Possession

by Kat Richardson

  I carefully collected the Grey-touched things. I found another key much like the one that had fallen from the ceiling in Kells, two more buttons, a bit of old jewelry chain, and a funny little tool with a dull point at one end and the other end flattened into a disk a little larger than the end of my thumb.

  There was also an old “flair” button with a rather naughty suggestion on it. I picked it up and rubbed some of the dirt off it. “One of yours, Mae?” I asked, looking it over. She didn’t respond, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had.

  The ground under me shifted and I scrambled a little to stay on my feet, lurching closer to the railings and clutching them to keep from falling off the planter. For a moment, my Grey-sighted left eye showed a flicker of ghostly hands reaching from the soil, but they faded as I moved away.

  A man stepped out into the courtyard, shielding his face from the rain with one hand. “Hey,” he called, “get out of that! It’s not safe up there—the planter almost collapsed a few months ago!”

  I put my collection of odd treasures into my pockets and scrambled back over the rails and down the stairs.

  The man scowled at me and shooed me inside, saying, “What the hell were you doing up there?”

  “I dropped my key,” I said. “I didn’t know there’d been any problems with the planter.”

  “It was months ago, but they had to shore up the wall afterward and I’m not sure it’s going to hold if the tunnel people keep on poking around. They buried some kind of sensor to monitor the tunnel there. Just making more messes than fixing them so far,” he muttered.

  “It’s quite a project, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a pain in the butt. Kind of like you.”

  “Me?” I objected.

  “I need to run my shop, not go climbing around saving tourists from being foolish.”

  “I’m not a tourist.”

  He gave me a cool look. “Then you should know better than to go climbing over rails around here. Now, go on. You’re dropping dirt on my floor.”

  He turned his back to me, but I noticed he kept an eye on me in a mirror mounted by the cash desk until I left. The market’s tiny, cluttered shops must have been prime targets for thieves and pickpockets. I hoisted what little dignity I had left and took off through the back, defiantly, to trot up the stairs to Post Alley.

  Taking a deep breath at the top, I braced myself for trouble and entered Kells. This time no horrifying vision of women with melting faces assaulted me. The worst scare I got was the ghost of a small girl who ran through me and then turned back to stare, saying, “Dance with me! No one at this party will dance with me.”

  I put out one hand and she put a thin wisp of cold into it. It didn’t feel like a hand, but I closed my own over it anyhow and walked her into the hallway between the two rooms, making a slow circle as if I were just looking around. In the unobserved corridor between the larger rooms, I executed a couple of pivot turns and a swing out that let the little girl spin into the larger room that had once been the crematory. She swirled away in a spiral of smoke and glitter, giggling as she vanished. I walked through to the bar and caught the bartender’s attention, though he was already giving me an odd look.

  “Hi,” I said. “I seem to have lost some things out of my pocket the other night. I was hoping they’d been picked up.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Oh, an old button, a key, a pencil stub . . .”

  His brows drew down. “Funny bunch of things to come back for.”

  “Part of a scavenger hunt,” I said.

  He shrugged and ducked his head a bit to look under the counter. “Huh.” He pulled out a cardboard box and set it on the bar. “Let’s see . . .”

  The box had a ragtag collection of small objects that included quite a few car and house keys, car alarm fobs, some safety pins, a length of broken chain, one dirty pearl bead, buttons, a pocketknife, a brooch shaped like a dolphin, two wedding rings, a thimble, a button hook, six or seven pens of varying quality, a large metal grommet, and several lighters. There was one pencil stub and I picked it up, feeling a cold burn on my fingertips as I did. This was the right one.

  “Anything else look familiar?” the bartender asked.

