Kat Richardson: Downpour

“Looking for the owner, y’won’t have much luck. It’s just summer places round here.” I knew that New England drawl....

I spun to my left, seeking the voice’s owner, and saw Darin Shea standing on the shore beside the next house to the south. He was wearing the same olive green parka and dirty work jeans as he had the first time we’d met and he kept his hands in the jacket pockets while he knocked his heavy hiking boots against the ground, shaking off a crust of icy mud. His aura was, as before, a weird mix of blue and gray with spikes of red, as if the world offended him in some degree and he was going to small talk it into submission.

“Hello again, Mr. Shea. You know the owner?” I asked, stopping where I was.

“That’s Mr. Leung’s place,” he said, sauntering toward me. “Ain’t seen him in a while, but the house is all wintered up. Safe guess he ain’t around.” He stopped a few feet from me, nodding as if we were just meeting for the first time. “Nice place, yeah?”

“Seems it,” I agreed, slightly put off by his slow-paced chattiness once again. “Do you do any work for the Leungs?” I asked.

“Nah. His daughters and son-in-law watch out for the house.”

“Do his daughters live nearby?”

“Yup.”

I’ve rarely wanted so much to brain someone with a heavy object. Plainly he didn’t feel like giving me the information yet. I tried a different tack. “Any idea when Leung left?”

Shea shrugged again. “Nope.”

“So . . . you’re staying on the lake?”

“Yes and no. I’m house-sitting one of my projects.” He waved in the direction of the southeastern shore. “Down there a ways.”

He had indicated south of the strange underwater lines, but not on them. I considered asking him about the clearing, but if he wasn’t volunteering information, I wasn’t sure I wanted to call his attention to either thing. I didn’t like the way Shea had just turned up, what with his weird aura and no visible way to have arrived here. I hadn’t heard an engine, or a door, and I didn’t see a boat at the dock or any footprints on the deck of the house behind him, though his boots had been muddy enough to leave some. There was also no boat in sight, and I didn’t think he’d walked on water or scrambled down from the tree line above without making a sound. With the oddness of the world-in-between around here, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d turned out to be a ghost. I wasn’t sure why it felt so strange to meet him here, but it just seemed . . . odd.

“What business y’got with Mr. Leung?” he asked.

“My own business.” Shea’s eyes went a little cold and flat as I said it, as if he were about to do something I wouldn’t like. I continued. “Just trying to find him; nothing sinister. But he’s not here, so . . . I guess I’ll ask his daughters.” I turned and stepped back onto the deck, away from Shea, starting toward the stairs to the upper story, then turned back in a rush, expecting to catch him moving. But he was just standing the same way, with his hands back in his pockets. “You couldn’t tell me where I could find them, could you?”

He chuckled, dismissing whatever danger he’d thought I posed. “Don’t think you’re too likely to catch up to Willa. Might have more luck with the older one, Jewel. You might not want to dawdle getting to her—folks say she’s dying, though she’s been doing it a while now.” Shea didn’t look broken up, and I thought I saw the tiniest flick of a smile pull one corner of his mouth as he said it. “She and her husband’ve got a big house on Lake Crescent. Ask anybody—they’ll show you. I gotta get back ’fore the light goes.” But he didn’t turn to go. He held still and watched me go up the stairs and across the upper deck.

I’d have to come back once he’d left. I wanted a look at that clearing without Shea or anyone else around, but I didn’t think he’d hang about long if he was seriously worried about getting home before dark; the shadows were already lengthening. I got back into the Rover and drove out to the highway, pulling in at the general store I’d passed when escaping the white monstrosities by the side of the road earlier. I checked on Chaos, who was still sleeping in her nest of sweatshirts, before turning the truck around and returning to Lake Sutherland Road. I left the Rover farther out this time, at the very edge of the scrubbed-clear space ahead of Leung’s home, and walked along the edges of the tree line to get back to the house on the lake. Twilight had dyed the overcast sky ink blue and leached the colors of the world to indigo and navy with odd patches of bone white where the rocky ground was naked of cover. The trees around me looked like charcoal smudges and I found the footing treacherous in shadow.

Nervous about what might happen, I let myself sink into the Grey where the world between worlds was bright with silvery mist and colored lines. I braced for any attack, noise, or the invading reach of the magical grid. But aside from the rattling whispering of the grid and the muttering of ghosts, nothing came for me this time. I couldn’t see the lakes, but the whole area within my view was like a more intense version of what I’d seen on the shore of Lake Crescent a few days earlier: Strange bolts of colored light shot horizontally through the mist, dodging the shadow-shapes of corporeal trees and diving suddenly downward toward the lake. Something gave a sharp laugh that came from no human throat, but no shape loomed from the Grey fog with it.

Ghost whispers grew louder as I worked my slow way back to the house, skirting the time-worn memory of the trees, and fell away as I emerged just south of the house, on the edge of the rise. I saw no sign of Shea or anyone else living—though there was a thin, boiling fog of ghosts along the shore. I caught my breath while my heart settled back into a normal pace.

I made my way to the hidden clearing next to the house with the quietest tread I could muster on the frosty loam, touching trees as I went, as if they would protect me from danger. Even out of the Grey, the effects I’d seen as I approached lingered. The lake below and the wooded hill I moved across seemed menacing and otherworldly in the still, cold dusk with a strange, sparkling light flickering from deep below the lake’s surface. I stopped at last at the edge of the weird clearing, peering at it through the Grey.

A hair-thin line of blue energy encircled the clearing and a thin sheen of silver stretched over the ground within, unmarred by other energy colors or strands of magic. The dark shadows I’d spotted before still lay there, and just beyond them a roiling haze of color with no defined shape that seemed to be tied to the circle in some way I couldn’t see. I stayed on the outside of the circle and moved around, trying to figure out the configuration of the shadows and colors and if they were meaningful. But the more I studied it, the more it looked as if the persistent Grey shadows were the residue of people working magic here for a long time, and some hadn’t bothered to clean up after themselves.

I pulled out my pocketknife and flipped open the long blade—it wasn’t ideal, but I thought it would do in a pinch—and squatted down. Then I drew the blade through the hairline of energy, breaking the circle’s edge. The Grey sighed a little, the colored haze dispersed, and the circle dimmed a bit, but nothing spectacular happened. Nothing active was going on there. That was fine with me. I stepped into the clearing proper and started looking for clues to the area’s purpose. Magic, of course, but to what end and what kind? I didn’t see the angry red and black accumulations of blood magic or necromancy, but the feel of the place was unsettling nonetheless, like unseen cobwebs fluttering against my face.