Underground Read online

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  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, August 2008

  Copyright © Kathleen Richardson, 2008

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Richardson, Kat.

  Underground / Kat Richardson.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-436-23522-8

  1. Blaine, Harper (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Washington (State)—

  Seattle—Fiction. 3. Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction. 4. Zombies—Fiction. 5. Vampires—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3618.13447U53 2008

  813 ’.6—dc22 2008000996

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER ’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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  FOR JIM, FOR EVERYTHING.

  AND IN MEMORY OF JAY MEZO:

  “EVERYTHING ’S BETTER WITH BACON!”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Two people in particular made this book work, and to them I owe huge thanks: Rick Boetel, chief historian of Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour in Seattle, and Fran Fuller, of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, who introduced me to Rick and vetted the first draft. Without their help, the setting of this book would never have come to life. However, I must also apologize to Rick for taking tremendous liberty with the real-life layout and access to the underground. All I can say is, “The story made me do it.”

  I’d also like to mention my agent, Steve, and my editor, Anne, who made fun of the monster at the proposal stage and thus made me swear it would work. All the funny bits are because of them. Special thanks to my mother-in-law, Sandy, who let me cast her as a homeless woman—she’s way too good to me. And many, many thanks to the Western Washington Urban Fantasy Posse: Cherie Priest, Richelle Mead, Caitlin Kittedge, Mark Henry, Lilith Saintcrow, and member-at-large Jackie Kessler.

  The usual suspects also deserve many thanks, but the list is so long I can’t name them all without boring the pants off you. Family, friends, fans, fellow authors, certain booksellers, RAMs, agents, editors, my incredible cover artist, and that husband fella: You guys rock!

  A final good-night to Jay Mezo, Boyd Grice, and Soren Pedersen. And the pirate kitty. You’ll all be missed.

  Also by Kat Richardson

  Greywalker

  Poltergeist

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR ’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  If ghosts and monsters had someone else to harass, my life would have been a lot quieter, like it was before I died. But something happened while I was gone for those two minutes—something no one has been able to explain to my satisfaction—and now I not only see ghosts and monsters and things that go “bump” in the night, I seem to be some kind of stepsister to them. I’m a Greywalker: a dual citizen of the regular world and the Grey—the creepy interference fringe between the normal and the paranormal. The Grey overlays the normal world, invisible to most people but there nonetheless. It’s a place of misty shapes and memories, shot with hot lines of living energy, layered with time and magic, where ghosts, vampires, and monsters are as real and common as dogs and cats and just as likely to bite.

  I’m a private investigator. I like the job most of the time, but I have to admit it isn’t a great occupation if I want to have a reasonable social life, even at the best of times and without the complication of a client list that reads like the cast of a gothic horror novel. My profession and my ability to work in the world of ghosts and magic seems to have tangled me up in the needs, cases, causes, and disputes of every undead thing in the Pacific Northwest. They aren’t very good at taking no for an answer and they don’t stick to office hours, either. As much as I might want to leave that part behind, it’s a job I can’t quit and it’s hell on my love life.

  It’s my bad luck, I suppose, that I met a great guy just when my life was being turned upside down by my own death and a permanent residence halfway into the uncanny. I’ve never been able to explain it—I don’t even try. Most people can’t really swallow the idea of murderous ghosts, helpful witches, uncanny artifacts, living energy, necromancers, vampires, and psychotic poltergeists. They are even less inclined to accept that those things are all part of my daily life. I have a few friends and acquaintances who know, but they aren’t exactly life-mate material and some are downright nasty. It’s not surprising that my life and relationship are both pretty messed up.

  My boyfriend, Will, and I were giving it another go over the holidays. A pretty rough go, I’m afraid, what with ghostly things demanding my attention whenever they took a shine to the idea. Thanksgiving had been OK, but Christmas hadn’t gone so well. By the second week of January, both the weather and my relationship got hit with an unexpected cold snap. And that was when I made the acquaintance of my first frozen cor
pse.

  ONE

  My knee ached in a way my physical therapist called “good” but I called “annoying.” Of course I might just have been annoyed with Will Novak and working too hard on the knee I’d messed up running from a murderous poltergeist in October. The lower leg lift I was concentrating on hurt like hell—who’d have thought that straightening my knee a paltry thirty degrees against a mere twenty pounds’ resistance would be so hard? But a lot of things are harder than they seem at first glance. What was hardest at that moment was holding my temper.

