Labyrinth

FIFTEEN

I drove up to Eighty-fifth and turned west for a few blocks. The address I wanted would be somewhere behind the strip mall that faced Northwest Eighty-fifth Street at Greenwood Avenue North. The area was residential, and once you got beyond the cheesy facades of the old shops on the main street, it was obvious that the gentrification that was barely started in Georgetown had settled in here a while ago.

The houses were nearly all from the early 1910s, with a handful of exceptions: a modern-art box featuring a white slab facade in front of hard angles in polished wood, a 1920s Spanish bungalow with smooth plaster and a red tile roof, and the ubiquitous block of condos under perpetual construction. Most of the buildings were wooden cottages with clapboard or shingle siding and a few larger Craftsman or Eastlake bungalows. One tiny house and matching garage had been painted the same deep purple as the foliage on the aging ornamental plum tree that sprawled in the front of the lot, though most homes were in subtler colors and none were falling down or flaking. Minivans and pickup trucks dominated the parking along the curbless edges of the road. I had to park a half block from the address Cameron had given me and walk. Just as well: It gave me a chance to look for hiding places and alternate routes out if anything went wrong. Not that I was having an easy time of it—concentration was unexpectedly difficult here from the moment I stepped out of the Rover.

The air seemed to tremble as I walked, the Grey flickering and moving in front of me like a heat mirage. The uncanny whispering in my ears became a rumpus of voices arguing and cajoling, crying and shouting. I could see long, thick grid lines of red and yellow, and one wild blue leyline, surging through the Grey at a slight angle to the middle of the street and sending abrupt feelers of color toward each house along the way. Most cut off abruptly, leaving the shadows of squares and half circles behind. Odd colorless shapes like tiny hunchbacked dogs crept across the lawns here and there, disappearing into vapor and sparkles of light. My skin crawled and my heart sped up, anticipating something horrible as I went on.

The house number I wanted hung in cool black iron figures on a weathered wooden gate gone silvery with age. A high, thick hedge of small-leaved, thorny branches cut off the view of the house beyond and gave refuge to a flock of tiny gleaming eyes. Whatever owned the eyes chittered and hissed to itself as I approached. I was panting as if I’d run to the gate rather than walked. I glanced around, looking for anyone or anything else that might be watching and waiting for me, but only the hedge eyes blinked back. The ground beneath my feet was like jet in the Grey: black earth sparkling with the cut edges of black grass and black roots growing out of the silver-green mass of the hedge. The thinnest red line, braided with obsidian gleams, outlined the edge of the gate and its threshold.

“Break it, break it!” something urged in my head.

Whispers and shouts of “Defile, destroy!” and “How dare they?” and the miserable shriek of an infant while someone sobbed without relief racketed in my mind with sparks of color bursting across my vision like flashbulbs.

“Shut up!” I snapped. I looked for ghosts but didn’t see anything more substantial than the searing power lines of the grid and the misshapen horrors that crawled across the ground. I pressed my hands over my ears for a moment, feeling my fingers quake against my skull as I squeezed my eyelids closed and tried to imagine the calm blue lines of the grid washing over everything like water, washing the sounds away as I breathed in and out for two long, slow breaths. “Be quiet,” I muttered. “Not now.”

The volume of the noise seemed to ebb back to a murmur and I reopened my eyes, reaching out, still shaking, to open the gate. I touched it with care, letting my fingers just brush the black iron latch handle, testing for a magical current before I took a stronger hold and pressed the gate open.

The red-and-black line around the gateway flexed a little, then reshaped as the gate opened, making a doorway within the doorway. Looking straight through the opening, the little buff-colored house in the garden beyond appeared entirely ordinary and quiet. From any other angle, it was wreathed in inky flames and scarlet coals. Hoping I was interpreting the invitation correctly, I stepped through, keeping my focus on the charming little house and the ordinary brick path to its porch.

The gate clacked shut behind me. Under my feet, the path stayed clear, but to each side, beyond the edge of the bricks and the low border of plants filled with still more gleaming silver eyes, the black fire raged across the whole breadth of the yard. All right then: Stick to the walkway. I stepped forward with more confidence than I felt—the hellish panorama in the garden and lawn only adding to my fears—and made it onto the porch in a sweat.

The front door was painted a cheery blue outlined in black, as if some dread magic oozed through the narrow gap in the frame. I really didn’t want to knock. . . .

