Vanished Read online

I had to snort a laugh—it was kind of funny imagining clean-cut, preppy Cary in the role of oracular spirit. “No! He loved spy novels, but he himself was about as cryptic as a bowl of cereal. He didn’t hide information; he just kept his mouth shut if he didn’t want things to get out.”

  “But he called you. After eight years. Maybe I have some competition here. . . .”

  I made a face. “I don’t think so. But that’s not the only weird thing. I dreamed about my death last night.”

  Quinton looked uncomfortable and sat down on the edge of my desk so he could avoid looking me straight in the eye. “You mean . . . in the future?” Some things still freak out even Quinton, I guess.

  “No, I mean when this all started two years ago; when I died in that elevator,” I explained. “I don’t see the future.”

  He gnawed on his lower lip and thought a bit, holding my hands in both of his. His grip was warm and comforting, loosening a tension in my shoulders I hadn’t noticed until it slid away. “It’s an interesting coincidence. Do you think it’s more than that?”

  I made a face and shook my head, slightly disgusted with the direction my thoughts were turning. “I have decreasing confidence in coincidence. Freaky Grey events almost never ‘just happen’ together. It’s like a pond where the ripples of one event can set off a whole series of others.”

  Quinton raised his eyebrows expectantly but said nothing.

  I sighed. “All right. I have the feeling that something’s building up. There’s a lot happening around here lately with the ghosts and vampires and magical things. I have three open cases right now involving ghosts, and Edward’s been sending more invitations—of various kinds—for me to come to work for him. You know how much he wants to control me.”

  “Yeah. The vampires have been kind of restless lately here in Pioneer Square,” Quinton added. “Do you think that’s something Edward’s doing to get to you?”

  Edward Kammerling was the leader of Seattle’s vampire pack; he was also the founder of TPM, one of Seattle’s biggest development groups in a city historically run by developers of various stripes.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t see how he’d benefit from drawing attention, do you?”

  “No,” Quinton confirmed, shaking his head with a grim set to his mouth. “But even with the stunners I gave to some of the homeless to drive the bloodsuckers away, there’s definitely more biting going on. But it’s kind of hit and run—I’m not seeing a pattern, just an increasing frequency of attacks.”

  Quinton had developed cheap, battery-operated shock prods that he called “stunners” that incapacitated vampires for a few minutes. The jolt was not strong enough to kill them but enough to give the near-victim a head start on running away. He’d distributed them to some of the more stable of Pioneer Square’s indigent population to reduce their chance of being an unwilling vampire lunch. Most of the “undergrounders,” as we called them—the homeless who lived in the hidden spaces under the city or simply preferred life below the rest of the world’s radar—didn’t always know their assailants were undead and they didn’t care. They just wanted to be left alone, like Quinton himself. He was their personal mad scientist.

  “It could be another faction war . . .” I suggested. When I’d first fallen into the Grey, I’d discovered that vampires jockey for position constantly. At the time there’d been at least three individuals who wanted Edward’s head on a plate and were looking for ways to get it. One was now dead—or re-dead if you prefer—one was apparently biding his time, and the other was currently holding to an uneasy agreement I’d helped to hammer out.

  “Could be,” Quinton admitted. “But who knows?” Still knitting his brows, he muttered to himself, “I wish I knew when ghosts were more active. If there’s a rise in paranormal activity . . .”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “Huh?” he grunted, jerking out of his thoughts. “I’m not sure, but I’d like to know. Maybe there’s a correlation between ghost activity and vampire activity, or maybe there’s something more personal here. I mean, if your dead boyfriend thinks there are things you should know and if there’s a rise in paranormal activity at the same time, I’d think that’s significant. But we don’t know what it’s indicative of. I wish I had some more equipment. . . .”

  Quinton was having a geek moment—that sort of glazed-eyed mental gymnastics session that ends in the discovery of penicillin or the invention of the Super Soaker and the resulting battalion of wet cats. I left him to it while I pondered what he’d just said.

