Underground by Kat Richardson Page B

shouldn’t be birds down here. That’s bad.”
     
     
    I backed up so I could lean against the other building corner and see down the sidewalk better. Through the fog of Grey shapes I spotted the more solid, moving flickers of large moths. They were acting strange for moths—staying away from the light in favor of fluttering around the heads of the people in the circle.
     
     
    “I don’t see a bird,” I said.
     
     
    Jay pointed into the shadow where the light began to fade away into darkness again. A gleam of something dark and shiny showed me the eye of a good-sized bird. As I concentrated on it the shape became more clear. It was a small crow—much smaller than the ones I’d seen at the tunnel mouth, but still a crow. It hopped and flapped its wings, flying farther into the shadows, and I knew this was screwy—birds don’t fly in the dark. The gleam of the light touched several more pairs of bird and rat eyes that blinked from the darkness.
     
     
    “What is it with crows and moths?” I muttered.
     
     
    “Moths carry messages from ghosts. Crows and ravens, they’re ’specially magical. Those guys are talking to ghosts. I don’t want nothing to do with ghosts. Bad, bad magic.” Jay began backing away, past Quinton and me. Then he turned and ran into the darkness in the opposite direction.
     
     
    I didn’t like the feeling of being abandoned, but fleeing myself wouldn’t help. There was something more than ordinarily eerie to the situation—perhaps it was the setting, though. The hidden sidewalk and its sun-deprived landscape populated by the shapes of memory and broken slabs of time over equally broken concrete had an otherworldly feel that encouraged an anticipation of something uncanny breaking through at any moment.
     
     
    “Well,” I muttered to Quinton, “I talk to ghosts all the time. This doesn’t look too bad. You know any of them?”
     
     
    Quinton pointed to each one, his voice edged in distaste as he spoke. “The woman is Jennifer Novoy—Jenny Nin. Small-time grunge rocker, got into drugs, fell out of the regular world and into this one. Whores for drugs, alcohol—you name it. Probably why Jenny’s down here with Tall Grass. He’s big-time trouble, small-time crook. Most of the shelters won’t let him in since he’s been caught stealing, dealing, and messing with the kids. Criminal record as Thomas Newman. He’s from a local tribe— Nisqually—on his mother’s side and makes a big deal of it when it suits him to play the victim. He’s one of the most politically aware of the undergrounders, though he mostly uses it to his own ends.” His tone went neutral. “That other guy—Grandpa Dan—I don’t know much about him except he’s older than dirt and he seems to polarize the Indians around here—they love him or hate him.”
     
     
    “How do you know some of this? Doesn’t sound like the kind of thing most people would tell.”
     
     
    Quinton shrugged. “I do things. I get to know them, or I look into records. I snoop when I have to—I want to know who’s going to do what. Some of these guys I know better than their parents did. I wish I didn’t, to be honest.”
     
     
    I knew that feeling. It may be part of my job, but sometimes digging around in other people’s lives seems dirty—it is dirty. Everyone in the business has a justifying excuse and some limit beyond which they won’t go, but there are times when it seems there’s not enough soap and hot water to remove the muck.
     
     
    I stood up straight and took a long, bracing breath. Then I caught Quinton’s eye. “Let’s go find out what they know about John Bear,” I said. “And the rest of this.”
     
     
    We came around the corner and began a slow walk toward the group near the light. A tumbling knot of energy rolled in the air around them, and a scent of burning wood and pot with a hint of rust and mold met us as we neared. The auras around Tall Grass and Jenny wove into each other