Labyrinth

TWENTY-NINE

I didn’t understand what Carlos had meant. I could barely keep myself upright enough to leave and was too exhausted to puzzle around with it for long. Which friends? Me, Cameron, Edward? I felt broken by the long events of the day,the horror, difficulty, and revelation. Not to mention being half crazy and all tired. I longed for the reassuring clutter and familiarity of my condo, with the ferret living up to her name by burrowing in the bookshelves and tossing paperbacks onto the floor—that was the only sort of chaos I desired. After this I might change the furball’s name. . . .

And Quinton. I was surprised that I missed him after only five hours apart. We didn’t live together and I normally didn’t mind my solitude—preferred it in fact—but now I wanted the comfort of his presence, a warm body wrapped around mine, not some cold construct of undead flesh like a cadaver that won’t lie still. I couldn’t understand why normal people fell for the glamour of vampires. Even cloaked in magic, the fact that they were the living dead should make an impression at some point before you shucked your clothes or bared your throat. Shouldn’t the atavistic lizard brain kick in and let you know there’s something deeply wrong with the thing you’re snuggling up to, magic or no? Ugh. . . . Even thinking about it made me queasy and in want of something warmer and more reassuring.

It was nearly three in the morning when I got back down to Edward’s apartment in the TPM basement, but Quinton was still up, pottering around with the computer suite. Some people drink when they’re worried; Quinton tinkers. He got up to let me in since we still couldn’t touch the doors themselves from the outside, but after a brief hug, he dragged me with him back to the monitors embedded in the conference table.

He pulled me onto his lap and reached around me to type. “Look what I found.”

I collapsed against him with only enough energy to mutter, “Oh, rotten, dear. How did your evening go?”

He squeezed me and kissed the side of my neck. “I know. I’m sorry. I know you did hard things and you want to go to bed, but I found something I think is very useful here. Tomorrow’s Monday, so I think we’ll be able to track Solis down and get him to bring the info to the investigators.”

“Huh? Why would we want Solis? Are we having someone arrested?”

“No, not ‘we’ as in you and me. Carol and me. And it’s Goodall we want nabbed. See, this footage should have been wiped, but Goodall’s not an alpha geek: He didn’t completely destroy the image, only the file system information. That’s probably what he was doing down here when you came to see El Jefe Sanquino. Now tell me this doesn’t look like a digital image capture of Renfield Jr. kidnapping Seattle’s favorite bloodsucking entrepreneur.”

Contrary to popular film and fiction, most vampires show up just fine on video, so long as they aren’t making an effort to obscure themselves by hiding in the Grey. They do look a little out of focus most of the time, however. This particular recording did look awful; it hurt my head to try and watch it.

I was so tired I didn’t even pick a fight about Quinton’s going to Solis with Edward’s secretary Carol, and I wasn’t sure the crappy image was due to damage to the electronic file or if it was me. On the center screen, hazy, low-quality video of the bunker’s elevator lobby jerked forward in a storm of digital snow. Goodall was recognizable—his size and bearing were distinctive, even on a video screen where the color was messed up and no Grey auras showed. He put his card on the reader plate while he kept his other hand clenched at his left side and waited for the door to open. Edward stepped into the doorway, holding out both arms to keep the bronze-covered door wide open for his security chief to enter. But Goodall didn’t pass through the door. He took a step forward, swinging his left fist up into Edward’s ribs. It wasn’t a hard blow, but the static bloomed in a white flash where he struck the vampire and Edward collapsed in a heap. Goodall bent down, tossed something behind him onto the foyer floor, and then grabbed Edward under the armpits to drag him out of the doorway. He never touched the door itself and got out of its way as quickly as possible, dragging the downed bloodsucker along the carpet another yard or so before he snatched up the dropped object. Then he crouched, dead-lifted Edward, and flung the unconscious vampire onto his shoulder before he vanished from the scene.

I blinked at the snowy screen. “What the. . . .”

“Want to see it again?”

“I’m not sure . . . what happened? I mean he can’t have taken Edward out with a single punch. Vampires aren’t that fragile.”