  There was a lot more going on in the paranormal than usual. Cary’s strange call only highlighted the fact that the activity seemed higher around me, something I’d been either missing or ignoring. It was unwise for me to turn a cold shoulder or blind eye to that sort of thing. Usually I don’t put a lot of trust in the words of ghosts—they tend to lie or know only a fractured, incomplete version of the truth, just like live people. But Cary had more weight with me when alive than most people, and his sudden call had come with the freight train impact of the dream that preceded it. If that was a coincidence I’d eat the proverbial hat.

  “I’m going to Los Angeles,” I announced.

  Quinton twitched from his reverie and raised his eyebrows at me. “Why?”

  “Because I can’t think of any place else Cary could mean by ‘here’ when he said I needed to ‘come here and look into the past.’ There’s too much of my past coming up all at once, too much strangeness, for his call to be meaningless. I know this isn’t the best time to go,” I added, stopping Quinton before whatever words forming on his lips dropped into the air, “but if there’s really something going on that will affect me, maybe I should get a jump on it first.”

  “You sound like you think I’m going to argue with you.”

  “Well . . .”

  He shook his head. “Oh no, Harper. I’m not getting between you and a case. I know better.”

  “A case? This isn’t a case. It’s me.”

  “Even worse. If you think there really is an answer in your past to what’s going on now, or to why you are what you are or how you got that way, I know nothing will stop you from pursuing it. I’m not going to throw myself in front of a runaway train. I’ll hold the fort here and I’ll look after the ferret, and we’ll take on whatever’s going on in Seattle when you get back. I think Chaos and I can manage that.”

  Chaos, my pet ferret, adored Quinton and his many pockets. Quinton was more than capable of keeping tabs on the strange and otherworldly while I was away. He couldn’t do much more, but unless hell literally broke loose and rose to the surface of Seattle’s streets, I didn’t think he’d have to.

  I bit my lip, uncomfortable about heading back to the place I’d escaped from and not sure I liked the idea of being a “case,” or having to look at my past, or tracking down an old, dead boyfriend to find out what he was talking about, or dealing—as I would have to—with my mother, either.

  Maybe all that showed on my face. Quinton gave me a crooked smile and leaned forward to kiss my cheek, murmuring, “The sooner you’re started, the sooner you’re done, right? And then you’re back with me, and whatever’s wrong, we’ll fix it.”

  That did put me over the edge, and I clutched him close and kissed him back very hard. I could feel the pent-up tears flow down my cheeks and a juddering sensation shook my chest. Why does love feel like hiccups? I snuggled into the warm sensation for a moment before I got back to the drudgery.

  I’d have to rearrange my schedule, but no matter how much I didn’t like the idea, it appeared Los Angeles and my mother were inevitable.

  TWO

  Two days later I was on a plane to Los Angeles and sharing my row with a dripping-wet dead teenager. She was pissed. I almost wished I’d driven down from Seattle, but the temptation to dawdle might have been overwhelming. So instead my sleep-deprived self was wedged up against the window seat to avoid the creep on the aisle and the glowering ghost in the middle.
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br />   She was about thirteen years old, I’d guess, and soaking wet. Her very long blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail so her angry face was unobscured. She’d appeared somewhere over Oregon and didn’t say anything for a while; she just scowled. I wanted to talk to her and get her story, but the man on the aisle was already giving me more attention than I wanted and might take it as an invitation. Instead, I got up and went back to the lavatories. The dripping specter followed me.

  “What do you want?” I asked when we got to the back of the plane.

  “It’s all your fault,” she hissed back.

  “What’s my fault?”

  “It’s your fault, Harper.”

  She didn’t tell me what was my fault. She only repeated her accusation over and over for the rest of the flight. Even retreating to the mindless noise of in-flight music couldn’t block her out of my head, since ghosts seem to have an affinity for electronic equipment and her uncanny voice seeped into the headphones to harry me.

  There are a lot of types of ghosts, from the nearly alive to the merely present. Repeaters—ghosts that are essentially memory loops on endless play—are among the least annoying most of the time. They don’t interact with anyone. This dreadful drowned child was something a bit more than that, but not a lot. She annoyed the hell out of me while instilling the discomforting sensation that I’d done something wrong. But I couldn’t recall having anything to do with any drowning victims, so I didn’t know why I should feel guilty, though for some reason I did. The ghost disappeared somewhere over Santa Barbara, but by then it was too late to rest.

