Mara nodded and I could see Quinton from the corner of my eye, mirroring her.
“Alice didn’t die in the museum fire. Wygan got her out and kept her....” I couldn’t bring myself to describe the ghastly and extreme measures he’d taken to heal Alice and keep her alive until he needed her again. I shuddered in spite of myself. “She was working for him. He sent her to London earlier this year to disrupt some business of Edward’s and lure me away from Seattle so Edward could be attacked and Wygan’s plan could begin to move into its final phase—and no, I don’t know why he needs Edward either. When I met Alice in London, she told me the man who killed me did it under her influence. I had every reason to believe her.”
“Is she still out there, then?” Mara asked.
I took a couple more deep breaths before I answered, tamping down a sudden spike of nauseous memory. “No. I killed her. I dropped her head into some kind of magical hole and left the rest to rot. I don’t feel bad about it: She helped kill me and she helped keep my dad a prisoner.”
Mara shook her head, her coppery brows pinching together. “You’ve lost me. When was your father a prisoner?”
“He still is. Wygan has his ghost in some kind of magical . . . oubliette—sort of a one-way prison hole. Two birds with one stone: leverage against me if I refuse to do what he wants, and a chance to torment Dad for kicking over the traces in the first place. Wygan’s like that: He carries grudges for a long time. This business with Edward seems to go back to something that happened between them in England two or three hundred years ago. When I called you guys from Los Angeles, I was trying to find my dad’s ghost, but all I could get was the ghost of his receptionist and a big, fiery hole where Dad should have been and a really pissed-off guardian beast running around it whenever I got close.”
“The Guardian Beast,” Mara said in an absent manner, biting at her lower lip and staring into nothing.
“Pardon me?” I asked.
“If it’s running around something like that at the edge of the Grey, it’s not just any guardian beast; it’s the Guardian Beast, protector of the Grey.”
I felt my own eyebrows draw down as I peered at her. “I thought there were a lot of guardian beasts.”
“In general, there are,” Ben put in. “Lots of them. Lots of types of them, too, guarding all sorts of things. But as Mara said, there’s just the one for the Grey. At least that’s what my—our—research shows.”
Out of the blue, Mara asked, “How do you know your father’s in an oubliette?”
That startled me a little. “I was told, but the hole I found at the site where he died kind of reminded me of the place Marsden tried to shove me into—the same hole I dropped Alice into.”
“Hm. I can’t say I’m knowin’ enough about how the Grey works to tell you if such a thing is possible without a spell in place, but a spell can be undone.”
“The one I found in London wasn’t created by a spell. It was more like a . . . black hole: Things around it had warped the magical landscape until it sort of folded on itself. It was kind of a magical vortex around a tree in a graveyard.”
“Hardy’s tree?” Mara asked. “At St. Pancras Old Church?”
I nodded. Being from Ireland, Mara must have at least heard of most of the magical oddities in the British Isles, even if she hadn’t seen them herself.
She pursed her lips. “Oh. Yes. Something like that is going to be a lot harder to extract anyone from.”
“Yeah, but I suspect Dad’s not locked down quite as thoroughly as Wygan thinks.”
She raised her eyebrows into quizzical arches. “Oh? Why ever do y’think that?”
“Because I keep getting hints. I’ve had several brushes with—not really ghosts, but energetic things like poltergeists and collective entities. They keep calling me ‘little girl.’ That was my dad’s nickname for me, and crazy as it sounds, I think he’s been trying to warn me in whatever way he can. I have a feeling that if I can get to him, he might know something about Wygan’s plans and how to stop them.”
“If that’s so, then you’ll have to be findin’ a way to your father’s ghost.”
I nodded. “I don’t think that’s going to be easy, what with the Guardian Beast around and that . . . fiery whatever in the way, but I would guess that the guy who killed me two years ago might have a few clues. He’s dead, too, and it sounds like more of Wygan’s minions at work.”
