The patrols were loose, but the clutches of loiterers were concentrated within a block of the Fujisaka. I suspected there were cameras and telescopes trained on the front door from one of the empty shop spaces in the old Uwajimaya building and from one of the buildings on Maynard. That's what I would have done if I'd been Solis—guard the doors at front and back, put patrols on the street and outlying watchers on the corners, if I could get them. If there had been no other major crimes this week, the detective pool would be available to assist him for a while. Ian's threats against Ana and Ken were only twenty-four hours old and serious enough to warrant attention for a few days. At some point Solis would have to drop the assistants and maintain the surveillance himself, but not yet.
And Ian wasn't likely to wait very long. He had the entity back now, and his fury was still hot enough to make him impetuous. I only hoped he'd wait until after dark to attack. It seemed likely, since the entity was weakened and it made sense to let it recharge a bit. Also, the confusion of costumed children and party-seeking teens would cover any sally Ian might make to view the results. He could sneak out into the open end of the alley and see the back of the Fujisaka building, hear the sirens on Sixth, watch the confounded police emerge from their useless ambush. No one would look his way for a few minutes and he could slip away into one of the half-empty buildings or under the freeway to Little Saigon, a few blocks farther to Rainier Valley or up to First Hill by routes no car could take. If the cops didn't spot him at once, he'd ease into the mess of Seattle's jumbled downtown neighborhoods and vanish.
My knee ached with a low throb, demanding rest and ice. I headed back to my truck.
I looked up the Wah Mee when I got back to my office—I had several hours to kill until dark—and recoiled from the information.
There was a lot of history to the Wah Mee. It had started out as a speakeasy, then been a swanky nightspot when the International District swung all night and hosted some of the biggest names in jazz. By 1983 it had become a little seedier, and was then a private gambling club for local Chinese business owners. The night of February 18, 1983, three young Chinese men had taken fourteen of their neighbors prisoner in the club and robbed and shot them all. Only one survived. "The Wah Mee Massacre" remained the worst mass murder in Washington history. But most people didn't remember it had happened and some, like the pet shop owner, didn't want to be reminded of the community's betrayal by three of its own.
* * *
"The bottle is broken and the genie is loosed," Carlos rumbled. His disquiet was infectious, hitting me in cold, black waves. "Unfortunate." I'd brought him up to speed as I drove toward Chinatown.
"Yes, it is," I agreed, refusing to apologize. "We'll have to adapt. The good news is that I found Ian—or at least where he's holed up. He's just outside the police surveillance zone, but there are patrols both on foot and in cars. We'll have to move in from the east with care and get through the door fast. There are two doors on the alley. Both are padlocked, but Ian must have gotten through one of them. There used to be a door on King Street, but that area's an import shop now and cut off from the old club. I think I could make my way in, but it's not a route you can take and I'd rather stick together, if we can."
He continued to growl in the back of his throat for a few moments. "All right. Since you cannot simply decant the entity onto your trap, you'll have to lay the trap and lure it in."
"This isn't going to be easy, is it?"
"It never was. But this will be riskier initially and our time will be shorter. The police will be curious if we give them cause."
"Yeah. And the detective in charge knows me on sight."
"Complicated."
"We'll just stay out of his sight until we're done. Then you leave and I'll take the fall for the break-in."
Carlos fell silent for the rest of the drive.
I parked the Rover under the freeway and stopped Carlos before he got out. I handed him a package I'd picked up.
"It's a cape," I said.
He raised an eyebrow at me.
"We have about three blocks to go down a major street with cops patrolling it," I explained. "It's Halloween, so we're going in costume—no one will notice—so I figured, why not dress the part?" I was going out on a rickety limb, but it had seemed like good camouflage at the time.
"I see. And what are you?"
I held up die fluffy ears on their headband. "I'm a cat burglar." I already had the all-black outfit on. I got out of the Rover and put the ears on, then clipped the tail to my belt. I hoped it wouldn't foul my pistol if I needed it. I stowed the spare clip and my cell phone in my jacket pockets and locked the truck.
