and the old-fashioned house key. Neither of the wedding rings had any ghostly haze to it, for which I was grateful—I doubted I could explain taking one of those when I hadn’t mentioned it to begin with. I did wonder where the thimble had come from, though. Who carries a thimble into a bar? The button hook was intriguing because although it was an old object, it had no Grey gleam at all. I supposed it was something bought in the market and dropped by accident. Maybe it went with the thimble. . . .
“That it?” the bartender asked, looking at the small pile I’d made on the bar.
I glanced up at him, opening both eyes. “Yeah. That’s it.”
“Weird. OK, they’re all yours.”
I shoved the objects into my pockets with the ones I’d found outside and thanked the man as I left. I didn’t see any further sign of the little girl ghost or Linda Hazzard and I was grateful. But I did feel a renewed tingling and burning where my skin had been scribed with phantom words. Being near the market was becoming a liability for me. I needed to solve the puzzle and get away from this as quickly as possible. I didn’t have all the pieces I needed, but Carlos might be able to help on that score and at the moment he owed me, though I wasn’t excited about collecting.
I also needed to find Quinton, which meant finding his father. Quinton had mentioned Northlake when I’d seen him last and it was in that general direction that the convoluted and knotted line between us had stretched when Carlos showed it to me. I already knew Quinton wasn’t downtown, and his father obviously wasn’t operating out of that area himself—much too easily observed by his government colleagues and others. I might also find Inman in the area, since a demi-vampire doesn’t wander far without orders from whoever is holding his leash. Carlos would be more inclined to do what I wanted if I had a lead on his missing dhampir.
I had to admit, I was curious as to how Papa Purlis had subverted the dhampir—the ties of blood and magic between creator and “child” vampires are strong and usually broken only by destruction of one or both vampires, though dhampirs are rather unusual cases. Purlis had discovered something very dangerous and I wondered if he recognized it or even knew what he’d done. Sending Inman after me had been risky and foolish. It made me think he wasn’t aware of the importance of what he’d accomplished. But since I hadn’t seen any sign of Inman today, it was possible he’d figured it out. His Ghost Division needed to be discredited and burned to the ground before he had any more breakthroughs. Not to mention I was running out of patience with Quinton’s obsessive absences. I was the unreasonable, obsessive member of this little party and I didn’t want to share the distinction.
I trudged back to the Land Rover and drove through the thinning traffic to the north end of Lake Union, thinking about where I might find Quinton or his father.
Northlake is a light industrial area, bounded by famous neighborhoods: Fremont on the west, Wedgwood to the north, and the University District on the east. It’s an area full of boatyards, marinas, workingmen’s cafes, and incongruous condos. My very first Grey case had started at an old naval architecture warehouse in the area—and now I was back. The area had changed a bit more in particulars than in general. The Lake Union Kite Shop had gone out of business. The moldering Kalakala Ferry had been moved to Tacoma, where its Art Deco superstructure could decline in silence, but the Skansonia remained, still hosting parties but never leaving the dock. Ivar’s Salmon House still squatted on the edge of the U-District, putting the scent of salmon and woodsmoke into the air. The remains of the old gasworks still stuck its rusted metal fingers into the air at Browns Point, surrounded by parkland and the kite-flying hill that hid the wreck of its old buildings, now buried in sod and environmental plastic to keep the seeping chemicals of sixty years of coal gas production under wraps.
If you want to hide something like a secret lair or a questionable government project, it’s better not to put it in the middle of nowhere. People will notice something new where once there was nothing and they’ll notice you coming and going, too. It’s far better to put your “secret” where people won’t question it. Spies work fairly well with industrial neighborhoods. No one thinks it’s strange if they soundproof a building, or have guards with guns around, or come and go at odd hours. No one pays attention to trucks bearing crates or large pieces of equipment, or to cars with blacked-out windows, and absolutely no one finds subterranean garages with security doors odd. Most won’t pay any attention to odd sounds, either—even sounds that mask screams—since there are plenty of other noises in the area.
