I jerked backward, thrust away from the calm sea of the grid, dazed by the sudden return of normal pain and the ripping loss of knowledge.
The card reader was out of the magical circuit.
I breathed hard and stumbled back a few more feet, becoming more painfully normal with every difficult tread.
Quinton stepped up behind me but didn’t quite touch me. “Harper,” he breathed. “Are you all right?”
My breath shook in my chest and my limbs felt burned and leaden, but I nodded. “Good enough.” Remarkable in the Grey. A total wreck in the physical. My electrified mind gibbered and shrieked while the grid chuckled to itself at my expense. My spine had already begun buzzing, and the singing sound was swelling back up with the residual pain from handling the grid that I had ignored at the time—ignored, since human concerns such as pain and loss were outside my world. My gods, if this was anything like what Wygan expected me to do, there was no way I’d do it, even as a bluff. I could feel my muscles and joints stiffening from the sensation of electric shock still lingering on my nerves. I could never let myself be subsumed into the inhuman power of the Grey’s magical grid as I’d just come very close to doing. The potential had been awesome, but the divorce from feeling was too chilling. I wasn’t very good at emotional expression, but the sensation of removal was too terrible. Even so, I couldn’t fall into contemplating that now; there was still something to do.
“Just need to put the card on the reader,” I gasped, breathless, enervated, and ready to collapse.
I tried to retrieve it from my pocket, but my fingers were too senseless and burned to feel it. Quinton got the card for me and held it out toward the reader’s plate at arm’s length.
The spell throbbed brighter but the monstrosity stayed quiet behind the restraining bars of the casting, now out of line with the card plate. The door clicked and swung a few inches open. Quinton started to move forward.
“Don’t touch them,” I panted, crumpling to my knees, unable to stay upright any longer. “The wards on the doors are still active. They’re worse—even worse than the dog.”
Quinton glanced at me and started back to pick me up, but I waved him off. Scowling, he looked around the foyer searching for something to shove the doors wider open.
A pretty, spindly-legged console table stood under a painting on the wall to the right of the elevator, distracting the eye from the hidden door to the observation room on the opposite wall. A large vase of wilted flowers stood on the tabletop, and at first I thought he was going to snatch it up and throw it at the doors.
Quinton picked up the whole table instead and shoved it hard into the gap between the doors. The red-shining panels on the door surfaces let out a gonging sound loud enough to make us both flinch and cower as the table exploded into flame. The force pushed the doors back on their hinges as the burning bits of the table flew away, cutting through the air of the room with whistling sounds.
Quinton snatched me up and threw me through the gaping opening before the doors could rebound and snap closed. He didn’t follow and the heavy portal slammed shut again.
Inside the room the hush was intense and made the resurging babble of the grid in my head all the more noticeable as I fought it down. Still, I limped to the doors and tugged one open: Edward hadn’t warded the interior, and even though the malevolence of the wards seeped through, the discomfort of visions and the cold pain of touching the handle weren’t enough to stop me. Quinton dashed through the doorway and kicked the door closed again behind him.
Then he turned and grabbed me and hugged me so hard I squeaked with what little breath I had left—it hurt, but it was a pleasant ache. He was breathing very fast, sweat making his face and hands sticky.
“That—I don’t ever want to do that again. I don’t want to see you do it again. There was—ugh. It was like all those tapes from 9/11 going off in my head. Screaming and fire . . .” He shuddered.
“I know.” Yes, I knew, like I’d been split in two: one half looking only at the numbers, the other burning in the wreckage.
TWENTY-SIX
It took some time to get settled in Edward’s hideout. First I had to find the magical odds and ends that might cause Quinton trouble and mark them or cover them in some way. The seals Edward had had installed at two corners of the conference room area were easy: one was shattered and the other I simply toppled a chair into upside down. There weren’t a lot more problems but I still had to spend the time searching to be sure. We also ruled out spending any time in one of the small rooms near the elevator shaft which seemed to be Edward’s sleeping space. I felt uncomfortable anywhere in or near it.
The suite had a small kitchen that didn’t seem to get much use, even though it had everything and the fridge held several bottles and containers that argued that someone—I was guessing Goodall or Carol—needed to eat once in a while. Aside from that, one would think only alcoholics ever came into the basement, but I’d noted long ago that vampires have no problem drinking alcohol. The extensive facilities in the bathroom made me think there might be things about vampire habits and hygiene I didn’t know and really didn’t want to. Quinton found it all rather unsettling, but he had no complaints about the security or the speed of the computer and communications equipment. He looked at it with speculative avarice while he settled me on a couch with a blanket we found in a closet.
“You look like you never took that nap,” he commented.
“I feel like I’ve been trampled by elephants wearing electrified cleats.”
He looked contrite. “I’m sorry. I should have asked how you were sooner.”
“Stupid to ask when you can just see it.”
“Well, yeah, but it’s . . . graceless of me.”
“I can skip grace. I like practical. Though I could stand to hear a little less of whatever’s bugging the Grey world at the moment.”
“Is it getting worse?”
“It’s . . . different.”
He knew I didn’t want to discuss how it had changed. Instead, he just said, “I need to work on that. . . .”
“I’m doubtful there’s much you can do.”
“I can try though. Electric shock seems to knock it down. . . .”
“You can’t keep on zapping me.” And I wasn’t sure that the zap hadn’t somehow facilitated the sudden shift in my connection to the grid. The ordinariness—for us at least—of the conversation was odd after my experience with the Grey a few hours earlier, but welcome.
“No. That would kill you. Eventually, maybe, but no thank you all the same.”
“Yeah. I think I’ll skip that option.”
“Still, it’s a datum and that’s a start. I wonder if it’s a field effect, like the Grey detector flux. . . .”
“Maybe I just need hearing aids that turn the volume down instead of up,” I joked.
“Noise canceling, maybe. Have to find the right frequencies though....”
“Have I mentioned that you’re cute when you’re obsessing?”
He smiled at me, but it wasn’t quite the irrepressible grin he usually used. “So are you. You bite your lip. It’s very Marilyn Monroe.”
I couldn’t say that comforted me since she was dead, so I didn’t say anything except, “I’ll have to call Carlos before this gets worse.”
“About what?”
“How to get him off Edward’s hook.” Not to mention figuring out a few other angles on this thing. . . .
Contacting Carlos proved easier than usual and he returned my call himself about nine o’clock. Quinton had been poking at me with weird implements and taking various electronic measurements whenever I said that the noises in my head were louder or more distinct. I wasn’t sure he was getting anywhere with the research, but at least it kept him busy and both our minds off the problems ahead.