She stepped through the open willow swag and over the red line of her own magic, which drew back in as soon as she was across. Quinton sighed in relief and I lunged forward, thrusting my empty hand through the willow fronds before the red lines closed completely.
“Wait!” I shouted. The fiery marks snapped onto my forearm like teeth and I yelped in pain. “Where is the maze?” I gasped.
Dru Cristoffer laughed on the other side of the green veil. “Find it yourself, Greywalker. I’ve done enough—more than enough—to save that pesthole city. And more than enough for you. Next time I shan’t open my door.”
I felt blood running down the hidden side of my arm. The warm liquid seemed to loosen the clamp of the magical lines and I yanked my arm back, feeling invisible barbs scrape gouges in my skin as I withdrew. Cristoffer’s laughter receded into the fallen darkness beyond the tree’s swaying curtain of leaves. I didn’t want to stay there, but at the moment I was shaking too much to move and I sat down hard on the ground at the base of the willow.
Quinton plopped down beside me. “Well, that was lovely, in a tea-party-with-Satan kind of way. You all right?”
“I’ll heal,” I observed, closing my eyes to the sight of my skin knitting up over pinpricks of light and lines of blood. “How about you?”
“I think I might have some welts, but I’ll be fine.”
“Welts?”
“Yeah, that magic of hers is like stinging nettle, only worse. Burning nettle might be more accurate. And that was just the friendly parts.”
“Well . . . we did get the puzzle ball, and some useful information—maybe.”
“But we still have to find the labyrinth.”
I nodded, taking a couple of deep breaths and heaving to my feet. “I don’t think we’ll do it tonight, though. We need some sleep and we can start looking in the morning.”
Quinton crept out of the willow’s shroud behind me. “Got any ideas where to start?”
“Historical society. This is the sort of town where all the buildings are documented by someone, even the outlying ones and especially the interesting ones. I’d think a house with a maze would rate at least a mention.”
“As long as we don’t have to go back to that . . . woman’s.”
I saw the Rover still standing at the side of the road, trailing the tattered Grey rags that seemed to adhere to everything I owned for more than a week. Nothing had disturbed them and no new colors of magic clung to the truck.
“She’s a blood mage,” I said as I climbed into the safety of the Rover’s front seat.
“You mean Cristoffer?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I probably would have guessed in a while, but that trick with the puzzle ball was pretty obvious. And she mentioned the wards in Edward’s bunker—those had to have been hung by a powerful blood-worker, which would be her.”
“She’s got to be a lot older than she looks,” Quinton added. “Not that I want to know. . . . Do you suppose she actually knew Andrew Jackson . . .?”
“I think she probably saw him in diapers.”
TWENTY-TWO
The hotels were full and we ended up sleeping in the Rover at a campground east of downtown Leavenworth—probably just as well since using a credit card for the deposit would have left a trace of our presence. Beside us the river gurgled to itself in the dark, lending a descant to the singing of the grid. The back of the Rover was a bit crowded and smelled of dog, but it was acceptable and Quinton fell asleep with ease. I lay on my side, tired and wanting to sleep but afraid to. The strange voices of the grid were increasingly present and increasingly loud. They chilled and compelled me, drawing me too close to the warp and weft of the Grey.
I was certain that anyone I asked would say, “Just don’t listen to them; don’t do what they say.” But that wasn’t so easy and the voices, singing in ever-closer harmony, hadn’t always been wrong. If my dad’s advice was what I thought, then I needed to listen—to “know” what they sang. And yet . . . those voices had urged me to kill Goodall and to do something to Will. One of those I had recoiled from and the other hadn’t worked. I had destroyed Alice, but that didn’t seem to me the same as killing Goodall. But it was difficult for me to articulate the difference and why one was acceptable and the other wasn’t. I hated the hard shell of ice that seemed to be growing around me, dragging me away from compassion where it seemed most deserved.
And I wondered what was I going to do once I got to Dad. Supposedly he would tell me Wygan’s plan and how to stop it. But what if he didn’t? What if it was a trap, as Mara had suggested? Or a wrong turn? Ghosts don’t know much and what they do know may be wrong or incomplete. I wasn’t sure why I assumed my father’s shade was different, but I did and I hoped that meant I hadn’t become a ruthless machine of some unknown retribution. “Paladin of the Dead” was what Carlos had called me. . . . What dread thing did that make me . . . ? In the dark, lying beside Quinton and yet feeling alone, I did not know what to do, which instinct or voice to give ear to. I felt I was not myself anymore, that my decisions were those of a foreigner in my skin.
I’d thought I understood who and what I was two years earlier, before I’d died in an elevator. I’d thought I had control of my life—at last—that I was the person I wanted to be, doing the job I wanted. Part of that certainty had been torn away from me when I ceased being blind to the Grey, when I became something I did not want to be and didn’t understand. I thought I had regained some equilibrium since then. I had come to accept what I was and what I did and make the best of it. Sometimes I’d even gotten a little smug about it. But I’d still been wrong. I wasn’t what I’d thought, nor had anything about my life been what I’d believed. Deceptions, manipulations, and illusions had shaped the fabric of my life and I had not been blameless in making it—I’d destroyed my own memories and lived in the bitter confines of my anger at my parents. I’d clung to my beliefs without questioning them and learned I was wrong. I’d reacted, rather than acting. I’d done the predictable thing and run the maze like a good little rat. Was I still a rat, still going where I was pushed?
Now I was further away from what I’d been—or thought I’d been—than ever. I felt something powerful and frightening coiling under my skin. This ability everyone pushed me to embrace would change me fundamentally. I knew this without any question; the rising, clarifying song in my mind and the cold electricity across my nerves told me it was so. It was one of the few certainties I had, and yet I did not think I had a choice to reject this power. Among the dozens of questions I couldn’t answer, one occupied and terrified me most: Would I, if I survived this, still be human? And if not, would I be able to stave off destruction of all that was dear? This sleepless horror held me until dawn.
By the time Quinton opened his eyes to the morning light, I was damned tired of being damned tired. He noticed I was dragging.
“Didn’t sleep?” he asked, sitting up and putting his arms around my shoulders.
I rubbed at my eyes. “No. It’s awfully noisy in my head these days.”
“I keep thinking I should be able to help you, but I’m not sure how.”
I gave him a weak smile. “You do. Just keep on doing what you already do.”
He made a rueful face. “You say so. . . .”
“I do. Now, let’s get moving and see if we can find this maze.”
We were still a bit ahead of the Maifest crowd, and the Upper Valley Museum, which housed the Upper Valley Historical Society, wasn’t open yet, so we were able to get some breakfast first and wait on the stonework terrace that surrounded the old house that was now the museum. It sat well back from everything else on the north side of the Wenatchee on a large swath of high riverbank land at the end of a small street that marked the eastern edge of Leavenworth’s Bavarian theme. The building itself—a fieldstone craftsman bungalow with a low, arched roof and lots of wood and windows—predated the theme by at least fifty years. Most of the houses and shops on Division Street were plain late-Victorian clapboard structures and a few much later condos, so the gracious low lines of the museum stood out even more as it rested in green isolation at the end of the road. From the back terrace I could see the willow trees where we’d stood the night before with Dru Cristoffer, but there was no sign from this distance across the river, other than a thin red haze in the Grey, that there was anything magical on the opposite bank.