Downpour

THIRTY-TWO

Willow seemed a bit uncomfortable indoors, glancing around continually and unable to sit still. She walked around the living room, noting the repositioned couch and the ashes in the Franklin stove, and grinned at us. “What have you two been up to in Mother’s house?” she quipped, not really expecting an answer and not getting one. I bit my lip and brushed absently at my cheek with the back of my hand.

Quinton came back into the living room from starting up the generator—he’d taken the gas can from the Rover. Since the cat was already out of the bag that we were staying in the lakefront house, it seemed pointless to live rough. There was nothing we could do about the propane stove and fridge, but electricity did make things a little cozier and helped push back the Grey fog and swirls of color that seemed to be seeping into the building, deepening, and growing thicker since we’d followed Willow inside.

“The water heater’s electric, and there’s a microwave, so it’s not going to be cold food and baths like last night,” he announced, sitting next to me. He rubbed at the dried poultice on his cheek, knocking some of it off.

Willow hopped up from the chair she’d barely perched on, announcing, “I’ll make tea!” and darted for the door, giving us amused looks as she went to the kitchen.

“What the hell is that about?” Quinton asked.

“Your goop is flaking,” I said, touching the crusted wound on his face with my fingertips.

“About time. It itches.” He scraped his fingers over it again, loosening more of the dry muck Costigan had plastered him with. Outside, the shadows were deepening under the cap of clouds as the sun headed for the ocean. I hoped we’d be able to talk Willow into meeting with Faith before things got crazy at the Newmans’—and it was a good bet they would get weird once we showed up.

I studied Quinton’s face. The dead color had vanished, leaving pale but healthy-looking skin under the fading gauze of magic that had covered most of his injured cheek. The tiny tendrils of energy were retracting into the dried cake of glop that hid the ugly black line that had appeared when the spirit thing had touched him. “Well . . . it looks a lot better,” I offered.

“Maybe I can wash it off, then. You think?” He raised his eyebrows in hope. “I shudder, imagining what might be in this stuff.”

“Something worse than rum and spit?”

Willow stuck her head around the kitchen door. “It’s mostly comfrey, red pepper, and bearberries, maybe some boneset, definitely some garlic. It brings the blood to the skin and warms it up, wards off infection. Since it was Loko who came to help, there isn’t any graveyard dust in it—you’re lucky.”

“Garlic and red pepper,” Quinton said. “That explains the smell. . . .”

“I wouldn’t use it,” she added with a raise of the eyebrows and a smug-cat smile, “but it does work when you’re getting some help from the loa.” Willow vanished from the doorway and went back to making tea.

“I begin to see why she’s a loner,” Quinton whispered.

I poked him with a finger in the ribs. “You could just go wash it off.”

“What, and miss my chance to imitate a spicy Italian sausage?” He waggled his eyebrows at me in a way that was too silly to be suggestive.

“You are a danger to morality,” I said, smiling.

“I try.”

I flapped a hand at him. “Go wash that stuff off. Costigan said it was done when it started to itch.”

“All right, all right,” he agreed, getting up from the couch and heading for the kitchen.

Willow redirected him up the stairs to the bathroom, saying she didn’t want Costigan’s concoctions dirtying up the place. In a few minutes, she came into the living room with a teapot in one hand and a cluster of mugs threaded on her fingers by the handles.

“You said he was your boyfriend,” she said, putting the tea things down on the nearest table.

I frowned. “He is.” Then I felt a sharp, cutting pain across my cheekbone. “Ow!” I gasped, clapping my hand over my face.

Willow shook her head. “Mates.”

“What the hell . . . ?”

She stopped what she was doing and peered at me. “When did it happen?”

“What happen?” I asked, looking at the palm of my hand and expecting to see blood, but there wasn’t any.

“When did you marry?”

“We’re not married.”

“Not by the state. The soul-bond. It must be new—it looks new.”

“We haven’t done anything like that. No ceremonies, no rings, no blood, no . . . whatever it takes.” I found myself glancing over my shoulder, half expecting some Chinese ancestor to materialize and chastise me for abusing their hospitality. No one did, but that funny feeling remained....

