Underground

CHAPTER 21

We evaded Laguire and escaped from the hospital to a taxi that took us to my condo in West Seattle. The temperature was nearly normal for Seattle in winter, and it wasn’t until we were outside I realized it was Wednesday—I’d been in the hospital overnight. Laguire hadn’t been as fast to respond as I’d thought.

At the condo, the ferret huddled in her nest and refused to have anything to do with me, twitching her head and backing away as if I smelled bad when I offered her a hand. Couldn’t blame her—me smelling of ghosts and monsters, carrying an angry spirit that lashed at me and screamed continually. I had to let Quinton take care of her while I took a shower. Chaos didn’t seem to mind that—being fond of him and his many interesting pockets.

Once I was out of the shower, Quinton tried to put me back to bed.

“You need some rest.”

“Not as much as I need to get rid of Lass,” I countered.

He made a face. “You don’t look good. You shake, you twitch… and you’re not too solid all the time.”

“All the more reason to get this ghost out. We need to find the string Lass mentioned—the leash—and take her pet back to Qamaits.”

“How do you expect to find one piece of string in Pioneer Square—whatever it looks like?”

“Lass will help—if he knows what’s good for him.” Lass writhed and kicked, sending pains through my legs and shouting obscenities in my head.

“You can’t rest even until it’s dark? I could go to the Women in Black vigil and come back for you.”

“There’s no way I could rest. Not without drugs—and anything strong enough to knock Lass out will take me down for another day.” Lass didn’t seem to mind that idea, cooling his ire for a moment in contemplation of a fix. “Besides, if the undergrounders are at the memorial and Solis and the Feds are busy at the hospital, they won’t be in our way in Pioneer Square. If I can find the leash, I think I can control Sisiutl and put paid to this whole sorry mess.” The boiling fury inside me shrieked and struck in terror at the thought. I stumbled and had to sit down. I pretended it was just to put on dry shoes.

Quinton looked resigned and rolled his eyes in mock horror. “Rosa’s going to kill me for missing the vigil.”

“She can’t kill you—you’re already dead,” I teased, but it didn’t come out too well as my voice broke in the middle and I barely restrained Lass’s epithets against Quinton.

“Behave,” I muttered. “I can find other places to put you and they won’t be as pleasant. Cooperate and you get to go. Mess this up and we’ll both be in hell for eternity.”

The raging thing settled down to a mutter of bitter words and the sensation of being dissolved by acid.

Quinton frowned at me. “What?”

“Talking to Lass,” I growled. I checked my bag for the pheasant feather and found it looking ratty but intact.

“You think that’s still useful? It looks pretty sad,” Quinton said.

“Don’t know. Better to have it, just in case…” My limbs burned and my guts felt like I’d been punched repeatedly in the stomach. “Quinton, can you drive?”

He blinked, frowning. “Sure. Why?”

“I’m not sure I can.”

“Drive what? The Rover—”

I cursed the air indigo as I recalled that my truck was a smoking ruin in the MOHAI parking lot.

I wound down in a minute. “Are you sure it’s wrecked?” I asked, foolishly hoping.

“Yeah. It was… flat in the middle and pretty crispy. Sisiutl left some nice tooth marks in it, too.”

“Terrific,” I muttered, hearing Lass’s malicious laugh in my head. As living pond scum, he’d been creepy; as a dead passenger riding in my skull, he was a real bastard.

Both the bus and borrowing my neighbor’s car sounded like bad ideas in my current, twitchy condition. I wasn’t thrilled with the expense of a cab, but it seemed the only reasonable option and it got us back to Pioneer Square with minimal fuss, though the cabby shot disturbed glances at me the whole way. I was sure he’d seen me flicker.

We went to my office building and Quinton stayed downstairs, watching, while I went upstairs to find some rounds for my pistol and reload the magazines. Even with Laguire distracted, we couldn’t assume her friends weren’t still listening and a misplaced voice would destroy Quinton’s cover among the dead. We’d have to sweep for bugs and clear the place, but it would have to wait until Fern Laguire was out of town and we were out of monsters.

We started the search near Sisiutl’s lair—the alley being so overlooked we figured to get in and out without being observed. The snow and ice that had accumulated in the sun-deprived alley was still drifted in the shadows, in spite of the temperature’s rise toward forty. It certainly wasn’t that warm in the tunnel.

Quinton had to help me down, but once I was at the bottom of the stairs, I let the normal slip away and looked for any hot shape of magic that might be the monster’s leash. I saw nothing that seemed right. I also didn’t see Sisiutl.

“C’mon, Lass, where did you drop it?” I asked.

“Not here!” he shrieked in my head, bashing himself around my head in panic.

“The bricks! Get out, get out, get out, get out!”

“If you’re lying I’ll feed you to it.”

“No! No, no!” He was shaking so hard I shook, too, and his dismay drove me back out into the cold gloom of the alley.

Quinton lowered the grate behind me, raising querying eyebrows.

