Labyrinth

PROLOGUE

Maybe he should havebeen more worried about the ghost detector going off. At the time it had seemed pretty exciting to have it work at all, but afterward it seemed as if the squawking of the alarm had presaged something much worse than a pack of ghosts. After Harper had left town, things went to hell.

First there had been the little problem of vampires. . . . It wasn’t the vampires qua vampires; it was the change in the way they acted and how many were visible. There was always the problem of vampires in the underground and hanging around the desperate and lonely looking for a snack. But suddenly there were more, and different, vampires around Pioneer Square and downtown Seattle. And they weren’t subtle. They killed people and they killed one another—nothing new—but now they were doing it in public, or as public as vampires got anyway. Dead and mutilated bodies in Belltown alleys, or awash in drifts of ash on unlit corners of First Avenue or Mercer Street, and still more after a lightning-fast gunfight a block from the Moore Theater about which witnesses could recall nothing but the speed and terror of it. The cops unhappily wrote it down as gang activity with some innocent bystanders caught in the middle and survivors too frightened to talk. All right, the vampire cliques were gangs of a sort, but since most of their victims vanished into dust and ash, the real explanation was unlikely to come up in any SPD briefing. The police were still looking into it, but Quinton was certain they weren’t going to arrest anyone soon.

While Harper had been in Los Angeles trying to figure out why a dead boyfriend had called her and what he had meant by “things aren’t what you think,” a vampire had killed another vampire under the streets of Pioneer Square and had used one of Quinton’s tools to do it. Or at least something that looked a lot like one of Quinton’s vampire stunners. This he had not appreciated. At all. But he also didn’t understand it and that really bugged him.

Quinton liked logic; it had stood him in good stead all his life. Where things didn’t add up, he’d learned to ignore what most people thought of as “common sense” and look for patterns that, when joined with confirmed facts, would establish a reasonable working hypothesis. After all, Fleming had discovered penicillin by ignoring the common wisdom of throwing out the “contaminated” petri dish, and taking a look at the mold, instead. Quinton had discovered magic. Of course, he didn’t get a Nobel Prize for it.

Quinton imagined at first that someone was trying to set him up for trouble with Edward, Seattle’s bloodsucker-in-chief, but nothing had come of that. Edward—never his biggest fan—seemed to know he hadn’t done it and he didn’t make a move Quinton could see in response to it. Not against Quinton; not against anyone. That was definitely outside standard operating procedure for El Supremo Sanquinisto. And then he had nearly begged Harper to look into a problem in London for him—another out-of-character move for Edward. Begging? C’mon....

Edward’s desperation had pinged Quinton’s danger signals. He hadn’t wanted Harper to accept the job, but it wasn’t his decision and he hadn’t tried to push her. Something was afoot, but whether the London job was a legit problem or just a dodge to get her out of Seattle, neither of them knew and data was too sketchy for an informed guess. It bugged the hell out of them both.

In the end, despite being busy with the investigation of her past and why she was a Greywalker, Harper had agreed to the London job. She hadn’t given all her reasons, but she’d admitted that running Edward’s errand would give her a chance to look into another, possibly related, problem of her own. Quinton hadn’t been entirely surprised to discover another ex-boyfriend was involved—this one still alive but not in fantastic health by the time things were done in England. For a moment, he’d wondered exactly how many ex-boyfriends she had, but it wasn’t any real concern to him, so he’d deep-sixed the question. He was with Harper and that was the important point to his mind.

If anyone had asked Quinton ten years earlier what he thought he’d be doing by this stage in his life, observing vampires and dating a female PI who worked for ghosts wouldn’t have leapt to mind. Nor would he have said applying his skills to inventing ghost detectors or dodging monsters while living under the streets of Seattle. It’s not the sort of life-ambition East Coast–born intellectuals and computer geeks generally aspire to. Even disillusioned ones who’ve discovered the world doesn’t run on the rules taught to you in ethics class, and sometimes not on the ones you presumed in physics lectures either.

On the night before Harper left for London, the ghost detector had gone off. Quinton was pleased when his prototype ghost alarm started screeching. He had surmised that ghost activity might be rising along with the vampire activity. His working hypothesis was that paranormal activity tended to rise as a body, not just as isolated actions of isolated groups. He had expected to find a ghost or two, and here it was. Except that according to Harper, it wasn’t just one ghost he’d measured; it was fifty. And they had come looking for her. Then they’d taken over the detector’s speaker and blurted out the same message that had come from the dead boyfriend: “Things aren’t what you think.”

A few hours later, Harper was on her way to England and Quinton was ferret-sitting under the streets of Seattle, puzzling over what the vampires were up to, tinkering with the ghost detector, and wondering how his calibration could have been so far off. After that, things got seriously weird.

He and Chaos, the ferret, had been down in the abandoned sidewalks under the old part of town when push finally came to shove. They were exploring near the site where the electrocuted vampire had expired, Quinton hoping to find some clue as to why the other vampire—the survivor and aggressor—hadn’t taken him out, too. The area was in bad shape, a trash-filled space that had once been a single large basement room, now partially subdivided by long-abandoned efforts to rehabilitate it into useful storage. A spill of crumbling plaster, garbage, lumber, and plain old dirt made a rat playground at one end, cutting off the small plumbing and wiring closet in which Quinton had originally found himself trapped by the vampires. Quinton was becoming paranoid and very jumpy.

