Labyrinth g-5

by Kat Richardson

  Mara was standing just inside the screen door when we climbed the back stairs. “Good morning to y’both. Have y’brought us a dog, then?” I’d never been able to read Mara’s energy, and today her face was just as difficult. She wasn’t ready to show me what she thought of our appearance at her door. Our friendship had been a little cooler since I’d nearly gotten her husband eaten by a monster, even if it had been more than a year ago.

  “Only temporarily,” I replied. I wasn’t surprised she’d known we were coming. Mara is a witch, after all, and her spells on the house were more sophisticated than they looked.

  She opened the door to let us pass. “Did y’take down that wretched blood spell on the garden gate? I thought to do it in a bit, but I wanted to see who’d be coming along to trip it. Not surprised as it’s you.”

  I entered the house, hearing the muttering of the grid fade to a distant water babble. The magical calm inside eased an unsuspected tension from my shoulders and I took a deep breath of the quiet. “Good guess.”

  She scoffed. “Hardly much of one: You’re the only person we know who consorts with vampires.”

  “So you saw them cast the spells?”

  “No, but I’ve developed a nose for ’em.” She looked at Quinton and cracked her blinding, infectious grin. “And how is it with you? Are y’keeping herself here out of trouble?”

  “Don’t seem to be.”

  “Ah. I see. Well, come inside. I’ve some coffee and scones on—if y’can get them before Brian.”

  Brian, the Danzigers’ three-year-old son, was scaling a chair beside the long kitchen counter as we entered. His mother snuck up and tapped him on the shoulder. “And what is it you’re playing at? Hm?” she asked as he jumped in surprise.

  Brian turned to face her and bit his lower lip, his eyes huge, shifting side to side as he tried to come up with an excuse. “I sawed a mouse.”

  Mara didn’t look convinced. “You saw a mouse on the counter?”

  Brian nodded with vigor and tried to look sincere. “Yes, Mama. Big mouse. It was gonna take the scones.” Brian’s s’s came out a bit lispy through a gap between his front teeth.

  “Oh, I see. A very large, black-haired mouse, I suppose. And was this very large mouse named Brian, by chance?”

  “Umm ... no... .”

  Mara raised her eyebrows and fixed a stern look on her son. Brian deflated and looked at the ground with a sigh. I gave him another two years to figure out that his mother really did know everything—at least everything he didn’t want her to. There was no longer a ghost in the house, spying on every move, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other ways for Mara to get information.

  Mara straightened up and took a small biscuitlike thing off a plate, wrapped it in a paper towel, and handed it to Brian. “ You may have one scone—just one, mind. You may take it out to the back garden to eat it and then y’can play with the dog.”

  Brian’s face lit up. “Did we get a puppy?”

  “Mara ...” I started. “Are you sure . . . ?”

  She gave me an arch look. “Now y’wouldn’t be bringing us a vicious killer dog, would you?”

  “No....”

  “Then we’ve nothing to fear.”

  I still wasn’t sure sending Brian out to play with Grendel unsupervised was a good idea. The boy was rambunctious and I didn’t know how the dog would react without someone he already knew around to cue him. I saw Mara whisper something over Brian’s head and draw a quick shape over him with her finger.

  The charm dissolved into a rain of tiny blue stars that seemed to stick to him as Brian turned and charged for the back door, shouting, “Hi, Harper! I’m gonna see the doggie!”

  “No scone for the dog!” Mara called after him. Then she looked a bit worried. “I suppose he’ll be all right a moment....”

  Quinton glanced at me. “Grendel doesn’t stand a chance,” he muttered. “I’m betting on the kid.”

  Mara stuck her head out the kitchen doorway and called out to her husband. “Ben! ’Tis Harper and Quinton. Come down, can you?”

  We could hear him clumping down the stairs from the attic, the old wooden steps musical and echoing under his tread.

  A shriek came from the backyard. Quinton, Mara, and I bolted back out to the screen porch and stared out at the yard. I don’t know about them, but I figured Grendel—the appetite on legs—had eaten Brian by now. But no: The boy was rolling around on the ground all right, but the dog was prancing about, wagging his whole butt in the air as Brian guffawed in whoops and gales like the maniac version of his mother’s own laughter.

