Kat Richardson - Labyrinth

Kat Richardsonis a former magazine editor who escaped Los Angeles in the 90s. She currently lives on a sailboat in Seattle with her husband. She rides a motorcycle, shoots target pistol and does not own a TV.

Visit her website at http://www.katrichardson.com/

Greywalker

Poltergeist

Underground

Vanished

IN MEMORIAM: RICHARD DENNIS HUFfiNE

(1933–1989)

Special thanks to Nelia Chalmers and Guilhermes Damian for their help with the Portuguese. Thanks also to my sister Elizabeth and her husband ’Tagh for help and advice about magical implements. And to all the usual suspects who make these books happen: my agents at JABberwocky; Anne Sowards and the rest of the amazing editorial and publication team at Penguin who let me keep my title and who make these books look so good; and my husband, Jim, who may never get to be a “kept man,” but might get a few bon-bons out of this gig. . . .

Also thanks to the cool writers of Team Seattle and beyond for keeping my brain straight during all the insanity of the past year-and-a-half: Cherie, Richelle, Caitlin, Mark, Mario, Nicole, Jaye, Jackie, Stacia, Diana R, and Tiffany T. And to Rob Thurman and Laura Ann Gilman for the best con after-hours ever. To David Thompson and the crew at Murder By the Book in Houston for “forcing” me to go to Texas in midsummer. To MaryElizabeth Hart for solving problems and being fun as well at SDCC 2009. To the ever-gracious Charlaine Harris. To Victor Gischler, to whom I owe a beer or three. To Ana Choi who put me at the right table at the wedding. And to everyone I forgot: I apologize for my Swiss cheese memory.

Maybe he should havebeen more worried about the ghost detector going off. At the time it had seemed pretty exciting to have it work at all, but afterward it seemed as if the squawking of the alarm had presaged something much worse than a pack of ghosts. After Harper had left town, things went to hell.

First there had been the little problem of vampires. . . . It wasn’t the vampires qua vampires; it was the change in the way they acted and how many were visible. There was always the problem of vampires in the underground and hanging around the desperate and lonely looking for a snack. But suddenly there were more, and different, vampires around Pioneer Square and downtown Seattle. And they weren’t subtle. They killed people and they killed one another—nothing new—but now they were doing it in public, or as public as vampires got anyway. Dead and mutilated bodies in Belltown alleys, or awash in drifts of ash on unlit corners of First Avenue or Mercer Street, and still more after a lightning-fast gunfight a block from the Moore Theater about which witnesses could recall nothing but the speed and terror of it. The cops unhappily wrote it down as gang activity with some innocent bystanders caught in the middle and survivors too frightened to talk. All right, the vampire cliques were gangs of a sort, but since most of their victims vanished into dust and ash, the real explanation was unlikely to come up in any SPD briefing. The police were still looking into it, but Quinton was certain they weren’t going to arrest anyone soon.

While Harper had been in Los Angeles trying to figure out why a dead boyfriend had called her and what he had meant by “things aren’t what you think,” a vampire had killed another vampire under the streets of Pioneer Square and had used one of Quinton’s tools to do it. Or at least something that looked a lot like one of Quinton’s vampire stunners. This he had not appreciated. At all. But he also didn’t understand it and that really bugged him.

Quinton liked logic; it had stood him in good stead all his life. Where things didn’t add up, he’d learned to ignore what most people thought of as “common sense” and look for patterns that, when joined with confirmed facts, would establish a reasonable working hypothesis. After all, Fleming had discovered penicillin by ignoring the common wisdom of throwing out the “contaminated” petri dish, and taking a look at the mold, instead. Quinton had discovered magic. Of course, he didn’t get a Nobel Prize for it.

Quinton imagined at first that someone was trying to set him up for trouble with Edward, Seattle’s bloodsucker-in-chief, but nothing had come of that. Edward—never his biggest fan—seemed to know he hadn’t done it and he didn’t make a move Quinton could see in response to it. Not against Quinton; not against anyone. That was definitely outside standard operating procedure for El Supremo Sanquinisto. And then he had nearly begged Harper to look into a problem in London for him—another out-of-character move for Edward. Begging? C’mon....

Edward’s desperation had pinged Quinton’s danger signals. He hadn’t wanted Harper to accept the job, but it wasn’t his decision and he hadn’t tried to push her. Something was afoot, but whether the London job was a legit problem or just a dodge to get her out of Seattle, neither of them knew and data was too sketchy for an informed guess. It bugged the hell out of them both.

In the end, despite being busy with the investigation of her past and why she was a Greywalker, Harper had agreed to the London job. She hadn’t given all her reasons, but she’d admitted that running Edward’s errand would give her a chance to look into another, possibly related, problem of her own. Quinton hadn’t been entirely surprised to discover another ex-boyfriend was involved—this one still alive but not in fantastic health by the time things were done in England. For a moment, he’d wondered exactly how many ex-boyfriends she had, but it wasn’t any real concern to him, so he’d deep-sixed the question. He was with Harper and that was the important point to his mind.

If anyone had asked Quinton ten years earlier what he thought he’d be doing by this stage in his life, observing vampires and dating a female PI who worked for ghosts wouldn’t have leapt to mind. Nor would he have said applying his skills to inventing ghost detectors or dodging monsters while living under the streets of Seattle. It’s not the sort of life-ambition East Coast–born intellectuals and computer geeks generally aspire to. Even disillusioned ones who’ve discovered the world doesn’t run on the rules taught to you in ethics class, and sometimes not on the ones you presumed in physics lectures either.

On the night before Harper left for London, the ghost detector had gone off. Quinton was pleased when his prototype ghost alarm started screeching. He had surmised that ghost activity might be rising along with the vampire activity. His working hypothesis was that paranormal activity tended to rise as a body, not just as isolated actions of isolated groups. He had expected to find a ghost or two, and here it was. Except that according to Harper, it wasn’t just one ghost he’d measured; it was fifty. And they had come looking for her. Then they’d taken over the detector’s speaker and blurted out the same message that had come from the dead boyfriend: “Things aren’t what you think.”

A few hours later, Harper was on her way to England and Quinton was ferret-sitting under the streets of Seattle, puzzling over what the vampires were up to, tinkering with the ghost detector, and wondering how his calibration could have been so far off. After that, things got seriously weird.

He and Chaos, the ferret, had been down in the abandoned sidewalks under the old part of town when push finally came to shove. They were exploring near the site where the electrocuted vampire had expired, Quinton hoping to find some clue as to why the other vampire—the survivor and aggressor—hadn’t taken him out, too. The area was in bad shape, a trash-filled space that had once been a single large basement room, now partially subdivided by long-abandoned efforts to rehabilitate it into useful storage. A spill of crumbling plaster, garbage, lumber, and plain old dirt made a rat playground at one end, cutting off the small plumbing and wiring closet in which Quinton had originally found himself trapped by the vampires. Quinton was becoming paranoid and very jumpy.