Praise for
unshapely things
“It will pull you along a corkscrew of twists and turns to a final, cataclysmic battle that could literally remake the world.”
—Rob Thurman, national bestselling author of Madhouse
“Masterfully blends detective thriller with fantasy…a fast-paced thrill ride…Del Franco never pauses the action…and Connor Grey is a very likable protagonist. The twisting action and engaging lead make Unshapely Things hard to put down.”
—BookLoons
“The intriguing cast of characters keeps the readers involved with the mystery wrapped up in the fantasy…I look forward to spending more time with Connor in the future and learning more about him and his world.”
—Gumshoe
“A wonderfully written, richly detailed, and complex fantasy novel with twists and turns that make it unputdownable…Mr. Del Franco’s take on magic and paranormal elements is fresh and intriguing. Connor Grey’s an appealing hero bound to delight fantasy and paranormal romance fans alike.”
—The Romance Readers Connection
“Compelling and fast paced…The world-building is superb…Fans of urban fantasy should get a kick out of book one in this new series.”
—Romantic Times
“A very impressive start. The characters were engaging and believable, and the plot was intriguing. I found myself unable to put it down until I had devoured it completely, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the sequel.”
—Book Fetish
“A wonderful, smart, and action-packed mystery involving dead faeries, political intrigue, and maybe a plot to destroy humanity…Unshapely Things has everything it takes to launch a long-running series, and I’m very excited to see what Del Franco has in store next for Connor Grey and his friends.”
—Bookslut
Unquiet Dreams
Mark Del Franco
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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 websites or their content.
UNQUIET DREAMS
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2008 by Mark Del Franco.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 1-4295-5801-6
ACE
Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
To my sister Michele, who is brave and strong.
And to my partner, Jack Custy, who isn’t fazed anymore
when I ask where my guillotine is.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
About the Author
acknowledgments
Many culprits contributed their time, energy, and ideas to make this book the best it can be. Front and center are Anne Sowards, my editor, whose enthusiasm and insight know no bounds; my kickin’ agent, Rachel Vater, who knows her stuff and gives excellent feedback and support; Cameron Dufty, Ace editorial assistant, who keeps the wheels turning; Sara and Bob Schwager, copyeditors extraordinaire, who have to deal with strange new words and the hyphens that love them (or not); and, of course, all the folks at Ace Books.
Publishing my first novel has given me the pleasure of meeting many new people, notably Melissa Marr and Jeaniene Frost, sage advisors and wicked friends, and the friends and colleagues from the LiveJournal online community of Fangs_Fur_Fey. It’s been inspiring seeing their works and getting to know them as well as all the readers who took the time to come to a signing, drop a note, write a review, and pass the word. Many, many thanks to all of you.
Big thanks to my sisters and parents, who are secretly publicity machines in their spare time.
Special thanks to Kelley Horton for her emergency photography and friendship with that guy who used to work down the hall.
And lastly but not leastly, thanks to Francine Woodbury, who had the pleasure of telling me when the manuscript went Horribly, Horribly Wrong, prompting me to revise it in record time. This book literally would not exist if not for her astute, yet evil, eye.
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams
—W. B. Yeats
1
No good phone calls come at seven o’clock in the morning. Strike that. No good phone calls from Detective Leonard Murdock come at seven o’clock in the morning. Actually, strike that, too. No good phone calls from Detective Leonard Murdock come at seven o’clock in the morning unless you count the fact that it means I might have a paying job. Of course, it also means someone is dead, too, but that’s where the “no good” part comes in.
That’s how I make my living now. Waiting for the phone to ring. Hoping a crime has been committed. Ideally, one that Murdock needs a little fey expertise on. Some people make the mistake of thinking I used to be a high-powered druid working the crime unit for the Fey Guild. The only “used-to-be” part of that is working for the Guild. I’m still Connor Grey, druid. Just because I’ve lost most of my abilities doesn’t mean I am not what I am. To be fey, to be a member of a species that can manipulate what is superstitiously called magic, is not just a job description. It’s a state of being.
And my current state of being was in the backseat of a cab wishing I had a cup of coffee. Murdock had given me an address in the deep end of the Weird. The Weird is not the nicest neighborhood in Boston. It’s certainly not the safest. But it’s where the fey live when they have nowhere else to go. There’s a comfort in that, a community of sorts, that outsiders don’t understand.
