Labyrinth

FIVE

They all stared at me again and their collective expressions, ranging from confusion to disbelief, made me a little sick to my stomach. I hated this and wished I could just go to sleep and somehow dream it all away, never have to talk about it, never live through it again in speech or nightmares. Or at least be able to magically give them the skinny on the situation without having to think about it, sort and select relevant facts, shape it into coherent speech, and blurt it all out. Just the act of speaking made me weary and I wasn’t sure I was making sense.

“I didn’t know Wygan was any different from any other vampire,” I explained. “I mean, I knew he was different, but I didn’t think it was something like this. While I was in London—”

Mara shook her head. “London? When was that?”

“Last week. I just got back yesterday and I went to see Edward ...” I realized I’d lost them all completely. The Danzigers didn’t know I’d been in London or why and Quinton had no idea what the asetem-ankh-astet were. I’d told him to be careful of Wygan, but I hadn’t had time to explain why. I shook my head, more to clear it of the muddle I was making than anything else. “Let me try this again.” I was making a hash of this. . . .

The Danzigers nodded. “Yes, do,” Mara requested.

I concentrated on her—it was easier than trying to keep my eyes on all three of my audience. “All right. My dad killed himself because he was a Greywalker—I didn’t get this until I was in London, though I feel I should have figured it out earlier. He didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t have anyone like you to help him. He never did know what he was, but he did figure out that something unnatural was happening to him and that it was being done to him by someone. That someone was Wygan. It took a while for me to put it together and I didn’t get all the pieces until I was in London and in some serious trouble. I’ll get to that in a minute, but the important thing is that my dad wasn’t really going crazy; he just wasn’t handling exposure to the Grey well. When he figured out that Wygan—he called him the White Worm-man—was trying to force him to do something that was probably terrible, he killed himself so Wygan’s plan would be ruined. Unfortunately, all he did was put things off. He thought he was protecting me, but what he did was put me in his place.

“Wygan has a long-range, overarching plan—I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s not good for anyone but Wygan. Anyhow, this plan of his requires a Greywalker with very specific powers. Wygan has figured out how to force that Greywalker to develop. It took him several tries. I got this information from one of his failed experiments, another Greywalker I met in London—a creepy son of a bitch named Marsden. Marsden wanted to get rid of me so the plan would collapse, but we ended up working together instead, and he explained a lot of this. That story’s strange stuff and not entirely relevant, so I’d rather just let those details slide for now. That OK with you guys?”

I finally looked around at Quinton and Ben. Ben, naturally, seemed a little disappointed. Quinton had a grim expression, but he nodded. Mara’s manner had slipped from a narrow, concentrated stare to wide-eyed horror. I took a couple of long breaths before I went on.

“So. My dad didn’t know the whole plan initially and he didn’t understand what was happening to him, but he knew he was changing, and to keep him in line, Wygan and his minions threatened him and his family. I’m pretty sure they killed his receptionist or gained some kind of magical hold over her so she’d spy for them or hurt my father in some way. Dad destroyed her—I met her ghost—and he killed himself so he wouldn’t become a monster. That’s what he thought was happening to him, that he was turning into some kind of monster. But taking himself out of the equation wasn’t enough. I’m next in line and Wygan’s been working on shaping me into the tool he wanted my dad to be. Every time I die a little, I change. So . . . he’s been making sure I die. I’m still not quite what he wants yet, but he’s going to try to gain control of me and kill me again because the final stage of his plan is now in motion.”

Quinton and Ben both yelled over me, drowning me out as Mara frowned.

“What is he doing?” Ben demanded.

Quinton clutched my arm. “Kill you? What the hell—”

I wriggled out of his grip as I tried to wave Ben off. “Stop it. Stop it! I don’t know!”

Mara sat back, making a thoughtful moue as I quieted the men. “Hm. Something that needs a special type of Greywalker. . . . Well, that can’t be good.” She got up and started twiddling with a pile of odds and ends on one of the unused chairs nearby, touching them absently as she thought. “So, your father was a Greywalker, you’re a Greywalker, and the only way out is . . . to kill yourself? I can’t say I like that.” She turned back to study me, scowling with unhappy thoughts as she leaned against the back wall of the house. The protective magic wrapped around the building made a worried murmur.

