Downpour

by Kat Richardson

  I turned on my heel, letting down my guard against the Grey and allowing it to flow around me, free and raging with ghosts. I felt fury spark and set fire to the nearest seeping threads and pools of energy as I reached for him, a sudden blaze of incorporeal strength flowing through me. I closed my hands on his white demon form, pushing my fingertips into him, past the shell of seeming flesh. I knew I couldn’t hold on to him for long or push much deeper, but I shook him and held tight for the moment. “Listen to me, yaoguai,” I roared, spitting the word out. “I will keep my bargain, but never, never threaten me. Do you understand?”

  I let go and shoved him backward. He slipped on a patch of ice and fell, just as the clouds chose to open up and let loose the rain.

  Lightning burned the sky and thunder cracked over our heads. I could hear a sound like a rush of wings, and the ghosts along the shore screamed in unison. In the Grey, the fallen night was lit with flashes of color that leapt from the ground and the water of the lake, then subsided back into the ground and the mist. The ghosts fell back to whispering and muttering. Jin landed hard on his ass and stared at me as I stepped back.

  I felt burned out and soaked through, but I refused to sag or stagger with the sudden draining of whatever power I’d momentarily held. Jin might want to consume me for whatever powerful creature he now thought I was, but he wasn’t going to do it just yet. I wanted to huddle into a tired little ball and go to sleep, but I wasn’t going to let him know that.

  “Now,” I said, “enough of this. Let’s get the hell out of the rain. Then I’ll tell you about the asetem. And you will tell me about the hot springs.”

  Jin picked himself up, brushing mournfully at his ruined suit. “I saved you from the shambling dead. You owe me more.”

  “You did what you were instructed to do. Don’t pretend you did it for me. But, I can be gracious: I’ll tell you more once we’re someplace dry. With a functioning phone.”

  TWENTY

  If I’d thought Jin would magically transport us someplace warm and dry, I was destined to be disappointed. Apparently he wasn’t that sort of demon. But he did know where the nearest dry place with a working phone was. About a half-mile walk along the shore, through clouds of ghosts and pouring rain, we stepped up onto the porch of the Log Cabin Resort’s main lodge.

  Under the overhanging roof, it wasn’t warm, but it was dry, and an old pay phone nestled in an aluminum hood on the wall near the front door. It wasn’t working when we arrived, but Jin assured me he could make it work as soon as I told him what he wanted to know. He also knew where Darin Shea had stashed the spare key to the lodge. I think he would have tried to dicker over that information, too, but he still seemed a bit in awe, which suited me fine.

  Frankly, I was a bit impressed myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I’d done—I’d pulled on the strands of the Grey for a moment, letting the already-loose power of the local grid flash up like a grease fire—but I hadn’t thought I still had any call on the grid itself. I certainly didn’t seem to have it in Seattle, so it must have just been here, where magic oozed up from the ground like springwater. It hadn’t felt the same as the seductive, leaching pull of the grid and its singing, near-sentient voices; it was just energy, not power, not knowledge. Knowing I wouldn’t be pulled back down into the infinite everythingand-nothing of the grid relieved me, even if it meant I’d have to bluff and work all the harder to get what I needed.

  So now we sat on the floor of the lodge, dripping, in front of an unlit fireplace. My coat was fairly soaked, but I was mostly dry under it, so I’d hung it up on a hook beside the door with my wet red scarf. I kept my boots on, just in case. Jin looked miserable and indecisive. His expensive suit and shoes were obviously ruined, but he didn’t want to take them off, no matter how wet they were. We didn’t want to start a fire, since we shouldn’t have been in the building to begin with, but it wasn’t a lot warmer inside than out, just drier.

  So I told him a story to cheer him up. It was the kind of tale one ought to tell around a waning campfire on a summer night when even the bats have gone to bed and the forest at your back creaks and groans and whispers as if every word has conjured up the monsters named and they lie in wait just outside the ring of light.... It was a story about Egyptian vampires who came to Seattle because their king wanted to let chaos loose upon the world and how the tool he’d forged turned upon him and destroyed him and, with him, his brood and kin.

