Underground

by Kat Richardson

  Not knowing where he might be, I paged him and he called me back as I was returning the Rover to its customary slot in the “sinking ship”—the tilted triangular parking structure across the street from my office building, which reared from the block like the prow of a doomed liner.

  “Hi, Harper. What’s up?”

  “I’m done with Edward—and Carlos and Cameron, too. I need to talk to you.”

  “I’m at the Double Header with Rosa and Tall Grass—he’s a bit freaked about Jenny. . . .” He paused. “Where should I meet you?”

  “Not a bar.”

  “Only place still open is Starbucks. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  I doubted the conversation would go well, but it wouldn’t be any better in private and at least I’d have a hot drink. I trudged down the street to the coffeehouse and ordered a very large drip coffee “with room” for cream. You have to be specific, or the baristas fill the cup to the rim with the crude oil they call coffee. I’d just gotten my drink doctored with cream and sugar when Quinton joined me.

  “Do you want coffee?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “It’s cold outside.”

  He blinked at me. “Yeah, it’s twenty degrees out there.”

  “Do you want to talk about this business in here?” I tipped my head toward one of the patrons reading a newspaper in the front window corner. To my view he was cloaked in a swirl of blackness, and I knew he was a vampire without even seeing the fangs. “Some people have friends everywhere.”

  He sighed and shrugged. “OK, I’ll get some coffee and we’ll go to your office.”

  My turn to shrug. I waited while he collected a cup of something hot and then we crunched along the frosty sidewalk to my office building. I had to use my key on the outer door since none of the ground floor businesses were open after six. As I unlocked, I noticed that the shadows nearby moved and reshaped themselves around furtive watchers. It appeared that Edward was keeping an eye on me, though it seemed he didn’t realize I could see his minions even when they thought they were hidden.

  I’d assumed all vampires understood the Grey at least as well as I did—certainly Carlos and Wygan seemed to know a lot more— but it occurred to me that Cameron had once been surprised he was unable to hide from me by sliding into the Grey. Maybe most vampires didn’t know what I did. . . . It was an interesting thought and it distracted me enough that Quinton had to elbow me and remind me to get inside out of the cold. I locked the door behind us and we went upstairs to my office.

  It was chilly, but the space was small and would warm up quickly enough. I put my coffee on the desk and sat down behind it while Quinton took the better of the two client chairs and leaned back in it with his steaming cup cradled in both hands. He looked tired, the aura around him reduced to a small blue glow. I studied him for a few moments, wondering.

  He returned a bland gaze and said nothing. Quinton was always good at silence.

  Well, I thought, might as well get it over with. “Are you a werewolf, Quinton?”

  He snorted a laugh, frowning at the same time. “No! Werewolves don’t exist. What would give you that idea?”

  I ticked them off on my fingers. “Vampires, ghosts, monsters in the sewer, why not werewolves, too? And the mutual dislike between you and Edward—who refers to you as a ‘lone wolf ’ and warns me to check into your ‘oddities.’”

  He sipped his coffee and remained reclined in the chair. “You’ve been reading too many bad horror novels. Or playing dumb-ass RPGs if you buy the idea of a deep-seated, traditional animosity between vampires and werewolves. It’s fantasy. Werewolves don’t exist,” he repeated.

  “So you say, but a year ago I’d have said ghosts and vampires didn’t exist, either. Do you have proof?”

  “I have logic. And I’ve never found any evidence of real lycanthropy. Vampires, magic . . . yeah. Weres? No. It’s not possible. At least I think not, from observation. Maybe I missed something, but so far, no evidence to the contrary.”

  I picked up my own coffee. “OK, then. Elucidate.”

  “All right. Everything I’ve seen tells me that magic tends to respect the laws of physics—kind of freaky physics, but lawful physics. For total form-shifting to happen in less than, say, a couple of days, max, it would have to break conservation of mass, conservation of energy, and the laws of thermodynamics at the very least. If shape-shifting does exist, then it’s an illusion, not an actual form change—unless it happens very slowly, which doesn’t seem to be the case. If someone were to change from human to wolf, he’d have to make a whole lot of physical changes very rapidly, shedding or gaining mass and using up a ton of energy. There just isn’t enough elasticity in the system to allow it—he’d burst into flames from the heat of the energetic change alone.

