Greywalker - Kat Richardson [141]
It was hard to explain what had happened, especially since there were details I couldn’t tell Ben. I was saved, after a while, by the arrival of Cameron, Mara, and Albert from the basement.
Between them, Mara and Cam thought that Carlos would recover, though it was going to be slow. Being dead to begin with had its advantages, but he was still in very bad shape. He’d spent a lot of himself, first for the spell, then fighting Sergeyev and the organ, and the fire had almost finished off what was left. Cameron declared that he would tend him.
Mara sent Cameron back downstairs and Ben upstairs to look after Brian, then sat on the sofa next to me. Albert hovered behind us. Mara picked up my hand and stared at it. “Why did you hesitate? Why did you pull away?”
I couldn’t look at her, giving tiny shakes of my head. “I couldn’t . . . couldn’t do it.” Geas. I swallowed the word like bitter medicine.
“But you gave yourself up to the Grey. That saved us. I saw that.”
I felt a smile jerk and die before it reached my mouth. “Lucky timing.”
She scowled. “But why did you—”
“I can’t say. I don’t know.” I pushed myself up, swaying with weakness and fatigue. “I’m going home.”
She stood up, too, and tried to catch me. “Not like that.”
I twitched away. “It’s not a request. And I won’t stay here.” I glared at Albert. He slipped farther from me.
“You won’t make it.”
“Then send someone with me. Send Ben. I won’t stay.”
Ben drove me home.
I turned off the phones and locked the doors behind me. I spent several days curled up with Chaos in my lap, surrounded by the muttering hum of the Grey.
The first morning, an impressive white card arrived in the mail, thanking me for attending a fund-raiser at TPM the night of the fire. I showed it to the investigators who showed up a couple of days later. I told them I had a bad case of the flu, which they didn’t question, since I looked like something scraped off a locker-room floor. They went away.
A few days later, the newspaper reported that the fire was due to a ruptured gas tank in the basement and a smoldering cigarette dropped by a workman. The arson investigators didn’t like it, but there was no accelerant and no sign of tampering with the tank. I doubt they ever really closed the books on it, but they let it lie.
They wouldn’t have believed that the fire was started by a desperate necromancer and a witch, or spread by a furious beast that devoured ghosts and prowled the edges of the world between worlds.They wouldn’t have believed that the fire had fed on magic as much as on dry wood, varnish, paint, and cloth. They wouldn’t have believed any of it. What kind of crazy person could? I wished I didn’t. But I felt it every day, the untied knot of Grey knitting deeper into me as the flow of power corrected itself and sang across my bones, illuminating the world in threads of fire that gleamed through an ever-present silver mist.
Eventually I returned to work. Cameron turned up at my truck the same night.
He’d had to clip his hair much shorter than mine, and his face had changed under the mop of angelic curls that resulted.
I kept the Rover between us and touched my own upper lip. “Hey, no mustache,” I commented.
“Nah. I figured I should change my look for a while.” He glanced down and sucked in his lower lip. “Harper . . . I owe you a lot more than money. Carlos is getting better and I’m doing all right. I moved him out to Bellevue with me. Got tired of squatting in the Danzigers’ basement. Besides which, Albert drove Carlos crazy.”
“He’s like that. How’s your sister handling the invasion of the vampires?”
“She moved back in with Mom. After they stopped acting like total wenches, they actually get along OK. Especially since they can both complain about me now. Sarah’s pretty good for Mom. She freaks out less whenever I come around. We’re getting things worked out. I’m not going to go back to school for a while, though—Carlos needs me too much and I figure I’ll get a pretty