Labyrinth (Book 5) (30 page)

“Why?” Sarah asked. “Why would Wygan want Carlos to do anything for him? And why would Carlos do it?”

“I don’t know the details, but I’ve been told that the Pharaohn will have to call and trap the Guardian in some kind of spell before he can . . . kill it, I suppose. He can’t do it himself since he means to take its place—or maybe the process is too complicated for him alone, I don’t know—and he needs the . . . elements, I guess you’d say, that led him to this stage: Edward seems to be one of those. Carlos is the only dark mage powerful and near enough to do the work. If he’s become Edward’s friend, he would refuse the Pharaohn’s request. We don’t stand a chance of stopping the creep if he thinks we have the ability to oppose him, to hell with the drive. So long as he thinks we’re all his tools or too weak and divided to stop him, we might stand a chance. He is an arrogant bastard, and I think that’s the only viable weakness to attack him through. We may have to get very close to the endgame before we can destroy his plans. He’ll have to believe we are at his mercy, distracted, naive, or too weak to stop him until it’s too late.”

They all nodded, which made me feel giddy with nausea. I was making plans with vampires to save the world from monsters even worse than they were.

“For this to work, there has to be someone . . .” I continued, but I couldn’t finish; my head was too noisy and my throat clogged with disgust and inarticulate horror. I had to bite my lip to hold back the urge to throw up or start screaming. The emotionless separation I’d experienced before hovered near the back of my head, but even that didn’t pull me away from the loathing I felt at what I was saying.

“There has to be a new Prince ready to lay claim to the city,” Gwen finished. “It will not be Carlos and it cannot be Ned. It must be someone strong enough, but not of concern to the Pharaohn. Someone he discounts . . .” She looked at Cameron. “You.”

Cameron reared back, recoiling from the idea. “I’m no one. The rest of them would tear me apart—I’m a child to them. I have no power, no influence. Without Edward to protect me, and Carlos to teach me, I’d already be dead. And I can’t front for Carlos.” He made an angry gesture, pointing into the north and then chopping downward. “He doesn’t want the job, and as a figurehead to a reluctant Prince, I’m still nothing but dog meat. I don’t know enough to keep this pack of animals in line, even if I could convince them I had Carlos or Edward behind me.”

Gwen began laughing, a sound both musical and menacing. She clapped her hands, tossing her hair back and jumping to her feet in excitement. “Oh, but
I
do!”

She danced around the room, laughing and talking in spurts. “No one worries about poor, silly little Gwen. No one is afraid of sad, stupid little Gwen. They talk and talk and never guard their tongues; they never hide their dirty little secrets and nasty little plans. And I know them all. I know them all! But they’d never let me be Prince—no, no, not Lady Gwendolyn who couldn’t slay anyone, who could never beat a necromancer like Carlos in a battle. But Cameron of Edward? Oh, yes! Cameron who studied at Carlos’s knee? Oh, yes!” She threw herself down on the floor in front of Cameron, ignoring me, and reached up to grab his hand. “My Prince, dear Prince, say yes! I’ll be your hidden consort and I’ll whisper in your ear. I’ll tell you everything and they’ll all cower like dogs and wonder how you know. Take pity on me, poor, sad little thing that I am, the last of Ned’s sorry, sorry mistakes, your warm sister’s cold friend, an ineffectual nobody whom no one will suspect.”

He pulled his hand away from her, startled and appalled by Gwen’s outburst. “It’s crazy!” He glanced at Sarah and then at me. “I’m still no one, doubly no one with you as my only supporter. I’d have to have Carlos’s backing at the very least, and I’m only his student!”

Sarah gave a “don’t look at me” shake of her head. I didn’t have a chance to say anything before Gwen chimed in again.

“Then defeat him! If you beat Carlos in some combat or contest, then he’s your vassal. He has to support you, but he doesn’t have to support Edward!”

“Me? Beat Carlos at . . . anything? Impossible.”

“Not if Carlos throws the fight.”

Cam and his sister stared at Gwen in dumbfounded silence.

But I nodded, further thinking aloud. “Which, I think, is exactly what he means to do. He said you needed a talking-to . . . that we needed a diversion and commitment to show Wygan. . . . Not a commitment to the Pharaohn, because he wouldn’t believe that, but against—or at least not in favor of—Edward. I’m not sure this is exactly what he meant, but it could work. . . .”

Cameron still looked a bit unsure. “He said something like that, but I thought it was insane.”

