Downpour g-6

by Kat Richardson

  I finished my lunch and drove back to my office. Parking at the municipal garage is ridiculously expensive, so I left the Rover in my own parking lot and walked to Seattle police headquarters at Fifth and Cherry. The usual afternoon rain hadn’t started up yet and it wasn’t as cold in Seattle as it had been around Lake Crescent, so I didn’t mind the hike, even if Cherry was one of the steepest slopes in downtown. I let my mind wander a little as I went, trying to decide what angle I’d take with Solis, but also just letting the problem of the lake tumble around in hope of some inspiration as to what I should do and if I should take Jewel Newman’s money.

  The differences in the Grey landscape of Seattle reminded me that whatever I chose to do, I would not have the advantage of knowing the magical lay of the land any more than I knew the physical geography around the lake. I’d need help up there. But I wasn’t sure whom I could trust. I didn’t even know who the other mages that so upset Jewel were aside from her sister, Willow, and I hadn’t met her. I wasn’t sure about Ridenour’s involvement, but while he wasn’t a mage, he could still be trouble. I didn’t know who else was in the game; the only player I had any kind of line on was Jin, the yaomo. . . .

  Thinking about the problem of Chinese demons, I paused for a light at Fourth Avenue and spotted a familiar-looking black coat and hat in the crowd on the opposite sidewalk. I thought about trying to call out to Quinton, but the distance was too great to expect him to hear me. I’d barely formulated the thought, though, when he turned and went across in the other direction, heading north toward Marion Street and the library. I would have liked to catch up to him, but I didn’t have the time, so I contented myself that I’d be able to page him once I was done with Solis and not have to tell him I was going on the lam from the cops.

  The cliché from a dozen old crime movies made me smile and I was still smiling when I entered the police headquarters lobby. Solis and his dour expression wiped that off my face soon enough. He escorted me through the security checkpoint and deep into the building to a small room with a sign beside the door that read ATTORNEY CONSULTATION ROOM—NO UNAUTHORIZED RECORDING. That was more reassuring than having our chat in an interrogation room, but only a little, and I experienced an unpleasant jolt of alarm at the thought that Michael might have been wrong about Solis’s suspicions. The decor wasn’t any nicer, either, but at least the chairs were clean.

  Solis closed the door behind us and dragged his chair to the short end of the table so he could sit at an angle and closer to me than the usual face-to-face formality of interrogation. I cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “You’re not here under any sort of charges, Ms. Blaine,” he offered. “This is not a formal meeting.”

  I made a show of glancing around the room. “I feel like I ought to have my lawyer. . . .”

  “I assure you, that’s not the case. Now, in the matter of William Novak—”

  “Who filed the missing person report?” I cut in.

  Solis blinked. “Mr. Novak’s doctor.”

  “Which Mr. Novak and which doctor?”

  “William’s attending physician, Dr. Booth, at Harbor View. According to his report, he became alarmed when his patient missed several appointments in a row. Mr. Novak was considered psychologically fragile. Is that all you want to know?”

  “It’ll do.”

  “Tell me all of your interactions with William Novak from the time you returned from England, please.”

  “I’ve already gone over them with you once.”

  “I am aware of that, but I want to hear it again. Please include as many particulars as you can remember.” He took a notebook out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open to a marked page. I assumed he wanted to check my new statements against the old, and that irritated me for an instant, until I thought what a good opportunity it really was to color in some persuasive bits of truth....

  We fenced back and forth for a while, him picking at details, me filling in petty information that revealed little. Finally, he sat back, giving me a long, considering stare. “We should give up this pretense. I do not want to know what Michael Novak told you earlier today. What I do want are details that prove or disprove his tale. So, again, what can you tell me?”

  So he knew I’d seen Michael. I wondered which of us he was having watched.... “Do you really believe Michael Novak is responsible for his brother’s disappearance?” I asked.

  “Like you with your interest in Steven Leung’s case, I find myself plucking at threads, looking for a pattern. There are more pressing cases that should occupy me, which is why I asked you here. I can spare very little time for this, but I cannot put it aside. There is a shape of a crime, but no clear picture. It is so much smoke and mirrors without substance,” he spat. Frustrated whips of orange energy around him punctuated his unhappy words.

  “I honestly don’t remember some of the details,” I said. Some things had scrubbed themselves from my mind; others were too bizarre to describe.

  “I believe you. But what more can you bring to mind? If there’s a fact that will cement the cause of William Novak’s disappearance, I want it, whether it implicates Michael Novak or not. I do not wish to lay a charge on an innocent man. But I must know who is innocent, even if I cannot prove who is guilty.” I’d rarely seen Solis so annoyed by a case. He took them all seriously and did his best, but this puzzle seemed to bother him at a personal level.

  “I don’t know what else will help you. I saw Will only twice after I returned from London. Once at Rice House Antiques, and I told you he came to see me before the incident at the gym. At that meeting I asked him to go home and stop trying to get in touch with me. He seemed less agitated and I thought he was going to take my advice, but the next evening, when things went to hell up on the hill, it was actually Will who called and got me to go up there.”

