Downpour

FOURTEEN

I did some more work at the office—the sort of mindless mechanical grind that isn’t hard if you have the tools to do it. It wasn’t much, but it generated billable hours and I spent the end of the day making up those bills and their accompanying reports. But my mind wasn’t on the paperwork. I worried a little about Michael, but not that either of us would find ourselves in jail. I worried more that he was now alone in a haunted world and I could offer him no more comfort. I had to admit, guiltily, that I was glad he wouldn’t want any such thing from me. I am not a good family person. I don’t have much and I’m not particularly fond of what family I have, for the most part, but I don’t wish to build another one from the wreck of someone else’s. Michael didn’t need me and I hoped he was right about finding his own life again in England. We’d both be better off without the other nearby.

More than Michael’s problem, though, I thought about Blood Lake and wondered what I was going to do about it. The paper Solis had given me bore the name of the Clallam County investigator, Deputy Alan Strother. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in Strother’s ability to get to the truth—not even a normal-world facsimile of it. He seemed like a nice guy; however, no one I’d met around the lakes was likely to take the young deputy and his questions seriously and he was not equipped to deal with the magical world at all.

The differences I’d seen in the Grey as I’d walked up to the police station had sparked a lot of new questions in my mind. Their unknown answers left me at their mercy and could do me harm if I returned to the area—and I was still trying to decide if I would. I knew the Grey and its grid of magical energy responded to the pressure of human belief and desire in strange ways, making way for the manifestation of monsters and ghosts that matched the concepts of the local people, but rogue elements could also exist—after all, I’d seen Native American monsters coexisting with pure thought-constructions and ghosts displaced through time and space to places they never should have been. Strother was going to be even further out of his depth with that than I was.

There was also a problem of culture. Clallam County’s population was more than ninety percent white and about as middle-of-the-road in terms of belief as any group of average Americans. Strother fit in perfectly. But, according to the records, Steven Leung had been Chinese and, though I was guessing from Jewel’s dark skin that his late wife had been black, his daughters probably got some of their own beliefs from him. That would explain the presence of the yaomo and yaoguai. But that didn’t seem to be the sum of Blood Lake’s strange powers. What else was in the mix? Mara had suggested that the spell circle and casting I’d seen were something akin to hoodoo spell work. Jewel had alluded to the native’s legends about the area, and the Winter kids in Port Angeles had been more than passingly interested in the later mysteries around the lake. There were also the strange puddles of light around the shores and the singing lines that had erupted near Fairholm. . . . All that was part and parcel of the complications I might have to deal with.

It didn’t appear that I had any real need to flee Seattle to avoid Solis, but I wasn’t enthusiastic about getting deeper into the problems around Lake Crescent even without that impetus. I found myself chasing the arguments around and around in my head: Should I go or should I stay away? Did I have to go? Was the situation potentially damaging to the Grey? Would I find myself hounded to go? Or could I slip off this hook? I just couldn’t come to a clear decision. I wasn’t even sure about what I wanted.

I pushed myself back from my desk in disgust and stood up. Moving around sometimes helped me think. Even though it had started to drizzle outside, I locked up and went down to the street to walk until I could figure it out.

At first I went around the block and up and down Pioneer Square, but after a while I stopped paying attention to where I was heading and just walked. The sidewalks were empty in the unwelcoming weather and I didn’t pass another living human being until I was nearly up to the Seneca Street off-ramp. Without thinking, I’d walked up to the area of Quinton’s hidden home beneath the street.

I wondered if he was there. It would have been nice to talk to him about the situation . . . but, given the way he’d vanished earlier, I thought he didn’t want to see me. The sun was going down, bruising the clouds darker shades of blue and gray and laying directionless shadows over everything. I turned and walked toward the waterfront.

As I went down the Seneca stairs, I had the sensation of sinking, as if the city were swallowing me. The rain took the remaining light and turned it into twisting strands of gleaming white and silver. I reached the bottom and turned left onto Post Avenue, which would eventually take me back to Pioneer Square. The rain seemed to fall down in wavering curves, filling the narrow road with something that seemed too thick and shiny to be water....

A cold ache burned along the ravaged muscles of my abdomen. I adjusted my sight a little and caught a spinning lurch of vertigo as the air flashed and thickened into the formless ghostlight of the Grey. The long silver strands of rain coiled and writhed, making a sound like wind chimes of glass and steel as they wove into a shape: a long dragonlike head on a slender neck and body that ran in looping undulations into the mist, rippling and cutting it here and there with claws and bones connected by spiderweb sinews of ghost-stuff. Light slipped around the shape of mist and shadow, leaving an impression of vitreous scales. I didn’t think I had any power to call it up, but here was the Guardian Beast, looming in the Grey outlines of Post Avenue, breathing cold down onto my face.

It wasn’t the same bone-spined monster I’d seen the first time I’d entered the Grey; this was the new version, a younger, sleeker thing built of the remains of Will Novak and the Grey’s own memories of guardians past. It didn’t have the clattering ruff of spines around its head or the accompanying sense of bone-jelling terror when it came near that the old one had possessed, but it was already different from the barely sketched form of mist and silver I’d last seen. For an instant I wondered how much of Will resonated in the creature, but the thought was knocked away as it lowered its massive skull and butted me in the chest hard enough to send me onto my back in the cold, roiling cloud-stuff of the world between worlds.

