Possession

SIX

I didn’t get a good look at my tail, but I got enough of a glance as I stepped up into my truck to know it was human—or humanoid at least. The tangled energy around the dark-haired figure in shapeless clothes was a mess of colors restrained in tight white bands that made me think of prisoners bound with rope. The colors weren’t any combination I associated with a specific paranormal creature or magic-user—it certainly wasn’t a vampire of any stripe—but I haven’t seen everything and some ghosts and monsters are complex enough to look convincingly human in such a short sighting. It was more likely to be a normal person than a denizen of the Grey, but if so, whoever it was had an unusual degree of control over their feelings—judging by the strange constraint of the aura.

I got back to the office, half wishing I could stay out in the sun, and keeping an eye out for my shadow as I went. Once I was upstairs, I took a look out of my tiny window, but I couldn’t see anyone on the street who seemed to be watching my building. I gave it up as a waste of time and got on with trying to find further information on Delamar, sorting through e-mails, typing up notes, and generally catching up on the boring necessities of my job.

Still nothing on Delamar. I’d probably have to go stake out the guy’s mailbox at this rate—which is about the least interesting job on the planet. I wondered if the three patients were connected in some way besides their extraordinary medical condition. So far, I had nothing to link them except that they were all vegetative. That in itself was disturbing, since Skelly had said PVS was so rare that the occurrence of three cases simultaneously stretched probability. I thought it was more likely that the ghosts were causing or prolonging the patients’ condition than that they were just lucky enough to have three outlets instead of one. Clearly, the ghosts wanted to be heard—were possibly desperate enough to exert considerable energy to keep the rightful owners out of their own bodies. But there were a lot of ghosts, which gave them a significant energy reserve, and I was afraid that the longer the living were unable to fully occupy their bodies, the less likely it was that they would survive or awaken from their strange state. The thought gave me a momentary surge of panic: Where were the ghosts getting this energy and how could I break this condition before the patients under their sway died?

Possession wasn’t one of my areas of expertise, but from what I’d observed, it obviously took a substantial force to keep a soul—for lack of a better term—out of the body it was meant to occupy. Many things in the paranormal realm cleave to their rightful place with the tenacity of limpets. Grey energy tends to return to its assigned path, be that a ley line, a spell, or a ghost. Once you release whatever is holding them out of place, they move back where they belong pretty quickly. As I understand it, fighting that inertia is one of the things that makes working magic of any kind a ton of effort. It was what made walking through the Grey so tiring for me, even though I’m a naturalized citizen. But the ghosts I’d seen at the Goss house and at the Sterling house hadn’t shown any inclination to slide away. They acted like they were waiting for an opportunity to act; they fell back when they had no chance, but didn’t leave the area, in case it became available again. Such behavior implied a collective consciousness, compulsion, or need strong enough to overrule the usual routines of the Grey. That kind of urge had to have some basis other than simple opportunity, or every ghost in Seattle would have been hanging about, but that wasn’t happening. Seattle’s phantasms were mostly right where I’d last seen them—those I took note of, at least. I hadn’t seen any drop in the number of spirits just hanging around Pioneer Square or anywhere else. So it wasn’t a general draw, but something specific. If I could figure out what linked the patients, perhaps I could find a common cause I could attack to change the situation. . . .

I didn’t yet know what had happened to Delamar, the third patient, but I could try to find similarities between Sterling and Goss and check them against Delamar later. With that thought I picked up my office phone and called Lillian Goss.

Eva Wrothen answered the phone in a clipped tone of annoyance over background noise. I identified myself and asked to talk to Lily.

“She can’t come to the phone. She’s with her sister.”

“So I hear. Is everything . . .” I paused to pick my term. “Is everything normal over there?”

She snorted. “As normal as ever.”

“Ms. Wrothen, I know it’s inconvenient, but I really do need to speak to Ms. Goss about her sister’s illness. I know you can’t discuss it with me and you aren’t a secretary, but can you let her know I’m on the phone?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

I heard her put the phone down on a hard surface while the din continued in the telephonic distance. I waited through it for several minutes, typing desultory notes on my computer. Then silence fell, cracked in a moment by the sound of hurried footsteps and the scrape of the receiver being moved.

“Hello?” Lily Goss said. “Ms. Blaine? I’m so sorry—”

“There’s no need to apologize. Ms. Goss, I wanted to know how and where your sister was injured.”

“Injured? Oh, the cause of the coma, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t really know where, exactly, but I’d assume it happened near the market, since I can’t imagine where else she’d have come in contact with a mosquito.”

