Labyrinth

TWENTY-FIVE

It wasn’t quite that simple. The key did get us into the parking structure and the building. Getting past security was a little more complicated: I was still on the pass list, but the key cards I’d taken off Goodall were dead and I didn’t have an appointment with anyone. Finally, a late call to one of Edward’s many secretaries produced a pissed-off young woman with interesting marks on her wrists and blood in her eye. Her name was Carol Linzey, and she fixed a glacial glare on the current chief of security and signed me through. Then she handed me her own card to the lower level and elevators before turning back to flay the man with a whiplash tongue and language you don’t expect out of the mouths of executive assistants for making her come downtown to show him how to do his job right. She dressed him down about everything from his lack of protocol or common sense to his hairstyle and he cowered as she did. I’ve heard milder manners from felons and parents in custody battles. I’d prefer the felons.

Down below, the elevator lobby in front of Edward’s bunker was empty. It was not, unfortunately, any quieter in the Grey. Normally I found the magic in that area muted, but as we faced the inner doors the chorus of the grid broke into a warring cacophony of advice and warning. “Shut up,” I muttered.

Quinton cut me a curious glance. “What?”

“Them,” I replied, shaking my head and tapping on my temple.

He frowned. “Have to do something about that.”

“That would be nice. . . .” I said, distracted by my study of the problem before us. I had Carol’s card to open the door, but I knew the wards hadn’t been told to let me in. The card alone wouldn’t get us past them or the other nasty things that had been twined into the protective magic around the portal. I doubted I could shut down the wards on the door itself, but I could get the door to open automatically if I could reach the key reader.

A secondary loop of protective magic circled the doorway and the card pad. I’d seen an invisible eye above the reader and the snapping teeth of something hungry under it the first time I’d come with Goodall. That monstrosity was right where I’d have to put my wrist to use the card, exposing the vulnerable skin, veins, and tendons to the horror beneath. Whether the card worked or not, I thought that the dreadful biting thing would rip open the arm of anyone it didn’t recognize or hadn’t been told to admit and I wasn’t sure it felt friendly toward me. I’d seen it take a chunk out of Goodall while he was still on the security pass list. Since I also qualified as a potential threat in both the normal world and the Grey one, I was more than a touch reluctant to put my flesh near the disembodied thing in the wall.

“What did Cristoffer say about this again . . . ?” The noise in my skull was making it hard to recall anything but what I was staring at right now. This time, the voice of the grid was not so much a song as a hooligan rabble.

“She said she probably hadn’t buried the tap as well as she would have now,” Quinton replied. “I would guess that’s sort of the power line feeding whatever magical alarm she put on the door for Edward.”

“It’s a little more complex than that. There are at least three linked systems here: two magical and one mundane. We have the card for the normal system, but we have to get past the others: recognition and defense. At least one of them took a bite out of Goodall—and I mean that literally.”

“OK, door bites man. I’d like to skip that.”

“Then don’t touch the door or the wall near it.” I crouched down to look harder at the bottom of the wall where it met the floor, searching for the power line up from the grid. I hoped Cristoffer hadn’t been teasing us with her hints. She had seemed angry and annoyed more than cruel, but I wouldn’t have put any sort of mean-tempered joke past her.

Even sliding deeper into the Grey, I found it hard to get a clear look at the spell around the door and card reader. The magical structure was almost Byzantine in the degree of twisting and doubling back that it displayed. I wondered how much of it was really necessary and how much was there to disguise the important parts. I wished I had Quinton’s knowledge of circuits but I couldn’t show it to him and describing it seemed impossible. Along the edge of the carpet that touched the wall, I could see a narrow, dark gap, as if the carpet hadn’t been stretched as tightly as usual when it was installed.

I eased out of the Grey so I’d have a better grip and, keeping my hand away from the bright crimson lines of the spell, I dug my fingertips into the carpet edge nearby. Something sharp poked my middle finger and I gasped, jerking my hand away.

