Labyrinth

by Kat Richardson

  “He didn’t. He tried to wipe it out but he’s not the hacker I am, and this recording is from one of Edward’s own backups, which Goodall didn’t have direct access to once the door locked and Carol had him taken off the security pass list. He tried to get at it through the remote backup system, but . . . he’s an end user and he doesn’t know how to really make a computer record disappear. And if it’s not wiped out in binary hash or physically destroyed, I can find it. Especially with direct access to said computer.”

  I nodded and scrubbed my face with my hands, trying to shove away the muzzy feeling that had settled on my brain. Quinton pulled my hands down and kissed my cheek. He tucked me tight against him and pressed my head onto his shoulder. I wanted to fall asleep there.

  “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I’m trying to make things easier, but I guess I’m just making them more complicated. And here I am running off at the mouth about my end. . . . I don’t know what you’ve had to do tonight—don’t even try to tell me now—but it couldn’t have been easy or pleasant, what with Novak and the vampires and Carlos. You go to sleep and I’ll take care of this.”

  “Take care of it . . . how?” I mumbled.

  “I’ll get the files cleaned up and together, and Carol and I will take them to Solis in the morning.”

  “No. You can’t go: He’ll arrest you.”

  “For what? For supposedly being a homeless drug addict who’s cleaning up his act and being a Boy Scout? He won’t. He’ll suspect me of something, but not this. Solis is a fair guy. He’s the only one I can trust, but he’s not the point man on this case. He’ll need more than Carol’s word to believe the information is good and take it to the team. This is the evidence that can bring the case out of the darkness and into the real world. Carol will give it weight to keep me out of trouble. And it’s one less job for you to do, so you can sleep in while I’m talking to Solis. Then I’ll show you the Grey dampener I’ve been working on and we’ll take care of the rest of this mess tomorrow night.”

  “Why you? Can’t you just give the recording to Carol and let her deal with Solis?”

  Quinton shook his head. “Convincing the cops will take some technical expertise and that’s my bailiwick. If it works, the feds might arrest Goodall before Wygan can put the last of his plan into motion and that may buy you some time. It’s a little risky but trust me: It’ll work out.”

  I made a grunt of protest; there was something wrong with what he was telling me and it would hurt him, I was certain, but I couldn’t put it together and I couldn’t keep my mind working against the pull of sleep to say so. I needed to tell him about tomorrow night and Carlos and all the rest, but it floated away before I could make the words. I tried to shake my head, but with me cuddled up against his chest, it just turned into a dopey nuzzle.

  Quinton kissed the top of my head and stood up, keeping me clutched against him. He carried me to a couch and tucked me in to sleep under the blanket, and I don’t remember what he did next. It didn’t involve any naked snuggling, though, which was disappointing.

  I know our bodies do most of their healing while we sleep. While we’re inactive, our brains sort through our activities and anxieties, making dreams and cleaning up the mental litter while the rest of the system goes into repair and restore mode. It’s also when most people die. Accidents and violence aside, it’s while asleep that most people shuffle off their mortal coil and leave the physical world for whatever lies beyond the far side of the Grey, where even the Guardian Beast doesn’t go.

  It was well after noon when I finally woke up, and Quinton was gone. The buzzing voice of the grid pulled me out of sleep and I woke up, blinking, into a world ablaze. The colors of the grid had bled up into the world overnight, or I’d stopped holding them back, and everything I looked at was brighter than I could stand. As I walked across the floor, it seemed to ripple silver and blue under my steps, little waves breaking outward as if the surface of the world were a thin membrane stretched over luminous water. Every movement I made seemed to whisper across the burning threads of the grid. I might have been able to push them back, but I just didn’t care to expend the energy and find out. This was the state Wygan had pushed me toward for so long and I’d fought it once, but that had only left me weak and unable to use the state to my advantage. I didn’t care to be in that position the next time I was deep in the Grey—and I would be unless something in the current situation changed more than I could imagine.