Carlos's natural menace was not diminished by the cheap polyester cape. Six feet plus of Iberian glower and a palpable badass aura went a long way. I pulled on gloves as we strode down the street toward Ian's hiding place.
Small monsters were parading on the streets amid an upwelling of the unseen. The wet air boiled with ghosts and the world felt slippery beneath my feet. We came to the corner and I stopped, glancing down to be sure the thin yellow strand still pointed into the alley.
"It hasn't moved yet," I muttered to Carlos.
"It will soon. Something is shifting toward death."
Maybe it was the suggestion, or maybe I caught it, too, but a frisson ran up my spine and the street seemed to ripple. My bones itched. I cast my gaze around, looking for cops, and led the way down the alley when I saw none. Their attention was in front of them, not behind.
We drifted down the darkness to the chained doors. Carlos started to reach for the lock, then drew back. "This is the Wah Mee."
"Yes," I answered. "You know about it?"
"It drew me here. I can feel them still. The thirteen."
"And Ian?"
His brows drew down. "Yes. Beyond this wall. He revels in it. He doesn't know what drew him here, but he feels the bloody carnage. He is feeding the entity on the death within."
His frown became a black storm of anger. I pulled a small fold of the Grey between us, pushing the horror of him back.
"Carlos," I begged in a whisper. "We have to move."
He touched the chain, sliding his hands down to the crusted padlock. His fingers found a broken link and he lifted the lock away. The defaced and weathered mahogany door pulled open with a thin sigh, as if relieved by our presence.
We eased into the vestibule. The door swung shut. Before us was another pair of doors. Red doors and a sea of heaving Grey. I saw the phantom portal swing open and three shapes rushed out into the night, laughing. Carlos pulled open the real door and we walked into the empty bar, into a maelstrom of unhealed pain and memory.
The curving question-mark bar and dining area were thronged with ghosts. They packed the space, layer upon layer, moving through each other, coming and going up the stairs at the back, through the door behind us. Laughing, talking, the calling of a dealer from the other room, the TV behind the bar flickering images of ancient shows and forgotten news. Then shouting, the sudden screams of a woman. The ghosts thinned, some going on, oblivious, as a confusion of robbery and death played out in front of us through their heedless, vaporous bodies.
"What the hell—?"
I backed away from the consuming images in which I'd been lost and felt a padded rail at my back. I'd wandered into the bar without knowing I'd moved. Through the boil of Grey I saw Ian in the gambling room a step below, through an arch of lucky-red pillars, the floor still stained with twenty-year-old blood where fourteen people had been shot in the head and left to die.
Carlos grinned at him, shedding his cape. "I want to speak to you, boy."
"Miss Clever Dick and her cop friend," Ian said. "Fuck you."
Carlos laughed and the world shuddered as he started toward Ian.
The sudden reek of rot and the whirling knives and hot light of the phantasm shot down toward Carlos. He batted it aside and continued, grinning, fangs bared, the whirl of his own bleak darkness spreading li
ke ink in water.
Ian jumped back in the face of the impossible, implacable thing bearing down on him.
I brushed off the cat ears and started in, tripping over a spectral corpse that stared with horrified eyes from a spreading pool of silver blood.
The thing that had been Celia dashed me into one of the pillars. I rolled to the floor, feeling the hot flow of phantom gore over me. I pulled the tangle from my pocket, its thorns prickling into my still-sore hand through my glove.
The entity dove again, blazing bloodred: pure fury and hate now. I slid across the dust-thick floor and tumbled to my feet through an oblivious pair of dancing ghosts, swaying together in incongruous romance among the bleeding images of the dead.
I dropped the tangle onto the dancing ghosts, who swirled into sudden stillness—a faded photograph superimposed on the memory of the night three young men robbed and shot fourteen of their neighbors.
I heard Ian scream and started to look, catching a movement of black out of the corner of my eye.