“He didn’t; he stunned him.” Quinton typed and poked the mouse a bit until he had a close-up of a frame where Goodall hit Edward. Even through the white confusion of the electric arc, I could see the small black horns of the stun stick protruding from Goodall’s hand. Quinton advanced the frames so I could see the small device flung across the room. Then he zoomed in on it and tweaked the still a bit until it was a little more clear.

“That looks like one of yours.”

“Not quite, but similar. You know you can’t buy one in this state unless you’re an officer of the law or the court. If you need to back someone off, you have to use another method or make your own. So what I’m thinking is all that craziness in the underground with vampires zapping other vampires was Wygan’s guys experimenting to see what voltage they needed to use and what happened if they got it wrong. They didn’t steal any of my stun sticks; they just started working on the idea themselves—maybe they even thought they could blame it on me and you. Whoever’s building the stunners doesn’t know as much about the technology as I do, so they had to do a lot more calibration and experimentation. They probably had to find out if Edward really was immune—he always implied that he was—before they even tried it. It probably took a while before you left for Goodall to get that information. And as soon as he had that and confirmation that you were in England and too far away to help—bam!”

“And Edward’s reclusiveness helped cover up his absence. Why did Goodall come forward with the missing boss story at all . . . ?”

“Edward’s secretary reported it. Carol. The one who let us in. I called her. Edward had her phone numbers on the desk phone speed dial. All of them.”

I blinked and rattled the information into place in my brain. “Oh, that Carol. You call innocent secretaries in the dead of night to ask about their missing bosses?”

“I learn from the best: Get ’em while their defenses are down. Besides, she wasn’t sleeping and she’s not innocent. She’s an insomniac, which I think is how she met Edward in the first place, and she was his favorite blood donor until Goodall showed up. I guess they were ‘sharing the love,’ so to speak, after that.”

“She could be pointing the finger at Goodall out of jealousy.”

“She didn’t say much about him, actually. And that clip isn’t doctored that I can see. Goodall bumped him, all right. Also, I got the idea that something Edward does or something about the bite itself helps her sleep. She’s effectively addicted to him, but like any drug, too much would have killed her. So she didn’t mind that her . . . doses of Edward were smaller. But she did notice when he didn’t show up at all for a couple of days.”

“Did she tell the investigating officer?”

“Only that he’d been missing for a couple of days and that she normally saw him every day or two on business. She never claimed Kammerling had been kidnapped and she didn’t accuse Goodall of anything. She assumed he’s like she is: some kind of addicted donor. When she started working with the police and FBI on the disappearance, she started hiding things from them—the sort of things a vampire’s buddies usually hide from the daylight world—and finding a few herself, like doctored security logs for key access to this floor. My guess is that Goodall changed the logs and wiped or doctored the security recordings for the cameras and monitors in the room down here.”

“But not this one? How did he miss it?” My brain was sluggish. I felt I was missing something. . . .

“He didn’t. He tried to wipe it out but he’s not the hacker I am, and this recording is from one of Edward’s own backups, which Goodall didn’t have direct access to once the door locked and Carol had him taken off the security pass list. He tried to get at it through the remote backup system, but . . . he’s an end user and he doesn’t know how to really make a computer record disappear. And if it’s not wiped out in binary hash or physically destroyed, I can find it. Especially with direct access to said computer.”

I nodded and scrubbed my face with my hands, trying to shove away the muzzy feeling that had settled on my brain. Quinton pulled my hands down and kissed my cheek. He tucked me tight against him and pressed my head onto his shoulder. I wanted to fall asleep there.

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I’m trying to make things easier, but I guess I’m just making them more complicated. And here I am running off at the mouth about my end. . . . I don’t know what you’ve had to do tonight—don’t even try to tell me now—but it couldn’t have been easy or pleasant, what with Novak and the vampires and Carlos. You go to sleep and I’ll take care of this.”

“Take care of it . . . how?” I mumbled.

“I’ll get the files cleaned up and together, and Carol and I will take them to Solis in the morning.”

“No. You can’t go: He’ll arrest you.”

“For what? For supposedly being a homeless drug addict who’s cleaning up his act and being a Boy Scout? He won’t. He’ll suspect me of something, but not this. Solis is a fair guy. He’s the only one I can trust, but he’s not the point man on this case. He’ll need more than Carol’s word to believe the information is good and take it to the team. This is the evidence that can bring the case out of the darkness and into the real world. Carol will give it weight to keep me out of trouble. And it’s one less job for you to do, so you can sleep in while I’m talking to Solis. Then I’ll show you the Grey dampener I’ve been working on and we’ll take care of the rest of this mess tomorrow night.”

