Labyrinth

THIRTEEN

Seattle’s FedEx World Service Center is deep in the industrial district, just north of the train yards from Georgetown and a short drive from both airfields. The bland, two-tone gray structure that looks like a collection of giant shoe boxes, featureless except for the huge purple-and-orange logo on one end. I figured any building that determined to be boring was probably full of troublemaking gremlins or some other supernatural pest equally determined to play havoc with the system from sheer perversity. I didn’t see any, but it seemed like their kind of haunt.

Probably because they’d been sitting for several days, the boxes took a few extra minutes to locate and extract from the delicate architecture of shipping crates into which they’d drifted. Once I had them, I didn’t want to wait to open them any longer than it took to haul them to the Land Rover.

“What’s in these?” Quinton asked as we carried them across the parking lot.

“Stuff of Edward’s. Mostly paperwork and files, but there are some loose things in one of the boxes that might be useful....”

I’d mailed the two boxes from England before I left. They weren’t mine, but I thought Edward wouldn’t mind if I scoured them for tools or clues since I meant to use whatever I found to get him away from Wygan. And me back to see my father so I could stop the Pharaohn-ankh-astet permanently.

Inside the truck, safe behind its locked doors, I slit open the packing tape on the smaller box. The contents had shifted since I’d packed them, and the collection of animal teeth and bones had drifted to the top of the other, heavier bits, tangled in the loops of a black silk scarf. Maybe it was the luminosity of the fabric or just the way it lay, but Quinton and I both paused and stared into the carton, disquieted.

“It looks like a cat,” he muttered.

“It almost looks like it’s breathing, the way the light moves on the silk,” I added. The thin filigree of smoke-colored power that lay over it all only added to the unsettling display in my eyes. Just because it was there and kind of creeped me out, I reached out and tapped the thing lightly, giving it a tiny stroke about where the top of its head would have been. “Good kitty. No biting.”

Quinton shivered. “That’s really disturbing.” He bumped the box with the edge of his hand, and most of the bones slid across the slick surface of the scarf, scattering again into the depths of the junk. The skull lodged in a corner and directed its empty eye sockets at us, as if waiting for another pat or a treat. Probably a finger.

I felt a touch queasy reaching into the box past that bony remnant. I half expected the thing of bones and mist to knit back together and attack me. But it didn’t. I lifted the skull and scarf out with care and settled it on the dashboard in the sun with a few of the bones. As I dug through the container, I found more bones and put them onto the scarf with the rest. Don’t ask why; it just seemed the right thing to do. I added some teeth as I found them, too. More than enough bits to make a cat and a half at the very least, though the teeth clearly hadn’t come from anything as small as a domestic house cat. Meat eater? Yes. House cat? Not on your life.

“You’re giving me the creeps, which I do not say lightly,” Quinton commented, watching me.

“Why? What’s so creepy? It’s just a bunch of bones.”

“It doesn’t seem that way when you touch them. And did you notice you’ve laid them out in a skeleton? Kind of a freaky one, but, still ...”

I looked at the pile and saw he was right. “Ah. I don’t know. It just . . . seemed the right thing to do.”

He peered at me. “That’s an odd thing to say. How do you get that impression? I mean you don’t usually do that sort of thing.”

I caught an annoyed sigh—I wasn’t put out with Quinton, but something was digging at me, and that scratched at my short temper. “Wygan said he was going to give me knowledge and ever since it seems like there’s something lurking, just at the edge of my understanding it. Like a shadow at the corner of a building, but I can’t see what’s making it. I have an urge to make order out of things. I keep thinking I can figure out what it is if I just clear away everything it isn’t. Does that make sense?”

“Mostly. But can you stop with the bones? There really is something . . . unsettling about that thing.”

I looked at it again, tilting my head to a better angle on the Grey without slipping in. The two-headed cat hissed at me from its disparate mouths. “Ugh,” I coughed, sweeping the bones into a single pile and shuddering as I touched them. “All right. No more skeletons right now.” I turned back to the box, more mindful of what I touched and how I laid it aside after that.

