Labyrinth

FOUR

It took more than forty minutes to get to the Danzigers’ house on Queen Anne Hill. We had to shake off a tail and check the truck for tracking devices once that was done. Then we were able to continue, but we knew we’d have to check for anyone watching their house. I didn’t know how many resources Wygan had to throw at surveillance and for causing me trouble, but I assumed it was plenty. I didn’t want to draw his attention to the Danzigers if it wasn’t there already. Mara was good at protecting the house with her magic, but the whole family couldn’t just stay home for as long as it took me to wreck Wygan’s plans.

Total destruction was my goal. Even in my bleary, sleepless state, my mind was clear on that. Whatever his plans were, the consequences wouldn’t be pleasant for anyone and I couldn’t let him win.

We both checked the area for watchers, Quinton by eye and scanner, me sinking into the Grey and looking for signs of energy out of place, ghosts, or the ashen signature of those who consorted with vampires. I found one harsh sigil on the sidewalk just outside the reach of Mara’s own protective spells. I left it intact so as not to alert its caster and circled around through the silver mist and ghost light of the Grey to the back of the house. The alley had a few shreds of deep-red blood magic, hot with anger, festooned across the back gate. It was amateur work, done in a hurry and easy to bypass. I wished I could show it to Mara and see what she thought, but I’d have to unmake the nasty little screamer spells to get past them. Whoever had set them hadn’t bothered—or hadn’t known how—to attach them to the grid so they would let him know if they were taken apart. They only went off if tripped. I’d just have to not trip them.

I fetched Quinton to watch my back while I went deeper into the Grey to dismantle the spell. I’d taken Grey things apart before; spells were generally out of my league, but these were rudimentary things and I didn’t have to work too hard to sort out the one thread of magic that held the things together. I grabbed onto the kernel of the thing in the Grey, feeling the muttering of the grid and the hot/cold burn of it through my bones as I did so, and pulled with an even, firm pressure. The fury of the spell ripped along my nerves like a spray of decompressed Freon, and the strands of magic fell apart. It wasn’t too bad, but I stumbled a little as I reemerged back into the normal world.

Quinton caught me. “You all right?”

“Yes.” I tried to brush him aside, but he wasn’t having any. “We can go in now.”

“Maybe we should catch our breath first. You look a little . . . pale.” I might have looked something worse than pale, like maybe not quite solid. Maybe it was just fatigue, but that worried me a little. I only got ghostly when I was very close to the Grey, and here I believed I was all the way out. I brushed the thought aside and let myself through the gate to the Danzigers’ backyard. The gate gleamed with a tracery of pure gold energy I recognized as part of Mara’s magical perimeter. I guess it was used to me after all this time since it didn’t do anything as we stepped through its complex lattice. I heard it whispering pleasing lullabies as we passed.

I’d never seen the back of the Danzigers’ house before; I’d always kept to the interior rooms. The big pale-blue house had a wide, slightly wild back garden, a little tamer than the tumbling wilderness in front, overlooked by a full-width screen porch that overhung the deep stone foundation. The yard was quiet, though we could hear some domestic noises from the house. Quinton tied Grendel to a tree that supported a half-built play platform and we finished the trek across the yard alone.

Mara was standing just inside the screen door when we climbed the back stairs. “Good morning to y’both. Have y’brought us a dog, then?” I’d never been able to read Mara’s energy, and today her face was just as difficult. She wasn’t ready to show me what she thought of our appearance at her door. Our friendship had been a little cooler since I’d nearly gotten her husband eaten by a monster, even if it had been more than a year ago.

“Only temporarily,” I replied. I wasn’t surprised she’d known we were coming. Mara is a witch, after all, and her spells on the house were more sophisticated than they looked.

She opened the door to let us pass. “Did y’take down that wretched blood spell on the garden gate? I thought to do it in a bit, but I wanted to see who’d be coming along to trip it. Not surprised as it’s you.”

I entered the house, hearing the muttering of the grid fade to a distant water babble. The magical calm inside eased an unsuspected tension from my shoulders and I took a deep breath of the quiet. “Good guess.”

She scoffed. “Hardly much of one: You’re the only person we know who consorts with vampires.”

“So you saw them cast the spells?”

“No, but I’ve developed a nose for ’em.” She looked at Quinton and cracked her blinding, infectious grin. “And how is it with you? Are y’keeping herself here out of trouble?”

“Don’t seem to be.”

“Ah. I see. Well, come inside. I’ve some coffee and scones on—if y’can get them before Brian.”

Brian, the Danzigers’ three-year-old son, was scaling a chair beside the long kitchen counter as we entered. His mother snuck up and tapped him on the shoulder. “And what is it you’re playing at? Hm?” she asked as he jumped in surprise.

Brian turned to face her and bit his lower lip, his eyes huge, shifting side to side as he tried to come up with an excuse. “I sawed a mouse.”

