Kat Richardson - Labyrinth

I concentrated on her—it was easier than trying to keep my eyes on all three of my audience. “All right. My dad killed himself because he was a Greywalker—I didn’t get this until I was in London, though I feel I should have figured it out earlier. He didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t have anyone like you to help him. He never did know what he was, but he did figure out that something unnatural was happening to him and that it was being done to him by someone. That someone was Wygan. It took a while for me to put it together and I didn’t get all the pieces until I was in London and in some serious trouble. I’ll get to that in a minute, but the important thing is that my dad wasn’t really going crazy; he just wasn’t handling exposure to the Grey well. When he figured out that Wygan—he called him the White Worm-man—was trying to force him to do something that was probably terrible, he killed himself so Wygan’s plan would be ruined. Unfortunately, all he did was put things off. He thought he was protecting me, but what he did was put me in his place.

“Wygan has a long-range, overarching plan—I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s not good for anyone but Wygan. Anyhow, this plan of his requires a Greywalker with very specific powers. Wygan has figured out how to force that Greywalker to develop. It took him several tries. I got this information from one of his failed experiments, another Greywalker I met in London—a creepy son of a bitch named Marsden. Marsden wanted to get rid of me so the plan would collapse, but we ended up working together instead, and he explained a lot of this. That story’s strange stuff and not entirely relevant, so I’d rather just let those details slide for now. That OK with you guys?”

I finally looked around at Quinton and Ben. Ben, naturally, seemed a little disappointed. Quinton had a grim expression, but he nodded. Mara’s manner had slipped from a narrow, concentrated stare to wide-eyed horror. I took a couple of long breaths before I went on.

“So. My dad didn’t know the whole plan initially and he didn’t understand what was happening to him, but he knew he was changing, and to keep him in line, Wygan and his minions threatened him and his family. I’m pretty sure they killed his receptionist or gained some kind of magical hold over her so she’d spy for them or hurt my father in some way. Dad destroyed her—I met her ghost—and he killed himself so he wouldn’t become a monster. That’s what he thought was happening to him, that he was turning into some kind of monster. But taking himself out of the equation wasn’t enough. I’m next in line and Wygan’s been working on shaping me into the tool he wanted my dad to be. Every time I die a little, I change. So . . . he’s been making sure I die. I’m still not quite what he wants yet, but he’s going to try to gain control of me and kill me again because the final stage of his plan is now in motion.”

Quinton and Ben both yelled over me, drowning me out as Mara frowned.

“What is he doing?” Ben demanded.

Quinton clutched my arm. “Kill you? What the hell—”

I wriggled out of his grip as I tried to wave Ben off. “Stop it. Stop it! I don’t know!”

Mara sat back, making a thoughtful moue as I quieted the men. “Hm. Something that needs a special type of Greywalker. . . . Well, that can’t be good.” She got up and started twiddling with a pile of odds and ends on one of the unused chairs nearby, touching them absently as she thought. “So, your father was a Greywalker, you’re a Greywalker, and the only way out is . . . to kill yourself? I can’t say I like that.” She turned back to study me, scowling with unhappy thoughts as she leaned against the back wall of the house. The protective magic wrapped around the building made a worried murmur.

“Actually, death won’t get me out of it,” I replied. “That’s more like a . . . reset button of sorts. If I die in a way that doesn’t destroy my brain or body, I come back, but each time I die there’s a window of opportunity to push my powers as a Greywalker into a new shape, or to let them reshape themselves. Most of the time. According to Marsden, there’s a limited number of times I can die and bounce back. At some point, I’ll just stay dead. According to my mother, I died once when I was a teenager. I didn’t remember it until, at my mother’s house, I saw a photo of my cousin Jill. We drowned together one summer. I came back; Jill didn’t. I don’t know if Wygan engineered that or not, but while I was in London, I found out my death two years ago wasn’t just a bit of bad luck either. Alice—you remember Alice?”

Mara nodded and I could see Quinton from the corner of my eye, mirroring her.

“Alice didn’t die in the museum fire. Wygan got her out and kept her....” I couldn’t bring myself to describe the ghastly and extreme measures he’d taken to heal Alice and keep her alive until he needed her again. I shuddered in spite of myself. “She was working for him. He sent her to London earlier this year to disrupt some business of Edward’s and lure me away from Seattle so Edward could be attacked and Wygan’s plan could begin to move into its final phase—and no, I don’t know why he needs Edward either. When I met Alice in London, she told me the man who killed me did it under her influence. I had every reason to believe her.”

“Is she still out there, then?” Mara asked.

I took a couple more deep breaths before I answered, tamping down a sudden spike of nauseous memory. “No. I killed her. I dropped her head into some kind of magical hole and left the rest to rot. I don’t feel bad about it: She helped kill me and she helped keep my dad a prisoner.”

Mara shook her head, her coppery brows pinching together. “You’ve lost me. When was your father a prisoner?”

“He still is. Wygan has his ghost in some kind of magical . . . oubliette—sort of a one-way prison hole. Two birds with one stone: leverage against me if I refuse to do what he wants, and a chance to torment Dad for kicking over the traces in the first place. Wygan’s like that: He carries grudges for a long time. This business with Edward seems to go back to something that happened between them in England two or three hundred years ago. When I called you guys from Los Angeles, I was trying to find my dad’s ghost, but all I could get was the ghost of his receptionist and a big, fiery hole where Dad should have been and a really pissed-off guardian beast running around it whenever I got close.”

“ The Guardian Beast,” Mara said in an absent manner, biting at her lower lip and staring into nothing.

“Pardon me?” I asked.

“If it’s running around something like that at the edge of the Grey, it’s not just any guardian beast; it’s the Guardian Beast, protector of the Grey.”

I felt my own eyebrows draw down as I peered at her. “I thought there were a lot of guardian beasts.”

“In general, there are,” Ben put in. “Lots of them. Lots of types of them, too, guarding all sorts of things. But as Mara said, there’s just the one for the Grey. At least that’s what my—our—research shows.”

Out of the blue, Mara asked, “How do you know your father’s in an oubliette?”

That startled me a little. “I was told, but the hole I found at the site where he died kind of reminded me of the place Marsden tried to shove me into—the same hole I dropped Alice into.”

“Hm. I can’t say I’m knowin’ enough about how the Grey works to tell you if such a thing is possible without a spell in place, but a spell can be undone.”

“The one I found in London wasn’t created by a spell. It was more like a . . . black hole: Things around it had warped the magical landscape until it sort of folded on itself. It was kind of a magical vortex around a tree in a graveyard.”