  When I finished, Jin stared at me, as a child at that campfire might have done. “They can’t all be gone,” he whispered. “I hear of them in the wind.”

  I shrugged, though his words disturbed me. “Maybe, but if there are any left, their numbers are small and they haven’t shown me their faces.”

  “They’ll come back,” he said, half-hopeful, half-convinced.

  I just shrugged again. “Now, tell me about the hot springs.”

  He blinked. “Why? I don’t owe you any information.” He plucked moodily at his trousers and one of the fine black silk threads snapped and unraveled, leaving a hole at his left knee. He cursed in Chinese—or I assumed it was cursing, from the tone—and slashed his black claws through the remaining fabric of the pant leg, tearing the lower half off and flinging the tattered piece across the room.

  “Stop that,” I ordered. “You’ll tear the whole thing apart and I have no interest in seeing you in your boxers.”

  He gave a disdainful sniff. Then he perked up and leered at me with an expression that might have been sexy if I hadn’t been able to see both his faces. “I could take them off, too. You really don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “I’d like to keep it that way, thanks.” An idea struck me: I might be able to get Jin working for me—at least at a low level—by assuaging his vanity and pique. I was out of exceptional information I was willing to share, but for the first time in my life, I had money—a ridiculous amount of money I didn’t really care about.

  “Jin,” I started, “I’m sorry about your clothes. They were very nice and you look so”—I searched for whatever word would flatter a vain, greedy demon—“debonaire in them.” A frown flickered across his face and I guessed that I’d hit another term he didn’t know. “Very refined. Very rich.”

  He smiled but didn’t say anything, apparently waiting for more compliments. But I wasn’t going there.

  “I know you can’t just give out other people’s secrets,” I continued. “They have value and, of course, you can’t just break any arrangements you have. Like the one you have with Willow. I understand. But . . .” I paused to see if the hook was going to set. Judging by the way his eyes lit up and he leaned forward to listen to every word, I was doing well. “I’m sure I could get you a much nicer suit. If you helped me while I’m here.”

  He frowned a little.

  I felt slimy for it; I hate wheedling. “I wouldn’t ask you to break anyone’s trust, just to tell me a few things, answer some questions, show me around—that sort of thing. And you’d have to be honest—no trickery.”

  He didn’t look happy about that, but his greed was greater than his caution. “What about the shoes?” he asked.

  “That goes without saying, doesn’t it?” What did it matter to me? I doubted Jin could go through a quarter of a million dollars for a single outfit. “But you’ll have to earn the rest. . . .”

  We sat on the dusty floor and dickered over the details for another fifteen minutes before Jin was satisfied. I knew he’d try to find loopholes and work-arounds, since it was his nature to deceive and devour, but I stopped up as many as I could think of and warned myself to keep a close eye on him. The seal on the bargain was that he agreed to turn on the phone so I could call someone to come get me and take me to my truck.

  The only number answering was the sheriff’s department. Strother wasn’t available, but he’d left a note that he wanted to talk to me, so another deputy was dispatched to fetch me. It would be another half hour or so before he arrived, however, because t
he shift had just changed and there weren’t any patrols nearby.

  I decided to use the time I had to question Jin a bit more. “This problem is all about the magic,” I started.

  Jin nodded.

  I thought about what the zombies had said concerning an anchor. What kind of anchor? Anchors stop things from drifting. The major north/south meridian of the grid in the area didn’t flow in a smooth, straight line, but wandered. And its color wasn’t strong and bright as it should have been. Earlier, from the side of the mountain, I’d thought it looked as if the east/west line was defined by the Costigan and Newman houses, not that they’d been built to take advantage of a nexus that already existed on the spot. But if Costigan’s was the west and Jewel’s house was the eastern cardinal point, then what were north and south? If Willow was the loose anchor, there should have been one fixed or semifixed point at one end....

  “What’s at the hot springs?” I asked.

  Jin raised his eyebrows and tried an innocent look, which didn’t work on either face. “Water?”

