I followed a flight of twisted steps down a dim shaft to a heavy door and along a short, narrow tunnel. I trudged on, tight with fear.
The dim flicker ahead winked out. The sounds died.
"Albert? Where are you?" My ears throbbed in the silence.
"Albert!" I howled, whipping around. I lost my balance in the shifting world and yelled, falling…
And crashed into a solid wall. I tumbled and sat down hard. I huddled on the cold ground and panted and held back tears of relief and exhaustion, and a desire to throw up.
Finally I looked up and around. I was in a basement storage area. There was a sound now, one I had been ignoring for a while: a burglar alarm going off.
I swore and promised under my breath, "Albert, I'm going to get you for this."
I crashed around in the dark for a minute or two before someone opened the exterior door to the basement. I breathed a thankful sigh and moved toward the shaft of streetlight illumination striping the floor. A body cut off most of the light and I slowed my steps.
"Police. Stop where you are and leave your hands in plain sight."
My relief soured to resignation and I raised my hands to shoulder level, open and empty.
The arresting officers were quite polite until they found my gun. Then the chill came on. They drove me to the downtown police station for processing, without a word beyond Miranda. The booking officers weren't happy, either, but they did concede that I had all the proper paperwork. They still put the gun in an evidence bag before they would let me use the phone, though.
It took only moments for the restaurant to find Will, who was still sitting at the table.
"Hi, Will, it's Harper. Look, I'm sorry. Something work related came up and I had to go. I didn't mean to leave you in the lurch like that."
"Something work related," he repeated.
"Yes. What? Do you think I just ran out on you? It was something I couldn't control."
"All right," he said, but it didn't sound all right.
"Will. Don't be angry. My job is like this. Weird stuff comes out of nowhere and I have to chase it down when the opportunity arises. If I hadn't wanted to have dinner with you, I wouldn't have called you back." There was a lot of silence at the other end of the line. "Will, I'm at the police station, so I can't stay on the phone. I don't know how much longer this is going to take. I'll have to call you later. OK?"
"All right," he said again. "If you call me later, we can talk about it." Then he hung up.
Great. Well, there went that romance. This was not turning into the sort of evening I'd had in mind.
I'd been booked and fingerprinted and had gone through a carefully edited version of my story once. The owners of the property weren't home when the alarm went off, and when they arrived to press charges, they wanted to hear what they'd missed.
I lied. I told them, as I had the cops, that I had been tailing an insurance fraud suspect from the restaurant and had stumbled through the remains of an old bootlegger's run into their basement. The owners of the house—now a bed-and-breakfast—were kind of charmed by the idea that their house might have a secret past as a speakeasy. The cops, on the other hand, were not charmed by the discovery of a rotting tunnel behind a bit of broken plaster, but that thin evidence was a lot more comfortable than explaining that I'd somehow managed to get into a basement which was still locked from the outside.
It was after eleven p.m. when they decided they couldn't hold me.
The cops returned my stuff, including the pistol, and I went downstairs to call a cab and get my car back.
When I paid off the cab, I was relieved to see that Will's truck was gone from Dan's parking lot, and then I got angry with myself for feeling relieved. I damned Albert with catholic breadth as I slammed the truck door behind myself. I sat still for a good two minutes, calming down before starting the drive home.
I pounded up the back stairs to burn off my lingering fury. I slammed out of the stairwell onto my floor to see my front door standing open. I stopped and gaped, then bent down and snatched up the ferret as she tried to scamper past me.
I stared into my living room. Chaos dove out of my arms and raced across the floor in wild, ferret delight. She danced across the face of disaster. The burglar alarm was off and the living room was a wreck. The ferret's cage was tilted on its side, the door hanging open. The surgeons' cabinet had been knocked over and the chair was dribbling stuffing from the underside of the cushion. Books and paperwork drifted around like autumn leaves.
I caught the ferret one more time and stuffed her into my jacket before going to knock on my neighbors' door. I left the place just as it was. It couldn't get much worse, after all.
"May I use your phone?"
He let me in and I called the police, asking for a detective I knew, but was told he was off duty. I'd have to take potluck.
I slammed the phone down and waited for the cops while watching my neighbor's half-breed pit bull sniff and whine in the direction of the lump of ferret moving around under my jacket. Once they showed up, my neighbor Rick let me wait in his living room eating cold pizza while the evidence crew found nothing. Once they were gone, I thanked Rick and his dog and went straight back to my place. I slammed the door, locked up, and headed to bed. And threw my damned, silly loafers against the bedroom door hard enough to dent it.
In the morning, I called Mara, my mood very little improved.
She answered the phone herself.
I started straight in. "Mara, I don't know what's going on, but Albert popped in to see me last night and I got arrested following him. What the hell was he doing?"
"You were following Albert… through the Grey?"
"Yes! And I ended up in someone's basement with their alarm going off like a teenage girl at a Hanson concert."
I heard her smother a giggle. "As bad as that?"
"Not funny. I got arrested, got dumped by my date, and had an interesting time fending off the blandishments of a beer-and-pizza-addled neighbor."
"I shouldn't laugh, it's just the image… But there is a problem and I'm afraid Albert has made a bags of the situation."
"What situation? A 'bags'?"
"A mess. I'd rather discuss it in person. Can you drop by? I've a geology lecture to give at one, so if you can come before eleven…."
"Geology?"
Mara sounded harried. "Yes. I also teach at the U. Can you come up?"
I growled. "All right."
I rushed my routine and drove up to Queen Anne. I was barely through the Danzigers' front door when Albert showed his shadowy face in a swirl of snow-threat Grey.
I jabbed a finger at him, too furious to consider how utterly stupid it was. "You! You are so lucky you're dead."
Mara blinked surprise at me as Albert blinked out. "It does no good to be threatening a ghost."
"It's not a threat. It's a fact. If I hadn't been following his incorporeal ass, I wouldn't have gotten arrested. Normally I'd take that sort of thing out of his hide. If he had one."
"Then it's me you should be angry with. Not Albert. It's my fault he showed up and acted badly."
"Is it? Why? What did you do?"
"I sent him looking for the source of the problem, but he came up with you!"
I threw my hands into the air in frustration. "What problem?" "There's something wrong with magic."
Chapter 15
"Something wrong with magic?" I echoed. "There's a lot wrong with it from my point of view. But I assume that's not what you mean." Mara made a sour face. "Not hardly. I know you've still some trouble with all this, but it is a serious problem. The house has its own nexus, but outside, things are running a bit slow, as if the power is dammed up. So I sent Albert out to find the source of the blockage, but he somehow followed it to you—he says you're a knot in the thread."