The carton yielded up a small trove of broken or orphaned jewelry—including a single garnet earring with an aura of outright malevolence clinging to it—a scatter of antique tarot and playing cards that didn’t make up a full deck of either, a few small cloth bags of plant matter that had dried to unidentifiable dust long ago, keys singly and in bunches, a stained leather glove so old and dry it had cracked across the knuckles, three knives of various materials and types, a tiny silver mirror in a carved mother-of-pearl frame, broken sticks of colored chalk, various candle stumps, a book no larger than my palm that had rotted into a lump and crumbled at the edges, and a leather bag containing a few old gold and silver coins whose origin I couldn’t guess from the misshapen portraits on the front.

“Any bells going off?” Quinton asked, watching me.

I slumped a bit, disappointed. “No. The bones, the knives, and that earring are the only things sending off anything I can pick out from the general clutter of Grey coming off this box in the first place. This stuff ’s been sitting around, going quiet or mixing with the rest for a long time. If it were just one or two objects, or if they’d been isolated from one another, the auras would be stronger. I could tell more about them. But this is like . . . soup. It’s been cooking together so long it’s hard to figure out which flavor came from what ingredient.”

“But it’s all got some magic remnant?”

“Seems that way.”

“So maybe it’s a box of tools and supplies for some kind of magic. Maybe someone cleaned them off before they packed them up originally.”

“They’re all dirty now.” I paused to think. “But someone might have tossed something else in the box, later, that infected the rest....”

I began picking up each item and trying to feel or scry some information from them.

Quinton put his hand on my arm. “That’s going to take a while. What can we eliminate? Anything too old or rotten to have been added late is probably not the thing you’re after. What was on top the first time you saw the box?”

I closed my eyes and tried to conjure a picture in my mind. The insistent muttering of the grid complicated the process, intruding as static yelps and stutters as I concentrated on remembering the box as it lay in its vault below London. “Shut up,” I muttered, pushing the sounds aside with a will and dredged the memory into my mind’s view. “Umm . . . the scarf. The garnet earring. A couple of teeth. A knife. The scarf covered everything below it and those few items were on top of the scarf.”

“Start with those. The scarf seems to be the dividing layer. Whoever packed the box may have used it to protect the lower contents.”

“So what’s on top is most likely to have been added later,” I finished for him. We didn’t think alike—his different perspective was one of the many invaluable things about Quinton—but we did understand each other’s way of thinking. It circumvented a lot of confusion and argument. When we didn’t want to argue, that is; we didn’t agree on everything, after all. Who does?

I did not wish to pick up the earring. I’d touched it once already and that had been unpleasant, but concentrating on it sounded like a bad idea. I put it aside for last and began with the teeth, picking them out from the pile of bones and disturbing as little else as possible.

They weren’t human teeth, so at least I wouldn’t fall prey to whatever intelligent horror might have held the creature when it died. I curled the half-dozen bits of rough ivory and enamel in my fist and closed my eyes for a moment, trying to settle my noisy mind before attempting to “read” them. I opened my eyes and my hand again and stared at the hard white objects.

There were five of them and they shone in each of the primary colors, plus one blue-green and one pink. Not black as I’d half expected. I didn’t know for certain what the colors represented, but they didn’t seem sick or warped. They didn’t send off much feeling either, at least not as a collection. If I separated them and concentrated on just one at a time, they sent out varying sensations of chill or warmth, sharp tingles or smooth hums, but that was all. Someday I was going to have to make a better study of the colors I saw in the Grey and figure out what they meant. I guessed most of the time based on how I felt or on other clues, but that was the best I could do.

I put the teeth back down.

Quinton raised his eyebrows. “Nothing?”

“Nothing interesting. I think they’re some kind of elemental icons. You know: earth, air, fire, water ...”

