Greywalker

Chapter 31

Car alarms shouted in the distance as frightened people tottered into the street and toward the hellish glow. No one seemed to find it strange that we were sitting in our vehicle, looking dazed and injured. They were all as confused and frightened as we were.

As we three battered humans sat in the Rover, we could see the Madison Forrest Historical House Museum consumed in a conflagration even the rain couldn't slow. A column of fire crowned the night-darkened hillside, the shape of the house becoming obscure in the black smoke, white steam, and flickering yellow light. For a while, only the sounds of the car alarms made any impact on the night. In a few minutes, fire crews arrived in their hopeless cacophony, attacked the fire, but fell back, bewildered by its fury. They turned their hoses on the grounds to keep the fire from spreading and then gave up and watched the mansion burn. We stared at it and at each other and felt as helpless as the firemen and the wandering neighbors.

The shape of the building remained bright as noon to me even as the walls began to crumble, Grey memory holding the energy in place as the grid reabsorbed and distributed the overflow in its own time. How long would the ghost of the house linger? I wondered.

Someone tapped on Mara's window. We all looked and saw a white face streaked with black under a tangle of gold and black straw. Mara opened her door.

"Cameron! You're all right!"

He pulled a face. "I'm kind of crispy around the edges." His long hair was gone below the shoulders, singed off by the heat of the fire. The rest was ragged, smoke-shot and heat-fried, his mustache just blackened stubble. "Carlos isn't doing so great, though."

"Where is he?" Mara demanded, stepping out of the truck into the running gutter.

"Over there," Cameron said, pointing into a darkness of bushes.

She looked into the truck at Quinton. "Come on," she ordered.

He looked at me. "You OK?"

I suppressed a cough and answered, "Yeah."

He nodded, then got out of the truck and followed Cameron and Mara into the dark. In a minute or two they returned, supporting a blackened, shambling figure between them. His head hung and he seemed much smaller, as if the fire had consumed part of him. His three guides helped Carlos into the rear compartment. He collapsed on his back and lay still in a settling funk of wet ash. I peered at him over the seat back, my guts twisting. The others scrambled in.

Mara frowned. "He doesn't look good."

"He got pretty burned up," Cameron explained. "I dont think he can see, either. I–I hope he'll be all right. Edward said he would…"

A thin whisper floated up. "Eventually." Carlos sighed and lapsed back into stillness.

I shivered. "Can we get out of here?" I begged.

Quinton started the Rover and crept through the throngs of stopped cars and wandering humans.

"What about Edward?" Mara asked.

Cam fumbled with his seat belt in blackened fingers. "He got Carlos and me out to you guys, then he left."

"Ungrateful bastard," Quinton muttered.

"No," said Cameron. "He had a lot of other stuff to take care of, what with Alice and everything else. He didn't have a choice."

"Alice was that harpy who attacked us? Is she dead, then?" asked Mara. She shot me an odd look.

Cameron gave a hollow laugh. "Well, yeah, but I don't know what happened to her. She was still pinned to the floor and we had to finish breaking up the organ, so we left her there. The circle kept most of the fire back for a little while, but by the time we were done, the whole room was blazing like hell. We had to bail out a window and I couldn't spot her. I guess she burned up with the house, but Edward wasn't sure. He thought she'd crawled away somehow. I didn't think anything scared vampires, until tonight. That fire… like some nightmare that's going to come for you and eat your heart." He shivered. "It would have eaten us if it could have."

Mara faked a reassuring smile. "You finished your job, in spite of it. That's courage."

"Or stupidity," Cameron added.

"Hey, where are we going?" Quinton interrupted.

"My house. Ben will be having kittens by now."

Quinton remembered the way and pointed the Rover toward Queen Anne Hill. The rest of the trip was silent except for the grumbling of the engine and the hiss of the wet road beneath the tires.

Albert glowered as Mara and Cameron helped Carlos down to the basement. He glared at me and made a face I interpreted as frustration before vanishing after them.

I huddled on the porch step. Quinton handed me my truck keys. I took them in shaking hands. "Are you all right?" I asked. "I was worried—"

He shrugged. "I'm fine. But I've got to go. I've got a few things to take care of myself. I didn't expect something like this to happen, so I need to take care of that little oversight. Don't worry. It'll be all right. I'll be in touch."