  Will sat on the weight bench to my left, watching me. Resistance machines clanked and groaned around us, and free-weight lifters snorted like bulls amid the smells of rubber and sweat. “I still don’t understand how you managed to tear that knee up so badly,” he said. “What were you doing?”

  “Working,” I said, grunting from the strain of the weight as I lowered my leg slowly, and muttering under my breath, “. . . three, four . . . five.” Two more reps and I could give the knee a rest while I worked on my shoulder—also a bit banged up from October’s ugly case.

  I ignored Will while I finished the knee lifts. Then I slid out of the machine and sat down beside him. It wasn’t my favorite gym, but the pre-Christmas windstorm had knocked a tree into the front of the one I preferred, so I was using the gym near Will’s hotel. Downed power lines and damage were still widespread in outlying parts of Seattle and King County, so the facilities that were functioning were packed, and the moment I vacated the machine, another customer rushed to use it.

  At first, Will had taken the hotel room so he wouldn’t presume on my hospitality when he’d come back from England as a Thanksgiving surprise. Somehow the right time to move his bags to my condo had just not come around—and I felt guilty that I didn’t want it to. He’d been lucky to keep his room at the hotel, since the city had been flooded with people who needed accommodations while their all-electric houses were unlivable during the power outage. It was expensive, but it had working plumbing and heat, which even my condo hadn’t had at one point.

  Right behind the wind and rain had come an epic cold snap, and the current daytime temperature hung two to ten degrees below freezing—not cold in the Midwest, but plenty cold enough for a coastal city whose winter daytime temps usually ran in the mid-forties. The bizarre weather had killed people: nine deaths by asphyxia—people trying to heat their homes with barbecues and open flame heaters; two by falling trees that crushed motorists; and one by drowning in a flooded basement office. I was lucky to have been too far away from any of those events to feel them propagate through the energy grid of the Grey—I’d felt the delayed shock of one person’s death earlier that year, and I hoped to avoid ever feeling such a thing again. Even without that it had been a rather grim holiday season and the cold wasn’t letting up now that it was January.

  “I was chasing a killer,” I continued. I’d said it before and I was a little galled at having the conversation yet again. In fact, I’d been running away, but the circumstances of that weren’t something Will would be able to swallow. I had been running with the intention of leading something into a trap—chasing it from in front, in a way.

  “It’s not your job to chase murderers. That’s what the cops are for. You aren’t a cop. You don’t have to do that.”

  “Sometimes I’m not in the position of saying ‘That’s not my responsibility,’ Will. I can’t arbitrarily stop at the legal limit and ignore what’s morally right. Come on . . . you were at the final hearing—the guy was a whack-job. Should I have let him get away to kill those other people?”

  I could tell he was trying to find a way to say yes without sounding like a jerk. I can be selfish, but not that much, and I didn’t want to hear that I should be, so I tried to redirect the conversation. “Would you get me the five-pound hand weights off the rack?”

  Will sighed and went to fetch the two small rubber-coated barbells. I admired his bright silver hair and his lanky frame as he loped across the room, but I still found myself heaving an exasperated sigh of my own. Where we once struck sparks, it seemed we could now only strike prickles. It didn’t help that I could see his frustration with me—it radiated around him in spikes of orange and red energy visible to my Grey-sensitive sight.

  I couldn’t shut the Grey out anymore; the best I could do was keep it enough at bay to know what was physically present to normal people and what wasn’t—I didn’t want to fall over real objects to avoid unreal ones. As a result, the gym looked to me like a steamroom haunted by layers of history and gleaming with a light show of neon energy and emotional sparks. I paid no attention to a bloated specter that lurked near the pull-up bars, but I also refused to use them.

  The ghostly world was always with me and it was yet another chafing veil between me and Will—him so normal and me so . . . not. I’d tried to tear through some of those layers over the holidays, but it only made me seem crazy, which increased the distance between us. Neither of us were happy with that and unhappiness had soured into an abrasive that chafed Will into wrongheaded prying and me into silent resentment.

