Greywalker

"Because you're a Greywalker. I warned you they would come. They hope that you can help them because you can see them and speak to them when others can't. As you can with Albert. Your arrival in the Grey must have woken a lot of creatures."

"Woken? Some of them have been lying in wait! As if I was late to an appointment." I found myself shivering.

Mara bit her lip. "Something worse than your ghost?"

I nodded, swallowing hard. "Saturday…," I started. "Saturday night I interviewed vampires." "For Cameron."

"Yes. And one of them—one of them dragged me into the Grey. He was—something worse." I couldn't get any more words out as I drowned in memory.

I sat at the kitchen table, pushing back an upwelling wail, gulping down air to force back the hard lump in my throat. It wrenched down into my chest and dissolved at a slow trickle when I caught my breath at last. My left hand hurt. I looked down and found Mara clutching it, staring at me and whispering curling blue charms under her breath. I tried to pull my hand away, but she wouldn't let go.

"What are you doing?" I demanded.

"Just holding on. Helping you hold on. You're doing much better now, aren't you? You look better."

I shuddered. "I'm all right."

"No, you're not. But you don't have to live through it again right now. Once was quite enough."

"Yes, but you don't know—"

"I don't need to," Mara stated. "Let's go find Ben. You'll not want to tell this story twice, and he needs to know."

She started to pull me up with her, but I winced in pain.

"You're hurt?"

"My skin feels roasted and I think I'm…. broken somewhere."

"How did that happen?"

"I'm not sure. But I guess I need to talk to Ben about that, too."

I got to my feet, stiff as an arthritic spider, and crept after Mara. We went upstairs to beard the scholar in his den. Ben bustled about moving papers and books and getting us settled on the sofa, which sent up a puff of dusty book-scent as we sat down. Then he retired behind his desk and looked at us like an owl.

"Harper, you don't look so good," he said.

I nodded in slow motion. "I know."

If I'd felt better, I'd have laughed at the concerned look he gave me. "What's happened?"

I couldn't get an answer together at first. Ben looked at his wife with alarm. She shook her head.

"Is this a ghost thing?" he asked. "This problem? There is a problem, isn't there?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes. Something's wrong. The Grey isn't quite what we thought. And—and now there is a piece of it inside me."

They both jerked forward. Ben's desk restrained him, but Mara grabbed my hand again and drove an intense stare into me. I felt the track of her eyes.

"There is something there," she murmured. "But it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be like that."

Ben rose from his seat. "What is it?"

"It's sort of a knot," she answered, hesitating, then shaking her head in frustration. "I can't tell more. It isn't easy to look at. And I'm not really good at this sort of scrying." She leaned back and frowned into my face, still holding my hand. "Harper, how did this happen? What is this?"

I bit my lip. Ben teetered on the edge of moving forward, waiting. Mara squeezed my hand a little. She was doing it again and I wished it irritated me, but I was grateful.

I began again, feeling a bit anesthetized. "Saturday. I was working Cameron's case. Talking to vampires. One of them was—something I can't describe. Something beyond vampires and ghosts. Something worse. He shoved me into the Grey. He wants something from me and he called this a present. He tore me open and he put this thing inside me." I covered the ache with my free hand. "All tied up and tangled all over me. And the Grey things crawled all through me, ate me, t-touched—" I covered my face, shuddering at the remembered feel of the cold, hungry things sucking away everything. "They ripped me up, but I'm still here, and now I can't turn it off!"

Ben fell back into his seat and hung his head. "Harper. I—oh, God, is this my fault?"

Mara gave him a sharp look. "Oh, do shut up, Ben. Of course it's not your fault." She turned her eyes back to me. "And the other client, too. I told Ben about the dark artifact."

I nodded. I no longer felt like howling in pain and grief. "I went to look at it again today. It's gotten worse. It extruded some kind of tentacle toward me and I felt so sick I couldn't stand it. There's a set of red lines all around it now. It hurts to be in the same room with it. My client wants it. He threatened me if I couldn't get it for him, and he backed it up by trying to throw something at me in the Grey. And I—this thing inside me—batted it back and I screamed at him. There was sort of an explosion and then he was gone. Just gone. But not forever. He'll come back."

Mara raised her hand and started to bring it toward my chest. I shied from her, curling my shoulders forward.

"I shan't hurt you."

Wary, I let her touch me. I gasped when her fingertips pressed against me, pushing prongs of dense stillness into the center of the hard Grey knot. She looked at me a while, blank and thoughtful. When she sat back, pulling both her hands into her lap, her withdrawal left a void in the ache.

"It feels… heavy, but elastic and smooth, like some kind of muscle— a diaphragm, perhaps. It bends if I push gently, but it won't yield to me, and the harder I push, the more it resists. It seems benign, if a little weak at the moment, but who knows what it does? It doesn't like to be probed."

Ben gave us both an incredulous look. "'Doesn't like'? How can you say what it likes?"

"I don't know," Mara replied.

But I did. "It's alive in some way. I can feel it full of the things that live in the Grey."

Ben shuddered.

I shook my head. "I can't do this. I can't live with this. This is a nightmare. Cameron's case… it's only going to get worse and I am not sure I can stand it. I believed he was a good guy, in spite of this. But he's a monster. They are all monsters. Inhuman, vile…"

Ben spoke up. "Not vile. But the rest goes without saying, doesn't it? They're ghosts. They're vampires. But they look like us, so we think they are like us. And then they do something horrible, because they aren't like us. Ghosts are much closer to us, because they remember what it was like. Memory is all they are, really. And memory can hurt."

"But a vampire, I imagine, must learn to forget," Mara added. "Or surely they'll go mad. How could they live with themselves if they didn't change?"

"And Cameron is one," I said.

"Yes, but he's at the beginning," Mara reminded me. "He's still a nice boy who has a problem. You were right about that. He'll change, but you will probably never have to see it. Someday, when he's as old and twisted up with his new culture as those others, then he will be a monster. But do you want to make the decision to let him die now, confused and miserable? That's your choice."

"That's not fair," I said.

"No, it's not. You'll have to work that one out for yourself, I'm afraid. Can't put the apple back on the tree. So, what are we going to do now? That's the question."

"It's my problem," I said. "Not yours. I'm drowning. I've felt like something's sucking me dry ever since my client—ex-client, ghost, whatever—came to the office."

Ben perked up with a scholar's zeal for a puzzle. "Really? Before or after your argument?"

"After."

"Let me think, let me think…." He began shuffling through his papers and riffling books. "His attraction to the organ… physical manifestations and volition… action…. Hmm." He glanced up at me from the pages of a thick tome and cringed a bit. "I'd say this guy's some kind of high-level willful spirit—that's a ghost who has volition and exercise of will—so he must be a revenant."