Labyrinth

TWENTY-EIGHT

I didn’t know if I hoped that Carlos was home or that he wasn’t. The street through what had once been a cemetery seemed as dark as ever and possibly more haunted. The ghost mist seemed to hum now, and it glowed in lambent colors as the voices of the grid muttered in my head. The névoacria crept across the landscape, flanking me like an honor guard, flickering in and out of existence as we went on.

I passed through Carlos’s hellish garden and found him glowering at me from the open darkness of the front doorway. He waved me in without a word.

I passed him and stopped in the living room, shuddering a little as the heat and cold radiating from the magic circle below brushed over my bones and added its voice to the chorus in my mind. I still had the broken Lâmina carefully wrapped up in my pocket, and the circle seemed to reach for it and want it. Perhaps it was drawn to the blade because it was similar to something that was part of the circle’s creator, or maybe it was just the nature of Carlos and his magic to want dark things.

“Did you have any idea Gwen was a devious mastermind?” I asked as Carlos entered the room.

He raised an eyebrow. “You met Cameron at his sister’s home, then.”

“Don’t act like that wasn’t what you intended.”

“I left that to Cameron. He has an interesting friendship with Edward’s other renovated error. Perhaps near-starvation made her sharper—she was certainly unremarkable when she walked in the daylight.”

I gave him a narrow stare. “You’re going to just love her plan. You get to publicly pick and lose a fight with Cam over who has Edward’s best interests—and those of the city’s vampires—at heart. Cam gets to be Prince of the City, with Gwen behind the throne, and you get to help me foul up Wygan’s plans and kill him before he replaces the Guardian Beast. All in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, depending on how fast the Pharaohn and his henchmen react to the rumors Cam, Gwen, and Sarah are busy spreading right now.”

“I’m impressed. Cameron exceeds my hopes for him.”

“He seemed to think you were a little disappointed that he isn’t much of a necromancer.”

Carlos snorted. “Only initially. Edward had an excellent eye for potential—it’s too bad that he’s usually only wasted, perverted, or destroyed it. He brought Cameron and Gwen into our community, and they have both proved to have exceptional depths no one yet recognizes.”

“No one but you.”

He made a half nod of acknowledgment, keeping his hands clasped low in front of himself and his stance as solid as a tor. He reminded me of a bouncer or a bodyguard when he stood that way, but the only thing he was guarding was himself. In the ghostlight, with the illumination of the grid’s whispering in my head, I could see that the black weight of his magic and his past pressed him hard onto the earth. “They’ll do well together.”

“Cam and Gwen? Maybe. But only if the rest of this works. You’ll have to pick the fight in a way that makes it clear to Wygan that you’re not on Edward’s side, while not putting Cameron there either.”

“I understand the situation,” he replied. “You will have to witness it yourself.”

I shook my head. “No one said anything about my being involved in any vampire dominance games.”

“A witness, Blaine. You are the neutral party everyone trusts. They know you’ve helped all of us and have no personal stake in who rules. I’ll make it easy. Trust me: I have learned how to lose in all the centuries of my existence. You’ll have no difficulty with that. It is this other that may challenge you.”

“This,” I said, pulling the silk-wrapped bundle from my pocket.

Carlos swayed a half-inch away from the iron knife in its black shroud. The buzzing and chattering in my head swelled to a dizzying volume. I could not help bringing my free hand to my face to wipe the sudden cold sweat that broke over me.

“I wish it didn’t have to be now,” I muttered. I was afraid of what might happen, of how close I would have to come to the grid and whether I could stay separate—I won’t pretend I wasn’t. The emptiness and inhumanity of it repelled me, but the overwhelming power pulled like gravity. And I was tired, perhaps too weak to resist. . . .

Carlos raised his left hand and touched my shoulder with a single finger, as if he saw something on my jacket. The light pressure of that one finger reverberated through me as if through a timpani. I clenched my teeth until it passed. Then I looked at him through narrowed eyes.