Mara didn’t look convinced. “You saw a mouse on the counter?”

Brian nodded with vigor and tried to look sincere. “Yes, Mama. Big mouse. It was gonna take the scones.” Brian’s s’s came out a bit lispy through a gap between his front teeth.

“Oh, I see. A very large, black-haired mouse, I suppose. And was this very large mouse named Brian, by chance?”

“Umm ... no... .”

Mara raised her eyebrows and fixed a stern look on her son. Brian deflated and looked at the ground with a sigh. I gave him another two years to figure out that his mother really did know everything—at least everything he didn’t want her to. There was no longer a ghost in the house, spying on every move, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other ways for Mara to get information.

Mara straightened up and took a small biscuitlike thing off a plate, wrapped it in a paper towel, and handed it to Brian. “ You may have one scone—just one, mind. You may take it out to the back garden to eat it and then y’can play with the dog.”

Brian’s face lit up. “Did we get a puppy?”

“Mara ...” I started. “Are you sure . . . ?”

She gave me an arch look. “Now y’wouldn’t be bringing us a vicious killer dog, would you?”

“No....”

“Then we’ve nothing to fear.”

I still wasn’t sure sending Brian out to play with Grendel unsupervised was a good idea. The boy was rambunctious and I didn’t know how the dog would react without someone he already knew around to cue him. I saw Mara whisper something over Brian’s head and draw a quick shape over him with her finger.

The charm dissolved into a rain of tiny blue stars that seemed to stick to him as Brian turned and charged for the back door, shouting, “Hi, Harper! I’m gonna see the doggie!”

“No scone for the dog!” Mara called after him. Then she looked a bit worried. “I suppose he’ll be all right a moment....”

Quinton glanced at me. “Grendel doesn’t stand a chance,” he muttered. “I’m betting on the kid.”

Mara stuck her head out the kitchen doorway and called out to her husband. “Ben! ’Tis Harper and Quinton. Come down, can you?”

We could hear him clumping down the stairs from the attic, the old wooden steps musical and echoing under his tread.

A shriek came from the backyard. Quinton, Mara, and I bolted back out to the screen porch and stared out at the yard. I don’t know about them, but I figured Grendel—the appetite on legs—had eaten Brian by now. But no: The boy was rolling around on the ground all right, but the dog was prancing about, wagging his whole butt in the air as Brian guffawed in whoops and gales like the maniac version of his mother’s own laughter.

Brian rolled onto his belly and, as we stared, Grendel trotted over and shoved him onto his back again, licking his face and nuzzling at him. Brian pulled himself up with his hands locked around the dog’s powerful neck and Grendel just stood there, grinning. Grendel received a lot of pats and scritches that rendered the dog into a wiggling mass of glee.

“Oh, yeah, the dog’s a goner,” Quinton murmured in my ear as Brian and Grendel started chasing each other back and forth across the yard.

“Hey, when’d we get a hellhound?” Ben Danziger asked from behind us. We all turned around—perfect synchrony that would have made Balanchine proud—and stared at him as he stood in the doorway from the kitchen and gazed over our heads at the yard beyond the screen. “Well, it doesn’t have three heads, so it can’t be Cerberus,” he added.

“That’s my neighbor’s dog, Grendel,” I said. “And no, he does not have a cat named Beowulf.”

Ben broke out laughing and almost fell, stumbling on the threshold plate of the doorway.

“We’re dog-sitting. My neighbor . . . got shot last night.”

Ben’s laughter cut off short and Mara looked alarmed.

“He’ll be OK,” I assured them, “but he can’t look after the dog for a while. And since it’s my fault he got shot—”

Quinton cut me off. “No, it isn’t. They were trying to kill the dog and Rick was just in the wrong place. That’s not your fault.”

“I told him to take the dog to the door.”

“You didn’t tell him to let it off the leash.”

Mara made sharp cutting gestures at us. “Stop it, the both of ya. I assume you’d not be here, arguing in my home, without a good reason. So. Whyn’t ya sit down and start tellin’ it, soon’s I’ve brought out a bit of food? I’ll not be listenin’ to such bickerin’ before breakfast.” She shooed us into wicker chairs around a wooden table and dragged Ben with her back inside to fetch and carry. Quinton and I kept eyes on Brian and the dog, but they only continued to play as if we weren’t there.

I refused coffee once it was offered, which got me some raised eyebrows, but I’d already had more caffeine than I needed if I was going to get any sleep soon. I played with a couple of the small biscuit-like scones Mara put in front of me along with a glass of water. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell the story—that was a big part of the reason we’d come—but I needed to put my thoughts in order before I started in. Quinton wouldn’t tell the tale for me, even if he’d known it all. It was an insane story, if you considered it. It was only because it had all built up over time, a bit here and there, that I could believe it myself.

