weighty things shoving into me. Not like sharp edges or pointy objects tearing the skin, but as if great balloons pressed past my fragile shell without breaking it, pushing in and stuffing me down into a corner I didn’t even know I had—a little dark closet of hell I had lived in once upon a time, when I believed the degrading, thoughtless things other people said about me. I couldn’t break out, even though I struggled, and I experienced sensation at a distance. I felt my hands close and move, felt words express themselves on my skin as if a drypoint pen was pressing from beneath the surface, scribing looping lines of script that my closed eyes couldn’t see. And always the pushing, pressing sensation of weight, moving, squirming inside me.
It felt like I was in this remote, tortured state for hours, unable to cry out, or even to breathe, unable to move or fight back. For a moment I did not fight, but let myself fall away, further into the Grey and the darkness that it had become. Now I saw nothing in my Grey sight but at the deepest level, where the power grid of magic roared in channels of searing, colored light and I could hear the murmur of the Grey talking to itself, of the souls in transition that were neither ghost nor human singing with the music of energy flowing through the world. I tumbled and soared to the grid and looked back, searching for the forms of the presences that had shoved me aside.
Silver and foggy black clouds—the half-life forms of the dispossessed dead—boiled through a wire-frame human form of white light that spun a full spectrum of colored strands in all directions until it looked more like a tiny sun than a woman. A rope of twisted colors shrouded in black tied me to the incandescent shape. I stared at it; I’d never seen my own energetic form before, yet this was clearly it. This was what Grey creatures saw, what drew ghosts and trouble to me like moths because I was, to them, as bright as flame and sun, moon and stars in cloudless skies. I’d been told this, but it’s not the same to be told as to see it for yourself.
I wanted it back—wanted my whole self—and I pushed with the only weapon I still controlled. I vaulted back toward the shape of me, thrusting with my mind against temporaclines and shadow shapes of things gone or yet to come, climbing back to it by will to drive the ghost shapes away. I could not grip them, but in this deep plane of the Grey I could exert myself as force, drive them out, thrust against their incorporeal weight with the vigor of being alive. I had so much more to lose than they did and though I was rough with them, I didn’t hesitate any longer. I pulled the burning flow of the grid into my mind, feeling it swell and howl through me, and then propelled it out and up to sweep them away on the gust of power. The ghosts scattered like autumn leaves before wind and I rushed back toward the gleaming shape of my self, passing again into darkness as I went.
I sat up with a gasp, dizzy from the transition back to normal. A young Chinese American woman jumped back from me and I thought she must have been bending over me as I’d lain across the tabletop. She was usually behind the cash register and I hadn’t seen her come over.
“You OK?” she asked, quivering a little from surprise. “I thought you fainted.” She looked frightened.
I shook myself, settling back into the feel of my own body. “I’m fine.”
I’m a good liar, but she wasn’t convinced. She stared at me with wide eyes and raised one hand to her cheek. “Your face . . .”
I touched my own face and recognized the stinging heat I’d felt the night before at Cameron’s house. This time the dermographia had scrolled up my neck and onto the side of my face, just in front of my ear, then vanished again under my hair. I could sense the burning tracery running down my back as well, like a trail of fire ants.
I pawed my brown locks down over my cheek. “Cat scratch,” I said, then stopped to stare at the tablecloth, scrawled with a soy-sauce-and-chopstick sketch of the same cliff I’d seen in Julianne Goss’s paintings. Beside it were the barely legible words “beach to bluff and back.” I dropped the stained chopstick from my left hand as if it were hot.
The young woman’s fear wasn’t appeased. “Are you sick?”
I forced myself up from the table, containing my rising panic for the moment. “No. No, I’m just very tired. Didn’t get any sleep last night. I’m so sorry I disturbed you,” I added, digging money out of my pockets and dropping it on the table so I could run away without feeling quite so guilty for disrupting the place.
