Uncertain Allies

by Mark Del Franco

  I did pity him then, a drunken old fool who had no idea the danger he was in. Like me, he had been sucked up in power politics without intending to be. Unlike me, he had no awareness of it, sure he was maneuvering his way out of a simple barter that had gone bad. “Have Ceridwen send someone for you, Nar. You can’t stay in here forever.”

  He waved at a waitress. “That one. Another high-on-herhorse woman who thinks Nar Veinseeker can be used. Well, I used her, dammit. I used her to keep that witch away from me for weeks like I wanted, then I laid a trap for Gerda, and she sprung it. Beautiful piece of work, it was.”

  “You killed her,” I said.

  He snorted. “She killed herself. She stole an access stone to try to kill me. No one forced her to walk into that wall.”

  “You set her up,” I said.

  He grinned and hopped off the stool. “Damn straight. She’s been hunting me for a hundred years, and now I’m free. Leave me be, Grey. You’re killing my party.”

  “At least stay here until I get back,” I said.

  He bowed and lost his balance, bumping into several people. “Gladly, my friend. The night is long, and I’m short on drinks. Buy me a drink, and I’ll spot you a tale.”

  He stumbled into the crowd, pushing his way back to his booth. I wanted to drag the idiot out of the place, but he would make a scene in the state he was in. Making a scene was against Heydan’s rules. Besides, I didn’t have the physical strength to wrestle a drunk dwarf out the door.

  I lingered in the alley outside, trying to decide what to do. Nar was right that Alfheim’s henchmen had disappeared. I hadn’t seen the Wild Hunt all night. Ceridwen probably wasn’t in any mood to save his ass anyway. I debated watching out for him myself, but I had my own spies on me.

  I called Rand and explained the situation. “Can you get someone to make sure he gets home alive?”

  “I’ll do it myself,” he said.

  “I didn’t want to ask,” I said.

  He chuckled on the other end of the line. “Right. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Curious, I hung up the phone. Rand’s attitude made me wonder what he knew about me, whether Eorla confided in him. He was acting awfully familiar for someone who didn’t know me well.

  I now knew what Donor and Vize were after. I knew who they were going after to find the faith stone. By keeping tabs on Veinseeker, I had a chance to contain the situation. Rand would watch the rest of the night. I would take over in the morning. Veinseeker was not going anywhere without my knowing about it.

  I made my way home to a warm bed and a hot woman.

  34

  I jumped when Meryl bolted upright in bed. In the dim light of the living room, her dark shape appeared featureless and unmoving. “What is it?”

  She threw back the covers. “We need to take a walk.”

  As I was reaching for the alarm clock, we both squinted when she turned on the light. “It’s almost four A.M.”

  She hopped in place getting into her jeans. “Heydan said we should go down to the bar,” she said.

  I was next to her in an instant, pulling on my pants. “Is it Nar?”

  “Probably. He didn’t say. He said we—you, actually—would want to be there,” she said.

  I pulled on a T-shirt. “It’s Nar. I wonder why Rand didn’t call me.” She flashed me a concerned look. “What? Did Heydan say something about Rand? Is he okay?

  She disappeared into the bathroom. “He didn’t say anything. I was being ominous.”

  I put on my jacket and held Meryl’s while I waited for her. “Should I call Leo?”

  She came out brushing her hair. “Let’s see what it is. No sense waking everyone up in the middle of the night.”

  As I locked the apartment, the security wards Eorla had installed for me activated. The elven essence shimmered across the door, an odd sensation for me since I had spent so much of my life fighting the Teutonic fey. We skipped the old elevator and quick-stepped down the stairs to Sleeper Street.

  At 4:00 A.M., the Weird was a perilous place. The late-night revelers had thinned, taking the protection of a large crowd with them, and the more mundane working crews had not hit the streets yet. The hard-core partiers were the only ones out, the ones who had no legal jobs to go to in the morning and the desperate still out looking for a fix or an adrenaline rush. They weren’t shy, but prone to confrontation or threat to whoever stood in their path. They sensed their own kind on some instinctual level, eyeing each other in the street, granting a wide berth on the sidewalk out of professional courtesy. It wasn’t fear. It was respect. Anyone else was fair game.

  Meryl waved hello to a group of guys, who waved back with tight smiles. “What are those guys doing on this end of the street?”

  I hugged her from the side as we hurried down the sidewalk and kissed her on the top of the head. “Uh . . . the neighborhood caught on fire down the other end, buildings exploded, people died, and martial law went into effect,” I said.

  Her eyes widened in realization. “Oh, right. I thought a decent club opened around here I didn’t know about.”

  The alley down to Yggy’s was empty, the lone light over the beat-up metal door illuminating a small pool of asphalt. The door clanked open, and someone walked off in the opposite direction toward the harbor. Rand drifted out of the shadows as we reached the entrance. “He’s still in there,” he said.

  “Are you sure? We got a sending to come down,” I said.

  Puzzled, Rand glanced at the door. “He hasn’t come out. Yggy’s doesn’t have a back door.”

