Labyrinth (Book 5) (31 page)

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.

The seconds that I lay in the mist, breathless and stunned, silenced the voices and I took my first new breath quivering but not afraid. I gulped in a few more lungfuls before I could look at Carlos again. He made no move, no indication that anything was amiss. He just sat where he was and waited.

“All right,” I told myself. “OK. Let’s do this and get it over with.” Carlos didn’t make any acknowledgment of my muttering.

I crept across the silver fog that obscured the floor, the lines of the circle gleaming like dim neon miles away below the ghostly maze.

I pulled the wrapped Lâmina from my pocket as I knelt in front of Carlos.

He held one hand out flat, palm upward and thumb tucked across it. “When you hold the knife, hold it in your palm like this, your fingers flat under the blade. Your hand becomes the knife, your arm the tang. Then cut. Like this,” he added, his hand curving upward and toward my own heart. “But slowly.”

He unbuttoned and opened his shirt so I could see the dusky amber of his skin marked with a thick scar nearly as broad as my own palm. The scar curved a little, raised into a long ridge that gleamed like oily water in the ghostlight. Low and to the left of his sternum, the uneven crescent made me think the blow had come from below, underhanded. Just like the urge that had driven it.

I nodded, tucking the still-wrapped knife into my hand as he’d shown, letting the silk fall away to a single layer between us. Carlos shut his eyes as a tremor moved under his skin. I sank down toward the grid, letting the color swell and burn out the mist of the labyrinth until there was only a thin smoke of substance clothing the lines and tangles of power in the world. The energy seemed to rush up, much hotter and more urgent than the cold steam of the Grey had ever been. The fearful silence stayed at bay this time, but I felt it nearby.

In the blazing net of the grid, Carlos, a smear of tangled threads wrapped in shadow, looked dim and weak but for a burning ruby ember at the core, gleaming like one of Dru Cristoffer’s earrings. A dull void of light or color—triangular and sharp—stirred across the face of the ruby that pulsed once, slowly, and shuddered as the dark thing scored across it. I wanted to stare into this fire wrapped in darkness and watch the gleaming heart of it as it trembled against the black shape, beautiful and horrifying. Then the voices were crying in my head that it was a heart, his heart, this burning thing was Carlos’s heart. The black shape was the broken tip of the Lâmina, stirring toward its missing part, cutting as it moved.

I tasted bile as I forced myself to action, pushing my hand toward his chest, toward the cloud of blackness that shrouded the fiery heart. I felt cold pressure against my fingertips, but I could barely see them. I put my other hand out flat against him, feeling the scar, the shape of his rib cage and muscles, invisible but solid and shockingly cold beneath my palm. I felt his shudder and the whispering told me to press with both hands, flat with one and forward with the other, press. . . . I felt the scar part at my fingertips as they sank into his skin. . . .

I had reached into zombies and into ghosts, into the warped and furious constructs of human madness, ambition, and anger, but never into a solid, living thing before. Though he was undead, as a vampire, Carlos still had the solid flesh of a live human being, cold as it was. One would have thought he didn’t need a heart and could feel nothing in that dead organ, and yet apparently he did. As my hand holding the knife pushed into his body, I tried to shut off my mind, tried not to gag as he tensed and shivered and the slow substance of his body resisted my cutting. I pinched the fingers of my other, flat hand into the trailing silk and let it pull away as the blade on my palm sank into him, drawing my hand into the cold flesh.

The naked blade sang to its missing tip and the dark triangle twitched toward it, cutting a path by centimeters across the vampire’s heart. Brilliant golden light oozed in the wake of the black shape and wrung a sound of suffering from Carlos’s throat.

I trembled also, every movement was so slow, hard fought for every half-inch, that my muscles ached with fatigue and knowing what I was doing sickened me. I wanted it over with. I could barely stand any more of this creeping torment. The perverse chorus in my mind teased me that I could kill him at any moment, if I wanted, that I did not have to follow the route already made. . . .

I eased the blade sideways, cutting further to the inside of his chest than the original path and pressing hard on the plane of his upper chest as he jerked against the sudden change of motion. A growling cry boiled out of him as the broken point wheeled sideways, nicking a deeper golden line in the blazing scarlet heart as it moved to align with its parent blade. I tightened the muscles of my arm and thrust harder into the new incision. I cut into his body, urging the knife to meet its missing part sooner.