He seemed to have expected my reaction, but he didn’t show any satisfaction in it. “I know, but it must be now. You’re shattering, coming close to the edge of the web itself. That is the moment the Pharaohn will act. We must act first. If you die without his control to hold you in place, all this may drain away and you will be useless.”

I pushed my suddenly damp hair off my forehead and glared at him. “I wish people wouldn’t keep talking about my dying like it’s no big deal. It’s a big one to me.”

Carlos laughed at my grousing tone. My temperature fell again as the sleet sound of it swept through me. “If you die before I do, I shall miss you, Blaine.”

“Like a favorite lab rat, maybe.”

He didn’t respond to that. He just looked past me to the cellar door. “Let us be about it, then. Before you grow too weary. I trust you have everything you need?”

“I think so.” Knife, ball, bad attitude, and all, I thought. Oh goody: magical surgery for amateurs. The idea made me sick. The act would probably be worse.

I followed him once more down to the basement. This time I knew enough to keep well to the edge of the room and watch where I put my feet. The foundation stones left ashen marks on my clothes as I passed. Carlos moved to the circle without hesitation, snatching something off one of his workbenches as he passed and crossing over the singing red and black lines with no qualm—but it was his circle and still unclosed. I doubted it would be so friendly to me. He stopped in the center of the open space within the glowing arcs and swirls.

“How do you intend to shield this action from the Pharaohn’s knowledge?” he asked.

“In part that’s why Cameron and the others are starting their whisper campaign—to give the other side something else to pay attention to tonight. But I did find my back door and if it works as my father says, we’ll do it there.”

Carlos looked wary. “This back door . . .”

“It leads to a sort of maze inside the Grey. The doors are one-way unless you have the key. Dru Cristoffer made it, if that’s any recommendation.”

Carlos looked intrigued and much less worried. “Recently?”

“No.”

“And I’ve never heard of it. Clever of her.”

“Given the way she hid it, I’m sure keeping anyone from hearing of it was exactly what she had in mind.”

“Did you meet her?”

The question was too casual. Knowing the twisted way Carlos’s mind tended to run, I wanted to say “no,” but I was sure I couldn’t lie to him in this room. Instead I said nothing at all while the noises of the grid clattered in my head. In a moment he cut his glance aside and the sound eased.

“Step into the circle, there,” he directed, pointing to a place on the floor where the design was thinner and darker. “Bring all you need. Once the circle—”

“Yes, I know how a magic circle works,” I interrupted him, irritable and rubbed raw by the constant hot and cold sensation across my nerves, fed by the babbling voices in my head and the growing draw of passionless silence. I put down my bag, grabbed the ball from it, checked my pockets for the key, and transferred the knife from my jacket to my hand. I thought that should be everything. As an afterthought, I turned off my cell phone—it just seemed like a bad idea to have it go off while I was trying this—and left the jacket behind with my purse. It was cold in the cellar workroom, but the ease of movement would be more important than warmth. Besides, no amount of clothing had ever negated the chill of the Grey.

With the wrapped Lâmina and the puzzle clutched to my chest, I stepped, cringing inside, over the darkened line of Carlos’s containment spells. The lines of the circle throbbed but remained quiescent.

Carlos glanced at me and cocked his head, frowning. “Are you afraid?”

“Wouldn’t you—” I started before I realized how stupid that idea was and shut up.

He made a sound in his chest that wasn’t quite a chuckle and a quirk at the corner of his mouth that definitely wasn’t a smile. “Yes.” Then he threw something hard at the ground where the circle was dim. The small, dark thing shattered on the smooth black floor in a chime of breaking glass, spreading a spill of red liquid that ran into the lines, flowing into the dim voids, to complete the shapes and close the circle with the iron scent of blood.

Carlos caught my startled expression and gave me an amused glance. “It’s hard to close one properly from the inside. That’s sloppy but effective. Nothing from the outside will interrupt us. Let us hope nothing from the inside will, either. Proceed,” he added, stepping as far back as the circle would allow.

