Greywalker (36 page)

I faked a smile. "Yep. You, Will. Me, Harper."

I walked away.

I walked a long time and ended up at my office and sat in the dark for a while. I just sat in the reupholstered client chair and stared at my desk from the wrong side and remembered the stink of uncanny fire.

That night at the Madison Forrest House had burned down my resistance to the Grey. It burned away much of what I had believed, but it had not taken my friends before, not quite. Not even sweet, lunatic Quinton, who still turned up to take me for beer and rounds of disastrous pool. Not even the Danzigers, though Mara often gave me speculative looks from the corners of her eyes.

I couldn't look at any of them without seeing the reminder of their stark faces that night and the threads of living color that tangled around them, diving in and out of the orderly grid that hummed in low registers below the normal world. It didn't make me sick to my stomach anymore—only sick to my heart.

Close as they were, none of them were like me—whatever I was. With Will who hadn't been there, I had, I thought, passed for human. I guess I didn't pass well enough.

Someone knocked on my door, the new glass rattling a little in the frame. When I didn't answer, I heard the swish of an envelope through the mail slot and the thin thump as it hit the floor. I left it a while, until I was sure the messenger was gone.

I turned on the desk lamp and cut the envelope open. There was a private check with a lot of zeros in the amount line, signed by Edward Kammerling. The note on the check read, "services to the community." I put it in my desk drawer, knowing I would never cash it. I wasn't like him, either, and I wouldn't be bought.

I left my office in the dark and went home, brushing past the shapes of things we do not see, into shadows of uncertain futures and pasts that don't lie down.