He handed it over, giving a slight, unconscious shudder. I closed my hand on the knife and felt a shock through my whole body, like I’d been stabbed in the chest with lightning.
I must have gasped aloud and started to crumple in my seat; Quinton grabbed onto my shoulders to hold me upright, then jerked as if he’d touched a live wire. I dropped the knife to the floorboard and batted him away, breaking the connection between us, between the scene rapid-spooling forward in my mind and the remembered horror of the first time I’d encountered it. Only this time it hadn’t been at a storyteller’s remove but first person and intimately dreadful. I gagged and gasped for breath; only the fact I hadn’t eaten in a day kept me from throwing up again.
“What the hell—?”
“That’s Carlos’s knife,” I gasped.
“What? What are you talking about? What happened?”
I drew several long breaths, trying to steady myself and doing a halfassed job as the voices of the dead shrieked in my ears. I raised my head and looked him in the eye. “Quinton, did you see something? Did you feel anything? What did you just experience?”
“To hell with me. What about you?”
I caught his reaching hands and pulled them down to the console between us. My heart wouldn’t stop racing, but I tried to pretend I was calm, that I hadn’t just experienced the deaths of a score of innocents, hadn’t felt the very knife I’d held plunge into my chest and shatter. . . . I kept my grip on his hands, comforted by the touch, and hoping he felt that reassurance too. “I’ll tell you in a minute, but I need to know what just happened to you. How bad is it?”
“Just painful, just . . . confusing. It was as if I’d grabbed onto an ungrounded electric cable when I touched you. And I thought—I swear I heard half the world screaming in my head. Jesus . . . what happened?”
“It’s over. It was more than two hundred and fifty years ago. Those voices are just ghosts. Just ghosts in my head.”
“Harper!” He put his hands back on my arms and I let him. Without the knife in my grip, I thought it was as safe as it was ever likely to be. I still heard them, the voices of the two dozen men, women, and children, dead and crying out as they were murdered a second time, their spirits ripped from the vessel they’d poured into at the instant their lifeblood flowed out. I thought Quinton would not also hear them, now. They screamed their shock only in the memory forced into my mind by the knife and by a tale I’d heard two years before. Quinton wasn’t psychic, didn’t share my mind. Thank the gods.
I caught him gently once more, putting my hands over his. “It’s all right. I’ve met them before. They’ll stop in a minute. It’s just a memory.”
He was aghast. “But of what? Do you go through this all the time? Is this what it’s like?”
I shook my head. “No. This is different. It’s . . . unusual. That knife, though. That’s what I need. I think that’s what the scarf was for—to wrap the knife so it could be handled by someone who could see what it had done.”
Quinton glared down at the fallen blade, his head wreathed in furious red and orange spikes: he loathed it.
“It’s just a thing, sweetheart. It’s not bad or dangerous on its own, but it can help me and I need it. There’s a paper bag in the glove compartment. Put the bones in that and then give me the scarf so I can pick up the knife.”
He didn’t want to look away from me, but he did what I wanted and handed me the black silk scarf, dusty from the bones and teeth and bits of chalk that had fallen on it. I bent in the seat and scrabbled blindly to catch the knife in the folds of silk, avoiding touching it with my bare hands. Once again, it wasn’t that I knew the silk would insulate me from it; it just felt like the right thing to do. And the whispering voices of the grid seemed to sing the action to me, like the chorus of some surreal ballet.
Even through the silk, I could feel the vibration of the tale, dread music sung in dead voices. I folded another layer over the knife and wrapped it tightly in the black scarf before I tucked it into the pocket of my jacket for safekeeping.
“So what is it?” Quinton asked when I paused, putting my hands on the steering wheel.
“Let’s get away from here first. We’ve been here a while and I think it’s best if we move.”
He shrugged, not happy with my stalling, but not objecting. Yet. I started the Rover and pointed it toward the loneliest place I could think of nearby.
Carkeek Park tumbles off the top of a steep, tree-thick ridge in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Broadview and drops into Puget Sound beside the railroad tracks that run from the aircraft plant at Everett, south to Boeing Field. Expensive homes overlook the park at a distance but see little through the rolling acreage to the small lawn at the cliff edge. A mile down the coast lie the busy locks and marina at Ballad, but you can’t see a sign of them from Carkeek. On a weekday at mid-morning, few people stroll the park and even fewer cross the pedestrian bridge that spans the railroad to descend steep steel stairs to the ragged spit of sand at the bottom littered with driftwood as large as cars. It’s a landscape of tree-crowded emptiness above desolate sand, and the isolated park that used to be a sewage treatment plant has hosted more than its share of assaults and dumped bodies, even a murder or two in the steep little canyon that cradles it. It is lovely now, but it’s not a place to drive; it’s a place to walk and possibly to disappear.
I parked the Land Rover as close to the cliffside strip of grass as I could. Then I donned my leather jacket against the chilly wind from the Sound and led Quinton down the lawn to the railroad bridge. We crossed down to the deserted swath of sand and sat on a sea-scoured tree trunk facing the cliff. Only a fish could sneak up on us from there.
I took the black package from my pocket but I didn’t unwrap it. I let it rest in my hands between my knees; it was heavy beyond its size with my knowledge of its past. “You know Carlos,” I started, looking up from the silk wrapper to glance into Quinton’s eyes.
He nodded. “Yeah. He was the extra crispy we stashed at the Danzigers’ after . . . what happened at the museum two years back.”
I nodded, too. “Yeah.”
“Scary customer. Even by bloodsucker standards.”
I looked back down at the hidden knife. “More than you know. He’s, uh . . . well, you know how Mara and I are always a little reluctant to deal with him. He’s, well . . . literally power hungry. He’s a necromancer, which is kind of unusual for a vampire. Dangerous stuff, sucking magic out of death when you’re dead yourself. So, he’s always tricky about dark power sources and I have to approach him carefully every time.”
“He’s kind of unpredictable.”
“Yes and no. You can bet if there’s magical power to be gained, he’ll want it, and unless you can hold him off or persuade him not to take it, he will. I’ve seen him do it and couldn’t stop him nearly killing someone for it. But, see, there’s more to the problem—the immediate problem—than that. He’s got a . . . an issue you could say, with Edward. They aren’t friends. They used to be, about two hundred and fifty years ago. I think they might have been the very closest of friends then, but Edward did something . . . just phenomenally stupid and greedy.” I felt increasingly constrained and physically uncomfortable telling him these things, even though I’d never been bound not to. But the sounds in my head and the humming of the grid sang a spell that dragged on the words and squeezed the breath from my lungs. I labored to bring each sentence into the air. “Edward wanted power, but to get it, he had to kill a lot of other vampires. It was easier to do it in one big cataclysm, so he persuaded Carlos to help him cast a spell that would destroy the homes of his enemies. It took out most of Lisbon in an earthquake back in 1755.”