  Showering felt strange: My skin was too sensitive and the water felt effervescent and sharp. Every step of my usual routine was fraught with oddity: scents that were too strong or out of place; sounds that came too clearly to my ears; touches and sensations on my skin and fingers that were too rough, too cold, too hot. Even the taste of an apple I found in the kitchen was too sour and too sweet at the same time. I wore the softest clothes I had and kept the lights low.

  I read my e-mail, including Cameron’s instructions for the evening, with the screen dimmed nearly black. Beside the computer, I found a note Quinton had left for me—handwritten on a single sheet of paper—saying he’d gone with Carol to talk to Solis. He thought he’d be back about two. But it was just passing that and he wasn’t back. I tried calling the numbers for Carol on Edward’s phone but only got voice mail and had to leave messages asking for updates. Finally I left a long note for Quinton myself, telling him what had happened the night before and what was going to play out tonight.

  Beyond the facts, I had to include my speculation, too. I didn’t know if we had one day left or only tonight until Dru Cristoffer’s deadline for the puzzle balls expired. Guessing based on her personality, I suspected she’d be literal and give me seventy-two hours exactly from when she’d declared it. That meant I’d have to act with Carlos as soon as the matter of vampire succession was settled. I didn’t know where Wygan would stage his Grey coup, but if Carlos was right about the timing, it had to be ready to go the moment I was, so it had to be someplace nearby and already prepped.

  I’d already touched the fabric of the grid and bent it to my own designs—badly and in a limited way—but that would be all Wygan was waiting for and I was pretty sure he already knew it had happened. His own connections to the grid weren’t the same as mine, but it was clear to me that he could sense or hear things happening there, too. So far, he’d had only one chance to grab me and that had been too soon after my experiment with the power lines of magic in the walls of Edward’s bunker to give him much time to come for me. The easiest thing for him to do now would be to let Goodall catch me and take me himself to wherever the Pharaohn’s plans were meant to play out. I didn’t like the role of goat, but I didn’t see a lot of options, and I knew that no matter how much Goodall disliked me, his master wouldn’t let him harm me at this stage. I imagined that my presence at the After Dark club would bring someone around if I lingered long enough.

  After that, it was a matter of action and, whatever the result, it would be over by morning. Live or die, I had to succeed in stopping the Pharaohn’s plans for good tonight.

  I wrote another long letter, folded it, and put it in my purse. Still no sign of Quinton or Carol and the time was now four thirty. I didn’t have much of a window left to get the last of my business done before night fell and things got crazy.

  My first stop was Nanette Grover’s law office downtown. I worked for her once in a while, doing backgrounds on witnesses and investigating their stories before Nan went into court. She also acted as my lawyer on the rare occasions I needed one. It was an easy walk to her office from TPM, though I had to wear sunglasses under the overcast sky: The grid was too brightly present without them. Her secretary, Cathy, came out to meet me and it took a little discussion before she agreed to hold on to my holographic will for forty-eight hours. I said I’d come back and tear it up if everything went well, but I didn’t explain why it might be necessary in the first place. Mostly I wanted to be sure the property and pets scattered across Seattle got back where they belonged i
f I wasn’t drawing breath in the morning.

  I had a feeling that I’d bounce back if something fatal happened to me, but that hadn’t been the case for my father. There were a lot of things that could, potentially, go wrong in a permanent way and I didn’t know how to mitigate any of them. The close harmony of the grid, its strange way of taking me over and then leaving me at a distance, only confused my sense of survivability. And there was the seductive call of the grid itself. You didn’t have to be dead to fall away from the world and not return. Or return altered. I thought my father had hinted I could lose these odd powers, but to what extent? And what would my shape be if that were true? For all of these reasons—and for Quinton—there had to be something left behind.

  After that long, depressing thought, I found a quiet spot to call my mother.