  “Come on. You told me that Leung’s killer is a magic user. There are four quarters and one of them has to be involved. I know who three are, so once I know who number four is, I can pick this thing apart. Who or what is the southern point?”

  I could see he was calculating something, appraising, measuring. “The southern cardinal is a ley weaver.”

  “A spider?”

  Jin laughed and the sound scratched at the back of my mind like a nightmare. “No. It builds . . . things. It shapes. You left your truck nearby. It’s a good thing you’re going to get it soon.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  Jin shrugged. “Only that metal gets in the way. If the ley weaver is making something, it won’t like your truck blocking the flow.”

  “Why would Ridenour be down at the hot springs today? Would he have business with this ley weaver?”

  “I can’t imagine what use he would have for such a creature. Nothing the ley weaver builds could help him get his wife back.”

  “Ridenour had a wife?” No one had mentioned any wife to me, and if something tragic had happened, surely Strother or Newman would have said something about it.

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to her? How did he lose her?”

  “She was banished.”

  That sounded medieval. “What kind of wife are we talking about here?”

  “She was a spirit wife, a huli-jing.”

  I had heard that word before.... Danziger had mentioned it.... Some kind of shape-shifting Chinese fox-demon, he’d said.

  “How did a nonmagical guy like Ridenour end up with a demon bride?”

  “She chose him because he was the only man alive who already had any power on the lake when we came.”

  “Who came and when?”

  Jin bit his lip. “The first guai and I came through the gate between your years 1989 and 1994. May came before the gate closed in 1995.”

  “May?”

  Jin nodded. “That’s what Ridenour called the huli-jing because she came in the month of May. She liked it; it sounded like a Chinese girl’s name, Mei. She liked to pretend she was a real woman, not a five-tailed fox. She helped him with his work. He got promoted and she got stronger—that was when she grew her sixth tail. She thought she could make him important and powerful. And when he was strong enough and she had nine tails, she was going to eat him.”

  “How very nice for her.”

  Jin gave another shrug. “We must consume enlightenment. Our souls are so weak, we cannot learn. We can only eat; we are demons. It is the only way to escape Diyu forever, to become human again, to leave hell.”

  If he hadn’t been talking about eating people, I might have felt sorry for him, but I didn’t.

  “So . . . what happened? Did Ridenour figure it out and banish her before she could eat him?”

  He laughed again. “No! He never knew her plans. He wasn’t smart enough. He knew she was a fox-woman, but he thought she was one of the old people—an Indian spirit come to help him. He was so surprised when he found out she was Chinese.”

  “Who told him that? And what happened afterward?”

  “Willow told him. She used to gather herbs with the huli-jing and Ridenour didn’t like it, so she taunted him with the knowledge. He was very angry—angry at May, angry at Willow. Then, when the telephone man died, May tried to help Ridenour catch Willow. When May disappeared, Ridenour thought Willow had killed her in revenge.”

  For a second I was thrown by his reference to “the telephone man,” but I guessed he meant the lineman Willow had supposedly shot. Still, I caught his main implication. “But she didn’t, did she?” I asked. “Willow didn’t kill or banish May.”

  Jin looked startled. “No.”

  “Who did?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You can’t or you don’t know?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “All right.” I stood up and squeezed my scarf and the sleeves of my coat to see how wet they still were. The sheriff’s car would be along soon, I thought, and I wondered how uncomfortable the ride to my truck was going to be. Judging by the squelching and dribbling, it would be awful.

  “When she was banished, could anyone else slip through from Diyu?”

  “The other little guai came, but the way wasn’t open very long.”

  “Why not?”

  “The one who banished her was very careful. Not like the one who opened the gate in the first place.”

  “So who opened that first gate?”

  He spoke with care. “I am not certain.”

  “Could you guess?”

  “I could.”

  It was frustrating that he would volunteer some information but make me work for other bits, and he seemed to enjoy the pure arbitrariness of it. Maybe he hoped that making me angry would lead to a mistake he could exploit. I put a lid on my irritation. “Tell me your guess. And be specific.”

