“You don’t seem worried he’ll tell someone you’re the one who shot him,” I said as I drove carefully toward West Seattle.
“No. Dad wouldn’t want it to get out. It wouldn’t make him look good to say the ‘top recruit’ he’d been working to bring on board was his renegade son who turned on him. He won’t tell the regular cops on me, either. Though if he did, I guess I could always go to them first, demand to see Solis, and get a sympathetic ear at the very least. No, Dad will keep his mouth shut, I’ll clean up as much of the disaster as I must to keep from being connected to it, and then I’ll have to find the rest of Ghost Division and take care of this problem in person.”
“In Europe? But—” I started. Then I shut my mouth over my objection and kept on driving.
Quinton let it drop and he didn’t say anything even while we were securing the shrine box.
I drove us home and he followed me up the stairs to the condo in silence. I wasn’t angry. I just wasn’t sure what to say or how to broach the subject that was weighing on my mind even more than the idea of a ghost and a god killing off a few hundred tourists so they could eat their souls. The booming silence of it hung between us and I tried to ignore it by doing normal, trivial things: I let the ferret out to romp while I undressed and got into the shower. Quinton followed me into the bathroom and leaned against the wall, playing desultorily with Chaos while the steam built up.
“I don’t want to leave you,” he said once he was completely obscured in clouds of vapor.
“But you’re going to.”
“I have to. What he’s doing is terrible and I feel a little responsible—if I hadn’t called on his help a couple of years ago, he wouldn’t have known where I was or tumbled to what I knew about ghosts and magic and that sort of thing. I wouldn’t have felt I owed him and he wouldn’t have been able to screw with my life again. This is at least partly my fault and I know he won’t fix it—he’ll just try to use the current situation to his advantage. Maybe he’ll spin the destruction of the lab as some kind of breakthrough or something. He’s perfectly capable of it. And he’ll have figured out who—and mostly what—Carlos is, so he’ll also have realized you’re not just a plain-Jane human being. I’m not sure if he saw anything but I think he already suspected you weren’t exactly ‘normal.’ I need to keep him off you.”
I stuck my head out of the shower and gave him a hard stare. “You are not my keeper and you aren’t responsible for fending off your dad as a result of my own actions. I can take care of myself in that regard. Especially now that he might already know I’m a little more than an average PI and I won’t have to pull my punches.”
He walked forward, putting Chaos down on the floor. She danced around our feet as he leaned forward and kissed me softly. “Harper, I know you can look out for yourself, but I have to take care of the situation he’s caused. It’s my responsibility.”
“Would you have shot him? I mean fatally?”
“I think I would have. And I guess I should say thank you for stopping me. That would have been a mistake. This way, he’ll want to cover it up. Otherwise, his bosses would have come looking for me and I’d never have been free again. I am grateful. I love you. And not just because you came to my rescue like a knight in crumpled armor with your trusty vampire sidekick, either. I just . . . I just do.”
I grinned at him. “Then why don’t you get your clothes off and get in here?”
He looked shaggy and dirty, his clothes were stained with some things I didn’t want to think about, and we were both at less than our best, but I couldn’t think of anyone I would rather share a shower with. He glanced down at himself, back at me, and broke into a wicked grin.
He was pretty quick at getting out of his clothes, though dropping them on Chaos wound her up and we could hear her chuckling and dancing around in miniature ire as Quinton joined me under the stream of hot water. We stayed until the water got tepid and then fought our way past the furious ferret to roll into bed and make love until we were both too tired to try anymore. We even forgot to put Chaos back in her cage.
A brush of whiskers on my face woke me at noon. Quinton was already gone, but a note said he’d be back. I picked up the ferret and showed it to her.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Truth or lie?”
She sniffed the paper and snorted. Then she tried to eat it, leaving neat sets of puncture marks in the corner of the page until I took it from her. “I’ll take that as a vote of confidence, since you didn’t turn up your nose.”