  Funny that a month earlier I wouldn’t have considered calling her for anything—not even a matter of life or death—but here I was, poking her phone number and hoping she had a few minutes to talk. She had been the monster of my childhood, but lately I’d begun to see her differently: as a desperate and lonely person I almost pitied. Almost. She was still responsible for her own misery, but at least she wasn’t truly responsible for mine.

  She answered her phone and I wondered if she ever didn’t. “Sweetie!”

  “Hello, Mother.”

  “I was worried about you! You had to leave LA so quickly and I thought there must be something wrong.”

  “Yeah. A little. I went to London on some business, but I had to come back to Seattle to finish it up. While I was gone, my employer was kidnapped.” If anything happened to me tonight, chances were good I’d be connected to Edward’s disappearance in a bad and public way—at least by the press—and, in spite of years of indifference, I didn’t want her to think that badly of me.

  She gasped and judging from the dramatic sound, I guessed she had an audience. Probably her fiancé. “Oh, my goodness! Is he all right?”

  “Not yet. I’m . . . helping out with something this evening,” I fumbled, uncomfortable with my ragged half-truth. “If it works out, everything will be fine. I just . . . thought I should let you know that I’m fine.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Harper, be careful. Obviously you’re not going to change your mind about doing . . . whatever it is you’re doing. But . . . you’re my baby. And you promised to come to the wedding.” Her voice quivered a little, but she stamped down on that and finished strong. “And I’m holding you to that! You hear?”

  I smiled. Gods, she was transparent. “Yes, Mom.” And she had not abandoned me, even when I thought my father had. I was wrong about that, too, but as much as she infuriated me, at least her reasons for the crazy things she did were human.

  She sniffled. “You never call me Mom. . . .”

  “Well, I do now. And I have to go.” Before I started getting weepy myself and bloodying my clothes in public. “Send the invitations early, OK?”

  “All right, sweetie. You take care.”

  “I will. And you too.”

  I hung up and looked at the phone a moment before I put it away. That had been awkward. . . .

  I killed the last of the sunlight eating dinner in a restaurant at the top of a glass tower and staring at the city below as the lights came on, arc-bright in the Grey I couldn’t shake off. The voices of the grid grew louder as the hours passed but less comprehensible, the words chopped up like I was standing in the midst of a large party that jerked in and out of time. It made me irritable and paranoid. Quinton didn’t call. I didn’t like admitting that I was worried, and more than that: I feared I’d never see him again.

  THIRTY

  I wasn’t dressed for the place, but the doorman at the After Dark let me in anyhow. I suppose being alive in a vampire club is all the cachet you really need to get in. Staying that way may be trickier. But they know me, which is my real ace in the hole.

  It was still early for the bloodsucking fraternity and there weren’t very many customers in the place yet. A lot of the early birds were demi-vampires, donors, and subordinate turns waiting for whoever pulled their strings or strung them out. The room was always cold, but now the chill was my sense of the Grey clinging to me like a wet coat. The white marble floors seemed almost reflective in their brightness, and once the room was full, the red-and-black clouds of vampiric auras would give it a stygian cast. I spotted two asetem near the back door, their uncanny glowing eyes free of the usual contact lenses and gleaming orange like hot coals. I imagined the news of my presence would be in Wygan’s ears in minutes. The broadcast station had plenty of phone lines, even if there wasn’t a more arcane method of communication between the Pharaohn and his children that I didn’t know about.

  I sat down at what was usually Edward’s table, making a small stir in the thin crowd. I put my sunglasses back on and waited, schooling myself to be still, not to fidget with my bag or look for something to do. It wasn’t too hard: With my shades on, I could close my eyes against the battering light and sound and let the noise of the grid, humming and babbling with every change in the room, be my alarm system. The one positive angle I could see to the increasing apathy I felt as the grid tried to bind me to itself was that I didn’t yet feel any anxiety about this situation. And that made me less interesting to the watching asetem as well.