And run I did. Frightened and adrenaline-fueled, I darted out of the deli as fast as I could without causing any more upset and hurried back toward my office, feeling horribly conspicuous, branded, pursued, and under threat. A cloudburst dampened my escape, rain erupting from the sky just long enough to wet everything and soothe the acid-burned sensation on my flesh. Though I felt oppressed by watching eyes, no one stared at me as I darted along Western toward Pioneer Square; they were all doing the same thing—running for cover.
I bolted into my building and up the stairs to my office, locking the door behind me as I looked around, just in case there were any little friends of Purlis’s—or anyone else’s—lurking about. All clear.
I’d thrown off the worst of my horror and panic, though I was still breathing too hard and quivering. I forced myself to calm down, breathe in mindful cycles, clear my mind before I did anything else. I knew I was safe enough here and that panic was unhelpful. I wasn’t vulnerable and helpless like Goss, Sterling, and Delamar—I knew what was happening and I could do something about it. This time I made myself undress enough to photograph the writing that had appeared on my skin, since there was no one to see but a handful of ghosts too remote from life to stare at me. I almost wished I’d stopped to photograph the drawing on the table, but I didn’t think I could have managed it. I could always see it again in Julianne’s room.
Standing in my tiny office, shirtless and chilly in spite of the season, I followed Levi Westman’s example and took photos of the dermographia with my cell phone’s camera. Photographing my back was difficult and I hoped I’d not ended up taking out-of-focus snaps of my butt. I hustled back into my clothes the moment I was done and sat down to examine the photos, hoping to decipher the text that had appeared on my skin. Naturally, some of the images were useless and others out of focus or not very good in other ways, but I could read parts of the text. I’d be able to see more when I looked at them at home, with the more powerful software that Quinton had loaded onto my home computer—I didn’t see any point in keeping a high-end machine in my office, since the building was more than a hundred years old and far too easy to break into.
My phone rang as I was trying to decide if I should send the photos to myself or keep them where they were on the off chance that Purlis Senior was monitoring my e-mail. “Harper Blaine,” I answered.
“Hey, girl. I got some books for you.”
“Hi, Phoebe. Thanks. That was fast.”
“I know what I got in stock. I’d have called you sooner, but I got to reading one of them and forgot the time. Anyhow, you going to come up and get these?”
“I am. In fact, right away.” I couldn’t think of anything less likely to interest Quinton’s father than Phoebe and the cat-house-that-books-built.
“Good. I’ll make you some coffee.”
Phoebe knows all about my coffee addiction. I thanked her and hung up, repacking the phone into my pocket after sending the photos to myself. It was a risk, but I hoped Purlis was too busy to be interested in an e-mail I’d labeled with the name of a well-known auto insurance company and a long case number.
SIXTEEN
Old Possum’s seems never to change. Phoebe occasionally rearranges the shelves and reorganizes the stock, but the air of everything having been, forever, as it is right now and always shall be is as permanent as the musical wooden floors and the cat hair on the doormat. The sign over the coatrack still read HE WHO STEALS MY COAT GETS TRASHED, and there were still fake dinosaur skulls on the walls, as there had been since I first arrived. One of Phoebe’s employees—eternally referred to as “the minions”—stood behind the cash desk, folding hardcover books into plastic covers, while Beenie, the dumbest of the shop cats, supervised. If Beenie stayed true to form, he would end up half-wrapped in plastic before the books were done and wandering through the shop in a daze, unable to fathom how to get it off. The shop wasn’t busy at this early-afternoon hour, so I just waved to the minion as I passed and headed toward the back, drawn by the scent of coffee.
Phoebe was waiting for me in the coffee alcove where I’d first talked to Lily Goss, cups of coffee—hers iced, mine hot—sitting on the painted table between the comfortable chairs. Simba, the giant cat, was curled on top of an ancient unabridged dictionary and overflowing the sides. They both looked up at me as I walked over to the unoccupied chair. Simba stared hard and I wondered if he could smell the ferret’s recent presence in my bag.
