Free Downpour by Kat Richardson Page B

kept a lookout for the white things by the side of the road, but they didn’t show up on this trip. With the complexity of the legal jurisdictions that overlapped around the lakes, it wouldn’t have been surprising if the case had been mired in buck-passing and paperwork. But there simply had never been a case opened. For some reason no one had said anything to anyone in authority about Leung’s disappearance. His daughters were both alive and in the area, according to Darin Shea, but neither of them seemed to have done anything about their missing father—and it seemed strange that they hadn’t noticed. Nor had anyone else said anything to the authorities. The small size of the year-round community and the Grey weirdness around the lakes made me think there may have been a more sinister reason for silence than jurisdictional uncertainty. I was going to have to step carefully until I knew what the situation around “Sunset Lakes” really was.
    I decided first to take another look at the spell circle near Leung’s house and left the Rover in a different location from the last time before walking down. I didn’t see any sign of Shea, but I did notice that even in the daylight, the area on the west side of Lake Sutherland had a strong gleam of magic to it—not as colorful as Lake Crescent, but well beyond normal. But this was not the orderly grid configuration I was used to; it was more as if an unseen current running deep between the two lakes created a wellspring in the area that seeped upward until it was detectable as a thinly spread general presence, rather than a single source. The strange glow I’d noticed the previous night was easier to see today, even without sliding into the Grey. I had a harder time seeing the bright bolts of colored energy that had darted around me before; they were there, but not as numerous or energetic, and I couldn’t see the spidery white lines in the lake at all from this angle. I was used to an orderly grid of magical feeder lines; what arises from the Grey is shaped by the human minds that manipulate it, so the density of humans in a city might cause the grid to reflect the shape of the city. Here, however, there weren’t enough people to push the lines of magic around so easily—or at least that was what made sense to me at the moment.
    When I reached the edge of the clearing where the circle was, I was disappointed: Someone had been there and done some cleaning up. The rest of the shadowy memories of spells cast had disappeared, and the circle itself was fading back into the wild stream of magic below the ground. Even the traces of herbs and dust had sunk into the ground or been swept away, so I didn’t stand a chance of identifying them.
    I swore quietly and at length.
    Something crunched and shuffled in the frost-blackened bracken beneath the trees. Then a light voice with an odd undertone of distant rocks grinding together spoke just ahead of its owner appearing at the edge of the clearing. “I have not met him, so I could not say, but I’m quite sure that if Shiva had dog breath, it wouldn’t be able to do that . But it is a blasphemy I’ve never heard before. May I keep it?”
    I spun around to stare at him, the red tails of my scarf flying. When you’re standing beside a magic circle in the woods between one lake that vomits up saponified murder victims and another that’s floored with lines of magic, you should expect to see a few strange things. To most people, the strangest thing about this man would have been that he was wearing a European designer suit to go walking in the forest. To me, it was that he wasn’t actually a person—though he was definitely male. Whatever he was, I guessed he was some relative of the things I’d seen beside the road yesterday; in the Grey, his skin was the same shade of otherworldly white and he had a smaller version of the burned-black-twig horns poking out of his forehead. I preferred seeing him in the normal, where he