He backed away a few steps, then waved and turned, disappearing down the stairs. I got up and stumbled into the house.

Ben Danziger stood in the entry looking dumbfounded. He jammed his fists through his hair, making it wilder than I'd ever seen it.

"Oh, you're all right!" he cried, grabbing my shoulders.

I moaned and everything got black around the edges. He carried me to a couch and sat me on it. "Wait here! I'll get you some water. Don't move, no, lie down. Yes, lie down…"

I slithered down the upholstery and closed my eyes. Ben woke me to give me water a few minutes later.

"You look terrible," he said, holding the glass for me.

"Thanks," I croaked. "I look better than the other guy."

"Oh, God, yes! What happened?"

"It burned. The museum burned down after the guardian came and ate Sergeyev. And I almost got them all killed because of Alice…"

It was hard to explain what had happened, especially since there were details I couldn't tell Ben. I was saved, after a while, by the arrival of Cameron, Mara, and Albert from the basement.

Between them, Mara and Cam thought that Carlos would recover, though it was going to be slow. Being dead to begin with had its advantages, but he was still in very bad shape. He'd spent a lot of himself, first for the spell, then fighting Sergeyev and the organ, and the fire had almost finished off what was left. Cameron declared that he would tend him.

Mara sent Cameron back downstairs and Ben upstairs to look after Brian, then sat on the sofa next to me. Albert hovered behind us. Mara picked up my hand and stared at it. "Why did you hesitate? Why did you pull away?"

I couldn't look at her, giving tiny shakes of my head. "I couldn't… couldn't do it." Geas. I swallowed the word like bitter medicine.

"But you gave yourself up to the Grey. That saved us. I saw that."

I felt a smile jerk and die before it reached my mouth. "Lucky timing."

She scowled. "But why did you—"

"I can't say. I don't know." I pushed myself up, swaying with weakness and fatigue. "I'm going home."

She stood up, too, and tried to catch me. "Not like that."

I twitched away. "It's not a request. And I won't stay here." I glared at Albert. He slipped farther from me.

"You won't make it."

"Then send someone with me. Send Ben. I won't stay."

Ben drove me home.

I turned off the phones and locked the doors behind me. I spent several days curled up with Chaos in my lap, surrounded by the muttering hum of the Grey.

The first morning, an impressive white card arrived in the mail, thanking me for attending a fund-raiser at TPM the night of the fire. I showed it to the investigators who showed up a couple of days later. I told them I had a bad case of the flu, which they didn't question, since I looked like something scraped off a locker-room floor. They went away.

A few days later, the newspaper reported that the fire was due to a ruptured gas tank in the basement and a smoldering cigarette dropped by a workman. The arson investigators didn't like it, but there was no accelerant and no sign of tampering with the tank. I doubt they ever really closed the books on it, but they let it lie.

They wouldn't have believed that the fire was started by a desperate necromancer and a witch, or spread by a furious beast that devoured ghosts and prowled the edges of the world between worlds. They wouldn't have believed that the fire had fed on magic as much as on dry wood, varnish, paint, and cloth. They wouldn't have believed any of it. What kind of crazy person could? I wished I didn't. But I felt it every day, the untied knot of Grey knitting deeper into me as the flow of power corrected itself and sang across my bones, illuminating the world in threads of fire that gleamed through an ever-present silver mist.

Eventually I returned to work. Cameron turned up at my truck the same night.

He'd had to clip his hair much shorter than mine, and his face had changed under the mop of angelic curls that resulted.

I kept the Rover between us and touched my own upper lip. "Hey, no mustache," I commented.

"Nah. I figured I should change my look for a while." He glanced down and sucked in his lower lip. "Harper… I owe you a lot more than money. Carlos is getting better and I'm doing all right. I moved him out to Bellevue with me. Got tired of squatting in the Danzigers' basement. Besides which, Albert drove Carlos crazy."

"He's like that. How's your sister handling the invasion of the vampires?"

"She moved back in with Mom. After they stopped acting like total wenches, they actually get along OK. Especially since they can both complain about me now. Sarah's pretty good for Mom. She freaks out less whenever I come around. We're getting things worked out. I'm not going to go back to school for a while, though—Carlos needs me too much and I figure I'll get a pretty good education just talking to him about stuff. He's got a lot in his head after knocking around so long."