  After my unpleasant flight, I was not in a good mood when I arrived at LA International. The baggage people at LAX added to my irritation by refusing to hand back my bag. It seemed that the X-ray tag that let them know there was a properly inspected and secured firearm in the case had gotten buried, and someone had freaked out when they saw the shadow of my pistol in the scanner. I had a long, boring, and circular discussion with everyone at the baggage office about handing it back. When they wanted to read me the riot act because they’d bungled the tagging and given some poor monkey on the X-ray machine a fit, I got a little testy, and that’s not a good idea with security people. By the time the luggage supervisor was involved, everyone was beyond pissy and I’d spent an extra forty minutes just trying to get my property back.

  Therefore I was a bit short with the car rental clerk. It was nearly nine o’clock in the evening and I had very little tolerance left, so when he smirked at my chest, I snapped at him.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Umm . . . your shirt’s funny. . . .”

  I looked down, having forgotten what I’d thrown on under my Seattle-necessary leather jacket for the flight to the warmer climes of Los Angeles in mid-May. It was a dark blue T-shirt with van Gogh’s famous evening sky above a picture of a giant, gore-fanged bunny menacing a tiny human figure. “Starry Starry Night . . . of the Lepus!” it read. My bookstore-owning friend Phoebe had given it to me for my birthday on the principle that if you won’t shop for yourself, your friends have carte blanche to give you things they think you should wear.

  “Oh, gods,” I groaned. The shirt was too conspicuous. I’d have to dump it at my first opportunity and hope Phoebe would forgive me.

  “I wasn’t checking you out, I swear!” the young man objected. “I’m just kind of into schlock film,” he added, pink-faced and defending his casual glance at my chest.

  “Right.”

  “Hey, it’s Night of the Lepus! One of the worst films ever made—mutant rabbits attack Arizona. It’s—umm . . .” He could see me losing interest and patience. He shifted back to business, and I wouldn’t have thought anyone’s face could have gone that shade of red without makeup. “So . . . would you like to upgrade to a midsize car for only six dollars more per day?”

  “No. Thank you.” We wrangled for a while longer before he let me have the compact car I’d reserved and I set out into the spring twilight looking for my hotel.

  THREE

  Most people visiting out-of-town relatives will stay with said relatives—especially if they live in a house like my mother’s four-bedroom cliff residence. But my mother’s M ideas about my life and my own aren’t exactly in sync, and it’s better that we not occupy the same house—or the same state—for long. The prospect of interrogating Mother about my past was already about as attractive as swimming in razor blades; I didn’t need to live with her while I did it. By the time I’d checked into my hotel, it was after eleven and late enough to ignore any urge to call and let my mother know I had arrived.

  But morning was inevitable and I made the call as soon as I was up and dressed—which wasn’t that early.

  A sultry female voice answered the phone. “Hello?” Mother was feeling femme fatale-ish.

  “Hi, Mother,” I said. “I got in late last night, and this was my first chance to call you.”

  Her voice swooped up in theatrical delight. “Snippet!” In spite of the fact that I tower over her by five inches, that’s been my mother’s nickname for me since I was five and suddenly a real human in her eyes, instead of a parasite. “I’m just having breakfast. You have to come up and join us.”

  “Us?”

  She ignored that. “Come up, sweetie! See you in a few!”

  And, having issued her orders, she hung up. As much as I hated feeling summoned, I wanted to get it over with, so I headed down to the ghost-stuffed lobby of my once-grand Hollywood hotel.

  The building was like something out of a Stephen King novel to me—ghosts, murders, crimes, and monstrosities lurked in every shadow—but at least I could see them first. I considered that I should have booked a more boring venue, but the haunting ratio isn’t a lot lower in most newer buildings—people just want to think it is—and I’d loved looking at the crazy California rococo facade back when I’d never seen a ghost. It tickled me a bit to finally be a guest. A dead flapper scurried, blood-spattered, down the hall, things watched me as I passed down the staircase of painted tile, and a tragically beautiful face gazed at me from a mirror. I didn’t stop to find out what any of them wanted. I didn’t need another mystery right now. I just retrieved the rental car and drove.

