I picked up the mask and put it in her flailing hand. I watched her clap it onto her face and suck in the gas to regain control of her breathing. I thought I should have felt more moved by Jewel’s condition, but something about her chilled my sympathy.
The bedroom door banged open and Geoff darted in, heading for the bed, but drew up short when he saw that Jewel already had the mask to her face. He glowered at me, but Jewel waved him away again, lowering the mask for a moment to say, “I’ll call you, Geoff. Go away now.”
“Jewel,” he protested.
She took the mask down again, but this time her voice was tender. “I will call for you.”
Newman stiffened his jaw, his mouth turning down as he tried to hold it steady and his eyes got wet. Then he wheeled and marched out, back and shoulders stiff.
I waited a while for Jewel to be ready to speak again, watching the fast-fading sunset color the lake darker and darker, like a stain.
Finally she put the mask aside. “Miss Blaine, I don’t have the luxury of beating around the bush. I’m sure you wonder why I didn’t make a report when Daddy went missing. But I knew he was dead, and I also knew it would only make things worse for me if I said anything. I didn’t want to be the subject of a murder investigation—my family’s had enough of that. I tried to discover what had happened on my own, but I couldn’t, and in trying . . . this was the result,” she added, waving at the machines and the hospital bed. “There was—there is—no one here I could trust to carry on the investigation. Not anyone with any power, at least, and I’m sure you understand that any normal person would be eaten alive by the things that drink from this lake. I think my father tried to stop these things—these poachers and despoilers and their filthy familiars—and I am sure one of them killed him and dumped his body in the lake to feed the power. I want to know, but more than that . . . I want them all to stop. I want them to stop using the lake. I want them all to die. At the very least I want them broken, driven away from here forever. Do you understand?” She stared at me, unwavering, the colors around her head clinging close, weaving into a snowy veil of white.
White: the color the Chinese used for death and mourning.
“I can understand that,” I replied, noncommittal. I knew it would get ugly and I wasn’t sure I needed to be the one to do it. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t want to do it, either. The proprietary fury that rolled off Jewel made me sick and her desire for bloody revenge repelled me.
Something yellow touched the distant side of her face and she cocked her head over as if listening to it, still watching me the whole time, calculating. She straightened up with an effort and nodded. “You do understand. I know that. I know your own father was driven to death by magical things.” Her voice had a disturbing singsong quality, carried on a thread of magic. “You can sympathize. You understand. I know you’ll do this. For me. For both of us.”
She was trying to play me and that was the last straw. I slammed down my mental doors and narrowed my eyes, letting cold disgust flow out at her. I took a step back. “Not for my sake,” I said. “And not for yours, either, you bitter old woman. You don’t understand one thing about me.” I’d already done my time with family vengeance. I wasn’t going to shoulder that gnawing burden for someone else, especially not for her.
I turned on my heel and started out, in that moment not caring if the lake drank up another hundred life forces before it finally destroyed whoever was using it—and I was sure it would, judging by the toll it was taking on Jewel Newman. I didn’t care who’d killed Steven Leung any longer. I told myself the county or the feds or the city of Port Angeles would find out eventually and that was no longer my job. I’d done what I’d come to do.
“I’ll pay you,” Jewel called out from the bed.
She couldn’t possibly pay me enough. I ignored her and reached for the doorknob.
“You can do whatever you feel you must—I’ll make sure of it. I’ll protect you,” she cried. “I can protect you from the police. Just break their power! Make the sorcerers and houngans go, and I’ll pay you.”
I ground my teeth and turned the knob.
“You’ll be saving us—all the rest of the people around the lakes. You’ll save them. You have to. You have to try. You have power and . . . and the Guardian will demand it.”
That stopped me. I knew that she’d been fed the information by some kind of Grey spy, some magical snooping, whispering thing, but unfortunately, she was right. That’s my job: Hands of the Guardian—the human instrument of the thing that keeps the Grey safe, and the rest of the world safe from the Grey. That was indisputably my role ever since the last job, when I’d unwillingly helped to destroy the previous Guardian and then watched a new one take form once I’d shut down the threat of an unfettered Grey—at the expense of my life and the lives of others. Damn it all! How dared she use that against me?
I halted at the door, indulging in a fit of mental cursing, but I didn’t turn back. “I’ll think about it,” I said. Then I left.
ELEVEN
The ferret woke up with a frantic need to scratch her ears as I was trudging down the darkened road toward the ranger station. I had forgotten to ask about Shea, and I didn’t think that query or a request for a lift to my car would have been well received after the way I’d walked out on Jewel Newman, so I’d just kept walking. Geoff Newman tried to brace me at the door, but I am good at slipping out of physical holds—especially when the person trying it has no idea what he’s doing.
In the falling darkness, the lake’s uncanny presence impressed itself on me as an ululating whisper of song, half-heard. The phenomenon that had lit Lake Crescent bloody red had faded as the torn clouds closed up again, gathering their stormy menace, and the sun set completely. Now I felt the sparking tingle of minuscule raindrops against my face like tiny ice needles.
“Great,” I muttered, grabbing the ferret as she tried to leap to the ground. “What odds will you give me that we don’t make it back to the truck dry?”
Her only response was to squirm harder and paw at my hands. I stepped off the road and let her down, holding her leash tight so I didn’t lose her. I could hear her scratching her ears and I knew she was propelling herself around in a backward circle like she always did, one back leg going a mile a minute, while the other made a pivot for her to scoot around. As soon as she was done, she hopped up onto my boot, apparently finding the slippery frozen ground too chilly for her liking. Sighing, I bent and picked her up again, putting her on my shoulder, since she was now too awake to go peacefully back into my pocket.
I got my phone out and pressed a button to illuminate the screen and check the time. It was only six p.m., but it was as dark as midwinter midnight. I started walking again. A mist-form darted out of the trees on my right, gleaming in my sight like a cloud of tarnished silver. It trailed streamers of color and darker smoke as it crossed the road, and a trio of the white doglike demons I’d seen on Friday chased it, letting out unearthly howls. Not wanting to be seen by them, I backed up into the line of trees beside the road until I felt a shaggy cedar trunk at my back. Chaos tensed and crouched, her tail moving rapidly along my neck as she prepared to leap at them, but I clamped a hand down on her and wrestled her inside my coat before she could make the weird, challenging bark she’d issued the last time. I did not want these creatures after me again.
The white demon dogs caught the cloudy form near the opposite edge of the road and locked their jaws on it as if it were a thing of flesh and bone. They began yanking it back and forth between them while they made noises that sounded like laughter.