Greywalker - Kat Richardson [105]
I couldn’t imagine what would want to come in here. The booth was small and lined floor to ceiling with automated CD racks behind smoked-glass doors. A homemade stand in one corner had three lightbulbs arranged across the top of it: red, blue, and amber. They alternated at a slow pace. A narrow strip of white light ran over the top of the horseshoe-shaped control console, which was heavy with switches, sliders, dials, and keyboards as well as several video monitors. One of the monitors was showing old, mute episodes of Lost in Space. Various meters and LED displays flashed or flickered silent information. Every shadow writhed.
“Close the door, would you, love?” he asked, flipping switches. “What good’s a soundproof booth with the door standing open, hmm?”
I closed the door and remained standing. I tried to hold it back, but the steamed-mirror world battered against me as I got closer to him.
“You should sit down.” He grinned at me, teeth snaggled, yellow, canines pronounced and elongated. His smile was a poleax, and my knees buckled. I thumped down into an empty chair, aware of shadows pooling thicker, like oozing tar, in the corners of the room, exuding a low reek of antiquity and decay. It was an ancient and foul corner of the cold blackness I’d fallen into when I touched Cameron. My stomach flipped and tried to stretch itself around my spine. A thin halo of blue and red wavered around Wygan’s head.
He cocked his head back and forth, looking like a hungry velociraptor. “Alice sent you to me about Cameron?” He gave an incredulous snort. “Pull the other one.”
I shook my head. “You’re not what I was expecting,” I confessed, swallowing discomfort. His proximity sent ripples through every sense I had, normal or not. Carlos was a teddy bear by comparison.
“Must be my charming and sophisticated on-air personality,” he quipped and brayed hundreds of hot slivers through me. “Hang on a tick—track’s almost over.”
He held one finger up in the air to me, then spun himself 450 degrees to face his console. His hands darted over the controls like albino spiders as a row of red numerals counted down.Then he flipped a switch and eased a slider down, leaning into the microphone. “Now here’s a prezzie from me to you—a whole album side of classic Floyd from Dark Side of the Moon.” He flipped off the microphone and leaned back into his seat. The room seemed to roll and shift with his every movement.
He swung the seat back and forth a few times, then spun it to face me. “So Alice sent you to me. About Cameron.” An eddy of darkness followed his movements. He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows in amusement, shrugged. “What of him?”
I found it hard to speak. “He hired me and I’m trying to stir up a little dirt on a vampire named Edward.”
His face twisted. “Edward Kammerling,” he breathed. “Yes . . .” The Grey surged around him, lighting his aurora with white lightning strikes and shivering the world between us.
Sudden cold trembled my bones. “You don’t like him.”
He turned an ophidian gaze on me. “I’ll see him to hell . . . in my own time. If I’m in a very charitable mood, I might not make him eat the parts I dismember him of.” He studied me with a baleful stare. I felt like a bird about to be swallowed. “They are as insignificant as flea-bites, the lot of them, beside you.”
I stammered, “What?” forcing words out as my stomach twisted and my lungs fought air that hung in clouds before me.
He laughed flaying knives and ice. “To think such fly-specks brought you here! I’ve waited so long for you.” He made a motion, as if opening a door. “Why don’t you come all the way in and see?” Ambient sound shushed away and a shock wave rolled out from the bright door now standing between us—the door to the Grey. The silence howled over me and shoved me deeper into the chair.
I fought my way up and started for the real door, stumbling on numb legs. This time the dragon-smoke door wouldn’t lead to the white place I’d chased Alice into. It