Vanished

CHAPTER 17

Quinton tucked me tighter against his body under the covers of his narrow bed. “You’re not going to change your mind and stay home?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. “I took the job; I’ll do the job.” We’d discussed Edward’s proposition twice by now, trying to suss out every possible pitfall and hidden agenda. Neither of us liked the situation and we were both convinced whatever was developing in Seattle’s Grey world wasn’t a coincidence, but if Edward felt the London situation took precedence, we’d have to take his word. Previous upheavals of the local vampire community didn’t go unnoticed; they just got explained away. They hit the human population as crime waves, gang killings, and warehouse fires and took down both the agitators and the innocent. If a power struggle was violent and widespread enough, it would break out into open warfare between the vampire factions and no one would be safe. If the skullduggery in London was the key to the unrest Edward had hinted at in Seattle, then solving the London problem was priority one. I didn’t know how the London vampire community worked or what the problems there might be. I’d have to trust Edward’s assessment.

Quinton nuzzled his nose into my hair and murmured, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“I’m not exactly getting a vacation-at-the-beach vibe off it myself. And don’t suggest you come with me. I need you to keep an eye on the situation here while I’m gone.”

“And take care of Chaos. I know.”

“Hey,” I said, rolling over to face him, “you’re not just the pet-sitter, you know.”

He grinned and kissed me. “I know. The pet-sitter never gets the girl.”

“The pet-sitter usually is the girl.”

“Not in John Cusack films.”

“Which film was that? The last one you saw, Cusack was an assassin trying to date his old high school sweetheart from Grosse Point, Michigan.”

“Hey, I’d move to Michigan to date you.”

“Does that mean there are still things I don’t know about what you used to do for the government?” I asked, teasing.

“Well. yeah, but not that kind of thing.”

“You’re sure, now? Because if I get back and my condo has been used to stash the bodies of victims killed with ballpoint pens, I may be a tad upset.”

“I promise: no bodies stabbed with ballpoints. Maybe just a Sharpie or two. ”

“Quinton!” I yelled as he tickled me, grinning.

The conversation dissolved into amorous wrestling in the sheets for a while, until an alarm went off somewhere.

“What the—?” I started, jerking up out of the tangled sheets.

For a second, Quinton looked blank, trying to identify the sound. Then his eyes got wide and he pulled in a sharp breath. “It’s the ghost detector. It works! Maybe. ” He twitched his attention to me. “Do you. see anything?”

Not only did I see something, it was looming over the bed. Or rather, they were. The Grey was overwhelming my senses and a crowd of ghosts filled the tiny bedroom of Quinton’s hidden home, leaving smudges of color like smoke in the silvery world around me, colors that ghosts shouldn’t display. Some seemed familiar, others not at all, but they were all staring at me in the humming intensity of the Grey. I shivered.

“Umm. yeah. about fifty of them,” I said, staring back. I feared to blink in case they rushed the bed. I don’t know why I thought that, but the feeling of imminent motion pressed on me like an incoming storm front.

Quinton rolled out of bed and darted through the assemblage of specters to one of his workbenches. He didn’t even twitch and I envied him that oblivion for an instant. He plucked a small LCD display out of a nest of wires that clung to it like fur and squeezed the rim, silencing the alarm while he studied the screen. Unconscious of his nudity, he turned slowly, treading the cold floor on bare feet as he swept the room with the ghost detector.

“They—” I started.

“Sh-h-h. I want to find them. Let’s see if this works. ”

If he’d just looked at me I was pretty sure he couldn’t miss the direction I was staring. I pulled the covers up to my neck. So long as the phantoms weren’t moving I could stand to be patient with Quinton, but I didn’t have to let them ogle me. Maybe clothes made no difference to them, but it made me feel better.

He pointed the messy hash of wires and readouts around the room until the wires were pulled too taut between the detector and a big box of mysterious purpose on the bench. He looked a little crestfallen. “Oh. It’s you.”

“No. Trust me. It’s them.”

“Are they. between us?”

“Oh, yes.” I stared at the ghosts. “Stay right there,” I told them. Then I crept out of the bed while keeping my eyes on them, reluctantly leaving the sheet behind, and backed to Quinton. The spectral mob turned as I went, tracking my movement like hunting hounds, but didn’t come closer. That was strange; ghosts don’t usually give much of a damn what I want, much less follow my orders. “Anything change?” I asked, still keeping my gaze on the ghosts.

“Only a little. The big reading is still by the bed.”

“What is it measuring?”

“A low segment of the high-energy band—a little more energetic than photons, not as hot as neutrinos. I figured that’s where the ghost energy had to lie. It’s not very specific, though. I get a lot of interference.”

“Oh.” It didn’t mean a lot to me but I trusted Quinton to have a handle on his subject. Either he was actually measuring ghosts or he’d found something else equally strange.

I strengthened my attention on the phantoms and slipped deeper into the Grey. “What do you want?” I demanded, feeling the cold of the magical world pierce my skin.

Most of them just stared. I had the feeling they weren’t very strong willed, so something beyond their own desire was directing them to me.

A collective sigh replied and about half of the ghosts faded away into sparks and random swirls of mist.

“Reading’s down to almost nothing. What’s happening?” Quinton asked.

“They’re leaving, but only about half are gone. I think your detector isn’t sensitive enough to pick up a single ghost on its own.”

He grunted and peered at the display. “That sucks.”

“Uh-huh. You mind if I get rid of this bunch now? They’re giving me more than the usual creeps.”

