Greywalker - Kat Richardson [112]
“No—” he started.
“Yes, I know—you Will, me Harper.”
He laughed. “You caught me!” He kissed my cheek this time and opened the Rover’s door for me.
I got in and buckled up. He closed the door and watched me for a moment; then he backed away and waited for me to pull out of the lot before he started back to his own truck.
I didn’t even get all the way through my office door before the client was in the office and normalcy was out.
I was startled. “Sergeyev. You’re back.”
“You have made progress to locating my furniture.”
I sat down at my desk, buying time. “Yes, I have.” I put my mouth on autopilot as my mind leapt around like a terrified monkey. “I’ve seen the organ at the museum and it seems to match your description—”
“Which museum? Tell the name. They must let me have it.”
Some warning instinct in the monkey brain made me stall. “That may not be possible.”
Sergeyev loomed over me, exuding a Grey reek and a flutter of colorless energy which didn’t surprise me. “You shall make them give it,” he demanded. “It is mine.”
“No,” I answered, my voice going hard as my stomach flipped over. The Grey pressed like a weight on my chest. I strained against it and wouldn’t allow it to break through any further. “You may believe you have a moral claim, but the owners can’t be forced to sell.”
“It is mine!”
My words popped in the thick air like water on hot oil. “Not legally. I cannot work miracles. Can’t simply make it yours. I have to work within the law.”
He ground his teeth, or I told myself that was the sound. “Laws of men! Who has more right to it than I? It is in every bone, every sinew. It is mine. You must loose it to me.”
I glared at him, seeing his shape slip and firm again, silver and Grey. Fury burned over me. “Don’t. Push me.”
He jerked his head back and glowered. “I expected better. You who can see the world should sympathize. I felt you and came for your help. But you are a silly, ignorant girl.”
Now he’d pissed me off. “I am getting damned tired of being insulted by things like you. And nobody calls me ‘girl’ in my own office.”
“You do not know with what you toy . . . girl.”
My heart slammed around my chest like a basketball in a box and I kept smelling something like a whiff of harsh tobacco smoke. I was too mad to feel ill or to think clearly about what I was about to do. I held off my fear and revulsion in a cold, dark place and braced myself.
“Really? Why don’t you show me?”
He stepped back and raised one hand, as if catching hold of the air itself. The worlds began to vibrate and hum. I threw myself across the immaterial mist of the Grey, feeling the same cold scream rip through me as brilliance burned me away. I lunged up to my feet, my office swamped and throbbing with the mirror-mist and aglow with lines of light and force. The ache in my chest grew hot.
Grey things trailing fire darted in and swarmed me, trying to cocoon me in their glowing threads. I struck at them, bending the edge of the Grey around me, and flung them back into Sergeyev’s face.
“Get out!” I shouted, lashing my fists against the swarming Grey between us. A swollen blue arc spanned across my thrumming chest and arms, bowing outward as I raised my arms again and brought them down against the cloud of fiery creatures.
I felt as if I’d smashed my arms against a cement wall which reverberated, then dissolved to gritty, unstable brick. Two masses of force collided between us, shook and toppled with a crack of thunder and a stink of burned sewage. Then it crumbled away, the flames dying in an instant. Sergeyev’s eyes glared at me through the haze and vanished. The world crashed back into its normal shape, thinly blurred at the edges.
I collapsed forward, landing half in my chair and half across the desk. My forehead smacked against the blotter. My arms and chest ached and burned and I swallowed again and again, tamping down the urge to be sick. Broken glass tinkled in the hall and outside. I forced myself to breathe in and out with care, settling myself around the dissipating ache centered in the knot of Grey between my breasts.