and then I was tumbling onto the living room rug. Exhausted tears streamed down my face as I reached for the ferret, rolling onto my back. Chaos struggled out of my shirt and bolted for her cage. I looked back, ready to grab on to whatever might pursue me. There was nothing to see, nothing to smell. Just the living room like it always was and me lying on the floor, panting.

I rolled slowly to my knees and knelt. My chest ached.

Mara was shouting my name on the phone, a tiny tinny voice of terror. I snatched the phone and yelled into it, "Goddamn it! Something tried to eat me in there! I couldn't get out! It was going to eat me!"

"Harper! Harper. Harper. It's all right, you're out. You're out and you're alive. It's all right." She babbled at me until I stopped freaking. Then she asked me what happened and I told her.

"Oh, my. It wasn't going to eat you. It just wanted to push you out of its territory. Look, you'd better stop by tomorrow and we can discuss this. We'll need to be working out a way for you to protect yourself."

"What is that thing?"

"A guardian beast. But never mind it now. It's gone. You're OK. You got distracted and things went to Halifax, but you did well. Really. You did marvelous. Are you hurt any? Is your pet all right?"

I looked down at myself, feeling weak and stupid. My torso was covered in slime. I crawled to the cage and checked on the ferret. She gave me a dirty look and then snuggled down deeper in her nest of old T-shirts, not deigning to spare me another glance. Fine. I closed the cage door and crawled back to the phone.

"Some kind of slime all over me.»

"Heavens! That's unusual."

"I didn't want to hear that."

"Come for breakfast tomorrow. We'll have to talk. Now you need to rest. Sleep is the best cure."

"All right. All right." I hung up. Shaking, I crept to the bathroom. I loathed the feel of my skin where the slime touched me. Even exhausted, I couldn't face sleeping in that feeling. I peeled off my gooey shirt.

As I turned my back to the mirror, I noticed the redness: a large semicircle of small punctures, starting into shallow scrapes across my right side. It looked like an unsuccessful bite by a very large animal with needle teeth. I shuddered at the thought of legions of hungry Grey things, waiting to rend me. Tears of frustration and fear scalded under my eyelids. I wanted to give up and hide.

"Stop that," I gulped. I glared at myself in the mirror. "You can't quit," I hissed. "You can't quit." A lot of ugly memories crashed past my mental eye. I had no choices and no place to retreat to. There was no place to hide from a creature who stalked the edges of death itself. I would have to learn my way around it, and I would have to watch my back.

Chapter 11

I slept in fits and woke to a Saturday morning clear and blue and mild. I argued with myself all the way up to Queen Anne. What was I doing? Did I really believe in ghosts now? Monsters, witches? It was nuts. But the bite on my side itched and even the hottest shower had not washed the eerie marks off my skin.

I parked in the same place and stared at the Danzigers' house. Ben Came out onto the porch with the baby in a backpack and trotted down the steps. The baby squealed in ear-piercing delight.

Ben spotted me and waved, shouting, "Brian and I are going to the park for a while."

I gave a token wave back. Couldn't get out of this now. I forced myself out and up the steps to the door. Mara let me in.

We went into the living room, a bright, warm space lit by a bank of windows, and sat on matching sofas facing each other across a low table. A tang of lemon oil and recent baking floated on the pale green light filtering through the spring leaves outside. Mara tucked her feet up under her skirts and looked at me, biting her lower lip a bit. "Last night wasn't such a grand success, was it?" "No."

"Still. Not a complete disaster."

"I don't see it that way. I got attacked by some… thing and chewed on like a rawhide bone. I don't even know what happened. Or how."

"You got stuck because you lost your concentration. You were fine up till then. You found the Grey on your own, instead of slipping, and you pushed it back, as well. It was the second time things went badly."

I snorted. "Tell me something new."

Mara narrowed her eyes at me. The air felt a touch chillier. "That is part of the problem."

I looked askance. "What is?"

Mara shook her head and made a motion with her hand. Albert filtered into view. He almost looked like a whole person this time, wrapped in a buffer of swirling mist, like a cloud of impending snow. "You're looking at a ghost. And you know it's as real as… as that sofa. But you've closed your mind to it, telling yourself you'll not believe it. When you dig in your mental heels, that's when things go bad. Ceasing to believe and panicking when you're in the thick of it, that's dire. You lose control, for how can you control something you'll not believe in? And so long as you're fighting it, you'll not be able to protect yourself or control your slipping."

"Slipping?"

She nodded. "Moving in and out of a magical field, rather side-ways, without meaning to. I used to know a young fella at home who did it all the time he was thirteen. Disconcerting, seeing him popping about. People made up all sorts of explanations for themselves, claiming he was just so quiet you'd not hear him sneak up on you, or he was so quick, you'd not see him go. But they didn't like it."

"He was a Greywalker?"

She laughed, an unexpected whoop of laughter. "My, no! He was just a witch like me."

I leaned forward, bemused. "But he stopped slipping eventually, didn't he?"

Her face blanked and she looked down. "Yeah. He slipped in front of a lorry on the N59." She squeezed her eyes shut, swallowed. "So. You see why I'd not like you to keep on slipping."

Slipping away from a car, slipping into the path of a truck— all the same thing as far as the Grey was concerned.

I nodded. "Yes, I do."

"All right then. Shall we try that exercise again? Albert and I will be here to help you."

I bridled. "Albert?"

She grinned. "Of course. You see him and he can go into the Grey, just like you. He'll be your spotter, so to speak."

I started to object. "But—"

"You'll see. We'll not let anything harm you." She tilted her head, raising her brows. "Give it a go?"

Self-conscious, I sat back into the couch and closed my eyes, breathing carefully until I relaxed and felt quiet.

"Open your eyes," Mara murmured.

I lifted my eyelids. A man in a plain, dark suit stood in the table. His hair was parted in the center, slicked back on each side around his long, angular face, and a pair of small wire-rimmed spectacles teetered on his nose. I could almost see through him. A snowfall of Grey hung around him and spread as I stared.

"Close your eyes. Push it back, and come back here."

And that's what I did.

Mara was grinning at me when I opened my eyes again. "That was grand!"

Albert was still standing in the table. I shuddered. "That's disturbing."

"Is it?"

"Albert looks like he's been cut off at the knee and is standing on the table on stumps. You can't see that?"

"No. He's quite a bit less corporeal to me. I imagine you see him better than almost anyone. When you're in better touch with the Grey, ghosts and some of the other things may look quite normal and solid to you. You'll be seeing them both here and there at the same time. Two partial images superimposed. The farther you are from the Grey, the thinner they'll look. Try it again, but keep your eyes open as you get near this time."

I felt a little dizzy and tired, but I tried.

As I slid closer to the familiar cold queasiness of the Grey, Albert looked more and more present. The details of his face and clothing grew surreally clear as the hungry pall of cloud-stuff around him expanded. I cringed from it. The Danzigers' living room shifted and faded to pale smears of gold and sage in the thick, desert-cold haze. A sharp whiff of alcohol and organic rot bloomed in the air.