We stepped out onto Airport Way at the north end of the former brewery complex and turned south to reach the partially demolished buildings Solis had mentioned. I thought I heard something muttering in my ear, but there was nothing nearby, even in the Grey, besides Quinton and the animals.
Ghosts grew thicker as we moved along the sidewalk on the brewery side, mostly men in work clothes and teams of horses pulling wagons piled with grain, hops, or barrels. I could smell the horse dung and sweat, the sharp, bitter memory of fresh hops, and the sweet odor of boiling grain mash. The weird muttering was drowned in the harsher, louder cries of workers, the snort and whinny of horses, and the heavy roll and thump of barrels being loaded.
Quinton’s hand closed on my upper arm. “Harper?”
I shook myself. “What?”
“Just making sure you’re still here.”
I felt my brows pinch down in a scowl. It wasn’t quite a slip, but I shouldn’t have been sliding into the Grey like that. I wasn’t tired, so that wasn’t the cause now, but I didn’t see any other reason I would have gone a bit ghostly. I concentrated a little harder as we walked on.
The long buildings were pierced by recessed, black-painted doors and windows with sparkling-new glass, and odd ramps to old loading doors swooped here and there. Finally we reached the end of a building with two walls of soaring, arched windows and impressive double doors that faced a driveway and another building on the other side. A covered iron walkway crossed the driveway at the third story and a gate stood closed across the passage. Through the chain-link gate we could see a huge brick chimney near the train tracks on the far side.
The partial shell of a building on the other side of the driveway had a sandstone foundation that had been eaten away at the corners and mortar joints until it looked like rotting teeth holding up the charming brick edifice with carved stone signs above the big, boarded-up doors and windows that read “Brew House” and “Stock—” Just beyond the truncated stock house sign, the wall ended abruptly and the black expanse of the asphalt parking lot stretched to the south nearly another block to run up against the former brewery office building that now stood alone under the pylons of yet another freeway ramp. We’d arrived and, naturally, it was the spot with the aberrant lines of Grey energy that had given me the willies on first sight.
We stepped around the broken wall, over a parking bumper so new it gleamed white, and turned to look into the gutted remains of the stock building. A chill cut through me as we crossed the gleaming Grey power lines in the memories of walls that had once stood there, but the feeling faded as we left the ghostly walls behind.
A bit of tattered yellow crime scene tape still fluttered from one of the massive iron pipes that had been erected to brace up the remaining front wall. Sand, scrub grass, and tumbled bits of stone and garbage were the only floor the old stock house had. The brew house still had one complete room, but the jagged edges of more rooms that had once stood beyond the front one ran like raw wounds in the towering brick walls. Ivy and grass had rooted in the back wall of the brew house along a jerry-rigged plastic downspout that had broken apart halfway down. The stock house walls grew a thick coat of some horrid yellow spray foam at the second floor, but nothing else. Straight down from the foam and in the corner of the last standing walls, I could see a thin red smear of remnant energy—not a ghost but the mute energetic residue of something angry and violent.
The noise of the grid increased as I got closer, whining and rattling like blues guitar feedback on a cheap amp. I’d never heard so much local disturbance from the Grey’s power grid before. I wondered if it was an artifact of the asetem’s involvement, but I didn’t recall any such thing from London. . . .
There was no roil of vampires, nor the gut-blow of death lingering over the site, not that I’d expected it, but it might have explained the spine-crawling racket of the grid at this spot. I stepped up onto the sand mounded where the building’s floor must have been. Chaos made a chuckling noise in my purse. Grendel watched me with his ears pricked up and his shoulders a little hunched, as if his hackles might start rising in a moment. Pretty strange body language for a dog, I thought. Quinton held on to the leash and followed several paces behind.
I looked toward the yellow scrap of crime scene tape and guided my gaze along the line from pole to pole, searching for another bit of yellow or some indication of exactly where the body had lain. A second tag on the boarded doorway to the brew house and a small dark patch on the sand near the smear of red energy led me deeper into the site. I didn’t have to look hard for signs once I got close; the red haze resolved itself into the misty wire-frame shape of a human curled on the ground in a semi-fetal position. The dark patch, predictably, was blood, though very little and mostly smeared on the sand, not soaked in, where the body had lain, battered but not bleeding out. Either he hadn’t bled much at all, or, as I’d suspected, he’d been dumped on the sand after he was too dead to do more than ooze a bit.
I crouched down and put my hand on the bloodstain. The world seemed to drain away into silver mist and the screech of metal tearing apart under massive strain. I hadn’t meant to sink into the Grey, but the bloodstain had drawn me in. I started to back out, afraid for a moment that I had fallen into some kind of magical trap, but the Grey was no less fluid than usual. I wasn’t imprisoned, just sucked in. I took a few deep breaths and let myself fall all the way in.
My heart caught on a barb of sudden pain as I went and my breathing faltered as if I were feeling the distant echo of Simondson’s death but not the man himself. “Where did you come from?” I muttered as I looked around in the fog-built world, trying to pick up and follow with my gaze the miserable red thread of energy that marked Simondson’s temporary resting place. I concentrated on it and it got a little brighter, a weak tendril raveling toward the south until it broke off and died out. I dug my hand harder into the ground, a little frustrated that I couldn’t pick up more, and felt a piercing electric thrill in my palm, as if the dormant line of energy had suddenly gone live. I gasped a startled breath and heard the ferret chitter in alarm.
I shot a glance over my shoulder, staring down the length of the vanishing red thread, and saw a faint ghost resolving out of the Grey mist, walking toward me in jerks and starts, the thread seeming to haul it along. I grabbed onto the thread and reeled it in, yanking the reluctant ghost closer. He stopped on top of the spot where he had lain dead and glared at me in resentful silence.
As vague as his image was, I could see that his jaw was still square, his hair still blond, even though it was showing some gray at the temples. But he wasn’t looking as sleek as the last time I’d seen him; his residual self-image seemed to have skewed into an ugly awareness of what his greed had lost him. He looked like a stockbroker who hadn’t weathered the crash. Angry self-pity rolled off him in sickening waves. I stood up and hooked my fingers into his substance before he could escape. “Hi, Simondson. Remember me?”
Someone growled, but I wasn’t sure whether it was the ghost or Grendel. I shook Simondson a little. “C’mon, I know you can talk. How did you end up here?”
“Fuck off.”
“Nice. You haven’t gotten any sweeter now that you’re dead.”
“Which is your fault, you nosy bitch.”
“It’s my fault you’re a foulmouthed ass with a bad temper?”
He tried to spit, but it’s not an impressive gesture from a weak phantom. “I died because of you.”