Quinton whistled. “Hell of a spell.”
“Well, Carlos is a necromancer. He’s good at killing people. He gets his energy from death and this needed a lot of death. About twenty people, I think he said.”
I knew what he’d said, but it was too bad and dreadful to admit. I could hear Carlos’s voice as if he were beside me: “. . . two dozen men and women—all children of the streets, the unnoticeables, the lost—knelt on a platform, bound within the machine ...”
“They killed them and powered the spell, but it wasn’t really enough for Edward. He wanted more. I guess there’s some kind of special magic in killing a mage or killing your lover or maybe both,” I lied. I knew well enough from Carlos that it was a vampire’s blood that was precious in this case, but that I could not say. I had promised that. “So, Edward stabbed Carlos with this, making the spell into something worse. He left him to die as the earthquake brought the building down on him. Carlos couldn’t do anything about it but hide from the sun and hope to survive.”
Quinton blinked as I paused and looked over at him. “That’s . . . extreme. But—”
“Why didn’t Carlos go after him?” I finished for him.
“Yeah. Neither of them is the forgiving type.”
“He couldn’t. Edward did something extra so Carlos couldn’t hurt him if he happened to survive the earthquake and the morning sun. Edward broke off the tip of this knife in Carlos’s heart. As long as it’s there, Carlos can’t touch him. He can’t hurt him. But he can’t help him much either. And I know the one thing that Carlos would do anything for is the chance to be free of this knife.”
The dual memory, Carlos’s evocation and my new experience of the story, brought up the echoing sound of Edward’s cruel anticipation in the depths of the long-ago carnage as he knelt over Carlos in the pool of blood and bodies. “I shall always be in your heart....” And I shuddered with his receding laughter, feeling myself in Carlos’s battered flesh, oozing the stolen blood of the murdered and knowing despair and betrayal so dark and bitter it made me blind.
I blinked and shivered, shaking the impression away as if it were offered poison.
Quinton didn’t respond at once. He looked out to sea over his shoulder. Then he gazed up at the heights of the cliffs above us and along the crumbling edge. His glance came back down, studying the sand and only very slowly returned to me. “So you’re going to use that as a lever to get Carlos to help you find Edward and figure out what Wygan’s doing.”
I nodded, making a grim smile as the pressure on my chest eased. I was done; the voices couldn’t stop me once the words were already out. They were angry, though. The noise in my head turned to rage and storm, unintelligible and violent.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to argue it to silence. It ebbed down only slowly, peeling into layers of discord that fractured and fell away in snatches of borrowed conversation.
“You won’t be safe with him,” Quinton said. “There will be nothing to restrain him if he gets free of that.” He pointed to the black thing in my hands.
“That may be true, but I think I can persuade him that stopping Wygan’s plans is worth suspending his revenge on Edward for a little while. Once this is over, I don’t care if he wipes out half the vampires in Seattle.”
Quinton made a skeptical frown. “Yes, you do. You’re tough but you’re not callous, and I don’t believe you’d let whole rooms full of people—if you can call those red-handed bastards people—die if you could avoid it. Not to mention the stink it would raise with your cop friend. He already thinks you have something to do with everything freaky that happens around here.”
“Yeah. I noticed that.”
Quinton cracked a smile. “He’s not that far off, you know: You attract the weird.”
I grinned pointedly at him. “Yes, I know. Lucky me.”
His smile, though crooked, widened and he slid his nearest arm around my waist. “Better than boring, I guess.” He tagged my cheek with a lightning-quick kiss.
I snorted. I had missed him horribly while in London. I had been too busy running for my life or someone else’s to notice most of the time, but every pause had brought it back to my mind. I hoped whatever happened next wouldn’t tear us from each other. I put my head on his shoulder a moment, resisting the insidious whispered urge to hurry, hurry, do something. . . .
I wanted to hiss back at it, “Shut up. Leave us alone for a while. Just an hour, half an hour. Go away!” But I kept my mouth shut and shouted only in my mind.
FOURTEEN
There wasn’t much we could do with the long summer day that would help my crusade. We could only wait it out until the sun went down and the vampires got up. Until then, I tried to put my mind to the other odd little mystery my father had given me—something about keys, mazes, back doors, puzzles. . . . It was like a maze itself, trying to unwind the possible meanings of all his hints. I knew he’d tried to be clear, but he hadn’t succeeded.
We couldn’t go back to my condo—it surely was still being watched—nor could we further endanger the Danzigers by returning there unless it was unavoidable. They were literally on danger’s doorstep and I’d put them at enough risk already. I hoped they’d take good care of the ferret and Grendel a while longer. Even my regular business routine seemed risky: Every Grey thing in Seattle knew what I did for a living, and it wouldn’t be hard for them to report back to anyone willing to pay for the information if I were spotted at the records office or my own.
It is very hard to break yourself of routines and places. When you have nothing else to do, you fall back to the familiar. What we needed was to run forward into the unsuspected.
What we did was take the ferry to Bremerton—a one-hour trip across the widest part of the Sound. Vampires, I’d noticed, didn’t like crossing water—and the longer, rougher, and saltier the stretch, the less they enjoyed it—so pockets of isolated vampires or their minions weren’t too likely to be watching out for us anywhere on the Kitsap Peninsula or tiny Bainbridge Island, which hung off the northeastern corner like a bud waiting to flower.
Off the ferry on the Kitsap side, I drove north along the rocky Soundview road from Bremerton, heading slowly for Poulsbo and the long span of the Agate Pass Bridge that crosses the rushing narrows between the peninsula and Bainbridge. The scenery along most of the route was breathtaking, and we stopped once or twice to stare at it, breathe in the salt smell of the Sound, and think. I’m not sure what Quinton thought about, though he did sometimes write frantically in a notebook he kept in his pocket. Me, I thought about my father and his riddle.
I was sure that the key to which he’d referred was the little wire pocket puzzle I’d found in his effects. With the help of Marsden, I’d discovered it was, in fact, a kind of magical skeleton key. It didn’t seem to work on real-world doors, only on Grey ones, but it was very effective. If that was the key to use on the door, what were the mazes he’d referred to? It seemed as if he’d equated mazes and puzzles, puzzles and doors, and they all opened to a key I already had. I just had to find the mazes. He’d said to find the first maze—no, a labyrinth—and that would lead me to a back door. . . .
So I was looking for a labyrinth. The only one I knew of was the one on the floor of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, but I was reasonably sure that wasn’t it—it would have been near impossible to open any magical device inside the cathedral without someone noticing. No matter how I may feel, personally, about any religion, wherever belief in something paranormal is strong enough, Grey things take shape or show up, and it was a sure bet the cathedral was thick with magic that would have a dampening effect on anything that didn’t belong there. There must have been other labyrinths. . . . I’d have to do some research when I got back to a computer.