  One of Heydan’s rules was that you left through the door you came in. It cut down on games and forced the clientele to behave themselves. No one wanted to deal with the bouncers if something started. “Nar told me I’d be surprised at how close his hidey-hole was. Maybe he has some kind of arrangement with Heydan. Let’s see what’s up,” I said.

  Inside, the music filled the bar more than the patrons. Liquor service was supposed to shut down at 2:00 A.M., but no cops ever bothered Heydan. Still, people tended to move on to more raucous venues after hours. Nar wasn’t in sight. We went to the back hall, where the restrooms were.

  “I’ll check,” Rand said, in answer to my unspoken thought. A moment later, he emerged and shook his head.

  Meryl walked toward a roped-off staircase. “Heydan said the roof.”

  “I didn’t know he allowed people anywhere else in the building,” I said.

  Meryl glanced over her shoulder. “Yeah, people. Not everyone.”

  I followed her up the dark stairs, winding through the building. Rand brought up the rear, summoning up a light body shield. The thump of the bar faded below as we passed closed doors, each floor painted black from floor to ceiling and covered with dust. The last flight was steep, and a door to the sky stood open at the top. Outside, years of debris littered the roof, old asphalt embedded with pea gravel. Beer bottles, condoms, broken ward stones, and shattered glass created their own layer of waste. In all the years I had been drinking at Yggy’s downstairs, I had no idea so much action happened on the roof.

  A small addition leaned against the abutting warehouse. At one time it had served as a greenhouse, maybe a respite for whoever owned the building in the days it had harbored a sweatshop. Now, the south-facing wall was an expanse of dirty, cracked windowpanes, and the door hung askew.

  The financial district shone overhead across the channel, office buildings lights on for no one. To the east, signals blinked blue and red on empty runways at Logan Airport. The roof gravel crunched beneath our feet as we walked toward a tall wooden scaffolding, part wood, part metal pipe, that supported old civil-defense horns thirty feet above the roof. The scaffolding was a remnant from World War II, when the East Coast had feared a massive invasion across the Atlantic. The invasion never came, but the horns remained, their original red paint fading over time to black-pitted maroon. Some were still used for emergencies around the city, but I never heard the ones in the Weir
d go off. They would probably go off constantly if they still worked.

  Nar’s body swayed in the breeze from the harbor, the leather cord around his neck making a soft squeak as it rubbed against a wooden brace. His right eye had been removed, a stain of blood and viscera trailing down his cheek. A glossy round stone bulged in the socket where the eye used to be.

  Meryl had to tilt her head far back as we stood beneath the body. “There are so many bad jokes running through my head right now, but instead I’ll question the wisdom of his meeting you in a bar.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Rand circled around the other side of the tower. “I failed you and apologize. My understanding was that those back stairs were warded, and no one was allowed elsewhere in the building.”

  “No blame from me. That’s what I thought, too. Did you see Vize tonight?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “None of the Elven King’s operatives entered while I watched.”

  “Vize has a nixie companion. She can cloak him,” I said. Gretan was taller than Joe, but not by much. She might have been able to slip past Rand, but I doubted she had the ability to overwhelm a dwarf.

  “I didn’t detect any unusual body signatures. I will check the alley again,” he said.

  “Don’t bother. It was Vize,” I said.

  “What makes you so sure?” Meryl asked.

  I gestured at the roof. Meryl sensed essence like I did. “The dead spots of essence around the tower. Vize used the darkness to absorb his body signature and hide his trail,” I said.

  “Can you do that?” she asked.

  I nodded. I wasn’t ready to tell her that I had almost absorbed some of her essence at Shay’s studio. “What do you make of the stone in his eye?”

  Before she answered, a welling of essence built beneath us like the shock wave of something huge surfacing from within the building. Meryl and Rand felt it, too, and we all turned toward the door. No one came out of the stairwell, but the decrepit greenhouse glowed with a deep blue light that faded. The tall figure of Heydan appeared in the doorway.

  I had to admit, Heydan gave me the shivers. The power he emanated was subtle yet immense, like a placid mountain pool that hid unfathomable depths. Ridged bone showed beneath the skin of his forehead, rising from his temples and back over his bare head. His calm, dark eyes beneath a heavy brow focused over our heads at Nar’s body. With ponderous steps, he moved out of the ruined greenhouse and joined us beneath the tower, keeping his gaze on the dead body.

  “This is deep work and bodes no good thing,” he said.

  “What happened to his eye?” I asked.

  Heydan shifted, moving his body away from tower. “It was taken for what it had seen. The stone conveyed the memory.”

  I looked at Meryl. “He knows where it is now.”

  Heydan lowered his gaze to me. “You know what was sought?”

  I gestured at the swinging body. “Veinseeker hid a stone of power. A terrorist named Bergin Vize wants it to take down the Seelie Court.”

  Heydan stepped to the edge of the roof, peering off into the night sky above the harbor. Seeing such a large person one step from the six-story drop made me a little queasy. He remained silent and unmoving for so long that I wondered if he had forgotten we were there. “It is the nature of power to invite its own destruction. Shadows grow and ebb against the future as ever. I listen and wait.”