The door swung open before I could tap or ring, quiet but for a slight shushing as the bottom weather stripping brushed the hardwood floor inside. Carlos stood just inside the entry, glowering, the dark cloud of his power riding on his shoulders like a storm rolling up from black waters. He had always seemed large to me and now he seemed huge, looming in the opening like a giant from a monstrous fairy tale, a study in darkness: dark hair, dark eyes, dark beard masking his olive skin. He looked more like a jungle predator patiently waiting for his prey than most people’s idea of the undead. He cocked one eyebrow slightly and moved aside to let me in. “Blaine.”

I gave him a small nod and stepped over the threshold, keeping my teeth set against the ice that seemed to slice through me as I moved inside. The sensation left an impression of maggots and knives across my nerves that almost made me gag until it faded away a second later. Carlos pushed the door closed again and it made a surprising chime of crystal notes that shimmered blue and white in the interior darkness for a moment, reducing the noise in my head to a low mutter and leaving my skin goosebumped with uncanny cold. I could barely see him or the room now as anything but gray shapes in the gloom.

“You’d prefer some light, wouldn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

“I haven’t grown cat’s eyes yet,” I replied, “so, yes, I would.”

He humphed a little as if amused by my human weakness. A quick shuffling sound preceded the brightening of the room, and as the lights came up, I glimpsed the same small, humped mist-shapes I’d seen creeping over the lawns outside now scuttling away from candles and oil lamps—there was no sign of electricity—throughout the visible rooms. Whatever they were, they’d lit the flames and now seemed to shy from them.

I caught my startled breath. “What are those?”

“Névoacria—the mist things.”

“I saw them outside. Are they . . . yours?”

“I use them. They grow here of their own accord from the displaced spirits of the dead. This ground was once a cemetery.”

That startled me, yet it made sense of the feelings and strangeness of the area, the hazy blackness of death on the ground and the deeper shades that held sway within the house. I hoped I’d never have to come here again, into a place the dead could neither find nor leave. A perfect place for a necromancer to work, I thought, and had no doubt the quaint little house had hidden Carlos’s secrets as long as it had stood. I pushed the sickening thought aside, cleared my throat, and asked the first seemingly safe thing that came to mind.

“And the eyes in the hedge . . . ?”

“Seraphi-guardi. That I did place there. It keeps watch for that which should not approach this place. The Guardian does not mind if I borrow some of its mille occhi for such a task.”

That made me blink. I’d heard the term “mille occhi” before—I couldn’t hang around people like the Danzigers without picking up a few words in Latin, Greek, and other languages—and knew it meant “a thousand eyes.” My father had written in his journals about the “Thousand Eyes” as if it were a single horrible creature that would swallow him for his misdeeds. I hadn’t had much time to puzzle that one out, nor had I cared much at the time with more immediate problems and threats to deal with. But now that I knew my dad had been a Greywalker, pieces fell into place. He had seen the Guardian Beast just like I had, but he had seen a different manifestation of it. He had seen the thousand watchful eyes of the Beast and known from the beginning that it hated the creature he’d called the White Worm-man: Wygan, the Pharaohn-ankh-astet. I wished I had known that.

Wygan’s approach to Dad had been too direct and had brought down the Guardian’s attention. So the Pharaohn had taken a more oblique approach to me, staying out of sight, using unsuspecting tools and cat’s-paws until I’d foolishly stumbled into his own hands.

Carlos was frowning at me. “Something bothers you?”

I shook my head. “No, just . . . lining up the pictures.”

He raised his chin a bit, half an acknowledging nod. “The coil is coming together.”

“Or just tightening around our necks.”

He narrowed his eyes as if considering his inclusion in the noose with curiosity. Then he turned his back and moved deeper into the house. “Come in and say your piece.”

Having no choice, I followed him into the living room. The furniture looked as if it had come with the house when it was new, but while the house had aged and darkened over a hundred years with whatever magic had soaked it, the furnishings had remained untouched—not even dust marred the upholstery and gleaming wood. Maybe the névoacria played housekeeper as well as lamplighter here, but it felt more like a stage set that no one lived in. Only the crammed-full bookcases that lined the walls looked used. Some of the volumes seemed to drip black and red gore that vanished into the charcoal haze over the hardwood floor. A darker shape of lines and curves radiated through the boards from below, incomplete to my eyes and incomprehensible with a baffling obsidian shine.

Whatever lay below sent a deep vibration through the house that twined into the remains of the voices in my head and made me dizzy. I reeled a little as I dropped into a chair in the deathly sterile sitting room.

Carlos sat down slower, watching me. “Something has changed in you.” He reached for me, one of his massive hands coming toward my face.

Faster than I could think of it, I knocked his hand aside. The crack of our bones against each other was sharp and red in the air. He froze, his eyes glittering. Then his hand went limp and he led it back toward my face by the wrist, leaving himself vulnerable to my grip if I chose. I steeled myself, but I didn’t stop him this time. The back of his hand barely brushed my cheek. Then he pulled his hand away and it seemed to drift through the dim light as if it wasn’t his at all.