  “Jonah Leung. He was Willow’s brother. A middle child. I don’t know that he opened the gate, but he was there when I came out.”

  I had a bad feeling, but I asked anyhow. “What happened to him? What did you do when you came through the gate and found him?”

  The white demon face grinned, but the human face seemed surprised. “I killed him.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  As I stared at Jin, I could hear a vehicle coming close, the engine grumbling while snow tires roared on the road’s rough surface. I wanted to keep on questioning Jin, but I figured the only person who would be driving this way now was the sheriff’s deputy on his way to pick me up. I grabbed my wet coat and scarf and struggled into them as we went outside.

  “You’d better get out of here and lock up when I’m gone. I’ll find you again tomorrow.”

  Jin made a face. “Bring something nice with you or I won’t come.”

  I wanted to smack him with the heaviest object I could find, but I didn’t have anything but my bag and I didn’t have time, either. “I’ll meet you at the hot springs gate. I need to talk to the ley weaver and you’re coming with me.”

  The demon looked unhappy but nodded and slid away around the corner of the lodge, lopsided and strange in his torn, legless suit and limping, barefoot, past the soup of ghosts and lambent magic along the shore. I gave a bitter laugh and the ghastly shadows in the yard echoed it as headlight beams swept down from the road and caught me on the porch.

  A white Crown Victoria with Clallam County sheriff’s office stripes and decals rolled into the parking lot. I stepped into the rain and onto the asphalt, away from the building, hoping to discourage the deputy from inspecting the lodge and seeing any telltale boot prints.

  The man, whose name tag read TRIPP, wasn’t too pleased with his errand, especially when he saw how wet I was, but he bundled me in and drove the thirty minutes to Sol Duc so I could get my Rover. He waited with his lights on while I approached the car. The noise and light of the ley
weaver’s work had dwindled, banked like a fire for the night, I guessed. If it had been brighter or louder, I might have missed the lingering streaks of gray, red, and blue that clung to the edges of the driver’s door. I paused and stared at it, not caring that I was getting further soaked in the persistent rain. I pressed the automatic lock switch on the fob, which I usually ignored since I’d long ago developed the habit of locking doors manually and hadn’t broken it, in spite of the Rover’s automated lock-and-alarm system.

  The car honked once, already locked and armed. But I knew there hadn’t been any tattered threads of Grey on it when I’d left it. Unless the ley weaver’s work had rubbed up on the truck in some way and left the energetic shreds behind, someone magical had been in my truck.

  I unlocked it from a distance—another thing I rarely did—and let myself in, checking for further signs of the intruder as I got into the driver’s seat. A few things had been moved around, but I could have written that off to the rough road, if I hadn’t seen the other indicators first. I checked the glove compartment and under the seats. Then I made the deputy wait while I got out and went around to check the back. I couldn’t see that anything was missing, nor did there seem to be anything new. . . . But something had happened.

  I checked my pockets. Something was missing: my hotel key card. I’d had it earlier. I could remember it in my hand when I’d been trying to persuade Ridenour to take me with him to the greenhouse. I’d tossed it on the passenger seat, but it wasn’t there now. I got back out and walked to the Crown Vic.

  Tripp lowered the window and gave me an expectant stare. “Something wrong?”

  “Yeah, I think someone’s been in my truck. My hotel key’s missing and I left it in there. Would you follow me to my hotel? Just in case?”

  “I can do that. Strother wanted to talk to you anyhow, and I can have the dispatcher call him to meet us there. That way I’ll know you got there all right.”

  “And didn’t run away,” he implied, but he was polite enough not to say so. “Thanks,” I said. Whatever his motives, I would be glad to have some backup if anyone was lying in wait for me at my hotel. I was wet and tired and sore from my hike down the mountain, running from zombies, and sitting in an ice-cold cabin while bargaining with a demon. I was not too proud to ask for help. I’d keep an eye out for Grey things at the hotel while the deputy played tough guy. That suited me fine.