“That’s only four.”

“Yeah. Well. They could be emotional icons instead. That pink one, that’s . . . love.” I felt a little nervous saying it. I’m not a romantic, moony person and I’ve never looked good in pink. “But I’m not sure. They aren’t giving off much. No clues. Let’s try something else.”

Quinton started to reach for the earring. I pushed his hand aside.

“Not that. Not yet. Hand me the knives.”

“Which one do you want first?”

My eye fell on the one with a missing tip. I recognized the odd shape of it from the first time I’d looked into the box, like a long leaf with a dark channel down the middle, and it was made of a curiously dull and heavy metal or some cold, homogenous stone that shone with a frigid darkness. The handle was wrapped in stained leather, bound on with gold wire. “That one—with the broken tip.”

He handed it over, giving a slight, unconscious shudder. I closed my hand on the knife and felt a shock through my whole body, like I’d been stabbed in the chest with lightning.

I must have gasped aloud and started to crumple in my seat; Quinton grabbed onto my shoulders to hold me upright, then jerked as if he’d touched a live wire. I dropped the knife to the floorboard and batted him away, breaking the connection between us, between the scene rapid-spooling forward in my mind and the remembered horror of the first time I’d encountered it. Only this time it hadn’t been at a storyteller’s remove but first person and intimately dreadful. I gagged and gasped for breath; only the fact I hadn’t eaten in a day kept me from throwing up again.

“What the hell—?”

“That’s Carlos’s knife,” I gasped.

“What? What are you talking about? What happened?”

I drew several long breaths, trying to steady myself and doing a halfassed job as the voices of the dead shrieked in my ears. I raised my head and looked him in the eye. “Quinton, did you see something? Did you feel anything? What did you just experience?”

“To hell with me. What about you?”

I caught his reaching hands and pulled them down to the console between us. My heart wouldn’t stop racing, but I tried to pretend I was calm, that I hadn’t just experienced the deaths of a score of innocents, hadn’t felt the very knife I’d held plunge into my chest and shatter. . . . I kept my grip on his hands, comforted by the touch, and hoping he felt that reassurance too. “I’ll tell you in a minute, but I need to know what just happened to you. How bad is it?”

“Just painful, just . . . confusing. It was as if I’d grabbed onto an ungrounded electric cable when I touched you. And I thought—I swear I heard half the world screaming in my head. Jesus . . . what happened?”

“It’s over. It was more than two hundred and fifty years ago. Those voices are just ghosts. Just ghosts in my head.”

“Harper!” He put his hands back on my arms and I let him. Without the knife in my grip, I thought it was as safe as it was ever likely to be. I still heard them, the voices of the two dozen men, women, and children, dead and crying out as they were murdered a second time, their spirits ripped from the vessel they’d poured into at the instant their lifeblood flowed out. I thought Quinton would not also hear them, now. They screamed their shock only in the memory forced into my mind by the knife and by a tale I’d heard two years before. Quinton wasn’t psychic, didn’t share my mind. Thank the gods.

I caught him gently once more, putting my hands over his. “It’s all right. I’ve met them before. They’ll stop in a minute. It’s just a memory.”

He was aghast. “But of what? Do you go through this all the time? Is this what it’s like?”

I shook my head. “No. This is different. It’s . . . unusual. That knife, though. That’s what I need. I think that’s what the scarf was for—to wrap the knife so it could be handled by someone who could see what it had done.”

Quinton glared down at the fallen blade, his head wreathed in furious red and orange spikes: he loathed it.

“It’s just a thing, sweetheart. It’s not bad or dangerous on its own, but it can help me and I need it. There’s a paper bag in the glove compartment. Put the bones in that and then give me the scarf so I can pick up the knife.”