Ahead of him in the darkened room, the ferret leapt straight up into the air, chittering and twisting, before she hit the ground on all fours and shot off across the rubble-strewn floor. Quinton had to dive and grab her before she made it into an unseen hole in the wall of the abandoned underground. Even wearing a harness and leash, Chaos was hard to catch. The ferret squirmed in his grip, determined to get to whatever was holding her attention. Quinton tightened up the harness, ignoring the little animal’s tiny claws and teeth.

“Give it up, tube rat,” he muttered. “You are not breaking for freedom on my watch. Harper would skin me if I lost you.” Normally, she was a well-behaved little pocket pest, but since the first vampire incident, Chaos had been pretty spooky, suddenly taking off with no visible provocation to zoom along baseboards and floors with determined concentration, chuckling like a lunatic.

Huh. No visible provocation, he thought. With his free hand, Quinton pulled the newest version of the paranormal activity detector out of one of his roomy pockets and flicked it on. It wouldn’t work very long since he’d had to trade battery bulk for portability, but it might pick up something while it lasted. He placed the ferret back on the floor, keeping a tight grip on her leash.

Chaos danced around in an angry circle of hops, baring her teeth, as if taunting some unseen foe to take its best shot. The detector chirped.

The chirping accelerated. Then the pitch changed and the detector began wailing. “Uh-oh,” Quinton muttered, sweeping side to side with the device, trying to pinpoint a source direction—so he could avoid it. Fascinating as hunting ghosts might sound, he was sure that whatever was causing the aberrant response was not something he wanted to tangle with. The signal was strong enough to push the detector into a near-overload state and that couldn’t be good.

He snatched Chaos up and stepped around the garbage fall with the wriggling ferret in one hand and the detector in the other. He didn’t know what he was getting, but it was putting out a lot of paranormal energy.

In the gloom behind the scree of trash, a pale woman with black-and-white-striped hair and embers for eyes turned toward him and hissed like a snake. Whoa. He stopped cold. OK, hypothesis confirmed: The detector picked up more than remnant spirits because this was no ghost. His instincts screamed “Vampire!” while his mind tried to argue; she wasn’t quite like the vampires he’d seen before. There was something ineffably horrifying about her and she looked . . . vaguely like a cobra spreading its hood with the way her hair fanned around her head.

Quinton twitched to the side as she charged at him.

The vampire woman passed him, then whipped around. Quinton had already shoved the detector into a pocket and snatched one of the vampire stunners as she recoiled to lunge at him again. The detector continued screeching.

She shot forward like an unloaded spring. The sound from the detector pierced upward like a needle through Quinton’s spine and debilitating terror rooted him to the spot.

The ferret shrieked and bit Quinton’s thumb, clawing his hand in pure panic. The pain cut through Quinton’s daze, and he jerked the stunner upward at the last second.

The vampiress was on him, driving stiletto claws into his back and shoulders as he squeezed the switch, shoving the lightning-spitting head of the stunner into the monster’s belly.

She fell back into the garbage. Quinton let out his breath and started turning away.

The vampiress stood up, spitting. Quinton blinked and almost let go of the ferret. The shock should have dropped the vampire in her tracks, knocked her out completely for an hour or more. He’d even adjusted the voltages up after his last encounter, not caring if he sent a few of the bloodsuckers to final oblivion in piles of ash, like the one who’d been zapped by its fellow bloodsucker.

Quinton swore and spun back to meet the vampire’s next leap at him, shoving the stunner up under her chin and holding the switch down as hard and long as the sweep of uncanny fear that rattled his bones would allow. This time she fell down and stayed on her knees, quivering and making a high-pitched keen that sounded less like pain than fury. But not dead. Not reduced to smoke and a greasy spot as she should have been.

Quinton whirled and ran. Chaos approved by letting go of his thumb and burrowing into his nearest pocket with a frightened yelp.

They were a room length away when Quinton heard the vampire get back up. The pile of detritus exploded as she forced her way through it, taking the shortest route toward him regardless of obstacles.

Quinton dodged and jumped, pelting through the underground toward his bunker under the Seneca Street off-ramp. The white vampiress was slower than she had been—at least he’d hurt her—but she wasn’t actually slow. And he could hear more bloodsuckers falling in behind her as he ran. Where were they coming from? He didn’t look back to find out. He couldn’t afford to waste the energy, and the fear that drove him wouldn’t let him anyhow.

Except for the scraping tattoo of their steps on the uneven, gritty floors of the underground, the vampires made no sounds as they pursued Quinton. They just came on.

He shoved through his back door barely ahead of a flock of grasping hands and cutting claws. He slammed the bars and bolts home, feeling the battering of bodies against the wood.

Silence fell for only a moment before something hissed on the outside, “Next time, solo boy.”

“Says you,” he spat back. It was a lame response but all he could manage between his panting and shaking. They frightened him bone-deep and he wasn’t used to that sensation at all.

Then something laughed and the sound made Quinton’s knees buckle until the amusement faded into the distance and darkness of the underground.

He moved out of his bunker and into Harper’s condo the next morning and waited for her to return from England. He didn’t consider the move cowardice; it was self-preservation. Whatever those things were, they weren’t your average vampires, and he didn’t want to tussle with them again anytime soon.