I was still skeptical, or perhaps I was tired of wrestling the idea, but it crept into my voice. "I glow? How do you know? Can you see that?"

"Just as you can see me work magic, yes, but as to the rest, that's a bit of guessing. I'm one of those who just stand by the edge of the water and cast lines or haul buckets. And Ben is purely a theoretician. We aren't you. We can't know what you know or experience. We know a lot, and can make best guesses, but it's not quite the same."

"If you don't know, how can you help me? I don't want to be a witch or a psychic or a medium or… whatever."

"You shan't be, for you aren't any of those. But you still need to be learning the principles. Ben and I can teach you what we know about the Grey and how it works, what lives in it, how to fend them off. You'll have to improvise here and there, but you'll have a good foundation. But you'll have to accept that this is real, that it is not going away, and that you must learn to live in it, not just with it."

"No." I stood up from the table. "My brain won't stretch to this right now. It doesn't fit!"

Mara's shoulders slumped a bit. "It does fit. No luck getting out of it. But I will help you, if you let me."

I shook my head hard enough to hurt. "Not today. I need to think. I won't make a leap of faith when I don't have any. And this is still—this is too strange for me to swallow."

I picked up my bag and walked out of the kitchen and met Ben coming in.

"You're not staying for dinner? Mara makes great food."

"I don't think I could digest it. I need to digest something else first."

"Oh. Well. We'll be here if you need us. I know this is a lot of crazy stuff to try and chew up all in one shot."

I looked him hard in the eye. "What if I don't?"

"Then you'll laugh me off as a kook. You won't be the first. I don't think I'm nuts, though, and I don't think you do, either, but you have to make up your own mind. Nothing works if you don't start there. I hope I'll hear from you, though. You seem… nice."

I snorted. "Haven't heard that in a while. Thanks."

Albert trailed after me to the gate and hung in the arch, fading and flickering, until I drove away.

Chapter 8

Friday morning I put the strange conversations of the night before out of my head, choosing to concentrate, instead, on my work. I had no doubt about how to do my job, and if I did it with all my concentration, I would not be spontaneously transported to uncanny realms… I hoped. The lurking shadows didn't disappear, but they stayed on the edges and were easier to ignore.

Colleen's list was mostly a bust. When I could reach anyone, the response to my questions about Cameron's whereabouts met with universal ignorance. Most of his friends and relatives had not seen him in an even longer time than his mother. Whatever events had caused him to vanish must have started a lot earlier than the first of March.

I did have one stroke of luck: Cameron's roommate agreed to meet me for lunch between classes.

Richard «RC» Calvin waited for me in front of a Greek cafe on University Way. He was short and muscular and unremarkable other-wise. We ordered at a counter and sat down nearby.

I put my notebook next to my coffee cup. "I know you think you don't know anything, but you might be able to give me a start. When did you last see Cam?"

He rolled his eyes as he thought. "Uh… sometime around the end of February, I think. It must have been a Thursday night, 'cause that's when we were usually both home at the same time. See, Cam didn't have any Friday lectures, like I do, so he'd usually stay up late on Thursdays and be hanging around when I got home from my late class."

"Didn't he go out?"

"Oh, yeah, he'd blow out of there after we talked about the rent and bills and stuff. You know, it's funny, I really didn't remember till just this second, but he said he'd be gone for a while, so not to worry. I guess I really took him serious, huh? 'Cause I didn't think anything of it till his mom called looking for him. Huh! That's kind of weird, isn't it?"

"Not really. Did you ever think that he'd returned to the apartment?"

"Uh, yeah. About a week ago or so some of his stuff disappeared. I was going to borrow a book from him, so I, like, went into his room, and most of his stuff was gone. Little stuff, like clothes and paper-backs, a couple of big things, like his laptop, but a lot of his stuff was still there, so I didn't think he'd, like, skipped or anything. His duffel bags were missing and his backpack, so I figured he'd gone on a trip, y'know?"

"He never called you after that?"

"Well, no. We're just roommates. We're not buddies or anything. We're kind of from different worlds, y'know?"

I nodded. "Was he distracted, seem to have something going on? Did his behavior change suddenly, or his schedule, anything like that?"

"Um… well, I thought he might have got a girlfriend or something for a while, 'cause he got a lot of calls from a chick and he was going out a lot at night, but he told me it was just his sister, so I didn't think any more about it. Then some guy called for him a couple of times, usually late, like when I was about to go to bed. Cam was home both times, so he took the phone to his bedroom, like he didn't want me to listen in. I don't know, maybe he's gay or something. Anyhow, the guy never called again."

"Could the man on the phone have any connection to Cameron's disappearance?"

RC shrugged his beefy shoulders and dug into his souvlaki. He hunched over the food, eating as if the plate was going to be jerked away any second. He talked with his cheek stuffed with food. "I don't know. Wouldn't think so. Cam had the flu about then, so he was sleeping all the time. Could have been someone from the U, I guess. The guy sounded older-forty or fifty, maybe. Hard to tell, y'know, and it wasn't any of my business anyway."

"Do you remember the man's name? Did he give it?" He took a swig of his soda before answering. "I can't remember. I think he told me, once… Everett. Something like that. Something snooty. Just can't remember."

"If it comes back to you, let me know. You said Cameron had the flu. How could you tell?"

"It's pretty easy when the guy's been puking his guts up for a week. He was really white when I did see him—pasty, y'know—and kind of thin and wasted-looking. If he hadn't been worshipping the porcelain god, I'd have thought he was on drugs or something. He looked like, y'know, in those old movies when someone's got a terminal disease-all white with big eyes. Couldn't keep anything down. Actually, I don't think he was eating at all for a while, just drinking water and some kind of nasty-smelling soup." He looked up at me and noticed I wasn't eating much myself.

"Did I gross you out? Sorry. Nothing makes me queasy anymore. I'm premed. He was starting to look a little better about the time he took off, but he was still pretty pale, y'know?"

"You're pretty sure it was the flu, then, not some other disease or drugs?" I asked, sipping my coffee.

He shrugged again. "Could have been something else, I guess—I mean, I'm not a doctor yet, so what do I really know? but flu can be pretty nasty. People think it's, like, just a little thing, but it can kill you, y'know. And there really isn't such a thing as a twenty-four-hour flu. That's usually mild food poisoning. Real all-out, balls-to-the-wall flu is a killer. The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 killed millions, and it's just a different strain of the same old bug that makes the rest of us answer the call of the great white telephone. Pretty disgusting, huh?"

I agreed, nodding. "Disgusting. Did anyone come to see Cameron while he was sick? Girlfriend drop by, classmates, anything like that?"