I was leery of letting Carlos anywhere near the puzzle ball or the key that would make it into a doorway to the Grey’s hidden places. While I knew we were bound together by the geas, that didn’t mean I could trust him, and things of power were always of interest to Carlos. These weren’t dark artifacts, but they were magical.

I didn’t have much choice, however. I shoved the knife awkwardly into my back pocket. Then I unlocked the puzzle ball with the odd little key while Carlos watched, frowning. The inner door of the ghost labyrinth spilled open and filled the room, wiping out the solid appearance of the walls and ceiling in the shimmering maze of the mist-world. This time there was no barrier between me and the man with me; I could still see Carlos, though it seemed he was distant in the fog.

“Oh, little girl, no. Not yet.”

I turned around and looked down the long bending corridor of mist to the spectral form of my father, half eaten by the boiling wall of tormented faces. “Dad?” I glanced back at Carlos, who hadn’t moved, though he was getting clearer, which I thought meant he was getting into the labyrinth somehow. I returned my attention to Dad. “I know. I know it’s not time. But I need to be here for a little while and . . . I need to ask you something while I can. What happened to Christelle? Your receptionist? Did . . . did you . . . ?”

“Kill her? I thought I had at the time. In a way I did. But it wasn’t quite Christelle anymore. The Pharaohn’s ushabti . . . took her over in some way. That one was a puppet master—the ushabti are all different just like you and I are different from each other. I didn’t know what any of them were, didn’t know about vampires and asetem and that they aren’t the same. I didn’t know about dhampirs, or that the ushabti can walk in the daylight. I couldn’t know or guess. . . . I only saw Christelle and knew she wasn’t really . . . normal anymore. I didn’t know she was a shell, animated by something inhuman. I didn’t want to hurt her. . . . I let her linger too long, spying, keeping the real Chris from leaving. Do you know—does she haunt the office? I thought she might, but . . . I can’t go there.”

“She does. She’s confused. She doesn’t know you’re gone.”

“Oh, poor girl. If you can, tell her what happened. Maybe she’ll go on.”

“What did happen, Dad?”

“The ushabti killed her. The Pharaohn used to tell me about it: He smothered her, so she wouldn’t have any marks I could see, and when they were done with her, they buried what was left in a landfill in Torrance.”

“Torrance? On the hill heading to Palos Verdes?”

“I think so.”

“That’s a botanical garden now.”

“Oh. Thank God it’s not a dump anymore. I hated thinking of her like that.”

Carlos’s voice came from a distance, buzzing with red noise from the Grey. “Blaine . . . ?”

“I have to go, Dad. I’ll let you out of here soon.”

“You mustn’t. He’ll know.”

“I’m not going to leave you in this place for eternity. I just need to know how to undo what the Pharaohn did.”

“Ah, that’s the easy part: remove anything crossing the core that isn’t blue. But you’ll never get to help me without dooming yourself. Just leave the doorways open. We’ll all go up in smoke together.”

“I won’t—”

“Oh, my little girl, don’t make my death useless. I can still save you from some of this, from giving way to the grid forever. We’re fluid when we die. Some things we gain; some things we lose. Some can be carried away forever. I was a terrible father and I can’t make you what you were never meant to be, but . . . I can make you safer.” And he pushed on the living Grey, making a wave of pressure that shoved me back.

“Dad!” I screamed as he forced me away from him, slamming a door between us.

“Blaine!”

I turned and ran through the sudden twists of the maze to the center and into Carlos, who was glowering at me.

“Where have you been?”

I was surprised that I wasn’t crying or shaking. “To visit my father. I don’t think I’ll have a chance again.”

The necromancer growled at me and my skin crawled with goose bumps. But I glared back at him. “Don’t rush me. I needed some information. He’s been haunting the Pharaohn since I was twelve and, like Gwen, no one’s been paying him any attention while he listened to everything they said. Sometimes it’s useful to interrogate the invisible man. He told me what Wygan is planning.”

“Did he.”

