Labyrinth

THIRTY-ONE

Run like hell. That’s what my brain said. Even in the strange, broken light through the gate with the glare of the Grey welling up, I could see the dark, squared-off shape of a pistol in Goodall’s hand. Parkerized black. He had no reason to harm Carlos—and a gun certainly wouldn’t do it—so that was for me.

One of the asetem grew impatient and pushed on my shoulders, urging me up. I let the motion take me forward at the waist and kicked back hard with one foot. Even as strong and fast as the asetem were, a boot to the chest will knock almost anyone down those slippery marble stairs.

Goodall cursed as I grabbed on and swung over the stair rail, rolling and dropping to the floor. The impact jarred through my body and I heard the crack of a shot. I ducked and ran back under the staircase, cutting for the door into the club. There was a scrambling and banging on the stairs behind me but I didn’t turn around to see what it was. The stair and its shaftlike opening blocked a good shot at me as I bolted, but that didn’t stop Goodall from taking some. Shards of marble ricocheted around the dark space as I plunged through the door.

The host usually stopped everyone, but he stood aside this time and pointed. “Door at the back.”

I ran through the main room at my best late-for-rehearsal speed, dodging bodies and jumping tables. It wasn’t graceful and I had to shove a few vampires and their friends aside. None of them moved to stop me, which was amazing. Vampires aren’t slow or weak, and just two or three could have caught me easily. I heard Cameron shout for someone to “stop those two!” which explained a lot. I spotted the discreet white door to the back room and pushed through it.

Vampire kitchens are not a sight for health inspectors. It’s not that they aren’t clean but that they aren’t really kitchens that’s disturbing. I dodged a lot of things that could have been prep tables but looked more like cots as I went through.

Nearly every building in Pioneer Square has a basement or two, and most have a door that leads into the underground—the network of abandoned sidewalks that ring the buildings at what was once street level. The downside is that there’s no way to cross the street without coming up to the surface. I had to assume Goodall had some more of Wygan’s asetem with him and they’d be spread out around the street—what else did they have to do now that their Pharaohn’s big night was at hand but roll up the competition? I’d have to come up where I could check for them before they could see me. That would mean the staircase by the old record store.

Bud’s Jazz Records had been in the basement near Temple Billiards for ages, but it had finally given in to declining sales and closed its doors. Now the old space was empty and I’d spent enough time in the underground with Quinton to know where the original back door was. It would be locked and alarmed, but at that moment, I didn’t care if I pulled in every cop in the district. It was pretty likely I’d get out before anyone arrived, but even if I didn’t, there’s little more secure from most bad guys than being surrounded by pissed-off patrolmen. Suicidal villains are a different problem, but I didn’t think Goodall or his asetem friends were willing to trade themselves for me just yet. They might be if they didn’t get me to Wygan tonight, but I didn’t plan to miss that party; I just meant to arrive my own way. I didn’t know what that was going to be, but I’d figure it out when I stopped running for my life.

I skidded around a corner on the filth of a hundred years’ neglect and slammed into a set of steel construction doors. Someone was doing work in the underground, and to secure the area from people just like me, they’d put up a barrier. Damn it! I didn’t hear anyone behind me, but that meant nothing. I was humped.

Except that I wasn’t. I was a Greywalker, and this was about as Grey as Seattle got: the depths of the old city where ghosts were as common as dirt and the layers of time slid and chimed over one another like slices of broken glass. I started to put my hand out by habit to feel for the temporaclines, but I didn’t need to. The bright glow of the grid as I now saw it turned the ripples of time into colored banners fluttering horizontally in an uncanny wind. And I didn’t need to slide onto one; I simply reached and it bent. I stepped through.

It was a miserable day I’d picked: pouring rain, the streets so muddy that cart horses bogged in it up to their fetlocks and had to be hauled up onto the wooden sidewalks while their wagons were cut free to sink until someone could come back for the goods. The ghosts of the early shopkeepers paid me no attention at all as they tried to save their stock of one kind or another. I slogged through the phantom mud, which felt as slimy and sticky as the real thing, to the waterfront and down the length of Yesler’s wharf toward the sawmill. The old dock area had long ago been filled in and made into the land on which the current waterfront and Alaskan Way stood within inches of the old level. That would be well out of the zone any of the Pharaohn’s henchmen would be watching and safe enough to appear in. I’d never exited a temporacline below the present world’s street level and I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I did.

I stumbled a little as I came out not far from Rice House Antiques. The warehouse was locked up for the night, even the red London phone box tucked away inside. I checked to be sure I wasn’t wearing the haunting of hundred-year-old mud and crossed the street to the ferry terminal. A few lonely cabs stood at the curb waiting for anyone returning on foot from Bremerton or the islands. I got in one and directed the driver to the Westin Hotel. It’s a big building near TPM, but not so near that you can see it from there, and I thought I could find a place to lurk long enough to figure out my next move.

And call Quinton to let him know I wasn’t dead yet.