Possession

FIFTEEN

I’m taller than a lot of people. I’m taller than Quinton and I’m taller than his father, so I could stalk along behind him, able to keep his head in sight at a longer following distance than usual. He must have known I was following him, though I never saw him give any indication. After all, he’d been in the business of following people longer than I had and I would have spotted me by now. Still, he led me up First Street in the thickening crowds of workers and tourists—and then he disappeared.

I was a little startled. He was in front of me and then he just wasn’t. I dropped into the Grey, feeling a bit vertiginous as I slammed through the barriers of the ghost world, looking for signs of his unusual aura. I spotted it sinking through what I knew was the street. I flung myself back into the normal, stepping on toes and body-checking a few people as I regained solidity and shoved my way forward to the spot where he must have vanished.

It was an old street-access elevator used by the utilities people to take equipment from the built-up sidewalks down to the original street level, about thirty feet below. Most of the devices weren’t in use anymore, closed up permanently as unsafe or impractical, but one or two lingered. The diamond-patterned steel plates over the lift clattered as I stepped onto them, settling back into position after being disturbed just minutes ago. He was fast; I had to give him that. I looked around, marking the area in my mind, and thought this was far too close to Quinton’s old bunker under the Seneca Street off-ramp. I had the urge to run and see if Quinton was there, but I wasn’t sure that Purlis wasn’t watching to see if I would do just that. From this vantage, I could no longer track his energy with any ease and I wasn’t sure where he was in the storm of mist and colored light that muddled half my vision while I stood amid the moving crowds on the sidewalk. There were plenty of places where he could have come back up to see what I was going to do. I hoped he hadn’t noticed my sudden vanishing act as I’d slipped into the Grey if that was the case.

To chase or not to chase . . . This had to be a feint to draw me into revealing Quinton’s lair. Quinton would have twigged to something like this elevator and its tactical value or vulnerability fairly early on since he had lived under the streets here for years and knew the buried sidewalks and passages better than anyone—including me. He wouldn’t have let his father get this close without having a way out.

If he’d felt threatened, he would have abandoned the tunnel bunker and—I shook my head at my stupidity—he’d been staying with me since his father had shown up in town. Apparently love is blind, because I’d missed the connection until now. While my condo was an obvious place, it was one that was much harder to approach unseen than Quinton’s subterranean hideout. I might have been miffed at his not saying anything about it, but since I’d just made an ass of myself on that point, I had no cause for complaint. He liked to keep his problems to himself, which was a familiar mode of operation for me, too.

I made a show of looking around and concluding I was out of luck before I turned back, retraced my steps half a block to the corner, and crossed the street. I worked my way down toward the waterfront, checking for a tail, but finding none this time. I paused long enough to send Quinton—who still carries a pager in preference to a more easily tracked cell phone—a numeric message with the code for “call me” before I started back up toward the various hidden doorways and utility accesses that led to the tunnels connecting with his hideout.

None of the doors or manholes looked recently opened but I couldn’t get too close without arousing Purlis’s suspicions if he was still watching me covertly. And I supposed he was, since I couldn’t imagine any other reason for his luring me up near Quinton’s lair. I kept looking for any sign of Quinton but I couldn’t find one. While that annoyed and depressed me in some ways, it at least meant that his father hadn’t found him, either.

I made one more round of the locations where I would expect to catch some indication that Quinton had been there and checked my phone again, but there was still no message. I’d walked all the way up to the southern entrance to Post Alley without any glimpse of him or the little markers he sometimes left.

My stomach made a gurgling sound and I felt a bit queasy, remembering that I’d had nothing to eat except coffee at the bakery since the soup I’d had last night. No matter how worried and off-stride I felt, I still needed to eat. But maybe not this close to Pike Place Market. I turned back and took myself out for lunch at a Chinese deli on Western. The food was mediocre, but the staff was nice and I could look out the windows at Western Avenue and the traffic working its way around the snarls of construction under the slowly eroding viaduct.