The bloodless meat below his ribs gave reluctant way and the jagged edges of the Lâmina yearned toward each other. The point turned a bit further, making one last bright line, thin as a hair, across the surface of his heart as it pulled from it. A slow golden haze slid over the ruby fire, gleaming as Carlos shivered and buckled backward a little. I shuffled forward on my knees to keep the blade from ripping out of his unseen flesh and felt the Lâmina quivering like a tuning fork in my grip.

I looked down, setting myself into position to continue and saw the glitter of gold fade off his heart’s surface. I froze in terror, thinking I’d miscalculated and destroyed Carlos, but he shuddered, not yet truly dead. I stared at the black shape of the blood blade within the skein of red fire and black smoke and noticed the point had cleared the bright knot of his heart and changed shape. The broken edges of the blade seemed to reach toward each other, thinning and elongating until they touched and bound. The blade lurched in my grip, as if it could not wait any longer to meet its missing part and I hauled backward to stop its hungry lunge.

The separated pieces rang together and the Lâmina vibrated, tolling like a bell and surging in my hand. I braced myself and pulled against it, hoping I was guessing right. The knife drew reluctantly from Carlos’s undead flesh. I lurched backward, back into the ordinary Grey, as the blade came free. I wrapped the black silk scarf over it at once, hiding it and binding it tightly, afraid it might move on its own. I scooted back, away from Carlos, keeping the knife bundled in my hand as I groped for the key that would shut the maze and dump us back into the cellar.

The moment I touched the key to the walls of the maze it collapsed as if it, too, had been impatient to escape from my nightmarish work. Even the bloody red lines of Carlos’s magic circle seemed comforting after what I’d just done. I shivered and hugged myself against the incorporeal cold as I sat on the glassy black floor, tucking my head down against my knees.

I could feel Carlos stirring before I bothered to look for him. He was back on his feet, if a little less steady than usual, his shirt already buttoned. He glanced at me and the dark gleam in his eye frightened me to the bone.

He stepped close to me and put out his hand. “May I have the blade.” A demand, not a question.

I started to hand it over but paused, clutching it in its silk swaddling and holding it aside. “Only if you promise not to use it on me.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I do so swear. Never on you.” His sharp white teeth shone in the gloom.

“And no fangs either. I’m not a blood donor.”

He chuckled. “Very well.”

His hand remained where it was, still waiting for me to hand over the Lâmina. I wondered if there was anything else I should say before I gave it to him, but no suggestions came to mind. The grid’s chorus was suddenly quiet.

I put the black-wrapped knife into his hand. His lips curled into his wolf’s grin. Then he flicked the scarf away from the dreadful object and looked at it in the ruddy light from the circle.

He tilted it back and forth, his gaze running over the restored blade like a touch. “Perfect. Now it
is
mine—of my blood, undying.” His smile was cruel and showed his sharp teeth to the darkness. He turned and slashed the knife through the circle, felling the protective barrier.

He stepped out and I was quick to follow, however ungracefully from my sitting position. I scrambled to my feet as he wiped the blade clean on its wrapping.

“You’ve done excellent work, though I thought you meant to kill me.”

“You trusted me,” I replied. “I don’t betray people.”

“Yes, generally. But you didn’t do as I told you. You changed the path of the blade.”

I started gathering my things, more than ready to be out of his house—forever, I hoped. I didn’t look at him as I moved around, not sure I could stand the sight right now. “If I’d let it come out the way it went in, the tip would have had to travel most of the way through your heart from top to bottom. Once I knew the path was immaterial, that the pieces would take the most direct route to each other, I pulled the blade to the side and shortened the path the tip would take. That’s all.”

“You could see the tip moving through me?”

“Yes. I could see everything. I’d like not to see it again.” I shrugged into my jacket.

He was behind me and I didn’t know how he’d gotten there. “The voices trouble you.”

“Not right now. They were helpful this time, but mostly they wear me down.”

“Do you understand what they are?”

“It’s the grid—the weft, whatever you call it.”

“It is the collective of souls, born and unborn, the consciousness and body of the power. You cannot lie so close to the warp of magic without hearing it. You cannot banish it. It is the material of the Grey, the ghost body, the mind that does not know itself. That is why it requires a Guardian. Or two. You are the Guardian’s hands and eyes on the hard side of the veil. It could not recognize you until you accepted it. You belong to the Grey and it to you.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, turning.

“I owe you for this.” He let the dim light of the room play over the dark blade of the Lâmina.

“You won’t be so pleased when I tell you what Wygan plans to do.”

“Ah. Yes.”