Willow looked around the room. Her gaze paused on the neat pile of blankets beside the couch, then on me. She looked me up and down again. “Did you two have sex in this house?”

I blushed and gaped at her, feeling like a naughty teenager.

She gazed around the room again, but this time with fondness. Then she shrugged. “It’s my parents’ house. It knows these things. You really have to be careful on top of a leyline.” Then she giggled. “Layline. That’s funny.”

Quinton came clomping down the stairs and into the room. “What’s funny?”

“You’re bonded and you didn’t know it,” Willow said, chuckling.

“What?”

“It’s sort of adorable,” Willow added, “in a sickening way. You two.” She started laughing. “You had sex. Here.”

“I’m confused . . .” Quinton said. “Are we in trouble?”

“Willow,” I growled in the most quelling voice I could, leaning hard on the Grey.

She snapped her head up, spinning away from me and into a crouch near the door, her expression feral and her hands curling into the rising tide of energy that flooded suddenly into the house. “Don’t do that! Don’t make me!”

I let go of everything and sat back against the couch, keeping my own hands relaxed and in plain sight. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Willow was still tense, but she stood up, slowly, unbending and releasing her grip. She let the magic pool around her feet, though. “All right, then.” She turned and looked at Quinton and pointed at a raw patch on his cheekbone where the red glop had been. “You are impatient—just like a man—and pulled the poultice at the end instead of soaking it off. It stung, didn’t it?”

Quinton touched his fingers to the redness on his face. “Yeah. So?”

Willow pointed at me. “She felt it.” Then she glared at me. “Didn’t you?”

I frowned. “Yes.”

“It will fade. You won’t feel the minor things after a while, but the major hurts, the physical and the emotional, you will. You’re bonded. Mated. When your souls were in tune and open, when you were soft and alight with love, you gave a piece of yourselves away to each other. It’s still there, knitting itself into you. You can tear it out now, while it’s still young and soft. You don’t have to . . . remain this way. If you don’t want to.” Darkness flitted across her face. “You have a few days to end it, if you change your minds.”

Quinton looked shaken and I could feel the trembling of his emotions like a distant earthquake in my body. “Why would we?” he asked, glancing at me.

“Because it makes you weak! It makes you vulnerable!” Willow shouted back. “It ties you to another person who can be hurt and hurt you! You’re a dependent, a thrall, a . . . an adjunct.”

“But it’s mutual, isn’t it?” Quinton asked. He didn’t sound unsure; he was just being polite by framing it as a question. “What might be a weakness could also be a strength. We’re together. We share—”

“Not like that, you don’t,” Willow snapped. “It’s not the powers you share, just the tugging—the horrible, horrible tearing apart when they leave you! The hollowness, the pain . . .” She curled on herself, sinking to the floor as if in agony. “Tear it out now. Get rid of it. It’s just a little pain, a little dead spot, like a place where the nerves died. You’ll never notice after a while and it’s so much better than—than . . .” She slumped against the hearth, sobbing and shaking. “In my parents’ house. My parents’ house . . .”

Quinton looked horrified and started to kneel down beside her. I shot off the couch and reached Willow first, tugging her into my arms.

“Who was it, Willow? Who . . . ?” She wasn’t a child now, but this was the house where she had been and it brought everything with it.

“All of them.” She breathed against my neck. “My mother, my father, my . . . friend. All of them. Tearing pieces of me away . . .”

I looked over her shoulder to catch Quinton’s eye. He made a frustrated little twitch, unsure what to do. I jerked my head upward, glancing toward the bedrooms upstairs, hoping there really was a connection between us, that he’d figure out what we needed to do. He blinked, then scrambled away, up the stairs. I heard him moving around and then the wheezy rattle of the electric heaters coming on for the first time in years. The house seemed to sigh and the shadows in the corners stirred.