I’m not a total klutz with chopsticks, but I’ll certainly never be taken for a native user. Still, I should have had less trouble picking up noodles and conveying them to my mouth. After the fourth missed mouthful, I put the chopsticks aside and sat still for a moment, catching my slightly labored breath and trying to steady the growing quiver in my hands. I felt dizzy and hot and too big for my skin—as if another me were writhing around inside it, pushing and shoving to make it bigger. The vision on my left side blazed up too brightly while my right seemed to fade slowly. My flesh felt as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper and soaked in alcohol while my hands ached and trembled. I sat back in my seat, hoping these sensations would pass quickly and that it wasn’t the first wave of another manifestation like last night’s two episodes. I couldn’t take time to be ill, but I’d have much preferred that this was just a sign that I was coming down with something prosaic—like the flu.

The deli was busy enough that no one was paying me any attention, but not so crowded that anyone was hovering over me, hoping to snag my table the moment I was done. I tried to pick up the chopsticks again, but I fumbled them and one clattered to the floor. As I leaned down to retrieve it, the lights went out and I felt the Formica tabletop press against my cheek just before I lost consciousness.

But I wasn’t unconscious, not really. I had been pushed aside, violently, inside my own body and felt cold, weighty things shoving into me. Not like sharp edges or pointy objects tearing the skin, but as if great balloons pressed past my fragile shell without breaking it, pushing in and stuffing me down into a corner I didn’t even know I had—a little dark closet of hell I had lived in once upon a time, when I believed the degrading, thoughtless things other people said about me. I couldn’t break out, even though I struggled, and I experienced sensation at a distance. I felt my hands close and move, felt words express themselves on my skin as if a drypoint pen was pressing from beneath the surface, scribing looping lines of script that my closed eyes couldn’t see. And always the pushing, pressing sensation of weight, moving, squirming inside me.

It felt like I was in this remote, tortured state for hours, unable to cry out, or even to breathe, unable to move or fight back. For a moment I did not fight, but let myself fall away, further into the Grey and the darkness that it had become. Now I saw nothing in my Grey sight but at the deepest level, where the power grid of magic roared in channels of searing, colored light and I could hear the murmur of the Grey talking to itself, of the souls in transition that were neither ghost nor human singing with the music of energy flowing through the world. I tumbled and soared to the grid and looked back, searching for the forms of the presences that had shoved me aside.

Silver and foggy black clouds—the half-life forms of the dispossessed dead—boiled through a wire-frame human form of white light that spun a full spectrum of colored strands in all directions until it looked more like a tiny sun than a woman. A rope of twisted colors shrouded in black tied me to the incandescent shape. I stared at it; I’d never seen my own energetic form before, yet this was clearly it. This was what Grey creatures saw, what drew ghosts and trouble to me like moths because I was, to them, as bright as flame and sun, moon and stars in cloudless skies. I’d been told this, but it’s not the same to be told as to see it for yourself.

I wanted it back—wanted my whole self—and I pushed with the only weapon I still controlled. I vaulted back toward the shape of me, thrusting with my mind against temporaclines and shadow shapes of things gone or yet to come, climbing back to it by will to drive the ghost shapes away. I could not grip them, but in this deep plane of the Grey I could exert myself as force, drive them out, thrust against their incorporeal weight with the vigor of being alive. I had so much more to lose than they did and though I was rough with them, I didn’t hesitate any longer. I pulled the burning flow of the grid into my mind, feeling it swell and howl through me, and then propelled it out and up to sweep them away on the gust of power. The ghosts scattered like autumn leaves before wind and I rushed back toward the gleaming shape of my self, passing again into darkness as I went.

I sat up with a gasp, dizzy from the transition back to normal. A young Chinese American woman jumped back from me and I thought she must have been bending over me as I’d lain across the tabletop. She was usually behind the cash register and I hadn’t seen her come over.

