”
“Yes,” I replied, touching the grip of my HK pistol for a fleeting moment to be sure it was where I’d put it: tucked into the holster at the back of my hip—I’d never had a lot of luck with shoulder rigs. I hoped there’d be no need for them, but I had a spare magazine and my cell phone in my coat pockets, and I thought I was as ready as I was going to get for whatever Ridenour had in mind. I had no intention of shooting anyone or letting Ridenour do so, either, but this wasn’t my show, and I had to go along with his paranoia if I was going to get a chance to talk to Willow.
“All right,” Ridenour said. “We’ll have to walk up from here. If Strother can make it, he’ll join us in a while, but we need to get a look at the place and see what’s going on. The greenhouse is just below the old observation tower and slightly to the west of the ridge, so anyone up there can’t see us down here, but we’ll have less cover while we’re near the tower. I’ll have to shut off my radio so it won’t squawk, so stick with me, move fast, but stay quiet.”
That was going to be a bit more of a challenge for this city girl than for Ranger Ridenour, but I could always slip into the Grey if I had to. I nodded and followed Ridenour out of the truck and into the brush.
The ice and snow on the ground were harder and thicker here near the top of Pyramid Mountain. It wasn’t the tallest peak in the area, but it was the farthest northwest, and even on the ground it had a mesmerizing view toward the ocean in one direction and back down into the lakes on the other. A spindly wood-and-steel tower poked out of the ridgetop. I guessed it was some kind of fire watch station, but no one seemed to be in it today. Glancing back toward Lake Crescent, I could see a sheet of white reflection off the windows of the Newmans’ house and starlike gleams from the buildings at the Lake Crescent Lodge resort near the Storm King ranger station. I could even spot the blue glimmer of Lake Sutherland from this height and, peering sideways through the Grey, see the thick river of magical energy flowing between the two lakes and sending thin creeks of power out over the ancient landslide toward Storm King Mountain on the east.
Ridenour ushered me off the ridgetop and into a stand of trees, the lower trunks of which were buried in chest-high seedlings and ferns sprouting from an old, dead log. He pointed through the undergrowth to the south of our position and whispered, “That’s the greenhouse.”
I looked through the leaves and saw the low building of wood and glass just on the ocean side of the ridge. I didn’t have the time or privacy to try to look down at the lake again through the Grey, so I concentrated on the task at hand.
The trees around the building had been cleared away when the tower was erected years ago and had not grown back, leaving an open field of low-growing scrub on the rocky ridge. The greenhouse roof stuck up a bit on the east side to catch the early hours of sunlight the ridge would otherwise block.
I couldn’t see into the building, the glass walls being steamed with moisture, but I could see the silhouette of a human shape moving around inside.
I patted Ridenour on the shoulder and pointed him toward the shadow.
“Do you think that’s Willow?” I whispered.
“Hard to say.”
He sized me up again before he said, “I feel funny asking, but would you head down there first? I’ll move around to come from the blind spot on the left of the door. Make all the noise you like. I’m thinking she’ll concentrate on you and maybe even come outside to see what you want. Then I can catch her from behind.”
I shrugged. “It’s worth a try. If she doesn’t come out, I’ll try going in. If I don’t come back out in ten minutes, you can assume Willow’s still in there with me and make your move.”
“I’m beginning to believe that ‘crazy’ thing,” Ridenour muttered as I started off to work my way around to the tower and walk along the exposed ground to the greenhouse. I didn’t have a pack and I didn’t look like a hiker, but I figured that anyone really suspicious wasn’t going to care. If Willow bolted, we’d have to give chase, but I thought I might be able to get inside and talk to her before Ridenour came barging in like the cavalry. Either way, I didn’t think the risk to me was that great—I was just a civilian getting into as much trouble as she was by breaking and entering the greenhouse.
The bare, scraped rock of the mountaintop was slippery wherever there wasn’t a patch of the stubborn, nubbly ground cover that had made a few inroads on the surface chinks and pits. I had to watch where I put my feet, trying to step on the hardy little plants only enough to keep my footing as a chilly breeze rushed over the mountaintop. I hoped the greenery wasn’t some rare sp
ecies of something Ridenour would have to cite me for trampling. I could see him from the corner of my eye, edging around to his own position until he disappeared behind the legs of the tower. I kept going for the door, making a little ordinary noise and swearing under my breath—as you do when you’re out walking on the top of a mountain and thinking your feet are going to slide out from under you any second.
My angle on the greenhouse didn’t give me a view inside now, but I could see something ripple through the Grey, like the visual representation of a single sonar ping across a dead sea. Willow—or whoever was inside—had noticed me. It would have been hard not to. No one came out to evaluate me, so I stumbled up to the door and pulled on the handle.
The door opened, making only a tiny squeak as the long rubber flap over the hinge rubbed against the glass wall beside it. The warmth of the greenhouse and the smell of mulch and cedar trees made me shiver with pleasure. I hadn’t realized how cold my walk had been until I was inside again. I rubbed my hands together and cast a glance into the Grey, looking for Willow or whoever was lurking in the greenhouse with me.
The power lines of the Grey seemed distant here, deep in the strata of rock and dirt between me and the ocean that looked like a dark blue ink stain spreading to my right as far as I could see. But the zipping, whirring bits of energy I’d seen down closer to the lake were here, if a bit less active and numerous. In the silver mist of the Grey, a whirling column of colored threads and spinning lights, wound in a whiff of scent like incense and hot brass, hovered near the back corner of the greenhouse. It was dense enough to cast a sort of shadow onto the rolling fog of the world. “Get out,” it said.
I adjusted my view and turned my head to look toward the corporeal source of the voice. The young woman occupying the swirling cloud of energy had to be Willow Leung. Her skin was much paler than her sister’s and she was distinctly more Asian in appearance. She also looked a lot younger—mid-twenties—and I wondered about the differences, but not for long. She moved toward me with a swift gliding motion, dodging the long tables full of seedlings like a feather on an updraft, her loose-fitting dress fluttering behind. The balls of energy around her flushed blue and green and glowed brighter as she started to thrust her arms out at me.
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