Labyrinth (Book 5) (22 page)

“Wanted to see you.”

“You don’t need to see me right now. You need to rest and get better.” But I feared he was never going to get better, that his broken, sickening discord was permanent, and that twisted in my gut. “How did you even know I was coming?”

His aura flickered with antifreeze-green lightning. “Michael told me.”

The mad chorus in my head chimed, “Liar, liar . . .” as Will drew his hands together, rubbing the bruised knuckles of one hand in the cupped hollow of the other. A prescient flash struck me like a physical blow. “You hit him.”

He blinked as if wounded. “He wouldn’t have told me otherwise. And I needed to see you. I owe you . . . everything. Everything.”

The worshipful sound in his voice sickened me. “No, you don’t. All I did was get you in too deep in the first place.”

He shook his head. “No. No. You saved my life.”

I felt myself growing remote and cold against my will. “Michael saved your life. He found you, he carried you out, he took you away. Not me.” My spine seemed to vibrate and ring with the shouting of the Grey voices, and I almost choked on the sound.

Charlie Rice tried to slip away while Will’s attention was on me, but Quinton sidled over and caught him. “Where did the ball come from?”

“Leavenworth,” Rice whispered back, shooting nervous glances at me and Will while trying to move farther away. “Old house in the orchards, but it’s gone. Nothing left but the foundation. . . .”

“Did this house have a maze or a labyrinth, a pattern on the floors—anything like that?”

Charlie shook his head in a spastic way without letting Will and me out of his sight. “Don’t know. I just—” He seemed to catch himself and change his mind before he said, “I just cleared the wreckage.”

Will stepped toward me, reaching with his bent, mutilated hands, his stride crooked and off-balance. “I need you, Harper.” He glanced toward Quinton and Rice, his aura flashing orange, followed by green and red. “The new guy doesn’t need you. Not like I do.” I felt repelled in a way I couldn’t explain, as if Will had become poisonous. Sensations of pity and horror fought with the frigid resistance that welled up in me as if I were splitting in two. This icy disgust wasn’t like me. . . .

Quinton’s shoulders stiffened and he turned a little more in our direction. “No. I don’t
need
her. I don’t need her to be anything or do anything. I only want her to be what she is.”

“See?” Will implored, laying his wrecked hands on my shoulders. “I need you. I’ll go with you.”

His touch was hot and cold, sharp as electricity; it roused the chorus and made me want to scream with them and shove him away. I gulped in air and swallowed the voices. “No, you won’t. Not there. It won’t be safe—there are monsters in labyrinths, don’t you remember? You’re only safe here, with Michael. Not with me.”

Rice turned to escape again, but Quinton sprang after him and snatched him to a halt nearby, asking, “Where did the other ball go? Who has it?”

“I . . . might have the receipt. . . .”

“OK, then. Let’s look at your records.”

Rice leapt at the chance to get away from Will and me and dragged Quinton back into the office, snapping the door closed after them and leaving us outside in the strange assembly of broken houses. Will tried to grip my shoulders and draw me closer, but his hands felt like giant crab claws and they had no strength to hold me. I slid free, guilty at my relief.

“Will, please. You don’t understand how unsafe you are with me. I didn’t save you from anything; I put you in danger.”

He shook his head and his eyes were bright with an unreasonable adulation. It made me feel sick and I wanted to cry over it, but that was the last thing I would do. “It’s not true,” he whispered. “I love you. You love me; you came after me.”

My voice came out cold. “I came after some work. I found you entirely incidentally. It was luck—mostly bad luck.”

He made a small smug smile and shook his head again. “You can’t get rid of me by lying. I know what you really feel.”

I sighed. “Oh, no.” I tried to turn away and come back later, figuring Quinton would get the information I needed for now. But whatever else I did, I had to get away from the mania shining in Will’s eyes. It tore me into pieces to see it—to see him like this—but still the sensation of being coated in emotional ice deepened.

Will hooked one of his hands under my arm at the shoulder and tugged me back. “We need to be together, Harper. I won’t let you go. I’ll come with you. Trust me.”

There was no way I could. The little voices trilled and chattered: “Touch him, touch him, make him go.”