“He’s going to take the Guardian’s place. He means to kill it, according to my father, and become a sort of . . . Anti-Guardian, I guess. ‘The Architect of the Grey,’ Dad said—the creator of a new purpose for all that magical potential. Someone told me the asetem thrive on chaos, pain, terror, and other strong negative emotions. You said the Pharaohn yearns to be like a god again and strengthen his brood. What could be better for that purpose than turning the power of the Grey loose on the world and letting his spawn feed as they like on what would happen after that? No restraint, no Guardian Beast to stop him, and all that power, pouring into the world like the flood from a broken dam. . . .”

Carlos became thoughtful, his gaze wandering to some dread vision as he contemplated my words.

“It would be hell on earth.”

The words rolled on, mine and not mine, unrestrained and cold with truth. “You still want to stop it? Edward has no more hold over you and therefore neither does Wygan. You don’t have to do what he wants, nor do you have to stop him. In fact, you don’t have to do anything for anyone, if it doesn’t please you.” There was the geas between us, but in the gleam off the Lâmina and glow of the grid, it was as fragile as frost flowers.

The glare he turned on me was black and painful. “The warp has turned your mind. What feeds the Pharaohn does not suit me. And I also don’t betray my friends.”

TWENTY-NINE

I
didn’t understand what Carlos had meant. I could barely keep myself upright enough to leave and was too exhausted to puzzle around with it for long. Which friends? Me, Cameron, Edward? I felt broken by the long events of the day,the horror, difficulty, and revelation. Not to mention being half crazy and all tired. I longed for the reassuring clutter and familiarity of my condo, with the ferret living up to her name by burrowing in the bookshelves and tossing paperbacks onto the floor—that was the only sort of chaos I desired. After this I might change the furball’s name. . . .

And Quinton. I was surprised that I missed him after only five hours apart. We didn’t live together and I normally didn’t mind my solitude—preferred it in fact—but now I wanted the comfort of his presence, a warm body wrapped around mine, not some cold construct of undead flesh like a cadaver that won’t lie still. I couldn’t understand why normal people fell for the glamour of vampires. Even cloaked in magic, the fact that they were the living dead should make an impression at some point
before
you shucked your clothes or bared your throat. Shouldn’t the atavistic lizard brain kick in and let you know there’s something deeply wrong with the thing you’re snuggling up to, magic or no? Ugh. . . . Even thinking about it made me queasy and in want of something warmer and more reassuring.

It was nearly three in the morning when I got back down to Edward’s apartment in the TPM basement, but Quinton was still up, pottering around with the computer suite. Some people drink when they’re worried; Quinton tinkers. He got up to let me in since we still couldn’t touch the doors themselves from the outside, but after a brief hug, he dragged me with him back to the monitors embedded in the conference table.

He pulled me onto his lap and reached around me to type. “Look what I found.”

I collapsed against him with only enough energy to mutter, “Oh, rotten, dear. How did
your
evening go?”

He squeezed me and kissed the side of my neck. “I know. I’m sorry. I know you did hard things and you want to go to bed, but I found something I think is very useful here. Tomorrow’s Monday, so I think we’ll be able to track Solis down and get him to bring the info to the investigators.”

“Huh? Why would we want Solis? Are we having someone arrested?”

“No, not ‘we’ as in you and me. Carol and me. And it’s Goodall we want nabbed. See, this footage should have been wiped, but Goodall’s not an alpha geek: He didn’t completely destroy the image, only the file system information. That’s probably what he was doing down here when you came to see El Jefe Sanquino. Now tell me this doesn’t look like a digital image capture of Renfield Jr. kidnapping Seattle’s favorite bloodsucking entrepreneur.”

Contrary to popular film and fiction, most vampires show up just fine on video, so long as they aren’t making an effort to obscure themselves by hiding in the Grey. They do look a little out of focus most of the time, however. This particular recording did look awful; it hurt my head to try and watch it.

