Possession (28 page)

I trudged back to the Land Rover and drove through the thinning traffic to the north end of Lake Union, thinking about where I might find Quinton or his father.

Northlake is a light industrial area, bounded by famous neighborhoods: Fremont on the west, Wedgwood to the north, and the University District on the east. It’s an area full of boatyards, marinas, workingmen’s cafes, and incongruous condos. My very first Grey case had started at an old naval architecture warehouse in the area—and now I was back. The area had changed a bit more in particulars than in general. The Lake Union Kite Shop had gone out of business. The moldering Kalakala Ferry had been moved to Tacoma, where its Art Deco superstructure could decline in silence, but the Skansonia remained, still hosting parties but never leaving the dock. Ivar’s Salmon House still squatted on the edge of the U-District, putting the scent of salmon and woodsmoke into the air. The remains of the old gasworks still stuck its rusted metal fingers into the air at Browns Point, surrounded by parkland and the kite-flying hill that hid the wreck of its old buildings, now buried in sod and environmental plastic to keep the seeping chemicals of sixty years of coal gas production under wraps.

If you want to hide something like a secret lair or a questionable government project, it’s better not to put it in the middle of nowhere. People will notice something new where once there was nothing and they’ll notice you coming and going, too. It’s far better to put your “secret” where people won’t question it. Spies work fairly well with industrial neighborhoods. No one thinks it’s strange if they soundproof a building, or have guards with guns around, or come and go at odd hours. No one pays attention to trucks bearing crates or large pieces of equipment, or to cars with blacked-out windows, and absolutely no one finds subterranean garages with security doors odd. Most won’t pay any attention to odd sounds, either—even sounds that mask screams—since there are plenty of other noises in the area.

Northlake is not heavily industrial, but it’s on the lake, next to the canal mouth, so there’s plenty of coming and going, plenty of din, plenty of distractions, and a fair number of buildings that aren’t fully leased. I figured I’d start at the park and work outward, since the most likely places were on the water. I left the Land Rover in the parking lot between the Adobe building and the rowing club and started walking, paying more attention to my Grey vision than to the normal—figuring I’d be more likely to spot an illicit bit of magic or a lurking monster that way. At first I ran into a tree along the Burke-Gilman Trail, but I got the hang of it after that.

The area around the park turned out to be the most active in the Grey—not that that should have surprised me. I drifted that way, trying to get a better idea of what was going on. Old factories are often scattered with ghosts, loops of history, and shredded temporaclines, and the coal-gas-cracking towers of the gasworks hung with mist that had nothing to do with the unseasonable clouds. I concentrated my search along the bike trail, looking for a likely building or entry to something Purlis might be using as a base of operation.

I walked past the loading docks for Fisheries Supply and noticed a sign at the edge of the park’s driveway. I strolled across to it, not bothering to hide, since there really wasn’t anyplace to go. It appeared to be an old notice that no one had removed claiming that the state Department of Ecology would be doing maintenance and upgrades to the ecological barriers in the northeast corner of the park, followed by regrading and restoring the area. The project was supposed to have been finished in the spring of 2013 once the grass was established. I didn’t see any signs of ongoing work, but the sign and a bit of temporary fencing remained. I assumed it was just an oversight that no one had bothered to fix, but as I strolled on, it struck me very much like the misdirection Quinton had used to create his secret bunker under the streets of Seattle, using the excuse of a construction project to carve a bit of space out of the underground and then keep people from investigating it by creating signs that didn’t say what it was but gave the impression it wasn’t safe.

Quinton was a clever guy, but he must have picked up a few things from his coworkers and mentors in Intelligence—maybe even from his dad. I walked up the hill beside Fisheries and then down another street, looking for a good place from which to observe the area. It didn’t look like much of an access, but there was a slope and a bit of old building within the fencing that could easily conceal a way deeper into the gasworks. And who would even think twice about odd sounds at an abandoned gasworks? The wind that made kite flying off the hill so attractive also made a whistling and howling sound as it passed through the many ladders, walkways, trusses, and towers of the old industrial site. I spotted a good vantage point where the corner of a condo building met the sidewalk and the builders had poured a small slab to make a level platform for the trash and recycling bins on the edge of the steep street. The fencing around the bins was woven with strips of bamboo to mask the unattractive little corner, but it didn’t obscure the view completely. I moved to the farthest part of the fence, where I couldn’t be seen from the park, and climbed over it.

