Labyrinth

by Kat Richardson

  “It does matter. You’re just overwhelmed.”

  I took that in with a nod, though I wasn’t sure I believed it.

  “You’re hearing things?” he asked, looking concerned.

  “Yeah. Singing and voices. From the Grey. Not ghosts, something more . . . endemic. Sometimes it says things I need to listen to, sometimes it seems to move me, but most of the time, it’s just noise. Intrusive, implacable noise. Like the audience at a rock concert without the music.”

  “Do they have lighters?”

  “What?”

  “Lighters. You know: The sappy ballad dedicated to some dead band member starts up and everyone flicks their Bic and holds it on high.”

  I fixed an incredulous stare on him. “You have a romantic streak as wide as a hair.”

  “I am very romantic—I brought you flowers for your birthday.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “The ferret ate them.”

  I glared at him.

  “All right, she didn’t eat them. She pushed them on the floor and broke the vase and I had to throw them out, but I did bring them. You just weren’t home to appreciate them. See: That’s romantic, even if it’s kind of messed up. But that rock concert thing is sentiment, of which I have almost none.”

  I continued peering at him, though I did feel a giggle tugging at one corner of my mouth.

  “I traded it in,” he explained, “for an oscilloscope—it was a pretty nifty one, too.”

  I snorted a laugh. “Goof.”

  “Yup. Big goofy geek-boy here. I’m working on that ‘he makes me laugh’ thing because, you know, Roger and Jessica have it all over Rhett and Scarlett.”

  Now I laughed out loud and Quinton had to shut me up by kissing me, which I didn’t mind at all. It wasn’t that I was happy about what had happened at Rice House Antiques, but I no longer felt too awful to go on or too cold to care. Quinton was right in saying I couldn’t do anything for Will—at least not right then—and there were more pressing things on my agenda. I did feel terrible for the brothers Novak, but I’d have to make some kind of . . . amends later.

  It’s about a three-hour drive to Leavenworth from Seattle if you don’t pause for much. Most map searches will tell you it’s two and a half, but even in the best weather the roads through the mountains in the final third of the trip don’t encourage driving over the posted limits. The surfaces themselves are fine, but the twists and turns with precipitous drops into rivers and ravines just a few feet aside aren’t. Ribbons, rock piles, and occasional plaques mark the places where the road and some of its drivers parted ways. We took the northern route through Monroe, but I had to ask Quinton to take the wheel once we passed Skykomish. Even with the filtering effect of the Rover’s steel and glass, the sudden flashes of accidents and ghosts racked me with shocks. We were almost out of the pass when I spotted the last shadow of a fatal accident on the route: Two women and a young boy in 1940s clothes stood at the outside edge of a bend that hung over the Wenatchee River below. They were dripping wet and looked frightened and confused. Even the small black dog at their feet seemed disoriented by what must have happened to them all. I had to turn my head away from their imploring stares.

  “Bad?” Quinton asked.

  I just nodded.

  About ten minutes later we came out of the pass and started the last short downhill to Leavenworth, a mock-Bavarian village beside the highway surrounded by a larger town full of retirees, orchard keepers, and railroad workers. The traffic was thicker than I’d expected for so late in the day—it was after four o’clock already—and we slowed to a creep as we entered the city limits. A soft, floral smell spiked with the odors of greenery, manure, and beer slipped into the truck’s vents and invited us to roll down the windows, even though the air outside was crisp and the shadow of the mountain was already falling onto the bowl of the valley, lowering the temperature further.

  “So where are we going?” I asked as we passed Icicle Road and the slope flattened considerably as U.S. 2 made its two-lane way through town.

  “No idea. Didn’t look it up yet.”

  “Did Rice tell you where the house it came from was?”

  “No. I had the impression the salvage wasn’t quite on the up-and-up, so he didn’t have an address—covering his ass in case anyone complained and identified him. He said it was in an orchard outside town.”