“Actually, death won’t get me out of it,” I replied. “That’s more like a . . . reset button of sorts. If I die in a way that doesn’t destroy my brain or body, I come back, but each time I die there’s a window of opportunity to push my powers as a Greywalker into a new shape, or to let them reshape themselves. Most of the time. According to Marsden, there’s a limited number of times I can die and bounce back. At some point, I’ll just stay dead. According to my mother, I died once when I was a teenager. I didn’t remember it until, at my mother’s house, I saw a photo of my cousin Jill. We drowned together one summer. I came back; Jill didn’t. I don’t know if Wygan engineered that or not, but while I was in London, I found out my death two years ago wasn’t just a bit of bad luck either. Alice—you remember Alice?”

Mara nodded and I could see Quinton from the corner of my eye, mirroring her.

“Alice didn’t die in the museum fire. Wygan got her out and kept her....” I couldn’t bring myself to describe the ghastly and extreme measures he’d taken to heal Alice and keep her alive until he needed her again. I shuddered in spite of myself. “She was working for him. He sent her to London earlier this year to disrupt some business of Edward’s and lure me away from Seattle so Edward could be attacked and Wygan’s plan could begin to move into its final phase—and no, I don’t know why he needs Edward either. When I met Alice in London, she told me the man who killed me did it under her influence. I had every reason to believe her.”

“Is she still out there, then?” Mara asked.

I took a couple more deep breaths before I answered, tamping down a sudden spike of nauseous memory. “No. I killed her. I dropped her head into some kind of magical hole and left the rest to rot. I don’t feel bad about it: She helped kill me and she helped keep my dad a prisoner.”

Mara shook her head, her coppery brows pinching together. “You’ve lost me. When was your father a prisoner?”

“He still is. Wygan has his ghost in some kind of magical . . . oubliette—sort of a one-way prison hole. Two birds with one stone: leverage against me if I refuse to do what he wants, and a chance to torment Dad for kicking over the traces in the first place. Wygan’s like that: He carries grudges for a long time. This business with Edward seems to go back to something that happened between them in England two or three hundred years ago. When I called you guys from Los Angeles, I was trying to find my dad’s ghost, but all I could get was the ghost of his receptionist and a big, fiery hole where Dad should have been and a really pissed-off guardian beast running around it whenever I got close.”

“The Guardian Beast,” Mara said in an absent manner, biting at her lower lip and staring into nothing.

“Pardon me?” I asked.

“If it’s running around something like that at the edge of the Grey, it’s not just any guardian beast; it’s the Guardian Beast, protector of the Grey.”

I felt my own eyebrows draw down as I peered at her. “I thought there were a lot of guardian beasts.”

“In general, there are,” Ben put in. “Lots of them. Lots of types of them, too, guarding all sorts of things. But as Mara said, there’s just the one for the Grey. At least that’s what my—our—research shows.”

Out of the blue, Mara asked, “How do you know your father’s in an oubliette?”

That startled me a little. “I was told, but the hole I found at the site where he died kind of reminded me of the place Marsden tried to shove me into—the same hole I dropped Alice into.”

“Hm. I can’t say I’m knowin’ enough about how the Grey works to tell you if such a thing is possible without a spell in place, but a spell can be undone.”

“The one I found in London wasn’t created by a spell. It was more like a . . . black hole: Things around it had warped the magical landscape until it sort of folded on itself. It was kind of a magical vortex around a tree in a graveyard.”

“Hardy’s tree?” Mara asked. “At St. Pancras Old Church?”

I nodded. Being from Ireland, Mara must have at least heard of most of the magical oddities in the British Isles, even if she hadn’t seen them herself.

She pursed her lips. “Oh. Yes. Something like that is going to be a lot harder to extract anyone from.”

“Yeah, but I suspect Dad’s not locked down quite as thoroughly as Wygan thinks.”

She raised her eyebrows into quizzical arches. “Oh? Why ever do y’think that?”

“Because I keep getting hints. I’ve had several brushes with—not really ghosts, but energetic things like poltergeists and collective entities. They keep calling me ‘little girl.’ That was my dad’s nickname for me, and crazy as it sounds, I think he’s been trying to warn me in whatever way he can. I have a feeling that if I can get to him, he might know something about Wygan’s plans and how to stop them.”

