Underground

by Kat Richardson

  “She’s due for shots in a couple of weeks. If she keeps acting up, I may take her in early,” I said. Then I looked him over and asked, “You done with whatever you were up to?”

  “Yup. No bugs in here,” he answered, keeping his voice low. “There’s always a possibility of passive bugging through the phones, tapping at the central station, or using parabolic devices at a distance, but they’re a pain, so it looks like Fern’s either not too interested in your home life or she’s on very short rations. We should check your office, too. Has your alarm called the cell phone since she turned up?”

  “Oh, damn it—my cell phone!”

  I got up and found my purse and dug for the phone, tossing other things out as I hunted: keys, feather, spare pistol clip, wallet. . . .

  Quinton knelt down in front of me and picked up the feather, and then offered it from his kneeling position with teasing reverence. “Your spear, m’lady zombie-slayer.”

  I laughed and he grinned, encircled instantly in little pink and gold sparks with the feel of champagne bubbles as they crackled through the air. Wow, pink sparks . . . My face felt hot and my fingertips were trembling from the sudden flush of giddiness.

  I turned away, putting the feather back in the bag, and tried to resume my hunt for the phone, but Quinton wasn’t having it. He stood up behind me and touched my shoulders very lightly.

  “Harper. I don’t want to make you nervous. Last night was wonderful—well, after the sheer terror—but it doesn’t have to mean—”

  “Shut up,” I suggested. “Don’t say it doesn’t have to mean anything. ” I turned around and faced him, standing very close, and the small difference in our height in bare feet let me look hard into his eyes without having to tilt my head down much. “I didn’t drag you into my bed just because I was scared or excited about being alive or . . . rebounding or whatever. I like you. I trust you—with my life. And I don’t have to lie to you. I love being with someone who knows! I think it’s better than the sex—which was damned fine.”

  He started to smile, but it kept on spreading wider until he grinned and laughed and gave me a fast kiss on the lips. I thought my blush would set us both on fire and had to look back down at my purse and make busy to keep from babbling like a fool.

  I got the phone out—still sealed in its crushed can. Quinton put his hands over mine, stopping me from unpackaging the phone.

  “Hang on. As soon as the battery is back in, the phone can be tracked and used as a bug. Right now, you’re the only lead to me and the cell phone is the best lead to you. Fern’s friends will definitely be monitoring it for her. For now, let’s assume the office is bugged until we can check the phone from someplace other than here.”

  I bit my lip and looked at him, taking a long, bracing breath before I said, “I think I need to know a little more about Fern Laguire’s motives. You’ve said several things that make me think this is personal between you two.”

  “Oh, it’s personal,” he replied, nodding, the colors around him fading down to a constrained amber glow, “in an impersonal sort of way.” His tone verged on amused. “We only met a handful of times, but I know her pretty well by observation—better than she does me—and she hates me. I am the huge black blot on Fern’s otherwise stellar career. I was on loan from another agency to do some work for Fern’s group at the NSA—my previous supervisor wanted to hide the embarrassing evidence of the project I’d been working on once it blew up. I had the right mix of odd skills, so they seconded me to Laguire’s group. The NSA’s nickname around Fort Meade is ‘Never Say Anything.’ It’s a great place to hide someone with tech skills from prying investigators.” Quinton paused and looked around. “This is going to take a while. Let’s sit down.”

  We parked ourselves on the sofa, leaning into opposite corners so we could see each other without one of us having to resort to sitting on my coffee table.

  “All right,” Quinton resumed. “I ended up at Fort Meade because the guys I had been working for were an embarrassment—it was their project that first got me started looking at the cracks in reality—and the agency wanted to keep it quiet, but I was already starting to think I was in the wrong working world. I’m just not of the mind they are—well, you know that. But working for Fern Laguire was not the best place to nurture a sense of the rightness of big central government and its actions.

  “You know about the NSA . . . ?”

  I nodded. “Crypto specialists, intelligence gathering by electronic eavesdropping. Supposedly, they don’t work on domestic systems or run covert ops.”

  Quinton snorted. “Yeah, and if you believe that there’s a pointy leftover from the World’s Fair up in Queen Anne I’d like to sell you. Mathematicians and their algorithms don’t care about political boundaries. The crypto-geeks at the server farms of Fort Meade do it because they love the game—the intellectual challenge of breaking the system—and very few of them know the source or final disposition of the intelligence they decode. But I did and so does Fern.

  “I had an attack of conscience over it and I wanted out. But there was no way Fern would let me go, because her idea of freedom and mine were not even in the same philosophical universe.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You’re not going to say they retire people to six-foot dirt apartments, are you? Because I have a hard time buying that.”

  Quinton shook his head. “No. Fern’s not homicidal as far as I know, but retiring from intelligence or any classified service comes with monitors and strings. They don’t just let you walk out and go your way and that’s what I craved. Fern didn’t want to let me go at all and she’s very good at finding ways to make people stay. It’s a big key to her success within the agency—people work for Fern until they drop. But I left. I didn’t say I was going, because I knew how she worked. I just made myself disappear, in spite of their security measures, and they didn’t know how. I think they still don’t. That alone must just boil Fern’s brain, but that I slipped the chain completely is even worse. I proved her fallible. She’s never going to forgive me. If she can get me back, then she saves face—which is all-important to Fern at this stage in the game. She’s nearing retirement and she has to be totally nonstick armored on her way out the door or she’ll get the same treatment she’s given plenty of others.”

  “Ugh,” I said with a shudder. “Sounds like she wouldn’t mind if you did get killed.”

  Quinton shrugged. “So long as she could show I’d never compromised her, she’d be good with it.”

  “I wonder if she could be persuaded that she’s hunting for a dead man. . . .”

  “It’s a remote possibility I could switch records with one of the missing undergrounders—I know most of them well enough to get at the right records—but she’d never buy it without a body.”

  “And you don’t really match up to any of the bodies that have turned up, so far.”

  “True. Nice thought though—never had a woman offer to kill me off before.”

  “Well . . . they say friends help you move and good friends help you move bodies. Just a different kind of body.”

  That got a laugh out of him, which pulled a smile from me, in spite of the subject matter. He sobered and looked at me with a tinge of blue in his energy corona.

  “Harper, you don’t have to be in the crush between me and Fern Laguire. You can roll over on me. I’d only ask that you tell me ahead of time, so I have a head start on her. I can disappear again and she’d leave you alone.”

  I gave my head an adamant shake. “No way. I’m sick of being left. I’m not throwing you to the dogs like a bone to save my own skin. I wouldn’t even if— And I need your help, because I’m not going to abandon the dead, either,” I added, letting my eyes turn aside as I felt a hot blush on my cheeks.

  “Umm . . . yeah,” Quinton said, looking pleased before his expression sobered with the subject. “There’s still our three-faced friend in the sewer,” he added with a shudder.

  “Not to mention Detective Sol
is—so long as we’re on the topic of people of interest.”

  “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 r
ambling 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.”