Downpour

ELEVEN

The ferret woke up with a frantic need to scratch her ears as I was trudging down the darkened road toward the ranger station. I had forgotten to ask about Shea, and I didn’t think that query or a request for a lift to my car would have been well received after the way I’d walked out on Jewel Newman, so I’d just kept walking. Geoff Newman tried to brace me at the door, but I am good at slipping out of physical holds—especially when the person trying it has no idea what he’s doing.

In the falling darkness, the lake’s uncanny presence impressed itself on me as an ululating whisper of song, half-heard. The phenomenon that had lit Lake Crescent bloody red had faded as the torn clouds closed up again, gathering their stormy menace, and the sun set completely. Now I felt the sparking tingle of minuscule raindrops against my face like tiny ice needles.

“Great,” I muttered, grabbing the ferret as she tried to leap to the ground. “What odds will you give me that we don’t make it back to the truck dry?”

Her only response was to squirm harder and paw at my hands. I stepped off the road and let her down, holding her leash tight so I didn’t lose her. I could hear her scratching her ears and I knew she was propelling herself around in a backward circle like she always did, one back leg going a mile a minute, while the other made a pivot for her to scoot around. As soon as she was done, she hopped up onto my boot, apparently finding the slippery frozen ground too chilly for her liking. Sighing, I bent and picked her up again, putting her on my shoulder, since she was now too awake to go peacefully back into my pocket.

I got my phone out and pressed a button to illuminate the screen and check the time. It was only six p.m., but it was as dark as midwinter midnight. I started walking again. A mist-form darted out of the trees on my right, gleaming in my sight like a cloud of tarnished silver. It trailed streamers of color and darker smoke as it crossed the road, and a trio of the white doglike demons I’d seen on Friday chased it, letting out unearthly howls. Not wanting to be seen by them, I backed up into the line of trees beside the road until I felt a shaggy cedar trunk at my back. Chaos tensed and crouched, her tail moving rapidly along my neck as she prepared to leap at them, but I clamped a hand down on her and wrestled her inside my coat before she could make the weird, challenging bark she’d issued the last time. I did not want these creatures after me again.

The white demon dogs caught the cloudy form near the opposite edge of the road and locked their jaws on it as if it were a thing of flesh and bone. They began yanking it back and forth between them while they made noises that sounded like laughter.

Two more shapes ran out of the bushes on my side. They trailed water as if they’d just come from the lake, though no one would swim voluntarily in that frigid water day or night at this time of year. The two new creatures headed for the ring of demons. I shifted my sight deeper into the Grey, looking through the gleaming mists in hope of seeing the creatures better.

One I recognized as Jin—a yaomo, according to Danziger—but this time his human form wasn’t wearing a fancy suit. Like his companion, he was stark naked and streaming wet. I concentrated on the other newcomer. It was a slim woman who lit up the Grey with her aura of dancing, brilliantly colored lights that gave off the odor of incense. The lights looked like small, captive versions of the bright energy bolts I’d been seeing all around the lakes and inside the Newmans’ house. The woman’s actual face or form was hard to see in the moving illumination; all I could tell was that she was slender and had long dark hair.

She moved with incredible speed and grace, stopping a hairbreadth from the monsters that worried at the spirit in their circle. She thrust a finger at them and snapped some words at Jin that I couldn’t understand.

The yaomo waded into the circle of smaller demons, slapping them aside and snarling at them, manifesting his inhuman form as he snatched the ghostly thing away from them. The guai didn’t like that and attempted to bite at him and fight back, but Jin shook them off, letting out a shriek that sent a shudder up my spine.

Holding on to the struggling mist-shape, he turned back toward the woman while the smaller demons lurked behind him, heads down, but beady eyes watching Jin for any chance to snatch the spirit back from him. The woman reached out and grabbed it from him. Then she tilted her head and let out a thread of sound that gleamed with color, twisting and coiling around the struggling Grey form, binding it and drawing it back toward her body. . . .

Headlights swept down onto the asphalt and struck across the figures as a car turned onto Highway 101 from East Beach Road. The woman gasped, snatching at the silvery cloud, and the entire group of demons bolted into the bushes on the east side of the highway, the spirit thing wailing as the woman dragged it away and slipped into the darkness in their wake. Her brilliant aura and smell faded swiftly into the distance beyond the edge of the trees.

I’d had enough. I stepped back into the normal and out to the edge of the tarmac, waving one arm while I clutched the ferret securely inside my coat. A dark red Mercedes SUV pulled to a halt in front of me.

I walked to the passenger-side window, which was already on its way down, and glanced in. The driver turned on the courtesy light and looked over at me. It was Geoff Newman and I wasn’t even surprised.

“Get in, Miss Blaine.”

“Is that an order, Mr. Newman?”

He fumed. “It’s common sense, woman! You don’t know what sort of things run in the night here.”

“You mean like those demons that just cleared the road?”

His eyes widened a little, but he just said, “Whatever they were, wouldn’t you rather not meet them again tonight?”

“That depends on what other monsters you might take me to.”

“Goddamn it, I’m trying to help you! Get in and I’ll take you to your car or your hotel or wherever you like, but let’s not just sit here like sheep!”

The flashes of anxious orange were back in his dim green energy corona. He was genuinely worried. I took a deep breath, making up my mind, and got in.

Chaos poked her head out of my coat and gave me a dirty look as I buckled the seat belt over her.