“If that’s so, then you’ll have to be findin’ a way to your father’s ghost.”

I nodded. “I don’t think that’s going to be easy, what with the Guardian Beast around and that . . . fiery whatever in the way, but I would guess that the guy who killed me two years ago might have a few clues. He’s dead, too, and it sounds like more of Wygan’s minions at work.”

My announcement didn’t come as a surprise to Quinton—he’d eavesdropped on my conversation with Solis, after all—but the Danzigers both looked taken aback. I was getting used to the number of dead people around me aside from the ordinary run of ghosts. I didn’t care for it, but it was a fact of what I was and how I’d gotten that way that death seemed to litter my background landscape like so many rocks in a floodplain. It even showed up in family photos as smudges and phantoms that weren’t just dust and lens flare.

I explained. “Todd Simondson—the guy who killed me two years ago—may be a little easier to get to than my father. I suspect he was killed by the same people, so he might have useful information, and if I can get anything out of him, that may help me get to Dad.”

Mara seemed to approve of my ill-expressed logic. “And from your father, perhaps a way to put paid to whatever the Pharaohn-ankh-astet is plannin’. It’s got to be nasty, whatever it is....”

Quinton was the only one left out of that reference. He turned a quizzical expression on me.

I sighed, feeling drained by the long recitation with still more ahead. “Lost?” I asked.

“A bit. You mentioned the asetem last night, but you didn’t say what they were. Some kind of vampire, but . . . what’s the deal? Aside from the spooky eyes and their resistance to stun sticks.”

“They’re Egyptian,” Ben started. He was in full lecture mode. “According to the legends, the boy-priest Astet was killed but didn’t die. He was so perfect in his devotion to the gods that they allowed him to live, even though they couldn’t restore his life—if you get the fine distinction. He was the undead, being on earth but existing in the afterlife as well. Very interesting stuff for a people who believed the afterlife was the perfection of earthly life, complete with food and sex and so on. So a cult formed around him and his closest followers also became the undead. How is a point of debate, but the upshot is it’s a lot harder to get to be an asete than a regular vampire—kind of an exclusive afterlife club with fringe benefits in the real world. It’s a pretty early version of the vampire myth. Some claim it’s the earliest, but the Assyrians have one about as old and the Asian vampire myths go back before that.”

Quinton looked a little doubtful. “Do you think there’s a real vampire for every myth?”

“Not all of them, perhaps, but some.”

I’d have been willing to bet against that statement: my experience had been that whatever humans believed strongly enough had form in the Grey. The only question would be how far those things projected into the normal for ordinary people to perceive and be tormented by.

Quinton took it all in like a sponge. “All right, so we have the asetem—these glowy-eyed creepazoids I’ve been seeing around—and they have a . . . what did you call it?”

“Pharaohn,” Ben said. “The ruler of the asetem is given the title Pharaohn-ankh-astet—God-King, Life of Astet—like the ancient pharaohs of Egypt were thought to be direct descendants of the god Ra. His subjects are the asetem-ankh-astet, or roughly translated, ‘descendants of Astet who are the life of Astet.’ They believe they are the children of the blood and soul of the immortal boy-priest. They’re a bit different from the regular kind of vampire: They’re emotion-feeders, not just blood-feeders. Supposedly they’re not as fast as Western vampires like Edward’s people, but they’re natural magic-users, which most Western vampires aren’t.”

“I can vouch for the speed,” Quinton said.

Ben perked up. “Really?”

“Yeah. They were showing up downtown and around the underground before I moved out. I got chased by a bunch of them the night I figured I should move someplace safer. If they’d been as fast as the regular kind, I’d be dead. Or shambling around after dark, looking for bums to make a withdrawal from.”

“Why did they chase you?”

“I’m not sure what started it. I saw one of them about a week ago take out a regular vampire with a sort of homemade Taser—knocks them out, but if you keep the voltage on, they go up in a fireball. I found another one snooping around where I’d seen the first one a couple of days later. That’s when I found out the zapper doesn’t work on these asetem. A discharge that should have turned one into a smoking pile of ash just knocked this one down for a minute. Then it got back up and came after me. I barely kept ahead of it, and it started calling in buddies to chase me. They tailed me to my hooch. It wasn’t safe to stay there after that, so I bugged out to Harper’s. If those things had been any faster, I’d have stood no chance. As it was, the fact I knew the area and they didn’t was about all that saved my ass.”

