“The vampires? Why?”
“Why not? Who else would be down here, preying on people? We’re like the fast food of the vampire world. Just drop down to Pioneer Square after dark, find an alley or a doorway, slip down into a basement, and there’s lunch. I just can’t figure out why their approach has changed. They’re usually careful and they don’t rip into people the way most of these bodies have been. They don’t chew, for one thing.”
“Why haven’t you asked Edward? You obviously have some clout with the… undergrounders.” The term felt odd in my mouth. “You know Edward and he knows you. Couldn’t you go to him as a neutral party, a representative of the homeless?”
Not that I thought the city’s chief vampire was likely to welcome Quinton with open arms—they didn’t seem to like each other—but I’d thought there was some mutual respect there, at least enough to make a parlay possible.
Quinton snorted and coughed on his beer. “Hell, no! I’ve gotten between the vampires and their next meal often enough to be unpopular with Edward and his friends.” If he hadn’t been drinking good beer, I think Quinton would have spit.
“And none of them’s tried to whack you yet?”
“They’ve tried. But I know what their weaknesses are and how to hurt them without killing them outright—which would make me fair game. I have tried to stay neutral—it’s a bad idea to have enemies down here. I used to do bits of work for Edward when I first got here, but working for him’s like working for the government, and I’ve had to keep my distance—and force him to keep his. I’m in no position to go snooping around at the After Dark.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Quinton knew about the vampire club—he seemed to know about a lot of things I was still figuring out. I sighed. “So, you want me to go to Edward?”
“Only if it’s necessary. I think it’s his crew, but I could be wrong. I don’t have the skills to really know what’s going on. That’s what I want—to know what’s going on and stop it. I don’t want to be lunch and I don’t want any more of my neighbors to be lunch, and I sure as hell don’t want anyone snooping around down here and bringing this place to official notice. Things are getting pretty high-profile now that the cops are looking into the guy I found in the tunnel, and it won’t be long before other… people start to stir the waters. That’s not good for any of us.”
“All right,” I said, putting down my empty bottle. “I get you. How many dead or missing are there?”
“Three dead, five missing. And the leg in the pit—which might be unconnected, but I doubt it.”
“Some of the missing could have moved on to some other location,” I suggested.
“One or two, but most of these guys have no way out of here. It’s not like they have cars or money for fares. In this cold at this time of year, most couldn’t walk far enough in a day to make it to the next place they could be assured of food and shelter. And it’s not like you can continuously hop transit buses from here to Los Angeles or someplace. Most of these people are stuck here—they didn’t come here by choice like I did—so they’re already at the end of the line. If they go missing from this community, the chances are good they’re dead.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and played devil’s advocate. “Some of them do get out. They find homes and jobs.”
“Some do—there are some good service groups around Seattle helping the ones who want help—but they usually let the rest of us know. That’s not what’s happening here. It’s the ones who stand the least chance of that who’ve been disappearing or turning up dead: the odd men out. They haven’t been killing themselves, so someone or something has been doing it for them.”
I put up my hands, conceding. “All right. Someone’s killing homeless people, and if the guy in the tunnel is typical, it’s in a pretty bizarre way. All right, you’ve convinced me. But I’m still not ready to agree it’s vampires. I don’t really want to mess with Edward unless there’s a good reason.”
“Then let’s go find one. Or find something else.”
Quinton stepped away from the table he’d been leaning on and collected his coat and hat before he started for the wooden door by the bed. I shrugged and got up to follow him.
Beyond the wooden wall was a tall, narrow corridor of brick and stone on one side and heavy stone blocks on the other. The surface beneath our feet was rough cement. There were no lights except what Quinton made with a pocket flashlight.
“There aren’t that many places where you can get in without anyone knowing,” he said as he led me down the cold hall. “Most of the actual underground is closed up pretty tight if it’s not in use by the property owner. I sort of forced my way in.”
“How did Lass get in, then?” “Oh, there’s a way down here where some service stairs go into the basement of the building at the other end of the block. He doesn’t know about the other door. Most people don’t.”
I stopped and stared at the wall on the right dimly illuminated by the light from Quinton’s flashlight, and I recognized the bricked-in shapes of windows and doors set above crumbled steps. “Where are we? What’s this building?”
“I don’t know the building’s name, but if you walked through the wall, you’d be in the kitchen of Las Margaritas Mexican restaurant. Next to that is the workroom and storage space for a wedding dress boutique. From here to the hotel is the back rooms of the stores that face Post. We’re under the sidewalk of First Avenue.”
“How far does this go?” I asked.
“Only to the end of the block. Then you have to get back out on the street. We’ll come out under McCormick and Schmick’s side door. There’s a lot more of these buried sidewalks, though. In some places, you can get into the basements of buildings, if you know what you’re doing. It’s supposed to be completely closed up, but nothing’s ever totally sealed. In weather like this, people who can’t get into the official shelters will look for any shelter they can get, even if it’s a hole in a wall, and some of those holes lead into the underground.”
I knew that there was an “underground city” below parts of Seattle—mostly Pioneer Square—but I hadn’t put any thought into what it actually was or how it would be laid out. I wasn’t sure of the details, but I did know the underground was a remnant of the city’s rebuilding after the famous fire. The streets had been raised from the muck and fireproof stone and brick architecture mandated in place of the previous tide-flat-level roads and wooden buildings.
They’d even laid a modern sewer and water supply that didn’t backflush every time the tide came in. This buried corridor, formed of the building’s foot and the raised road’s retaining wall under the modern sidewalk, was just a part of that whole tangled, buried mess.
I’d thought the underground city was just a tourist version of local history in basements and sewers. Listening to Quinton, it seemed that there were really two undergrounds—the physical one and the hidden social structure of the economically dispossessed who lived near or in it. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was more to it…
I put my hand against the building’s wall and relaxed, breathing in the musty smell of the space below the street. Quinton just stood by without speaking as I let the Grey come up to full strength around me.
Most of the time, the Grey seems darker than the normal world, but this time, the silvery overlay of time and memory was brighter—much brighter. The accessible layers of time at that spot all seemed to be filled with daylight.
Ghosts bustled past, busy with their own long-ago affairs: women in sweeping dresses from the 1890s, men in suits or work clothes. A mob of giggling flappers stumbled through me, shushing each other in drunken whispers and going on their way just as giddily as before. I shivered involuntarily when they touched me. I looked around, expecting to see an open sky over the street on the other side of the walkway, but there was still a wall, even then. I glanced up and realized that the light poured down into the sidewalk through thick glass prisms in the concrete above. In other angles of time there was no upper walkway, just ramps that connected the upstairs shop doors to the street across the open hole and a wooden staircase at the corner.