I blinked. “A mosquito? I’m afraid I’m missing the gist here. What happened to your sister?”

“She contracted meningitis from a mosquito bite.”

Mosquitoes are fairly rare in Seattle. In spite of the continual rain, there’s not a lot of standing fresh water for them to breed in—Seattle has pretty good drainage, existing as it does on a series of hills and streets raised above the tide line specifically to encourage sewage to head one way only: down. That’s not to say they don’t turn up—especially in the suburbs and small towns of Washington’s agricultural areas—but they aren’t something the city is noted for.

“She got bitten at work?”

“Yes—well, after work. She works—worked—at an architectural firm on the Pike Hill Climb. You know—below Pike Place Market.”

The Hill Climb scrambled from the waterfront near the Seattle Aquarium up what had once been a steep bluff covered in fir and cedar trees to the city’s famous farmers’ market. The wide stairs of the Hill Climb are broken by terraces that connect to buildings full of tourist shops, hidden apartments, and offices. Restaurants dominate the open ends of the buildings, spreading tables out on the terraces when the weather allows. It’s a nice place to linger over a drink on a summer evening—just when the mosquitoes come out.

“What did your sister do at the firm?”

“She is—was—a computer modeler. She ran the system that created the wire-frame and simulation models of the buildings they design. She was always the math whiz in the family, which is another reason why this painting thing is so weird—Julie never liked drawing as much as drafting and she never learned to paint.”

I thanked Goss for the information and sat frowning over it for a few minutes. No common cause except trauma and buildings, and I wasn’t sure how a computer modeler at one firm would connect to a tunnel engineer at a different one. Both Goss and Sterling had been near the waterfront when the events that put them into comas occurred, but two points of similarity didn’t constitute a particularly strong argument, especially since one was on the job but the other wasn’t and the types of injury were completely dissimilar. I needed to find Jordan Delamar and discover what had happened to him and where. First, however, I was going to take a look at the tunnel-construction site where Sterling had been injured. It wasn’t far from my office—an easy walk even in unlovely weather. I wrapped up my notes and left the office.

The sun was still shining, though some clouds had rolled in from the north looking threatening. Typical first of July. It would probably start raining once the sun went down and remain overcast all day tomorrow, just to remind the tourists that this was, indeed, Seattle—the land of seasonal depression and rental umbrellas.

I had gone about two blocks toward the waterfront when I noticed my tail again. The foot traffic was a little thicker through Pioneer Square, but it thinned around the construction under the viaduct and to the south. There are a few parking lots in the area, so it wasn’t unusual to see pedestrians looking intense or confused, but only one of them had the same tightly bound aura I’d spotted near the Sterlings’ house. I might not have seen him so soon without that edge, but I did. My observer was definitely male, but just to be certain that he was following me, I crossed through a parking lot in the middle of the block and turned onto Post Avenue instead of going all the way down to Alaskan. There’s no cover on that block unless you have the key to one of two alley gates and few people have any reason to walk any farther than the first parking lot. My shadow hung back, but followed me nonetheless. I wished I could turn and get a better look at him, but I needed to get into an area where I had the chance of cornering the mysterious follower. If I was going to blow somebody’s cover, I wanted to get more information out of the encounter than just a glimpse at a face. I walked south toward King Street and the tunnel section that had collapsed over Kevin Sterling, hoping the construction would give me the opportunity I wanted.

The tunnel construction area was huge—about the size of a commercial parking lot—crammed in under the slowly disappearing viaduct between a row of old buildings and the industrial straightaway heading south on Alaskan Way. A yellow-striped plywood barrier had been erected around the project boundaries just south of the ferry terminal, forcing pedestrians to cross the road with the blind hope that Seattle’s drivers would actually obey the signals and signs temporarily put up around it. Honking, cursing, and scampering demonstrated that neither the pedestrians nor the drivers were willing to play by the ever-changing rules at that location.

Most of the pedestrians came from the water side of the road at the ferry terminal and headed down the row of buildings on the landward side or toward the stadia farther east. I was on the other side and I figured any route into the construction would be on the water side off the straightaway, so I crossed the street, staying close to the plywood barriers and their confusing profusion of signage.

I went quickly around the water-facing side of the barrier and came to a hard stop on the other side of it, between the blind plywood wall, painted like a school-bus-colored zebra, and the southbound traffic. I’m tall, but still under six feet, and the barrier hid me completely. My tail peered around the barrier as he walked past the end and I snatched him into a headlock, dragging him behind the upstanding plywood and then pivoting, propelling him past me with our mutual momentum and into the next plywood frame head first.

