then things had evolved so slowly I hadn’t noticed that we now saw each other nearly every day and he slept with me more often than we slept apart. Without any intention, without realizing how we had changed, we had become a couple and I liked it more than I would have imagined. More than I would have liked it years ago when I felt I needed no one but myself—could trust no one but myself—to make my life what I wanted. The downside was this worry I had over what might be happening where I couldn’t see and shouldn’t intrude in his life. No matter how much I loved him, or how much our lives had become entwined, each of us had our own needs and our own problems that couldn’t be changed by the other’s desire for it. I still didn’t like sitting it out, though. Eventually, I’d have to go looking for Quinton or his father and put a stop to the battle of wills that had me in the middle—and I knew whose side I’d be on.
I played with Chaos for a while and tried to sleep, but did a lousy job of it and got up in the morning grumpy and still half-blind. Besides my work, Quinton and I were supposed to have dinner with Phoebe Mason tonight. Right now I wasn’t sure he’d make it. Uncomfortably aware of my aloneness, I decided to take the ferret with me back to Pike Place Market. The main arcades are, by default, open to animals because it’s impossible to close them—the Sanitary Market Building is called that not because it’s any cleaner than the others but because it used to be the only building people couldn’t take their horses into. These days, horses are about the only animal you
Last night’s unexpected downpour had already been swept away on the morning breeze—even if the gray sky hadn’t been. The air was cooler, but not enough to frighten off the tourists, so I was reasonably confident I’d be able to find some buskers around if the market office wasn’t able to give me a line on Delamar’s whereabouts. I wasn’t foolish enough to go out without my coat this time, though. I’ve gotten used to getting wet, but that doesn’t mean I like it.
I got to the market office just a few minutes past opening. Like the rest of the place, the office was thickly haunted and looked fog-bound to my vision. One tall female ghost with a hard face under a pile of dark hair glared at me as I entered and watched me the entire time I was there. I chose to ignore her—I’d have time to figure out her problem later, if I gave a damn.
The office was as busy in the normal plane as in the Grey. When I entered I found a frantic secretary and a handful of other people dashing in and out of the front room with an odd assortment of objects, paperwork, and problems. One of the problems was a monkey at which Chaos took one look before she dove to the bottom of my bag.
The woman holding the monkey tried to put it on the secretary’s desk, but each time she put it down, the monkey jumped back onto her chest and climbed up to sit on her shoulder, wrapping its arms around her head. “Get this damned thing off me!” she yelled. “It’s been crawling all over my stall and throwing fruit on the ground since six a.m. and if I’m stuck with it for one more hour I’m going to drown it. And if that means drowning myself in the process, I will!”
“Where’s Animal Control?” the secretary asked the nearest person passing by. “Didn’t anyone call them?”
“We did, but they said they can’t come for the monkey until they deal with a bear out in Crown Hill,” came the reply as the person vanished behind a wall.
“Oh God . . . is this some kind of hoax? What is this, Animal Planet?”
“City Fish lost a monkfish this morning, and a bunch of shrimp got loose in the main arcade stairway, too,” the absent person called back, accompanied by a lot of rattling and clanging.
The glaring ghost seemed to find the hullabaloo amusing; she smirked at me as if, somehow, this was all a joke I should have gotten. I stared blankly back until she was distracted by something else.
“Please tell me the monkfish wasn’t alive when it went AWOL,” the secretary said.
“It was still flopping. . . . Ah! I got it!”
The woman with the monkey on her head unwound the creature’s arms one more time and held it at arm’s length. “Please let it be a shotgun. . . .”
A man with a pile of cloth in his arms came out from the other side of the wall. “Monkfish was apprehended in the women’s bathroom on Down Under One. And, yes, we have no shotgun—also no bananas—but we do have a tablecloth! Hold the monkey where I can get it. . . .”
“If it were that easy, we’d have wrapped the little bastard up hours ago!”
The man threw the large, dirty tablecloth toward the struggling monkey. The monkey tried to dodge by biting the woman holding it and scrambling up her arms again. It nearly made it, but one side of the cloth got over its head and the woman, now screaming and trying not to move back or sideways, juggled the miscreant up and down, bouncing more of the fabric over the beast’s head. “Get it, get it, get it!” she screeched. “Oh God, just get the little monster off me!”
The man who’d brought the tablecloth grabbed at the wriggling shape under the folds of dirty linen and wrestled it free of the woman, wrapping the extra bits of fabric around and around, imprisoning the monkey in the folds.
“Don’t suffocate it!” the secretary exclaimed.
The monkey, realizing it was trapped, began to howl and let out an unpleasant stench of an origin I didn’t want to think about.
The man fighting with the cloth gave the secretary an exasperated glare. “I don’t think there’s much chance of that. Someone find a damned cage or a box.”
One of the other milling people dragged a large plastic file box into the room, hastily emptying the contents in armfuls onto the secretary’s desk. Once the box was empty, the cloth-bound monkey was dumped into it and the lid slammed down and latched.
“Do you think it’ll be OK in there?” the secretary asked.
“I hope it dies!” said the woman who had recently been its perch.
“Oh, you do not!” The box thumped and rattled, but the lid held tight. “I think it’ll be fine so long as someone punches some air holes in the box,” the man said. “It’s us who’ll be nervous wrecks. Someone get the first-aid kit for Gabby.”
Gabby, the now de-monkeyed woman, looked down at herself. “Oh . . . holy fish guts. It bit me and I’m covered in monkey poo! Gross!”
“I’ve changed my mind,” the man said. “Forget the first-aid kit. Someone get Gabby to a shower.”
The secretary grabbed her desk phone. “I’ll call the hotel—they’ll have something.”
“Good.” The man sat down on the corner of the desk and blew his disheveled hair out of his eyes while another woman came out from behind the wall and ushered the distraught Gabby somewhere less public. The annoying ghost seemed disappointed in the return of relative sanity and the ferret took one peek out of my bag and decided it still wasn’t safe to come into the open—maybe she didn’t like the look of the ghost any more than I did.
The secretary was busy with the phone, so after a moment of my standing there like a stork, the man looked up and said, “I guess it’s all me then, is it?” He held out his right hand. “Hello, how are you? I’m John and I don’t usually wrangle monkeys and shrimp first thing in the morning. What can I do for you? And does it involve livestock, because if so, I’m afraid I’ll have to run screaming from the room.”
“No livestock,” I replied.
“Thank God.” He glanced at the secretary, who was putting the phone down. “Emily, make sure you punch some holes in the box for the monkey.”
“With what?”
“I don’t know . . . a letter opener? You can’t let it smother in there.”
The secretary seemed unimpressed with his argument. “Oh . . . all right. But don’t blame me if it gets poked.”
“Just don’t let it out,” John added. He looked back to me as Emily got on her knees wielding a wicked-looking letter opener. She looked dangerous. “What was it you needed again?” he asked.
“I’m trying to find out if a certain person has a performer’s badge. Is there a list?”
He looked blank for a moment, then blinked, pursing his mouth as he thought, and then raising his eyebrows