For a raw, heartless moment I did not resist them. I turned back, letting my body roll into the compass of his arms, not like a lover but like an enemy ducking under his guard, and putting out my hands so the tips of my fingers brushed across his chest. It felt like I’d touched a corpse. I let my hands slide up to frame his face, feeling the rippling colors of his chaotic aura like currents of hot and cold water and sudden spikes of electric shock. I tangled my fingers in the energy strands and wondered if I could do something. . . .

I leaned on all the persuasion I had and tried to
think
his aura to a calm shade of blue. I doubted it would work, but anything was worth trying. “You don’t need to come along now. You need to sleep. And I’ll be back soon. Just sleep.” No luck: Nothing was happening and, if anything, Will only seemed annoyed by my attempts to calm him down or persuade him to give up.

“Don’t coddle me, Harper.” His tone was sharp with sudden anger.

I stiffened and would have replied, but the opening of the office door cut me off. Quinton popped out, stuffing something into his pocket and closing the door behind him, leaving Rice alone inside. Will glared at him as Quinton eased next to me and put his left hand around my waist, pulling me back from my former boyfriend. I felt something nudge against my side as I dropped my arms and stepped back next to Quinton, but I couldn’t look down. “You ready to go?” he whispered.

I nodded and we started to turn away.

Will stepped forward, trying to reestablish his hold on me. Quinton gave him a narrow look over his shoulder. I risked a glance down and saw that Quinton was pressing the hard handle of a stun stick into my hidden side, offering it to me underhand, as he turned halfway back to say, “Let it go.”

“You don’t understand—” Will started.

“I do. But Harper can’t save you; you need to start saving yourself. And you need to let her go and do what she has to do.”

Will glared at him and brushed past to pull me to his chest again. I snatched the device into my fist as Will yanked me away from Quinton.

“Oh, man. Don’t do that,” Quinton said.

“Will, don’t,” I echoed, stumbling forward, turning the hard shape of the stun stick around in my hand. “Just let go of me. Go home to Michael—”

Heavy footsteps thudded on the wooden floor, drawing closer to the rear of the shop.

“Michael can’t help me—he doesn’t know how!”

“Neither do I!”

“Yes, you do! Yes, you do! You’re the only one. I need you! I’m going—”

He cut himself off as two cops came around the end of the stack of doors and windows. These weren’t slicked-down, tourist-friendly bike cops; they were old-fashioned beat-pounders in full gear. They glanced at Quinton and then at Will, then back to Quinton, their shoulders tensing as they took in Will’s grip on my shoulder and Quinton’s protective arm at my waist, masking the object I now held.

“Mr. Rice?” one of them inquired, but they both kept their eyes on Will. I knew they couldn’t see the madhouse colors around his head, but they still had cop instincts for trouble. Neither reached for their guns, but their hands touched their belts. One of them hung back while the other stepped toward us. “Is one of you Mr. Rice?”

The office door creaked open on its damaged hinges and the owner stuck his head out. “I’m Rice.”

“What’s the problem, Mr. Rice?”

Rice’s voice quavered, but he answered strongly enough. “Mr. Novak is frightening my customers. He should be at home—he’s been in an accident and he’s . . . not himself. I—please. Would you help Mr. Novak get home safely?”

Will whipped back to stare at Rice. “Charlie! No! Don’t do this to me!”

“William, you’re not well.”

Will made an irrational growling sound and released me so he could grab for Rice. The violence of his gesture spun me toward the nearer policeman and I ducked to avoid hitting the man. The cop sidestepped me and lunged forward to catch Will by the shoulders.

In a second, the two cops, Will, and Charlie Rice were a scuffling mass in the office doorway. Will shouted and thrashed, doing more damage to his reputation than anything else, though he did manage to break Rice’s nose with one flailing elbow. The splattering blood sent Will into fits, and he threw himself back from Rice and the cops, exhausted and terrified beyond all reason. Making shrill screeching sounds, he lurched backward into the half-glass doors and tumbled through one of the upper panes with a crash.

The cops and Charlie Rice ran into the office to retrieve him and Quinton put his hand back under my free elbow, urging me forward. “C’mon, let’s get out of here before this gets crazier.”