  “Why did you conceal that from me before?”

  “To be frank, I was in no condition to tell you at the time. I thought I’d explained everything when the FBI questioned me, but I guess I didn’t. Later, I didn’t mention it because I thought you’d blame me for Will’s disappearance. You came very close to accusing me of being involved in Kammerling’s kidnapping and Todd Simondson’s death, so why not an apparent-stalker ex-boyfriend, too? And I wasn’t thinking quite straight after getting shot. Most people don’t. As you know.”

  Solis pressed his lips together and kept silent while he thought and drew his frustration back down. In a minute he asked, “Why did Novak call you?”

  “Maybe because Goodall had called him.”

  “Why?”

  “To make sure I showed up so Goodall could frame me for what happened. Goodall was a power-hungry monster, but he wasn’t stupid. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to spot Will following me, find out who he was, and get his number. Beyond that, I’m just guessing that he must have fed Will some story about me that convinced him to sneak away from Michael and go up to Queen Anne. After that, Goodall just had to wait for Will to turn up, and then force him to call me with a cry for help. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Did you see William at the gymnasium?”

  “Yes. Fleetingly. Then I lost him in the confusion. I did try to find him, but that was about when things went to hell. I will tell you this and it’s the truth whether you believe it or not: Will was alive when I saw him last.”

  “It might still be possible that he left the gymnasium and was found by Michael.”

  I gave it only a moment’s thought to calculate the times before I said, “No, it isn’t. The timing doesn’t work. Unless Michael lied about when he picked up the car and when he left it at the park. The car rental company might be able to tell you where the car was at what time by looking up the tracking device information, but even without that, I saw Will later than Michael claims to have picked up the car. So unless he found Will totally by luck, wandering around after the FBI and SPD broke into the gym, that idea won’t hold water.”

  Solis sighed heavily
and leaned back into his chair. “I’ll check the records. I do not want to arrest the young man. I hope that you’re right, even though that leaves the mystery of William Novak’s disappearance unsolved. You know I hate mysteries.”

  “Some things never get solved, Solis. There are more than a hundred thousand missing persons cases that have never been closed in the U.S.”

  “There are as many where I came from, in a country a tenth the size. And this is no better than any of those.”

  “Except that you aren’t going to put an innocent man in jail. Isn’t that worth something?”

  His brow furrowed, but he didn’t reply. He wrote something on a page of his notebook and tore it out, handing it to me. Then he stood up suddenly, tucking the notebook under his arm. “You can go, Ms. Blaine.”

  “Thank you,” I said, picking up the paper and rising to my feet to follow him to the door.

  He showed me out and watched me go, and I had no idea what he was thinking as I walked away.

  FOURTEEN

  I did some more work at the office—the sort of mindless mechanical grind that isn’t hard if you have the tools to do it. It wasn’t much, but it generated billable hours and I spent the end of the day making up those bills and their accompanying reports. But my mind wasn’t on the paperwork. I worried a little about Michael, but not that either of us would find ourselves in jail. I worried more that he was now alone in a haunted world and I could offer him no more comfort. I had to admit, guiltily, that I was glad he wouldn’t want any such thing from me. I am not a good family person. I don’t have much and I’m not particularly fond of what family I have, for the most part, but I don’t wish to build another one from the wreck of someone else’s. Michael didn’t need me and I hoped he was right about finding his own life again in England. We’d both be better off without the other nearby.

  More than Michael’s problem, though, I thought about Blood Lake and wondered what I was going to do about it. The paper Solis had given me bore the name of the Clallam County investigator, Deputy Alan Strother. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in Strother’s ability to get to the truth—not even a normal-world facsimile of it. He seemed like a nice guy; however, no one I’d met around the lakes was likely to take the young deputy and his questions seriously and he was not equipped to deal with the magical world at all.

  The differences I’d seen in the Grey as I’d walked up to the police station had sparked a lot of new questions in my mind. Their unknown answers left me at their mercy and could do me harm if I returned to the area—and I was still trying to decide if I would. I knew the Grey and its grid of magical energy responded to the pressure of human belief and desire in strange ways, making way for the manifestation of monsters and ghosts that matched the concepts of the local people, but rogue elements could also exist—after all, I’d seen Native American monsters coexisting with pure thought-constructions and ghosts displaced through time and space to places they never should have been. Strother was going to be even further out of his depth with that than I was.

  There was also a problem of culture. Clallam County’s population was more than ninety percent white and about as middle-of-the-road in terms of belief as any group of average Americans. Strother fit in perfectly. But, according to the records, Steven Leung had been Chinese and, though I was guessing from Jewel’s dark skin that his late wife had been black, his daughters probably got some of their own beliefs from him. That would explain the presence of the yaomo and yaoguai. But that didn’t seem to be the sum of Blood Lake’s strange powers. What else was in the mix? Mara had suggested that the spell circle and casting I’d seen were something akin to hoodoo spell work. Jewel had alluded to the native’s legends about the area, and the Winter kids in Port Angeles had been more than passingly interested in the later mysteries around the lake. There were also the strange puddles of light around the shores and the singing lines that had erupted near Fairholm. . . . All that was part and parcel of the complications I might have to deal with.