  “I’ve never burst into flame that I’m aware of. Besides, you’ve been out with me plenty of times when the moon was full and I don’t even get hairy palms. QED, not a werewolf.”

  He drank more coffee and gave me his bland look again.

  I had to chuckle at the perverse sanity of it—and at Quinton’s expression. There was a hint of merriment in his eyes that made me feel a touch foolish but not enough to mind. It was kind of sweet, in a way, to be gently teased after the emotional whirlwind of my failed love affair. I smiled a little as I asked, “All right, but why does Edward call you the lone wolf?”

  Quinton shrugged. “You’re the one who calls him the leader of the pack. Early on he discovered I was useful, but Edward doesn’t like contractors. If you’re not one of his kind, he prefers you to be either cattle or chattel, and I won’t play that game. I’m the stranger with teeth who won’t roll over and show my belly. Since I know how to hurt him, he can’t come at me directly. So he makes a show of being unworried and immune. It raises his stock with the rest of the pack and we have a sort of uneasy truce. That doesn’t stop him from making attempts to control me, and he’s not above making trouble for me if it’s not out of his way—which is what he’s doing with you. His time scale is much longer than mine, so he doesn’t try very often, but he does try.”

  “He’s persistent,” I agreed.

  “Yeah.” He paused and looked at me, a half smile turning into a small, thoughtful frown. “So what about you? He’d consider you a useful piece to control. How do you keep him at bay?”

  “Mostly by seeing the traps ahead of time. So far, he’s been predictable, but he’ll try harder eventually. He tried tonight and I backed him off, but it was the last card I had to play. Next time will be worse unless I learn some new tricks. It’s possible I know things about the way magic works that he doesn’t, but I’m not sure yet.”

  His gaze on me was quizzical. “I know you know things—see things—I don’t, but I don’t have any idea what your life is like, how you manage this knowledge. It must be strange.”

  I nodded. “It’s not easy to explain. Ben gave me a theory once, but it’s not entirely correct. But the upshot is I don’t just see ghosts, I interact with them. I see magic—the sort of energetic stuff magic comes from. . . .” I found myself unable to go further with that thought. Someday I’d figure out why. I shook my head, frustrated, but resigned for now. “Anyhow. There’s a lot of freaky between the here and the there and I see most of it. I can even walk around in it and do a few things with it, but it’s not as impressive as it sounds.”

  “What sorts of things? Aside from talking to ghosts and seeing magic.” He leaned forward with his cup in both hands between his knees, giving me an intent look.

  I didn’t mind the scrutiny. He seemed truly interested and maybe . . . something more? I didn’t mind that either, but I put that aside and thought a moment. “I can . . . see layers of time if they happen to be in the right orientation at the right spot. I can pull a sort of shield between me and the magic stuff, sometimes. I—” I couldn’t say I could pluck energy and move it around. Strange. I could talk about it with Carlos, but not Quinton. I filed that for fut
ure investigation. “Well, not a lot else aside from the ghosts and being able to see that some people—or things— are magical in certain ways, but I don’t know what all the signals mean.”

  “That’s how you spotted the vampire in Starbucks.”

  I nodded again. “Yeah. I can see he’s a vampire. They’re sort of . . . in both places at the same time and there’s a look and a smell to them I’ve come to recognize.”

  “A smell? Aside from the bad breath?” he added, making a face.

  I laughed. “Yeah, aside from that.”

  He smiled before growing serious again. “Edward must want you badly—a human who can spot vampires and magic and still go around in the daylight. Someone with enough balls to take him on and enough skill to survive it. And you’re a pretty good investigator, too. Very attractive package.” I wasn’t sure if he meant that intellectually or in a more personal sense. Either way, I kind of liked it, but that liking made me a little nervous.

  I ducked my head and felt my face get hot. “Yeah. Well . . .”