In a few more minutes Quinton returned to the living room and scooped Willow out of my hold and into his arms. She nuzzled against him, exhausted and trembling as he carried her upstairs. I came along behind. When we reached the top of the stairs, he turned and carried Willow into what must once have been her own bedroom. A cloud of raw ghost-stuff trailed them, passing through me and leaving a strange tingling warmth on my skin as it went. The green light that had welled up at her feet downstairs flowed up and oozed across the floor into Willow’s bedroom, spreading out to touch all the walls and send glimmering fingers up to frame the door and windows. Even asleep, the magic looked after her.

Quinton left Willow tucked into bed with an extra blanket over her, against the chill he felt as ghosts began filling the room with swirling fog that seemed to fall from the ceiling. I turned away and preceded him down as he returned to the stairs.

He caught up to me in front of the Franklin stove and pulled me gently back around to face him. “We’re screwed, aren’t we?”

“Well, I wasn’t counting on a breakdown from the only mage on our side.”

“That is not what I meant.”

“I know, but I can’t solve that problem right now and this one, too. This business at the Newmans’ will be happening soon and, without Willow, I’m not sure how it will come out. I can’t let any of them get an advantage before we figure out how to put the anchor stone back in its proper place. Of course, we have to get the stone first, which won’t happen with Willow passed out upstairs. Why can’t the damned Guardian Beast look after this stuff him—itself? It can shove me through a wall. Why can’t it pick up a rock and put it back where it came from?”

Quinton shook his head and made an exasperated face. “Harper, stop. You’re frustrated because you’re too focused on one path instead of on the goal. It doesn’t matter if they all destroy one another. Or not. It’s not up to you to pick the one-mage-to-rule-them-all. You’re already more than half-done with your job: You found out who killed Leung and Strother and you can turn him over at any time. Then we can get the anchor and put it back in the lake. And I have an idea how to find the place for it.” He glanced aside, and then back into my face. “This other thing . . . I guess we’ll have to figure out later what we’re going to do.”

I bit my lip. I didn’t know what would happen and I shouldn’t have anticipated the worst, but I admit that Willow’s hysterics weren’t too far from my own thoughts, and Quinton knew it.

“Then I guess we fall back and punt.”

He snorted. “Please, no football analogies. Now I have an ugly vision of zombies in shoulder pads and tight pants doing wind sprints on the lake.”

I laughed in spite of myself. “Then, so long as we’re at loose ends, tell me your brilliant idea about the anchors.”

“You said it made a high-pitched sound, right?”

“The anchor stone? Yes, when you sparked it, it did.”

“All right. Sound waves travel very efficiently through water, so if we can isolate that sound and get an electronic sample from the anchor stone, I should be able to rig a rudimentary sonophone that will help us physically locate the area where a matching tone is being emitted. That’ll be where we have to drop the rock.”

“How are you going to get the waveguides to sing in the first place?”

“That’s a little trickier. You should be able to see the line of both the intact and broken waveguides. Once we have the line, we can find a place to apply a current to the broken one and then follow the sound into the lake.”

“But . . . ?” I asked.

“But since the sound was emitted in the Grey, I think you’re going to have to apply a Grey current. You’ll have to pull a bit of energy to the waveguide.”

“I can’t do that anymore. I don’t have that ability to simply . . . pull the grid around.”

“We don’t need a grid line. Just a thread. Like an extension cord. You managed threads last night. We don’t need more than that.”

“I broke them—I didn’t put them together. I can’t make things of the Grey—I can only . . . break them.”

Quinton sighed and put his arms around me. “I don’t think that’s true. You don’t just break things; you fix them. We’ll figure out a way to fix this, too.”

“We?”

“Hey, we’re bound together, babe. Remember?” He struck a noble stance, showing me his profile as if posing for a dramatic movie poster, and declaimed, “Soul to soul, heart to heart, together forever!” He looked like Val Kilmer in Real Genius when he introduced the student beauticians.

I scoffed and shoved him gently backward. “Goofball.”

He exaggerated his loss of balance and fell on his ass, taking me with him, laughing all the way down. I landed on his chest and he let out his breath with an oof! Then he pulled me hard against him, wriggled a little, and caught my legs with his so I was pressed against him full length. “Mmm . . . That’s nice.”