  Brian rolled onto his belly and, as we stared, Grendel trotted over and shoved him onto his back again, licking his face and nuzzling at him. Brian pulled himself up with his hands locked around the dog’s powerful neck and Grendel just stood there, grinning. Grendel received a lot of pats and scritches that rendered the dog into a wiggling mass of glee.

  “Oh, yeah, the dog’s a goner,” Quinton murmured in my ear as Brian and Grendel started chasing each other back and forth across the yard.

  “Hey, when’d we get a hellhound?” Ben Danziger asked from behind us. We all turned around—perfect synchrony that would have made Balanchine proud—and stared at him as he stood in the doorway from the kitchen and gazed over our heads at the yard beyond the screen. “Well, it doesn’t have three heads, so it can’t be Cerberus,” he added.

  “That’s my neighbor’s dog, Grendel,” I said. “And no, he does not have a cat named Beowulf.”

  Ben broke out laughing and almost fell, stumbling on the threshold plate of the doorway.

  “We’re dog-sitting. My neighbor . . . got shot last night.”

  Ben’s laughter cut off short and Mara looked alarmed.

  “He’ll be OK,” I assured them, “but he can’t look after the dog for a while. And since it’s my fault he got shot—”

  Quinton cut me off. “No, it isn’t. They were trying to kill the dog and Rick was just in the wrong place. That’s not your fault.”

  “I told him to take the dog to the door.”

  “You didn’t tell him to let it off the leash.”

  Mara made sharp cutting gestures at us. “Stop it, the both of ya. I assume you’d not be here, arguing in my home, without a good reason. So. Whyn’t ya sit down and start tellin’ it, soon’s I’ve brought out a bit of food? I’ll not be listenin’ to such bickerin’ before breakfast.” She shooed us into wicker chairs around a wooden table and dragged Ben with her back inside to fetch and carry. Quinton and I kept eyes on Brian and the dog, but they only continued to play as if we weren’t there.

  I refused coffee once it was offered, which got me some raised eyebrows, but I’d already had more caffeine than I needed if I was going to get any sleep soon. I played with a couple of the small biscuit-like scones Mara put in front of me along with a glass of water. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell the story—that was a big part of the reason we’d come—but I needed to put my thoughts in order before I started in. Quinton wouldn’t tell the tale for me, even if he’d known it all. It was an insane story, if you considered it. It was only because it had all built up over time, a bit here and there, that I could believe it myself.

  “There’s a bit of a problem at my place and . . . I hoped we could presume on your hospitality for a day or two,” I started, keeping my voice low so as not to alarm Brian. “I haven’t had a lot of sleep lately and my condo isn’t safe for us to stay in right now. We need someplace secure to catch up and do some planning until things get better. I can’t imagine any place safer from Grey things and I don’t think we led any here. The spell on the back gate didn’t get a chance to alert its caster when I dismantled it, so no one should be coming to check, either.”

  Mara made a face. “So things are bad, then.”

  “If the normal level of ‘bad’ is something like ‘oh darn, we’ve blown up the house,’ this bad comes with its own small but unattractive mushroom cloud. I’m kind of
behind on the news in Seattle since I’ve been out of town, but a little Columbian birdie came by this morning to tell me that the homicide rate in town doubled in the past two weeks and I hear there’s been a lot of purported gang activity downtown, which probably isn’t really gangs. Our favorite vampire king, Edward, has been kidnapped. And it all comes together in some unpleasant plan with me as the bow on the package.”

  Ben scowled. “I’m sorry, I think I’m missing something. Is this related to the ghost you were trying to find, the one you called us about a couple of weeks ago?”

  I nodded, keeping my gaze on the plate in front of me. “That was my dad.”

  “Your da?” Mara questioned. “I thought he died when you were small.”

  “It turns out,” I said, feeling something cold and miserable knot up in my gut, “that he blew his brains out. I didn’t know this. I thought it was an accident. I was twelve. But . . . well ...” I stopped talking. This wasn’t going well at all: I felt like crying. Just tired, I told myself. Just too damned tired.