“Are you all right?”

I looked at my fingertip, seeing a small, dirty puncture. “Just a carpet tack.” A single drop of blood squeezed out of the skin as it reclosed. I sucked the injured finger, thinking it would be a bad idea to let the blood escape and land anywhere near the chittering red lines of the spell. I tucked my fingers back into the gap with a bit more care and caught the edge of the carpet. As suspected, it wasn’t tight to the wall or the strip of tacks as it should have been—the installers hadn’t been allowed close enough to do it properly, or whoever finished up the job wasn’t experienced with the technique. Either way, lucky for me. The edge of the carpet pulled up and away, making a sloppy pocket at floor level on the right side of the doorway.

In the shadow of the lifted carpet, the strands of magic gleamed like neon threads. One was quite a bit thicker than the others and it split about an inch up the wall into four other lines that described the whorls and arabesques of the spell. Of the four lines, one was slightly thicker and brighter than the others. Among the knots and twists above it was difficult to pick out, but so close to the split it was obvious. Warily, I touched it.

A jolt of pain shook my spine and a snapping doglike head thrust out of the wall below the card reader. The creature was bright red and gruesome, furious as it pushed into reality.

Quinton took two fast steps backward. “Jesus! What in hell is that?”

I twitched my finger away from the thick line and the monstrosity recoiled into the wall. The voices in my head screamed conflicting insults and remonstrations at me. “Shut up!” I barked at them.

Quinton stared at me.

“Not you.” I put my hands over my ears for a second, but it didn’t help. “I don’t know,” I whispered, tucking my head down. “I don’t know what it is, only what it does.”

“Eats people?”

“Pretty much.”

Quinton sounded shaken. “I wasn’t really expecting to see anything like that. . . .”

I groaned from the rising noise in my head, like pressure in a balloon. “Don’t say you didn’t believe there was really something there.” My voice sounded hollow in my ears.

He stepped close and crouched down, putting his arms around me and pulling me back a little from the wall. “No, sweetheart. I just didn’t think I’d be able to see it. There’s no physical sign of any . . . animal or cage here. Where did it come from?”

“I think . . .” I felt sick to my stomach, sorting the noise and my own thoughts as I spoke. “I think someone sacrificed a dog.”

“You mean Dru Cristoffer.”

I nodded, spasmodically. “That’s the dog. In the wall.” If I sorted the images that were flooding into my head from touching the line of its imprisonment, I could see what had happened to the poor animal and I didn’t want to describe it to anyone. In light of what she’d done, I reevaluated Dru Cristoffer: She was evil. And I painted Edward with the same brush for letting her—telling her—to do it.

I didn’t want to simply go around this monstrous security system. I wanted to destroy it, wards and all. It wasn’t my place to make that decision—it wasn’t my property, and Edward wouldn’t thank me for ruining it—but knowing what had been done to safeguard this place made me sick and seething with anger. I didn’t want to know what Cristoffer had done to make the panels on the doors throb as they did—didn’t think I could ever sleep again with such knowledge in my head.

The Grey chorus tried to give me the information and I screamed at them, “Shut up! Don’t tell me!” I couldn’t block them out with my hands so I tried to beat them into silence rocking violently forward in Quinton’s embrace to strike my head against the floor. “Shut up! Shut up!”

Quinton hauled me hard against his chest, locking me to him and pushing away from that wretched wall. “Stop it! Harper, stop!”

I couldn’t. The insidious whispers of the grid would not go away. They persisted and echoed, telling me horrible things that had happened in these rooms, reciting a litany of horrors that lay ahead. I panted and gulped my breath, thrashing against Quinton’s grip because there was nowhere to turn that they did not come, invisible and unstoppable, into my mind. I felt myself shaking, convulsing as if the voices brought the electric shock of the grid with them. I understood why my father had killed himself, why he had blown out his brains rather than live with this. . . . I wished I could. I wished I could stop—

Quinton clamped one arm hard across my body, crushing the air from my lungs. I felt a jab against my side and then a jolt, a violent yank as if I’d been hit in the chest and thrown across the room. I buckled and collapsed onto the floor, facedown, huddled like a hurt child.

