Kat Richardson - Vanished

“Do you require assistance?” the beadle asked.

I started to refuse but thought I’d be better off without another visit from Percy. “Yes, please. I seem to be managing poorly with these boxes.” With a very good grace, he took the biggest box from me and escorted me to the nearest street door to hail a cab and wave me on my way. There were no other little tricks from the resident poltergeist.

I asked for the nearest place I could pack and ship the boxes, and the cabby obliged with alacrity while I worried at the question of what the poltergeist meant. It was obvious this was a continuation of the messages I’d been getting since this whole kerfuffle started, but they’d dropped off once I’d left the States and I’d been happy to be shut of them for a while. Now here was another message and much clearer than before. The question I’d started out with had been answered to a degree: I was a Greywalker because my father had dumped the job and Wygan, the Pharaohn of the asetem-ankh-astet, had a purpose for one, a special one, so he’d pushed us to be that tool. But, as the ghosts had warned, that answer wasn’t the answer at all. The real question wasn’t so much “why” as “what next?” and the answers seemed to be coming, in a way, from my dad, if the telltale endearment meant anything. Obviously, I had a lot of unfinished business back in Seattle, which included finding out what had become of my killer and what Wygan was doing with the ghost of my father. Yet another reason to get home as soon as possible. The job I’d come for was almost done and the one remaining loomed like a tidal wave.

Once the packages were on their way to my place in Seattle—I figured that even the collective powers of the Red Brotherhoods of St. James and St. John couldn’t subvert FedEx—I called Quinton. It was about eight in the evening there, so it only took a few minutes for him to call me back as I was walking toward the nearest Underground station.

“Hey, beautiful,” he said.

“Hey, yourself. You still at my place?”

“Yeah. It’s still crazy under the streets. Crazier, even. And Edward is still missing or incognito.”

I made a face. “I hate to say that’s what I was expecting.”

“So, you’re not coming back?”

“No, I am coming back. Tomorrow in fact. So long as things go as planned. If not, well. send flowers.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“It is all of that bad. Do you remember Alice, the vampire who crashed our party at the museum two years ago?”

“I thought she was dead,” Quinton answered slowly.

“Join the club. She fooled us all. She was hooked up with Wygan and he somehow kept her going long enough to ship her here and start pulling the rug out from under Edward. Once she was in control, she lured me here under his orders and tried to make me a little more dead so I’d be a better fit for whatever Wygan has in mind. That’s what this has been about since I was a little kid, even before I was born. My dad was supposed to be the Greywalker, but he quit with a.38-caliber resignation.” I was amazed how angry I felt as I recited it. I was furious at how I’d been used, how my father had been pushed until he broke, how our friends and family had been hurt and killed and used as levers against us.

I continued, “Alice was Wygan’s cat’s-paw from the start. She got me killed the first time, too—or the second, I guess, but who’s counting—so I could be the right kind of Greywalker for Wygan’s purpose. Once I have Will back, I’m done here, because what’s going on at home is apparently just the start of Wygan’s endgame, and I’m going to stop him. At least now I know. I know what I am: I’m a tool to build some kind of gateway—but I’m not going to do it.”

“You don’t have to. Sweetheart, we could run—”

“No. You can run. Wygan will just keep coming after me until he gets what he wants or he gets stopped.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you, unless I’m running toward you.”

I smiled and felt warm for the first time all day. “I’ll be the one running toward you. Will you come get me from the airport?”

“Sure.”

“I may have the Novaks with me, but I’m hoping they can travel alone and attract less attention. I’ll page you with more info. Then I’ll call the condo when the plane touches down. You should be able to get to the airport by the time I’m through customs. The car keys are on the—”

“Floor. Chaos has them.”

I laughed. “She’s such a little thief.”

“She’s not a very good thief. She never tries to fence anything that’s worth a damn. Just old squeaky toys and buttons—which were mostly mine to begin with.”

We both laughed a little more, but the next breath brought back our worries and Quinton said, “You are coming back. Right?”

“I am coming back. Yes. Because the alternative is not an option. And I love you.” It was the hardest thing I’d ever said, especially after the casual blow Cary’s ghost had delivered about those words, and I waited in torment during the silence that followed.

Very quietly, Quinton responded, “I love you, too. And I will see you soon. Once I get the keys back from the ferret.”

I hung up, smiling, even though the prospect ahead was grim, and headed for my meeting with Marsden at Angel Station.

The platform was busy, and I looked through the Grey for Marsden’s slippery aura of colorless shapes rather than try to sort the crowd by eye for him. It took a bit of walking and a ride up the nearly endless escalator to find him on a bench in the intermittent sunshine that was breaking through the clouds.

A girl and her mother were sharing the bench with the blind man, who was keeping his head down, his long hair masking the disfigurement of his face, as he talked to them. The woman looked a bit wary, but the girl was smiling and holding something out to him. He took it and stroked the thing with remarkable gentleness. I got a little closer but stopped to watch, rather than interrupt the scene.

Marsden must have sensed my proximity; I saw him stiffen a bit and turn his head a little in my direction. He passed his gnarled hands over the furry little thing. “Magic, he is,” he murmured. “Just magic. I had a hob just like him once—noble fella and a fine mole catcher, too. Quick as thought, he was, and clever with it. He’ll do well with you, I think.”

Then he held the fluff ball out for the girl: It was a young sable ferret with a little bandit mask and bright eyes. The sight of it made tears sting in my eyes as I thought of Chaos living in Quinton’s pockets, and I hoped she would stay safe. “I’ve got to move along now,” Marsden continued. “Thank you, my dear, for introducing me to your Dexter. You’ll take good care of him, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” the girl replied, cuddling the little animal to her chest.

He nodded at her mother before tapping his way across the busy cement apron around the station’s mouth to where I stood.

“You’re late,” he said.

“And you are a big fake, you grumpy old man. I didn’t have you pegged for a ferret fancier.”

He snorted and began walking on, expecting me to follow. “Clever little beggars. Excellent at flushin’ moles from holes. And ghosts from buildings—they can’t resist chasing ’em. Not trying to kill ’em, mind you; they just like to rout ’em out. They’ll dance and chatter like a mad thing and drive the haunts bloody bonkers. They’ll zoom along a ley line and pounce on anything Grey as gets in their way. Fearless, they are. Charm the socks right off ya, too.”

“Yes, they do,” I replied, thinking of Chaos’s wild behavior around anything ghostly, like the first time she’d dived headfirst into the Grey to take on the guardian beast on her own. She hadn’t won that fight, but she hadn’t lost it, either. “I have a ferret at home.”