“You OK?” she asked, quivering a little from surprise. “I thought you fainted.” She looked frightened.

I shook myself, settling back into the feel of my own body. “I’m fine.”

I’m a good liar, but she wasn’t convinced. She stared at me with wide eyes and raised one hand to her cheek. “Your face . . .”

I touched my own face and recognized the stinging heat I’d felt the night before at Cameron’s house. This time the dermographia had scrolled up my neck and onto the side of my face, just in front of my ear, then vanished again under my hair. I could sense the burning tracery running down my back as well, like a trail of fire ants.

I pawed my brown locks down over my cheek. “Cat scratch,” I said, then stopped to stare at the tablecloth, scrawled with a soy-sauce-and-chopstick sketch of the same cliff I’d seen in Julianne Goss’s paintings. Beside it were the barely legible words “beach to bluff and back.” I dropped the stained chopstick from my left hand as if it were hot.

The young woman’s fear wasn’t appeased. “Are you sick?”

I forced myself up from the table, containing my rising panic for the moment. “No. No, I’m just very tired. Didn’t get any sleep last night. I’m so sorry I disturbed you,” I added, digging money out of my pockets and dropping it on the table so I could run away without feeling quite so guilty for disrupting the place.

And run I did. Frightened and adrenaline-fueled, I darted out of the deli as fast as I could without causing any more upset and hurried back toward my office, feeling horribly conspicuous, branded, pursued, and under threat. A cloudburst dampened my escape, rain erupting from the sky just long enough to wet everything and soothe the acid-burned sensation on my flesh. Though I felt oppressed by watching eyes, no one stared at me as I darted along Western toward Pioneer Square; they were all doing the same thing—running for cover.

I bolted into my building and up the stairs to my office, locking the door behind me as I looked around, just in case there were any little friends of Purlis’s—or anyone else’s—lurking about. All clear.

I’d thrown off the worst of my horror and panic, though I was still breathing too hard and quivering. I forced myself to calm down, breathe in mindful cycles, clear my mind before I did anything else. I knew I was safe enough here and that panic was unhelpful. I wasn’t vulnerable and helpless like Goss, Sterling, and Delamar—I knew what was happening and I could do something about it. This time I made myself undress enough to photograph the writing that had appeared on my skin, since there was no one to see but a handful of ghosts too remote from life to stare at me. I almost wished I’d stopped to photograph the drawing on the table, but I didn’t think I could have managed it. I could always see it again in Julianne’s room.

Standing in my tiny office, shirtless and chilly in spite of the season, I followed Levi Westman’s example and took photos of the dermographia with my cell phone’s camera. Photographing my back was difficult and I hoped I’d not ended up taking out-of-focus snaps of my butt. I hustled back into my clothes the moment I was done and sat down to examine the photos, hoping to decipher the text that had appeared on my skin. Naturally, some of the images were useless and others out of focus or not very good in other ways, but I could read parts of the text. I’d be able to see more when I looked at them at home, with the more powerful software that Quinton had loaded onto my home computer—I didn’t see any point in keeping a high-end machine in my office, since the building was more than a hundred years old and far too easy to break into.

My phone rang as I was trying to decide if I should send the photos to myself or keep them where they were on the off chance that Purlis Senior was monitoring my e-mail. “Harper Blaine,” I answered.

“Hey, girl. I got some books for you.”

“Hi, Phoebe. Thanks. That was fast.”

“I know what I got in stock. I’d have called you sooner, but I got to reading one of them and forgot the time. Anyhow, you going to come up and get these?”

“I am. In fact, right away.” I couldn’t think of anything less likely to interest Quinton’s father than Phoebe and the cat-house-that-books-built.

“Good. I’ll make you some coffee.”

Phoebe knows all about my coffee addiction. I thanked her and hung up, repacking the phone into my pocket after sending the photos to myself. It was a risk, but I hoped Purlis was too busy to be interested in an e-mail I’d labeled with the name of a well-known auto insurance company and a long case number.