I shook my head, wobbling a little and catching myself on the nearest icy wall.

“He says the bricks.”

“Which part? Occidental’s three blocks long there and it’s two blocks wide—that’s six blocks, and most of it’s exposed at this time of day. And you’re barely staying on your feet.”

I ignored the last and tried to rouse Lass to answer, but he kept his mouth shut for once in a smug silence. I damned his contrary paranoia in harsh whispers and got nothing from him but snorts and giggles. He was enjoying making me scrounge for it—petty revenge for my threats, I assumed; for holding him to earth and the obligation he’d incurred. Fine. I could out-stubborn a junkies ghost any day—I hoped.

I walked out of the alley and around to Pioneer Squares chilly wooden benches in front of the Underground Tour and the neighboring bars. We were passed by a flock of tour guests following Rick, the guide, out to the totem pole. Zip was chatting and smoking with Blue Jay and they waved to us, listing from a few early beers.

I sat on a bench and tried to think. It was easier with Lass being stubbornly silent, but the stinging pressure of his presence made my thoughts shatter and fall away. I tried thinking aloud.

“The bricks. It wouldn’t be the First Avenue side—that lets out the whole three blocks there. There’s no access to the underground at the park end except through the arcade, and that’s public and well-locked at night. Not Oxy Park, then.”

“Two blocks left.”

“Lass said… he threw the leash away after what happened to Jenny. We found Lass in the segment under the Cadillac Hotel block when we found Tall Grass down there a couple of days ago. That’s when Lass sent us to Sistu’s lair under… here. It’s the same place we met Grass and Jenny and the place where Lass had a run-in with Tanker and Bella. He said he lived there…”

“What if it’s the other block?”

“Burn that bridge when we come to it.”

We stood up and headed for the bricks, my knees stiff from the cold and a sudden tremor from Lass. He hadn’t thrashed when I’d gone down to the mouth of Sisiutl’s cave, but now he was flipping out. His anxiety was like a dowsing rod.

I hoped I could use that to my advantage while I searched the bricks. The time of day might make it difficult to get in and out and I dreaded the sensations that might come in such a haunted place with my uncanny passenger, but I wanted this over with, and waiting would make it worse, not better.

As we walked—I shuffled, really—it seemed the area was less trafficked than usual. The homeless and undergrounders were fewer—attending the vigil, I supposed—in spite of the warming weather. Neither had the regular pedestrians yet returned like swallows, still driven off by the chill of the salt-laden wind that came up the streets from Elliot Bay. Yet as we went along, a small group of Indians—normal and Grey—and the shadows of animals began to follow us, emerging from the underground, from alleys and doorways, the animals morphing from trees and cloud shadow. A few real birds joined the flight above us and a stray dog trailed well behind, curious but wary.

Grandpa Dan was at the head of this bizarre procession, seeming to draw them forth—real and spirit—dancing and making curious, graceful motions with his old, gnarled hands. He’d said they’d come if there was a need, and I guessed there must have been one. Whatever brought the Indians and their spirit companions, I was glad to have them nearby.

The Klondike Gold Rush parks doors were closed, though a sign said they were open for business. The cold kept the rangers and their visitors inside, and we had no difficulty in slipping down into the bricks, leaving our odd entourage behind.

Down below the sidewalk, pain blossomed; in the sea of ghosts, Lass seemed to expand inside me, pressing unbearably on every joint and organ. I gulped air, swallowing the silvered mist of the Grey and sweating in the cold.

I let myself drop deep into the Grey, to the point of the grid. Searing lines shot off in hard geometric shapes and sudden baroque curlicues that flung energy through the invisible world like catapults. Quinton grabbed my hand; his grip felt remote and thready like a handful of empty plush, but it seemed to hold me in my own shape, rather than spinning out into the blackness of the grid in a million burning strands. He turned on his pocket flashlight whose beam looked like smoke on water. We went forward by inches as I looked for something that didn’t belong—a line too hot, disconnected, wild among the busy conduits of the Grey’s power lines. Lass kicked and writhed, making me jerk in Quinton’s grasp.

We rounded the first corner, coming to the alley colonnade. I turned into it.

Lass settled and sighed. I turned back out, toward the distant corner where we’d first seen Tall Grass and Jenny Nin sitting in the light of a small fire with Grandpa Dan and his shadowy wings. Lass moaned and twisted, clawing at my back, trying to escape. I shuddered and took another step and another. Each footstep was a struggle against the unwilling ghost.

Progress slowed more the farther we all moved into the darkness under the street and Lass became increasingly hysterical, shrieking and throwing himself against me. I stumbled over nothing time and again, forced to stop and hold on to a bit of wall in order to look around, searching for the leash, feeling ice-cold stone I couldn’t see beneath my hands.

Down the farthest corridor—where Lass had hidden while Grass tried to give me the hat that had belonged first to Bear and then to Jenny—I saw a gleam as richly colored as pure emeralds and scintillant with old magic that smelled of water lilies and smoke. I crept closer against the thrust and panic of the ghost, who screamed, “No, no, no, no!” and slashed at me with bitter cold and the barbed edge of terror.

