Greywalker - Kat Richardson [117]
He looked sheepish. “Oh. Umm . . . Psychometry—well, I guess I’ll get to that another time. But retrocognition . . . if you see a ghost walking through a place that no longer exists in this time and space, you’re probably retrocognating, seeing stuff from the past. Do you ever experience that?” His eyes glittered.
“Sometimes,” I responded, feeling more drained every second.
He nodded, then shook himself and continued. “All right, so the right medium could study the object and attempt retrocognition to tell you exactly what the connection is between your client and the parlor organ, but it would be very dangerous if it is as powerful a dark artifact as you two think.”
“It’s tangled up in the Grey and it seems to be drawing energy from the nexus nearby, like a battery charging up or something.”
“Yes, Mara told me about it.” He stopped to look at his wife, who smiled a tight smile and nodded for him to go on. “I wonder what the thing’s purpose was.”
“Not nice,” I said. “It’s black and red and very unfriendly. I think it sucks the energy out of everything that comes near it.”
“Couldn’t have been doing that for very long. Someone would have noticed.”
“I noticed it,” Mara muttered.
“You didn’t say anything.”
She shrugged and looked unhappy.
Ben made a rueful face. “I should call some of my contacts and see if they’ve noticed anything else.”
I shook my head. “There’s no time, Ben. I’m not doing very well, my ex-client is dangerous, and Cameron’s problem may not be solvable. By me. The organ is getting worse. It’s been drawing on the energy below the museum for ten months. And I don’t know, but things seem to be accelerating.”
“Good God! If it really is a battery, it’s loaded. Anyone with control of it could wreak all sorts of havoc through the Grey.”
“You’re scaring me, Ben. I don’t need to be any more scared than I am.”
“I’m scaring me!” His eyes had grown wide. “Do you know anything about this ghost? Any guesses?”
“I don’t know much. The last three owners of the organ, at least, are dead—all suddenly—and I suspect more. I have someone looking into its history, but . . .” I tossed up my hands feebly. “I don’t know.”
“A murderous ghost? That would require some big expenditures of energy and will.”
“But with the organ acting as a collection and storage device, he’d have it, wouldn’t he?” I asked. “And it seems to be getting worse since he arrived in my office. Just like I seem to be getting worse.”
Mara looked between Ben and me and kept quiet, though her face was white and her eyes had turned dark.
“Presupposing he could access that power,” Ben stipulated.
My brain engaged in the puzzle again, though I felt shredded. “If he could tap the power, why would he need me? Wouldn’t he know where it was already?”
Ben waved his hands through the air. “Not necessarily. There are lots of cases where seeking ghosts can’t locate even the most intimate items on their own. If he didn’t know, was blocked from knowing, or had to establish some kind of path to the object before he could get to it, he could still benefit from its intimate connection to him, without being able to find it or go near it. But he wants it. . . . Tell me everything you know or guess about him.”
“I think he’s European, judging from his speech. Russian or Slavic, if his name is any indication.”
“He told you his name?”
“Yes, it’s—”
“No! Wait! Write it down.” Ben scrabbled around the cluttered surface of his desk for paper and pencil, then pushed them across to me, sending several cataracts of books and papers tumbling to the floor. “We’ll just play it safe on this one, shall we?”
I shrugged and wrote the name down. “What do you mean, ‘play it safe’?”
“I’m probably being paranoid, but some ghosts are attracted to their names. I don’t think we want this guy looking over our shoulders, do we?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
I would have laughed at our nervous glances, if I wasn’t so damned scared myself. Albert haunted the doorway, as clear and solid to my Grey-sensitive sight as Sergeyev had been. Mara looked at him and made a sparkling, circling