  I looked around. Everything that wasn’t houses or quaint Bavarian shops was either apple trees or ski resort business. Even from the business-choked confines of Highway 2, I could see the fruit trees climbing the hills surrounding the town. Late blossoms covered many of the visible trees in mantillas of pink-tinged white. Brighter white or pink splashes marked out the occasional pear or cherry tree in the congregation.

  “Yeah . . . that’s going to be easy to spot.”

  “We’ll start with the address we’ve got for Christopher Drew—the guy who bought the puzzle ball. The writing’s a bit hard to read, but that seems to be the name. If I can find some WiFi, I can look it up.”

  It didn’t seem likely we’d get any signal in the middle of the road, but it wasn’t going to be easy to park: The streets of the town were thick with cars and pedestrians. Over the sound of engines idling, a loudspeaker squawked something about Apple Blossom Royalty and beer gardens. A lot of the cars ahead of us peeled off to the right in front of a restaurant named Gustav’s that sported an onion dome on a steeplelike extension and gingerbread deck rails cut with fanciful tulip shapes.

  Quinton shot a wary look at the throng turning right and stayed to the left. “Let’s not go wherever they’re going.”

  I took a longer look and saw the branching road was much more ornately built with unrelenting Bavarianisms on both sides. A block or so away the road curved abruptly and I could see a bright yellow banner hung high across the street on the dogleg beyond. It wasn’t close enough to read but I got the gist.

  “I doubt we’ll be able to avoid it,” I said. “There’s some kind of festival going on.”

  We crept past a hotel dressed up like an Alpine ski lodge that sported a smaller yellow banner with the words “Welcome to Maifest!” right under its Howard Johnson logo. I grimaced at our timing.

  “Better park and walk,” Quinton suggested.

  I rolled my eyes at the thought.

  It turned out not to be so bad, though it did take fifteen minutes to find a parking place. I figured that dinner was approaching for some of the locals and they might prefer to eat at home rather than at the tourist-quaint biergartens and rathskellers. A bit of walking on the less popular highway side of the main drag brought us back into the center of town. Quinton spotted a familiar green logo near the park in the middle of the village and we headed for it, though the heavy German script made it difficult to make out the small carved sign on the building’s side that read “Starbucks.” We hunkered down with the dark sludge they call coffee while Quinton poked at his handheld.

  Leavenworth was an odd place. On the south side of the highway it was conspicuously a themed tourist mecca with cute Alpine architecture straight off the slopes of Disney’s version of the Matterhorn. North of the highway, the Bavarian theme continued but in patches, interrupted with much more prosaic American buildings and ordinary houses beyond that. The Alpine architecture wasn’t entirely out of place since we’d only come a few hundred feet down from the ridge to the valley floor: The area was still mountainous and would whiten with thick drifts in the first snowfall. In the Grey I could see the bland, busy railroad town it had once been. But the rails had moved north to take a shorter route though the pass and this town had nearly died.

  I stepped outside for a moment and glanced up and down Front Street—the main drag—looking at the pretty little buildings that hung their present happy colors over the sad, shuttered businesses that had once dominated the place. That was depressing, but as silly as I thought the current incarnation was, at least it was thriving. I had to applaud whoever had come
up with the idea. Other towns abandoned by their primary industry hadn’t fared so well.

  Quinton came out onto the railed porch that overlooked the street and put his arm around my waist. “It’s a little weird, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you know they have their own German-language newspaper here? They’re really into the Bavarian thing.”

  “Seems to be working. Though it must seem a bit sad and strange when it isn’t Maifest.”

  “It’s always something out here. Next week is Spring Bird Fest. Can you imagine what it must be like in October?”

  I shivered at the vision of thousands of beer-loving tourists flooding into the tiny town to celebrate the traditional German brewfest. I wondered if they had to chase the visitors indoors and hose off the streets every night, though at that time of year, hosing might lead to icing; the seasons turned cold quickly on the eastern side of the state. I didn’t like the way my thoughts kept coming back to the negative, so I changed the subject. “Did you figure out where the address is?”