Talking to the ferret made me feel less alone, but it probably would have given most people the impression I was completely off my rocker. I put her down and got dressed, then took her out to the kitchen while I made some breakfast and thought about what I’d have to do next.
Carlos and I had determined that we needed another seance in order to capture Limos. The only practical bait would be the families of the patients, since they would attract the ghosts bound to Hazzard and through her to Limos. We’d have to use them to get the goddess to her shrine, then capture her in it and disperse whatever hold Hazzard had established over the ghosts. Once that was done, we’d have to get rid of Hazzard and hope that allowed the ghosts the freedom to rest and leave their unwilling hosts alone.
Not a very detailed plan. We would have to wing it a lot and I’d have to be the one to talk Stymak into trying one more time. I knew Lily Goss would join me in cajoling him, but I really needed someone representing each of the patients to make the circle work. Carlos and I would have to stand aside from the circle to do our work in the Grey once the ghosts and their hungry handlers were present. It wasn’t going to be fun and it had to be tonight— before Purlis could make any efforts to get the shrine back or more harm could be done to Julianne, Sterling, and Delamar.
I started with a phone call to Lily Goss. She answered, sounding very harried, and I could hear Julianne’s babbling in the background.
“Hello? What? I’m sorry, we’re having a crisis, could you call back?”
“No. This is Harper Blaine. I’ve got a solution to the problem. I think. But it will require a seance with Richard Stymak.”
“What? Seance? I’m not sure. . . .”
In the distance I heard Julianne scream, “Somil, somil! Throuf eeluge lew eth drag! Lew eth drag!” I couldn’t figure out what she was saying on the fly and that frustrated me, but first I needed to concentrate on persuading her sister to do as I asked. If Julianne wanted me to get the message, she’d repeat it, I was sure.
I said, “I believe we can fix the whole problem, in one effort, tonight, if we can just do this. But I need you to persuade Stymak. He’s afraid and I need him. I need you, too—I can’t do this on my own.”
“But Julie is so agitated. I’m afraid to leave her. She may hurt herself. . . . Her vital signs are very strange. She keeps saying—screaming—that phrase—‘throuf eeluge lew eth drag’—over and over since yesterday morning.”
“Did you write it down? Why didn’t you call me?”
“I . . . I couldn’t break free. She’s been so bad, I felt I had to stay with her and do what I could for her. But she’s getting worse and she started throwing things. . . .”
“I know about the throwing things part,” I replied, touching my eyelid. It stung just a little and I thought of the eyedrops I’d been neglecting. The Grey connection may have been severed but the physical damage was still there. “Repeat that phrase for me? What Julianne is saying.”
She stuttered, started, stopped, and finally got it out. “‘Throuf eeluge lew eth drag.’ Or that’s what it sounds like. She’s been screaming it and then she . . . passes out. When she wakes up, she starts again.”
I wrote the phrase down and stared at it while Julianne continued to raise a ruckus in the background.
“Oh, please . . . Julie, sweetie . . .” Lily said, turning aside from the phone for a moment. “Please calm down. I’m trying to help. . . .”
I puzzled at the words. I knew they were backward but knowing and translating aren’t instantaneous. “‘Throuf . . . fourth . . . eeluge . . . july . . . lew . . . well’ . . . no, ‘Wheel . . . eth’ . . . that’s got to be ‘the’ . . . ‘drag . . . gard’ . . . ‘guard.’” I rewrote the phrase in proper order, just to be sure . . . Guard the Wheel July Fourth. “Oh shit . . . It’s tonight.”
Julianne fell silent.
“What?” Lily asked in the sudden quiet.
A surge of fear squeezed my heart and my ears sang with the pressure. “Please, Lily. Get Wrothen to sit with her—she’s a dragon, but she’s a good nurse. She’ll take good care of Julianne and if things work out, you’ll never need her help again after tomorrow.”
