“What did Cristoffer say about this again . . . ?” The noise in my skull was making it hard to recall anything but what I was staring at right now. This time, the voice of the grid was not so much a song as a hooligan rabble.
“She said she probably hadn’t buried the tap as well as she would have now,” Quinton replied. “I would guess that’s sort of the power line feeding whatever magical alarm she put on the door for Edward.”
“It’s a little more complex than that. There are at least three linked systems here: two magical and one mundane. We have the card for the normal system, but we have to get past the others: recognition and defense. At least one of them took a bite out of Goodall—and I mean that literally.”
“OK, door bites man. I’d like to skip that.”
“Then don’t touch the door or the wall near it.” I crouched down to look harder at the bottom of the wall where it met the floor, searching for the power line up from the grid. I hoped Cristoffer hadn’t been teasing us with her hints. She had seemed angry and annoyed more than cruel, but I wouldn’t have put any sort of mean-tempered joke past her.
Even sliding deeper into the Grey, I found it hard to get a clear look at the spell around the door and card reader. The magical structure was almost Byzantine in the degree of twisting and doubling back that it displayed. I wondered how much of it was really necessary and how much was there to disguise the important parts. I wished I had Quinton’s knowledge of circuits but I couldn’t show it to him and describing it seemed impossible. Along the edge of the carpet that touched the wall, I could see a narrow, dark gap, as if the carpet hadn’t been stretched as tightly as usual when it was installed.
I eased out of the Grey so I’d have a better grip and, keeping my hand away from the bright crimson lines of the spell, I dug my fingertips into the carpet edge nearby. Something sharp poked my middle finger and I gasped, jerking my hand away.
“Are you all right?”
I looked at my fingertip, seeing a small, dirty puncture. “Just a carpet tack.” A single drop of blood squeezed out of the skin as it reclosed. I sucked the injured finger, thinking it would be a bad idea to let the blood escape and land anywhere near the chittering red lines of the spell. I tucked my fingers back into the gap with a bit more care and caught the edge of the carpet. As suspected, it wasn’t tight to the wall or the strip of tacks as it should have been—the installers hadn’t been allowed close enough to do it properly, or whoever finished up the job wasn’t experienced with the technique. Either way, lucky for me. The edge of the carpet pulled up and away, making a sloppy pocket at floor level on the right side of the doorway.
In the shadow of the lifted carpet, the strands of magic gleamed like neon threads. One was quite a bit thicker than the others and it split about an inch up the wall into four other lines that described the whorls and arabesques of the spell. Of the four lines, one was slightly thicker and brighter than the others. Among the knots and twists above it was difficult to pick out, but so close to the split it was obvious. Warily, I touched it.
A jolt of pain shook my spine and a snapping doglike head thrust out of the wall below the card reader. The creature was bright red and gruesome, furious as it pushed into reality.
Quinton took two fast steps backward. “Jesus! What in hell is that?”
I twitched my finger away from the thick line and the monstrosity recoiled into the wall. The voices in my head screamed conflicting insults and remonstrations at me. “Shut up!” I barked at them.
Quinton stared at me.
“Not you.” I put my hands over my ears for a second, but it didn’t help. “I don’t know,” I whispered, tucking my head down. “I don’t know what it is, only what it does.”
“Eats people?”
“Pretty much.”
Quinton sounded shaken. “I wasn’t really expecting to see anything like that. . . .”
I groaned from the rising noise in my head, like pressure in a balloon. “Don’t say you didn’t believe there was really something there.” My voice sounded hollow in my ears.
He stepped close and crouched down, putting his arms around me and pulling me back a little from the wall. “No, sweetheart. I just didn’t think I’d be able to see it. There’s no physical sign of any . . . animal or cage here. Where did it come from?”
“I think . . .” I felt sick to my stomach, sorting the noise and my own thoughts as I spoke. “I think someone sacrificed a dog.”
“You mean Dru Cristoffer.”
I nodded, spasmodically. “That’s the dog. In the wall.” If I sorted the images that were flooding into my head from touching the line of its imprisonment, I could see what had happened to the poor animal and I didn’t want to describe it to anyone. In light of what she’d done, I reevaluated Dru Cristoffer: She was evil. And I painted Edward with the same brush for letting her—telling her—to do it.
I didn’t want to simply go around this monstrous security system. I wanted to destroy it, wards and all. It wasn’t my place to make that decision—it wasn’t my property, and Edward wouldn’t thank me for ruining it—but knowing what had been done to safeguard this place made me sick and seething with anger. I didn’t want to know what Cristoffer had done to make the panels on the doors throb as they did—didn’t think I could ever sleep again with such knowledge in my head.
The Grey chorus tried to give me the information and I screamed at them, “Shut up! Don’t tell me!” I couldn’t block them out with my hands so I tried to beat them into silence rocking violently forward in Quinton’s embrace to strike my head against the floor. “Shut up! Shut up!”
Quinton hauled me hard against his chest, locking me to him and pushing away from that wretched wall. “Stop it! Harper, stop!”
I couldn’t. The insidious whispers of the grid would not go away. They persisted and echoed, telling me horrible things that had happened in these rooms, reciting a litany of horrors that lay ahead. I panted and gulped my breath, thrashing against Quinton’s grip because there was nowhere to turn that they did not come, invisible and unstoppable, into my mind. I felt myself shaking, convulsing as if the voices brought the electric shock of the grid with them. I understood why my father had killed himself, why he had blown out his brains rather than live with this. . . . I wished I could. I wished I could stop—
Quinton clamped one arm hard across my body, crushing the air from my lungs. I felt a jab against my side and then a jolt, a violent yank as if I’d been hit in the chest and thrown across the room. I buckled and collapsed onto the floor, facedown, huddled like a hurt child.
But the silence! The blessed silence. I wanted to stay in it, curled around myself in the quiet.
I felt Quinton holding me against his chest, panting and sweating. Or was that me? Breath came hard, in gasps, into my lungs and a ringing started up in my ears, but just an ordinary buzzing noise this time. We were on the floor. Were we on the floor? It seemed we had to be since I couldn’t feel my feet touching anything.
“Harper? Sweetheart?” He breathed the words against my neck. “I’m sorry. I had to. I didn’t know what else to do. Harper?”
I pressed my face against his shoulder and tried to say it was all right, but it came out a weak mewling sound.
He sagged under me, relieved, and shifted his grip so I slid lower into his lap. “Thank God. Baby, I thought I’d killed you for a second there. Oh, sweetheart, I didn’t know what else to do.”
“S’all right,” I mumbled. Or I think I did. My mouth wasn’t working very well. Actually, nothing was. I was a big, limp lump, but everything was wonderfully quiet. I didn’t think it was permanent, but it was fine for now. I’d have to do something about the spell and the dog in the wall before the noisy voices of the grid came back, but for a few more seconds, I only wanted to cling to Quinton.