"I imagine so."

"Anyhow, I just wanted to let you know things were working out."

I smiled at him and we talked about money a bit, but I was glad to see him go. His presence in the Grey was already changing.

Three days after the museum burned, Brandon McCain fired Will, disappeared with the company funds, and was arrested in Los Angeles for fraud two weeks later. Will called me a week afterward, and we had the first of a lot of dinners. I loved sitting in the mundane world with him.

Over dessert on our one-month anniversary, he said, "I'm not going to have to testify against Brandon."

"So you did find something, that day."

"And a lot of days afterward. When you got me looking into that organ's provenance, I started thinking about the paperwork on some of our stock, and I looked into that, too. I found all sorts of stuff in the paperwork, once I figured out where to look. Brandon foisted a lot of fakes off on people, and he used my reputation to do it. I warned him… but he fired me." He looked sick over it. "Anyhow, that's over. He, uh…. what's the phrase? Took a plea?"

"Copped a plea. He made a bargain with the DA so he wouldn't have to go to jail."

"Yeah… and he's supposed to make restitution, but there's nothing left to make restitution with. He grabbed it all and hid it somewhere. Everything else is going to be sold off to pay people back, so… I've got nothing."

"What are you going to do?"

"Well… savings are running low and I need to look after Michael. But I got a call…"

"Oh?"

"Yeah. To go back to Europe. To England, actually. Investigating provenances. It's what I really like doing—what I should have been doing all along—and it'll get my career back on track. It's a good job."

My heart fell and I bit my lip. "Oh. Yeah, that's a great job. How did you hear about it?"

"The curator from the Madison Forrest House called me about it. She's going over to do related work and told me about the opening. Do you remember her?"

"How could I forget? The place burned down right after we went there."

"Yeah. Well, that's another thing."

"What thing?"

"You. You have secrets. Weird things seem to happen around you."

"That's the way my job is, Will."

Distress boiled off him in sickly green waves. He took my hand and held it too tightly. "It's not just the job, Harper. It's something about you. It's like there's an invisible wall between you and the world, and only part of you is walking around out here with me. I am… I'm crazy about you, but after Brandon, I can't live with secrets like that. Not right now. I need a simple life for a while."

"You're dumping me."

"No! I will stay in touch. I do want to—I don't know, stay with you? But I can't."

I eased my hand back from him. "I understand, Will. It's a great opportunity and you need a break. It's all right."

Harper…

I kissed him on the cheek, though it seemed an icicle stabbed through my heart. "It'll be all right. Someday the wall will come down. But not yet." He looked fit to cry when I stood up. I didn't shake his hand. "Stay in touch."

He rose from his seat and stared at me. "I will."

I faked a smile. "Yep. You, Will. Me, Harper."

I walked away.

I walked a long time and ended up at my office and sat in the dark for a while. I just sat in the reupholstered client chair and stared at my desk from the wrong side and remembered the stink of uncanny fire.

That night at the Madison Forrest House had burned down my resistance to the Grey. It burned away much of what I had believed, but it had not taken my friends before, not quite. Not even sweet, lunatic Quinton, who still turned up to take me for beer and rounds of disastrous pool. Not even the Danzigers, though Mara often gave me speculative looks from the corners of her eyes.

I couldn't look at any of them without seeing the reminder of their stark faces that night and the threads of living color that tangled around them, diving in and out of the orderly grid that hummed in low registers below the normal world. It didn't make me sick to my stomach anymore—only sick to my heart.

Close as they were, none of them were like me—whatever I was. With Will who hadn't been there, I had, I thought, passed for human. I guess I didn't pass well enough.

Someone knocked on my door, the new glass rattling a little in the frame. When I didn't answer, I heard the swish of an envelope through the mail slot and the thin thump as it hit the floor. I left it a while, until I was sure the messenger was gone.

I turned on the desk lamp and cut the envelope open. There was a private check with a lot of zeros in the amount line, signed by Edward Kammerling. The note on the check read, "services to the community." I put it in my desk drawer, knowing I would never cash it. I wasn't like him, either, and I wouldn't be bought.

I left my office in the dark and went home, brushing past the shapes of things we do not see, into shadows of uncertain futures and pasts that don't lie down.