A voice floated down from above. “You have no time for that.”

It wasn’t Willow’s voice, exactly, but it was something like it. More resonant, but not loud, as if the speaker were standing in a hollow place that reflected the sound slightly out of sync. A small cloud descended from the ceiling, filtering straight through the floor from the master bedroom rather than coming down the stairs.

Quinton didn’t quite focus on it, but he had turned his head in the right direction and was squinting like a man trying to see against the glare of the sun. He kept his arm around my waist as we struggled back up to our feet to face the apparition. His breathing was a little fast, and I could feel his excitement and apprehension tingle across my skin and shorten my own breath. I worked to keep my own emotions calm.

“Ghost?” he whispered.

I nodded.

The mass of Grey-stuff billowed and tumbled, changing shape on its surface, but staying about the same dimensions—a tapering column about five feet tall and two feet at the widest point in the center. It sank to within a foot of the floor and stopped, floating and churning in front of us. A broad-cheeked, almond-eyed face pushed out of the mist and was replaced by another and then another—a company of spirits taking turns looking us over. A dragonlike head extruded from the cloud for a moment and thrust toward us, its ghostly jaws agape. Quinton flinched.

The first face returned. “She is leaving.”

“Willow?” I asked. “But—”

“We awaken to our own. We have told her she must talk to your policeman. It is right.”

“Ancestors,” I whispered.

Quinton nodded. He wasn’t scared, just excited. I would have interrogated him to find out what he was experiencing, but the spirits of Sula’s family spoke again.

“When the stone was here, we could not be heard. Our daughter died without our voice in her ear. Our granddaughter lost her way. It must be made right. Willow will help you. Go to the sister’s house and tell what you know.”

The collective spirit began fading, sparkling into dust and water vapor wafting on curls of colored smoke that rose off the grid. I felt I was supposed to do something, but I couldn’t think what.

“Bow,” Quinton whispered. “Be polite.”

Hastily, we bowed together, his arm still around my waist. “Thank you,” I murmured.

The house flickered and seemed to dim into ghostlight and fog, leaving us an instant’s impression of being surrounded by hundreds of ghosts who looked at us and laughed. “Love has brought power back to our house.” They bowed to us in return and vanished in the sudden drawing of a breath.

Quinton staggered against me as we found ourselves alone and back in the small house at the lake’s edge. I wasn’t so startled; I’d gotten used to the sudden comings and goings of ghosts.

“Did we actually move or did I imagine that part?” he asked.

“Not physically,” I replied. “Did you see them?”

He seemed a little dazed, nodding. “I—I certainly did. They were kind of vague at first, so I wasn’t sure.... I could hear them better than see them, and even that was kind of lousy. And then they were . . . they were here. Or we were there. I’m a little confused.”

“No, you’re spot-on. It’s here and there at the same time. Makes you a little seasick at first.”

Quinton let go of me and flopped into the nearest chair, blowing out a long, slow breath. “Yeah. Am I going to have to get used to that?”

“I don’t know. What do you see now?”

He glanced around. “Um . . . the living room.”

“Look very attentively out of the corners of your eyes. Sounds crazy, I know, but give it a try.”

I watched him struggle with it, shifting his eyes as he turned his head.

“This is giving me a headache. . . .”

“But do you see anything . . . unusual? Sort of sneaking up in your peripheral vision.”

“Some flashes, but nothing I can identify or focus on.”

I heaved a sigh. My relief was almost embarrassing. I smiled. “I think you’ll be fine. Well, normal at least. Most people can see the Grey once in a while, just around the edges. If you start seeing it easily, right in front of you, then you need to worry.”

He looked up at me and cocked his head to the side. “I don’t know if I’m pleased or disappointed.”

“I think I prefer you normal.”

“I object to being called something as boring as ‘normal.’ ”

“Will you settle for ‘within a standard deviation of deviant’?”

He gave it a token thought. “I guess,” he replied with a shrug. “Now I’d better go shut that generator down so we can go back to hunting killer mages.”