I was so tired I didn’t even pick a fight about Quinton’s going to Solis with Edward’s secretary Carol, and I wasn’t sure the crappy image was due to damage to the electronic file or if it was me. On the center screen, hazy, low-quality video of the bunker’s elevator lobby jerked forward in a storm of digital snow. Goodall was recognizable—his size and bearing were distinctive, even on a video screen where the color was messed up and no Grey auras showed. He put his card on the reader plate while he kept his other hand clenched at his left side and waited for the door to open. Edward stepped into the doorway, holding out both arms to keep the bronze-covered door wide open for his security chief to enter. But Goodall didn’t pass through the door. He took a step forward, swinging his left fist up into Edward’s ribs. It wasn’t a hard blow, but the static bloomed in a white flash where he struck the vampire and Edward collapsed in a heap. Goodall bent down, tossed something behind him onto the foyer floor, and then grabbed Edward under the armpits to drag him out of the doorway. He never touched the door itself and got out of its way as quickly as possible, dragging the downed bloodsucker along the carpet another yard or so before he snatched up the dropped object. Then he crouched, dead-lifted Edward, and flung the unconscious vampire onto his shoulder before he vanished from the scene.

I blinked at the snowy screen. “What the. . . .”

“Want to see it again?”

“I’m not sure . . . what happened? I mean he can’t have taken Edward out with a single punch. Vampires aren’t that fragile.”

“He didn’t; he stunned him.” Quinton typed and poked the mouse a bit until he had a close-up of a frame where Goodall hit Edward. Even through the white confusion of the electric arc, I could see the small black horns of the stun stick protruding from Goodall’s hand. Quinton advanced the frames so I could see the small device flung across the room. Then he zoomed in on it and tweaked the still a bit until it was a little more clear.

“That looks like one of yours.”

“Not quite, but similar. You know you can’t buy one in this state unless you’re an officer of the law or the court. If you need to back someone off, you have to use another method or make your own. So what I’m thinking is all that craziness in the underground with vampires zapping other vampires was Wygan’s guys experimenting to see what voltage they needed to use and what happened if they got it wrong. They didn’t steal any of my stun sticks; they just started working on the idea themselves—maybe they even thought they could blame it on me and you. Whoever’s building the stunners doesn’t know as much about the technology as I do, so they had to do a lot more calibration and experimentation. They probably had to find out if Edward really was immune—he always implied that he was—before they even tried it. It probably took a while before you left for Goodall to get that information. And as soon as he had that and confirmation that you were in England and too far away to help—bam!”

“And Edward’s reclusiveness helped cover up his absence. Why did Goodall come forward with the missing boss story at all . . . ?”

“Edward’s secretary reported it. Carol. The one who let us in. I called her. Edward had her phone numbers on the desk phone speed dial. All of them.”

I blinked and rattled the information into place in my brain. “Oh,
that
Carol. You call innocent secretaries in the dead of night to ask about their missing bosses?”

“I learn from the best: Get ’em while their defenses are down. Besides, she wasn’t sleeping and she’s not innocent. She’s an insomniac, which I think is how she met Edward in the first place, and she was his favorite blood donor until Goodall showed up. I guess they were ‘sharing the love,’ so to speak, after that.”

“She could be pointing the finger at Goodall out of jealousy.”

“She didn’t say much about him, actually. And that clip isn’t doctored that I can see. Goodall bumped him, all right. Also, I got the idea that something Edward does or something about the bite itself helps her sleep. She’s effectively addicted to him, but like any drug, too much would have killed her. So she didn’t mind that her . . . doses of Edward were smaller. But she did notice when he didn’t show up at all for a couple of days.”

“Did she tell the investigating officer?”

“Only that he’d been missing for a couple of days and that she normally saw him every day or two on business. She never claimed Kammerling had been kidnapped and she didn’t accuse Goodall of anything. She assumed he’s like she is: some kind of addicted donor. When she started working with the police and FBI on the disappearance, she started hiding things from them—the sort of things a vampire’s buddies usually hide from the daylight world—and finding a few herself, like doctored security logs for key access to this floor. My guess is that Goodall changed the logs and wiped or doctored the security recordings for the cameras and monitors in the room down here.”

“But not this one? How did he miss it?” My brain was sluggish. I felt I was missing something. . . .

“He didn’t. He tried to wipe it out but he’s not the hacker I am, and this recording is from one of Edward’s own backups, which Goodall didn’t have direct access to once the door locked and Carol had him taken off the security pass list. He tried to get at it through the remote backup system, but . . . he’s an end user and he doesn’t know how to really make a computer record disappear. And if it’s not wiped out in binary hash or physically destroyed, I can find it. Especially with direct access to said computer.”

I nodded and scrubbed my face with my hands, trying to shove away the muzzy feeling that had settled on my brain. Quinton pulled my hands down and kissed my cheek. He tucked me tight against him and pressed my head onto his shoulder. I wanted to fall asleep there.