Gwen smiled at me and it flipped my stomach over cold. Then she turned back to Cameron. “If you and Carlos have a public falling-out about Ned and who’s going to hold power while he’s missing, that’s not a move against him on Carlos’s part. If you come to blows and Carlos loses—even for a ridiculous reason—no one else would want to challenge you after that. The city
would
be yours! And the Pharaohn will believe Carlos is on his side if only to harm you and Ned.” Her eyes gleamed dreadful red. “Then Carlos can get close to the Pharaohn and destroy him. Before he can take the Guardian’s place. It will work. It will.”

I felt a little less sanguine about it but confined my comments to saying, “Now we just have to figure out the timing of everything else.”

Cameron looked at the rest of us, his expression hardening from dismay and incredulity to cold determination. “Tomorrow.” He gave me a hard look. “You’ll have to get to Carlos immediately—now!” He glared at Gwen and Sarah. “And we’ll have to start agitating tonight so it will look as if Carlos is coming after me as soon as word reached him.” He checked his watch—an expensively understated thing. “We can get to the After Dark by eleven if we leave now.” He glanced back to me, as if he heard the objection forming on my tongue. “It has to be now. Enough time’s slipped by us already, and the longer we wait, the closer Wygan gets to his goals. Our activity tonight will help mask yours, but there’s no margin for error. I can see you’re tired, that things are falling apart for you, but all the better reason to move as soon as possible. I’ll work out the details and send you the plan for tomorrow by e-mail.”

Then he paused, a moment’s uncertainty crossing his face. “I owe you my life—such as it is. I can’t give that back, but . . . maybe I can return the favor. The longer we wait, the less likely that becomes.”

Cameron stood up in a sudden fluid movement, pulling Gwen with him to her feet and holding his other hand out to his sister. “Come on, then.”

There was a flurry of grabbing coats against the summer’s moist night wind—vampires don’t need coats, but they do need camouflage—before Cameron herded us all out the door. He paused to give me one more odd look as Sarah and Gwen went down the hall. “Be careful, Harper.”

“If I were careful, we never would have met.”

He only gave me a sardonic smile in return and followed the women.

I called Quinton on my way to pick up the Rover and left him an undetailed update on my situation. I mentioned Will’s appearance and told him to keep an eye on the monitors for anything else that might lurk in the urban jungle nearby. I didn’t tell him exactly what I was going to do. In theory the line was clean, but I felt paranoid enough to speak in generalities and hope he would fill in the blanks.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I
didn’t know if I hoped that Carlos was home or that he wasn’t. The street through what had once been a cemetery seemed as dark as ever and possibly more haunted. The ghost mist seemed to hum now, and it glowed in lambent colors as the voices of the grid muttered in my head. The névoacria crept across the landscape, flanking me like an honor guard, flickering in and out of existence as we went on.

I passed through Carlos’s hellish garden and found him glowering at me from the open darkness of the front doorway. He waved me in without a word.

I passed him and stopped in the living room, shuddering a little as the heat and cold radiating from the magic circle below brushed over my bones and added its voice to the chorus in my mind. I still had the broken Lâmina carefully wrapped up in my pocket, and the circle seemed to reach for it and want it. Perhaps it was drawn to the blade because it was similar to something that was part of the circle’s creator, or maybe it was just the nature of Carlos and his magic to want dark things.

“Did you have any idea Gwen was a devious mastermind?” I asked as Carlos entered the room.

He raised an eyebrow. “You met Cameron at his sister’s home, then.”

“Don’t act like that wasn’t what you intended.”

“I left that to Cameron. He has an interesting friendship with Edward’s other renovated error. Perhaps near-starvation made her sharper—she was certainly unremarkable when she walked in the daylight.”

I gave him a narrow stare. “You’re going to just love her plan. You get to publicly pick and lose a fight with Cam over who has Edward’s best interests—and those of the city’s vampires—at heart. Cam gets to be Prince of the City, with Gwen behind the throne, and you get to help me foul up Wygan’s plans and kill him before he replaces the Guardian Beast. All in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, depending on how fast the Pharaohn and his henchmen react to the rumors Cam, Gwen, and Sarah are busy spreading right now.”

“I’m impressed. Cameron exceeds my hopes for him.”

“He seemed to think you were a little disappointed that he isn’t much of a necromancer.”

Carlos snorted. “Only initially. Edward had an excellent eye for potential—it’s too bad that he’s usually only wasted, perverted, or destroyed it. He brought Cameron and Gwen into our community, and they have both proved to have exceptional depths no one yet recognizes.”

“No one but you.”

He made a half nod of acknowledgment, keeping his hands clasped low in front of himself and his stance as solid as a tor. He reminded me of a bouncer or a bodyguard when he stood that way, but the only thing he was guarding was himself. In the ghostlight, with the illumination of the grid’s whispering in my head, I could see that the black weight of his magic and his past pressed him hard onto the earth. “They’ll do well together.”

