Underground (Greywalker, Book 3)

by Kat Richardson

  “Maybe Sistu will eat Fern and we can blame it on a secret government project,” Quinton speculated, half-seriously. “The Feds would step in and Solis wouldn’t be allowed to pursue the case any further no matter how he felt about it.”

  “We should be so lucky,” I scoffed. “It’s not as if we have any control—” I stopped, cut off by an intersecting thought.

  “Control of what?” Quinton asked.

  I frowned, concentrating, trying to get a hold of the slippery idea that had run through my head. I put up one finger to hold back his questions as I thought. “We postulated a pattern. What if the pattern is determined by a person—not a god masquerading, but an ordinary person and their ordinary drives? Ella Graham said that if the gods were pleased they might send Sistu to help a petitioner hunt. Maybe . . . Qamaits can lend out her pet herself. She’s got power over the monster, so why not hand him over to someone who did her a favor? Like . . . getting her out of the construction pit?”

  “Then the person who helped her out is still alive.”

  “And using their monster-on-loan to settle scores. But Sistu needs to eat more frequently than his hunting buddy wants to whack someone, so . . . he grabs a snack and takes it to his lair for later.”

  “So Felix was a snack, but Jenny or Go-cart were revenge?”

  I nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. Separate the zombies from the disappeared, and the ones who were found dead are the key to finding out who’s responsible. We’re not looking for anything supernatural on that score—just a human with a grudge.”

  I shuddered and thought about the necessities of the normal world. “This isn’t going to fly with Solis. He might buy the idea that someone killed some of the undergrounders, but the chances are good whoever it was has an alibi for at least one of the deaths—he doesn’t have to be nearby if Tall Grass was right about Jenny’s death. I’m not sure how I’d point the finger, either. Solis is not my biggest fan since the poltergeist business.”

  “It’s more important to get rid of the monster than to lock someone up for it.”

  I nodded. “We’ll have to catch up to whoever it is first since the monster must be hanging around him . . . or her. It won’t be easy, since the monster might decide we look like lunch and whoever’s directing it might not even know what’s going on if they don’t speak Lushootseed or whatever the thing speaks. I wish I knew what it was saying last night. . . .”

  “What who was saying?”

  “Sistu. Didn’t you hear it yelling at us?”

  “I couldn’t make anything out of it. It sounded like screaming or speaking in tongues.”

  “Many tongues. I think I caught a few words, but the rest was mush. It talks. And it flickers through a whole closetful of shapes as it does. Ella Graham said it was clever and sneaky. Maybe we can slow it down if we can just figure out how to talk to it. . . .”

  SIXTEEN

  Mara let us in. She nodded to Quinton and gave me a keen look that wasn’t a smile but wasn’t anything else, either. I didn’t know what had brought on this distance—unless she was still upset about Albert— but her invitation inside was distracted and formal. “Do come in. Ben’s upstairs. I’ll be keeping Brian busy down here, so he’ll not trouble you.”

  I gazed hard at her, trying to figure out what was wrong, but she’d cloaked herself in deliberate blankness. I glanced deep into the Grey for any sign of Albert—thinking he might be the cause of her coolness—but I could find no sign of him in the house and only the hard, red ball of the trap Mara had wrapped him in the last time, still clinging to the roof under the twisting gold lines of her protective spells.

  “Thanks. Mara,” I started, but she waved the rest of my words aside.

  “Not now, Harper. I’ve a lot to think on,” she said, and hurried off, worrying her bottom lip.

  I looked at Quinton and shrugged. We headed for the stairs and up to Ben’s office beneath the eaves.

  Ben was doodling and drinking tea when we entered the attic. He jumped up from the desk, not quite knocking his head against the low ceiling.

  “Oh, hello! Sorry, sorry—kind of jumpy since the Albert incident. ”

  “Why?” I asked. “Has he done something else?”

  “No, no, no,” Ben babbled. “But I keep thinking he will and I’m a little stir-crazy anyhow. I feel like I’m in Mara’s way. I thought I’d rework my lesson plans since we’ve lost almost a week of classes, but . . . I just can’t concentrate on them. Oh, who’s this?” he added, finally turning his attention to Quinton.

  “This is Quinton. He brought me a . . . an interesting case and we could use your help. It’s likely to be dangerous, though.”

  Ben seemed to perk up. “Is it a Grey thing?”

  “Yes. We’ve been looking into the deaths of some homeless in Pioneer Square—”

  “I saw some news articles about that,” Ben said.

  I nodded. “The ones that said bodies had been found apparently chewed by dogs, right?”

  “Yeah. Not dogs, I take it?”

  I shook my head and sat down on a clear spot on the office sofa. “Not dogs.”

