into the Grey.
The road bent away, but the lines stayed their general course south and I stepped out of their influence for a few steps. I stumbled and felt disoriented and deafened as I stopped on the ice-packed verge of the tarmac. Looking at the lines on the far side of the road, I could still hear their noise and feel their compelling pull. In the background, if I concentrated, there were other sounds, normal and Grey, that continued without reference to the bizarre orchestra of light and noise, clashing against it in head-aching discord.
Cleaving to the Grey I recognized, I looked around, sinking as deeply as I dared toward the grid, hearing its murmur and whine. The aberrant lines and sounds continued, but in an echoing distance, as if they were in another plane somehow, or in another room. I turned slowly, trying to gaze into the more familiar structures of the Grey and see what the cause was of this unsettling development.
But I was distracted by more familiar things. Not far from me, back toward the gate, I could see two tangled energy shapes, one more radiant and red than the other, but while they both showed some connection to the deeply buried grid and not to the freakish sound and light show, neither seemed particularly strong. I’d bet one of them was Ridenour. As much as my curiosity was piqued by the strange array of energy, I wanted to know who his companion was more, so I pushed myself back up to the normal and started back along the road as quickly as I could without too much clatter and concentrating on staying out of the singing, enthralling construct that had led me down the road to begin with.
I walked toward the tollbooth through icy ground fog, still hearing the echoes of the ethereal noise in my head, which masked the voices of Ridenour and his companion. As I was rounding the last turn, coming out of a stand of trees and nearly to the gates, the sounds fell away and I could just make out the words, “Over there before she slips out,” but I couldn’t quite place the voice.
“On my way! Thanks!” Ridenour replied.
I caught a glimpse of his companion turning and jogging into the trees, but I still didn’t know who it was.
Ridenour saw me and glared, his hands on his hips. “Miss Blaine, what the hell are you doing out here?”
“I was looking for you. Didn’t the station radio you to meet me here?” I still couldn’t quite throw off the Grey completely and saw him through a thin veil of silver where the trees around us seemed to be moving without wind, shifting in the ground and glowing with green, blue, and yellow light. Their branches appeared to reach for Ridenour, the naked alders and birches looking like bony hands among the furry greenery of the cedars. I shivered, thinking the trees were aware of me, too, in some way foreign to humans, as if they watched with incorporeal eyes. Whatever strangeness was going on farther down the road had set my imagination running in creepy directions.
“I had other business and now I’ve got some more that’s more pressing than whatever it is you want,” Ridenour said, walking the last few feet to meet me. “You should have just waited by the gate until I got back.”
“I meant to, but . . . I thought I saw something and assumed it was you.”
He snorted, heading back to his truck. “Lots of people think they see things up here. The rain forest has a lot of fog this time of year, especially out here near the hot springs. It’s too easy to misstep and fall into something, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go wandering around off the road here.” He looked at the way my Rover blocked his truck in the narrow road. “Damn it! Move this truck of yours!”
“Where are you headed in such a hurry?” I asked, walking past him to get into the Rover and digging through my pockets for my keys. Ending up with the hotel key card first, I held it in my other hand as I pulled out the truck keys and unlocked the vehicle.
“I got a tip that Willow might be up at one of our greenhouses and I’d like to catch her, if you don’t mind, since it is on park property.”
I stopped and turned back to him from the open door of the Rover, tossing the hotel key onto the passenger seat. “I’d like to go with you, then.”
“What the hell business is it of yours?”
“I’d be there if you catch Willow. I’d like to talk to her and I’m not sure how long she’ll stay in custody.”
He slammed his truck door closed again and stomped to me. “Are you implying I can’t keep a prisoner?”
“No. I’m saying she seems to be hard to hold and, if nothing else, her sister may bail her out. And when you do catch her, won’t it be better if you have an unbiased witness around? Her family seems the litigious kind.”
He glowered but gave in. “All right. You’d better come along. I called Strother for backup, but he isn’t close enough. I can’t miss this opportunity! Just hurry up!”
I got in and started the Rover while he went back to his truck and lifted the barrier on the tollbooth. I backed the Rover into the interpretative center parking area a short stretch back up the road beside the sign and got out again, locking up and running to the side of the narrow road to catch up to Ridenour.
He’d turned the pickup truck through the tollbooth’s gates and lowered them again, but he was only just getting back into the driver’s seat, so I ran around and got in on the passenger side before he could do anything about it.
He rolled his eyes and buckled up. “We have to get up to the old watchtower on Pyramid Mountain. Road’s pretty rough, and it’ll take about fifteen or twenty minutes. Hang on and pray we catch her.”
The pickup lurched and leapt along the road and out onto the highway. Ridenour pointed it northeast toward Lake Crescent. I thought now was the time to ask a few questions, while the road was still smooth.
“What’s Willow doing at a park service greenhouse?” I asked.
“Forestry service and I have no idea. Maybe checking on something she put there herself. Forestry has a few greenhouses scattered around on the ridges to grow native plants for replanting in slide areas and where we’ve had to do redevelopment and construction. That way we anchor the soil and get the ecology back on track faster. But none of us check up on them frequently in the winter and one extra planter full of something might not be noticed. I wouldn’t put it past Willow to plant something illegal or dangerous and not worry too much about the consequences.”
“So you trust your tipster to have steered you right? It sounds like those greenhouses would make a pretty good spot for an ambush.”
Ridenour snorted. “Willow is dangerous and crazy, and there’s no love lost between us, but I can’t imagine she’d go out of her way to try to kill me.”
“That’s not quite what I meant. . . .”
He turned the truck sharply off the highway and onto the road that led to Fairholm where the barge was kept. I could see it tied up at the dock as the road rose a bit and turned to the west, toward the ocean and Pyramid Mountain. And there was the same bright array of energy lines that sprang out of the water and headed south toward the hot springs. It was just as it had been on Sunday, just as I’d seen it near the springs.
Ridenour interrupted my thoughts. “I’m not much for guessing what people aren’t saying, so whatever you’re thinking, you’d better spit it out.”
“I’d imagine everyone around here knows you’re pretty hot to catch Willow. What if one of them wanted to get you out of the way? Telling you Willow is someplace isolated and dangerous where you might nab her seems to get you moving pretty fast.”
Ridenour made a growling noise. “Now you’re assuming I’ve got enemies around here who’d like to see me dead. You have one hell of an imagination, Miss Blaine. Mostly we’re all pretty friendly up here.”
I reserved judgment on that. I’d garnered the impression that the Newmans weren’t great friends of Ridenour’s, and certainly Strother didn’t think as well of him as Ridenour might imagine. According to Strother, the Newmans didn’t get along with their lakeshore neighbor Elias Costigan, and no one seemed to trust Willow Leung, who probably returned the sentiment in spades. Even if Jewel Newman hadn’t said so, the strange things I’d already seen around the lake had convinced me there were other magic workers in the area. It was a safe bet there were rivalries and grudges galore between them, and I knew they’d be downright thrilled if Ranger Ridenour stopped keeping such a close eye on “his” park and let them get on with their casting and calling without needing to be discreet and sneaky about it. Not that any of them seemed overly concerned with being sussed out, so far as I could see. The lack of population gave them a fairly open field most of the winter.
Ridenour changed the subject. “So what the hell did you think you’d seen out at the springs to make you go