Quinton cast a startled glance at me and noticed we were both still naked. He blushed. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

He started to put an arm around me, but I shook him off. I was searching the remaining crowd of spirits for the cause of their bright colors. Aura energy is colored by emotion, habit, and magical associations, the trappings of life and action, which aren’t exactly common traits among the memory shadows that are ghosts. Somewhere in the writhing soup of the phantom mob there had to be an emotional kernel that had drawn them together. That ghost would be the dangerous one—the one who’d dragged the rest to me for whatever purpose.

There: One hot, orange spike, like the stamen of an exotic flower, gleamed in the silver spirit fog. I fixed my eyes on it.

“You. You dragged your preternatural posse to see me for a reason, I presume. So what do you want?”

I hated it, but I stepped though the curtain of colored energy and into the depths of the swirling crowd of ghosts, shoving them aside with the edge of the Grey one by one as I advanced through them to their core. But there was nothing; only the burning orange glow of frustration from someone or something that couldn’t come any closer, a shell of emotion with no apparent source. I pushed my left hand into it, trying to find any substance at all, Grey or real or merely transient, to clutch and confront. My fingers closed on nothing. The orange gleam flashed white and hot. I jerked my hand back with a yelp of pain.

Quinton dropped his gadget and leaped forward, throwing his arms around me. “Harper!”

“It’s all right. It’s OK,” I panted. “I don’t think it wants to hurt me. I. think I just startled it.”

“What? What is it? What is it doing to you?” he asked, wrapping himself around me like a protective shield.

“Nothing,” I said, amazed. “It reacted to my grabbing at it, but it’s not doing anything. It’s not a ghost; it’s. just. some kind of emotional energy drawing other ghosts in like a magnet. I don’t know what it wants or why it’s here, though. It can’t seem to communicate any better than this.”

The energy around us faded to blue and pale yellow—colors I thought of as neutral or low-threat at least. It drew together and moved toward the workbench, leaving the ghosts huddling into a pale mass of cold steam and twisting into a tighter, denser rope of energy. It streamed toward the fallen detector, drawing the spirits into thin strands of silver within the elongating cable of power. The luminescent stream surged into the device and a squawk came from the alarm speaker.

The big black box on the bench rattled and steamed, the speaker pinging and squealing for a moment before it gave out a more coherent sound. “Not.”

Quinton and I both stared at the box.

“What,” the box croaked. “You.” The bright rope of energy faded with every word. “Think. Why—” But there the message stopped in a fizz of sparks and the stink of burning wires as the rope flared and blinked out, leaving me coiled in Quinton’s arms, naked in the darkness from which even the gleam of ghosts and the bright lines of the Grey power grid had momentarily faded as if all energy had been exhausted in the area. I could feel Quinton shuddering.

“You OK?” I asked.

“Yeah. for pretty loose values of OK. That felt. really nasty.”

“I–I think your machine is toast.” I’d almost apologized, but I hadn’t done anything—had I?

“Probably.” He squeezed me closer. “But I can make another one. How ’bout you? Are you all right?”

“As right as I ever am.”

“Your skin feels cold.” He kissed my cheek. “You want to get back in bed and warm up?” I could feel him smiling and a pink glow radiated from his body as the room’s normal Grey presence began twinkling back.

“You are an adorable lunatic.”

“I can go for adorable.”

“Not so much the lunatic?”

“I think I prefer techno-geek. I know I prefer the bed over standing on this cold-ass floor.”

The glimmer and gleam of the grid hummed back to normal as we scampered across the chilly floor to huddle under the blankets again.

Quinton kissed my temple. “That was pretty freaky.”

“And I have no idea what it was in service to.”

“That’s the same message your dead boyfriend delivered: It’s not what you think. Isn’t it?”

I called that memory up. “Yeah, it is. But that. mob wasn’t Cary.”

“Someone wants you to get that message pretty desperately.”

“Oh, I get it. But it’s not very helpful. What is not what it seems? Me? Edward? His little business trip? That wasn’t even on the table when Cary got in touch.” The more I thought of it, the madder I got at the whole cipher-wrapped-in-an-enigma thing. “I’m not going to back out of this trip, even if that is what the ghosts are warning me about. I think I stand a better chance of finding answers in England than staying here and chasing my tail, not knowing which questions to ask whom and pissing Edward off in the bargain. I have a plane to catch in five hours and I’m not planning on wasting what’s left of that time puzzling over the energetic missives of cryptic specters,” I snapped.

“Hey, sweetheart. It’s just me here now.”

I closed my eyes, chagrined at my anger. “I’m sorry. I feel like I’m being played in some way. It makes me. short-tempered.”

“Played by Edward?”

I shrugged dismissal. “Not really. Manipulation is Edward’s stock-in-trade. There’s something else. Ever since this started there’s been something. lurking. I just have a bad feeling. ”

“I know.”

I sighed. “I don’t mean to take it out on you.”

“I don’t mind being your sounding board. Or your backup or whatever you need.” He hesitated. “That’s—you know. what you do for someone you love.”

Something ridiculous and giddy swelled through me at the word. I could feel the fizz of it bursting out of my skin and igniting sparks in the writhing platinum mist, bouncing off the living, glowing streams of energy that powered magic, and the rippling knife edge of the Grey. After the devastation Cary had wreaked on the remnants of my juvenile romanticism, the gleaming evidence of Quinton’s sincerity was intoxicating.

“Want me to prove it?” he whispered into my ear. His grip tightened just a little as his body temperature kicked up.

“You don’t need to prove—”

He nipped at my neck below the ear. “I want to,” he breathed against my skin. His hands slid up toward my breasts.

I turned in his arms and met his mouth with mine, passion heating the air until it baffled our lungs and fused us together, flesh to flesh. I forgot to say the words, but I did my best to show him that I felt the same way.