“Why you? Can’t you just give the recording to Carol and let her deal with Solis?”

Quinton shook his head. “Convincing the cops will take some technical expertise and that’s my bailiwick. If it works, the feds might arrest Goodall before Wygan can put the last of his plan into motion and that may buy you some time. It’s a little risky but trust me: It’ll work out.”

I made a grunt of protest; there was something wrong with what he was telling me and it would hurt him, I was certain, but I couldn’t put it together and I couldn’t keep my mind working against the pull of sleep to say so. I needed to tell him about tomorrow night and Carlos and all the rest, but it floated away before I could make the words. I tried to shake my head, but with me cuddled up against his chest, it just turned into a dopey nuzzle.

Quinton kissed the top of my head and stood up, keeping me clutched against him. He carried me to a couch and tucked me in to sleep under the blanket, and I don’t remember what he did next. It didn’t involve any naked snuggling, though, which was disappointing.

I know our bodies do most of their healing while we sleep. While we’re inactive, our brains sort through our activities and anxieties, making dreams and cleaning up the mental litter while the rest of the system goes into repair and restore mode. It’s also when most people die. Accidents and violence aside, it’s while asleep that most people shuffle off their mortal coil and leave the physical world for whatever lies beyond the far side of the Grey, where even the Guardian Beast doesn’t go.

It was well after noon when I finally woke up, and Quinton was gone. The buzzing voice of the grid pulled me out of sleep and I woke up, blinking, into a world ablaze. The colors of the grid had bled up into the world overnight, or I’d stopped holding them back, and everything I looked at was brighter than I could stand. As I walked across the floor, it seemed to ripple silver and blue under my steps, little waves breaking outward as if the surface of the world were a thin membrane stretched over luminous water. Every movement I made seemed to whisper across the burning threads of the grid. I might have been able to push them back, but I just didn’t care to expend the energy and find out. This was the state Wygan had pushed me toward for so long and I’d fought it once, but that had only left me weak and unable to use the state to my advantage. I didn’t care to be in that position the next time I was deep in the Grey—and I would be unless something in the current situation changed more than I could imagine.

Showering felt strange: My skin was too sensitive and the water felt effervescent and sharp. Every step of my usual routine was fraught with oddity: scents that were too strong or out of place; sounds that came too clearly to my ears; touches and sensations on my skin and fingers that were too rough, too cold, too hot. Even the taste of an apple I found in the kitchen was too sour and too sweet at the same time. I wore the softest clothes I had and kept the lights low.

I read my e-mail, including Cameron’s instructions for the evening, with the screen dimmed nearly black. Beside the computer, I found a note Quinton had left for me—handwritten on a single sheet of paper—saying he’d gone with Carol to talk to Solis. He thought he’d be back about two. But it was just passing that and he wasn’t back. I tried calling the numbers for Carol on Edward’s phone but only got voice mail and had to leave messages asking for updates. Finally I left a long note for Quinton myself, telling him what had happened the night before and what was going to play out tonight.

Beyond the facts, I had to include my speculation, too. I didn’t know if we had one day left or only tonight until Dru Cristoffer’s deadline for the puzzle balls expired. Guessing based on her personality, I suspected she’d be literal and give me seventy-two hours exactly from when she’d declared it. That meant I’d have to act with Carlos as soon as the matter of vampire succession was settled. I didn’t know where Wygan would stage his Grey coup, but if Carlos was right about the timing, it had to be ready to go the moment I was, so it had to be someplace nearby and already prepped.

I’d already touched the fabric of the grid and bent it to my own designs—badly and in a limited way—but that would be all Wygan was waiting for and I was pretty sure he already knew it had happened. His own connections to the grid weren’t the same as mine, but it was clear to me that he could sense or hear things happening there, too. So far, he’d had only one chance to grab me and that had been too soon after my experiment with the power lines of magic in the walls of Edward’s bunker to give him much time to come for me. The easiest thing for him to do now would be to let Goodall catch me and take me himself to wherever the Pharaohn’s plans were meant to play out. I didn’t like the role of goat, but I didn’t see a lot of options, and I knew that no matter how much Goodall disliked me, his master wouldn’t let him harm me at this stage. I imagined that my presence at the After Dark club would bring someone around if I lingered long enough.