  I picked through the trove, closing my right eye and looking only with my left for the black gleam of the ghostly artifacts. There were several more than I’d originally seen, and I picked them all up. The bartender squinted suspiciously at me, but didn’t object when I took the brooch and the grommet as well as several buttons and the old-fashioned house key. Neither of the wedding rings had any ghostly haze to it, for which I was grateful—I doubted I could explain taking one of those when I hadn’t mentioned it to begin with. I did wonder where the thimble had come from, though. Who carries a thimble into a bar? The button hook was intriguing because although it was an old object, it had no Grey gleam at all. I supposed it was something bought in the market and dropped by accident. Maybe it went with the thimble. . . .

  “That it?” the bartender asked, looking at the small pile I’d made on the bar.

  I glanced up at him, opening both eyes. “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “Weird. OK, they’re all yours.”

  I shoved the objects into my pockets with the ones I’d found outside and thanked the man as I left. I didn’t see any further sign of the little girl ghost or Linda Hazzard and I was grateful. But I did feel a renewed tingling and burning where my skin had been scribed with phantom words. Being near the market was becoming a liability for me. I needed to solve the puzzle and get away from this as quickly as possible. I didn’t have all the pieces I needed, but Carlos might be able to help on that score and at the moment he owed me, though I wasn’t excited about collecting.

  I also needed to find Quinton, which meant finding his father. Quinton had mentioned Northlake when I’d seen him last and it was in that general direction that the convoluted and knotted line between us had stretched when Carlos showed it to me. I already knew Quinton wasn’t downtown, and his father obviously wasn’t operating out of that area himself—much too easily observed by his government colleagues and others. I might also find Inman in the area, since a demi-vampire doesn’t wander far without orders from whoever is holding his leash. Carlos would be more inclined to do what I wanted if I had a lead on his missing dhampir.

  I had to admit, I was curious as to how Papa Purlis had subverted the dhampir—the ties of blood and magic between creator and “child” vampires are strong and usually broken only by destruction of one or both vampires, though dhampirs are rather unusual cases. Purlis had discovered something very dangerous and I wondered if he recognized it or even knew what he’d done. Sending Inman after me had been risky and foolish. It made me think he wasn’t aware of the importance of what he’d accomplished. But since I hadn’t seen any sign of Inman today, it was possible he’d figured it out. His Ghost Division needed to be discredited and burned to the ground before he had any more breakthroughs. Not to mention I was running out of patience with Quinton’s obsessive absences. I was the unreasonable, obsessive member of this little party and I didn’t want to share the distinction.

  I trudged back to the Land Rover and drove through the thinning traffic to the north end of Lake Union, thinking about where I might find Quinton or his father.

  Northlake is a light industrial area, bounded by famous neighborhoods: Fremont on the west, Wedgwood to the north, and the University District on the east. It’s an area full of boatyards, marinas, workingmen’s cafes, and incongruous condos. My very first Grey case had started at an old naval architecture warehouse in the area—and now I was back. The area had changed a bit more in particulars than in general. The Lake Union Kite Shop had gone out of business. The moldering Kalakala Ferry had been moved to Tacoma, where its Art Deco superstructure could decline in silence, but the Skansonia remained, still hosting parties but never leaving the dock. Ivar’s Salmon House still squatted on the edge of the U-District, putting the scent
of salmon and woodsmoke into the air. The remains of the old gasworks still stuck its rusted metal fingers into the air at Browns Point, surrounded by parkland and the kite-flying hill that hid the wreck of its old buildings, now buried in sod and environmental plastic to keep the seeping chemicals of sixty years of coal gas production under wraps.

  If you want to hide something like a secret lair or a questionable government project, it’s better not to put it in the middle of nowhere. People will notice something new where once there was nothing and they’ll notice you coming and going, too. It’s far better to put your “secret” where people won’t question it. Spies work fairly well with industrial neighborhoods. No one thinks it’s strange if they soundproof a building, or have guards with guns around, or come and go at odd hours. No one pays attention to trucks bearing crates or large pieces of equipment, or to cars with blacked-out windows, and absolutely no one finds subterranean garages with security doors odd. Most won’t pay any attention to odd sounds, either—even sounds that mask screams—since there are plenty of other noises in the area.