“Ahhhh . . . so they aren’t locals....” Ben murmured, scribbling notes on a napkin with a finger dipped in coffee. Mara clucked her tongue and plucked a yellow legal pad from her pile of junk. She tossed it onto the table with a proper pen, and Ben snatched them and wrote in rapid, spiked shorthand, nodding as he did. “Did they look different from a regular vampire?”

Quinton sent me a bemused glance. We were all used to Ben’s research obsessions and it was easier to humor him most of the time than try to restrain him to the topic at hand. Unless the topic was at hand, red in tooth and claw. Then things could get intense. But at least this was useful. I now knew what had driven Quinton out of his hidden home and he had a better idea of how bad these creatures we were tangling with truly were.

“The ones I saw had either white hair or streaked black and white. Their skin was pretty pale, but it’s hard to tell under the street what color ‘pale’ is. From most angles, their eyes glow orange—fiery orange—and there’s something . . . kind of snakelike about them.”

“Their skin has a faint scale pattern to it,” I put in. “Sekhmet referred to them as having ‘fine, white cobra forms,’ if I am remembering the conversation right, and they do look a little like hooded cobras when they get annoyed.”

“They hiss,” Quinton added into the silence as Mara and Ben stared at us.

I stared back. “What? You don’t think they hiss?”

Ben started, excited. “Sekhmet is the Egypt—”

I cut him off, not wanting to risk the goddess’s attention. “I know what she is.”

Mara seemed frightened more than amazed. “You . . . met her? In London?”

I bit my lip. Time to sound crazy. . . . “Yes. Sort of. Not so much in the flesh . . . in the Grey form, I guess you could say. We had a rather disturbing chat. The asetem aren’t much liked by the other vampires in London, but there’s a sort of truce . . . or there was until Wygan got Alice to kick over that apple cart. That was what caused Edward to send me to London in the first place.”

“Why ever didn’t y’say something to us if you knew there were asetem involved?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know they existed or what the problem was. I just went where I was told to go and did what I had to do. And I don’t care to repeat that conversation—it wasn’t pleasant—but it did put me onto Wygan and Alice. They were undermining Edward, partially to get to him and partially to get to me, but Alice thought it wasn’t good enough, so she kidnapped Will Novak, too, and that’s when things started to get really strange—but it doesn’t matter! The point is this: Wygan is moving forward with a plan that has something to do with Edward, and with me, and with the Grey itself. Whatever it is, I don’t want to be part of it, but more than that, I don’t want it to go ahead at all. I intend to put a stop to it, but it has to be my way.

“Wygan has been attacking my home, trying to get at me, wear me down, keep me off-balance I’m guessing. I can’t let him do that. I have to be free to move or I’ll end up doing what he wants. And I have to get some sleep so I don’t keep on making stupid mistakes because I’m too tired to think more than a single move ahead.” I was losing my cool and I knew it, but I just didn’t have the energy to be more subtle. I took a few long breaths that turned into yawns before I could continue. “That’s why we’d like to use your basement for a day or two. Lie low long enough to get some sleep and plan. We can leave the dog with you until things are less dangerous. Grendel is a great protection dog. Wygan likes to grab people and use them as leverage against others and I don’t want him to get you or any of my other friends. I know you can take care of yourselves, but ...”

Ben and Mara exchanged a worried glance, and we all stared out into the yard, watching Brian gambol with Grendel. The dog was jumping around and knocked the boy over. All of us got to our feet, poised to run to the rescue, but the pit bull just held Brian down for a moment and slobbered all over his face, making happy wuffing sounds through his nose while the boy shrilled his pleasure. Boy and dog got back to their feet and Grendel herded Brian around the yard for a while as we watched. I noticed the dog somehow kept himself between Brian and the bloodred stars of the malefic spells scattered along the fence. Maybe all animals had a touch of Grey vision, like the ferret seemed to. I hoped so.

“It won’t be for long,” I said. “Just until I can get into a better position against Wygan. I’ll have to free my father from him somehow and I’ll have to figure out what he’s doing so I can stop it. I have to take the offensive or the game is lost already. Please ...”