“Yes,” I snapped back. “And I’ll tell you as soon as I get that . . . thing out of your chest. Because, frankly, I would like out of this place as soon as possible.”

“It is not a pleasant place,” he agreed and I goggled at him. Never would I have expected such a sentiment from him.

I took a steadying breath. Carlos sat down on the misty floor, crossing his legs and bracing his arms behind him.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Reducing the distance I’ll fall when you pull that wretched fragment out. Don’t imagine it will be painless. For either of us.”

I hadn’t thought of it at all and that bothered me: Was I becoming callous? Was the unemotional distance of the grid taking over? I preferred to think I was sure of Carlos’s lack of feeling rather than any of my own, but in truth, it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about it. If Carlos hadn’t been a vampire, would I have? I hadn’t given any thought to this process. I didn’t know what to do or how it would work, if at all. I assumed I could do it because I had the tools—the power—but what if I couldn’t . . . ?

Carlos grabbed one of my wrists and yanked me all the way down to his level. The furious cold of his touch froze my lungs and bound up my chest in ice and agony. “It won’t be complicated: The Lâmina wants to be whole again and you’ve only to help it come together. Just be sure the smaller part comes to the larger and not the other way around. And slowly, or what blood I have will spill like water. You will not wish to be the only warm, human thing within reach if it does.”

I knew what any animal would do to maintain its life and I knew he would do the same and more. My choices had gone the moment I’d walked through his door and now I had to do this right. I felt a moment of panic like smoke in my chest. I yanked my arm back from him, fighting his superior strength without thinking. My shoulder popped and creaked, near to dislocating before he let go. I fell back, the hard, silk-padded bulk of the blade in my pocket jabbing into my buttock. I was panting and the shrieking of the grid in my mind drove my fear into tightening circles, but the sudden hard thump of the knife startled me and shocked the last of my breath from my lungs in a sad little squeak.

The seconds that I lay in the mist, breathless and stunned, silenced the voices and I took my first new breath quivering but not afraid. I gulped in a few more lungfuls before I could look at Carlos again. He made no move, no indication that anything was amiss. He just sat where he was and waited.

“All right,” I told myself. “OK. Let’s do this and get it over with.” Carlos didn’t make any acknowledgment of my muttering.

I crept across the silver fog that obscured the floor, the lines of the circle gleaming like dim neon miles away below the ghostly maze.

I pulled the wrapped Lâmina from my pocket as I knelt in front of Carlos.

He held one hand out flat, palm upward and thumb tucked across it. “When you hold the knife, hold it in your palm like this, your fingers flat under the blade. Your hand becomes the knife, your arm the tang. Then cut. Like this,” he added, his hand curving upward and toward my own heart. “But slowly.”

He unbuttoned and opened his shirt so I could see the dusky amber of his skin marked with a thick scar nearly as broad as my own palm. The scar curved a little, raised into a long ridge that gleamed like oily water in the ghostlight. Low and to the left of his sternum, the uneven crescent made me think the blow had come from below, underhanded. Just like the urge that had driven it.

I nodded, tucking the still-wrapped knife into my hand as he’d shown, letting the silk fall away to a single layer between us. Carlos shut his eyes as a tremor moved under his skin. I sank down toward the grid, letting the color swell and burn out the mist of the labyrinth until there was only a thin smoke of substance clothing the lines and tangles of power in the world. The energy seemed to rush up, much hotter and more urgent than the cold steam of the Grey had ever been. The fearful silence stayed at bay this time, but I felt it nearby.

In the blazing net of the grid, Carlos, a smear of tangled threads wrapped in shadow, looked dim and weak but for a burning ruby ember at the core, gleaming like one of Dru Cristoffer’s earrings. A dull void of light or color—triangular and sharp—stirred across the face of the ruby that pulsed once, slowly, and shuddered as the dark thing scored across it. I wanted to stare into this fire wrapped in darkness and watch the gleaming heart of it as it trembled against the black shape, beautiful and horrifying. Then the voices were crying in my head that it was a heart, his heart, this burning thing was Carlos’s heart. The black shape was the broken tip of the Lâmina, stirring toward its missing part, cutting as it moved.