  Northlake is not heavily industrial, but it’s on the lake, next to the canal mouth, so there’s plenty of coming and going, plenty of din, plenty of distractions, and a fair number of buildings that aren’t fully leased. I figured I’d start at the park and work outward, since the most likely places were on the water. I left the Land Rover in the parking lot between the Adobe building and the rowing club and started walking, paying more attention to my Grey vision than to the normal—figuring I’d be more likely to spot an illicit bit of magic or a lurking monster that way. At first I ran into a tree along the Burke-Gilman Trail, but I got the hang of it after that.

  The area around the park turned out to be the most active in the Grey—not that that should have surprised me. I drifted that way, trying to get a better idea of what was going on. Old factories are often scattered with ghosts, loops of history, and shredded temporaclines, and the coal-gas-cracking towers of the gasworks hung with mist that had nothing to do with the unseasonable clouds. I concentrated my search along the bike trail, looking for a likely building or entry to something Purlis might be using as a base of operation.

  I walked past the loading docks for Fisheries Supply and noticed a sign at the edge of the park’s driveway. I strolled across to it, not bothering to hide, since there really wasn’t anyplace to go. It appeared to be an old notice that no one had removed claiming that the state Department of Ecology would be doing maintenance and upgrades to the ecological barriers in the northeast corner of the park, followed by regrading and restoring the area. The project was supposed to have been finished in the spring of 2013 once the grass was established. I didn’t see any signs of ongoing work, but the sign and a bit of temporary fencing remained. I assumed it was just an oversight that no one had bothered to fix, but as I strolled on, it struck me very much like the misdirection Quinton had used to create his secret bunker under the streets of Seattle, using the excuse of a construction project to carve a bit of space out of the underground and then keep people from investigating it by creating signs that didn’t say what it was but gave the impression it wasn’t safe.

  Quinton was a clever guy, but he must have picked up a few things from his coworkers and mentors in Intelligence—maybe even from his dad. I walked up the hill beside Fisheries and then down another street, looking for a good place from which to observe the area. It didn’t look like much of an access, but there was a slope and a bit of old building within the fencing that could easily conceal a way deeper into the gasworks. And who would even think twice about odd sounds at an abandoned gasworks? The wind that made kite flying off the hill so attractive also made a whistling and howling sound as it passed through the many ladders, walkways, trusses, and towers of the old industrial site. I spotted a good vantage point where the corner of a condo building met the sidewalk and the builders had poured a small slab to make a level platform for the trash and recycling bins on the edge of the steep street. The fencing around the bins was woven with strips of bamboo to mask the unattractive little corner, but it didn’t obscure the view completely. I moved to the farthest part of the fence, where I couldn’t be seen from the park, and climbed over it.

  Seattleites can be a little obsessive about garbage, so the area wasn’t too rotten, but it did have a bit of a smell to it. I was thinking I might have to give up the surveillance as a bad job when someone spoke nearby.

  “Hey there, beautiful.”

  I turned toward Quinton’s voice, but could see only a shadow behind the fencing. “Hey. How’d you find me?”

  “You and I have the same taste in observation posts.”

  “Ah,” I said. “How come you’re not replying to pages?”

  “Kind of busy lately. I’m sorry.”

  “I need to talk to you. Your dad seems to have snatched a demi-vampire from Carlos and Cameron. They aren’t happy about that. And I’ve got the impression that you or your father knows something connected to my own case. What’s going on here?”

  “Details are still pretty sketchy. I knew he’d grabbed a few paranormals, but at first I didn’t know he’d gotten a vampire. I don’t know how he managed that. At least not yet.”

  “What other paranormals has he got?”