I was still at war inside: A part of me said I should stay and try to help Will, but I turned with Quinton and we zigzagged our way out of the antiques warehouse and back to the Rover. I hoped that Will was all right—or as all right as he was likely to be—and that Rice’s nose wasn’t too badly wrecked, but I didn’t go back to find out. We bailed into the truck and abandoned the situation to the cops.

TWENTY-ONE

W
e reached the West Seattle Bridge near the container yards before I broke down. I felt as if some fortress of ice had surrounded me and now shattered, letting the horror and despair I should have felt before rush out. I had to pull over and stop the truck as my vision flooded with wavering crimson. Quinton drew me into his lap and pressed a paper napkin to my cheek to catch my running red tears. “It’s OK, babe. It’ll be all right.”

“ ‘Babe’?” I sniffled, pulled out of my confusion, upset, and pity by the oddity of the word.

He shrugged. “I’m terrible with synonyms. I’m a science geek, not an English teacher, you know.”

I blotted up the bloody mess and blew my nose. “ ‘Babe’ is what you call women with more boobs than brains,” I said. “And I may be acting stupid, but given how little bust I’ve got, it doesn’t say much for what’s north of my chin.”

Quinton made a bemused face. “I am not going to try to unravel that. But regardless of whether it’s your boobs or your brain you’re insulting, you’re wrong: They’re both magnificent.”

I poked him in the shoulder. “What are you on? I feel like I’ve got a sieve full of Jell-O in my head. Oh, gods, poor Will. . . . I shouldn’t have left him like that.” And why had I? Why had I gone so cold . . . ?

“It was Rice’s call—he thought the cops might be the best solution. He’s known Novak for years and he’s just as worried about him as you are. He’ll be all right.”

“No, he won’t.” I squirmed around so I could see Quinton better. “Maybe you didn’t notice—”

“That he’s lost it completely? Yes, I did. But it wouldn’t be diplomatic of me to say it.”

“You just did.”

“Yeah. . . .” He bit his lower lip and looked away. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s the truth, so . . . you shouldn’t be. And I feel there’s nothing I can do. I wanted to—I tried . . . but it didn’t work. I felt like it was too much to care for. . . .”

“You can’t fix everything. You try too hard to fix too much of the world as it is. And don’t start saying that what happened to Novak is your fault: It isn’t. No one could expect him to keep his head on straight after being kidnapped and tortured by things he thought only existed in horror films and pulpy novels. This is one thing you’re going to have to let go. You can’t help Novak. You
can
help a lot of other people by completing the task you already set for yourself. You have to stop wasting your energy on what you can’t change.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. I wanted to be angry or, better still, to be as cold and remote as I’d felt at Charlie Rice’s warehouse—it would hurt less than the horror and sorrow that now pressed on my chest—but that, too, wasn’t working. Quinton dropped his forehead onto my shoulder for a moment and took a deep breath before he looked up again.

“Harper. I’m not saying it’s wrong to want to help, but you can’t do it all, and some of it is simply not doable. Someone said, ‘Pick battles small enough to win, big enough to matter.’ You need to pick the one you can win.”

“How do I know which one that is?”

“You know. You just don’t like thinking you’re abandoning someone. Especially someone you went back for once already. But that’s not the job you’re on now. It’s up to Novak and his brother to take what you gave them and do their best. Like it’s up to you to do your best with what you have in front of you right now.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and spread it on my thigh. “I have the address in Leavenworth.”

My heart stuttered. “For the maze?”

“No. For the other puzzle ball. Kind of a funny coincidence that it went right back where it came from, yeah?”

I felt a tug of curiosity and a touch of premonition. My brows drew down as I thought about it. “Probably not a coincidence at all. . . .”

Quinton hugged me suddenly and with unexpected power. “Glad to have you back, sweetheart.”

I slumped into him. “Have I been missing?”

“A little. Off and on.”

I shook my head. “I’m hearing things and I can’t seem to . . . feel what I ought to, as well as all the rest. I feel pressed for time and anxious to get this over with before things get worse. As if I even knew what sort of worse they might get. And yet part of me is growing remote, as if none of this matters.”

“It does matter. You’re just overwhelmed.”

I took that in with a nod, though I wasn’t sure I believed it.

“You’re hearing things?” he asked, looking concerned.