But the silence! The blessed silence. I wanted to stay in it, curled around myself in the quiet.

I felt Quinton holding me against his chest, panting and sweating. Or was that me? Breath came hard, in gasps, into my lungs and a ringing started up in my ears, but just an ordinary buzzing noise this time. We were on the floor. Were we on the floor? It seemed we had to be since I couldn’t feel my feet touching anything.

“Harper? Sweetheart?” He breathed the words against my neck. “I’m sorry. I had to. I didn’t know what else to do. Harper?”

I pressed my face against his shoulder and tried to say it was all right, but it came out a weak mewling sound.

He sagged under me, relieved, and shifted his grip so I slid lower into his lap. “Thank God. Baby, I thought I’d killed you for a second there. Oh, sweetheart, I didn’t know what else to do.”

“S’all right,” I mumbled. Or I think I did. My mouth wasn’t working very well. Actually, nothing was. I was a big, limp lump, but everything was wonderfully quiet. I didn’t think it was permanent, but it was fine for now. I’d have to do something about the spell and the dog in the wall before the noisy voices of the grid came back, but for a few more seconds, I only wanted to cling to Quinton.

“Wha—where . . . ?” I tried, not sure where I was or how long I’d been gone. I couldn’t feel him touching me now. . . .

“Still here. Basement. Had to shock you. Only thing I could think of to make you stop. I think you lost a couple of minutes there. Are you . . . all right?”

I couldn’t answer that. It wasn’t just that I was messed up—I was more than that—but that the flow of the grid had risen over me in a rapid swarm of flickering light and awesome silence. The same whirring, pale-blue energy that had settled on me as I’d escaped from Wygan’s lair under the broadcast tower clothed me and moved me up to my knees. Then forward, lurching a bit as my limbs tried to coordinate the signals of this power with the familiar firing of my nerves.

Without any desire for it, I pushed myself out of Quinton’s embrace and sprawled across the rug, bringing my face closer to the gap I’d made between the carpet and the wall. My vision should have been weak from the electric shock but it was sharp as a sniper’s, and I stared into the complexity of the spell that painted its light up the wall with a terrifying, alien understanding. I could see which of the loops and whorls acted like a retainer or cage for the angry spirit of the dog, which held the eye that had been separated from the animal, and which was the subroutine that connected the card reader to the spell. I’d have to cut that out of the magical circuit and push the guardian aside so it wouldn’t take a bite out of me or Quinton on general principle. The eye was no threat alone, so I could ignore it and reinforce the cage or rip it out altogether, but I didn’t care to at that moment. Just didn’t care, didn’t feel the emotional coil and turmoil of being human. I knew I could simply . . . change it, move whatever I didn’t like aside. For now.

So, this was what Carlos meant by an ability to warp the fabric of magic—my ability for the moment. I could have this all the time if I stopped resisting the changes happening to me and just . . . took them in. I’d held back so long that, this time at least, touching the power lines and shapes of the Grey would be agonizing. This I simply knew.

I started to slip deeper into the Grey, closer to the grid that flared and sang, reaching for me as if I’d been lost such a long time . . .

“Harper?”

I paused, balancing between the normal and the paranormal, glancing over my shoulder at Quinton. He was chewing his bottom lip and trying not to look frightened, but the energy around his head had gone a solid, unhappy shade of orange with jagged sparks of bile-green, a combination I’d always thought of as “scared sick.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, my voice echoing up from a distance well below me, filled with the chorus of the grid. The hollow look Quinton returned should have sent a pang through me, but I felt nothing beyond the necessity of rearranging the elegant abomination around the doors. Some distant, silly creature said I’d have to deal with the consequences and his distress later, but that was later and somewhere else. Not here, in the fine-lined world of the grid that spread in all visible directions and outward past what any puny human eyes could see.