  Will returned with the hand weights and I started doing slow lateral lifts to rebuild the muscles of my injured shoulder. I did the other arm as well, figuring I might as well get my money’s worth out of the gym time. It wasn’t as convenient as running, but it was more comprehensive—and seeing all those trim and toned gym rats plucked at my competitive side and reminded me of my athletic past.

  Maybe Will was more in touch with the Grey than I’d credited and had picked up on my thoughts. As he watched me work out, he said, “If you keep this up, you could go back to dancing professionally.”

  “Too old,” I said, panting between lifts.

  “You’re thirty-two.”

  I puffed and put the weights down for a short rest between sets. “For a pro dancer, thirty’s old. Thirty-five is ancient and forty is the walking dead. Baryshnikov and Hines might have been able to dance in their fifties, but they danced continuously from the age of nine. I started younger, but I quit when I was twenty-four. I never wanted to make a career of it and I’ve only kept up my moves as an amateur.”

  “You could teach. . . .”

  I glared at him. “Will. Let it go. I worked hard to be good at my job—the job I chose to do—and I’m not going to give it up over a few injuries and freaks.” I picked up the weights again and started on my last set. Any exhilaration I felt from working out had burned off under the heat of my growing irritation. Leaving professional dance was no loss to me: I’d hated it. It had been my mother’s dream forced upon me from the time I was little. Useful but not beloved, and I didn’t miss the pain, the paranoia, or the dieting.

  “I’m not asking you to change jobs—”

  “No. You’re hinting that I should.” Breathe, Harper, nice and slow, I reminded myself—it kept both my temper and the Grey in check enough that I could keep going. “You get me as I am or you don’t get me at all.” I finished my set and took the weights back to the rack. I didn’t even limp, which was my consolation prize, I guess, since the day itself was starting out so crappy.

  Will stayed where he was and watched me. I knew he didn’t like that I’d been hurt and I knew he was confused as to why I’d want to stay in a business that had suddenly turned violent after years of routine. He didn’t understand all the strangeness that collected around me. How was I supposed to explain that I didn’t have a choice about it? That it was better for me to stay in my job, where I had the autonomy and skills to maintain my independence and keep at least some of the Grey things in line, than to end up a pawn—or dead—by some monster’s whim? And I liked my job, damn it—most of the time.

  I walked back to Will and looked up at him. “I have to shower and get to work.” I schooled myself and waited. I didn’t want to upset him, no matter how irritated I was. It wasn’t his fault. Was it?

  “Mm,” Will grumbled.

  “Hey, at least it’s safe and boring—just a bunc
h of witness backgrounds for Nanette Grover and some financials.” I put my arm around his waist and turned toward the locker rooms. I hoped he’d take the gesture as a sign of truce, even though I wasn’t feeling very peaceable. At least I was trying.

  “Yeah . . . I have to do some work, too.” Will laid his arm over my shoulders, careful not to put any weight on the dicey one, and walked with me.

  At the doors he stopped and turned, putting both arms around me in a loose hug, looking down from his six-foot-plus height and making me feel delicate. The overhead lights glared off his eyeglass lenses. “Maybe we could get together for a late lunch?” he asked.

  I pasted on a smile. “OK.”

  He leaned down and kissed me. “I’ll come by your office about . . . two?”

  “Two’s good. I’ll see you then.”

  “I’ll call you when I’m close.” He kissed me again, squeezed a little, and stepped back. I turned away, feeling odd, and went to shower.

  I washed and dressed and headed out to my old Land Rover to drive to my office in Pioneer Square, thinking about the strangeness. The rhythm of our relationship hadn’t ever been truly on beat—we’d always had some personal concern between us or some distance keeping us apart. The togetherness that I’d hoped would put us in sync didn’t seem to be doing anything of the kind. It was like trying to dance samba while the band was playing “Dixie”—you can almost do it, but it’s uncomfortable as hell and you look like an idiot.

  On the drive, there was ice on every horizontal surface. The roads were mostly dry enough to negotiate during the day, but inside my parking garage, the floors were slick. I had to place my feet with care as I walked from the Rover to the sidewalk.

  It didn’t help that Pioneer Square is the most haunted area of Seattle, and the ice hid under a silver fog of ghosts and memory. I walked flat-footed and slowly and made it to the doors of my office building.