I tasted bile as I forced myself to action, pushing my hand toward his chest, toward the cloud of blackness that shrouded the fiery heart. I felt cold pressure against my fingertips, but I could barely see them. I put my other hand out flat against him, feeling the scar, the shape of his rib cage and muscles, invisible but solid and shockingly cold beneath my palm. I felt his shudder and the whispering told me to press with both hands, flat with one and forward with the other, press. . . . I felt the scar part at my fingertips as they sank into his skin. . . .

I had reached into zombies and into ghosts, into the warped and furious constructs of human madness, ambition, and anger, but never into a solid, living thing before. Though he was undead, as a vampire, Carlos still had the solid flesh of a live human being, cold as it was. One would have thought he didn’t need a heart and could feel nothing in that dead organ, and yet apparently he did. As my hand holding the knife pushed into his body, I tried to shut off my mind, tried not to gag as he tensed and shivered and the slow substance of his body resisted my cutting. I pinched the fingers of my other, flat hand into the trailing silk and let it pull away as the blade on my palm sank into him, drawing my hand into the cold flesh.

The naked blade sang to its missing tip and the dark triangle twitched toward it, cutting a path by centimeters across the vampire’s heart. Brilliant golden light oozed in the wake of the black shape and wrung a sound of suffering from Carlos’s throat.

I trembled also, every movement was so slow, hard fought for every half-inch, that my muscles ached with fatigue and knowing what I was doing sickened me. I wanted it over with. I could barely stand any more of this creeping torment. The perverse chorus in my mind teased me that I could kill him at any moment, if I wanted, that I did not have to follow the route already made. . . .

I eased the blade sideways, cutting further to the inside of his chest than the original path and pressing hard on the plane of his upper chest as he jerked against the sudden change of motion. A growling cry boiled out of him as the broken point wheeled sideways, nicking a deeper golden line in the blazing scarlet heart as it moved to align with its parent blade. I tightened the muscles of my arm and thrust harder into the new incision. I cut into his body, urging the knife to meet its missing part sooner.

The bloodless meat below his ribs gave reluctant way and the jagged edges of the Lâmina yearned toward each other. The point turned a bit further, making one last bright line, thin as a hair, across the surface of his heart as it pulled from it. A slow golden haze slid over the ruby fire, gleaming as Carlos shivered and buckled backward a little. I shuffled forward on my knees to keep the blade from ripping out of his unseen flesh and felt the Lâmina quivering like a tuning fork in my grip.

I looked down, setting myself into position to continue and saw the glitter of gold fade off his heart’s surface. I froze in terror, thinking I’d miscalculated and destroyed Carlos, but he shuddered, not yet truly dead. I stared at the black shape of the blood blade within the skein of red fire and black smoke and noticed the point had cleared the bright knot of his heart and changed shape. The broken edges of the blade seemed to reach toward each other, thinning and elongating until they touched and bound. The blade lurched in my grip, as if it could not wait any longer to meet its missing part and I hauled backward to stop its hungry lunge.

The separated pieces rang together and the Lâmina vibrated, tolling like a bell and surging in my hand. I braced myself and pulled against it, hoping I was guessing right. The knife drew reluctantly from Carlos’s undead flesh. I lurched backward, back into the ordinary Grey, as the blade came free. I wrapped the black silk scarf over it at once, hiding it and binding it tightly, afraid it might move on its own. I scooted back, away from Carlos, keeping the knife bundled in my hand as I groped for the key that would shut the maze and dump us back into the cellar.

The moment I touched the key to the walls of the maze it collapsed as if it, too, had been impatient to escape from my nightmarish work. Even the bloody red lines of Carlos’s magic circle seemed comforting after what I’d just done. I shivered and hugged myself against the incorporeal cold as I sat on the glassy black floor, tucking my head down against my knees.

