Underground

Quinton shrugged. “So long as she could show I’d never compromised her, she’d be good with it.”

“I wonder if she could be persuaded that she’s hunting for a dead man…”

“It’s a remote possibility I could switch records with one of the missing undergrounders—I know most of them well enough to get at the right records—but she’d never buy it without a body.”

“And you don’t really match up to any of the bodies that have turned up, so far.”

“True. Nice thought though—never had a woman offer to kill me off before.”

“Well… they say friends help you move and good friends help you move bodies. Just a different kind of body.”

That got a laugh out of him, which pulled a smile from me, in spite of the subject matter. He sobered and looked at me with a tinge of blue in his energy corona.

“Harper, you don’t have to be in the crush between me and Fern Laguire. You can roll over on me. I’d only ask that you tell me ahead of time, so I have a head start on her. I can disappear again and she’d leave you alone.”

I gave my head an adamant shake. “No way. I’m sick of being left. I’m not throwing you to the dogs like a bone to save my own skin. I wouldn’t even if—And I need your help, because I’m not going to abandon the dead, either,” I added, letting my eyes turn aside as I felt a hot blush on my cheeks.

“Umm… yeah,” Quinton said, looking pleased before his expression sobered with the subject. “There’s still our three-faced friend in the sewer,” he added with a shudder.

“Not to mention Detective Solis—so long as we’re on the topic of people of interest.”

“Maybe Sistu will eat Fern and we can blame it on a secret government project,” Quinton speculated, half-seriously. “The Feds would step in and Solis wouldn’t be allowed to pursue the case any further no matter how he felt about it.”

“We should be so lucky,” I scoffed. “Its not as if we have any control—” I stopped, cut off by an intersecting thought.

“Control of what?” Quinton asked.

I frowned, concentrating, trying to get a hold of the slippery idea that had run through my head. I put up one finger to hold back his questions as I thought.

“We postulated a pattern. What if the pattern is determined by a person—not a god masquerading, but an ordinary person and their ordinary drives? Ella Graham said that if the gods were pleased they might send Sistu to help a petitioner hunt. Maybe… Qamaits can lend out her pet herself. She’s got power over the monster, so why not hand him over to someone who did her a favor? Like… getting her out of the construction pit?”

“Then the person who helped her out is still alive.”

“And using their monster-on-loan to settle scores. But Sistu needs to eat more frequently than his hunting buddy wants to whack someone, so… he grabs a snack and takes it to his lair for later.”

“So Felix was a snack, but Je

I nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. Separate the zombies from the disappeared, and the ones who were found dead are the key to finding out who’s responsible. We’re not looking for anything supernatural on that score—just a human with a grudge.”

I shuddered and thought about the necessities of the normal world. “This isn’t going to fly with Solis. He might buy the idea that someone killed some of the undergrounders, but the chances are good whoever it was has an alibi for at least one of the deaths—he doesn’t have to be nearby if Tall Grass was right about Je

“It’s more important to get rid of the monster than to lock someone up for it.”

I nodded. “We’ll have to catch up to whoever it is first since the monster must be hanging around him… or her. It won’t be easy, since the monster might decide we look like lunch and whoever’s directing it might not even know what’s going on if they don’t speak Lushootseed or whatever the thing speaks. I wish I knew what it was saying last night…”

“What who was saying?”

“Sistu. Didn’t you hear it yelling at us?”

“I couldn’t make anything out of it. It sounded like screaming or speaking in tongues.”

“Many tongues. I think I caught a few words, but the rest was mush. It talks. And it flickers through a whole closetful of shapes as it does. Ella Graham said it was clever and sneaky. Maybe we can slow it down if we can just figure out how to talk to it…”

CHAPTER 16

Mara let us in. She nodded to Quinton and gave me a keen look that wasn’t a smile but wasn’t anything else, either. I didn’t know what had brought on this distance—unless she was still upset about Albert—but her invitation inside was distracted and formal. “Do come in. Ben’s upstairs. I’ll be keeping Brian busy down here, so he’ll not trouble you.”

I gazed hard at her, trying to figure out what was wrong, but she’d cloaked herself in deliberate blankness. I glanced deep into the Grey for any sign of Albert—thinking he might be the cause of her coolness—but I could find no sign of him in the house and only the hard, red ball of the trap Mara had wrapped him in the last time, still clinging to the roof under the twisting gold lines of her protective spells.

“Thanks. Mara,” I started, but she waved the rest of my words aside.

“Not now, Harper. I’ve a lot to think on,” she said, and hurried off, worrying her bottom lip. I looked at Quinton and shrugged. We headed for the stairs and up to Ben’s office beneath the eaves.

Ben was doodling and drinking tea when we entered the attic. He jumped up from the desk, not quite knocking his head against the low ceiling.

“Oh, hello! Sorry, sorry—kind of jumpy since the Albert incident.”

“Why?” I asked. “Has he done something else?”

“No, no, no,” Ben babbled. “But I keep thinking he will and I’m a little stircrazy anyhow. I feel like I’m in Mara’s way. I thought I’d rework my lesson plans since we’ve lost almost a week of classes, but… I just can’t concentrate on them. Oh, who’s this?” he added, finally turning his attention to Quinton.

“This is Quinton. He brought me a… an interesting case and we could use your help. It’s likely to be dangerous, though.”

Ben seemed to perk up. “Is it a Grey thing?”

“Yes. We’ve been looking into the deaths of some homeless in Pioneer Square—”

“I saw some news articles about that,” Ben said.

I nodded. “The ones that said bodies had been found apparently chewed by dogs, right?”

“Yeah. Not dogs, I take it?”

I shook my head and sat down on a clear spot on the office sofa. “Not dogs.”

“Tea!” Ben exclaimed.

Quinton and I both stared at him, startled by the outburst.

Ben blinked back. “Sorry. Tea. Would you guys like some? I have a pot up here; I can get more glasses.”

I considered saying no, but it was a little chilly in the office and Ben seemed to want to do something. “Tea is great, Ben. We can wait.”

“I’ll be right back,” he said, clucking out and bounding down the steep steps so the stairwell rang behind him.

I tugged at the elastic knee brace under my jeans as Quinton cleared some space beside me. He looked at the spines of the books as he lifted them off the seat.

“I can’t even read half these titles and its not just because they’re in German and Russian and… I don’t know what language that is… He’s got some really old books here.” He had a gleam in his eye as he flipped opened a venerable leather-bound tome stamped in faded gold Cyrillic. “Wow. The publication date on this is 1789. That was a hell of a year.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. The French Revolution started in 1789—among a lot of other events that changed the world.” He caught my bemused look. “Hey, I was always good with dates and numbers. Mom was an engineer and Dad was a spy—you pick up skills,” he added with a shrug.