  “Yeah. It’s close, but it’s on the other side of the river, so we’ll have to drive. The nearest bridge is a two-mile walk and we’d have to walk about the same distance on the other side. I don’t relish that sort of hike with the mountains already cutting the sunlight.”

  Quinton was right: Snuggled up tight to the valley’s western wall, the shadow of the mountains had already cloaked the town, casting it into a long blue twilight scented with apple blossoms. We’d have to get moving if we were going to get much done before full darkness.

  Quinton had his map on the palmtop and I drove to his directions, continuing down Highway 2 until we crossed the Wenatchee River, then doubling back on the other bank, looking for a house set back from the road. We nearly missed it, overhung as it was by trees and pushing its back door almost up to the riverbank. It wasn’t an interesting house, just an old one and quite plain, painted a muddy green that vanished into the trees and overgrown yard.

  There was nothing sinister about it, yet as I got out of the truck, I felt a chill creeping over my skin that had nothing to do with the oncoming night or the rising chatter of the grid. In the Grey, a brilliant line of clear blue energy sizzled along the river behind the house while spikes and coils of red and yellow formed an ornate fence around the property. I’d never seen anything like it. The closest thing I could think of was the gold tracery of Mara’s perimeter spells around the house on Queen Anne Hill. This wasn’t the same shape or color: The lines and curves were much more pointed, thin, and sharp, more like barbed wire than the vinelike weaving Mara made. Although it was red, I didn’t get the same nauseous sensation from this cloud of energy that I did from vampires. It was unpleasant in a different way and I was not pleased that the puzzle ball was in the possession of whoever had raised that fence.

  Quinton noticed I was looking askance at the place. “What?”

  “Something magic. I don’t know if it will let us pass or not.”

  “Magic like a monster, or magic like a spell?”

  “Spell. Boundary markers, I think. How do you feel when you look at that house?”

  Quinton turned to study the building. “Like I shouldn’t be here; this is the wrong house. Whatever I came here for is pointless and I might as well go home.” He started to turn away and caught himself. “Ah . . . I get it. It’s some kind of . . . ‘leave me alone’ spell. Must keep the kids out of the yard pretty well.”

  I hummed to myself. That wasn’t quite the reading I was getting, but then I didn’t see or hear things in the normal way. The energetic border was definitely sending out a “go away” vibe, but more specifically, it was a warning to other magic users: Don’t try it. Looked as if I was in for a bit of dismantling, though I couldn’t imagine that was going to make the spell-caster pleased. I glanced around the property, searching for a place to take a shot at the magical fence without being in direct view of the street or neighbors. This was not going to be fun and I preferred not to do it in public, though it was growing dark so fast that that might not be an issue for long.

  As I was staring, Quinton gave a sudden twitch and dug into one of his pockets as if it were on fire. He pulled out a mints tin and held it out to me in two fingers, as if it were hot or infected with something. “I think you want this.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Your ghost is giving me shocks. Maybe it doesn’t like this place, either.”

  I took the tin, having momentarily forgotten about Simondson’s ghost. Flipping it open, the ghost of my killer emerged like a red-orange smog. “Earring.”

  “What?” I asked, peering at his thin form.

  “I don’t know. Something says ‘earring.’ You need an earring.”

  “And whose errand boy are you, now?” I demanded.

  He grew thick and solid, then winced and writhed away in pain, falling back to his shadowy state. “I don’t know! I just want shut of you! Of this. Something says ‘get the earring’ and I say ‘get the earring.’ I don’t care if you do or not. Go get yourself killed for all I care.”

  I felt the urge to laugh at him, however nuts that sounded. “If I get killed, you’ll be stuck here forever in this candy box.”

  “No, I won’t. You’ll come back, like the damned bad penny that you are.”

