“And you are not overly generous in anything,” Prudence retorted. “Now I shall have to go after her. Oh, dear.” Her statue also went dark.

“I hope you got what you were after, Peter. I doubt they’ll any of them come back.”

“It will do or we’ll make do,” Marsden replied.

“Yes. Well,” Temperance said. “I shall go and look after them. Mr. Smith is an upsetting presence. It’s quite a pity his wife, Rosemary, has left him on his own, but I suppose one can’t grumble about another’s passing on. Now I must go. Good luck to you, Peter—and your friends.”

Given the inflection she gave to “friends,” I was pretty sure she didn’t care for me and Michael. I wasn’t entirely sure she liked Marsden, either. Temperance’s caryatid also went dark, leaving us alone between the crypt and the iron fence.

We waited a few minutes in case Chastity returned, but didn’t get lucky. Marsden and I gave up. I stepped back from the Grey to what passes for normal to me and turned toward Michael. He looked everywhere but at me.

“Michael. Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine,” he replied too quickly.

I hadn’t had a chance to prep him for what happened when I submerged into the Grey and got a bit see-through in the normal, and he’d said he saw and heard a little. Anyone would find such things disconcerting; for a kid who’d been through what he had in the past day, it must have been staggering.

“Michael—” I started, turning up one hand and reaching for him.

He waved me off. “No. I’m fine. Just. Fine.”

It was better than his brother’s reaction, but it still left me frustrated. Doing my job had always caused problems for someone, and it had gotten worse after I become a Greywalker. I didn’t have the luxury of making other people comfortable about what I did or how I did it most of the time. Usually, I didn’t have to worry about people seeing me do something strange; most people ignore the majority of what goes on around them, especially when it’s weird or upsetting. But Michael had had this dumped on him with no mitigation or preparation. I felt rotten about it, but what was I supposed to do? If I went at it with kid gloves, what was already bad would have turned worse—if it hadn’t already, and I feared it had.

“Time for tea and discussion,” Marsden stated. “Keep up, you two.”

He headed off through the church gates, cane out in front and confident that we were trailing him like ducklings.

I made a rueful face at Michael.

He gave a self-conscious shrug and took off after the blind Greywalker.

CHAPTER 38

“St. James’s,” Marsden said over tea. “Very odd, that.”

Marsden had led us to a grubby little shop on a side street near the British Museum, which turned out to serve good, cheap tea and sandwiches that had no resemblance to delicate bits of thin bread and water-cress. We’d spent a quarter of an hour bringing Michael up to speed, though he was thinking and watching more than talking while Marsden and I tried to make a plan. Michael seemed to getting his mind around it, though.

“What’s so odd? I mean, aside from ghosts and vampires and talking statues. ” he snarked, swallowing a mouthful of bread and meat.

“What’s odd, boy, is that the Red Brothers of St. James is the faction what Harper’s employer used to run with. Purcell was his man of business. But he doesn’t know what’s happened to Purcell, so the conclusion I draw is that either the rift is mended between the Brotherhoods—which I doubt—or someone’s suborned the whole lot. That would be a rather good trick. And if it’s done, it’s the asetem what have done it. That could be worse, but not a whole bloody lot.”

“What’s the asetem?” Michael asked.

“A different type of vampire altogether—”

Before Marsden could get started, my cell phone rang. I’d almost forgotten I had it until it started jiggling around and making my purse rattle on the tile floor. I answered it and let Marsden explain the Egyptian vampires.

It was Quinton. “Hi,” he started, breathless and sounding strained. “I’m sorry I couldn’t call you back last time. Things are getting scary here. I’m not at my place; I’m at yours—it’s safer, if that tells you anything.”

“What’s happening? Is it. a vampire thing?”

“Right in one. It hasn’t moved up from the shadows yet, but it’s bad. The dark places are not safe. And there’s a lot of new creeps around making a whole lot of trouble. I’m not sure if it’s better for you to come home right away or stay out of it.”

My heart seemed to be tap dancing and my stomach twisted. “I’ve only been gone. what? Three days? When did this start?”

“Pretty much as soon as you left. It’s like they were waiting for you to be gone.”

“Oh, no,” I said, feeling that sense of doom hanging over me again like the Sword of Damocles. “I think it’s connected to my case here. Or rather, it’s all part of the same thing.”

“Damn it. I was afraid of that. Edward’s in this, isn’t he?”

“Somehow, yeah. But I don’t know exactly how. Keep a very low profile, and especially keep away from Wygan.”

“The DJ?”

“Yeah, that one. He’s not your average bloodsucker. He’s something special and very nasty.” Just thinking of the feast for the asetem that massive destruction and unrest among Seattle’s vampires would provide nauseated me, and from what Marsden had said about Wygan’s known plans, that was just the icing on the cake.

“Oh?” Quinton prompted.

“Yeah. He’s like. ” And I stopped, not sure I could explain it succinctly and still include the shades of suspicion, implication, and intuition that were holding it all together in my mind. “Damn it. It’s complicated. He’s got very big plans that include me and the Grey and something about Edward, too. He’s been pulling strings and causing trouble since I was kid. I still need to find one more big piece of the puzzle and I think I’ll know what I am and what he has in mind.”

“What you are? You’re Harper Blaine. You’re what you make of you, not what some megalomaniac vampire wants.”

I could have reached through the phone and kissed him for that. It reminded me that no matter what Wygan had in mind, the decisions weren’t all his.

I grinned for the first time in days. “Yeah. I’ll give you the whole messy story when I get back, but I have to finish up a few things here first. I’m not sure if Edward is playing me or if he’s really a victim, but whatever else is happening, the local vampires have William Novak and it looks like they’ve been using him to get to me. For Wygan. Why is still a mystery, though.”

The pause grew very long. “Novak. Your ex.”

“Yes.”

“I guess the ghosts were right.”

“Sorry. I’m not sure what you mean.”

“They said it wasn’t what you thought. All this stuff that’s been going on isn’t about the vampires; this is about you.”

“Not all of it. Some of it’s a plan of Wygan’s—”

“That needs you to make it work and needs Edward or something of Edward’s. Whatever’s going on there is all about you. Or they wouldn’t have taken your ex.”

He went on as I fell silent, thinking about what he’d said. “The stuff that’s going on here has the feeling of clearing the decks. It’s dangerous, but it’s not concentrated yet. It started when you left. And I think it’ll shift into higher gear when you get back. Or whenever they find Edward.”

“Every vampire in Seattle knows where to find Edward.”

“No, they don’t and neither do a lot of other people. That’s what I needed to tell you: Edward’s missing. It’s on the news.”

“What?” I hoped that Edward had only pulled back to hide in his bunker if handbaskets were indeed hell bound. If Edward was gone, I might be in a lot of trouble when I got back to Seattle—or even before, if the things I was thinking were true.

“They’re hinting he’s been kidnapped,” Quinton said. “The vampires are going nuts. They’re all over the place and they’re all over each other. The new ones—”