  I lifted my head. They were all watching me, and you’d think after more than a decade of professional dance and almost as much in surveillance and snooping, I’d shrug it off, but this time I froze.

  Quinton pushed his knee up against mine under the table and dropped his near hand to rest, still and warm, on my leg. “Maybe you should start with the phone call,” he suggested.

  The Danzigers huddled closer to the table and leaned in as if I were about to tell a ghost story around the campfire. In a way, I suppose I was.

  I shifted my gaze away from them, unhappy about this necessity, and started in. “All right. About three weeks ago I got a phone call from a dead boyfriend. He said things weren’t what I thought they were and that there were . . . things lying in wait for me. Since he died in Los Angeles eight years ago, I thought that might be the place to start looking. It seemed to me that whatever he was talking about must be related to my past—and to my abilities as a Greywalker—since I couldn’t imagine anything else a dead guy might think I needed to be warned about. So I went.”

  I glanced around to see how they were reacting. Quinton knew this part, but the Danzigers didn’t. Mara looked wary, her head half turned so she regarded me sideways with narrowed eyes. Ben just looked intrigued. I stifled a yawn and went on.

  “I thought I should visit my mother and see if she had any ideas—though of course she doesn’t know about the . . . paranormal connection. A lot of what she revealed isn’t relevant, but she is the one who told me my father hadn’t died in an accident, as I’d believed, but had shot himself.”

  Mara flinched back into her seat, catching a sharp breath through her nose. She looked out into the yard, watching her son a moment before she spoke. “Had she any inkling why he did it?”

  “That’s the creepy part. My mother claimed he was depressed, crazy, and having an affair with his receptionist. She said he’d been kind of crazy for a long time and finally, he just . . . lost it. But she let me look through his things, including his old diaries, and . . . at first I thought he might just be nuts, too—those diaries are pretty freaky.” I didn’t say his suicide note had been addressed to me, that just seemed too personal and gruesome, even for this group, and especially with three-year-old Brian playing nearby. “It was obvious that he had some kind of contact with the Grey, although he didn’t understand what it was or what was going on. It was upsetting him even before Wygan started prodding—”

  Ben cut in, staring. “Wait a minute. Wygan? The DJ on Radio Freeform?”

  I nodded, catching each pair of eyes in turn. “Vampire. He’s the one who stuck the knot of Grey into my chest two years ago. You remember.”

  Mara and Ben nodded, recalling, I imagined, the long, uncomfortable session in their kitchen when Mara had tried to untie it from me. Quinton looked quizzical. It wasn’t a point of my history I’d discussed with him since we hadn’t been close at the time. I caught his eye and gave a minuscule shake of the head. I’d explain it to him later. He returned a quick, reassuring smile.

  Ben was scowling. “You mean, right up the hill ...?” I knew he was thinking of the proximity of the broadcast towers on the crown of Queen Anne, just about fifty feet straight up and a hundred yards over from where we sat. I caught his gaze also creeping toward his son.

  I nodded. “Yes. But he’s not the same type of vampire as Edward and his bunch. He’s the Pharaohn-ankh-astet.”

  “What?” Mara let out a startled squawk.

  Ben was appalled. “Asetem? Here? But ...”

  “What? They shouldn’t be in the New World, or something?” I asked.

  “Well, basically, yes. I mean . . . at least according to legends, they’re rare and very clannish. Why would they be here?”

  “Because I am.”

  FIVE

  They all stared at me again and their collective expressions, ranging from confusion to disbelief, made me a little sick to my stomach. I hated this and wished I could just go to sleep and somehow dream it all away, never have to talk about it, never live through it again in speech or nightmares. Or at least be able to magically give them the skinny on the situation without having to think about it, sort and select relevant facts, shape it into coherent speech, and blurt it all out. Just the act of speaking made me weary and I wasn’t sure I was making sense.

  “I didn’t know Wygan was any different from any other vampire,” I explained. “I mean, I knew he was different, but I didn’t think it was something like this. While I was in London—”

  Mara shook her head. “London? When was that?”