  “I’m not sure. There was something . . . I called it Pandora’s Box, since it seemed to have something in it, but now it doesn’t. Not big enough for something living unless it was insect-sized. Kind of like a . . . folding shrine. I didn’t get to examine it or get a good close look, so I don’t have much information except that it had been stored in dirt for a while. I got a sample of the dirt and I asked Fishkiller to look it over.” Ruben Fishkiller was a forensic pathology technician who’d exchanged a few favors with me over the years. Quinton went on. “But he says it’s local, which kind of surprised me, since I know the thing came from Europe. Whatever was in the box or attached to it is gone, but it looks like Dad put the container in the tunnel dig for a while—that’s where the dirt came from, according to Fish—and I’d guess that Dad set the thing from the box loose there, or it escaped. He doesn’t seem very worried about it, so I imagine he let it go himself. Anything new running around town aside from your pushy ghosts?”

  “There is definitely some strange stuff going on, but neither I nor the vampires have spotted any new paranormal players in the area. Doesn’t mean there isn’t something, though, and that might be the connection between your dad’s project and my case. . . . Quinton, please be careful. You’re focusing on your father, but there are a lot of other interests watching this.”

  “You mean Carlos and Cameron.”

  “Not just them. And not just the paranormal end of the spectrum. What your father is doing is only barely on the reservation, so when it goes wrong—as you are bent on making sure it does—there’s going to be a lot of fallout. I don’t want you to be in the blast.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  I wanted to argue with him, but it wasn’t going to do any good and I’d only be doing exactly what I didn’t like done to me. I settled on “Be careful.”

  “I will. And I’ll try to stay on top of the messages.”

  I made a face. “‘There is no try,’” I quoted.

  He laughed. “I’ll bear that in mind, Master Yoda.” Then he slunk off and left me to extricate myself from the trash bins.

  I wished I had Quinton’s skill with electronics—not to mention his ever-ready stash of parts—and could leave some kind of monitor behind, but I would just have to make an opportunity to come back later. At least I knew I’d found the secret lair. Now I just had to find out what Purlis had let loose on my city and what the hell it was doing to so terrifyingly empower the ghosts in the market. Mentally cursing, I crawled back over the fence and took myself home for cleaner clothes.

  EIGHTEEN

  With no other leads to chase, I felt there was no option left but to contact Carlos and ask him to “read” the objects I’d collected from
the secret cemetery and Kells. I hoped that if I knew who the ghosts were I might be able to contact them and make the connection to Purlis and whatever was happening between them and the PVS patients. By the time I got back to my place, dusk was falling and I was pretty sure I could reach Carlos at one of the phone numbers Cameron had provided, if not his own.

  Chaos wasn’t pleased with me for leaving her alone all day, but ferrets have the memory of clams and she forgot to be angry as soon as she was on the living room floor with her favorite toy, a squeaky anthropomorphized eggplant with massive feet and a nose that resembled a ski jump. Quinton had christened it “Nixon.”

  While Chaos bit and wrestled Nixon, I took a shower and heated soup for my dinner. Then I put in a call to Carlos’s voice mail. I always find the idea of vampires with voice mail odd, though I can’t really say why; maybe it’s that the idea of something as far removed from the technological world as a vampire just runs counter to the concept. I was barely seated to slurp down my dinner when he called back.

  Even over the phone his voice sent an unpleasant crawling sensation up my spine. “Blaine,” he said.

  “I have some objects that I believe are connected to the ghosts in this case of mine. And I think I have a line on where your missing assistant is. Can you take a look at these things and tell me about them?” I wasn’t telling him the whole story just yet, but I’d get to it once I had his agreement.

  “If you will tell me where Inman is.”

  “Afterward.”

  He was silent for a moment, thinking about it, I assumed. It was possible for him to get around me—by some magical trick, by force, or by setting another of the vampire community’s helpers on my tail until I showed them the way. But all of those strategies were wasteful and Carlos didn’t approve of waste—necromancy is the ultimate expression of the phrase “Reduce, reuse, recycle.”