Seattleites can be a little obsessive about garbage, so the area wasn’t too rotten, but it did have a bit of a smell to it. I was thinking I might have to give up the surveillance as a bad job when someone spoke nearby.

“Hey there, beautiful.”

I turned toward Quinton’s voice, but could see only a shadow behind the fencing. “Hey. How’d you find me?”

“You and I have the same taste in observation posts.”

“Ah,” I said. “How come you’re not replying to pages?”

“Kind of busy lately. I’m sorry.”

“I need to talk to you. Your dad seems to have snatched a demi-vampire from Carlos and Cameron. They aren’t happy about that. And I’ve got the impression that you or your father knows something connected to my own case. What’s going on here?”

“Details are still pretty sketchy. I knew he’d grabbed a few paranormals, but at first I didn’t know he’d gotten a vampire. I don’t know how he managed that. At least not yet.”

“What other paranormals has he got?”

“I’m not sure. There was something . . . I called it Pandora’s Box, since it seemed to have something in it, but now it doesn’t. Not big enough for something living unless it was insect-sized. Kind of like a . . . folding shrine. I didn’t get to examine it or get a good close look, so I don’t have much information except that it had been stored in dirt for a while. I got a sample of the dirt and I asked Fishkiller to look it over.” Ruben Fishkiller was a forensic pathology technician who’d exchanged a few favors with me over the years. Quinton went on. “But he says it’s local, which kind of surprised me, since I know the thing came from Europe. Whatever was in the box or attached to it is gone, but it looks like Dad put the container in the tunnel dig for a while—that’s where the dirt came from, according to Fish—and I’d guess that Dad set the thing from the box loose there, or it escaped. He doesn’t seem very worried about it, so I imagine he let it go himself. Anything new running around town aside from your pushy ghosts?”

“There is definitely some strange stuff going on, but neither I nor the vampires have spotted any new paranormal players in the area. Doesn’t mean there isn’t something, though, and that might be the connection between your dad’s project and my case. . . . Quinton, please be careful. You’re focusing on your father, but there are a lot of other interests watching this.”

“You mean Carlos and Cameron.”

“Not just them. And not just the paranormal end of the spectrum. What your father is doing is only barely on the reservation, so when it goes wrong—as you are bent on making sure it does—there’s going to be a lot of fallout. I don’t want you to be in the blast.”

“I’ll be all right.”

I wanted to argue with him, but it wasn’t going to do any good and I’d only be doing exactly what I didn’t like done to me. I settled on “Be careful.”

“I will. And I’ll try to stay on top of the messages.”

I made a face. “‘There is no
try
,’” I quoted.

He laughed. “I’ll bear that in mind, Master Yoda.” Then he slunk off and left me to extricate myself from the trash bins.

I wished I had Quinton’s skill with electronics—not to mention his ever-ready stash of parts—and could leave some kind of monitor behind, but I would just have to make an opportunity to come back later. At least I knew I’d found the secret lair. Now I just had to find out what Purlis had let loose on my city and what the hell it was doing to so terrifyingly empower the ghosts in the market. Mentally cursing, I crawled back over the fence and took myself home for cleaner clothes.

EIGHTEEN

_W
ith no other leads to chase, I felt there was no option left but to contact Carlos and ask him to “read” the objects I’d collected from the secret cemetery and Kells. I hoped that if I knew who the ghosts were I might be able to contact them and make the connection to Purlis and whatever was happening between them and the PVS patients. By the time I got back to my place, dusk was falling and I was pretty sure I could reach Carlos at one of the phone numbers Cameron had provided, if not his own.