He got his arms up and slammed himself back off the wood as it started to topple, spinning around to face me. He drew his hands across his body and flicked one outward. A steel baton telescoped out of his fist. I turned to keep my good eye on him, not wanting to lose him under the visual noise of the Grey.

He took a step forward, raising the baton, and said, “I can tell you’re going to be trouble, Harper Blaine.”

It was the voice as much as the dark brown hair and the slim, athletic build that put the pieces together for me. I hadn’t seen him in almost a year, and then it had been fleeting as he’d shoved me down in my own living room and bolted out the door. He still looked essentially like Quinton—a similarity he had enhanced at the time with hair dye, clothes, and facial hair. Now he had let his natural gray thread through his hair and had shaved off the beard. His voice was as colorless as air and chill-neutral. Now I understood why his aura looked the way it did. “I’m surprised it took you so long to figure that out, Papa Purlis,” I said.

His energy flushed red. For a moment the bands of his control flexed under the strain of his anger and I had the strong impression that he hated me but wasn’t going to give in to it. He feinted forward, but I didn’t take the bait and flinch. Behind me was a train of cement trucks and I knew better than to go toward them. He swept the baton at me—not very seriously, but I still had to turn aside to avoid an unpleasant contact.

“Now, now,” I chided him. “If you break me, Quinton will be very upset with you.”

“Then he might stop playing games and do what I tell him.”

I snapped a hand at his face. He caught it and pulled me to him. I dove forward as he pulled and rammed my shoulder into his chest. I heard him gasp and his grip on me loosened. I ducked and rolled my shoulders down, hoping to pull him under me. Instead, he let go, rolling to the side and scrambling back to his feet. He was quick, had great instincts, and was in fantastic condition for a man in his late fifties. I suspected he didn’t spend much time behind a desk. This wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped.

I swept one booted foot under him and he hopped to avoid it. I spun with the movement and came back up, grabbing and turning him with me to put my back to the plywood barrier while nearly throwing him into traffic. He clutched my jacket and shoved one leg between mine, using my own weight and momentum to trip me up.

I got a heel and a hand on the ground to break the fall and we both went down in a heap. A cement truck roared past, inches from our heads, blowing its horn. I tried to keep hold of him, but he had retained the baton and rapped hard on my knuckles. I let go and scampered backward, rising to my full height against the tilting barrier. I was taller than he was, but that wasn’t necessarily an advantage.

He glared at me, his eyes almost glowing with ire, then pushed the emotion away and straightened up, taking a step back and sideways out of my reach. Standing still, contained and focused, he looked very much like his son. Except that I loved Quinton and I felt no such thing for his father.

“Why have you been following me, Purlis?”

“I just want to know what J.J.’s been up to—and who he’s been sleeping with.” He looked me over as if I were an insect caught crawling on his dinner plate.

The sneering didn’t bother me, but I wasn’t used to anyone calling Quinton by his initials—or his real name—and it threw me off for an instant before I said, “Just fatherly concern, then. Nothing about trying to get him to return to the fold and play spy with you.” Quinton claimed that misplaced hero worship was what had gotten him into government work to begin with, but I had never been sure there wasn’t a good dose of naive delight in cracking codes and solving problems all day involved as well.

“He talks a good game, but J.J. knows what he needs to do. If I have to remind him what’s best for him—and what’s not—I will,” his father said, his voice dead calm.

“You’d better think hard before you do him any harm, Pops.”

He laughed and it wasn’t a pretty sound. “It’s not my son who’ll get hurt first.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Absolutely. Persuade J.J. to stop fucking around and get with my program and we’ll get on fine. But if you get in my way, or hold him back, I will go through you.”

“I’m a lot harder to get through than you think.”

“Everyone has soft spots.”

I gave him a cold smile. Then I lunged and snatched him by the shirt, yanking him toward me. He pushed and we hit the barrier behind me. The baton swung around again and I ducked as the plywood crashed down into a pit behind us.

I shook him and pushed him off me, backward toward another of the endless line of cement trucks. “Piss off, Purlis.”

He caught himself, just out of my range, eliciting another horrified screech from the nearest truck’s horn. “Or you’ll shoot me, like Bryson Goodall?”

I laughed. If he had any idea what had actually happened the night Goodall died, he would never let me out of his sight again. “I won’t need to shoot you. You would be wise to stay out of Quinton’s life and out of my sight.”

“Oh, you won’t be seeing me again. I know what I need to about you.”

“I don’t think you do,” I said, starting forward one more time.