The whole world was a fiery network of colored lines in the darkness, so thick and numerous that they cooked the air white. It sang the voices of nymphs and selkies in the vast ocean of luminous mist. I focused past the distracting beauty of it, closing my eyes to all but the gyre of the spells and the thick, blue stream they sprang from.

Cristoffer had picked a strong line of neutral blue that turned red only as it entered the coils of her spell, the influence of blood. This was the first time I’d ever studied the structure of a constant, dynamic spell. Most of the ones I’d seen before were static things, powered by their creator’s personal energy or some stolen energy and doomed to eventually fade and die out. This was live, drawing power continuously to keep it up and active, ready to respond to whatever happened near it. The lines of the spell split into four parts: the main circuit that sustained the slaughtered animal, a second heavy line that composed the restraints and camouflage over its furious remains, a third thread not much wider than an eyelash and very slightly blue-tinged by the mundane electrical connection of the card reader, and a fourth bloody-red strand that fed the unblinking eye above the card plate—the magical half of the recognition system. With the brightness of the three red lines that coiled around and over it, the thin, orchid-red line was hard to discern. Even with the right key card in hand, the wrong hand holding it would still be bitten—or even ripped right off—by the fury of the guard dog embedded in the wall. The baroque loops of the three other lines made it nearly impossible to reach for the card pad’s line without touching one of them. It was very clever and would have been difficult to dismantle, or even bypass, without injury. But that wasn’t going to be a problem for me. Not now.

Standing up, I looked for a place well above the pad and eye, where the card reader’s line was exposed and found a tiny loop near the upper hinge plate. I could tear it all apart if I liked, but there was that other person, Quinton, to think of. He needed the pad to work without worrying about the teeth of the door’s guardian. I’d have to shunt the beast and its support aside but leave the rest, and the wards, intact.

I puzzled over it for a minute. I just needed to pull the unwanted bits away, as the mage had done to power her spell and much the same way I had teased Simondson’s thread up from the ground. It was convenient that I was tall and could reach the loop without standing in front of the spell itself. I pushed both hands into the wall, feeling invisible resistance from the material things that composed it, finding the action more difficult than I’d anticipated. It should have been easier . . . but I wasn’t familiar with this power yet. I knew I could do much more and with very little effort once I was truly part of the grid, but for now, I’d have to try something more limited.

I remembered the way the edges of the hole around the Hardy Tree in the old London churchyard had torn at my touch and whirled off into tiny vortices. I could tear the edges of something exposed and ragged. It seemed to me that the tap Cristoffer had pulled up must have a ragged edge to it somewhere, like a rough spot where it had come away from another feeder line.

I reached below the red color of the spell and closed my fingers on the blue line of magic. My seeming-distant body twitched involuntarily as the power line seared into my fingertips, sending pain and electrical shock into the nerves of my hand and up my arm. I bit my lips against an impulse to scream. I concentrated and pushed the feeling aside. The hot pain dropped down to a lower intensity, still burning and miserable but no longer of concern. I pulled steadily until a strand of cool blue energy spooled out from under my fingers, about two feet long.

I pinched the free end and stood, pulling a longer filament of energy free. I knew the loop wouldn’t last long once I pulled it away from the feeder line it came from. If it withered and died, I’d have to start again. I’d have to make the connection quickly so I could let go as soon as possible. The pain was growing, and holding two live ends simultaneously might be more than the body could bear.

I snapped the energetic thread off, like breaking the yarn on a raveling sleeve. For a moment, it pulsed; then it began fading. I knew I had very little time. I pinched the nearest end onto the lowest part of the card reader’s red thread. Then, from below the gaze of the disembodied eye, I shoved the fiery container of the dead dog aside a few feet with one hand before I rose and pinched the second end on at the loop above the hinge. The watchdog snapped at nothing as I passed its eye, reached, and turned the small, unblinking organ to see only the emptiness of the space inside the wall. Then the dog fell quiet.