My announcement didn’t come as a surprise to Quinton—he’d eavesdropped on my conversation with Solis, after all—but the Danzigers both looked taken aback. I was getting used to the number of dead people around me aside from the ordinary run of ghosts. I didn’t care for it, but it was a fact of what I was and how I’d gotten that way that death seemed to litter my background landscape like so many rocks in a floodplain. It even showed up in family photos as smudges and phantoms that weren’t just dust and lens flare.
I explained. “Todd Simondson—the guy who killed me two years ago—may be a little easier to get to than my father. I suspect he was killed by the same people, so he might have useful information, and if I can get anything out of him, that may help me get to Dad.”
Mara seemed to approve of my ill-expressed logic. “And from your father, perhaps a way to put paid to whatever the Pharaohn-ankh-astet is plannin’. It’s got to be nasty, whatever it is....”
Quinton was the only one left out of that reference. He turned a quizzical expression on me.
I sighed, feeling drained by the long recitation with still more ahead. “Lost?” I asked.
“A bit. You mentioned the asetem last night, but you didn’t say what they were. Some kind of vampire, but . . . what’s the deal? Aside from the spooky eyes and their resistance to stun sticks.”
“They’re Egyptian,” Ben started. He was in full lecture mode. “According to the legends, the boy-priest Astet was killed but didn’t die. He was so perfect in his devotion to the gods that they allowed him to live, even though they couldn’t restore his life—if you get the fine distinction. He was the undead, being on earth but existing in the afterlife as well. Very interesting stuff for a people who believed the afterlife was the perfection of earthly life, complete with food and sex and so on. So a cult formed around him and his closest followers also became the undead. How is a point of debate, but the upshot is it’s a lot harder to get to be an asete than a regular vampire—kind of an exclusive afterlife club with fringe benefits in the real world. It’s a pretty early version of the vampire myth. Some claim it’s the earliest, but the Assyrians have one about as old and the Asian vampire myths go back before that.”
Quinton looked a little doubtful. “Do you think there’s a real vampire for every myth?”
“Not all of them, perhaps, but some.”
I’d have been willing to bet against that statement: my experience had been that whatever humans believed strongly enough had form in the Grey. The only question would be how far those things projected into the normal for ordinary people to perceive and be tormented by.
Quinton took it all in like a sponge. “All right, so we have the asetem—these glowy-eyed creepazoids I’ve been seeing around—and they have a . . . what did you call it?”
“Pharaohn,” Ben said. “The ruler of the asetem is given the title Pharaohn-ankh-astet—God-King, Life of Astet—like the ancient pharaohs of Egypt were thought to be direct descendants of the god Ra. His subjects are the asetem-ankh-astet, or roughly translated, ‘descendants of Astet who are the life of Astet.’ They believe they are the children of the blood and soul of the immortal boy-priest. They’re a bit different from the regular kind of vampire: They’re emotion-feeders, not just blood-feeders. Supposedly they’re not as fast as Western vampires like Edward’s people, but they’re natural magic-users, which most Western vampires aren’t.”
“I can vouch for the speed,” Quinton said.
Ben perked up. “Really?”
“Yeah. They were showing up downtown and around the underground be
fore I moved out. I got chased by a bunch of them the night I figured I should move someplace safer. If they’d been as fast as the regular kind, I’d be dead. Or shambling around after dark, looking for bums to make a withdrawal from.”
“Why did they chase you?”
“I’m not sure what started it. I saw one of them about a week ago take out a regular vampire with a sort of homemade Taser—knocks them out, but if you keep the voltage on, they go up in a fireball. I found another one snooping around where I’d seen the first one a couple of days later. That’s when I found out the zapper doesn’t work on these asetem. A discharge that should have turned one into a smoking pile of ash just knocked this one down for a minute. Then it got back up and came after me. I barely kept ahead of it, and it started calling in buddies to chase me. They tailed me to my hooch. It wasn’t safe to stay there after that, so I bugged out to Harper’s. If those things had been any faster, I’d have stood no chance. As it was, the fact I knew the area and they didn’t was about all that saved my ass.”