I could feel Carlos stirring before I bothered to look for him. He was back on his feet, if a little less steady than usual, his shirt already buttoned. He glanced at me and the dark gleam in his eye frightened me to the bone.

He stepped close to me and put out his hand. “May I have the blade.” A demand, not a question.

I started to hand it over but paused, clutching it in its silk swaddling and holding it aside. “Only if you promise not to use it on me.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I do so swear. Never on you.” His sharp white teeth shone in the gloom.

“And no fangs either. I’m not a blood donor.”

He chuckled. “Very well.”

His hand remained where it was, still waiting for me to hand over the Lâmina. I wondered if there was anything else I should say before I gave it to him, but no suggestions came to mind. The grid’s chorus was suddenly quiet.

I put the black-wrapped knife into his hand. His lips curled into his wolf’s grin. Then he flicked the scarf away from the dreadful object and looked at it in the ruddy light from the circle.

He tilted it back and forth, his gaze running over the restored blade like a touch. “Perfect. Now it is mine—of my blood, undying.” His smile was cruel and showed his sharp teeth to the darkness. He turned and slashed the knife through the circle, felling the protective barrier.

He stepped out and I was quick to follow, however ungracefully from my sitting position. I scrambled to my feet as he wiped the blade clean on its wrapping.

“You’ve done excellent work, though I thought you meant to kill me.”

“You trusted me,” I replied. “I don’t betray people.”

“Yes, generally. But you didn’t do as I told you. You changed the path of the blade.”

I started gathering my things, more than ready to be out of his house—forever, I hoped. I didn’t look at him as I moved around, not sure I could stand the sight right now. “If I’d let it come out the way it went in, the tip would have had to travel most of the way through your heart from top to bottom. Once I knew the path was immaterial, that the pieces would take the most direct route to each other, I pulled the blade to the side and shortened the path the tip would take. That’s all.”

“You could see the tip moving through me?”

“Yes. I could see everything. I’d like not to see it again.” I shrugged into my jacket.

He was behind me and I didn’t know how he’d gotten there. “The voices trouble you.”

“Not right now. They were helpful this time, but mostly they wear me down.”

“Do you understand what they are?”

“It’s the grid—the weft, whatever you call it.”

“It is the collective of souls, born and unborn, the consciousness and body of the power. You cannot lie so close to the warp of magic without hearing it. You cannot banish it. It is the material of the Grey, the ghost body, the mind that does not know itself. That is why it requires a Guardian. Or two. You are the Guardian’s hands and eyes on the hard side of the veil. It could not recognize you until you accepted it. You belong to the Grey and it to you.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, turning.

“I owe you for this.” He let the dim light of the room play over the dark blade of the Lâmina.

“You won’t be so pleased when I tell you what Wygan plans to do.”

“Ah. Yes.”

“He’s going to take the Guardian’s place. He means to kill it, according to my father, and become a sort of . . . Anti-Guardian, I guess. ‘The Architect of the Grey,’ Dad said—the creator of a new purpose for all that magical potential. Someone told me the asetem thrive on chaos, pain, terror, and other strong negative emotions. You said the Pharaohn yearns to be like a god again and strengthen his brood. What could be better for that purpose than turning the power of the Grey loose on the world and letting his spawn feed as they like on what would happen after that? No restraint, no Guardian Beast to stop him, and all that power, pouring into the world like the flood from a broken dam. . . .”

Carlos became thoughtful, his gaze wandering to some dread vision as he contemplated my words.

“It would be hell on earth.”

The words rolled on, mine and not mine, unrestrained and cold with truth. “You still want to stop it? Edward has no more hold over you and therefore neither does Wygan. You don’t have to do what he wants, nor do you have to stop him. In fact, you don’t have to do anything for anyone, if it doesn’t please you.” There was the geas between us, but in the gleam off the Lâmina and glow of the grid, it was as fragile as frost flowers.

The glare he turned on me was black and painful. “The warp has turned your mind. What feeds the Pharaohn does not suit me. And I also don’t betray my friends.”