“Yeah. Singing and voices. From the Grey. Not ghosts, something more . . . endemic. Sometimes it says things I need to listen to, sometimes it seems to move me, but most of the time, it’s just noise. Intrusive, implacable noise. Like the audience at a rock concert without the music.”

“Do they have lighters?”

“What?”

“Lighters. You know: The sappy ballad dedicated to some dead band member starts up and everyone flicks their Bic and holds it on high.”

I fixed an incredulous stare on him. “You have a romantic streak as wide as a hair.”

“I am very romantic—I brought you flowers for your birthday.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“The ferret ate them.”

I glared at him.

“All right, she didn’t eat them. She pushed them on the floor and broke the vase and I had to throw them out, but I did bring them. You just weren’t home to appreciate them. See: That’s romantic, even if it’s kind of messed up. But that rock concert thing is sentiment, of which I have almost none.”

I continued peering at him, though I did feel a giggle tugging at one corner of my mouth.

“I traded it in,” he explained, “for an oscilloscope—it was a pretty nifty one, too.”

I snorted a laugh. “Goof.”

“Yup. Big goofy geek-boy here. I’m working on that ‘he makes me laugh’ thing because, you know, Roger and Jessica have it all over Rhett and Scarlett.”

Now I laughed out loud and Quinton had to shut me up by kissing me, which I didn’t mind at all. It wasn’t that I was happy about what had happened at Rice House Antiques, but I no longer felt too awful to go on or too cold to care. Quinton was right in saying I couldn’t do anything for Will—at least not right then—and there were more pressing things on my agenda. I did feel terrible for the brothers Novak, but I’d have to make some kind of . . . amends later.

It’s about a three-hour drive to Leavenworth from Seattle if you don’t pause for much. Most map searches will tell you it’s two and a half, but even in the best weather the roads through the mountains in the final third of the trip don’t encourage driving over the posted limits. The surfaces themselves are fine, but the twists and turns with precipitous drops into rivers and ravines just a few feet aside aren’t. Ribbons, rock piles, and occasional plaques mark the places where the road and some of its drivers parted ways. We took the northern route through Monroe, but I had to ask Quinton to take the wheel once we passed Skykomish. Even with the filtering effect of the Rover’s steel and glass, the sudden flashes of accidents and ghosts racked me with shocks. We were almost out of the pass when I spotted the last shadow of a fatal accident on the route: Two women and a young boy in 1940s clothes stood at the outside edge of a bend that hung over the Wenatchee River below. They were dripping wet and looked frightened and confused. Even the small black dog at their feet seemed disoriented by what must have happened to them all. I had to turn my head away from their imploring stares.

“Bad?” Quinton asked.

I just nodded.

About ten minutes later we came out of the pass and started the last short downhill to Leavenworth, a mock-Bavarian village beside the highway surrounded by a larger town full of retirees, orchard keepers, and railroad workers. The traffic was thicker than I’d expected for so late in the day—it was after four o’clock already—and we slowed to a creep as we entered the city limits. A soft, floral smell spiked with the odors of greenery, manure, and beer slipped into the truck’s vents and invited us to roll down the windows, even though the air outside was crisp and the shadow of the mountain was already falling onto the bowl of the valley, lowering the temperature further.

“So where are we going?” I asked as we passed Icicle Road and the slope flattened considerably as U.S. 2 made its two-lane way through town.

“No idea. Didn’t look it up yet.”

“Did Rice tell you where the house it came from was?”

“No. I had the impression the salvage wasn’t quite on the up-and-up, so he didn’t have an address—covering his ass in case anyone complained and identified him. He said it was in an orchard outside town.”

I looked around. Everything that wasn’t houses or quaint Bavarian shops was either apple trees or ski resort business. Even from the business-choked confines of Highway 2, I could see the fruit trees climbing the hills surrounding the town. Late blossoms covered many of the visible trees in mantillas of pink-tinged white. Brighter white or pink splashes marked out the occasional pear or cherry tree in the congregation.

“Yeah . . . that’s going to be easy to spot.”

“We’ll start with the address we’ve got for Christopher Drew—the guy who bought the puzzle ball. The writing’s a bit hard to read, but that seems to be the name. If I can find some WiFi, I can look it up.”

