The Medic One team hustled up the stairs with their kits. Wayne sent them to Ken first, then resumed his position blocking the main stairs.
Tuckman seemed a little dazed. "What? Why?”
"I suspect that Detective Solis has been keeping an eye on you and your group. Someone has surely called campus security about the noise and the smoke, and Solis's guys will be right behind them. Keep these people in order and under control and try to get them coherent. No detective is going to buy the idea that your pet ghost got loose and attacked a few people—especially not when one of your project assistants died in mysterious circumstances a week ago.”
His respiration was a little fast, his eyes still a little glazed. I leaned in and peered into them. "Do you understand me, Tuckman? Hello?”
He blinked several times. "Yes. Yes, I think so." He shook himself back to normal. "I need to keep them together. Will you stay or have you other concerns elsewhere?”
I smiled at him. "I have other things I have to do. I need to talk to you about all of this, but it'll have to wait.”
"All right." He nodded and stepped away from me, beginning to move through the small crowd, soothing them and organizing their thoughts for them.
I watched the ghost-makers wander for a moment, beginning to fall back under Tuckman's calm. They seemed frightened and confused—unaware of what power they wielded. Most of them. But at least one of them was acting.
I followed Quinton's lead and slid away before the cops arrived. I had an appointment I couldn't miss. Not even for Solis.
CHAPTER 20
Carlos paused a moment outside the building to study it, as I had a week before. The Grey fog of yellow and black that had hung over the building the night of Mark Lupoldi's death had thinned and contracted to a single blazing spot on his window. The police cars and barricades were gone, but the building still had an air of violation and depression.
Carlos said nothing until we were upstairs and standing in front of Mark's door. The snap lock had been engaged but it was old, unsophisticated, and poorly installed—easily bypassed with a credit card. "Corruption is rife when even the locks take bribes," he observed. I raised an eyebrow. I'd never expected a joke out of Carlos. "It doesn't usually work," I replied. "This just happens to be a very cheap lock in a run-down building.”
I closed the door behind us, locking us into the murder scene. The landlord had not cleaned the apartment yet and the bloodstains and print-kit residue still marked the walls. Carlos looked it over and nodded approval as he began pacing around the room. His tread made no sound in spite of his size. He put his hands out as if touching objects as yet invisible to me.
I sank down into the Grey, hoping to see something of what he saw. The cold silver mist swelled over me, shot with the phosphorescent glow of energized objects, heaving and flickering with the shapes of ghosts and memories. Layers of old tenants had built up a map of their daily routines, laying a path paved with ghost footprints around the bed, kitchen counter, and bath. A similar pearly patch floated near the windows, where generations of tenants had gazed out, watered their plants, or sat to read in the sunlight a while.
I pushed myself deeper, to the lines of the grid. Bright white, yellow, and blue dominated the vertiginous view through the blackness between the worlds. I felt dizzy at the apparent emptiness below my feet. Cars left a blur of displaced energy overhead on the black smear of the Aurora Bridge as the neon wire-frame world rolled down to the cold cut of the canal below.
A tangled stain of red and yellow—like strands of poisoned cottonwood fluff-lay upon the air a few feet from me. They didn't seem to hover, but to have become caught on some invisible hook in the air. A boiling shape of black and red moved around them. I started toward it, curious, then saw it reach out, beckon to me. The shape was Carlos s presence in the deepest levels of the Grey. It was heavier and more solid than I would have expected, though it had strange rents and holes.
I fixed my sight on the shape that was Carlos and eased back toward normal, watching the energy-shape change and clothe itself in layers of power, appearance, and memory as I surfaced. Jagged shards of glittering ice danced in his shape and clustered through him, reflecting sudden glimpses of history before he regained the dark, hulking cloak of shadow and blood I was familiar with.
I emerged with a shudder. Carlos watched me, one eyebrow raised. We were standing in front of the bloodstained wall, facing the cracked dent Mark's body had made in it. I could barely see the faded red and yellow threads, hanging at chest height. Carlos pulled a filament from it and brought it to his face.
"This is the trace of your ghost.”
"So it was here.”
"It was. A strange ghost, as you said. It is very difficult for me to read—it's not dead. It's alive. It is a living thing of this power, created by ignorant will, thriving on many power sources. One is not alive—a natural power source, but not that of a human life. It is not the life of the man who died here. He is not part of this. . entity.”
"What is it, then? They call it a poltergeist, but it doesn't seem to be that.”
"A thought-entity," he answered. "The accumulation of their will with this power source they stumbled on, displaced time, memory, things dragged from their proper place in the net of combined human desire. It should not be as powerful as it is, except for whatever power source they found. A strange creature. .”
He rubbed the strands between his fingers and breathed in whatever odor rose from it, frowning and casting his glance to me.
I looked at the bloodied wall. "Could it have caused that?”
"It did. I would not expect it of daylighters, usually. But the mind that guided it is unrestrained.”
"It was controlled? By a single person?”
"Without doubt. The smell of this is strange, though." He plucked another thread of it and I shivered. "It has a scent of you, also, and has the tang of fury and madness, surprise. . desire? Odd." He crushed the strand in his hand and drizzled it out as dust on the floor. "Why does it smell of you?”
"I fell in it earlier today and got caught in it at least one other time at one of their séances," I replied. "I suppose that would account for the smell of it on me.”
Carlos frowned cold ripples across the surface of the Grey. "I did not say you smelled of it—though it clings to you. It brought the odor of you with it here.”
I stared at him and my mind spun through the chronology of Mark's death. "Wait. When I first investigated the lab, some of the threads of it were gathered under a table—I didn't know what it was at the time. I slipped and my head and shoulders plunged into the knot of threads, like a large version of that little snag here. That was the day Mark was killed. Maybe an hour or two before he died.”
Carlos closed his eyes and smiled.
A surge of despair swamped me. "Did I have something to do with this?”
"No. The trace of you is a mere shred and I wouldn't have recognized it without your presence now.”
"But—" I started to object, unsure I hadn't somehow pushed this thing.
His glance cut through me. "You own nothing of this.”
"Then what happened here?" I asked.
"I can't see the whole of it—the death was quick and the shock short. The man who died did not linger. This thing came as fury and struck him with its power unleashed. It flung him, crushed him, sweeping the room like flash fire, then was gone.”
"Did it take anything?”
Carlos snorted. "If it did, I cannot see that. It has no story, only these near-extinguished remains of its rage. The power of it amazes me.”
"I think I know where the extra power came from. The room the group picked to work in has a power line nearby.”