Greywalker - Kat Richardson [53]
“You were following Albert . . . through the Grey?”
“Yes! And I ended up in someone’s basement with their alarm going off like a teenage girl at a Hanson concert.”
I heard her smother a giggle. “As bad as that?”
“Not funny. I got arrested, got dumped by my date, and had an interesting time fending off the blandishments of a beer-and-pizza-addled neighbor.”
“I shouldn’t laugh, it’s just the image. . . . But there is a problem and I’m afraid Albert has made a bags of the situation.”
“What situation? A ‘bags’?”
“A mess. I’d rather discuss it in person. Can you drop by? I’ve a geology lecture to give at one, so if you can come before eleven . . .”
“Geology?”
Mara sounded harried. “Yes. I also teach at the U. Can you come up?”
I growled. “All right.”
I rushed my routine and drove up to Queen Anne. I was barely through the Danzigers’ front door when Albert showed his shadowy face in a swirl of snow-threat Grey.
I jabbed a finger at him, too furious to consider how utterly stupid it was. “You! You are so lucky you’re dead.”
Mara blinked surprise at me as Albert blinked out. “It does no good to be threatening a ghost.”
“It’s not a threat. It’s a fact. If I hadn’t been following his incorporeal ass, I wouldn’t have gotten arrested. Normally I’d take that sort of thing out of his hide. If he had one.”
“Then it’s me you should be angry with. Not Albert. It’s my fault he showed up and acted badly.”
“Is it? Why? What did you do?”
“I sent him looking for the source of the problem, but he came up with you!”
I threw my hands into the air in frustration. “What problem?”
“There’s something wrong with magic.”
FIFTEEN
Something wrong with magic?” I echoed. “There’s a lot wrong with it from my point of view. But I assume that’s not what you mean.” Mara made a sour face. “Not hardly. I know you’ve still some trouble with all this, but it is a serious problem. The house has its own nexus, but outside, things are running a bit slow, as if the power is dammed up. So I sent Albert out to find the source of the blockage, but he somehow followed it to you—he says you’re a knot in the thread.”
“What does that mean?”
“That you’re connected to the problem, though you aren’t the problem yourself. And that’s a relief. When Albert found you, he got confused and tried to bring you straight to me. Unfortunately, Albert’s idea of straight seems to mean straight through the Grey. Can’t say I’m pleased with him for that. Whatever this is, I do need your help to find it and fix it. Can you see that you’re the only person who can help me?”
I sighed and shook my head. “I’m not sure about that, but I can try.”
“You’ll find this much easier if you can accept what you are.”
My annoyance had dropped, but it was starting to notch back up. “What I am able to accept is that most people in my situation wake up every morning in a padded room.”
It was Mara’s turn to sigh now. She took a few steps away from the door and sat on a wooden bench in the hall, tired and frustrated with me. “It’s fighting it that will drive you mad. That’s why you slip and stumble and why Albert couldn’t stay with you. You burn up energy needlessly fighting to do something you’d find so much easier if you accept and relax into the Grey.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the doorframe. “A couple of days ago you were trying to show me how to push it back, now you want me to let it in. Which is it?”
“That’s access-control, not denial. The normal and the Grey are different states, and you can’t go on struggling against that fact once you’re in the Grey. You’ll exhaust yourself, and you’ll not be able to protect yourself or concentrate or do any work. You must connect to it to control it.”
“And how do you suggest I do that without ending up like your friend?”
Mara gave me a look which must have quelled rooms full of rowdy undergraduates without raising her voice. “Sit down, Harper.”
I considered it. What did I lose by giving in?
I sat down on the bench.