  “Tea!” Ben exclaimed.

  Quinton and I both stared at him, startled by the outburst.

  Ben blinked back. “Sorry. Tea. Would you guys like some? I have a pot up here; I can get more glasses.”

  I considered saying no, but it was a little chilly in the office and Ben seemed to want to do something. “Tea is great, Ben. We can wait.”

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, ducking out and bounding down the steep steps so the stairwell rang behind him.

  I tugged at the elastic knee brace under my jeans as Quinton cleared some space beside me. He looked at the spines of the books as he lifted them off the seat. “I can’t even read half these titles and it’s not just because they’re in German and Russian and . . . I don’t know what language that is. . . . He’s got some really old books here.” He had a gleam in his eye as he flipped opened a venerable leather-bound tome stamped in faded gold Cyrillic. “Wow. The publication date on this is 1789. That was a hell of a year.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. The French Revolution started in 1789—among a lot of other events that changed the world.” He caught my bemused look. “Hey, I was always good with dates and numbers. Mom was an engineer and Dad was a spy—you pick up skills,” he added with a shrug.

  “So, the spy thing . . . that’s the family business?” I asked.

  “Dad’s side,” he said, putting the book down with care and sitting next to me. “I was kind of my mom’s kid and I got into computers and science and math early on because of her—got the nickname because of her, too. I didn’t see my dad much, so the spy thing seemed sexy and exciting—which you can’t say for engineering—and that’s how I ended up working for the government in the first place. I wish I’d stuck to electronics.”

  The sound of Ben’s heavy feet on the stairs cut the conversation short before I could ask, “What nickname?”

  It took a bit of faffing about to get everything distributed and settled again—Ben’s Russian tea habits being almost as fussy as any formal Brit’s—before Quinton and I could get Ben’s attention.

  I curled my hands around the hot glass in its metal holder and noticed the scabs and scrapes from the previous night’s narrow escape. It seemed strangely distant until the memory of fear rushed back in for a moment and made my gut twist. I sipped my tea and caught my breath as Quinton cast a questioning glance my way.

  I shook him off with a small, reassuring smile. Ben was watching me, too, but his look was more plainly curious.

  “All right. So. These poor homeless folks,” he prompted.

  “Aside from the dead, there are several missing and they all seem to be victims of the same thing. They’re being eaten by a legendary Native American monster and, aside from killing people, it also makes zombies,” I said. Ben was capable of rambling for hours, so I figured I’d better nip that tendency
in the bud by cutting straight to the bone of the matter.

  Ben’s face lit up. “Really?” Then he shook himself and his face went white under his dark beard. “Oh my God, that’s horrible!”

  “There’s a lot more to it,” I said. “This monster, Sisiutl, seems to be under someone’s control—partial control. We need to catch both the monster and the man and get rid of the monster. But we’re here because we got up close and personal with Sistu—it’s a safer name to use—last night and it seems to talk in a whole glut of languages, bits and pieces all at once. I think we’d be a lot safer if we can talk to it. It’s clever enough to pull pranks and make deals to hunt in exchange for food, so if we can talk to it there’s always a possibility we can bargain with it—if it doesn’t eat us first. It also seems to cast illusions of shape-shifting. I’m not sure what’s going on and I’d like to be better equipped the next time we run into it. So I thought we should ask you for any ideas about the nature of the beast.”

  Ben glowed gold and sparky with intellectual pleasure. “You’ve both seen it?”

  “Not just us. Plenty of people who didn’t know what they saw, or who died right afterward,” I said.

  That made Ben a little grimmer as he asked, “What does it look like? What kind of forms does it throw?”

  “It’s a two-ended sea serpent—kind of like a hairy snake with a head at each end and a human face in the middle. It’s the human face that does the talking. The snake ends just hiss and bite. It shows various forms—I saw Ouroboros, a gorgon, a multiheaded dog with snakelike necks for each head, a dragon, and a kind of snake with hands. Oh, its default form seems to have clawed hands near the human face and horns on the snake heads. And it sometimes acts as a guard to the house of the gods, sometimes helps hunters and warriors, but it’s also a bit of a trickster and very, very hungry.”

  I thought Ben was going to dance with glee, once again caught up in the excitement of his favorite subject. “Let me think, let me think,” he muttered, scrabbling in his books and papers. He found a pen and made a bunch of quick notes on the back of a legal pad that was already full of other notes on the pages. “Repetition of the snake theme . . . guardian . . . warrior . . . helper . . . hungry . . . multiheaded . . . Oh, man. It’s the universal monster.”

  “Huh,” Quinton and I both said.