Especially when so many people end up dead here.
The cab pulled off Old Northern Avenue onto a narrow lane that ran between two burnt-out warehouses. A block away, the lane ended at a desolate field with a small group of people wandering about, which, given the early hour, could only be my destination. I paid the driver, got out, and shivered. It was cold—too cold for early October and much colder than when I got in the cab just a few blocks away. I looked up at the sky and sensed more than saw a faint white haze in the air that was by no means natural.
The early morning sun cast a surreal light, bleaching colors like a faded photograph. At the curb, a police car with its blue lights flashing enhanced the effect with a silvery sheen. Across the field from where I stood, the officers’ uniforms looked almost black and the medical examiner’s coat a stark white. I recognized Murdock immediately by his long trench coat even though it appeared pale beige instead of its normal camel color. The field looked ashen.
I stepped across the remains of a sidewalk and walked toward them. It had rained like hell the night before, and while the field should have been muddy, it was now an uneven surface of frozen ruts. I made my way to the center of activity, a body in dark clothing lying on the ground.
Murdock didn’t see me until I was standing next to him. “Bit nippy,” I said.
He didn’t startle, but smiled slightly as he cupped his hands over his mouth and blew into them. “That’s part of why I called you.”
I nodded. As a human, Murdock has no fey abilities, but he’s worked the Weird long enough to know when something is, well, weird. He’s good at what he does, and part of what makes him good is that he knows when to ask for help. It’s a lesson I’m still learning.
I bunched my own cold hands into the pockets of my leather jacket. It didn’t occur to me when I left the apartment that I’d need gloves in early October. “What do you have?”
He gestured at the obvious body. “Tell me why I called you.”
I stepped away from him, then between another officer and the medical examiner. On first glance at the body, my chest tightened. “Dammit, Murdock, you could have warned me it was a kid.”
“Late teens, we’re guessing. Haven’t checked for ID yet,” he said.
The cop standing next to me nodded without saying anything. When you’re with law enforcement, you see a lot of things you’d rather not. Dead kids are the worst. The younger they are, the worse it is. Even if this guy—this boy—turned out to be eighteen or nineteen, he still had a helluva lot of life to miss out on. And his parents, if he had them, were still going to be heartbroken. Telling the parents is the second-worst thing about it.
I put that aside for now and took in the scene. Lying faceup was a white male with dark brown hair, obviously young, with a pained grimace locked on his face. His head angled up too sharply to one side, which probably meant a broken neck. His arms and legs splayed out haphazardly. One foot had an orange Nike sneaker, the other just a plain white sock. He wore two hooded black sweatshirts, generic-looking jeans, and a bright yellow bandana on his head. The bandana was wrapped so that knotted ends stuck out from his temples. At a guess, I’d go with gangbanger. So far, unremarkable.
I swept my eyes up and down the body again. His clothes were frozen. That meant he was out in the rain long enough to get soaked before the air got cold enough to freeze him. And the mud around him. He was embedded in it, sunk a good two or three inches into the ground.
I scanned the periphery of the body and gazed outward in concentric circles as I turned. “He ended up here before the mud froze, but there’re no footprints and no indication he was dragged. No sign of a struggle.”
“Bingo,” said Murdock. “Tossed or dropped?”
Now I saw why Murdock had called me. The kid was too far from the edge of the field to have landed in this spot on his own. Either someone with tremendous strength had tossed him in or someone who could fly had dropped him. A fairy dropping him was an obvious possibility. I estimated the shortest distance to the street at fifty feet, well within the range of strength for a troll or even a dwarf. It could have also been an Unseelie, one of the shunned fey that don’t fit easily into any species category. We didn’t see a lot of those in Boston, but it was too early to rule out them out.
“I’d go for dropped,” I said. “There’s no slippage in the mud. He looks like he came straight down. I suppose if he were flung the right way from the street, he wouldn’t slide, but dropped is the easier explanation.”
Murdock nodded as though he had come to the same conclusion. “Naturally, that leads to ‘why?’”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, Murdock. Look at the gear he’s wearing. I think you’re looking at a gang fight.”
He tilted his head to the side as he continued looking at the body. “No physical signs of struggle, no visible bruises. We might find something when he’s stripped, but why would a fey bother with him?”