He didn’t want to look away from me, but he did what I wanted and handed me the black silk scarf, dusty from the bones and teeth and bits of chalk that had fallen on it. I bent in the seat and scrabbled blindly to catch the knife in the folds of silk, avoiding touching it with my bare hands. Once again, it wasn’t that I knew the silk would insulate me from it; it just felt like the right thing to do. And the whispering voices of the grid seemed to sing the action to me, like the chorus of some surreal ballet.

Even through the silk, I could feel the vibration of the tale, dread music sung in dead voices. I folded another layer over the knife and wrapped it tightly in the black scarf before I tucked it into the pocket of my jacket for safekeeping.

“So what is it?” Quinton asked when I paused, putting my hands on the steering wheel.

“Let’s get away from here first. We’ve been here a while and I think it’s best if we move.”

He shrugged, not happy with my stalling, but not objecting. Yet. I started the Rover and pointed it toward the loneliest place I could think of nearby.

Carkeek Park tumbles off the top of a steep, tree-thick ridge in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Broadview and drops into Puget Sound beside the railroad tracks that run from the aircraft plant at Everett, south to Boeing Field. Expensive homes overlook the park at a distance but see little through the rolling acreage to the small lawn at the cliff edge. A mile down the coast lie the busy locks and marina at Ballad, but you can’t see a sign of them from Carkeek. On a weekday at mid-morning, few people stroll the park and even fewer cross the pedestrian bridge that spans the railroad to descend steep steel stairs to the ragged spit of sand at the bottom littered with driftwood as large as cars. It’s a landscape of tree-crowded emptiness above desolate sand, and the isolated park that used to be a sewage treatment plant has hosted more than its share of assaults and dumped bodies, even a murder or two in the steep little canyon that cradles it. It is lovely now, but it’s not a place to drive; it’s a place to walk and possibly to disappear.

I parked the Land Rover as close to the cliffside strip of grass as I could. Then I donned my leather jacket against the chilly wind from the Sound and led Quinton down the lawn to the railroad bridge. We crossed down to the deserted swath of sand and sat on a sea-scoured tree trunk facing the cliff. Only a fish could sneak up on us from there.

I took the black package from my pocket but I didn’t unwrap it. I let it rest in my hands between my knees; it was heavy beyond its size with my knowledge of its past. “You know Carlos,” I started, looking up from the silk wrapper to glance into Quinton’s eyes.

He nodded. “Yeah. He was the extra crispy we stashed at the Danzigers’ after . . . what happened at the museum two years back.”

I nodded, too. “Yeah.”

“Scary customer. Even by bloodsucker standards.”

I looked back down at the hidden knife. “More than you know. He’s, uh . . . well, you know how Mara and I are always a little reluctant to deal with him. He’s, well . . . literally power hungry. He’s a necromancer, which is kind of unusual for a vampire. Dangerous stuff, sucking magic out of death when you’re dead yourself. So, he’s always tricky about dark power sources and I have to approach him carefully every time.”

“He’s kind of unpredictable.”

“Yes and no. You can bet if there’s magical power to be gained, he’ll want it, and unless you can hold him off or persuade him not to take it, he will. I’ve seen him do it and couldn’t stop him nearly killing someone for it. But, see, there’s more to the problem—the immediate problem—than that. He’s got a . . . an issue you could say, with Edward. They aren’t friends. They used to be, about two hundred and fifty years ago. I think they might have been the very closest of friends then, but Edward did something . . . just phenomenally stupid and greedy.” I felt increasingly constrained and physically uncomfortable telling him these things, even though I’d never been bound not to. But the sounds in my head and the humming of the grid sang a spell that dragged on the words and squeezed the breath from my lungs. I labored to bring each sentence into the air. “Edward wanted power, but to get it, he had to kill a lot of other vampires. It was easier to do it in one big cataclysm, so he persuaded Carlos to help him cast a spell that would destroy the homes of his enemies. It took out most of Lisbon in an earthquake back in 1755.”

Quinton whistled. “Hell of a spell.”