  It didn’t appear that I had any real need to flee Seattle to avoid Solis, but I wasn’t enthusiastic about getting deeper into the problems around Lake Crescent even without that impetus. I found myself chasing the arguments around and around in my head: Should I go or should I stay away? Did I have to go? Was the situation potentially damaging to the Grey? Would I find myself hounded to go? Or could I slip off this hook? I just couldn’t come to a clear decision. I wasn’t even sure about what I wanted.

  I pushed myself back from my desk in disgust and stood up. Moving around sometimes helped me think. Even though it had started to drizzle outside, I locked up and went down to the street to walk until I could figure it out.

  At first I went around the block and up and down Pioneer Square, but after a while I stopped paying attention to where I was heading and just walked. The sidewalks were empty in the unwelcoming weather and I didn’t pass another living human being until I was nearly up to the Seneca Street off-ramp. Without thinking, I’d walked up to the area of Quinton’s hidden home beneath the street.

  I wondered if he was there. It would have been nice to talk to him about the situation . . . but, given the way he’d vanished earlier, I thought he didn’t want to see me. The sun was going down, bruising the clouds darker shades of blue and gray and laying directionless shadows over everything. I turned and walked toward the waterfront.

  As I went down the Seneca stairs, I had the sensation of sinking, as if the city were swallowing me. The rain took the remaining light and turned it into twisting strands of gleaming white and silver. I reached the bottom and turned left onto Post Avenue, which would eventually take me back to Pioneer Square. The rain seemed to fall down in wavering curves, filling the narrow road with something that seemed too thick and shiny to be water....

  A cold ache burned along the ravaged muscles of my abdomen. I adjusted my sight a little and caught a spinning lurch of vertigo as the air flashed and thickened into the formless ghostlight of the Grey. The long silver strands of rain coiled and writhed, making a sound like wind chimes of glass and steel as they wove into a shape: a long dragonlike head on a slender neck and body that ran in looping undulations into the mist, rippling and cutting it here and there with claws and bones connected by spiderweb sinews of ghost-stuff. Light slipped around the shape of mist and shadow, leaving an impression of vitreous scales. I didn’t think I had any power to call it up, but here was the Guardian Beast, looming in the Grey outlines of Post Avenue, breathing cold down onto my face.

  It wasn’t the same bone-spined monster I’d seen the first time I’d entered the Grey; this was the new version, a younger, sleeker thing built of the remains of Will Novak and the Grey’s own memories of guardians past. It didn’t have the clattering ruff of spines around its head or the accompanying sense of bone-jelling terror when it came near that the old one had possessed, but it was already different from the barely sketched form of mist and silver I’d last seen. For an instant I wondered how much of Will resonated in the creature, but the thought was knocked away as it lowered its massive skull and butted me in the chest hard enough to send me onto my back in the cold, roiling cloud-stuff of the world between worlds.

  The Beast rumbled a growl and churned up the mist with hooked talons as if it were trying to pick me up and put me back on my feet. The power lines of the Grey—the grid—strobed in sudden flurries of red energy that illuminated the face of the Guardian Beast with a suggestion of flesh that bore an angry expression and then vanished back into nothing. The Beast began circling me, laying coil on coil around me like a boa getting ready to squeeze.... Then it shrieked and launched upward, dragging me into the air for several feet and swatting me violently toward the water with the whiplike end of its tail and the sound of a ton of steel pipes crashing to the ground.

  I hit the wall on the other side of the narrow street with my arms up to protect my head, but even in the Grey mist, the impact hurt and now my whole body ached. I held myself up by digging my h
ands into the cracks between the bricks. I started to turn and the Guardian spun around, coming back to shove me again, westward. It put its long snout against my spine and pushed as if the building had no more substance than fog and the creature could force me through it. But the wall was a hundred years old and even its ghost memories were solid and resisted my passage.

  “Stop it,” I yelled, twisting and batting at the Beast’s head, trying to get away before it crushed me. It was a little slower than the old one, which was all the hope I had. As it reared to get another run at me, I dropped down flat into the rising silver mist of the Grey, my hearing suddenly clogged with whispers and muttering.

  The massive head of the Beast passed over me and the movement pulled sound from the grid like fingers plucking a chord on a harp. “Go.”

  I rolled onto my back and propped myself up against the flickering wall. “OK, OK! I’ll go. Gods, you’re as subtle as a train wreck.”

  The Guardian Beast moved its head through the mist and the Grey laughed at me. I felt the sound roll over me and swim outward into the rippling incorporeal world until it died on distant shores of memory and broken time.

  Was this better or worse than the old version? I couldn’t decide. The old Guardian hadn’t told me what to do, but it hadn’t really been communicative at all; it was mostly a bundle of inchoate fury drawn by need alone to whatever threatened the Grey. It had been strong and driven, but incredibly stupid, which had made catching and killing it comparatively easy. This version wasn’t so dumb—in either sense. Not that it was exactly chatty, and it certainly didn’t have Will’s reticent personality.