Downpour

TWENTY-ONE

As I stared at Jin, I could hear a vehicle coming close, the engine grumbling while snow tires roared on the road’s rough surface. I wanted to keep on questioning Jin, but I figured the only person who would be driving this way now was the sheriff’s deputy on his way to pick me up. I grabbed my wet coat and scarf and struggled into them as we went outside.

“You’d better get out of here and lock up when I’m gone. I’ll find you again tomorrow.”

Jin made a face. “Bring something nice with you or I won’t come.”

I wanted to smack him with the heaviest object I could find, but I didn’t have anything but my bag and I didn’t have time, either. “I’ll meet you at the hot springs gate. I need to talk to the ley weaver and you’re coming with me.”

The demon looked unhappy but nodded and slid away around the corner of the lodge, lopsided and strange in his torn, legless suit and limping, barefoot, past the soup of ghosts and lambent magic along the shore. I gave a bitter laugh and the ghastly shadows in the yard echoed it as headlight beams swept down from the road and caught me on the porch.

A white Crown Victoria with Clallam County sheriff’s office stripes and decals rolled into the parking lot. I stepped into the rain and onto the asphalt, away from the building, hoping to discourage the deputy from inspecting the lodge and seeing any telltale boot prints.

The man, whose name tag read TRIPP, wasn’t too pleased with his errand, especially when he saw how wet I was, but he bundled me in and drove the thirty minutes to Sol Duc so I could get my Rover. He waited with his lights on while I approached the car. The noise and light of the ley weaver’s work had dwindled, banked like a fire for the night, I guessed. If it had been brighter or louder, I might have missed the lingering streaks of gray, red, and blue that clung to the edges of the driver’s door. I paused and stared at it, not caring that I was getting further soaked in the persistent rain. I pressed the automatic lock switch on the fob, which I usually ignored since I’d long ago developed the habit of locking doors manually and hadn’t broken it, in spite of the Rover’s automated lock-and-alarm system.

The car honked once, already locked and armed. But I knew there hadn’t been any tattered threads of Grey on it when I’d left it. Unless the ley weaver’s work had rubbed up on the truck in some way and left the energetic shreds behind, someone magical had been in my truck.

I unlocked it from a distance—another thing I rarely did—and let myself in, checking for further signs of the intruder as I got into the driver’s seat. A few things had been moved around, but I could have written that off to the rough road, if I hadn’t seen the other indicators first. I checked the glove compartment and under the seats. Then I made the deputy wait while I got out and went around to check the back. I couldn’t see that anything was missing, nor did there seem to be anything new. . . . But something had happened.

I checked my pockets. Something was missing: my hotel key card. I’d had it earlier. I could remember it in my hand when I’d been trying to persuade Ridenour to take me with him to the greenhouse. I’d tossed it on the passenger seat, but it wasn’t there now. I got back out and walked to the Crown Vic.

Tripp lowered the window and gave me an expectant stare. “Something wrong?”

“Yeah, I think someone’s been in my truck. My hotel key’s missing and I left it in there. Would you follow me to my hotel? Just in case?”

“I can do that. Strother wanted to talk to you anyhow, and I can have the dispatcher call him to meet us there. That way I’ll know you got there all right.”

“And didn’t run away,” he implied, but he was polite enough not to say so. “Thanks,” I said. Whatever his motives, I would be glad to have some backup if anyone was lying in wait for me at my hotel. I was wet and tired and sore from my hike down the mountain, running from zombies, and sitting in an ice-cold cabin while bargaining with a demon. I was not too proud to ask for help. I’d keep an eye out for Grey things at the hotel while the deputy played tough guy. That suited me fine.

I took off my wet coat and grabbed a dry jacket from the rear so the drive to Port Angeles wouldn’t be quite as itchy and miserable as the stretch from East Beach to Sol Duc had been. I cranked the heat up to maximum as I drove. The deputy followed me down Highway 101, keeping a safe but observant distance all the way to the hotel.

My room was on the back of the building and I drove around to park the Rover near it before walking up to reception. I don’t know if Tripp was afraid I’d bolt or if he thought I was being silly, but he stuck with me every step of the way. He’d been chatting into his radio as I asked for a new key, and as the clerk handed it over, the deputy stepped up beside me.

“Pardon me,” he said to the clerk. “Has another sheriff’s deputy been in asking about this woman here?”

The clerk looked a bit nervous and gave me a sidelong glance. “Um . . . yeah.”

“About when was that?” the deputy asked.

“ ’Bout an hour ago, maybe an hour and a half.”

“Where’d he go after that?”

“He . . . uh . . . he headed on back to her room. ’Cuz he asked for her and she didn’t answer the phone when I called her and he said he’d just go on back and try the door himself, so I told him the room number and he started walking that way.”

Tripp nodded. “Thank you. And he hasn’t come back up here to leave a message or passed by on the way out?”

The clerk shook his head.

The deputy bit his lip. Then he added, “All right, then. We’ll go take a look ourselves.”

This time, Tripp walked in front of me with his flashlight in one hand and his other resting on his gun. I looked for things in the Grey but didn’t see much I hadn’t seen the night before. The only things new in the thin soup of mist and a small cluster of ghosts were a few streaks of black and red near the jamb of my steel-clad door. There were no bright lines of magic or bolts of streaking light; no knots of pain or spiked figures of malevolent spells.

I stood to the side and unlocked the door. Tripp pushed it open and took a step inside.

“Ah, shit.”

He stepped back out, trying to pull the door closed, but I stuck my foot in the way and swung it open again.

“Ma’am, don’t go in there.”

I just stopped in the doorway and doubled over, not from the sight, which was bad enough, but from the blast of recent death that hit me like a giant fist. I spun back out of the doorway and let the door slam closed, wishing I hadn’t looked.

I collapsed in a crouch against the wall and put my head between my knees, trying to squeeze away the pain in my chest and gut and the nausea that twisted through me. I retched. I hadn’t seen it coming. The steel door had blocked it, holding in all but the tiniest threads of horror.

Even in the dim light from the hallway, there’d been enough illumination to see the man lying facedown on the floor, a few thin strands of blond hair showing above the gruesome pulp someone had made of the back of his head. The uniform, the height and build, all told me who it was; I didn’t even need the confused, aching tangle of ghost hovering there to know it was Alan Strother.