Kat Richardson: Underground

Two people in particular made this book work, and to them I owe huge thanks:

Rick Boetel, chief historian of Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour in Seattle, and Fran Fuller, of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, who introduced me to Rick and vetted the first draft. Without their help, the setting of this book would never have come to life. However, I must also apologize to Rick for taking tremendous liberty with the real-life layout and access to the underground. All I can say is, “The story made me do it.”

I’d also like to mention my agent, Steve, and my editor, Anne, who made fun of the monster at the proposal stage and thus made me swear it would work. All the funny bits are because of them. Special thanks to my mother-in-law, Sandy, who let me cast her as a homeless woman—she’s way too good to me. And many, many thanks to the Western Washington Urban Fantasy Posse: Chérie Priest, Richelle Mead, Caitlin Kittedge, Mark Henry, Lilith Saintcrow, and member-at-large Jackie Kessler.

The usual suspects also deserve many thanks, but the list is so long I can’t name them all without boring the pants off you. Family, friends, fans, fellow authors, certain booksellers, RAMs, agents, editors, my incredible cover artist, and that husband fella: You guys rock!

A final good-night to Jay Mezo, Boyd Grice, and Soren Pedersen. And the pirate kitty. You’ll all be missed.

If ghosts and monsters had someone else to harass, my life would have been a lot quieter, like it was before I died. But something happened while I was gone for those two minutes—something no one has been able to explain to my satisfaction—and now I not only see ghosts and monsters and things that go “bump” in the night, I seem to be some kind of stepsister to them. I’m a Greywalker: a dual citizen of the regular world and the Grey—the creepy interference fringe between the normal and the paranormal. The Grey overlays the normal world, invisible to most people but there nonetheless. Its a place of misty shapes and memories, shot with hot lines of living energy, layered with time and magic, where ghosts, vampires, and monsters are as real and common as dogs and cats and just as likely to bite.

I’m a private investigator. I like the job most of the time, but I have to admit it isn’t a great occupation if I want to have a reasonable social life, even at the best of times and without the complication of a client list that reads like the cast of a gothic horror novel. My profession and my ability to work in the world of ghosts and magic seems to have tangled me up in the needs, cases, causes, and disputes of every undead thing in the Pacific Northwest. They aren’t very good at taking no for an answer and they don’t stick to office hours, either. As much as I might want to leave that part behind, its a job I can’t quit and it’s hell on my love life.

It’s my bad luck, I suppose, that I met a great guy just when my life was being turned upside down by my own death and a permanent residence halfway into the uncanny. I’ve never been able to explain it—I don’t even try. Most people can’t really swallow the idea of murderous ghosts, helpful witches, uncanny artifacts, living energy, necromancers, vampires, and psychotic poltergeists.

They are even less inclined to accept that those things are all part of my daily life. I have a few friends and acquaintances who know, but they aren’t exactly life-mate material and some are downright nasty. It’s not surprising that my life and relationship are both pretty messed up.

My boyfriend, Will, and I were giving it another go over the holidays. A pretty rough go, I’m afraid, what with ghostly things demanding my attention whenever they took a shine to the idea. Thanksgiving had been OK, but Christmas hadn’t gone so well. By the second week of January, both the weather and my relationship got hit with an unexpected cold snap. And that was when I made the acquaintance of my first frozen corpse.

My knee ached in a way my physical therapist called “good” but I called “annoying.” Of course I might just have been annoyed with Will Novak and working too hard on the knee I’d messed up running from a murderous poltergeist in October. The lower leg lift I was concentrating on hurt like hell—who’d have thought that straightening my knee a paltry thirty degrees against a mere twenty pounds’ resistance would be so hard? But a lot of things are harder than they seem at first glance. What was hardest at that moment was holding my temper.

Will sat on the weight bench to my left, watching me. Resistance machines clanked and groaned around us, and free-weight lifters snorted like bulls amid the smells of rubber and sweat. “I still don’t understand how you managed to tear that knee up so badly,” he said. “What were you doing?”

“Working,” I said, grunting from the strain of the weight as I lowered my leg slowly, and muttering under my breath, “…three, four… five.” Two more reps and I could give the knee a rest while I worked on my shoulder—also a bit banged up from October’s ugly case.

I ignored Will while I finished the knee lifts. Then I slid out of the machine and sat down beside him. It wasn’t my favorite gym, but the pre-Christmas windstorm had knocked a tree into the front of the one I preferred, so I was using the gym near Will’s hotel. Downed power lines and damage were still widespread in outlying parts of Seattle and King County, so the facilities that were functioning were packed, and the moment I vacated the machine, another customer rushed to use it.

At first, Will had taken the hotel room so he wouldn’t presume on my hospitality when he’d come back from England as a Thanksgiving surprise. Somehow the right time to move his bags to my condo had just not come around—and I felt guilty that I didn’t want it to. He’d been lucky to keep his room at the hotel, since the city had been flooded with people who needed accommodations while their all-electric houses were unlivable during the power outage. It was expensive, but it had working plumbing and heat, which even my condo hadn’t had at one point.

Right behind the wind and rain had come an epic cold snap, and the current daytime temperature hung two to ten degrees below freezing—not cold in the Midwest, but plenty cold enough for a coastal city whose winter daytime temps usually ran in the mid-forties. The bizarre weather had killed people: nine deaths by asphyxia—people trying to heat their homes with barbecues and open flame heaters; two by falling trees that crushed motorists; and one by drowning in a flooded basement office. I was lucky to have been too far away from any of those events to feel them propagate through the energy grid of the Grey—I’d felt the delayed shock of one person’s death earlier that year, and I hoped to avoid ever feeling such a thing again. Even without that it had been a rather grim holiday season and the cold wasn’t letting up now that it was January.

“I was chasing a killer,” I continued. I’d said it before and I was a little galled at having the conversation yet again. In fact, I’d been running away, but the circumstances of that weren’t something Will would be able to swallow. I had been running with the intention of leading something into a trap—chasing it from in front, in a way.

“Its not your job to chase murderers. That’s what the cops are for. You aren’t a cop. You don’t have to do that.”