“Well, Carlos is a necromancer. He’s good at killing people. He gets his energy from death and this needed a lot of death. About twenty people, I think he said.”

I knew what he’d said, but it was too bad and dreadful to admit. I could hear Carlos’s voice as if he were beside me: “. . . two dozen men and women—all children of the streets, the unnoticeables, the lost—knelt on a platform, bound within the machine ...”

“They killed them and powered the spell, but it wasn’t really enough for Edward. He wanted more. I guess there’s some kind of special magic in killing a mage or killing your lover or maybe both,” I lied. I knew well enough from Carlos that it was a vampire’s blood that was precious in this case, but that I could not say. I had promised that. “So, Edward stabbed Carlos with this, making the spell into something worse. He left him to die as the earthquake brought the building down on him. Carlos couldn’t do anything about it but hide from the sun and hope to survive.”

Quinton blinked as I paused and looked over at him. “That’s . . . extreme. But—”

“Why didn’t Carlos go after him?” I finished for him.

“Yeah. Neither of them is the forgiving type.”

“He couldn’t. Edward did something extra so Carlos couldn’t hurt him if he happened to survive the earthquake and the morning sun. Edward broke off the tip of this knife in Carlos’s heart. As long as it’s there, Carlos can’t touch him. He can’t hurt him. But he can’t help him much either. And I know the one thing that Carlos would do anything for is the chance to be free of this knife.”

The dual memory, Carlos’s evocation and my new experience of the story, brought up the echoing sound of Edward’s cruel anticipation in the depths of the long-ago carnage as he knelt over Carlos in the pool of blood and bodies. “I shall always be in your heart....” And I shuddered with his receding laughter, feeling myself in Carlos’s battered flesh, oozing the stolen blood of the murdered and knowing despair and betrayal so dark and bitter it made me blind.

I blinked and shivered, shaking the impression away as if it were offered poison.

Quinton didn’t respond at once. He looked out to sea over his shoulder. Then he gazed up at the heights of the cliffs above us and along the crumbling edge. His glance came back down, studying the sand and only very slowly returned to me. “So you’re going to use that as a lever to get Carlos to help you find Edward and figure out what Wygan’s doing.”

I nodded, making a grim smile as the pressure on my chest eased. I was done; the voices couldn’t stop me once the words were already out. They were angry, though. The noise in my head turned to rage and storm, unintelligible and violent.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to argue it to silence. It ebbed down only slowly, peeling into layers of discord that fractured and fell away in snatches of borrowed conversation.

“You won’t be safe with him,” Quinton said. “There will be nothing to restrain him if he gets free of that.” He pointed to the black thing in my hands.

“That may be true, but I think I can persuade him that stopping Wygan’s plans is worth suspending his revenge on Edward for a little while. Once this is over, I don’t care if he wipes out half the vampires in Seattle.”

Quinton made a skeptical frown. “Yes, you do. You’re tough but you’re not callous, and I don’t believe you’d let whole rooms full of people—if you can call those red-handed bastards people—die if you could avoid it. Not to mention the stink it would raise with your cop friend. He already thinks you have something to do with everything freaky that happens around here.”

“Yeah. I noticed that.”

Quinton cracked a smile. “He’s not that far off, you know: You attract the weird.”

I grinned pointedly at him. “Yes, I know. Lucky me.”

His smile, though crooked, widened and he slid his nearest arm around my waist. “Better than boring, I guess.” He tagged my cheek with a lightning-quick kiss.

I snorted. I had missed him horribly while in London. I had been too busy running for my life or someone else’s to notice most of the time, but every pause had brought it back to my mind. I hoped whatever happened next wouldn’t tear us from each other. I put my head on his shoulder a moment, resisting the insidious whispered urge to hurry, hurry, do something. . . .

I wanted to hiss back at it, “Shut up. Leave us alone for a while. Just an hour, half an hour. Go away!” But I kept my mouth shut and shouted only in my mind.