  Quinton didn’t leave me to twist. “So what happened tonight?” he asked.

  “He denies anything to do with the deaths or the zombies.”

  Quinton snorted. “Of course he does.”

  “I believe him. He was pissed off about it and disgusted by the thought of zombies, and his denials rang true. He even offered to warn his people off of us while we look into it. He didn’t have to. He could have said nothing and sent me on my way or tried to kill me if I was too close to a truth he didn’t want me to know. But he didn’t even try. He sent me to talk to Carlos, instead.”

  Quinton shivered but kept silent, encouraging me with an eager nod.

  “The details are nasty, so I’ll skip them for now, but between the vampires and Fish—the guy at the morgue—I think I’ve spotted an emerging pattern that goes back at least to the 1949 earthquake, assuming all the dead or missing were in the underground or Pioneer Square at the time.”

  “All the people who’ve died or disappeared were undergrounders sleeping in the tunnels or the alleys and streets above them,” Quinton confirmed, thinking aloud. “Not in the shelters.”

  “Then we’re on the right track,” I said. “This thing is paranormal, but it’s not a vampire and it’s not a zombie. It makes zombies of some of its prey by coating them in some kind of paranormal web, but that seems to be incidental to the way it stalks people or captures them or something. I’m not sure of that yet. But, corny as it sounds, we really are looking for a creature that’s crawling around somewhere in those underground tunnels. That makes every undergrounder a potential meal. We have to find it and get rid of it, or it’ll just keep on killing people, and some of them are going to get back up and walk. And I don’t think the cops are going to be too hip to that.”

  “No. We’ll have to go down and figure out where it comes from or where it dens up. Then we’ll have to trap it and kill it.”

  I was glad Quinton had automatically included himself in the solution—it made me like him even more; he could have left the baby in my lap as Carlos and Cameron had. I went on, making a face as I said, “It might not be mortal. It’s very long-lived if it’s the same thing that killed people in 1949. And there might be earlier deaths that aren’t in the database or not in a way that’s made them stand out. If we can figure out what happened after the earthquake in 1949, we might have some clues as to where it came from and how to get rid of it again.”

  Quinton looked thoughtful and finished his coffee. “Y ’know ... there are a few undergrounders who might remember.”

  I scoffed. “Anyone old enough to remember the earthquake would have to be approaching eighty.”

  “Not necessarily. They’ve resurrected the oral tradition down there—it’s not like there’s TV or great reading material in the underground, so mostly they tell each other ‘back when’ stories. Some of them might still be awake, if they have a fire to keep warm by and haven’t been drinking.”

  He got up, fired with urgency. “Let’s go find them before they crash. The sooner we find the thing, the sooner it’s gone.”

  I finished off my coffee too and stood up, not really thrilled about going back into the cold, musty dampness of the buried streets. I didn’t have a choice, though; I’d agreed to help and I couldn’t—wouldn’t—back out. I wished I had some decent gloves and warmer clothes, but at least there was no wind in the dead city below and I’d have a friend at my back.

  Quinton showed me another way into the underground down a narrow stairway in an alley. Once again there was a nearly hidden door at one side, set into an arch of cement. Quinton jiggered with it and we slipped into a catacomb of brick and old steel girders.

  Something grunted in the darkness and there was a thump. We both fell silent and turned our heads, trying to pinpoint the noise. Quinton pointed deeper into the gloom ahead and began down the sidewalk corridor. I followed him carefully over the dusty, rubble-strewn floor, brushing past ghosts, to a set of stone arches where wooden doors must have hung that had now rotted and fallen away. We edged into the a cavernous space and I felt a touch of cold nausea.

  I whispered into Quinton’s ear, “Vampire.”

  He made a low noise and a shaft of white light cut the blackness, showing a slice of a once-grand room. Near the door where we stood was a humped, wriggling thing: two human shapes, one slumped, the other holding that one, bending over it. . . .

  A sharp crack of ozone and a burst of arc light came from Quinton’s other hand and he jabbed a small lightning bolt into the bending figure. The vampire shrieked and spun toward us, fangs bared, dropping the ragged man he’d been trying to bite.