Then the dervish of hate swept down on me again, howling. And froze in the shade of the dancers buried knee-deep in the horror of murdered bodies.
I wavered.
Carlos roared. "Now, Blaine!"
I dove into the entity, into the knives of time and the barbed wire of Ian's fury woven into it. I slipped and twisted my way through the tesseract of what had been Celia, just as I had run through time and space to elude and capture it, feeling blood in the palm of my glove where the thorns of the tangle had ripped my hand. I slid over frozen lakes of memory and crashed deeper into the structure of power and madness, seeking the center, where the control must lie.
Something was muttering, crooning images of terror. "… in the fire, limbs crisped and split… own living eyes…"
The entity's tectonic plates of memory shifted, sliding and buckling under me, throwing me against the agony of a shred of Mark's death, hanging in the frozen storm like a drop of crystal. The dancers had stopped but the other ghosts had not and they brushed through the suspended entity, disturbing chimes of memory and pain that rang on my own bones.
"… implacable. They crawl beneath your skin…"
That voice; part Ian, part Carlos, speaking nightmares. I shook the sound from my ears, staggering back into the depth of the thing I hoped to destroy.
"… dolls of flesh…"
I buried my hands in the tangle of energy and memory, wrenched at the structure that resisted me, fought as if alive, pulsing in my grip and burning over my nerves. Nausea swamped me as I felt I was tearing some live thing to shreds. I gagged and clutched for support, reeling in the swamp of remembered blood rising from the floor on the tide of unwholesome light. I was lost in the maze of knotted rage that had been Celia, unable to find the core and open it up to be destroyed.
"… drinks your soul and will…"
Desperate, I clutched at my own thin thread and followed it down into the clenched bud of the monster's core. Coiled tight, the heart of the entity looked like a pulsing spiral-rose of blood and fire. Wincing with fear, I clutched the thing and twisted it backward, unwinding the spiral through a writhing curtain of time.
"… eternal…" No, not Ian. Carlos, turning Ian's horrors back on him!
Then the core opened and I stared down into the web of human desire that had formed it. Four broken threads, one more frayed almost through, my own a pale golden color against the yellow and blue weave, shot with ashen gray and warped with Pyrrhic red. The red lines pulsed like arteries, feeding on something, swelling toward an overload of corrupted power as something else fed on the brightness of the life that bound the entity together. White flashes of memory seared my eyes and I tried to turn away.
Images and sensations erupted in my mind: a book tumbled from on high and struck my chest; a whirling brooch sliced into my cheek; a wooden slab rammed into my thigh; a shocked instant—
I tried to rip myself out of the fully flowered heart of the thing— out of the boomerang memories of Ian's cruelty pouring from the collective memory of the entity. I struggled in the net of flooding madness.
A tide of specters washed around the room, crashing against the corner where Carlos stood, muttering over Ian. Nightmares and memories, every eternal terror that ever crawled or clawed through the thoughts of men, he poured into the gaping mind of the young man who shuddered and dwindled at his feet.
"What are you doing?" I gasped. "Stop it!"
Carlos turned a vicious face to mine. "Is he worth your life? Look to the charm!"
I shot a glance down and saw below the shape of murder that the tangle was burning to a circle of ash. Only a small fragment of thorn and vine remained. I threw myself back into the construct's core.
My heart racking, trepid, against my ribs, I grabbed for the blazing center of the vile red core, for Ian's control line. My bleeding hand closed on the power line and the agony of the inferno roared up my arm, spreading through my body. A sad sigh of smoke coiled up and the splayed layers of the entity shrieked as they rushed inward.
I bit down, tasting blood, yanking with all my might as the dancers lurched. Time and memory crashed in and I yelled, plummeting backward, shredded by the flying knives of history whirling outward.
The stained floor slammed into my back, ramming my pistol into my kidney, my shoulder making a grinding sound as I hit. Reality swam in the mist of Grey and near-unconsciousness.
