Kat Richardson - Labyrinth

I bit my lip. Time to sound crazy. . . . “Yes. Sort of. Not so much in the flesh . . . in the Grey form, I guess you could say. We had a rather disturbing chat. The asetem aren’t much liked by the other vampires in London, but there’s a sort of truce . . . or there was until Wygan got Alice to kick over that apple cart. That was what caused Edward to send me to London in the first place.”

“Why ever didn’t y’say something to us if you knew there were asetem involved?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know they existed or what the problem was. I just went where I was told to go and did what I had to do. And I don’t care to repeat that conversation—it wasn’t pleasant—but it did put me onto Wygan and Alice. They were undermining Edward, partially to get to him and partially to get to me, but Alice thought it wasn’t good enough, so she kidnapped Will Novak, too, and that’s when things started to get really strange—but it doesn’t matter! The point is this: Wygan is moving forward with a plan that has something to do with Edward, and with me, and with the Grey itself. Whatever it is, I don’t want to be part of it, but more than that, I don’t want it to go ahead at all. I intend to put a stop to it, but it has to be my way.

“Wygan has been attacking my home, trying to get at me, wear me down, keep me off-balance I’m guessing. I can’t let him do that. I have to be free to move or I’ll end up doing what he wants. And I have to get some sleep so I don’t keep on making stupid mistakes because I’m too tired to think more than a single move ahead.” I was losing my cool and I knew it, but I just didn’t have the energy to be more subtle. I took a few long breaths that turned into yawns before I could continue. “That’s why we’d like to use your basement for a day or two. Lie low long enough to get some sleep and plan. We can leave the dog with you until things are less dangerous. Grendel is a great protection dog. Wygan likes to grab people and use them as leverage against others and I don’t want him to get you or any of my other friends. I know you can take care of yourselves, but ...”

Ben and Mara exchanged a worried glance, and we all stared out into the yard, watching Brian gambol with Grendel. The dog was jumping around and knocked the boy over. All of us got to our feet, poised to run to the rescue, but the pit bull just held Brian down for a moment and slobbered all over his face, making happy wuffing sounds through his nose while the boy shrilled his pleasure. Boy and dog got back to their feet and Grendel herded Brian around the yard for a while as we watched. I noticed the dog somehow kept himself between Brian and the bloodred stars of the malefic spells scattered along the fence. Maybe all animals had a touch of Grey vision, like the ferret seemed to. I hoped so.

“It won’t be for long,” I said. “Just until I can get into a better position against Wygan. I’ll have to free my father from him somehow and I’ll have to figure out what he’s doing so I can stop it. I have to take the offensive or the game is lost already. Please ...”

It took a little more talking before the Danzigers felt they knew enough to let me head for bed in the basement guest room. Grendel, the fuzzy bodyguard, turned out to be our ace in the hole: Brian’s immediate response to the idea that we might go and take his playmate away was to throw his arms around the pit bull’s neck and literally dig in his heels. “No! Doggie stay!” he insisted. The plight of adults being a bit too abstract for even the brightest three-year-old, he went for the most important thing to himself: the pet. Ben and Mara exchanged a rueful glance and gave in, which earned a delighted squeal from their offspring. Rick was going to have a hard time getting his dog back.

Quinton had gotten a lot more sleep the previous night than I had and elected to stay up for a while and help the Danzigers out with some household projects. I suspected he wanted to pick their brains a bit more about the situation we were getting into, and Ben had looked more than happy for the opportunity to do some picking of his own, too. Whatever work Quinton did for the Danzigers would mitigate some of the obligation we both felt for the safety and quiet they had extended to us. Some, not all. I knew I was probably dragging them into the enemy’s sights and I didn’t like it, no matter how much they protested that they wanted to help. Quinton, too, come to that. It seemed that this had become his fight as well, whether I liked it or not.

I fell toward sleep wondering why Simondson had ended up in Georgetown. . . .

As I slept, I dreamed I was sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool, trying to make sense of conversations going on at a party above the surface. Distant, burbling sounds that were almost words floated in and out of my ears, and I could see them darting through the water like glittering, colored fish. My dead cousin Jill swam by, her long hair forming a blond cloud as she paused to look at me.

“This time, we’ll use the back door,” she bubbled. In the drowned light, her pale, dead skin looked blue. She swam away, dissolving into a school of neon-bright tadpoles that broke into sudden shapes and began spiraling around a single, flame-filled bubble. When the gleaming creatures reached the middle, they doubled back and swam out again: an endless gyre of brilliant flecks going in and out, round and round. . . .

A randomly bobbing conversation bubble popped, releasing the words “phone box” to rise to the surface and burst into the air as a disjointed gasp of sound. An effervescence of englobed words rushed past, swirling through the tangled net of light that the waves cast onto the bottom of the pool. A few bubbles collapsed, letting their syllables out into the water: “rosaceae,” “polyphony,” “etrier,” and “fur.” The glimmering tadpoles darted apart and away, fleeing the sudden voices and dispersing the dream into blank sleep.

In spite of the weirdness, I slept well once the dream left and woke feeling more clearheaded than I had in a while.

Quinton had stretched out on the bed beside me while I slept, still dressed and dozing only lightly. As I started to sit up, he rolled over and looked at me, propping himself up on one elbow. “Hey, how are you feeling?”

“Well enough to go hunting for ghosts.”

“Should we grab the dog? If we can separate him from Brian, that is.”

“I’m sure Ben and Mara have the parental equivalent of a crowbar somewhere. It can’t hurt to take the fur-covered assault weapon along. If nothing else we can always tell any busybodies that we’re taking Grendel for a walk. And who’d argue with that?”

“Only the suicidal.”

As if she knew we were talking about some other trouble-making animal, the ferret began to rattle her temporary cage’s door. We both looked at her and she gave us the imploring ferret look.

I let Chaos out to romp while I put on fresh clothes. “That reminds me. While I was in London, Marsden told me ferrets seem to have an affinity for the Grey. How, I don’t know, but it would explain her craziness around the vampires and ghosts.”

“Then we’ll take the carpet shark, too.”

It wasn’t too hard to get the dog to ourselves: we just had to wait until Brian went to bed. We took a lot of precautions as we left, looking for observers and tails, checking for tracking devices both technological and magical, and paying attention to the reactions of the animals—just in case.

The sun was still up but starting to slant a bit, lengthening the shadows around the old brewery as we passed it. Where the southern brewery building had stood until a few years ago, there was now a neatly paved parking lot, devoid of the chain-link that had once held back the rubble from the street. I’d read that the old building, not originally built for cold storage, had chilled the ground enough to form a ball of filthy ice as large as a house. The current owners’ plans for redevelopment of the lot into shops and apartments had come to a standstill while the site was dug out and thawed. The remaining walls of the stock and brew houses had been shored up with cement blocks and steel posts, leaving two walls of the shell standing empty, boarded doors and windows gaping in the upper stories between brick scars where the floors had once been. The ghost-shape of the original building flickered in the Grey, silver-touched with persistent lines of blue energy as if the magical grid had risen into the walls and was crumbling back to ground at a glacial pace. I shivered as I saw it and drove on, looking for a less exposed place to leave the truck.