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I’m trying to make things easier, but I guess I’m just making them more complicated. And here I am running off at the mouth about my end. . . . I don’t know what you’ve had to do tonight—don’t even try to tell me now—but it couldn’t have been easy or pleasant, what with Novak and the vampires and Carlos. You go to sleep and I’ll take care of this.”

“Take care of it . . . how?” I mumbled.

“I’ll get the files cleaned up and together, and Carol and I will take them to Solis in the morning.”

“No. You can’t go: He’ll arrest you.”

“For what? For supposedly being a homeless drug addict who’s cleaning up his act and being a Boy Scout? He won’t. He’ll suspect me of something, but not this. Solis is a fair guy. He’s the only one I can trust, but he’s not the point man on this case. He’ll need more than Carol’s word to believe the information is good and take it to the team. This is the evidence that can bring the case out of the darkness and into the real world. Carol will give it weight to keep me out of trouble. And it’s one less job for you to do, so you can sleep in while I’m talking to Solis. Then I’ll show you the Grey dampener I’ve been working on and we’ll take care of the rest of this mess tomorrow night.”

“Why you? Can’t you just give the recording to Carol and let her deal with Solis?”

Quinton shook his head. “Convincing the cops will take some technical expertise and that’s my bailiwick. If it works, the feds might arrest Goodall before Wygan can put the last of his plan into motion and that may buy you some time. It’s a little risky but trust me: It’ll work out.”

I made a grunt of protest; there was something wrong with what he was telling me and it would hurt him, I was certain, but I couldn’t put it together and I couldn’t keep my mind working against the pull of sleep to say so. I needed to tell him about tomorrow night and Carlos and all the rest, but it floated away before I could make the words. I tried to shake my head, but with me cuddled up against his chest, it just turned into a dopey nuzzle.

Quinton kissed the top of my head and stood up, keeping me clutched against him. He carried me to a couch and tucked me in to sleep under the blanket, and I don’t remember what he did next. It didn’t involve any naked snuggling, though, which was disappointing.

I know our bodies do most of their healing while we sleep. While we’re inactive, our brains sort through our activities and anxieties, making dreams and cleaning up the mental litter while the rest of the system goes into repair and restore mode. It’s also when most people die. Accidents and violence aside, it’s while asleep that most people shuffle off their mortal coil and leave the physical world for whatever lies beyond the far side of the Grey, where even the Guardian Beast doesn’t go.

It was well after noon when I finally woke up, and Quinton was gone. The buzzing voice of the grid pulled me out of sleep and I woke up, blinking, into a world ablaze. The colors of the grid had bled up into the world overnight, or I’d stopped holding them back, and everything I looked at was brighter than I could stand. As I walked across the floor, it seemed to ripple silver and blue under my steps, little waves breaking outward as if the surface of the world were a thin membrane stretched over luminous water. Every movement I made seemed to whisper across the burning threads of the grid. I might have been able to push them back, but I just didn’t care to expend the energy and find out. This was the state Wygan had pushed me toward for so long and I’d fought it once, but that had only left me weak and unable to use the state to my advantage. I didn’t care to be in that position the next time I was deep in the Grey—and I would be unless something in the current situation changed more than I could imagine.

Showering felt strange: My skin was too sensitive and the water felt effervescent and sharp. Every step of my usual routine was fraught with oddity: scents that were too strong or out of place; sounds that came too clearly to my ears; touches and sensations on my skin and fingers that were too rough, too cold, too hot. Even the taste of an apple I found in the kitchen was too sour and too sweet at the same time. I wore the softest clothes I had and kept the lights low.

I read my e-mail, including Cameron’s instructions for the evening, with the screen dimmed nearly black. Beside the computer, I found a note Quinton had left for me—handwritten on a single sheet of paper—saying he’d gone with Carol to talk to Solis. He thought he’d be back about two. But it was just passing that and he wasn’t back. I tried calling the numbers for Carol on Edward’s phone but only got voice mail and had to leave messages asking for updates. Finally I left a long note for Quinton myself, telling him what had happened the night before and what was going to play out tonight.

Beyond the facts, I had to include my speculation, too. I didn’t know if we had one day left or only tonight until Dru Cristoffer’s deadline for the puzzle balls expired. Guessing based on her personality, I suspected she’d be literal and give me seventy-two hours exactly from when she’d declared it. That meant I’d have to act with Carlos as soon as the matter of vampire succession was settled. I didn’t know where Wygan would stage his Grey coup, but if Carlos was right about the timing, it had to be ready to go the moment I was, so it had to be someplace nearby and already prepped.