Carlos bent over me. "You're not done." He hauled me to my feet, his touch stabbing me with horrors, and set me before a tangled skein of yellow and blue threads that hung pathetically in the air, wafting in an unfelt breeze as the shooting played out again around us. "Finish the job," he added. "Pluck it out."
My left arm hung limp from a misshapen shoulder. With my right hand, I pulled the frayed strand of Celia's tether from around my own head and tore it from me. It felt like some horrible weed was drawn from my flesh, its spreading, spidery roots gone deep into my limbs. I stumbled and shied from another touch of Carlos's hands.
I panted and blinked, finding the last pathetic shred of the entity turning in the air as from a gallows. I stuck my good hand into it, pushed, and it fell to pieces. The shower of yellow and blue threads glittered and vanished.
I sank to my knees, looking toward Ian. He was huddled in the corner against a broken table, staring, cloaked in a strange, black haze. His lips moved, but he didn't see anything normal people would see and the words were a gabble of broken thoughts. I hadn't pulled the plug fast enough to save him from the memories of his own actions, the torments he had inflicted on the helpless filtered through Carlos's necromancy and poured back into his mind like poison. He seemed smaller, burned hollow, and I knew I hadn't imagined that Carlos had somehow drawn the living power of the entity through Ian into himself as he drove him mad.
"You bastard," I muttered. My shoulder and knee were throbbing and I had no more energy to express my fury, revulsion, and despair.
He chuckled, the burn scars on his face fading as I watched. "I am. He was not so very hard to break—his mind already teetered on the edge. I only made sure he would fall into chaos, not into power. It's best."
"When I believe you, I'll let you know," I whispered, swaying. My back blazed pain, my tongue was clumsy in my mouth and I tasted blood from biting it. The world swam in blazing colors and restless silver ghosts.
"Even in victory, you spit like a cat." I felt the rolling disturbance of his amusement. "Formidable creature. Assure yourself this was necessary. It was what had to be for everyone's sake."
There was some noise from outside. Carlos glanced over his shoulder. "Do you wish to leave here?"
"No," I gasped, falling against the wall and sliding down. "The cops—"
"Are coming." He stood and melted into the darkness.
I was alone with the ghosts. The twenty-year-old memory of robbery and murder played again before my eyes. I waited for the police as I watched the shade of the lone survivor of that bloody night crawl
from the room.
Solis found only me and Ian.
EPILOGUE
No one would have been believed and judged competent to stand trial when they raved about ghosts and vampires, sex and death, and women who danced in curtains of blood and fire. During his hearing, Ian's sudden fits of screaming, swearing, and sobbing did nothing to advance a finding for sanity, even though the things he said were true. I would not have called what I had done in the dread light of the entity dancing, however.
Ian had been quiet at first, sitting still and calm beside his lawyer. His demeanor and responses had been almost childlike in simplicity and lack of focus. Then he had burst into profanity and screaming. Guards removed him from the room after the second rage of hysteria, when he had raised his hands to his face, shrieking and gouging at his own eyes. He was committed to Western State Hospital, confessing to Mark's murder over and over in gruesome detail. I knew he'd never be coming out; Carlos had deranged his mind too far for hope of recovery.
While he wasn't sane enough to stand trial after the fact, the summary hearing found Ian sane at the time of Mark's murder. Ian had been a diarist. In the office of the Wah Mee, Solis discovered a notebook in which Ian had written everything he'd thought, felt, and planned. His intended actions through Celia, coldly detailed, were perverse and violent, written in a neat draftsmanly hand, between precise margins.
My name was included in his list of those he'd meant to have Celia "remove," just below Ana's, Ken's, and Cara's. The testifying psychologist believed that Celia was Ian's own disassociated personality and that everything he attributed to Celia was something he had done—or wished to do—himself, deluded that he had some kind of magical powers. I wouldn't have argued with that concept. With his increasing skill, Ian might have been able to do what he'd written. I was glad not to have tested the hypothesis, though.
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