“Ahhhh . . . so they aren’t locals....” Ben murmured, scribbling notes on a napkin with a finger dipped in coffee. Mara clucked her tongue and plucked a yellow legal pad from her pile of junk. She tossed it onto the table with a proper pen, and Ben snatched them and wrote in rapid, spiked shorthand, nodding as he did. “Did they look different from a regular vampire?”
Quinton sent me a bemused glance. We were all used to Ben’s research obsessions and it was easier to humor him most of the time than try to restrain him to the topic at hand. Unless the topic was at hand, red in tooth and claw. Then things could get intense. But at least this was useful. I now knew what had driven Quinton out of his hidden home and he had a better idea of how bad these creatures we were tangling with truly were.
“The ones I saw had either white hair or streaked black and white. Their skin was pretty pale, but it’s hard to tell under the street what color ‘pale’ is. From most angles, their eyes glow orange—fiery orange—and there’s something . . . kind of snakelike about them.”
“Their skin has a faint scale pattern to it,” I put in. “Sekhmet referred to them as having ‘fine, white cobra forms,’ if I am remembering the conversation right, and they do look a little like hooded cobras when they get annoyed.”
“They hiss,” Quinton added into the silence as Mara and Ben stared at us.
I stared back. “What? You don’t think they hiss?”
Ben started, excited. “Sekhmet is the Egypt—”
I cut him off, not wanting to risk the goddess’s attention. “I know what she is.”
Mara seemed frightened more than amazed. “You . . . met her? In London?”
I bit my lip. Time to sound crazy. . . . “Yes. Sort of. Not so much in the flesh . . . in the Grey form, I guess you could say. We had a rather disturbing chat. The asetem aren’t much liked by the other vampires in London, but there’s a sort of truce . . . or there was until Wygan got Alice to kick over that apple cart. That was what caused Edward to send me to London in the first place.”
“Why ever didn’t y’say something to us if you knew there were asetem involved?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know they existed or what the problem was. I just went where I was told to go and did what I had to do. And I don’t care to repeat that conversation—it wasn’t pleasant—but it did put me onto Wygan and Alice. They were undermining Edward, partially to get to him and partially to get to me, but Alice thought it wasn’t good enough, so she kidnapped Will Novak, too, and that’s when things started to get really strange—but it doesn’t matter! The point is this: Wygan is moving forward with a plan that has something to do with Edward, and with me, and with the Grey itself. Whatever it is, I don’t want to be part of it, but more than that, I don’t want it to go ahead at all. I intend to put a stop to it, but it has to be my way.
“Wygan has been attacking my home, trying to get at me, wear me down, keep me off-balance I’m guessing. I can’t let him do that. I have to be free to move or I’ll end up doing what he wants. And I have to get some sleep so I don’t keep on making stupid mistakes because I’m too tired to think more than a single move ahead.” I was losing my cool and I knew it, but I just didn’t have the energy to be more subtle. I took a few long breaths that turned into yawns before I could continue. “That’s why we’d like to use your basement for a day or two. Lie low long enough to get some sleep and plan. We can leave the dog with you until things are less dangerous. Grendel is a great protection dog. Wygan likes to grab people and use them as leverage against others and I don’t want him to get you or any of my other friends. I know you can take care of yourselves, but ...”
Ben and Mara exchanged a worried glance, and we all stared out into the yard, watching Brian gambol with Grendel. The dog was jumping around and knocked the boy over. All of us got to our feet, poised to run to the rescue, but the pit bull just held Brian down for a moment and slobbered all over his face, making happy wuffing sounds through his nose while the boy shrilled his pleasure. Boy and dog got back to their feet and Grendel herded Brian around the yard for a while as we watched. I noticed the dog somehow kept himself between Brian and the bloodred stars of the malefic spells scattered along the fence. Maybe all animals had a touch of Grey vision, like the ferret seemed to. I hoped so.