“Jesus! What’s that?” Newman yelped when he saw her.

“It’s a ferret. Don’t worry—she’s a pet, not some wild animal I picked up on the road.”

He huffed and forced his attention back to driving. “I know what a ferret is. I just wasn’t expecting one to come bursting out of your chest like an alien.”

I laughed. I hadn’t pegged Newman for a science fiction fan, though I certainly didn’t know enough about him to have made that leap, anyway. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to keep my aliens to myself.”

“Well,” he said, but he seemed to switch thoughts as he finished his sentence. “So, where can I take you?”

“My truck’s at Storm King ranger station.”

“You drive a truck?”

I nodded. As far as I’m concerned, the “SUV” thing is a load of marketing crap: It’s either a sport vehicle or a utility vehicle. His Mercedes was more of a luxury utility vehicle while mine was definitely just plain utility, but neither one of them was “sporty.”

As we rolled down the dark highway, he started to talk, flicking on the wipers as slushy rain finally arrived. “Miss Blaine, I don’t want you to have the wrong impression. . . .”

“What impression do you think I have?”

“You may be thinking Jewel’s a little . . . unstable. It’s not true. She’s just . . . put a lot of herself into the community here and she has some odd ideas sometimes.”

“Trust me, Mr. Newman. Your wife’s ideas are not that far off the beam. There is something very unsavory around here.”

“Ridenour’s gotten to you.”

“No. Not the way you mean, at least. I don’t think your wife’s crazy, either, but that doesn’t mean I trust either one of you—or anyone else from this place—as far as I could drop-kick the pair of you.”

“Is that why you told her no?”

I made a show of thinking about it. “Yep. That would be it.”

“Jewel didn’t kill her father. If—if anyone were to say she had, they’d be wrong, and if either of us were to have done it, it would have been me,” he babbled.

I sighed and rubbed the ferret’s ears. “Mr. Newman, I’m not the one you need to convince, and I’d advise you not to say anything that stupid when Ridenour—or whoever gets the case—comes around with questions. I cannot be involved in an active homicide investigation and especially not one that might end up on the feds’ plate. I could lose my license.”

He chewed his lower lip. “What about the rest . . . ?”

“Were you eavesdropping on our conversation?”

“No, but if it were just about the homicide thing, you’d have said so to Jewel just like you did to me. So that’s not what’s put your tail in a twist.”

“Do you believe in ghosts, Mr. Newman?”

He stared at me. “What?”

I pointed out the windshield. “Deer.”

He looked up and slammed on his brakes. The phantom herd of long-dead deer ambled across the road, through his front bumper. He stared at them; then he turned his head and stared at me.

“It rubs off after a while,” I said. “When you spend enough time with someone who sees ghosts and works magic, even a normal person starts to see the freak show. And then you start to think like them, too. You might want to drive on now.”

Newman got the Mercedes moving again.

“The problem I have here, Mr. Newman, is that the unsavory elements are running the show, and I don’t know the players or the play, but I’m reasonably sure I can’t do what your wife wants without becoming as bad as the rest of them. Now, why would I want to do that?”

He turned in at the ranger station and said nothing until he’d pulled up next to my lonely Rover. Then he looked at me, keeping his hand on the automatic door lock, holding me in the Mercedes until he’d said his piece. His aura went an ugly chartreuse shade. “You kicked over the wasps’ nest; it’s up to you to clean it up.”

I unbuckled my seat belt, but I didn’t try to leave yet. “I didn’t kick over anything. This rotten situation was already brewing, and it was what killed Steven Leung as much as any person did. All I did was bring a light.”

“And now that you’ve shined your flashlight on the problem, you think it’ll go away.”

I shook my head, disappointed. “Not exactly. See, when I said ‘a light,’ I meant something more like a match to gunpowder. You don’t want to see what will happen if I accept your wife’s proposal. Because I won’t be dictated to about my methods; I’ll do it my own way, and that way is not pretty. Now, please unlock the door and let me go.”

“No.” He looked sick and scared, but I had to give him credit for balls.

What I didn’t have to do was give in. I rolled my eyes and reached under my coat for my pistol. “Let me out or I’ll have to shoot your car.” I let him glimpse the hard shape of the slide and sight as I drew it, carefully keeping it pointed away from him. I placed the P7’s muzzle against the passenger window. It made a hard clink as the metal touched the glass. I glanced back at him.

He looked about to faint. Then he pushed the lock release. I had to keep one arm across the ferret—which was tricky—as I opened the door and stepped out. Once I was standing on the ground between the two vehicles, I reholstered the gun—I hadn’t even cocked it, but Newman didn’t know the difference. I turned and started unlocking the Rover as half-frozen rain worked into my collar and hair. I refused to hurry, to give him the impression I was afraid or anxious, but I was still relieved when I got into the seat and closed the door on the weather.

Newman watched me the whole time, rolling down the window as I started to pull out. He shouted, “A quarter of a million dollars!”

I just drove away.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t tempted by the money, but I didn’t want to think about it right then. I wanted to go home. I didn’t even want to stop at the hotel and pick up my things. I certainly didn’t want to spend another night here. I could still catch a ferry and be home before midnight. I could even drive all the way down to Olympia and back up the other side of the Sound if I had to. In my gut I knew I wasn’t going to escape, but for now I’d do whatever it took to get home and away from Blood Lake.