the chance to grab the person who’d set Steven Leung’s car on fire and smashed in Alan Strother’s head.
Eventually I drove to the tollbooth outside the Sol Duc Hot Springs resort with a watch that cost more than my first car tucked into the pocket of my new coat—the old one, still pretty damp, was hanging up in the back of the Rover, making the whole interior smell of wet sheep. So much had happened the previous day, it seemed like more time should have elapsed since I was last at the tollbooth looking for Ridenour, but it was only a little more than twenty-four hours. It was less than that since I’d seen Strother alive for the last time on the top of Pyramid Mountain.
I wasn’t in a spectacular mood when I arrived and Jin, dressed in a suit of dark gold silk with a brown stripe, only tempted my temper to flare by saying, “You’re late.”
I pulled my red scarf tight around my neck and swung toward him, pushing the loose strands and pools of magic outward with a vicious thought that flashed up white and bowled the demon onto his back. “Don’t screw with me,” I warned him. “I told you to meet me here. I didn’t say when.”
Jin picked himself up out of the icy bracken and brushed himself off with finicky little flips of his hands. He glanced at me warily in the normal, but I could see the demon face glowering with indignation. I caught my ire and clamped it back down before I could get myself into real trouble. The flash-bang trick was about the only one I had in my arsenal at the moment and I didn’t want him to catch on.
I sighed as if disgusted. “I’m sorry,” I said with clear insincerity. “I had a bad night.”
He didn’t look mollified, but I noticed he didn’t say anything about Strother. Did he not know? I wondered as the sound in the Grey escalated to a warped chorus of untuned organ pipes and wailing musical saws. The lines that reached from the lake to the springs coruscated as if someone had turned up the wattage on an array of neon tubes. The ley weaver seemed to have noticed I’d borrowed some of his power. I wondered how long I had before he—or it—showed up.
“Do you know about Alan Strother?” I asked.
“The sheriff’s man? I know a few things.”
“Do you know where he is right now, or where he was last night?”
Jin looked truly puzzled. “No. Why do you care?”
“Because I suspect your . . . friend, Willow, will care that he’s in the morgue—or what passes for one around here—until his body can be shipped to Seattle for investigation.”
Jin frowned. “He . . . is dead?”
“Yes. He was murdered last night in my hotel room.”
He blinked at me, leaned in, and sniffed me. Then he settled back onto his heels. “You didn’t kill him.”
“No—and here’s the juicy bit you won’t be hearing from anyone else—he was bludgeoned to death while I was going to retrieve my truck here last night. Since you seemed genuinely surprised to hear it, I assume you didn’t kill him.”
He shook his head and looked mournful on both faces. “No, I did not. I wouldn’t. Willow was . . . fond of him. She would be angry if I had killed him.”
It didn’t take Willow off the hook since many a fond heart has been moved to murder the object of its affection, but it did put a different light on her interest in him at the greenhouse. Though that, in turn, left me wondering why Strother had shot at her . . . if he had actually been shooting at
The noise in the grid began to rise and play across my bones in uncomfortable disharmonies as the light and energy flickered.
“We’ve attracted the ley weaver’s attention. But we’re safe up here. He won’t come out to the road where he might be seen,” Jin said. He gave me a cringing glance, as if he was afraid I’d lose my temper with him again. “Did you . . . bring me . . . something?”
He was like a kid who wanted his birthday present but felt embarrassed to ask. Maybe that was the truth of it: He was a child in demon terms, not old enough to have much power and a little naive about how the rest of the world worked outside his playground. It would certainly explain his odd behavior a bit.
“Oh,” I said, reaching into my pocket. “I did bring you a present.”
I held out the box and Jin took it with care. I was surprised he hadn’t snatched it, but if he was truly wary of me now, I guessed that wouldn’t do. He looked at the box, turning it over a few times and reading the labels. He opened the white outer box and pulled out the black leather-covered inner box. He looked at the brand name stamped in gold on the top. Then he glanced at me. “Is it really?”
I just nodded.
He grinned and ripped the box open, hooking out the watch inside with one curved claw and holding it up to his face. He cooed at it, and I wish I were exaggerating, but there’s no other word for the sound he made as he looked at the slim automatic watch and stroked the eighteen-karat-gold case with his fingertip. For a moment I’d been tempted by a flashier Rolex with diamonds and a case so heavy you could crack crabs with it. But I’d remembered the elegant lines of the defunct black suit and thought a lower bling factor and a more rarefied name would be better. Score one for me.
Strange noises, like a tarantula walking on a piano’s strings, played across the grid and moved closer to us while Jin strapped on his new watch. Then he snapped out his well-adorned hand and snatched me forward, onto the trail down to the resort. “We have to meet him before he can sneak up on us.”
“You can’t call that sneaking,” I gasped, running behind his remarkable speed down the road. “He sounds like a whole convoy on the move.”
“You can hear that?”
“Better than you.”
Jin giggled and dragged me onward for a few dozen yards before he stopped with a jerk and shoved me forward. “You have to go without me. He won’t like you if he thinks we’re together. Just go down the road and when the fire starts, keep going. Follow the lights.”
I stumbled forward on my own and caught my breath, coughing on the memory of smoke. I let the mist- world rush in on me—not that it was giving me much choice. Ahead of me a silvery plane cut across the Grey: a single, shimmering temporacline from which the noise and heat rose. Surely Ridenour hadn’t come down here before? And to what was Jin sending me?
I stepped into the temporacline and the world opened out into a vista of trees through which the light of a massive fire flickered. I walked forward into the slab of memory, down the road on which women in long, straight dresses and men in white trousers and striped jackets, all looking as though they predated the First World War, passed by me. The people—memories of people—ran from the flickering light, calling out in fear as they went toward the highway. I walked on toward the firelight until the trees opened up to expose a compound of wooden buildings engulfed in flame, facing a long, steaming body of water. The buildings had been elegant before they caught fire and, as I watched the loop of time replay itself, some of the smaller ones collapsed, sending sparks into the shivering air. The roaring of the flames was accompanied by the eerie, warped sound of an organ playing something funereal and grim while a handful of people tried to extinguish the flames with buckets of water. They were no match for the fire, and the inferno blazed while the organ played on.
There was a whiff of sulfur in the air that wasn’t just a memory; nor was the smell of evergreens and soil that hadn’t frozen over but churned with some unnatural life just below the surface. Stripes of colored light shot through the scene—power lines drawn from the grid—veering into the trees to my left. Bright orbs and streamers of color danced along the lines, heading deeper into the trees. I followed them away from the memory of the burning resort and into the rain forest.
Ahead, through the mist both real and not, I could see something rising and shining through the gloom. Echoing the mournful organ, a strange atonal song came from the brightness ahead, and I felt a frisson of cold fear run along my spine. Something was moving in the bracken nearby, something low to the ground and many- legged.
I stepped through a screen of low-hanging branches, feeling a curious buzzing in my blood as I crossed out of the temporacline and into a huge bubble of Grey separated from the rest. The cacophony I’d heard off and on near the hot springs shifted suddenly into tune and swelled, the harmonies of grid and ghost voices roaring in a chorus of sound that slammed me to my knees.
Where my hands and legs hit the ground, the mist and colored light rippled, adding a chime of silver bells to the uncanny choir and a wash of blue and gold lights to the weird construction ahead. Something scurried up to