I gritted my teeth against the spurt of agony and felt hard, crumbling stone beneath my knees and hands. Quinton’s thin, warm touch moved up onto my back as I crawled toward the green line that grew thicker as I neared. Its length coiled away into the distance, as thick as my thumb, impossibly cutting through walls and looping over the vibrant lines of the grid like a mad vine over a trellis. I could hear it singing in a hundred languages. I reached for it and my incorporeal prisoner shrieked, gibbered, and lashed me blind. I shut my eyes, gasping and shaking my hanging head, my hand falling short of my goal. Tears gushed over my lashes and ran blood-hot down my face.

Quinton’s touch drew away and I felt a twist of my own fear tightening the grip of Lass’s terror on my body. I moaned as Lass howled in despair and sank into a dull blankness in my head. I blinked my vision clear and rolled back to sit against the nearest wall, trying to focus again on the normal.

Quinton was looking at something in his hand under the beam of his light. He held it up and I could see its true shape as a green shadow around its thin and ragged manifestation outside the Grey.

“Its just a bit of string. But it feels heavy.”

The long green tail of it snaked away into the mist of the Grey, shivering like a live thing. I put up my hand.

“Give it to me, please.”

He handed it over and I felt the weight of something far at the invisible end. I tugged it. The green line went taut, singing. I pushed myself back up onto my feet but kept my back to the wall for support.

The wall across from me rippled and the rings of disturbance spread outward through the Grey until they vanished in the edges of vision. The singing blended to a roar and Sisiutl swam through the wall on a slice of time, shouting in a dozen languages, drowning Lass’s horrified keening. The snakelike heads snapped and hissed, and the whole monstrous serpent rolled to bring its screaming center face to glare at me, gnashing its teeth and bringing its other heads close to strike.

I knew it understood at least some English—it had listened to Lass and had called me a thief—so as it raged and menaced us, I grabbed the feather from my bag and yanked once more on the leash. It reared up and I poked the central face with the long plume of the feather.

Sisiutl recoiled and snorted, its appearance rippling as the wall and the Grey had done before. I gave one more sharp jerk on the string and, thinking of Tanker’s commands to Bella, ordered, “Peace, Sisiutl. Be quiet.”

The monster seemed surprised, blinking all its eyes. Then it made two coils of its snake ends and raised the central head to my own height, staring with yellow eyes from the nearly human face. Meeting that gaze was like looking into a restless kaleidoscope. I had to shake myself and cling to the sobering pangs of Lass’s pressure in my head to keep from falling into that stare.

We looked at each other as Lass went rigid and silent in my head. Quinton kept as still as the stone walls.

“I have your leash. That makes me your master for the time being,” I said, not giving it a chance to argue or bargain. “I’m going to return your leash to Qamaits so you can go back to sleep.”

“Hungry!” it roared.

“You’ve had enough to eat. Don’t be greedy. You will stay here and be patient while I go to find Qamaits.”

Sisiutl growled and snapped at us.

I yanked the string. “Enough! You will stay until called for.”

Amazing me, Sisiutl lowered itself to the ground and sulked like a reprimanded dog.

“Now to find Qamaits,” I said, starting to turn for the exit. Too soon. At the sound of her name, Lass twitched violently, making me jerk and stumble. Quinton grabbed my arm and steadied me, casting a nervous glance at Sisiutl.

“Do you trust it?”

I gave an unsteady nod. “Rules. It has to follow them. Now, you,” I said, turning my attention inward to Lass. “Where can we find Qamaits—the old Indian woman who gave you Sisiutl’s leash?”

Lass went still and stubbornly silent.

“Tell me or I’ll cast you out and let the monster eat you.”

Lass jerked and writhed. “Don’t know where she is!” he whined in my head. “She’s just a fat old squaw!”

“Bull. You know her. Is she in the crowd that followed us here?”

I could feel him sulking. “No.”

“Then tell me who she is and where to find her!”

“Beside herself,” came the rolling voice of Sisiutl.

I shot a glance back at the zeqwa. It merely blinked innocently. Then it grinned with all its sparkling teeth, the forked tongues of its snake heads flickering.

It chuckled as we retreated but stayed where I had ordered it. Trickster.

We rushed out of the block, careful to check before bursting out of the door to the street. A rush and flutter of wings swished into the air as we emerged, making crow shadows on the sidewalk beneath the waking streetlamps.

The crowd we’d left behind had grown—natives and ghosts, human and animal.

They stood in the new-fallen night and watched us with patient eyes. Then they fell into step behind us as we began to walk.

“Beside herself…?” Quinton muttered.

Ogress, eater of children, nightmare bringer… Tsonoqua was also an ogress.

Fish had said Qamaits went by many names. Maybe one half-goddess, half-ogress would cleave to another… I knew where she was.