"You won't make it."
"Then send someone with me. Send Ben. I won't stay."
Ben drove me home.
I turned off the phones and locked the doors behind me. I spent several days curled up with Chaos in my lap, surrounded by the muttering hum of the Grey.
The first morning, an impressive white card arrived in the mail, thanking me for attending a fund-raiser at TPM the night of the fire. I showed it to the investigators who showed up a couple of days later. I told them I had a bad case of the flu, which they didn't question, since I looked like something scraped off a locker-room floor. They went away.
A few days later, the newspaper reported that the fire was due to a ruptured gas tank in the basement and a smoldering cigarette dropped by a workman. The arson investigators didn't like it, but there was no accelerant and no sign of tampering with the tank. I doubt they ever really closed the books on it, but they let it lie.
They wouldn't have believed that the fire was started by a desperate necromancer and a witch, or spread by a furious beast that devoured ghosts and prowled the edges of the world between worlds. They wouldn't have believed that the fire had fed on magic as much as on dry wood, varnish, paint, and cloth. They wouldn't have believed any of it. What kind of crazy person could? I wished I didn't. But I felt it every day, the untied knot of Grey knitting deeper into me as the flow of power corrected itself and sang across my bones, illuminating the world in threads of fire that gleamed through an ever-present silver mist.
Eventually I returned to work. Cameron turned up at my truck the same night.
He'd had to clip his hair much shorter than mine, and his face had changed under the mop of angelic curls that resulted.
I kept the Rover between us and touched my own upper lip. "Hey, no mustache," I commented.
"Nah. I figured I should change my look for a while." He glanced down and sucked in his lower lip. "Harper… I owe you a lot more than money. Carlos is getting better and I'm doing all right. I moved him out to Bellevue with me. Got tired of squatting in the Danzigers' basement. Besides which, Albert drove Carlos crazy."
"He's like that. How's your sister handling the invasion of the vampires?"
"She moved back in with Mom. After they stopped acting like total wenches, they actually get along OK. Especially since they can both complain about me now. Sarah's pretty good for Mom. She freaks out less whenever I come around. We're getting things worked out. I'm not going to go back to school for a while, though—Carlos needs me too much and I figure I'll get a pretty good education just talking to him about stuff. He's got a lot in his head after knocking around so long."
"I imagine so."
"Anyhow, I just wanted to let you know things were working out."
I smiled at him and we talked about money a bit, but I was glad to see him go. His presence in the Grey was already changing.
Three days after the museum burned, Brandon McCain fired Will, disappeared with the company funds, and was arrested in Los Angeles for fraud two weeks later. Will called me a week afterward, and we had the first of a lot of dinners. I loved sitting in the mundane world with him.
Over dessert on our one-month anniversary, he said, "I'm not going to have to testify against Brandon."
"So you did find something, that day."
"And a lot of days afterward. When you got me looking into that organ's provenance, I started thinking about the paperwork on some of our stock, and I looked into that, too. I found all sorts of stuff in the paperwork, once I figured out where to look. Brandon foisted a lot of fakes off on people, and he used my reputation to do it. I warned him… but he fired me." He looked sick over it. "Anyhow, that's over. He, uh…. what's the phrase? Took a plea?"
"Copped a plea. He made a bargain with the DA so he wouldn't have to go to jail."
"Yeah… and he's supposed to make restitution, but there's nothing left to make restitution with. He grabbed it all and hid it somewhere. Everything else is going to be sold off to pay people back, so… I've got nothing."
"What are you going to do?"
"Well… savings are running low and I need to look after Michael. But I got a call…"
"Oh?"
"Yeah. To go back to Europe. To England, actually. Investigating provenances. It's what I really like doing—what I should have been doing all along—and it'll get my career back on track. It's a good job."
My heart fell and I bit my lip. "Oh. Yeah, that's a great job. How did you hear about it?"
"The curator from the Madison Forrest House called me about it. She's going over to do related work and told me about the opening. Do you remember her?"
"How could I forget? The place burned down right after we went there."
"Yeah. Well, that's another thing."
"What thing?"
"You. You have secrets. Weird things seem to happen around you."
"That's the way my job is, Will."
Distress boiled off him in sickly green waves. He took my hand and held it too tightly. "It's not just the job, Harper. It's something about you. It's like there's an invisible wall between you and the world, and only part of you is walking around out here with me. I am… I'm crazy about you, but after Brandon, I can't live with secrets like that. Not right now. I need a simple life for a while."
"You're dumping me."
"No! I will stay in touch. I do want to—I don't know, stay with you? But I can't."
I eased my hand back from him. "I understand, Will. It's a great opportunity and you need a break. It's all right."
Harper…
I kissed him on the cheek, though it seemed an icicle stabbed through my heart. "It'll be all right. Someday the wall will come down. But not yet." He looked fit to cry when I stood up. I didn't shake his hand. "Stay in touch."
He rose from his seat and stared at me. "I will."
I faked a smile. "Yep. You, Will. Me, Harper."
I walked away.
I walked a long time and ended up at my office and sat in the dark for a while. I just sat in the reupholstered client chair and stared at my desk from the wrong side and remembered the stink of uncanny fire.
That night at the Madison Forrest House had burned down my resistance to the Grey. It burned away much of what I had believed, but it had not taken my friends before, not quite. Not even sweet, lunatic Quinton, who still turned up to take me for beer and rounds of disastrous pool. Not even the Danzigers, though Mara often gave me speculative looks from the corners of her eyes.
I couldn't look at any of them without seeing the reminder of their stark faces that night and the threads of living color that tangled around them, diving in and out of the orderly grid that hummed in low registers below the normal world. It didn't make me sick to my stomach anymore—only sick to my heart.
Close as they were, none of them were like me—whatever I was. With Will who hadn't been there, I had, I thought, passed for human. I guess I didn't pass well enough.
Someone knocked on my door, the new glass rattling a little in the frame. When I didn't answer, I heard the swish of an envelope through the mail slot and the thin thump as it hit the floor. I left it a while, until I was sure the messenger was gone.
I turned on the desk lamp and cut the envelope open. There was a private check with a lot of zeros in the amount line, signed by Edward Kammerling. The note on the check read, "services to the community." I put it in my desk drawer, knowing I would never cash it. I wasn't like him, either, and I wouldn't be bought.
I left my office in the dark and went home, brushing past the shapes of things we do not see, into shadows of uncertain futures and pasts that don't lie down.