The edge of history fluttered under my groping right hand. I riffled through the knife-sharp edges of memory, pushing and scrambling for the harsh light of my own time. When it canted up like a whale broaching, I heaved myself onto it, careening through the Grey to be spit out into the normal.
I fell a few feet onto hard cement steps, keeping the bottle intact at the expense of my own limbs. Something wrenched in my left knee and shoulder as I landed on the upper steps of the Convention Center transit station. A scruffy kid with a long skateboard and two days' worth of unshaven barbed-wire beard grabbed my right elbow and helped me back to my feet.
"Oh, man, that was a real header! You OK, lady?”
"Yeah, yeah," I panted.
I took off before he could say more, feeling a hot stab in my left knee with every jolting, pounding step. I made for the corner of Seventh and Pine, just a couple of blocks west.
Four on a Saturday afternoon. Traffic was heavy, but slow enough for me to barge through. I could feel Celia's pressure against my back the whole time, but the entity was growing as tired as I, and I managed to stay ahead—I had more to lose.
A clerk in the upper lobby of the Barnes & Noble yelled at me to slow down as I rocketed through the doors and down the escalator. I didn't have the breath to tell him I'd only be a minute or I'd be dead. I slalomed through the crowd and back to the deep cell-signal death zone where science fiction shared space with romance novels.
A whey-faced teenager with long, lank hair squatted on the floor reading English-translation manga when I skittered to a halt at the end of the freestanding shelves that faced the book-lined basement walls. I backed myself up against the romance novels, facing the hard corner of SF. The shelf shuddered and rocked against my spine. My chest heaved and my throat felt raw and lined with corroded brass. There was no history to cut through here. Celia would have to play on my turf and come down the aisle just like a human.
The hot yellow knot of energy whipped around the corner and slammed down hard enough to shake the stacks. I didn't have the energy to taunt it. I pointed the open neck of the silvered vessel at it and braced.
It rushed. I tipped the bottle. One edge of the mass caught on the silvered glass and the thing smacked me hard on the side as it was whipped around like a leaf caught in a vortex and sucked into the trap. I snatched the stopper from my pocket and slammed it home.
I slumped to the floor against the corner of the shelf, a small cascade of novels pattering to the floor around me. The kid with the manga stared at me, gaping.
"What?" I asked. She shook her head.
From my other side a voice said, "Miss. I'm going to have to ask you to leave now.”
I looked up into the clean-shaven face of a security guard.
"OK," I replied. "I'm ready to go now. Can you give me a hand?”
He seemed a little confused, but put out a hand and helped me back to my feet. He appraised me, his eyebrows in a quizzical W. "What. . what happened to you?" he asked, leading me toward the downstairs doors.
I limped forward, my knee and shoulder throbbing. "I was hit by a car," I lied. I wasn't going to say I'd been smacked with a fake poltergeist.
His expression escalated to terrified. "Oh, no! Do you want to sit down?”
"No. No, I'll be all right. Just get me out of here." He escorted me all the way onto the street, leaving me under the mall's Pine Street portico. A dirt-crusted man with a hand-lettered sign harangued the automotive traffic against trusting the police or a certain apartment manager while a combo of electric violin and ordinary sax played jazz to a grinning bulldog.
CHAPTER 28
I was bruised and disarrayed and I smelled of sewers. I was surprised the cabby had allowed me into his car at all and I felt obliged to give him a very large tip when he dropped me off. I should have been paying more attention—I'd have noticed the pandemonium around the Harvard Exit. Crowds, cops, an aid car, and a press of onlookers surrounded the building.
Holding the flask in one hand, I got out of the cab around the corner from the theater and turned to find a cop by my elbow. The cab had already darted off and I was in no shape to run. "Miss Blaine. Will you come with me, please." I shrugged, grimacing, and limped along with the policeman. He made an opening in the cordon and led me into the lobby. Solis stood in front of the fireplace with his back to me. Ana was in a chair with her shoulders in a defensive hunch. Ken stood behind the chair with his hands on her shoulders, glowering at Solis with an expression that flickered between defiance and panic, his cold Grey shield against the world in shreds. Another plainclothes officer loomed a few feet beyond them.
My escort stopped me a couple of yards off, but not quite out of hearing range. He nodded at the plainclothesman facing us, who gave a curt nod back. I could just hear Solis's intense, quiet voice saying, ". . very dangerous. You will make every effort to cooperate with us this time, Mr. George, and there will be no repeat of your previous mistakes. Or of ours.”
Ken bit his lip and nodded.
"Good. Detective McBride will escort Miss Choi home. Now, you can all go.”
They trooped past me. Ken, with his arm around Ana's shoulders, shot me a puzzled look. A deep crease pinched between his brows and he started to say something, then turned his attention back to Ana, pulling her tight against his side. Ana kept her head down, exhausted and miserable.
I watched them go, then turned back to Solis, who had turned to stare at me. He was seething.
"What happened to you?" he asked.
"I fell into a sewer.”
"How?”
"I don't know." Which was the truth, and a more detailed explanation would just piss him off further. "How did you happen to get here so fast?”
He narrowed his eyes and turned his head a little, appraising me.
"Let me guess," I hazarded. "You sent Ana here with a wire and those keys to see if you could trip Ian Markine up.”
The tiniest trace of a satisfied-cat smile pulled at his mouth. "Miss Leaman identified the keys." His expression darkened again. "But you surprised me—you and Mr. George. We weren't ready to make the arrest. You fouled us. What did you come for?”
Now I knew why so many faces in the lobby crowd had looked familiar—they were cops. "I had some questions for Ian. I didn't get a chance to ask him at the funeral.”
"About what?”
I needed to fabricate something fast. I remembered the equipment in the loft. "About faking effects in the experiments and getting caught by Mark. That storage room is full of old equipment for rigging stage effects. He knew how, but he lied about it.”
"That's not what you asked him about upstairs," Solis reminded me.
"No. I overheard his argument with Ana and things made sense. You told me Cara had rejected him and he already had a complaint against Mark. The guy has an ego the size of a Metro bus and it's fairly obvious he's unstable and violent—he has a history of cruelty to animals and that's just the start, I imagine." I remembered with a shudder the pleased memory fragments of pain and death Ian had projected and his parents' distress about the poisoning of their dog.
Solis was still glaring at me. "So you barged in," he stated.
I took a risk and said, "He had something in his hand and he was trying to get Ana close enough to strike her.”
"What was it?”
"It looked like a pipe." A lie, but one impossible to disprove. There were dozens of bits of pipe in the storage room.
"How did you leave the room? When we came in you were gone and Markine escaped.”
"What? You didn't arrest him?”
"No!" Solis shouted. His habitual calm shattered. He was furious enough to talk.