“I don’t think Wygan is too worried about that sort of thing.”
Quinton snorted. “Makes my job easier.” He scrambled in his pockets and brought out a small flashlight in place of the monocular. “Do you see anything in the Grey between here and the door?”
“Nothing significant.”
“Then get ready to run when the next car comes over the hill.”
We both crouched in the shadows of the plants at the edge of the street and waited. After a few minutes, an SUV came up the road, its headlights momentarily flicking upward and over the building as it crested the rise. Quinton flicked on his powerful flashlight, aiming for the camera and flooding the lens with bright white light under cover of the headlights’ glare. We bolted forward for the few seconds that the camera was blinded and stopped directly under it, where it had no view. Whoever had set it up had assumed that no one inside wanted to see the lock keypad or the intercom as much as they wanted to see the face of someone standing on the porch to use them, leaving a nice human-sized hole in the view if you stood right under the camera or up against the door. I took the door position so Quinton could work on the lock, putting my back to it and scanning the area in the Grey, just in case.
An unusual number of ghosts seemed to wander near the building, thin vaporous things even in the Grey, loops of memory drained of all intelligence, but lingering. Or perhaps drawn in, I thought as I peered harder at one: the ghost of a railroad worker, wearing an antique coverall and cap with the Great Northern’s mountain goat logo on the front. What was he doing here? What little I could make out of the rest was equally hodgepodge and as I started to examine them the ringing in my ears returned, rising to a whining chatter. I shook my head.
“Not ready?” Quinton whispered.
“Huh?”
“I said I’m done and you shook your head. Aren’t you ready to go in?”
“Oh. Yes, I think it’s safe to open the door and see what’s on the other side.”
Quinton quirked an eyebrow at me, catching the pun. A heavy click sounded from the lock mechanism and, remaining crouched outside the threshold, he pushed the door open. I looked in through the Grey.
Just beyond the door, the hallway to the broadcast booth looked like a red-and-black version of a funnelweb spider’s trap. I could barely spot a surface on the walls or floor bigger than my hand that wasn’t thick with the filaments of magic. They caked the narrow corridor, converting it into a tunnel that led to the monster’s lair at the center of the web: the booth where I’d first met Wygan.
My stomach heaved and a flash of hot fear broke a sweat on my skin that went instantly clammy. I had to go ahead, even though my mind and body balked. In all the rushing to examine my past and the why and how of my Greywalker status—even though I knew it would come to this—I hadn’t considered the visceral horror that returning to confront Wygan here would hold for me. In this building, at the end of the spell-hung hall, was where he had broken me, where I’d been forced to knowledge I didn’t want.
The buzzing in my ears crescendoed to a screeching of ghostly voices calling out to me: “darling,” and “Harper,” and “monster,” and “bitch.” They cried for my attention in every way imaginable, pleading, cursing, cajoling, flirting, and even in the din a thin voice called me “little girl” and sent a flare of dying fire scurrying toward me on the spider’s web of magic. That was my father—this time I was sure—and he was trying to reach me. I’d hoped there might be a way to him if I was close to Wygan and it seemed I might be right. And no matter how half-formed my plan, now I had no choice; I had to go to him, somewhere ahead in this web-bound maze.
The tangle of energy that festooned the hall pulled away from the weak flare, making a path too narrow and coiling to tread but pointing the way deeper into the heart of the gyre. I could see there were other holes in the uncanny fabric, now that I was looking for them. A difficult string of stepping-stones, rising normal and dry in the flood of Grey energy. It was going to be tricky, but I thought I could do it. . . .
I braced myself, catching my breath and straightening my spine as much as I could. I hadn’t been en pointe for decades and I didn’t have the shoes for it, but I still knew how to move with the precision and balance required. I hoped. I shed my boots and socks and started to step over the doorsill.
Quinton caught my near elbow, steadying my movement. “You’re going?”
“Yeah,” I whispered back, digging in my pocket. “Here, hold on to Simondson while I’m gone. I don’t want Wygan to sniff him out.”
Quinton accepted the tin that held the thread of my dead assailant and tucked it away, adding, “Forty minutes and I’m coming after you.”
“You damn well better.”
I took a long, storklike step into the thick nest of magical threads, arching my foot into a slender point that slid through a hole in the crimson tangle until I could touch the floor. As I stepped away from Quinton, I eased deeper into the Grey, becoming less solid, more fluid, and closer to death. I lost contact with his warmth but didn’t look back as the sound of the Grey roared in my head.
Tunnel-like, the center of the hallway was clear enough for me to stalk down without much bending to avoid the energy threads. I plotted each step with care, certain that like a real spiderweb, one inappropriate twitch of the magical mesh would bring its master rushing to capture me. It was difficult finding the right spot for each step, but the thin, blazed trail of my father’s sending remained, though slowly closing, hinting at the way ahead and leaving clear spaces on the walls to put down an occasional steadying hand.
Progress was slow and miserable. Each step sent a new shout of sound through my head, as if I were treading on unseen wounded beneath the fire and fog of the Grey. I controlled a shudder and went on toward the chromatic flashing of lights at the end of the hall.
I remembered that light from the first time I’d met Wygan: a rack of simple, colored bulbs strobing random combinations of blue, red, and yellow. I didn’t understand it then, but now I knew the Guardian Beast had difficulty with certain colors of light and shied away from them, confused that they looked like magic but didn’t act like it. Wygan, plotting something it wouldn’t like, had learned the trick of hiding himself from the Beast with the random lights. But it meant he couldn’t go far without risking its attention. No wonder he’d sent Alice to England: He couldn’t leave Seattle unless he took his light show with him. I nearly stumbled as I thought that perhaps he’d needed them two years ago to keep the Beast away as he’d planted a piece of the Grey in my chest. And now he was too far advanced into his plan for the Beast to ignore him. Which meant that killing Simondson—for which he’d left his lair, at horrendous risk—had been the last stage before he became an active threat to the Grey. Now I knew what the coils of electric cable in the brewery office had been for: to run the light show under which Wygan hid from the retribution of the Guardian Beast. Whatever I was going into, it was extremely unpretty.
As I neared the door I began to see hints of a dark-blue thread in the red-and-black warp of magic in the halclass="underline" Goodall was nearby or had had a hand in making the web. Either way, it seemed likely I would find him in the room with Wygan. I wondered how long the funnel web had been in place and what it meant. It could have been a trap just for me, but it had the feel of something built up in layers over time.
I paused at last before the door, standing in a void of the web just a little bigger than a shoe box. Music I couldn’t identify muttered from speakers over the door, mixed with the whispering of the grid. The sound made my head ache. My bare feet were cold—so was the rest of me—and I wasn’t sure if I should pull the gun or not. It wouldn’t do much to Wygan I was sure, but it did seem to distract Goodall, who wasn’t used to being bulletproof yet.