The host usually stopped everyone, but he stood aside this time and pointed. “Door at the back.”
I ran through the main room at my best late-for-rehearsal speed, dodging bodies and jumping tables. It wasn’t graceful and I had to shove a few vampires and their friends aside. None of them moved to stop me, which was amazing. Vampires aren’t slow or weak, and just two or three could have caught me easily. I heard Cameron shout for someone to “stop those two!” which explained a lot. I spotted the discreet white door to the back room and pushed through it.
Vampire kitchens are not a sight for health inspectors. It’s not that they aren’t clean but that they aren’t really kitchens that’s disturbing. I dodged a lot of things that could have been prep tables but looked more like cots as I went through.
Nearly every building in Pioneer Square has a basement or two, and most have a door that leads into the underground—the network of abandoned sidewalks that ring the buildings at what was once street level. The downside is that there’s no way to cross the street without coming up to the surface. I had to assume Goodall had some more of Wygan’s asetem with him and they’d be spread out around the street—what else did they have to do now that their Pharaohn’s big night was at hand but roll up the competition? I’d have to come up where I could check for them before they could see me. That would mean the staircase by the old record store.
Bud’s Jazz Records had been in the basement near Temple Billiards for ages, but it had finally given in to declining sales and closed its doors. Now the old space was empty and I’d spent enough time in the underground with Quinton to know where the original back door was. It would be locked and alarmed, but at that moment, I didn’t care if I pulled in every cop in the district. It was pretty likely I’d get out before anyone arrived, but even if I didn’t, there’s little more secure from most bad guys than being surrounded by pissed-off patrolmen. Suicidal villains are a different problem, but I didn’t think Goodall or his asetem friends were willing to trade themselves for me just yet. They might be if they didn’t get me to Wygan tonight, but I didn’t plan to miss that party; I just meant to arrive my own way. I didn’t know what that was going to be, but I’d figure it out when I stopped running for my life.
I skidded around a corner on the filth of a hundred years’ neglect and slammed into a set of steel construction doors. Someone was doing work in the underground, and to secure the area from people just like me, they’d put up a barrier. Damn it! I didn’t hear anyone behind me, but that meant nothing. I was humped.
Except that I wasn’t. I was a Greywalker, and this was about as Grey as Seattle got: the depths of the old city where ghosts were as common as dirt and the layers of time slid and chimed over one another like slices of broken glass. I started to put my hand out by habit to feel for the temporaclines, but I didn’t need to. The bright glow of the grid as I now saw it turned the ripples of time into colored banners fluttering horizontally in an uncanny wind. And I didn’t need to slide onto one; I simply reached and it bent. I stepped through.
It was a miserable day I’d picked: pouring rain, the streets so muddy that cart horses bogged in it up to their fetlocks and had to be hauled up onto the wooden sidewalks while their wagons were cut free to sink until someone could come back for the goods. The ghosts of the early shopkeepers paid me no attention at all as they tried to save their stock of one kind or another. I slogged through the phantom mud, which felt as slimy and sticky as the real thing, to the waterfront and down the length of Yesler’s wharf toward the sawmill. The old dock area had long ago been filled in and made into the land on which the current waterfront and Alaskan Way stood within inches of the old level. That would be well out of the zone any of the Pharaohn’s henchmen would be watching and safe enough to appear in. I’d never exited a temporacline below the present world’s street level and I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I did.
I stumbled a little as I came out not far from Rice House Antiques. The warehouse was locked up for the night, even the red London phone box tucked away inside. I checked to be sure I wasn’t wearing the haunting of hundred-year-old mud and crossed the street to the ferry terminal. A few lonely cabs stood at the curb waiting for anyone returning on foot from Bremerton or the islands. I got in one and directed the driver to the Westin Hotel. It’s a big building near TPM, but not so near that you can see it from there, and I thought I could find a place to lurk long enough to figure out my next move.
And call Quinton to let him know I wasn’t dead yet.
THIRTY-TWO
My phone buzzed as I walked into the Westin lobby. I didn’t stop to look at the number, I just opened it up and answered. “Quinton?” “H-Harper?” The voice was shaking so hard the word barely came out, but I still recognized the speaker.
“Will?”
“Run . . .” he started, but his voice trailed away as someone else snatched the phone. “ ’Ello there . . . ‘little girl.’ It appears your friend ’as dropped by to play. . . .”
I swore. “Haven’t you had enough fun torturing that man, Wygan? You won’t get anything from him and his mind’s already too broken to be much good.”
“Oh, but there is still blood in ’im and, as you say, the fun of it. And of course there is your father. . . .”
“Why hold on to him? He’s dead. How much satisfaction can you get from tormenting a ghost?”
“Not enough, that’s true. They really are somewhat unsatisfac’try. But you do ’ave quite a few other friends. I’m not overfond of witches, so I might take a particular delight in the anguish of that cozy little family. They are quite nearby. . . .”
Broadcast tower. That’s where they were. The idea came into my head illuminated by another: I still had a back door. Wherever Wygan was, the ghost of my father was nearby, which meant that the door opened to within a few feet of the Pharaohn. It was behind a barrier in the Grey, but I thought my current affinity for the grid might allow me to tear through that barrier. I just had to get close enough to use it unseen and I could step out almost on top of him. Then I would have Carlos to help me destroy the Pharaohn for good.
“That’s enough,” I said. “I’m coming.”
“Ah, good. I knew you’d want to play your part.”
“What I want is to rip your head off.” And I did, but it had a distant, intellectual kind of appeal at that moment. I didn’t feel the burn of hate I would have expected, just a clear, steel-strong certainty that he needed to be removed from existence. Now.
“I suspect you shall be disappointed.”
“I don’t think so.” I hung up on him. It was a small, cold satisfaction, but at least it was mine. I wasn’t completely lost to humanity yet.
I called Quinton again, cutting in the moment he answered. “I’m all right. I slipped Goodall but I have to go stop Wygan—”
“No, you don’t! He can’t force you. If you don’t cooperate, he can’t get what he wants.”
“I don’t intend to cooperate, but I can’t let him hurt people. He has Will, he is threatening the Danzigers, and you know what he will do once he has his way. He has to be stopped for good. What’s happening to me is almost finished. If it goes on to the end, I believe I will . . . I’ll just disappear into the grid. It is pulling on me, singing me into it, and my ability to remain separate is failing. My father suggested there’s a way to stop that, but putting an end to the Pharaohn is the only chance I may have. And the only thing that matters. You said someone’s not coming out of this alive. I would rather choose who and how this ends than hope for the best.”
“Harper, don’t—”