“Cam and Gwen? Maybe. But only if the rest of this works. You’ll have to pick the fight in a way that makes it clear to Wygan that you’re not on Edward’s side, while not putting Cameron there either.”

“I understand the situation,” he replied. “You will have to witness it yourself.”

I shook my head. “No one said anything about my being involved in any vampire dominance games.”

“A witness, Blaine. You are the neutral party everyone trusts. They know you’ve helped all of us and have no personal stake in who rules. I’ll make it easy. Trust me: I have learned how to lose in all the centuries of my existence. You’ll have no difficulty with that. It is this other that may challenge you.”

“This,” I said, pulling the silk-wrapped bundle from my pocket.

Carlos swayed a half-inch away from the iron knife in its black shroud. The buzzing and chattering in my head swelled to a dizzying volume. I could not help bringing my free hand to my face to wipe the sudden cold sweat that broke over me.

“I wish it didn’t have to be now,” I muttered. I was afraid of what might happen, of how close I would have to come to the grid and whether I could stay separate—I won’t pretend I wasn’t. The emptiness and inhumanity of it repelled me, but the overwhelming power pulled like gravity. And I was tired, perhaps too weak to resist. . . .

Carlos raised his left hand and touched my shoulder with a single finger, as if he saw something on my jacket. The light pressure of that one finger reverberated through me as if through a timpani. I clenched my teeth until it passed. Then I looked at him through narrowed eyes.

He seemed to have expected my reaction, but he didn’t show any satisfaction in it. “I know, but it must be now. You’re shattering, coming close to the edge of the web itself. That is the moment the Pharaohn will act. We must act first. If you die without his control to hold you in place, all this may drain away and you will be useless.”

I pushed my suddenly damp hair off my forehead and glared at him. “I wish people wouldn’t keep talking about my dying like it’s no big deal. It’s a big one to me.”

Carlos laughed at my grousing tone. My temperature fell again as the sleet sound of it swept through me. “If you die before I do, I shall miss you, Blaine.”

“Like a favorite lab rat, maybe.”

He didn’t respond to that. He just looked past me to the cellar door. “Let us be about it, then. Before you grow too weary. I trust you have everything you need?”

“I think so.” Knife, ball, bad attitude, and all, I thought. Oh goody: magical surgery for amateurs. The idea made me sick. The act would probably be worse.

I followed him once more down to the basement. This time I knew enough to keep well to the edge of the room and watch where I put my feet. The foundation stones left ashen marks on my clothes as I passed. Carlos moved to the circle without hesitation, snatching something off one of his workbenches as he passed and crossing over the singing red and black lines with no qualm—but it was his circle and still unclosed. I doubted it would be so friendly to me. He stopped in the center of the open space within the glowing arcs and swirls.

“How do you intend to shield this action from the Pharaohn’s knowledge?” he asked.

“In part that’s why Cameron and the others are starting their whisper campaign—to give the other side something else to pay attention to tonight. But I did find my back door and if it works as my father says, we’ll do it there.”

Carlos looked wary. “This back door . . .”

“It leads to a sort of maze inside the Grey. The doors are one-way unless you have the key. Dru Cristoffer made it, if that’s any recommendation.”

Carlos looked intrigued and much less worried. “Recently?”

“No.”

“And I’ve never heard of it. Clever of her.”

“Given the way she hid it, I’m sure keeping
anyone
from hearing of it was exactly what she had in mind.”

“Did you meet her?”

The question was too casual. Knowing the twisted way Carlos’s mind tended to run, I wanted to say “no,” but I was sure I couldn’t lie to him in this room. Instead I said nothing at all while the noises of the grid clattered in my head. In a moment he cut his glance aside and the sound eased.

“Step into the circle, there,” he directed, pointing to a place on the floor where the design was thinner and darker. “Bring all you need. Once the circle—”

“Yes, I know how a magic circle works,” I interrupted him, irritable and rubbed raw by the constant hot and cold sensation across my nerves, fed by the babbling voices in my head and the growing draw of passionless silence. I put down my bag, grabbed the ball from it, checked my pockets for the key, and transferred the knife from my jacket to my hand. I thought that should be everything. As an afterthought, I turned off my cell phone—it just seemed like a bad idea to have it go off while I was trying this—and left the jacket behind with my purse. It was cold in the cellar workroom, but the ease of movement would be more important than warmth. Besides, no amount of clothing had ever negated the chill of the Grey.

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 . . . ?