The new strand slowly flushed red while the strand it bridged paled to lavender. I reached out and snapped off the original line just above the floor. Shock jolted through me as the line faded to pale blue, then withered and vanished.

I jerked backward, thrust away from the calm sea of the grid, dazed by the sudden return of normal pain and the ripping loss of knowledge.

The card reader was out of the magical circuit.

I breathed hard and stumbled back a few more feet, becoming more painfully normal with every difficult tread.

Quinton stepped up behind me but didn’t quite touch me. “Harper,” he breathed. “Are you all right?”

My breath shook in my chest and my limbs felt burned and leaden, but I nodded. “Good enough.” Remarkable in the Grey. A total wreck in the physical. My electrified mind gibbered and shrieked while the grid chuckled to itself at my expense. My spine had already begun buzzing, and the singing sound was swelling back up with the residual pain from handling the grid that I had ignored at the time—ignored, since human concerns such as pain and loss were outside my world. My gods, if this was anything like what Wygan expected me to do, there was no way I’d do it, even as a bluff. I could feel my muscles and joints stiffening from the sensation of electric shock still lingering on my nerves. I could never let myself be subsumed into the inhuman power of the Grey’s magical grid as I’d just come very close to doing. The potential had been awesome, but the divorce from feeling was too chilling. I wasn’t very good at emotional expression, but the sensation of removal was too terrible. Even so, I couldn’t fall into contemplating that now; there was still something to do.

“Just need to put the card on the reader,” I gasped, breathless, enervated, and ready to collapse.

I tried to retrieve it from my pocket, but my fingers were too senseless and burned to feel it. Quinton got the card for me and held it out toward the reader’s plate at arm’s length.

The spell throbbed brighter but the monstrosity stayed quiet behind the restraining bars of the casting, now out of line with the card plate. The door clicked and swung a few inches open. Quinton started to move forward.

“Don’t touch them,” I panted, crumpling to my knees, unable to stay upright any longer. “The wards on the doors are still active. They’re worse—even worse than the dog.”

Quinton glanced at me and started back to pick me up, but I waved him off. Scowling, he looked around the foyer searching for something to shove the doors wider open.

A pretty, spindly-legged console table stood under a painting on the wall to the right of the elevator, distracting the eye from the hidden door to the observation room on the opposite wall. A large vase of wilted flowers stood on the tabletop, and at first I thought he was going to snatch it up and throw it at the doors.

Quinton picked up the whole table instead and shoved it hard into the gap between the doors. The red-shining panels on the door surfaces let out a gonging sound loud enough to make us both flinch and cower as the table exploded into flame. The force pushed the doors back on their hinges as the burning bits of the table flew away, cutting through the air of the room with whistling sounds.

Quinton snatched me up and threw me through the gaping opening before the doors could rebound and snap closed. He didn’t follow and the heavy portal slammed shut again.

Inside the room the hush was intense and made the resurging babble of the grid in my head all the more noticeable as I fought it down. Still, I limped to the doors and tugged one open: Edward hadn’t warded the interior, and even though the malevolence of the wards seeped through, the discomfort of visions and the cold pain of touching the handle weren’t enough to stop me. Quinton dashed through the doorway and kicked the door closed again behind him.

Then he turned and grabbed me and hugged me so hard I squeaked with what little breath I had left—it hurt, but it was a pleasant ache. He was breathing very fast, sweat making his face and hands sticky.

“That—I don’t ever want to do that again. I don’t want to see you do it again. There was—ugh. It was like all those tapes from 9/11 going off in my head. Screaming and fire . . .” He shuddered.

“I know.” Yes, I knew, like I’d been split in two: one half looking only at the numbers, the other burning in the wreckage.