“Fey gangs are out there, too, Murdock. The xenos figure out how to hold their own against the fey ones. You know that,” I said. “And the human ones have been known to hire freelancers for a little revenge. I’d check that angle.”
He didn’t look convinced, but that’s Murdock’s nature. He wouldn’t be happy until he nailed it down precisely. I know he has more than a few files of unsolved cases that he uses for bedtime reading. He’s the type.
“Can you sense anything off him?” Murdock asked.
At one time, I had the ability to manipulate essence on a high level. I was growing, maturing into my skills to the point where I thought I might end up being one of the most powerful druids alive. It sounds vain and ambitious, which is why I would never have admitted the thought aloud to anyone. I had attracted the attention of some very powerful people, who took me under their wings, some of them literally. The more I learned, the more I saw that I hadn’t peaked yet.
But I fell. More like, “was knocked on my ass.” Hot on the trail of a miscreant terrorist elf named Bergin Vize, I had cornered him in a power plant. Just when I thought I could take him out, Something Happened. No one knows quite sure what, but it involved a lot of essence, a Teutonic ring of power, and a smidge of nuclear energy. I don’t remember anything after catching up to him. I woke up dead inside, with no real ability anymore, a mysterious mass in my head that feels like molten knives stabbing my brain whenever I try to manipulate essence. It gives me a really, really bad headache.
Now I have just a few abilities, none of which is extraordinary for someone of my kind. Human normals can replicate most of what I can do with the right accessories. Except for one thing, which is literally sense essence. For some reason, that skill remains strong. It might be because it’s a biological function. Receptors in my nose and eyes are what make it work. Most fey have the ability to some extent, but not as strongly as druids. Researchers have been studying the phenomenon for decades with no real understanding.
So, it was time for my parlor trick. “Can I have everyone step away from the body a moment?” I said.
Since working with Murdock, I was beginning to recognize more of the local force. In turn, they were getting used to me being around to help. The officers and medical examiner shuffled back to allow me a clear space.
I crouched over the victim, trying not to think about how young he was. Sometimes when you see dead bodies, you can tell if they knew what was coming. This kid did. He died scared. I shook the thought away and inhaled. The boy had been dead awhile. Between the cold and the rain, most of the essence he had recently come in contact with had faded. What hit me immediately was troll. Trolls have a strong essence that lingers. They also stink. That lingers, too. The next strongest essence was human, but not the victim’s. He had been with another human for an extended period before he died. To complicate matters, I picked up traces of two different elves and a fairy, all weak enough that I could not place the actual clans.
I told Murdock what I had found. “Our victim keeps very strange company.”
“
Well, it is the Weird,” he said.
I stood up. “True. But you don’t get elves and fairies hanging out together much. And everyone is creeped out by trolls.”
“That’s Guild talk, Connor. Politics don’t mean shit down here.”
He had a point. Publicly, the Guild was all about fey crime investigation first, politics second. Operatively, it’s the other way around. It makes a show of unity between the fey races—druids and fairies, elves and dwarves all one big happy family. But underneath lies chronic suspicion of each other’s motives. It’s been going on for over a century. The Celtic and Teutonic races had a little war that got out of hand, and somehow it caused the event known as Convergence. Modern reality found itself merged with parts of Faerie that it thought were just myth and legend. And the fight continues, sometimes physically, but mostly in boardrooms now.
Me, I couldn’t care less about Faerie. I was born here. I have no nostalgia for a place I’ve never known. While leaders of both sides talk about return, I’ll take this reality, thank you. Besides, I’ve asked people who would know, and there’s no Guinness in Faerie, so it couldn’t be that great.
“You’re right. But it still complicates things. He came in contact with two of the races that could have dropped him here. If I thought about it, I could probably come up with a way for an elf to do it, too. They’re pretty strong,” I said.
Murdock shrugged. “Hence, the job. We have some leads now. And unless this kid ends up being the son of the president of the United States, you know the Guild is not going to take the case. So it’s mine. Ours, if you want in.”
I didn’t have to think about it. I hate unsolved kid murders, human or fey. “I’m in.”
He turned his face to the sky. “What about this cold? It’s only around here.”
I had a little mind hiccup. Seeing Murdock check out the sky had me thinking for a moment that he could see the residual essence I was seeing, which wasn’t possible for a human. Then I realized he was just doing what everyone does when they talk about the weather; they look up.
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