Chaos wasn’t pleased with me for leaving her alone all day, but ferrets have the memory of clams and she forgot to be angry as soon as she was on the living room floor with her favorite toy, a squeaky anthropomorphized eggplant with massive feet and a nose that resembled a ski jump. Quinton had christened it “Nixon.”

While Chaos bit and wrestled Nixon, I took a shower and heated soup for my dinner. Then I put in a call to Carlos’s voice mail. I always find the idea of vampires with voice mail odd, though I can’t really say why; maybe it’s that the idea of something as far removed from the technological world as a vampire just runs counter to the concept. I was barely seated to slurp down my dinner when he called back.

Even over the phone his voice sent an unpleasant crawling sensation up my spine. “Blaine,” he said.

“I have some objects that I believe are connected to the ghosts in this case of mine. And I think I have a line on where your missing assistant is. Can you take a look at these things and tell me about them?” I wasn’t telling him the whole story just yet, but I’d get to it once I had his agreement.

“If you will tell me where Inman is.”

“Afterward.”

He was silent for a moment, thinking about it, I assumed. It was possible for him to get around me—by some magical trick, by force, or by setting another of the vampire community’s helpers on my tail until I showed them the way. But all of those strategies were wasteful and Carlos didn’t approve of waste—necromancy is the ultimate expression of the phrase “Reduce, reuse, recycle.”

“Very well. Where?”

This was a problem. I didn’t want him in my place and I had no desire ever to return to his. “Where are you?” I asked, thinking I could find a location conveniently between.

He was silent. Vampires don’t breathe and Carlos had the trick of being utterly still, so the only sound that came through the phone was a very distant whispering that might have been the voice of the grid or just people in some other room. It was unnerving.

“Ten Mercer. Upstairs.”

“Thirty minutes,” I said.

He chuckled and hung up. I frequently have the impression that he’s humoring me—and considering how easily he could wipe me off the face of the planet, he probably is.

I finished up my soup as quickly as I could without wearing it. Then I rounded up the ferret, put her back in her cage—much to her consternation—and headed out again.

Ten Mercer is one of those places that a lot of people thought would die with the market crash—and yet it is still hanging on, a couple of blocks from the Opera House and Intiman Theatre, on the north end of the Seattle Center complex. One of those undecorated New American cuisine places that manages to seem sparsely elegant rather than empty and barnlike. The upper floor is the dining room, while the larger lower floor is the lounge. Floor-to-ceiling windows on both floors between the exposed red brick of its building front allow the world to see others drinking and yet no one looks, except in a general way. The lowered lights hint that you, too, might be able to come inside, but it would just be uncouth to stand outside and stare. Ironically, there’s a bus stop right in front of it. No one stares in. No one stares out. And it’s rarely busy before ten p.m., when the theaters let out.

When I arrived and told the hostess I was meeting someone for dinner, she gave me a thoughtful little frown and asked whom I was meeting. I gave Carlos’s name and she wordlessly led me up the stairs to the empty dining room. She tucked me into one of the few booths, far from the windows and isolated from the room full of tables by a low, curving wall of slatted wood. The table could have seated six with room for their winter coats. I would have felt conspicuous but for the half wall.

Since I’d had dinner and didn’t really want to linger with Carlos, I didn’t order anything more than sparkling water with lime. It’s never safe to drink alcohol with vampires—even the ones you think you know. Carlos kept me waiting for another fifteen minutes and came up the stairs alone. The hostess didn’t return and Carlos sat down across from me, bringing his cloud of darkness and death. He didn’t speak; he just sat and studied me for a while.

A waiter passed, as if casually on his way elsewhere, but he slid an appetizer plate of smoked sturgeon onto the table before he walked on. I peered sideways, looking for signs that the staff was bespelled in some way, but aside from being preternaturally good-looking, they seemed normal.

Carlos unrolled his silverware and spread the cloth napkin out between us. “What did you bring me?” he asked.

I dug the objects out of my pockets and put them on the napkin, each separate from the next rather than in a pile. They nearly covered the thick cloth square. Carlos made a thoughtful growl in his throat and leaned forward to look at them. He pushed the plate of food in my direction. “Make this look eaten.”