It didn’t seem likely we’d get any signal in the middle of the road, but it wasn’t going to be easy to park: The streets of the town were thick with cars and pedestrians. Over the sound of engines idling, a loudspeaker squawked something about Apple Blossom Royalty and beer gardens. A lot of the cars ahead of us peeled off to the right in front of a restaurant named Gustav’s that sported an onion dome on a steeplelike extension and gingerbread deck rails cut with fanciful tulip shapes.

Quinton shot a wary look at the throng turning right and stayed to the left. “Let’s not go wherever they’re going.”

I took a longer look and saw the branching road was much more ornately built with unrelenting Bavarianisms on both sides. A block or so away the road curved abruptly and I could see a bright yellow banner hung high across the street on the dogleg beyond. It wasn’t close enough to read but I got the gist.

“I doubt we’ll be able to avoid it,” I said. “There’s some kind of festival going on.”

We crept past a hotel dressed up like an Alpine ski lodge that sported a smaller yellow banner with the words “Welcome to Maifest!” right under its Howard Johnson logo. I grimaced at our timing.

“Better park and walk,” Quinton suggested.

I rolled my eyes at the thought.

It turned out not to be so bad, though it did take fifteen minutes to find a parking place. I figured that dinner was approaching for some of the locals and they might prefer to eat at home rather than at the tourist-quaint biergartens and rathskellers. A bit of walking on the less popular highway side of the main drag brought us back into the center of town. Quinton spotted a familiar green logo near the park in the middle of the village and we headed for it, though the heavy German script made it difficult to make out the small carved sign on the building’s side that read “Starbucks.” We hunkered down with the dark sludge they call coffee while Quinton poked at his handheld.

Leavenworth was an odd place. On the south side of the highway it was conspicuously a themed tourist mecca with cute Alpine architecture straight off the slopes of Disney’s version of the Matterhorn. North of the highway, the Bavarian theme continued but in patches, interrupted with much more prosaic American buildings and ordinary houses beyond that. The Alpine architecture wasn’t entirely out of place since we’d only come a few hundred feet down from the ridge to the valley floor: The area was still mountainous and would whiten with thick drifts in the first snowfall. In the Grey I could see the bland, busy railroad town it had once been. But the rails had moved north to take a shorter route though the pass and this town had nearly died.

I stepped outside for a moment and glanced up and down Front Street—the main drag—looking at the pretty little buildings that hung their present happy colors over the sad, shuttered businesses that had once dominated the place. That was depressing, but as silly as I thought the current incarnation was, at least it was thriving. I had to applaud whoever had come up with the idea. Other towns abandoned by their primary industry hadn’t fared so well.

Quinton came out onto the railed porch that overlooked the street and put his arm around my waist. “It’s a little weird, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Did you know they have their own German-language newspaper here? They’re really into the Bavarian thing.”

“Seems to be working. Though it must seem a bit sad and strange when it isn’t Maifest.”

“It’s always something out here. Next week is Spring Bird Fest. Can you imagine what it must be like in October?”

I shivered at the vision of thousands of beer-loving tourists flooding into the tiny town to celebrate the traditional German brewfest. I wondered if they had to chase the visitors indoors and hose off the streets every night, though at that time of year, hosing might lead to icing; the seasons turned cold quickly on the eastern side of the state. I didn’t like the way my thoughts kept coming back to the negative, so I changed the subject. “Did you figure out where the address is?”

“Yeah. It’s close, but it’s on the other side of the river, so we’ll have to drive. The nearest bridge is a two-mile walk and we’d have to walk about the same distance on the other side. I don’t relish that sort of hike with the mountains already cutting the sunlight.”

Quinton was right: Snuggled up tight to the valley’s western wall, the shadow of the mountains had already cloaked the town, casting it into a long blue twilight scented with apple blossoms. We’d have to get moving if we were going to get much done before full darkness.

Quinton had his map on the palmtop and I drove to his directions, continuing down Highway 2 until we crossed the Wenatchee River, then doubling back on the other bank, looking for a house set back from the road. We nearly missed it, overhung as it was by trees and pushing its back door almost up to the riverbank. It wasn’t an interesting house, just an old one and quite plain, painted a muddy green that vanished into the trees and overgrown yard.