This time, both his eyebrows came up and Carlos stared at me with plain surprise. He resettled his face into its usual silent glower in a moment and said, “I meant you no disrespect, Blaine. I have touched a million of the dead and find suicides are rarely men of courage. Father, like daughter, astonishes me. Accept my apology.”
I wanted to kill him—the muttering in my head sounded like psychotic ranting urging me on—but I knew I needed his help; I needed him on my side. What was I thinking . . . ? I tried to shake it off but this time it wasn’t going. The sound swelled in screams and I felt sweat break on my skin—don’t let it be blood this time, gods, not this time. Something brushed my right leg. Another of the névoacria. I kicked it away in disgust, the thing of mist and shadow surprisingly solid on my boot.
The urge to do harm slid away, the raging in my head spiraling down to a whisper of nonsense: “a rose by any other name . . . superior, orientalis. . . .” I shuddered and looked down. A crimson line swept across the floor beside my right foot. A piece of Carlos’s circle. I had been standing on it; the feelings that had overwhelmed me were not mine but those of the circle’s voice and victims. I swallowed hard, tasting bile in the back of my throat as I edged away.
“Perhaps this place is no safer for this conversation, now that the knife is put away,” Carlos suggested, remaining still and waiting for me to move first.
“Yes. That is, I agree. But I . . .”
“You tire.”
I closed my eyes for a second. They were gritty and I did, indeed, feel tired. “There’s so much . . .”
“Yes, and you fight it. You can’t. It will come. You will change. Learn it.”
“That’s what he said. Wygan,” I spat.
“Better to know the tool you have been given than become one yourself. If you hope to stop him, you must use every weapon you have at your disposal. And we must not let him know of our . . . agreement. If he cannot hope to control us through our friends, the Pharaohn will destroy them. He must think us alone and powerless until the last minute.” He waved his arm toward the doorway and looked the question at me.
I nodded and swayed a little. Then I let him lead the way back up to the sitting room, muttering to myself as I went, “I have to get to my father. I have to find this labyrinth, this back door . . .”
“The back door . . .” Carlos echoed, his voice soft in thought as we came to the top of the steps. “If there is such a thing, and it leads to your father’s prison, then it also leads to the lost passages of the Grey, places that have been sealed away or broken beyond repair. That would be the place to make the knife whole again—where no one but you and I could see. You have a key?” He turned back to me, standing in the doorway of what started as the kitchen—a room I didn’t want to examine any closer after what I’d felt elsewhere in this house.
“Yes, my father’s key,” I explained. “It’s a kind of puzzle. Puzzle . . . I have another puzzle. . . . Maybe. . . .”
“Yes?”
“It’s crazy,” I objected, shrugging it off.
“Would any of this have seemed sane to you two years ago?”
I hacked a bitter laugh. “No.”
He gave me that damned look with the raised eyebrow again.
“All right,” I conceded. “I’ll think about it.”
“Look for the connections. Don’t reject what seems completely mad.”
“As I seem headed that way myself, I guess I shouldn’t.”
He nodded and walked me to the door. He watched me pass him but remained inside, in the shadow. Even in his death-black sanctuary, he was cautious. “Take care, Blaine, but move with speed: Our days are numbered.”
I would have turned back, but the door clicked closed behind me. This time I couldn’t hear it chime. All I had ahead of me was the narrow path. I put my hands in my pockets, disliking the thought of touching anything by accident in this garden of hell. The bundled knife lay like an uncanny weight beneath my fingers. I hated to touch it, but I couldn’t let it go, afraid to lose it.
The eyes of the seraphi-guardi blinked at me as I passed, and its rustling hisses sounded like whispers in the night. I wanted to hurry away from the silvery stares, but I walked forward with care, trying to keep my thoughts from breaking on the whispers and muttering of the grid. Forgetting, forgetting . . . there was something in the noise that haunted my mind. I was forgetting something.
“Goodall.” Damn it, I hadn’t figured him out yet. How had the Pharaohn’s ushabti come to work for Edward? Carlos had almost told me, but I hadn’t pressed and now I didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t matter, but it worried me nonetheless.
I made it to the end of the walkway and pulled the gate open. The road outside was as it had been before, still hot with energy and silvered with the mist of the Grey. But at least it wasn’t the black flames that burned ceaselessly behind me.
I stepped out and began to retrace my steps to the truck, forcing myself to think of something other than my self-righteous past. I thought about Goodall. Carlos had said something about a final offering. . . . It must have been a complicated ritual, whatever it was, taken a step at a time. Something like the demi-vampires, not quite vampires yet but only a bite or two away. . . .
EIGHTEEN
I stopped on the sidewalk, still about half a block from the truck. A cluster of névoacria paused in the yard beside me and waited for me to go on—some kind of honor guard sent along by Carlos, or just spies? The whispers in my head were loud in the former graveyard. I didn’t want to hear my own reflections on what Carlos had accused me of. They were too dreadful, and anything, even the shredded and stinging melodies of the Grey, had to be better. It was hard to sort them, to concentrate, but something seemed to answer my question. I could hear it; like someone singing very far away, it dipped and swelled through the mist and magic, buzzing with energy. I closed my eyes and tried to listen for that one line in the clashing harmonies of the grid.
Not an answer, just another question: What if the origin is different from the end? Huh. That didn’t make a lot of sense, but it gave me something else to occupy my mind for the rest of the distance, and that seemed to help push the noise back a bit.
The creeping things of mist and shadow followed me, some coming when others vanished but always there until I reached the edge of the road by the Rover and let myself in. Then they sparkled away.
It was much quieter in the truck. Something about the heavy steel and glass filters out most of the ghosts and lowers the effects of the Grey. That had contributed to my decision to replace the old Rover with another despite the cost. Even so, I didn’t want to linger in Carlos’s neighborhood.
I started the truck and drove, glancing at the clock in the dash. It was eleven thirty. The bar at Louie’s didn’t close until one, but I would have to rush a little if I wanted to spend any time there with Quinton—and I did want to.
But the question in my head started me thinking as I drove, and I poked the last-number redial on my cell phone and put it on the console while I waited through the rings from the speaker until Cameron answered.
“Harper?”
“Yeah. I’ve seen him.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, the silence growing long and sad.
“He’s all right,” I said, finally getting it.
“Ah. Good.”
“I have a very rude question for you.”
“OK.”
“Becoming a vampire. Is that . . . umm, that is, is it a one-shot kind of process or does it take a few steps?” It was hard to talk like a normal person; the strangeness lingering in my head made me want to scream or babble or just curl in a corner and rock while I muttered to myself. I hope I didn’t sound as unhinged as I felt.
“There’s a lot to it. Over time. It’s . . . complicated.”