  “Says who?” I asked, but I, too, had the feeling that I wasn’t quite up to death-the-last yet. If I was, Wygan wouldn’t have been continuing to push me; he’d have given up on me as he had on Marsden in London. But if he wasn’t there to push me, who knew what I would become in the Grey? Or what I might lose . . . ?

  “Says . . . them,” Simondson replied. “Those . . . voices. They say so.”

  Them. The voices in the Grey. He didn’t identify them as other ghosts, just “voices” the same as I did. I nodded. “All right. I got the message. Are you ready to go back in the box, now?”

  “No! I want to leave! You said—”

  “When I’m done, Todd. Not before. Now, in you go.”

  I shoved his incorporeal self back into the tin and snapped it closed. I turned back to the truck for a moment, stuffing Simondson’s box into the glove compartment while I looked around the floor.

  “What are you searching for?” Quinton asked, drawing close behind me. He was still rubbing his fingertips as if contact with the tin had given him a shock or a burn.

  “That box of Edward’s that the knife was in. It had an earring in it. . . .”

  “Why do you want that?”

  I’d forgotten Quinton couldn’t hear the ghosts. “Simondson says I need it.”

  We scrabbled in the accumulation of bags and belongings stowed in the back until we found the carton I’d slit open outside the FedEx building. I extracted the earring from the collection with care, feeling a bitter pain as I touched it. I tucked it into my pocket with its twin from the puzzle ball and turned back to the house.

  I started back along the property line toward the river. Quinton followed saying, “What are you thinking?”

  “That I need to find a way past this magic fence and then I can do whatever it is I’m supposed to do with this earring. . . . I have a bad feeling that just walking through is not as easy as all that. And once I do break the fence, whoever made it is not going to be pleased.”

  “Maybe you don’t have to break it. Could you bypass it?”

  I turned back under a weeping willow tree and frowned at him. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Magic seems to be a bit like electricity. Electrical circuits can be bypassed—jumpered—in some places. You run a piece of wire from one part of the circuit directly to another, which cuts part of the circuit out without the rest of the system noticing since current is still flowing and all other parts are functioning. So long as the bit you bypass doesn’t set off an alarm on its absence, you can go right through the circuit at that point. That’s how burglars used to get through simple wired perimeters: Just make a jumper wire long enough to sl
ide under, connect your wire from one side to the other of the hole you need, cut the original wire, and go through the hole while the electricity keeps on flowing through the system as if nothing happened. Most magic things seem to be pretty simple circuits, so maybe some kind of bypass would work without disrupting the spell enough to set off an alarm.”

  “If it were that easy, I think witches and mages would do it all the time,” I replied.

  “Maybe it’s not easy for them. Magic users have to address the system through the interface they have; they don’t just grab hold of the system itself. But that’s not the way you see it. You see magic in the raw, as it were.”

  “But you’re not talking about seeing; you’re talking about manipulating. I don’t do that.”

  “Why not? If you can pull magical things apart like you did with that alarm spell outside the Danzigers’, why not this? It doesn’t make you a mage,” he hastened to add, cutting short my objection, “but it seems to be in line with other things you’ve done recently.”

  That startled me. The idea was dangerously close to the one advanced by Carlos: that I could potentially bend the fabric of magic itself. “I . . . really don’t want that power.”

  “You don’t seem to have a choice, sweetheart.” He pulled me into a loose embrace under the willow with its long strands of leaves like a curtain between us and the world. “I know you’re afraid—”

  “Not afraid, more like horrified. I don’t want to be Wygan’s tool for . . . whatever it is he’s got planned.”

  “I understand that. But he’s going to keep pushing until you’re his or you’re dead. I don’t want you dead, not even hurt. It’s hard for me to see the things that happen to you, the things that are happening, but—and I never thought I’d say this—Carlos may be right: The only way to stop Wygan is to take the power and use it against him. If you understand it and control it before he has a chance to control you, it’s not his power or his choice anymore: It’s yours.” Even in the gloom, I spotted a suspicious moist shine in his eyes. Quinton cry? Surely the world had turned upside down.