“There’s a bit of a problem at my place and . . . I hoped we could presume on your hospitality for a day or two,” I started, keeping my voice low so as not to alarm Brian. “I haven’t had a lot of sleep lately and my condo isn’t safe for us to stay in right now. We need someplace secure to catch up and do some planning until things get better. I can’t imagine any place safer from Grey things and I don’t think we led any here. The spell on the back gate didn’t get a chance to alert its caster when I dismantled it, so no one should be coming to check, either.”

Mara made a face. “So things are bad, then.”

“If the normal level of ‘bad’ is something like ‘oh darn, we’ve blown up the house,’ this bad comes with its own small but unattractive mushroom cloud. I’m kind of behind on the news in Seattle since I’ve been out of town, but a little Columbian birdie came by this morning to tell me that the homicide rate in town doubled in the past two weeks and I hear there’s been a lot of purported gang activity downtown, which probably isn’t really gangs. Our favorite vampire king, Edward, has been kidnapped. And it all comes together in some unpleasant plan with me as the bow on the package.”

Ben scowled. “I’m sorry, I think I’m missing something. Is this related to the ghost you were trying to find, the one you called us about a couple of weeks ago?”

I nodded, keeping my gaze on the plate in front of me. “That was my dad.”

“Your da?” Mara questioned. “I thought he died when you were small.”

“It turns out,” I said, feeling something cold and miserable knot up in my gut, “that he blew his brains out. I didn’t know this. I thought it was an accident. I was twelve. But . . . well ...” I stopped talking. This wasn’t going well at all: I felt like crying. Just tired, I told myself. Just too damned tired.

I lifted my head. They were all watching me, and you’d think after more than a decade of professional dance and almost as much in surveillance and snooping, I’d shrug it off, but this time I froze.

Quinton pushed his knee up against mine under the table and dropped his near hand to rest, still and warm, on my leg. “Maybe you should start with the phone call,” he suggested.

The Danzigers huddled closer to the table and leaned in as if I were about to tell a ghost story around the campfire. In a way, I suppose I was.

I shifted my gaze away from them, unhappy about this necessity, and started in. “All right. About three weeks ago I got a phone call from a dead boyfriend. He said things weren’t what I thought they were and that there were . . . things lying in wait for me. Since he died in Los Angeles eight years ago, I thought that might be the place to start looking. It seemed to me that whatever he was talking about must be related to my past—and to my abilities as a Greywalker—since I couldn’t imagine anything else a dead guy might think I needed to be warned about. So I went.”

I glanced around to see how they were reacting. Quinton knew this part, but the Danzigers didn’t. Mara looked wary, her head half turned so she regarded me sideways with narrowed eyes. Ben just looked intrigued. I stifled a yawn and went on.

“I thought I should visit my mother and see if she had any ideas—though of course she doesn’t know about the . . . paranormal connection. A lot of what she revealed isn’t relevant, but she is the one who told me my father hadn’t died in an accident, as I’d believed, but had shot himself.”

Mara flinched back into her seat, catching a sharp breath through her nose. She looked out into the yard, watching her son a moment before she spoke. “Had she any inkling why he did it?”

“That’s the creepy part. My mother claimed he was depressed, crazy, and having an affair with his receptionist. She said he’d been kind of crazy for a long time and finally, he just . . . lost it. But she let me look through his things, including his old diaries, and . . . at first I thought he might just be nuts, too—those diaries are pretty freaky.” I didn’t say his suicide note had been addressed to me, that just seemed too personal and gruesome, even for this group, and especially with three-year-old Brian playing nearby. “It was obvious that he had some kind of contact with the Grey, although he didn’t understand what it was or what was going on. It was upsetting him even before Wygan started prodding—”

Ben cut in, staring. “Wait a minute. Wygan? The DJ on Radio Freeform?”

I nodded, catching each pair of eyes in turn. “Vampire. He’s the one who stuck the knot of Grey into my chest two years ago. You remember.”

Mara and Ben nodded, recalling, I imagined, the long, uncomfortable session in their kitchen when Mara had tried to untie it from me. Quinton looked quizzical. It wasn’t a point of my history I’d discussed with him since we hadn’t been close at the time. I caught his eye and gave a minuscule shake of the head. I’d explain it to him later. He returned a quick, reassuring smile.

Ben was scowling. “You mean, right up the hill ...?” I knew he was thinking of the proximity of the broadcast towers on the crown of Queen Anne, just about fifty feet straight up and a hundred yards over from where we sat. I caught his gaze also creeping toward his son.

I nodded. “Yes. But he’s not the same type of vampire as Edward and his bunch. He’s the Pharaohn-ankh-astet.”

“What?” Mara let out a startled squawk.

Ben was appalled. “Asetem? Here? But ...”

“What? They shouldn’t be in the New World, or something?” I asked.

“Well, basically, yes. I mean . . . at least according to legends, they’re rare and very clannish. Why would they be here?”

“Because I am.”