  “Last week. I just got back yesterday and I went to see Edward ...” I realized I’d lost them all completely. The Danzigers didn’t know I’d been in London or why and Quinton had no idea what the asetem-ankh-astet were. I’d told him to be careful of Wygan, but I hadn’t had time to explain why. I shook my head, more to clear it of the muddle I was making than anything else. “Let me try this again.” I was making a hash of this. . . .

  The Danzigers nodded. “Yes, do,” Mara requested.

  I concentrated on her—it was easier than trying to keep my eyes on all three of my audience. “All right. My dad killed himself because he was a Greywalker—I didn’t get this until I was in London, though I feel I should have figured it out earlier. He didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t have anyone like you to help him. He never did know what he was, but he did figure out that something unnatural was happening to him and that it was being done to him by someone. That someone was Wygan. It took a while for me to put it together and I didn’t get all the pieces until I was in London and in some serious trouble. I’ll get to that in a minute, but the important thing is that my dad wasn’t really going crazy; he just wasn’t handling exposure to the Grey well. When he figured out that Wygan—he called him the White Worm-man—was trying to force him to do something that was probably terrible, he killed himself so Wygan’s plan would be ruined. Unfortunately, all he did was put things off. He thought he was protecting me, but what he did was put me in his place.

  “Wygan has a long-range, overarching plan—I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s not good for anyone but Wygan. Anyhow, this plan of his requires a Greywalker with very specific powers. Wygan has figured out how to force that Greywalker to develop. It took him several tries. I got this information from one of his failed experiments, another Greywalker I met in London—a creepy son of a bitch named Marsden. Marsden wanted to get rid of me so the plan would collapse, but we ended up working together instead, and he explained a lot of this. That story’s strange stuff and not entirely relevant, so I’d rather just let those details slide for now. That OK with you guys?”

  I finally looked around at Quinton and Ben. Ben, naturally, seemed a little disappointed. Quinton had a grim expression, but he nodded. Mara’s manner had slipped from a narrow, concentrated stare to wide-eyed horror. I took a couple of long breaths before I went on.

  “So.
My dad didn’t know the whole plan initially and he didn’t understand what was happening to him, but he knew he was changing, and to keep him in line, Wygan and his minions threatened him and his family. I’m pretty sure they killed his receptionist or gained some kind of magical hold over her so she’d spy for them or hurt my father in some way. Dad destroyed her—I met her ghost—and he killed himself so he wouldn’t become a monster. That’s what he thought was happening to him, that he was turning into some kind of monster. But taking himself out of the equation wasn’t enough. I’m next in line and Wygan’s been working on shaping me into the tool he wanted my dad to be. Every time I die a little, I change. So . . . he’s been making sure I die. I’m still not quite what he wants yet, but he’s going to try to gain control of me and kill me again because the final stage of his plan is now in motion.”

  Quinton and Ben both yelled over me, drowning me out as Mara frowned.

  “What is he doing?” Ben demanded.

  Quinton clutched my arm. “Kill you? What the hell—”

  I wriggled out of his grip as I tried to wave Ben off. “Stop it. Stop it! I don’t know!”

  Mara sat back, making a thoughtful moue as I quieted the men. “Hm. Something that needs a special type of Greywalker. . . . Well, that can’t be good.” She got up and started twiddling with a pile of odds and ends on one of the unused chairs nearby, touching them absently as she thought. “So, your father was a Greywalker, you’re a Greywalker, and the only way out is . . . to kill yourself? I can’t say I like that.” She turned back to study me, scowling with unhappy thoughts as she leaned against the back wall of the house. The protective magic wrapped around the building made a worried murmur.

  “Actually, death won’t get me out of it,” I replied. “That’s more like a . . . reset button of sorts. If I die in a way that doesn’t destroy my brain or body, I come back, but each time I die there’s a window of opportunity to push my powers as a Greywalker into a new shape, or to let them reshape themselves. Most of the time. According to Marsden, there’s a limited number of times I can die and bounce back. At some point, I’ll just stay dead. According to my mother, I died once when I was a teenager. I didn’t remember it until, at my mother’s house, I saw a photo of my cousin Jill. We drowned together one summer. I came back; Jill didn’t. I don’t know if Wygan engineered that or not, but while I was in London, I found out my death two years ago wasn’t just a bit of bad luck either. Alice—you remember Alice?”