Cameron met my eyes and looked disappointed. “Yes. While it’s true that the people who fall through your society’s cracks may become prey to the desperate and unscrupulous of mine, they aren’t cattle. They are human beings, as we were once human beings. We must coexist without drawing attention to ourselves and that means using every resource wisely. Something Edward didn’t always appreciate.”
He put one hand up as if warding off a comment he knew was coming. “Yes, I said ‘resource.’” His eyes narrowed a little and his face hardened with a touch of cold anger I’d never before seen in him. “The past few years have been a hard education for me. Ours is not a society apart from yours. We’re predators, but we’re also parasites. We are dependent on normal humans and creatures of magic to maintain us and to keep our existence secret. Unless human society changes in vast and significant ways, we’ll always be things that live in the shadows—nightmares, dreams, things half seen by moonlight. Phantom lovers who melt away at dawn,” he added, scoffing. “That is the fairy tale we perpetuate for our own interests—thank the gods for the pliant imaginations of Bram Stoker and Stephenie Meyer.”
He paused with a rueful half smile and made a slight change to his position in the chair—more for my sake than his, I thought—before he went on, his expression growing harder. “Because there are few of us, we’re ruthless. Because we’re long-lived, we’re acquisitive. And if we’re not clever and tricky about it, we’re dead. We have to tread lightly on the earth and we have to maintain the balance by husbanding resources, by being careful, abstemious, and—when warranted—manipulative, underhanded bastards. So, yes, I keep watch on the homeless, the transient, and the insane. They’re like a pack of idiot cousins—an obnoxious, smelly, drooling horde most of the time, but a few are quite likable. A decent custodian doesn’t just stand aside and let them all jump off cliffs. Or push them.”
I found his use of “our” and “your” startling and unsettling, but it was an eloquent speech and not at all what I would have expected of the chief vampire of Seattle. I had not given much thought to how much the terrified and confused living-dead college student I’d once rescued from a parking garage would be forced to change by taking the reins. I was pleased to detect a touch of student-activist-style passion there. Some things are, apparently, not exclusive to the living.
I bowed my head a little. “I hadn’t given it that kind of thought. But . . . much as I don’t like to sound petty, could we focus on the more immediate problem? I do understand the larger context, but for now, we both seem to have pieces of a larger puzzle and I’d like to put them together.”
Cameron chuckled. “Yes. I’m sorry. I get carried away on this topic lately. As I said, people have gone missing. Among the homeless it’s not uncommon for them to move on and we can’t always track what becomes of them. I didn’t pay that much attention at first, but when a few of my people disappeared, I began to worry. Initially it was our support people—catspaws, blood-bound, day servants—then a few demi-vampires and the ascending. Those are always dangerous stages, when it’s very easy for something to go wrong—you remember what I was like. But the apparent mortality rate was a little too high and then I started to notice that no one could positively say that any of these missing had died—it was just assumed. There should have been bodies, but there weren’t. No funerals, no rise in suspicious deaths reported to the coroner’s office. They were just gone. Like they’d been taken. But there was a lot more ghost activity—according to Carlos.” He indicated the other vampire with a small gesture. “I don’t have his acuity, so I can’t confirm it, but I’d assume you can.”
“I have noticed more ghosts, but only in some areas,” I said. “And I can’t be sure it’s really more activity so much as my spending too little time some places and not being familiar with the normal activity levels any longer.”
“Are you sure? Carlos seems to think there’s a profound disturbance. . . .”
Carlos took a step forward. “It’s not what I
I gave it a moment’s consideration, mentally cursing James Purlis but holding back my ire. “When did this start? This rise in activity? And did you notice a geographic pattern?”
“Near the end of the year there was a change,” said Carlos. “It has surged twice since then. There are a greater number of animate ghosts active in Seattle now than last year, and yet there has been no significant rise in deaths to account for it. There has been no great cataclysm or disaster here in the right time frame. The activities of your lover’s father have also had an effect on the weft and warp of magic. He draws the things of magic to him through mechanical contrivance and he has drawn our own away from us—as he did with Inman.”
Of course Carlos would know what the normal death rate was in Seattle and what effect Purlis’s activities were having on the local Grey power grid. “Are you certain that he’s responsible for the disappearance of the demi-vampires and others like that?” I didn’t want to overlook some factor, though I also thought that Purlis was behind the changes Carlos was describing. It fit with what I knew of his project through Quinton.
“I have cast spells and questioned the dead and I am sure of it.”
Cameron rejoined the conversation. “We would have brought this to you much earlier, but when Carlos discovered that Quinton was involved, I thought it would be better if we didn’t mix in family politics.”
I gave a harsh laugh. “James Purlis is not the sort of person I consider ‘family.’”
“But he is your . . .” He hesitated and cast a glance at Carlos.
“He is the blood father of your spouse-in-soul. That is a complex relationship in matters magical.”
“As far as I’m concerned, the man could die unseen and become food for crows without my shedding a single tear. Except that his corpse might poison the poor crows.”
“Not if he were to die by magic or by the hand of creatures bound to you. As Cameron and I are.”
I scowled in confusion. “I don’t understand. We have no bond.”
“Indeed we do, Greywalker.” He put his hand out into the air between us, whispering, and touched one finger to a barely glimmering thread of energy. It flared bright, revealing a gossamer-thin line of perfect whiteness that made a web uniting the three of us, with two more tendrils vanishing into distance and darkness beyond the room. Then he let it go and the line faded back to being near-invisible. His expression when he spoke again was solemn. “You were witness to our bond of fealty. You made it so, and so you are tied to us. Were either of us or anyone we controlled to kill your father-in-law—for lack of an easier term—there would be consequences. As the Hands of the Guardian, your family weighs on the fabric of magic—not so heavily as you do, but they are not insignificant. They cannot be wiped off the face of the earth casually.”
“My family? I have a mother—who drives me crazy—and Quinton. And that’s all.”
Carlos laughed at me. “I think you don’t quite understand what a family is.”
It shouldn’t have disturbed me, but his statement seemed to set a weight on my chest and I felt suffocated as a swarm of icy chills prickled my flesh. I didn’t see magic at work, but something I had pushed away in a dark closet of my mind was breaking out. . . .
FOURTEEN
Carlos stepped closer to me and I flinched as he raised a hand to touch the side of my face. “I won’t hurt you, ghost girl.” From him, that was very nearly an endearment. But I still loathed his touch— there’s nothing like the sickening in-flooding of history, death, and emotion that comes with the touch of a necromancer—and wanted none of it, nor of whatever my brain was trying to serve up. He settled back. “What have you done to your eye?”
The distraction relieved my panic and I was able to reply in a dry voice, “I got paint in it.”
He stroked the air over my shoulders and arms but he didn’t actually touch me. “You have been in the company of dangerous things.”
“I’m in the company of dangerous things right now.”
He grunted and looked me over, ignoring my flippancy. “Their ties and remnants complicate my view, but I can’t clear them off now.” I didn’t know what he was referring to and it seemed a bad time to ask. His hand rose again, toward the center of my chest, and stopped, hovering over my sternum. “I should have known you’d have a romantic streak,” he said, rubbing the tips of his fingers against his thumb as if he were balling up some tiny filament, muttering more words that dripped into the air.
From his fingers a tiny glowing strand of pink light emerged and stretched away, reaching for the window, and splitting in two as it spun out. It was so thin that it was hard to see. Carlos blew on the strand and it fluttered