Northlake is not heavily industrial, but it’s on the lake, next to the canal mouth, so there’s plenty of coming and going, plenty of din, plenty of distractions, and a fair number of buildings that aren’t fully leased. I figured I’d start at the park and work outward, since the most likely places were on the water. I left the Land Rover in the parking lot between the Adobe building and the rowing club and started walking, paying more attention to my Grey vision than to the normal—figuring I’d be more likely to spot an illicit bit of magic or a lurking monster that way. At first I ran into a tree along the Burke-Gilman Trail, but I got the hang of it after that.
The area around the park turned out to be the most active in the Grey—not that that should have surprised me. I drifted that way, trying to get a better idea of what was going on. Old factories are often scattered with ghosts, loops of history, and shredded temporaclines, and the coal-gas-cracking towers of the gasworks hung with mist that had nothing to do with the unseasonable clouds. I concentrated my search along the bike trail, looking for a likely building or entry to something Purlis might be using as a base of operation.
I walked past the loading docks for Fisheries Supply and noticed a sign at the edge of the park’s driveway. I strolled across to it, not bothering to hide, since there really wasn’t anyplace to go. It appeared to be an old notice that no one had removed claiming that the state Department of Ecology would be doing maintenance and upgrades to the ecological barriers in the northeast corner of the park, followed by regrading and restoring the area. The project was supposed to have been finished in the spring of 2013 once the grass was established. I didn’t see any signs of ongoing work, but the sign and a bit of temporary fencing remained. I assumed it was just an oversight that no one had bothered to fix, but as I strolled on, it struck me very much like the misdirection Quinton had used to create his secret bunker under the streets of Seattle, using the excuse of a construction project to carve a bit of space out of the underground and then keep people from investigating it by creating signs that didn’t say what it was but gave the impression it wasn’t safe.
Quinton was a clever guy, but he must have picked up a few things from his coworkers and mentors in Intelligence—maybe even from his dad. I walked up the hill beside Fisheries and then down another street, looking for a good place from which to observe the area. It didn’t look like much of an access, but there was a slope and a bit of old building within the fencing that could easily conceal a way deeper into the gasworks. And who would even think twice about odd sounds at an abandoned gasworks? The wind that made kite flying off the hill so attractive also made a whistling and howling sound as it passed through the many ladders, walkways, trusses, and towers of the old industrial site. I spotted a good vantage point where the corner of a condo building met the sidewalk and the builders had poured a small slab to make a level platform for the trash and recycling bins on the edge of the steep street. The fencing around the bins was woven with strips of bamboo to mask the unattractive little corner, but it didn’t obscure the view completely. I moved to the farthest part of the fence, where I couldn’t be seen from the park, and climbed over it.
Seattleites can be a little obsessive about garbage, so the area wasn’t too rotten, but it did have a bit of a smell to it. I was thinking I might have to give up the surveillance as a bad job when someone spoke nearby.
“Hey there, beautiful.”
I turned toward Quinton’s voice, but could see only a shadow behind the fencing. “Hey. How’d you find me?”
“You and I have the same taste in observation posts.”
“Ah,” I said. “How come you’re not replying to pages?”
“Kind of busy lately. I’m sorry.”
“I need to talk to you. Your dad seems to have snatched a demi-vampire from Carlos and Cameron. They aren’t happy about that. And I’ve got the impression that you or your father knows something connected to my own case. What’s going on here?”
“Details are still pretty sketchy. I knew he’d grabbed a few paranormals, but at first I didn’t know he’d gotten a vampire. I don’t know how he managed that. At least not yet.”
“What other paranormals has he got?”
“I’m not sure. There was something . . . I called it Pandora’s Box, since it seemed to have something in it, but now it doesn’t. Not big enough for something living unless it was insect-sized. Kind of like a . . . folding shrine. I didn’t get to examine it or get a good close look, so I don’t have much information except that it had been stored in dirt for a while. I got a sample of the dirt and I asked Fishkiller to look it over.” Ruben Fishkiller was a forensic pathology technician who’d exchanged a few favors with me over the years. Quinton went on. “But he says it’s