After that, it was a matter of action and, whatever the result, it would be over by morning. Live or die, I had to succeed in stopping the Pharaohn’s plans for good tonight.

I wrote another long letter, folded it, and put it in my purse. Still no sign of Quinton or Carol and the time was now four thirty. I didn’t have much of a window left to get the last of my business done before night fell and things got crazy.

My first stop was Nanette Grover’s law office downtown. I worked for her once in a while, doing backgrounds on witnesses and investigating their stories before Nan went into court. She also acted as my lawyer on the rare occasions I needed one. It was an easy walk to her office from TPM, though I had to wear sunglasses under the overcast sky: The grid was too brightly present without them. Her secretary, Cathy, came out to meet me and it took a little discussion before she agreed to hold on to my holographic will for forty-eight hours. I said I’d come back and tear it up if everything went well, but I didn’t explain why it might be necessary in the first place. Mostly I wanted to be sure the property and pets scattered across Seattle got back where they belonged if I wasn’t drawing breath in the morning.

I had a feeling that I’d bounce back if something fatal happened to me, but that hadn’t been the case for my father. There were a lot of things that could, potentially, go wrong in a permanent way and I didn’t know how to mitigate any of them. The close harmony of the grid, its strange way of taking me over and then leaving me at a distance, only confused my sense of survivability. And there was the seductive call of the grid itself. You didn’t have to be dead to fall away from the world and not return. Or return altered. I thought my father had hinted I could lose these odd powers, but to what extent? And what would my shape be if that were true? For all of these reasons—and for Quinton—there had to be something left behind.

After that long, depressing thought, I found a quiet spot to call my mother.

Funny that a month earlier I wouldn’t have considered calling her for anything—not even a matter of life or death—but here I was, poking her phone number and hoping she had a few minutes to talk. She had been the monster of my childhood, but lately I’d begun to see her differently: as a desperate and lonely person I almost pitied. Almost. She was still responsible for her own misery, but at least she wasn’t truly responsible for mine.

She answered her phone and I wondered if she ever didn’t. “Sweetie!”

“Hello, Mother.”

“I was worried about you! You had to leave LA so quickly and I thought there must be something wrong.”

“Yeah. A little. I went to London on some business, but I had to come back to Seattle to finish it up. While I was gone, my employer was kidnapped.” If anything happened to me tonight, chances were good I’d be connected to Edward’s disappearance in a bad and public way—at least by the press—and, in spite of years of indifference, I didn’t want her to think that badly of me.

She gasped and judging from the dramatic sound, I guessed she had an audience. Probably her fiancé. “Oh, my goodness! Is he all right?”

“Not yet. I’m . . . helping out with something this evening,” I fumbled, uncomfortable with my ragged half-truth. “If it works out, everything will be fine. I just . . . thought I should let you know that I’m fine.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Harper, be careful. Obviously you’re not going to change your mind about doing . . . whatever it is you’re doing. But . . . you’re my baby. And you promised to come to the wedding.” Her voice quivered a little, but she stamped down on that and finished strong. “And I’m holding you to that! You hear?”

I smiled. Gods, she was transparent. “Yes, Mom.” And she had not abandoned me, even when I thought my father had. I was wrong about that, too, but as much as she infuriated me, at least her reasons for the crazy things she did were human.

She sniffled. “You never call me Mom. . . .”

“Well, I do now. And I have to go.” Before I started getting weepy myself and bloodying my clothes in public. “Send the invitations early, OK?”

“All right, sweetie. You take care.”

“I will. And you too.”

I hung up and looked at the phone a moment before I put it away. That had been awkward. . . .

I killed the last of the sunlight eating dinner in a restaurant at the top of a glass tower and staring at the city below as the lights came on, arc-bright in the Grey I couldn’t shake off. The voices of the grid grew louder as the hours passed but less comprehensible, the words chopped up like I was standing in the midst of a large party that jerked in and out of time. It made me irritable and paranoid. Quinton didn’t call. I didn’t like admitting that I was worried, and more than that: I feared I’d never see him again.