The Beast rumbled a growl and churned up the mist with hooked talons as if it were trying to pick me up and put me back on my feet. The power lines of the Grey—the grid—strobed in sudden flurries of red energy that illuminated the face of the Guardian Beast with a suggestion of flesh that bore an angry expression and then vanished back into nothing. The Beast began circling me, laying coil on coil around me like a boa getting ready to squeeze.... Then it shrieked and launched upward, dragging me into the air for several feet and swatting me violently toward the water with the whiplike end of its tail and the sound of a ton of steel pipes crashing to the ground.

I hit the wall on the other side of the narrow street with my arms up to protect my head, but even in the Grey mist, the impact hurt and now my whole body ached. I held myself up by digging my hands into the cracks between the bricks. I started to turn and the Guardian spun around, coming back to shove me again, westward. It put its long snout against my spine and pushed as if the building had no more substance than fog and the creature could force me through it. But the wall was a hundred years old and even its ghost memories were solid and resisted my passage.

“Stop it,” I yelled, twisting and batting at the Beast’s head, trying to get away before it crushed me. It was a little slower than the old one, which was all the hope I had. As it reared to get another run at me, I dropped down flat into the rising silver mist of the Grey, my hearing suddenly clogged with whispers and muttering.

The massive head of the Beast passed over me and the movement pulled sound from the grid like fingers plucking a chord on a harp. “Go.”

I rolled onto my back and propped myself up against the flickering wall. “OK, OK! I’ll go. Gods, you’re as subtle as a train wreck.”

The Guardian Beast moved its head through the mist and the Grey laughed at me. I felt the sound roll over me and swim outward into the rippling incorporeal world until it died on distant shores of memory and broken time.

Was this better or worse than the old version? I couldn’t decide. The old Guardian hadn’t told me what to do, but it hadn’t really been communicative at all; it was mostly a bundle of inchoate fury drawn by need alone to whatever threatened the Grey. It had been strong and driven, but incredibly stupid, which had made catching and killing it comparatively easy. This version wasn’t so dumb—in either sense. Not that it was exactly chatty, and it certainly didn’t have Will’s reticent personality.

It gave me another look. Then it whipped around and shot away, through the wall, sucking the chuckling mist with it. I found myself sitting against the brick wall of the Post Alley Pizza Company, thin tendrils of ghost-stuff trickling around me while water started soaking into my clothes. Most of the bruised and battered sensation in my body had gone, but not all, and I still felt tender along my belly and where my limbs had hit the not-so-incorporeal bricks of the building.

I picked myself up and brushed the mud off, muttering, “Oh, yeah, that was graceful. Thanks so much.”

But at least I had an answer. It was not an answer I was thrilled with, nor was I thrilled with the manner of its delivery, but still, I couldn’t argue that it was ambiguous. I hoped the Guardian wasn’t going to make a habit of such assistance to my decision making in the future. Among other things, I must have looked like a drunk at the moment; I was glad no one seemed to have observed my sudden stumble, fall, and flop.

But I was wrong about that. As I turned to walk back out of the narrow street, I saw someone at the base of the stairs, watching me. Great. Swallowing my embarrassment, I headed back the way I’d come, toward the person in the long black coat and hat. . . .

Quinton.

I stopped, feeling a flush on my cheeks. “Hi. . . .”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Traction problem?”

“Slippery planar problem.”

“Ah. Do you need a hand?”

“Not with that, but . . . maybe you could see me home?” I added with a grin.

His face went utterly blank, startling me. I’d seen that lack of expression only once or twice before from him and it was still as opaque to me now as the first time. “No.”

I frowned. “Is there something—”

“I have to get back to work. I can come by later.”

“I’ll be out of town for a while.”

His eyes flashed wide for a moment as if in panic and he started to say something. Then he clamped his mouth shut and bit his lip, swallowing hard. “The same case as before?”

“Same area.”

“I’ll come to your place to get the ferret.” He turned from me with a twitch of his shoulders and started off, away from his hidden door.

“Hey,” I called out.

He glanced back over his shoulder. “Not now.” And he strode across the street and turned to dash up the steps of Post Alley toward the multiple paths of the Harbor Steps complex.

It was clear he didn’t want me to follow him or question him, so I didn’t pursue, but I stared after him, confused and bothered. What had he nearly said? Why was he being so cryptic?

This had been a day for the books: First Solis’s phone call had put me on edge and ready to flee; then Nan had made noises as if she was going to fire me; Michael had flipped my perspective over and driven me right back to Solis, whom I’d had to steer into different lines of investigation; and now I’d had a rough-and-tumble with the new Guardian Beast that dumped me practically into my boyfriend’s lap, where I’d been set down as if I were radioactive. What. The. Hell?

The upside was at least I knew where to go from here. But nothing else made any sense at all.