should have called it if they were telling the truth?”
“Sunset Lakes,” I answered, remembering the story the clerk at the county offices had told me.
The curtains stopped moving at the extreme edges of the window, revealing the lake, carmine red in the reflected light from the sunset below the western peaks. The water lay so still and deep, the colors of the landscape washed away completely in the darkness beneath and the ruddy light from above, that it looked thick, as if it had poured down into the basin from some giant’s wound.
“Blood Lake. That’s what they should have called it,” Jewel said. “For all the blood it’s swallowed and all the horror it’s spat right back.” She stared out at the lake as if it mesmerized her. “The Indians say there used to be a beautiful river valley here, the Valley of Peace. But the people in the valley got to fighting and Storm King wanted to shut them up, to punish them for making war, so he tore off the peak of his mountain and threw it down into the valley—right here, right where we are now—and he dammed up the river. All the people in the valley drowned and the lakes formed over their corpses. That’s what this is, a valley full of blood, a lake full of death.”
“Is that what you think killed your father? Some kind of curse?”
“What do you think, Miss Harper Blaine? Don’t be so surprised. I’m sick and broken, but I still have ways of knowing what I need to know.”
“I don’t doubt that, Mrs. Newman. But your father—”
“Was killed by one of
“What about your sister, Willow? Couldn’t it have been her?”
“It might well have been. The Powers know she didn’t have any love for our father or any care about the lake. She’s as bad as the rest.” Jewel collapsed in a fit of coughing, her near hand scrambling like a spider over the coverlet for an oxygen mask that lay on her pillow as an alarm began squealing on the monitors beside the bed.
I picked up the mask and put it in her flailing hand. I watched her clap it onto her face and suck in the gas to regain control of her breathing. I thought I should have felt more moved by Jewel’s condition, but something about her chilled my sympathy.
The bedroom door banged open and Geoff darted in, heading for the bed, but drew up short when he saw that Jewel already had the mask to her face. He glowered at me, but Jewel waved him away again, lowering the mask for a moment to say, “I’ll call you, Geoff. Go away now.”
“Jewel,” he protested.
She took the mask down again, but this time her voice was tender. “I
Newman stiffened his jaw, his mouth turning down as he tried to hold it steady and his eyes got wet. Then he wheeled and marched out, back and shoulders stiff.
I waited a while for Jewel to be ready to speak again, watching the fast-fading sunset color the lake darker and darker, like a stain.
Finally she put the mask aside. “Miss Blaine, I don’t have the luxury of beating around the bush. I’m sure you wonder why I didn’t make a report when Daddy went missing. But I knew he was dead, and I also knew it would only make things worse for me if I said anything. I didn’t want to be the subject of a murder investigation—my family’s had enough of that. I tried to discover what had happened on my own, but I couldn’t, and in trying . . . this was the result,” she added, waving at the machines and the hospital bed. “There was—there is—no one here I could trust to carry on the investigation. Not anyone with any power, at least, and I’m sure you understand that any normal person would be eaten alive by the things that drink from this lake. I think my father tried to stop these things—these poachers and despoilers and their filthy familiars—and I am sure one of them killed him and dumped his body in the lake to feed the power. I want to know, but more than that . . . I want them all to stop. I want them to stop using the lake. I want them all to die. At the very least I want them broken, driven away from here forever. Do you understand?” She stared at me, unwavering, the colors around her head clinging close, weaving into a snowy veil of white.
White: the color the Chinese used for death and mourning.
“I can understand that,” I replied, noncommittal. I knew it would get ugly and I wasn’t sure I needed to be the one to do it. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t want to do it, either. The proprietary fury that rolled off Jewel made me sick and her desire for bloody revenge repelled me.
Something yellow touched the distant side of her face and she cocked her head over as if listening to it, still watching me the whole time, calculating. She straightened up with an effort and nodded. “You do understand. I know that. I know your own father was driven to death by magical things.” Her voice had a disturbing singsong quality, carried on a thread of magic. “You can sympathize. You understand. I know you’ll do this. For me. For both of us.”
She was trying to play me and that was the last straw. I slammed down my mental doors and narrowed my eyes, letting cold disgust flow out at her. I took a step back. “Not for my sake,” I said. “And not for yours, either, you bitter old woman. You don’t understand one thing about me.” I’d already done my time with family vengeance. I wasn’t going to shoulder that gnawing burden for someone else, especially not for her.
I turned on my heel and started out, in that moment not caring if the lake drank up another hundred life forces before it finally destroyed whoever was using it—and I was sure it would, judging by the toll it was taking on Jewel Newman. I didn’t care who’d killed Steven Leung any longer. I told myself the county or the feds or the city of Port Angeles would find out eventually and that was no longer my job. I’d done what I’d come to do.
“I’ll pay you,” Jewel called out from the bed.
She couldn’t possibly pay me enough. I ignored her and reached for the doorknob.
“You can do whatever you feel you must—I’ll make sure of it. I’ll protect you,” she cried. “I
I ground my teeth and turned the knob.
“You’ll be saving us—all the rest of the people around the lakes. You’ll save them. You have to. You have to try. You have power and . . . and the Guardian will demand it.”
That stopped me. I knew that she’d been fed the information by some kind of Grey spy, some magical snooping, whispering thing, but unfortunately, she was right. That’s my job: Hands of the Guardian—the human instrument of the thing that keeps the Grey safe, and the rest of the world safe from the Grey. That was indisputably my role ever since the last job, when I’d unwillingly helped to destroy the previous Guardian and then watched a new one take form once I’d shut down the threat of an unfettered Grey—at the expense of my life and the lives of others. Damn it all! How dared she use that against me?
I halted at the door, indulging in a fit of mental cursing, but I didn’t turn back. “I’ll think about it,” I said. Then I left.
ELEVEN
The ferret woke up with a frantic need to scratch her ears as I was trudging down the darkened road toward the ranger station. I had forgotten to ask about Shea, and I didn’t think that query or a request for a lift to my car would have been well received after the way I’d walked out on Jewel Newman, so I’d just kept walking. Geoff Newman tried to brace me at the door, but I am good at slipping out of physical holds— especially when the person trying it has no idea what he’s doing.
In the falling darkness, the lake’s uncanny presence impressed itself on me as an ululating whisper of song, half-heard. The phenomenon that had lit Lake Crescent bloody red had faded as the torn clouds closed up again, gathering their stormy menace, and the sun set completely. Now I felt the sparking tingle of minuscule raindrops against my face like tiny ice needles.
“Great,” I muttered, grabbing the ferret as she tried to leap to the ground. “What odds will you give me that we don’t make it back to the truck dry?”
Her only response was to squirm harder and paw at my hands. I stepped off the road and let her down,