“Changing, but incomplete. Where have you been, ghost-girl?”

“Where I’ve been isn’t as important as where I’m going. And where I hope you’re going to help me.”

“I warned you that further favors come with a price.”

“I think I have something you want.”

“Indeed. Which one will you offer?”

Fear chilled my bones and made my heart beat out of time. If I was miscalculating the importance of the knife, if he’d misled me or I’d misunderstood the complicated relationship between Carlos and Edward, I had nothing else to bargain with. At least nothing I was willing to give. I could try to draw him out and see if my guesses were good, but in the end it would come down to the heavy, silk-wrapped bundle in my jacket pocket, one way or another.

I felt queasy as I drew it out, the sudden protest of ghost-voices clogging in my throat as I choked them down. Carlos jerked back in his seat as I flipped the black covering away from the knife and the blade gleamed oily-black and radiant. Its exposure to the stygian air wrung a cry from the house, and the whole structure trembled, real and Grey, shivering in colors more numerous and flickering than the eyes of the seraphi-guardi. Carlos’s gaze locked onto the shadow-glowing broken blade with such intensity that, if he had not already been sitting down, I thought he would have fallen. The strange sound of the house echoed out of his mouth, strangled and horrible.

He stood up in a rush, the house howling and buckling as if with rage and anguish, though Carlos now made no sound at all. He snatched my wrist into his grip and hauled me forward, yanking me out of the writhing room, through a twisted doorway, and down a flight of unyielding stone stairs into the basement: the black heart of the house. I was completely in his territory, his power, and yet he let me go, dropping my arm as if I were made of fire and stepping away. “Put it down,” he demanded, pointing to the center of the cellar floor. “Throw it there!”

The basement was built of gray-and-white stone that looked charred, becoming glassy black as it met the floor. The floor itself was matte black, as if a smooth surface had been etched with acid and left blurred and rough. Lines and curves of glossy jet and carmine joined and crossed, containing and elaborating one another into a complex sigil on the floor. Some kind of magic circle, it was the actual version of the vision I’d seen upstairs, the shape that had shone through the living room floorboards. It radiated black and red energy straight upward, strong but incomplete, waiting, throbbing with potential, for something to close the circuit and make the circle whole.

“No,” I shouted back.

“Put it in the circle or the house will come down on our heads!” he roared. He didn’t touch me, didn’t move toward me, only pinned me in his black stare and shouted.

The house moaned as if it were collapsing. I tried to slide into the Grey, to slip sideways and out, but the house was solid in both worlds and still writhing as if in pain, no matter how I turned. At the center of the magic circle I could see a pool of calm that never moved or flickered, not a void like the emptiness at the center of the Hardy Tree or the hole where my father’s ghost should have been in Glendale, just stillness.

The little singing voices in my head bent themselves into a single melody and urged me toward the stillness—not the raging voices I’d been hearing off and on but the more cohesive chorus of something else.

A section of the subfloor above cracked and fell, collapsing against the stone walls of the foundation with a reverberating crash. I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake. . . . My heart raced so fast I couldn’t feel my legs and I stumbled into the circle, rushing for the center of calm. The lines on the floor burned and sent fire up my body in midnight sheets and spikes of scarlet that jabbed through my limbs and I staggered almost to my knees. I caught my balance and took two more steps, into the quiet at the heart of the circle.

The house went still and sighed. I stopped, relieved and slumping slightly as the charge of fear shook my body and burned low. Carlos leaned back against the closest wall. “Leave it there and come out.”

My silence told him I didn’t like the implications of that option. I had no doubt it would take him only a second to close the circle behind me and keep the knife inside if he wanted.

“Then put it away, for the love of life, but choose!”

Quivering, I rewrapped the knife in as many folds of the black silk scarf as I could make and tucked it back into my pocket. I edged out of the circle with care and a wary eye on Carlos. He didn’t seem angry, but I wasn’t sure what he was feeling or thinking and I didn’t trust him. Once I was out of the circle, he kept his distance, as suspect of me as I was of him, I thought.

He pointed into a corner where a table and two stools lurked in the shadows. “Sit down, Blaine, and I will tell you what you’ve brought into my house.”

I backed into the corner and onto one of the stools, not looking away from him. “I already know this is the knife Edward stabbed you with in Seville.”

“It is considerably more than that. I had been told that someone else had it. I would gladly sacrifice numberless virgins and goats to any god or monster you care to name in thanks that that is not true.”