Greywalker - Kat Richardson [36]
“Oh, my. It wasn’t going to eat you. It just wanted to push you out of its territory. Look, you’d better stop by tomorrow and we can discuss this. We’ll need to be working out a way for you to protect yourself.”
“What is that thing?”
“A guardian beast. But never mind it now. It’s gone. You’re OK. You got distracted and things went to Halifax, but you did well. Really. You did marvelous. Are you hurt any? Is your pet all right?”
I looked down at myself, feeling weak and stupid. My torso was covered in slime. I crawled to the cage and checked on the ferret. She gave me a dirty look and then snuggled down deeper in her nest of old T-shirts, not deigning to spare me another glance. Fine. I closed the cage door and crawled back to the phone.
“Some kind of slime all over me . . .”
“Heavens! That’s unusual.”
“I didn’t want to hear that.”
“Come for breakfast tomorrow. We’ll have to talk. Now you need to rest. Sleep is the best cure.”
“All right. All right.” I hung up. Shaking, I crept to the bathroom. I loathed the feel of my skin where the slime touched me. Even exhausted, I couldn’t face sleeping in that feeling. I peeled off my gooey shirt.
As I turned my back to the mirror, I noticed the redness: a large semicircle of small punctures, starting into shallow scrapes across my right side. It looked like an unsuccessful bite by a very large animal with needle teeth. I shuddered at the thought of legions of hungry Grey things, waiting to rend me. Tears of frustration and fear scalded under my eyelids. I wanted to give up and hide.
“Stop that,” I gulped. I glared at myself in the mirror. “You can’t quit,” I hissed. “You can’t quit.” A lot of ugly memories crashed past my mental eye. I had no choices and no place to retreat to. There was no place to hide from a creature who stalked the edges of death itself. I would have to learn my way around it, and I would have to watch my back.
ELEVEN
I slept in fits and woke to a Saturday morning clear and blue and mild. I argued with myself all the way up to Queen Anne. What was I doing? Did I really believe in ghosts now? Monsters, witches? It was nuts. But the bite on my side itched and even the hottest shower had not washed the eerie marks off my skin.
I parked in the same place and stared at the Danzigers’ house. Ben came out onto the porch with the baby in a backpack and trotted down the steps. The baby squealed in ear-piercing delight.
Ben spotted me and waved, shouting, “Brian and I are going to the park for a while.”
I gave a token wave back. Couldn’t get out of this now. I forced myself out and up the steps to the door. Mara let me in.
We went into the living room, a bright, warm space lit by a bank of windows, and sat on matching sofas facing each other across a low table. A tang of lemon oil and recent baking floated on the pale green light filtering through the spring leaves outside.
Mara tucked her feet up under her skirts and looked at me, biting her lower lip a bit. “Last night wasn’t such a grand success, was it?”
“No.”
“Still. Not a complete disaster.”
“I don’t see it that way. I got attacked by some . . . thing and chewed on like a rawhide bone. I don’t even know what happened. Or how.”
“You got stuck because you lost your concentration. You were fine up till then. You found the Grey on your own, instead of slipping, and you pushed it back, as well. It was the second time things went badly.”
I snorted. “Tell me something new.”
Mara narrowed her eyes at me. The air felt a touch chillier. “That is part of the problem.”
I looked askance. “What is?”
Mara shook her head and made a motion with her hand. Albert filtered into view. He almost looked like a whole person this time, wrapped in a buffer of swirling mist, like a cloud of impending snow. “You’re looking at a ghost. And you know it’s as real as . . . as that sofa. But you’ve closed your mind to it, telling yourself you’ll not believe it. When you dig in your mental heels,