I turned my head, searching for any sign of the Guardian Beast. It had rushed to harry me at the border of the zone in Dad’s office, but here there was no sign of it. Whatever had happened here didn’t seem to threaten the Grey directly as the other incident had. I reached for one of the broken shards of time and felt a jolt of electricity at my fingertips as I touched it and it came away in my hand.
I’d only once held a piece of the material Grey before: when I’d grabbed and used a ghostly knife in the underground cells of an abandoned prison beneath the streets of London. This was like holding on to electrified ice. It crackled and sizzled with cold that arced up my arm. The moment of time contained in the shard replayed like a broken film as I stared at the shattered piece of memory: twenty seconds of Simondson cowering in the corner while two figures stood in front of him holding heavy objects I couldn’t quite see. Something white moved behind Simondson, coming into view for only a moment. “Break the spell.” The voice was Wygan’s. Then the vision broke off, sharp as the shattered edge of the temporacline.
I snatched at the next shard of memory, hoping for more information, but all I got was the same wrecked moment of time from different angles, as if the broken temporacline was a hologram, smashed into a dozen pieces but showing the same thing, no matter where you looked. There had to be more. . . .
I pulled Chaos out of my shirt, holding her tightly by the harness. The ferret looked around, her whiskers twitching. I studied the area where I had no doubt Simondson had died cornered and beaten, cocking my head side to side as I looked for ghostly traces in the unsettled mist. I’d rarely seen temporaclines less than two decades old and the residue of broken time struck me as something else done by Wygan and his minions. It didn’t have the same impact as the hole left at my father’s office, so I guessed it wasn’t the same thing. This wasn’t something locked up and hidden; it was just someone’s way of removing evidence. The void of Grey information was just a convenient side effect for whoever had broken the plane of time. If that was the case, they might have left a few other things behind. . . .
Chaos jerked and tried to jump from my hands to the floor. I knelt down, keeping a grip on her as she began wiggling like a mad thing and chuckling to herself. She wrenched out of my hands and dove through the mess of broken temporacline, dancing in fury over a tiny spot on the floor and snapping at something dark and gleaming near the corner.
It was a tiny loop of black energy almost invisible against the filthy floor and the heavy mist of history that lay on it. Black. Dead. The ferret stopped dancing and watched as I reached through the knife-edged circle of shattered time and hooked the thread of Grey energy onto my pinkie, trying not to leave a fingerprint on the dusty floor as I did. The remnant of some lifeless thing unspooled at the speed of chilled molasses, reluctant to reemerge from the grid of Grey energy beneath the city.
I persisted, standing and pulling with a steady pressure until it came free and cast up a pall of memory and a loop of remembered action. It wasn’t Simondson or his ghost, just a bit of the building’s recent cache of time. The scene unfolded and spread into the corner, playing forward like scratched film, the sound thin and partially covered by the squabbling whisper of the grid that had invaded my head and the noise of the ferret scrambling back into the safety of my shirt.
Simondson stood in the corner. The light in the memory of the room seemed to flicker and change at random times, as if it were changing color, though to me it was all a dim silver and gray, like an old black-and-white movie on a dirty screen. Two male figures faced Todd Simondson, vampires I thought, until I recognized the stance of one: Bryson Goodall—whatever he was. Even in the loop of memory, pale and shuddering as it was, I could see something magical clinging to Simondson, glittering in the silvery mist like a rage of moths. The sound cut in and out as the second villain swung a long, heavy object into Simondson’s side.
“. . . know why you did it ...” That was Goodall, I thought.
Simondson buckled and cowered into the confluence of the walls.
Wygan walked past, barely casting them a glance, his mouth moving. “. . . the spell. She’ll sniff ...” I thought I could fill in the first part since I’d already seen it. He was telling them to break the spell. Perhaps whatever it was that had compelled Simondson to attack me...?
Goodall reached out, curling his free hand around Simondson’s head. “Jackass ...” Then he pulled his hand back, closing his fist and yanking the glimmer away. He flinched a little as the web of spell-stuff tore and came dangling and dying into his grip.
Simondson screamed.
“. . . rid of him.” Was that Wygan who’d spoken? I couldn’t tell with the sudden howling of Simondson coupled with the garbled muttering in my ears.
Goodall and his companion belted him with their blunt weapons. Simondson collapsed, but the careful beating went on and the scene darkened, as if someone had turned off the lamps. I thought I smelled something burning—like circuit boards and wires smoldering into flame. I heard a rattle and a roar that chilled my spine. Then the image shuddered and started again.
I watched for another moment, compelled to learn more even as I felt sickened by what I saw. Until something buzzed and burbled against my hip, insistent and getting louder. . . . I shook myself, dropping the loop of memory. It whipped away into the floor, fading until I could no longer see it in the mist that was receding as I struggled back to normal, pestered to the surface of reality by my cell phone vibrating in my pocket. Chaos rumpled about in my shirt as if she, too, had been shaken from a daze.
I took a few cautious steps away from the corner death had occupied, groping for my phone as I set my feet only where they would leave no significant marks. I squatted down and answered.
“Yeah?”
“Where are you? You’re running late. The patrolmen are heading back around your way.”
It was Quinton. I took a couple of relieved breaths before I answered. “How long till they’re here?”
“Five minutes to sight of the office, I’d say, coming from the north on the opposite side of the street.”
“OK. I’m on the way out. See you at the truck.”
If I got out fast enough, I could stay to the darkened side of the building below the freeway ramp. They wouldn’t see me until I crossed the street.
I wanted to look around more and try to figure out what the electrical cables were for, but that was not an option: I didn’t know if the cops would inspect the office building again, hang around the bars across the street, or what. Quinton was taking a risk watching them at this point. They’d notice him if he kept it up. I had to be gone before they came down to this end of the block. I slipped into the Grey and found my way out through another balmy ghost of a summer day, onto the darkened asphalt beneath the freeway.
I strode out, keeping the building between me and the path of the policemen until I was a long block down. Then I crossed the road, timing myself between two trucks that rattled along the dray-haunted street with the sound of a dozen car wrecks. I nipped down the block until I was below the old Georgetown City Hall building and checked back up the street for the cops.
No sign. They must have stopped in a shadow or a doorway farther up the road—probably talking to the bouncer of one of the clubs. I made my way around by the long route to the lonely row of houses facing the plastic playfield.
The old man was still on his porch, but he didn’t pay me any mind this time, his odd aura keeping close as I made my way to Quinton and Grendel, strolling along the edge of the fake grass. The ferret took the first opportunity to abandon the snug confines of my clothing for the luxurious complexity of Quinton’s coat pockets.