  My mother’s house clung to a hillside far from the site of Cary Malloy’s death—I wasn’t ready to face that twisting bit of road yet. I stopped the car for a moment at the bottom of the street, peering out the side window at the curvaceous white plaster building hanging from the steep canyon walls like a hornets’ nest buzzing with orange and yellow energy clouds. She had one part of her dream, at least—she’d always wanted a house in the canyons. Judging by the colors around the place, I figured it hadn’t mellowed her out much, but I guessed I’d find out for sure in a few minutes. I hadn’t seen my mother since acquiring my Grey sight and I wasn’t sure if the manic flares of energy around her home were better than what she’d have shown me a few years ago. I shoved the car back into gear and growled up the twisty, eucalyptus-lined road.

  The smell of the dusty trees, cholla, and canyon weeds reminded me of long treks up the ridges as a kid and of baking-hot days on “ego duty” with Cary—watching the houses of minor celebrities for suspected stalkers and known exes with grudges. It was the scent of the seemingly endless summer of southern California childhood. It should have made me smile, but I felt my brow creasing into a frown. Something nagged in the back of my head, making the memory bitter beyond the remembered misery of sweltering hours of dance rehearsals and auditions wearing fake smiles and unbroken shoes that raised bleeding blisters for the sake of five minutes’ beauty. That particular sunshine made me morose.

  The house didn’t seem any more restful when I got closer to it, in spite of the architect’s best efforts. It was still too active in the Grey for my comfort. I pulled past a gate that shut behind me and into the narrow, trellis-covered shelf that served as a carport, between an older, forest green Jaguar convertible and a spanking-new Mercedes coupe. That brought m
y eyebrows up, but the thought that prompted it got no further as I was hailed by my mother’s voice from a speaker set in the creamy white wall.

  “Sweetie, come through the gate to the terrace. It’s on the left.”

  I left my bag in the car—who was going to steal it?—but I kept my jacket on. I walked through the rustic gate in the plastered wall, which was as white and perfect as wedding cake frosting. My boots clacked onto a bed of smooth indigo stones pretending to be an oxbow surrounding the white marble island of the terrace. The view spread beyond the wall in the perpetual canyon haze of blue eucalyptus dust as if the pebble watercourse had widened into a river of sky. It would have been a restful haven if only my mother hadn’t lived in it.

  My mother and a man who looked like an accessory to the fake-Mediterranean decor sat at a round redwood table facing the view over the scattered remains of the morning meal. So much for “join us for breakfast.”

  Mother smiled and waved like Princess Grace. I admit she looked great, if too thin. She’d given up the battle against gray hair and embraced a dramatic sweep of silver through her chestnut mane. Makeup and artfully casual clothes added to her morning polish. It would have looked better without her apple green aura—possessiveness? Jealousy? I wasn’t sure.

  The man stood up, bending to give her a quick kiss on the lips before walking toward me. He put out his hand as he got close. He was Hollywood’s idea of sixty-five and dressed like a 1940s gangster on vacation. I smothered a snicker.

  “So, you’re Ronnie’s Snippet. I’ve heard all about you. I’m Damon.”

  I took his hand, but I didn’t shake. His palm was warm and dry, but the gleam of energy around his body in the Grey was sickly olive green. Mother’s complementary green energy trailed after him like a thread raveling from his sleeve. I guessed he was the owner of the quarter million dollars’ worth of Mercedes in the carport.

  My mother’s name was currently Veronica Geary, and she’d always hated the nickname Ronnie, so I had to assume that she was angling to make Damon into husband number five, or she would have chilled him to the bone for calling her by the despised moniker. I wondered if she knew there was something wrong with him, though whether it was physical or mental, inward or outward directed, I didn’t know. I only knew the size and color of his aura weren’t good. I didn’t like seeing my mother’s energy tied up to his that way; there was something squick-worthy about it.