  “Well, you know your Campbell, right? His ideas about monomyth—universal themes in myth and religion—and universal heroes?”

  We both nodded—it’s hard to avoid Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces in college.

  “OK, well . . . he’s a bit overblown and people always forget his sources—Joyce, Mann, Frobenius, Spengler—but there is good support for the idea of universal—or at least widespread and recurring—themes in myth. What you’ve encountered is a great example. The guardian, the serpent god, the helper and slayer of warriors. It comes up again and again. So . . . my guess is that the shapes it shows are the various forms by which it’s known in different cultures and it can speak the languages of all of those cultures which call it into being.”

  Quinton interrupted. “I only saw the one form—the double-ended snake with the head in the middle.”

  “Oh?” Ben looked puzzled. “Why is that do you think?”

  Quinton scoffed. “Because that’s the shape I was expecting. Harper is the one who sees magic things. I just see what’s there to be seen.”

  “Did you have any idea what you might see before you encountered it?” Ben asked.

  “Yes,” Quinton replied. “We’d been told by an old Indian woman what it was and what it looked like.”

  Ben grinned. “Clearly the monster’s appearance fulfills the expectations of the viewer. Of course Harper sees multiple forms— she sees the magic, so she sees it all. Wonderful! I hadn’t thought of it.”

  “Well, it’s fine to see it, just not too close,” I said. “It’s big and it’s got lots of teeth in those heads. If we run into it again—and we have to if we’re to get rid of it—we need to keep it from eating us before we can send it away. It understands English and speaks a little, but mostly it spews words in dozens of languages at once, which makes it hard to understand.”

  “I’m sure it would pick just one if you get its attention long enough,” Ben suggested.

  “That’s kind of tricky,” I protested. “Its default form seems to be the native legend—the double-ended sea serpent—and that version doesn’t speak English. Also, I don’t think any of those forms are really native English speakers. Unless it turns out to be Grendel in disguise, too.”

  Ben shook his head. “No, Grendel isn’t that archetype and he would have spoken Old English at best, not modern.”

  “Well, then . . .”—I hesitated to ask, since I was already in the doghouse with one member of the Danziger family—“would you come with us to talk to it? Assuming we can catch it? We need to figure out where it came from and who controls it. There’s also an ogress around somewhere who can call it back to her side, and we’d like to send the whole bunch back to the gods and keep any more homeless from being lunch.”

  “Well, you can’t compel gods or their helpers; you can only argue with them and get them to agree to leave,” Ben said. “You’ll have to gain the agreement of this ogress to send the monster home after you separate the monster from whoever is currently using its powers.”

  “We’re not sure who controls it,” Quinton reminded me, “but we can find out. But we’ll have to catch the thing eventually and it’s not likely we can just throw a rope around its neck and drag it to the zoo. We may need to persuade it.”

  “Legends are full of that kind of lawyering—you can’t just banish power from the gods and you can’t kill gods or their guardians. If it’s a clever monster, bargaining will appeal to it,” Ben agreed, nodding. “Yes, I’ll go. I’d be stupid not to. I’ve never seen an incorporeal beastie before.”

  “This thing is not incorporeal,” I warned. “It’s got real teeth and they chew through real concrete walls. And if anything happens to you on this excursion, Mara will probably kill me.”

  “She’s not like that.”

  “She seems plenty upset with me at the moment.”

  “I think she’s more upset with herself—we both feel a bit like Ted Bundy’s neighbors. ‘He was such a nice ghost, so quiet. . . .’ It’s unsettling and we both wonder what else we may have missed seeing.” Ben raised his eyebrows at me.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know of anything else. And I only suspected Albert because his behavior didn’t add up in my mind. So far, my experience with lively ghosts has been predominantly unpleasant.”

  “I know. . . .”

  “I don’t think this monster business is going to be a lot more fun, but it’s at least something I don’t have to chase on my own. So,” I added, standing up, “you guys ready to go catch monsters? ”

  Ben stood up and put his glass aside. “I don’t have anything I’d rather be doing. I’ll let Mara know I’m going. I’ll meet you in the hall.”

  Quinton and I nodded and we all trooped down the first flight of stairs. Ben peeled off to find Mara on the second floor while Quinton and I continued to the first.

  As we stood in the entry hall, I concentrated on buttoning my coat. “So . . . what about the nickname?” I asked.

  “The—? Oh,” he said, remembering our interrupted conversation upstairs. “My mother’s name is Quinn.”

  “And you’re Quinn’s son. Quinn’s son becomes Quinton. . . . That’s a terrible pun.”

  “It stuck for a while. But my dad never used it—I don’t know if he even knew it existed—and I never used it around my employers. Everyone there called me J.J.”