“It won’t be for long,” I said. “Just until I can get into a better position against Wygan. I’ll have to free my father from him somehow and I’ll have to figure out what he’s doing so I can stop it. I have to take the offensive or the game is lost already. Please ...”
SIX
It took a little more talking before the Danzigers felt they knew enough to let me head for bed in the basement guest room. Grendel, the fuzzy bodyguard, turned out to be our ace in the hole: Brian’s immediate response to the idea that we might go and take his playmate away was to throw his arms around the pit bull’s neck and literally dig in his heels. “No! Doggie stay!” he insisted. The plight of adults being a bit too abstract for even the brightest three-year-old, he went for the most important thing to himself: the pet. Ben and Mara exchanged a rueful glance and gave in, which earned a delighted squeal from their offspring. Rick was going to have a hard time getting his dog back.
Quinton had gotten a lot more sleep the previous night than I had and elected to stay up for a while and help the Danzigers out with some household projects. I suspected he wanted to pick their brains a bit more about the situation we were getting into, and Ben had looked more than happy for the opportunity to do some picking of his own, too. Whatever work Quinton did for the Danzigers would mitigate some of the obligation we both felt for the safety and quiet they had extended to us. Some, not all. I knew I was probably dragging them into the enemy’s sights and I didn’t like it, no matter how much they protested that they wanted to help. Quinton, too, come to that. It seemed that this had become his fight as well, whether I liked it or not.
I fell toward sleep wondering why Simondson had ended up in Georgetown. . . .
As I slept, I dreamed I was sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool, trying to make sense of conversations going on at a party above the surface. Distant, burbling sounds that were almost words floated in and out of my ears, and I could see them darting through the water like glittering, colored fish. My dead cousin Jill swam by, her long hair forming a blond cloud as she paused to look at me.
“This time, we’ll use the back door,” she bubbled. In the drowned light, her pale, dead skin looked blue. She swam away, dissolving into a school of neon-bright tadpoles that broke into sudden shapes and began spiraling around a single, flame-filled bubble. When the gleaming creatures reached the middle, they doubled back and swam out again: an endless gyre of brilliant flecks going in and out, round and round. . . .
A randomly bobbing conversation bubble popped, releasing the words “phone box” to rise to the surface and burst into the air as a disjointed gasp of sound. An effervescence of englobed words rushed past, swirling
through the tangled net of light that the waves cast onto the bottom of the pool. A few bubbles collapsed, letting their syllables out into the water: “rosaceae,” “polyphony,” “etrier,” and “fur.” The glimmering tadpoles darted apart and away, fleeing the sudden voices and dispersing the dream into blank sleep.
In spite of the weirdness, I slept well once the dream left and woke feeling more clearheaded than I had in a while.
Quinton had stretched out on the bed beside me while I slept, still dressed and dozing only lightly. As I started to sit up, he rolled over and looked at me, propping himself up on one elbow. “Hey, how are you feeling?”
“Well enough to go hunting for ghosts.”
“Should we grab the dog? If we can separate him from Brian, that is.”
“I’m sure Ben and Mara have the parental equivalent of a crowbar somewhere. It can’t hurt to take the fur-covered assault weapon along. If nothing else we can always tell any busybodies that we’re taking Grendel for a walk. And who’d argue with that?”
“Only the suicidal.”
As if she knew we were talking about some other trouble-making animal, the ferret began to rattle her temporary cage’s door. We both looked at her and she gave us the imploring ferret look.
I let Chaos out to romp while I put on fresh clothes. “That reminds me. While I was in London, Marsden told me ferrets seem to have an affinity for the Grey. How, I don’t know, but it would explain her craziness around the vampires and ghosts.”
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