Greywalker - Kat Richardson [102]
As she entered the room I stepped forward to introduce myself. “Excuse me. Are you Gwen?”
The Grey scurried behind her. My skin prickled with cold, unaffected by her watery smile as the dark fog folded around us both. “My name is Gwen.” Her voice was as thin as she. “Why were you looking for me?”
“A young man named Cameron Shadley gave me your name. Do you know who I mean?” I asked.
“I know of Cameron Shadley.”
“Then you’ve never met him?”
“Oh, in passing, when he was still in the daylight. We never became friends. He’s not with us anymore.”
“That would depend on who you mean by ‘us,’ ” I said. “He’s my client. I’m a private investigator.”
“Oh. I didn’t know there were any of your profession for our kind. You’re not one of us.”
“No. I’m the daylight kind.”
She giggled a little. “Let me get some tea,” she murmured and drifted away to the coffee counter.
In a few minutes, she returned. She toyed with a china pot and a cup, but didn’t drink. “I don’t know how much help anything you hear from Lady Gwendolyn of Anorexia is going to be. I’m not much use to anyone, you know.”
Her use of the nickname in the third person gave me pause. “Maybe you could be more help than you think,” I suggested. “Cameron has a little problem with Edward and he asked me to intervene. But I want to know more about Edward first. What do you know about him?”
“Ned? Ned’s irresponsible, but he hides it well. I suppose it’s easy when you have dozens of underlings to manage the details for you.”
“How long have you known him?”
“All my unlife. He made me.” Her voice held no ran-cor, almost no emotion at all, in fact. She spoke in her thin, measured tone, as if she were talking about some other person. “In 1969, I was a carefree little chippy—make love, not war, you know. And Ned was, well, Ned. I didn’t know it at the time, but he had just gained control of Seattle, so he got away with a lot. I was a mistake.” She paused and sipped her tea, inhaling more of the scent than she swallowed of the brew.
“How is that? Isn’t it a deliberate act? I mean, it doesn’t happen by accident, does it?”
Her voice floated like petals. “No, it doesn’t. What I meant is his choice of me was a mistake and his timing was poor. Long-range planning isn’t his best skill. He’s an opportunist and very good at it.”
“What about you?”
“What about me? I’m nobody. In a community so small that every member counts, I’m only barely a member. I go to movies, because I can like those celluloid people and care about them and they never grow old and die, or stay young and become monsters. They’re so nice. Even the bad guys. I like celluloid people.”
“What about your role-playing friends?”
“They’re not my friends—they’re warms.” She blinked in slow motion. “Oh. That was rude of me.”
“I’m not ashamed to be warm. But if you don’t like them, why do you spend time with them?”
“I like them well enough. It’s the game that’s interesting. I’ve been with the same game for three years now, but the people change. It’s wonderful to feel like life and death and adventure and honor are important. It’s better than just drifting along in limbo and feeling like nothing matters. Sometimes it’s better than movies. It’s almost like being alive. And I matter so much more than I ever did.”
“What else can you tell me about Edward?”
“Not much.”
“What about TPM?”
“TPM? One of his little projects. I don’t know what ever became of that. He liked to play with things, buildings and businesses and things like that. It’s a game. To Ned, most of the world is just a big game. He likes to win—he’ll even cheat to win, but not if it breaks his own rules. He has rules, you know, they’re just not the ones everyone else knows. That’s all.”
“Tell me about you and Edward, then.”
“Me and Edward. I wish there had been a me and Edward. There was just Edward.