"You should sit down." He grinned at me, teeth snaggled, yellow, canines pronounced and elongated. His smile was a poleax, and my knees buckled. I thumped down into an empty chair, aware of shadows pooling thicker, like oozing tar, in the corners of the room, exuding a low reek of antiquity and decay. It was an ancient and foul corner of the cold blackness I'd fallen into when I touched Cameron. My stomach flipped and tried to stretch itself around my spine. A thin halo of blue and red wavered around Wygan's head.
He cocked his head back and forth, looking like a hungry velociraptor. "Alice sent you to me about Cameron?" He gave an incredulous snort. "Pull the other one."
I shook my head. "You're not what I was expecting," I confessed, swallowing discomfort. His proximity sent ripples through every sense I had, normal or not. Carlos was a teddy bear by comparison.
"Must be my charming and sophisticated on-air personality," he quipped and brayed hundreds of hot slivers through me. "Hang on a tick—track's almost over."
He held one finger up in the air to me, then spun himself 450 degrees to face his console. His hands darted over the controls like albino spiders as a row of red numerals counted down. Then he flipped a switch and eased a slider down, leaning into the microphone. "Now here's a prezzie from me to you—a whole album side of classic Floyd from Dark Side of the Moon." He flipped off the microphone and leaned back into his seat. The room seemed to roll and shift with his every movement.
He swung the seat back and forth a few times, then spun it to face me. "So Alice sent you to me. About Cameron." An eddy of darkness followed his movements. He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows in amusement, shrugged. "What of him?"
I found it hard to speak. "He hired me and I'm trying to stir up a little dirt on a vampire named Edward."
His face twisted. "Edward Kammerling," he breathed. "Yes…" The Grey surged around him, lighting his aurora with white lightning strikes and shivering the world between us.
Sudden cold trembled my bones. "You don't like him."
He turned an ophidian gaze on me. "I'll see him to hell… in my own time. If I'm in a very charitable mood, I might not make him eat the parts I dismember him of." He studied me with a baleful stare. I felt like a bird about to be swallowed. "They are as insignificant as fleabites, the lot of them, beside you."
I stammered, "What?" forcing words out as my stomach twisted and my lungs fought air that hung in clouds before me.
He laughed flaying knives and ice. "To think such flyspecks brought you here! I've waited so long for you." He made a motion, as if opening a door. "Why don't you come all the way in and see?" Ambient sound shushed away and a shock wave rolled out from the bright door now standing between us—the door to the Grey. The silence howled over me and shoved me deeper into the chair.
I fought my way up and started for the real door, stumbling on numb legs. This time the dragon-smoke door wouldn't lead to the white place I'd chased Alice into. It reeked of something much worse. "I don't think so," I stated.
"I think otherwise," he barked and launched through the doorway, ripping open the fine seam between normal and Grey, pushing the glowing boundary wide.
Reality split open with a roar as the Grey rushed over us, slamming the breath from my lungs. I thrust back against it and felt my protection shatter and whirl away into the flood. I gasped for air and fought the icy battering of a storm of shadows and boiling silver mist. The world shuddered and the urge to retch wrenched my innards.
White claws dug into my upper arms and held me upright. I sucked in the thick cold, eyes clenched shut, struggling, and began screaming.
Wygan shook me. "Scream! Scream, my delight, my own. There's no one to hear but me. No one, no one," he crooned, his voice moving slow and cold as a half-frozen river, deep under ice, under my skin. "Open your eyes. Open the eyes within and see your pretty new world. See what I am giving you. A gift. A gift so needful."
I fought to get out of his grip, which seemed to pierce all the way through me in javelins of ice. I felt tears streaking my face, warm tracks in a frozen world. My eyelids ground open against my will.
Wygan held me to the padded wall. His eyes glowed, and red fire and white sparks danced jagged lightning strikes around us in a world of roiling, tormented shadow and coiling mist. His eyes were snake-like. His skin gleamed pearlescent and finely marked with tiny, over-lapping fringes. His ice white hair was a sculpted ridge that camouflaged the true shape of a saurian skull. The Grey surged around us like water from a broken dam, and I was drowning.
I stared back at him in strangled silence, my lungs frozen in my chest. I wanted to bolt, to claw, swim, dig my way out of there, but in the prison of his gaze, I could do no more than shake. Half a smile tore his face.
"Fear," he murmured. His breath smelled of tombs. "I could feed upon you for days. Look at my world. My prison of hunger, cold, unbridgeable distance, without touch, without warmth, but what I can steal. This is my torment, my gift. Look at it!"
He whipped me in front of him, thrusting me into a maelstrom of writhing, tortured shapes and animate cold. Twisting, arctic forms pressed against me, gaping, changing ever and ever into unending nightmares intangible and horrible, stabbing cold fingers of avarice and hunger through me. They devoured me, tore me, inhabited me in mouthless screams. I gasped and sobbed and tried to pull away from them, felt them sucking my thoughts and my life away in unraveling skeins, emptying all thought, even emotion, fear, self-preservation, draining me to bleak despair.
I sagged, and he let me fall to my knees.
"You don't see it," Wygan whispered behind me. "You haven't ascended to your proper place. Worthless fools and incompetents. They discovered you, but could not mold you as I told them to."
My mind flashed hot images: the apparently crazy man in the alley; the unkillable assailant in my garage; the break-ins… I couldn't get words to form properly, only choking out, "You… you?"
As if he could see my thoughts—or had sent them—he laughed, the sound slashing me. "You reentered this world, incomplete, half made. You needed honing to your true shape. But they failed. Cowards. Imbeciles. Faulty tools like Alice, clinging to their own paltry half-lives, petty schemes." His voice spiked upward into my skull. "Ages waited! And at last!"
He stepped to my side and crouched, a slender reptilian creature cloaked in a clot of gruesome shadow and dancing fury-light. "But you aren't here as you should be. You haven't grown to it. Imprisoned, blind, weak! You are no good to me. How can you walk where you can't see? And I must have you or cannot cross. You must see what I can see but cannot touch. Touch what I can take but cannot feel. I will make you what you ought to be."
He reached into the mist and hooked a thread of glimmering blue on one white claw. "Your power is too small. You must embrace it, must grow for me. Take this."
I cringed back with a whimper. "No. No, I don't want it," I protested, my voice a weak trickle of steam in the cold.
"Did I offer you a choice?" He pushed his tangled claw into my chest, ripping me open, unbleeding. I tried to yell, but nothing came out.
The blue thread went taut and vibrated, then shimmered and crawled over me, spreading over my limbs and up to my head. The thread passed over my eyes and blinded me a moment, then faded. The shape of it vanished, seeming to sink into me, knitting me closed again around its adamantine knot within my ribs.
The mist-world blazed and faded like fog under sun. The shape and color of the Grey changed, roaring with a tangle of light, fountains and smudges of illumination, glowing forms of vibrant color and force, lines as straight and hot as highways in the desert, as twisted as tornadoes, wild as wind.
The studio, formed of soft mist, was limned in gleaming threads around us, and the top of Queen Anne Hill spread away beyond it, through inconsequential walls, glimmering with phantom fires and falling into an ink-dark stain of cold nothingness—the Sound. In the distance, the black beast howled in rage and I felt it gather itself and rush toward us, all teeth and claws and unquenchable hatred.