Kat Richardson - Labyrinth

I wanted to walk the neighborhood a little. If Simondson had been dumped at the brewery rather than killed there, I suspected he hadn’t been moved far. Wygan couldn’t have thought I’d miss the news that my assailant had died by violence, so chances were good that the location wasn’t a fluke.

We parked a few blocks away near an off-ramp and a playfield that sprouted artificial grass. A row of old-fashioned clapboard-sided houses in varying states of refurbishment or decay faced the field. A swaybacked house in the middle of the block hosted an elderly man with a Santa Claus beard and crow-sharp eyes who sat on the dilapidated porch. He didn’t stare at us as we got out of the truck, but the curious, blue-green energy around his head reached out, as if scenting us, then pulled back once satisfied we had no interest in him.

Grendel wanted to investigate the playfield but lost interest once he realized that only the grass near the bleachers was the real thing. Instead, he peed on the leg of a bench and then looked up at us, satisfied and ready to walk on. Chaos was happier to ride in my purse with her head sticking out the top. We passed under the freeway ramp and across two sets of railroad tracks within a block. Except for the cars parked at the curbs, the street we walked on looked like something straight out of the Old West: Buildings of corrugated tin, clinker brick, and horizontal boards crowded the narrow sidewalk leading toward the long brick-and-sandstone wall of the brewery’s late-Victorian buildings. Even with the sun still up in the long summer twilight, I could see wisps of ghost-stuff and bright scribe-lines of energy that chattered like squirrels. The Grey was as noisy as a train yard in this low-lying stretch of ground between the bluffs and the river. The animals seemed unaffected, except that they glanced around more than usual—like kids in a new neighborhood. This all struck me as odd, but I didn’t comment—it would do no good to discuss the strange degree of activity until I had a little more information, and it might be nothing more than the residue of a still-busy settlement that hadn’t been buried and remade like much of Seattle had over the years.

We stepped out onto Airport Way at the north end of the former brewery complex and turned south to reach the partially demolished buildings Solis had mentioned. I thought I heard something muttering in my ear, but there was nothing nearby, even in the Grey, besides Quinton and the animals.

Ghosts grew thicker as we moved along the sidewalk on the brewery side, mostly men in work clothes and teams of horses pulling wagons piled with grain, hops, or barrels. I could smell the horse dung and sweat, the sharp, bitter memory of fresh hops, and the sweet odor of boiling grain mash. The weird muttering was drowned in the harsher, louder cries of workers, the snort and whinny of horses, and the heavy roll and thump of barrels being loaded.

Quinton’s hand closed on my upper arm. “Harper?”

I shook myself. “What?”

“Just making sure you’re still here.”

I felt my brows pinch down in a scowl. It wasn’t quite a slip, but I shouldn’t have been sliding into the Grey like that. I wasn’t tired, so that wasn’t the cause now, but I didn’t see any other reason I would have gone a bit ghostly. I concentrated a little harder as we walked on.

The long buildings were pierced by recessed, black-painted doors and windows with sparkling-new glass, and odd ramps to old loading doors swooped here and there. Finally we reached the end of a building with two walls of soaring, arched windows and impressive double doors that faced a driveway and another building on the other side. A covered iron walkway crossed the driveway at the third story and a gate stood closed across the passage. Through the chain-link gate we could see a huge brick chimney near the train tracks on the far side.

The partial shell of a building on the other side of the driveway had a sandstone foundation that had been eaten away at the corners and mortar joints until it looked like rotting teeth holding up the charming brick edifice with carved stone signs above the big, boarded-up doors and windows that read “Brew House” and “Stock—” Just beyond the truncated stock house sign, the wall ended abruptly and the black expanse of the asphalt parking lot stretched to the south nearly another block to run up against the former brewery office building that now stood alone under the pylons of yet another freeway ramp. We’d arrived and, naturally, it was the spot with the aberrant lines of Grey energy that had given me the willies on first sight.

We stepped around the broken wall, over a parking bumper so new it gleamed white, and turned to look into the gutted remains of the stock building. A chill cut through me as we crossed the gleaming Grey power lines in the memories of walls that had once stood there, but the feeling faded as we left the ghostly walls behind.

A bit of tattered yellow crime scene tape still fluttered from one of the massive iron pipes that had been erected to brace up the remaining front wall. Sand, scrub grass, and tumbled bits of stone and garbage were the only floor the old stock house had. The brew house still had one complete room, but the jagged edges of more rooms that had once stood beyond the front one ran like raw wounds in the towering brick walls. Ivy and grass had rooted in the back wall of the brew house along a jerry-rigged plastic downspout that had broken apart halfway down. The stock house walls grew a thick coat of some horrid yellow spray foam at the second floor, but nothing else. Straight down from the foam and in the corner of the last standing walls, I could see a thin red smear of remnant energy—not a ghost but the mute energetic residue of something angry and violent.

The noise of the grid increased as I got closer, whining and rattling like blues guitar feedback on a cheap amp. I’d never heard so much local disturbance from the Grey’s power grid before. I wondered if it was an artifact of the asetem’s involvement, but I didn’t recall any such thing from London. . . .

There was no roil of vampires, nor the gut-blow of death lingering over the site, not that I’d expected it, but it might have explained the spine-crawling racket of the grid at this spot. I stepped up onto the sand mounded where the building’s floor must have been. Chaos made a chuckling noise in my purse. Grendel watched me with his ears pricked up and his shoulders a little hunched, as if his hackles might start rising in a moment. Pretty strange body language for a dog, I thought. Quinton held on to the leash and followed several paces behind.

I looked toward the yellow scrap of crime scene tape and guided my gaze along the line from pole to pole, searching for another bit of yellow or some indication of exactly where the body had lain. A second tag on the boarded doorway to the brew house and a small dark patch on the sand near the smear of red energy led me deeper into the site. I didn’t have to look hard for signs once I got close; the red haze resolved itself into the misty wire-frame shape of a human curled on the ground in a semi-fetal position. The dark patch, predictably, was blood, though very little and mostly smeared on the sand, not soaked in, where the body had lain, battered but not bleeding out. Either he hadn’t bled much at all, or, as I’d suspected, he’d been dumped on the sand after he was too dead to do more than ooze a bit.

I crouched down and put my hand on the bloodstain. The world seemed to drain away into silver mist and the screech of metal tearing apart under massive strain. I hadn’t meant to sink into the Grey, but the bloodstain had drawn me in. I started to back out, afraid for a moment that I had fallen into some kind of magical trap, but the Grey was no less fluid than usual. I wasn’t imprisoned, just sucked in. I took a few deep breaths and let myself fall all the way in.