With the wrapped Lâmina and the puzzle clutched to my chest, I stepped, cringing inside, over the darkened line of Carlos’s containment spells. The lines of the circle throbbed but remained quiescent.
Carlos glanced at me and cocked his head, frowning. “Are you afraid?”
“Wouldn’t you—” I started before I realized how stupid that idea was and shut up.
He made a sound in his chest that wasn’t quite a chuckle and a quirk at the corner of his mouth that definitely wasn’t a smile. “Yes.” Then he threw something hard at the ground where the circle was dim. The small, dark thing shattered on the smooth black floor in a chime of breaking glass, spreading a spill of red liquid that ran into the lines, flowing into the dim voids, to complete the shapes and close the circle with the iron scent of blood.
Carlos caught my startled expression and gave me an amused glance. “It’s hard to close one properly from the inside. That’s sloppy but effective. Nothing from the outside will interrupt us. Let us hope nothing from the inside will, either. Proceed,” he added, stepping as far back as the circle would allow.
I was leery of letting Carlos anywhere near the puzzle ball or the key that would make it into a doorway to the Grey’s hidden places. While I knew we were bound together by the geas, that didn’t mean I could trust him, and things of power were always of interest to Carlos. These weren’t dark artifacts, but they were magical.
I didn’t have much choice, however. I shoved the knife awkwardly into my back pocket. Then I unlocked the puzzle ball with the odd little key while Carlos watched, frowning. The inner door of the ghost labyrinth spilled open and filled the room, wiping out the solid appearance of the walls and ceiling in the shimmering maze of the mist-world. This time there was no barrier between me and the man with me; I could still see Carlos, though it seemed he was distant in the fog.
“Oh, little girl, no. Not yet.”
I turned around and looked down the long bending corridor of mist to the spectral form of my father, half eaten by the boiling wall of tormented faces. “Dad?” I glanced back at Carlos, who hadn’t moved, though he was getting clearer, which I thought meant he was getting into the labyrinth somehow. I returned my attention to Dad. “I know. I know it’s not time. But I need to be here for a little while and . . . I need to ask you something while I can. What happened to Christelle? Your receptionist? Did . . . did you . . . ?”
“Kill her? I thought I had at the time. In a way I did. But it wasn’t quite Christelle anymore. The Pharaohn’s ushabti . . . took her over in some way. That one was a puppet master—the ushabti are all different just like you and I are different from each other. I didn’t know what any of them were, didn’t know about vampires and asetem and that they aren’t the same. I didn’t know about dhampirs, or that the ushabti can walk in the daylight. I couldn’t know or guess. . . . I only saw Christelle and knew she wasn’t really . . . normal anymore. I didn’t know she was a shell, animated by something inhuman. I didn’t want to hurt her. . . . I let her linger too long, spying, keeping the real Chris from leaving. Do you know—does she haunt the office? I thought she might, but . . . I can’t go there.”
“She does. She’s confused. She doesn’t know you’re gone.”
“Oh, poor girl. If you can, tell her what happened. Maybe she’ll go on.”
“What did happen, Dad?”
“The ushabti killed her. The Pharaohn used to tell me about it: He smothered her, so she wouldn’t have any marks I could see, and when they were done with her, they buried what was left in a landfill in Torrance.”
“Torrance? On the hill heading to Palos Verdes?”
“I think so.”
“That’s a botanical garden now.”
“Oh. Thank God it’s not a dump anymore. I hated thinking of her like that.”
Carlos’s voice came from a distance, buzzing with red noise from the Grey. “Blaine . . . ?”
“I have to go, Dad. I’ll let you out of here soon.”
“You mustn’t. He’ll know.”
“I’m not going to leave you in this place for eternity. I just need to know how to undo what the Pharaohn did.”
“Ah, that’s the easy part: remove anything crossing the core that isn’t blue. But you’ll never get to help me without dooming yourself. Just leave the doorways open. We’ll all go up in smoke together.”
“I won’t—”
“Oh, my little girl, don’t make my death useless. I can still save you from some of this, from giving way to the grid forever. We’re fluid when we die. Some things we gain; some things we lose. Some can be carried away forever. I was a terrible father and I can’t make you what you were never meant to be, but . . . I can make you safer.” And he pushed on the living Grey, making a wave of pressure that shoved me back.
“Dad!” I screamed as he forced me away from him, slamming a door between us.
“Blaine!”
I turned and ran through the sudden twists of the maze to the center and into Carlos, who was glowering at me.
“Where have you been?”
I was surprised that I wasn’t crying or shaking. “To visit my father. I don’t think I’ll have a chance again.”
The necromancer growled at me and my skin crawled with goose bumps. But I glared back at him. “Don’t rush me. I needed some information. He’s been haunting the Pharaohn since I was twelve and, like Gwen, no one’s been paying him any attention while he listened to everything they said. Sometimes it’s useful to interrogate the invisible man. He told me what Wygan is planning.”
“Did he.”
“Yes,” I snapped back. “And I’ll tell you as soon as I get that . . . thing out of your chest. Because, frankly, I would like out of this place as soon as possible.”
“It is not a pleasant place,” he agreed and I goggled at him. Never would I have expected such a sentiment from him.
I took a steadying breath. Carlos sat down on the misty floor, crossing his legs and bracing his arms behind him.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Reducing the distance I’ll fall when you pull that wretched fragment out. Don’t imagine it will be painless. For either of us.”
I hadn’t thought of it at all and that bothered me: Was I becoming callous? Was the unemotional distance of the grid taking over? I preferred to think I was sure of Carlos’s lack of feeling rather than any of my own, but in truth, it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about it. If Carlos hadn’t been a vampire, would I have? I hadn’t given any thought to this process. I didn’t know what to do or how it would work, if at all. I assumed I could do it because I had the tools—the power—but what if I couldn’t . . . ?
Carlos grabbed one of my wrists and yanked me all the way down to his level. The furious cold of his touch froze my lungs and bound up my chest in ice and agony. “It won’t be complicated: The Lâmina wants to be whole again and you’ve only to help it come together. Just be sure the smaller part comes to the larger and not the other way around. And slowly, or what blood I have will spill like water. You will not wish to be the only warm, human thing within reach if it does.”
I knew what any animal would do to maintain its life and I knew he would do the same and more. My choices had gone the moment I’d walked through his door and now I had to do this right. I felt a moment of panic like smoke in my chest. I yanked my arm back from him, fighting his superior strength without thinking. My shoulder popped and creaked, near to dislocating before he let go. I fell back, the hard, silk-padded bulk of the blade in my pocket jabbing into my buttock. I was panting and the shrieking of the grid in my mind drove my fear into tightening circles, but the sudden hard thump of the knife startled me and shocked the last of my breath from my lungs in a sad little squeak.