I did have other alternatives, but they would tip my hand to Wygan. I wouldn’t tangle my fingers into the magical grid of the Grey until I had to.
I felt Goodall shift, preparing to move in spite of the magical weight on him. I dropped the compulsion at once, surprising him. Then I rammed my knee into the side of his and slammed an elbow into his chest. I pushed him back as I spun aside, out of line with the doors.
Off-balance, he lurched back into the ensorcelled doors and then bounded away from them with a shout and a jingle of dropped keys as the magic screamed and bit at him. While he reacted, I stepped in again. I grabbed him by his left wrist, yanked it up between his shoulder blades, and put the pistol to the back of his neck. He could outmuscle me, but he didn’t want to argue with a nine-millimeter bullet as I twisted his arm up behind his back. I turned him to face the doors.
Bloodred flames of cold magic roared up over the warded doors as I pushed him closer. “Open it,” I demanded. Through the pall of furious magic on the door, I could just make out the entry control pad with its uncanny eye above and the jagged line of invisible teeth below.
He stiffened and I tightened my grip so his arm strained in the socket and the pistol’s front sight dug into the base of his skull. He raised his right hand slowly, holding his card key in white fingers. He should have been sweating, but though the tension in his body was right, not a drop of moisture rose to his skin, just an odor like burned lilies and cheap hamburger. I shoved him and his wrist flattened against the wall below the pad. The ghostly eye above it flashed wide open, but this time the sharp little teeth bit deep into his wrist. Goodall shrieked and yanked himself backward, knocking us both down as the card went tumbling away and the doors stayed locked.
We rolled apart, him clutching his unbleeding, ripped wrist, me holding tight to the gun. I was panting. Goodall just looked murderous, crouching between me and the spell-locked doors.
“You’re not going to live through this,” he muttered. “Just give up. It’ll be easier.”
“Nothing is—”
Goodall snapped his bitten arm toward my face, slapping me hard between the eyes with his limp hand. The fingertips cracked across my skin like tiny whips. I jerked back. Then he spun and bolted for the monitoring room’s door.
Shaking my head clear, I turned and yelled, “Stop!” It was more a reflex than an expectation as I brought the pistol up in both hands. If he stopped, I didn’t have to kill him—and believe me, I didn’t want to.
He didn’t even slow but slammed the white door backward on its hinges and vaulted over the mess.
I squeezed on the trigger—three fast shots at his retreating back.
Goodall jerked, stumbled, and kept going as three burned holes marred the back of his shirt. He wasn’t bleeding that I could see.
I swore one sharp word as I took off after him, more angry with myself than at him. Bryson Goodall might have been human when we met, but he sure as hell wasn’t now. How could I have missed it? I didn’t think he was a vampire—any queasiness or the usual stink seemed to be a residue of Edward’s—but I really should have put some pieces together earlier.
I jumped over the broken door and chased Goodall across the small room full of monitors. He was heading for another door on the far side. Fire stairs. He hit the bar and streaked up the steep concrete steps. He wasn’t any faster than a very fit human—at least not yet—but he was still pretty fast.
No fire alarm went off as I followed him through the door. I didn’t put much thought into why the alarm was dead; I just chased after Goodall. Adrenaline doesn’t compensate for lack of sleep, though, so I was falling behind. In a few minutes, I lost sight of him up the cement stairwell. I was still going up, but his footsteps were fading. Then a metal door rattled and clanged, and the sound of Goodall’s escape was cut off in the echo of it slamming shut.
I kept going, hoping I might catch sight of him once I reached the door, but when I got there, he was long gone. I looked out into an obscure corner of the alley behind TPM’s big glass behemoth of a building with no one else in sight.
I let out a string of annoyed curses and started retracing my steps to the bunker and from there—I hoped—to the garage.
My cell phone rang. The number was my own home. Frowning, I answered, out of breath.
Quinton yelled from the phone over a pall of background noise, “Harper! Something is trying to break down your door!”
TWO
“Fantastic,” I muttered. Now what? “Did you say something?” “Yes, I did. Chaos is bouncing around the door and the new Grey detector is making noise—it’s not calibrated yet, so I don’t know what the signal strength is, but something not normal is trying to get in here.”
I could make out the steady banging on the condo door through the phone and the electronic ping of Quinton’s latest project.
“Can you see anyone out there?”
“Yeah, there’s a couple of people at the door and one downstairs outside the balcony. They look mostly normal, but the detector gets louder when I point it at them.”
“Do they know you’re there?” I asked as I started back to the garage.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure they do ....”
His voice faded away as I stepped into the stairwell, the concrete and steel of the fire stairs cutting off the cell signal. I stepped back up to the door and opened it. “Tell them I’m not there. I’ll be there as fast as I can, but don’t tell them I’m coming. Can’t use the phone until I’m closer.”
I didn’t hear his response as I rushed down to get back to my truck. It was almost as difficult to get out of Edward’s bunker and back to the parking garage as it had been to get in the first time. As I went back out, I recovered Goodall’s keys and card from beside the warded doors—though not without a shudder as the blood magic whined and snapped at me. Without them, I don’t know if I would have gotten out.
I drove fast toward home in West Seattle. The thought of strange visitors gave me the creeps after everything else that had happened. These weren’t ghosts—not like the last time—or Quinton wouldn’t have been able to see them. They might be some kind of vampire or something else entirely. Had they tried knocking first and asking to come in or had they just stormed my home? And if they had come on so strong and without warning, why?
From the moment I’d died, I’d been moved like a chess piece toward some hidden goal of Wygan’s. I hadn’t known it until my trip to London. Every step of the way things had pushed me. I wondered if this was more of Wygan’s doing. Goodall had said I wasn’t supposed to come back—at least not under my own power—and I was pretty sure no one had known exactly when I’d return. So if this was something of Wygan’s, it had come together at the last minute, once Goodall let him know I was back in town. Of course, it could be something else. My father’s ghost seemed to be involved in all this and there were always plenty of other spirits and monstrosities trying to get my attention on any given day. Where one aspect of the Grey became active, others tended to also.
I left the truck on the street and approached the condo building on foot from the western, downhill side—I live near High Point, the tallest but least trendy hill in Seattle. There used to be some wretched public housing nearby until the city bulldozed it for condo development. The neighborhood on the east side of Thirty-fifth Avenue Southwest has improved a lot since the time when I moved in on the west side. People don’t shoot one another as often, and the neighbors have gotten to like their peace and quiet enough to call the cops sooner than they used to when a ruckus starts. Whatever was going on at my place needed to end quickly or I’d be up to my butt in policemen and there was one in particular to whom I really didn’t want to explain anything. There was already a dog barking somewhere and someone complaining, so an outbreak of Seattle’s finest might be imminent.