Greywalker - Kat Richardson [14]
“The manager’s a bit of a jerk, but I’ll get around him. The owner couldn’t care less, as long as he gets his tax credit.”
We hammered out a few more details, but by the time we’d finished eating and were chasing the meal down with coffee, the conversation had gotten onto other topics. Maybe it was the glass of wine I’d had, but I felt comfortable. Quinton made easy conversation, and a business dinner turned into just hanging out.
We walked back toward Pioneer Square afterward. Quinton stopped at First and Columbia.
“This is it for me. I’ll get in touch as soon as I’ve got the parts. And . . . thanks for dinner. That was good.”
“Yeah, it’s a pretty good place.”
He grinned and started down Columbia toward the waterfront, turning back to wave before disappearing below the freeway ramp on the steep downgrade.
I strolled on, heading for the Rover a few blocks away, feeling warm and full and a little drowsy. It was getting colder, as I’d expected, though. As I passed my office building, a swirl of clammy steam licked up from the street. The cold slither of the mist around my ankle made me shiver and raised the hair on my nape.
I looked around, feeling observed, and started arguing with my paranoia. It was just steam. All the steam covers leaked a little wisp into the cooling air and made tiny ghosts dance a moment on the cobbled street. But this steam slunk up a shape in an alley nearby.
I gave a start. Someone was standing, shadowed, in the alley, watching me. I turned and strode toward the gleam of eyes. The shadow moved, flickering through light from a window above. A female shape and a flash of wine red hair, then she was gone around the next corner without a sound.
I started after her, pursuing the Cabernet gleam of her cropped hair. Alternating heat and cold rushed over me. I darted around the corner into indeterminate light and a deep, low thrumming. Everything was shrouded as if within a dense snow cloud, always moving, almost revealing . . . something, then closing up again. The light—hazy gray and impossible to look at as sun-glare in the desert—wiped out detail in a fuzz of visual noise. Shapes seemed to surge and stream just at the knife-edge of perception, flickering with black dots in the corners of my eyes.
I stopped short and whipped around. More of the same. I quailed, gripped by vertigo, and swiped at my eyes as if I could wipe my dimming vision clear and find the way out.
I turned again, but the alley had become an unending plain of cloud-stuff.
I shouted, “Where are you? Where are you!” Panic rushed my breath. I staggered backward in circles, panting and calling.
Something murmured, “Be quiet or it will hear you.”
I spun toward the whisper. A face had formed out of the thick atmosphere, glowing with a pale, internal light—a soft-edged human face, but with no defining factors and no real color, just a thicker, more luminous density of the wavering not-mist. My heart stuttered in my chest.
I shook and stammered, “Who are you?”
“I am . . . I. I am . . . he. I am she. . . .”
I didn’t care about philosophy. I waved a shaking hand in front of the face. “Strike that. Just get me out of here.”
The face murmured and began to dissolve. “Shhhh . . . be patient.” The formlessness distorted and writhed as if unseen snakes rolled within it, dragging the face back into its depths. I was alone in my pocket of the haze-world.
A shriek and a moaning howl ripped the thickened light. Shudders racked my spine. Something screamed back. A shape bulged out of the mist, brushing hard against me, spinning me.
A maw of dripping teeth snapped at my head, rushing ahead of a coiling blackness that drove a wave of shock through the mist. It turned, drawing a shape to it, gathering itself—massive, dark, with a snarling, eyeless head. A mane of bone spines whipped the smoky light. It screamed, lunging.
I caught its scream and stumbled backward. Then I felt a touch on my head and another on my chest that resolved into a shove. The unseen force flung