I finally looked around at Quinton and Ben. Ben, naturally, seemed a little disappointed. Quinton had a grim expression, but he nodded. Mara’s manner had slipped from a narrow, concentrated stare to wide-eyed horror. I took a couple of long breaths before I went on.
“So. My dad didn’t know the whole plan initially and he didn’t understand what was happening to him, but he knew he was changing, and to keep him in line, Wygan and his minions threatened him and his family. I’m pretty sure they killed his receptionist or gained some kind of magical hold over her so she’d spy for them or hurt my father in some way. Dad destroyed her—I met her ghost—and he killed himself so he wouldn’t become a monster. That’s what he thought was happening to him, that he was turning into some kind of monster. But taking himself out of the equation wasn’t enough. I’m next in line and Wygan’s been working on shaping me into the tool he wanted my dad to be. Every time I die a little, I change. So . . . he’s been making sure I die. I’m still not quite what he wants yet, but he’s going to try to gain control of me and kill me again because the final stage of his plan is now in motion.”
Quinton and Ben both yelled over me, drowning me out as Mara frowned.
“What is he doing?” Ben demanded.
Quinton clutched my arm. “Kill you? What the hell—”
I wriggled out of his grip as I tried to wave Ben off. “Stop it. Stop it! I don’t know!”
Mara sat back, making a thoughtful moue as I quieted the men. “Hm. Something that needs a special type of Greywalker. . . . Well, that can’t be good.” She got up and started twiddling with a pile of odds and ends on one of the unused chairs nearby, touching them absently as she thought. “So, your father was a Greywalker, you’re a Greywalker, and the only way out is . . . to kill yourself? I can’t say I like that.” She turned back to study me, scowling with unhappy thoughts as she leaned against the back wall of the house. The protective magic wrapped around the building made a worried murmur.
“Actually, death won’t get me out of it,” I replied. “That’s more like a . . . reset button of sorts. If I die in a way that doesn’t destroy my brain or body, I come back, but each time I die there’s a window of opportunity to push my powers as a Greywalker into a new shape, or to let them reshape themselves. Most of the time. According to Marsden, there’s a limited number of times I can die and bounce back. At some point, I’ll just stay dead. According to my mother, I died once when I was a teenager. I didn’t remember it until, at my mother’s house, I saw a photo of my cousin Jill. We drowned together one summer. I came back; Jill didn’t. I don’t know if Wygan engineered that or not, but while I was in London, I found out my death two years ago wasn’t just a bit of bad luck either. Alice—you remember Alice?”
Mara nodded and I could see Quinton from the corner of my eye, mirroring her.
“Alice didn’t die in the museum fire. Wygan got her out and kept her....” I couldn’t bring myself to describe the ghastly and extreme measures he’d taken to heal Alice and keep her alive until he needed her again. I shuddered in spite of myself. “She was working for him. He sent her to London earlier this year to disrupt some business of Edward’s and lure me away from Seattle so Edward could be attacked and Wygan’s plan could begin to move into its final phase—and no, I don’t know why he needs Edward either. When I met Alice in London, she told me the man who killed me did it under her influence. I had every reason to believe her.”
“Is she still out there, then?” Mara asked.
I took a couple more deep breaths before I answered, tamping down a sudden spike of nauseous memory. “No. I killed her. I dropped her head into some kind of magical hole and left the rest to rot. I don’t feel bad about it: She helped kill me and she helped keep my dad a prisoner.”
Mara shook her head, her coppery brows pinching together. “You’ve lost me. When was your father a prisoner?”
“He still is. Wygan has his ghost in some kind of magical . . . oubliette—sort of a one-way prison hole. Two birds with one stone: leverage against me if I refuse to do what he wants, and a chance to torment Dad for kicking over the traces in the first place. Wygan’s like that: He carries grudges for a long time. This business with Edward seems to go back to something that happened between them in England two or three hundred years ago. When I called you guys from Los Angeles, I was trying to find my dad’s ghost, but all I could get was the ghost of his receptionist and a big, fiery hole where Dad should have been and a really pissed-off guardian beast running around it whenever I got close.”
“The Guardian Beast,” Mara said in an absent manner, biting at her lower lip and staring into nothing.
“Pardon me?” I asked.
“If it’s running around something like that at the edge of the Grey, it’s not just any guardian beast; it’s the Guardian Beast, protector of the Grey.”
I felt my own eyebrows draw down as I peered at her. “I thought there were a lot of guardian beasts.”
“In general, there are,” Ben put in. “Lots of them. Lots of types of them, too, guarding all sorts of things. But as Mara said, there’s just the one for the Grey. At least that’s what my—our—research shows.”
Out of the blue, Mara asked, “How do you know your father’s in an oubliette?”
That startled me a little. “I was told, but the hole I found at the site where he died kind of reminded me of the place Marsden tried to shove me into—the same hole I dropped Alice into.”
“Hm. I can’t say I’m knowin’ enough about how the Grey works to tell you if such a thing is possible without a spell in place, but a spell can be undone.”
“The one I found in London wasn’t created by a spell. It was more like a . . . black hole: Things around it had warped the magical landscape until it sort of folded on itself. It was kind of a magical vortex around a tree in a graveyard.”
“Hardy’s tree?” Mara asked. “At St. Pancras Old Church?”
I nodded. Being from Ireland, Mara must have at least heard of most of the magical oddities in the British Isles, even if she hadn’t seen them herself.
She pursed her lips. “Oh. Yes. Something like that is going to be a lot harder to extract anyone from.”
“Yeah, but I suspect Dad’s not locked down quite as thoroughly as Wygan thinks.”
She raised her eyebrows into quizzical arches. “Oh? Why ever do y’think that?”
“Because I keep getting hints. I’ve had several brushes with—not really ghosts, but energetic things like poltergeists and collective entities. They keep calling me ‘little girl.’ That was my dad’s nickname for me, and crazy as it sounds, I think he’s been trying to warn me in whatever way he can. I have a feeling that if I can get to him, he might know something about Wygan’s plans and how to stop them.”
“If that’s so, then you’ll have to be findin’ a way to your father’s ghost.”
I nodded. “I don’t think that’s going to be easy, what with the Guardian Beast around and that . . . fiery whatever in the way, but I would guess that the guy who killed me two years ago might have a few clues. He’s dead, too, and it sounds like more of Wygan’s minions at work.”
My announcement didn’t come as a surprise to Quinton—he’d eavesdropped on my conversation with Solis, after all—but the Danzigers both looked taken aback. I was getting used to the number of dead people around me aside from the ordinary run of ghosts. I didn’t care for it, but it was a fact of what I was and how I’d gotten that way that death seemed to litter my background landscape like so many rocks in a floodplain. It even showed up in family photos as smudges and phantoms that weren’t just dust and lens flare.
I explained. “Todd Simondson—the guy who killed me two years ago—may be a little easier to get to than my father. I suspect he was killed by the same people, so he might have useful information, and if I can get anything out of him, that may help me get to Dad.”