  “Bastard,” Quinton muttered. He jabbed a second time at the vampire with the small stun stick. The arcing horns connected with the creature’s shoulder and slid up the curve to its neck. The vampire shrieked and jerked and then fell to the ground where he lay looking more dead than it probably had in a long time.

  “Edward said he’d keep his people out of our way,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well, either he lied, or this one didn’t get the memo.”

  I looked at the vampire and recognized his face from the After Dark. “He didn’t say he wouldn’t keep them out of the snack bar,” I said, “and this one probably figured it was the last chance to grab a bite of marinated bum for a while. So . . . is this one . . . down for good?”

  “No, unfortunately. Just out for a while. The current disrupts what passes for a bioelectrical system in these guys, but it’ll reset after he’s been out a while. With higher voltage I could probably kill them, but I don’t want to be in that kind of trouble with Edward or let someone like Lass loose with a stun stick that might kill a human as well.”

  “And that’s what keeps Edward at his distance?”

  “Kind of. He stays away from me so I don’t stick him. That way none of his pack will ever see that he’s as vulnerable to the stun as they are. Right now they think he’s immune. If they find out he’s not, his strongman image will be on its ass.”

  “How did you figure this electrical thing out?”

  He grinned and I saw the light of his flashlight reflected off his white teeth. “You’d be amazed at the things you can find out if you break into the right parts of the Internet.”

  The other man moaned and rolled on the floor. Quinton went to help him up. It was Blue Jay.

  “Hey, Jay. Are you all right?” Quinton asked.

  Jay rubbed his head. “Yeah, I guess. I feel woozy. . . .”

  “Let’s get you somewhere warmer.” Quinton put his shoulder under Jay’s armpit and helped him up.

  Jay directed us down the sidewalk and around to a hole in a wall where we could dimly see a yellow glow deeper in the hole. We crawled in and found a room in what must have been some building’s condemned and forgotten basement. A clutch of shapeless people sat in a huddle around a lit Sterno can, passing bottles and chatting in low voices. They welcomed Jay, one of the figures gi
ving him a blanket while another asked what had become of his own.

  “I—lost it. One o’ them bad men.”

  “One of them stole it?” asked a woman—I assumed from the voice, since it was impossible to tell gender by the shadowed hump of the form from which it issued.

  “Nah. I dropped it. But I don’t wanna go back for it now. Go in the morning. When he’s gone.”

  The shapeless female nodded.

  “You guys seeing more of those creeps down here?” Quinton asked.

  “The bad ones? Not more’n normal.”

  “Anything else? Critters? Walkers?”

  One of the shapes rocked back and forth. “I seen a . . . a crawling thing, long as a snake, hairy like a yak.”

  “A yak!” one of the other shapes said. “You ain’t never seen no yak.”

  “Then hairy like a musk ox—I seen plenty musk ox when I was home in Alaska at that qiviut farm.”

  “And a buncha rats,” another said. “We saw ’em. Rats running through here last night.”

  They began chattering, throwing in comments in a flurry, and I couldn’t keep track of which lump of filthy cloth was talking when.

  “Bugs. Been a lotta bugs for winter time.”

  “And the shadow people.”

  “Lotta rats, yeah. Big ’uns!”

  “That’s trouble—rats. Something’s stirred ’em up.”

  “It’s the cold.”

  “Maybe they’s scared of the yak!”

  “And the crows,” said Jay.

  They got quiet and stared at Blue Jay.

  “No birds down here, Jay.”

  “I know that. But I seen a crow with Jenny last night and this morning she was killed. You saw it, too, Grandpa Dan. It was an omen.”

  “Why didn’t you see no crow when Go-cart died?”

  “I ain’t no medicine man. I just seen the one crow.”

  “Do crows come out when people die?” I asked in a low voice. I didn’t like the clutching feeling that rasped up my spine as I thought of those big crows and Go-cart or of the gleaming eyes of creatures in the tunnels, watching Jenny from the darkness.