  The crowd was denser half an hour later when Gwen arrived. She slid next to me, as light on the strings of the grid as the stroke of a feather, but I still felt her presence like a cold finger drawn up my spine. “You look ruthless,” she whispered.

  “Ruthless?” I asked, opening my eyes and glancing at her.

  She was as pale and ineffective-looking as ever, but her eyes gleamed and she gave a tiny, hungry smile. “Yes. Dangerous with an air of power held in check.”

  “Hm,” I muttered. The strange change in my perception of the Grey seemed to have an outward expression as well, and that intrigued me a little. Or maybe it was just that the brightness and the noise made me scowl.

  I could feel tremors and flutters in the Grey. It was like being a spider in her web the way every disturbance traveled to me. The impression of Cameron’s arrival rippled through the room just a moment ahead of his presence with a gust of Grey whispers. I wondered if psychics felt something like this. It was interesting, but overall, I didn’t care for it. The asetem in the opposite corner were a different matter. They thrived on strong emotional emanations, so they must have been having a delicious time with the hors d’oeuvres of anticipation radiating from most of the people in the room.

  There was a palpable wave of anxiety and excitement that rang discordant wind chimes on the grid when Cameron and Sarah walked in. A sussuration of speculation raced and spread like flame, leaping high when Cam paused by the table, looking it over before he chose to sit down in what was usually Edward’s chair.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket and made me twitch—I hoped the vampires would take it as a sign that I was as surprised as they about Cameron’s move. Without looking, I squeezed the silence button and sent the call to voice mail. I hoped it was Quinton, but this was not the time to be checking my phone.

  Two of Edward’s usual hangers-on sidled close, plainly hoping to talk to Cam about what he was doing and looking askance at Sarah, who had taken the seat on his other side, putting him between her and Gwen. I, the foreign creature with the scary aura, sat at the free end of the group, where I could move at any time. The setting projected “Prince in his court” with the subtlety of a brick through a window.

  Cameron gave the two curious vampires a bland “Yes?” that served as opening enough for them to sit down and start whispering at him. The sound grated on my ears, distorted by the noise of the grid into sharp squawks. Cam looked bored and a little annoyed by the two supplicants, but he leaned forward and listened. I wondered if they’d been put up to the scene or if it was just a natural extension of the usual jockeying for position. I let my attention float out into the room on the power lines of t
he grid, wide enough to thin the noise in my head, but it only helped a little as everyone was focused back toward Cameron’s entourage.

  The other vampires and kin in the room stirred and muttered. Some left or moved to new tables, breaking and forming alliances as I watched; most stayed as they were, acting as if nothing going on in the room was important to them. A few sent Cameron glares of open hostility. Cam ignored it all and went on with his conversation.

  The place was full and the murmurs and adjustments were dying down when Carlos entered and blew the latent emotions in the room into brilliant flame that roared through the blazing grid. He stopped a single pace inside and studied the scene. A slow boil of black fury rolled off him and he strode toward our table. He did not seem to look at anyone other than Cameron, but I knew he was aware of us all, from the asetem looking avid and excited in the corner to me, playing stone-faced in my personal madhouse while Gwen cringed beside me.

  Carlos stopped at the edge of the table and glared at the two whispering vampires next to Sarah. They scuttled away without another word, leaving an insectile chittering on the threads of the Grey.

  Cameron looked up, his expression one of pleasant surprise and confusion with a touch of fear that I didn’t think was entirely feigned. He stood up, smiling. “Carlos!” Then he bridled and winced as Carlos redirected his glower to him.

  Carlos’s voice was not loud, but it rumbled through the Grey and set waves crashing into one another. “Presumptuous whelp. Do you think you’re Edward’s equal because you are my student?”

  Cameron shook his head. Tiny flashes of white and gold exploded in the energy nimbus around him. “No. Of course not. But there’s a void without him and it needs to be filled. I seem to be the only person willing to step in temporarily rather than try to grab it all for myself.”

  “Are you? And what if he never comes back? Will you step aside for someone else?”