  “Do you know where Vize is?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer for another few minutes, then stepped back from the edge. “I do not know this man. It matters not who he is.”

  “It matters to me, maybe a lot of other people. I would appreciate the help,” I said.

  Heydan’s deep eyes gleamed beneath his shadowed brow. “I watch and listen. I heard a shadow move like to the one within you. The Wheel of the World turns, and I hear the sighing of Its passage. What say you to a hanging man?”

  “I warned him this would happen. He didn’t listen,” I said.

  “No one ever does,” he said.

  35

  The sky over the alley outside Yggy’s bled gray into black. Police lights flashed on Old Northern, rubberneckers pressing against crime-scene tape. Gerry Murdock leaned against a squad car, indifference in his stance though he threw the occasional glower in my direction. Meryl wrapped her arms around me inside my jacket to keep warm in the cool morning air.

  Next to the entrance to the bar, another door stood open leading to the building stairwell. Heydan wouldn’t let the police in the bar and disappeared after he opened the access door. Murdock came down the alley, all pressed shirt and clean shoes. He didn’t stop to talk to his brother. He glanced at the medical-examiner staff car. “Is Janey here yet?” he asked.

  “No, OCME sent someone else,” I said.

  He slid his hands into his pants pockets, standing back to let a beat officer enter the building. “Looks like we have the same case again.”

  “Yeah, but this time we know who the killer is,” I said.

  “Vize?” he asked.

  I nodded. “He knows where the stone is now. It’s only a matter of time before he finds it.”

  “Can we use the vitniri to track him?” Murdock asked.

  “They’re not dogs, ya know. You can’t point, and say, ‘fetch.’ They need a reason,” said Meryl.

  “I wasn’t under the impression that reason and half wolves went together all that well,” Murdock said.

  A tinge of red flushed across Meryl’s cheeks. “They’re still people,” she said.

  Murdock smirked and nudged her. “You’re so easy sometimes.”

  “Not in my experience,” I said. They both turned to look at me like I had no business interrupting. The look, in fact, reminded me that I didn’t. “I want to get ahead of Vize. We’ve been chasing him. We’ve been everywhere he’s been. Even if he had to kill Nar to get the answer, there’s a method to his search that we’re not seeing. We’re missing the pattern.”

  “Old dwarves and stone,” Murdock said.

  Meryl nodded in feigned amazement. “I would never have noticed that.”

  Down on the avenue, a murmur ran through the crowd. People had turned their attention from the alley to the sky. Above us, three Guild agents swept across the alley and over the roofline of the building. “That’s interesting. The Guild hasn’t touched a crime scene down here in ages,” Murdock said.

  “Veinseeker popped up on the alert database,” Meryl said.

  “Why didn’t you tell us he was in the Guild database?” Murdock said.

  She cocked an eye at him. “Um . . . because I’m not a field agent on your case, and no one asked me to? And that I picked up the alert from a security sending about a minute ago? And did I mention I’ve been in a coma?”

  Amused, Murdock grunted. “That coma’s going to get a lot of mileage, isn’t it?”

  With a small smile, Meryl tilted her head down. “Would you like to try one?”

  More Guild agents landed at either end of the alley and began clearing everyone out. Instead of waiting to be tossed, we walked to the avenue. At the sidewalk, the Boston police were moving their crime-scene perimeter farther out, pushing the crowd back.

  Murdock leaned against his car. “Why is it I’m annoyed when the Guild won’t take a case in the Weird and pissed off when they do?”

  “Because it speaks to your ineffectual nature,” Meryl said. They made faces at each other.

  “The Guild knows where the faith stone is. That’s why they’re here,” I said.

  Meryl nodded. “Veinseeker is flagged in the system for a reason. If you guys haven’t connected him to anything else, the stone’s as good a reason as any for the Guild to watch for him.”

  I gave Meryl a playful look. “Can I ask you a favor?”

  She sighed. “Yes, I will hack into the system, Grey.”

  I hugged her. “See? Not everything involves major interdimensional meltdowns.”

  “Yet,” said Murdock. We got in hi
s car and drove past the growing line of Guild agents. At the Boylston Street T station, Meryl remained in the car as I stood on the curb. “Do you need change for the fare?” she asked.

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  She poked me in the chest. “I’m allowed in the front door. If I’m going to be hacking security and someone catches me, I’m not raising questions about how I got in without my building pass registering.”

  I tapped her nose. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  I entered the station and paid the fare. This early in the morning, the platform was empty and the token-booth agent half-asleep. I walked into the tunnel unseen. The glamour covering the access door to the escape tunnel had an odd resistance but let me through. I was down the stairs and through the passageway in minutes.

  Meryl was at her desk before I reached her office. The room was back in some semblance of order, at least by her standards. The piles of papers and folders that had been knocked over were back in their precarious piles, the chair was unsittable with boxes, and the trashed computer components on her credenza had been replaced and reconnected. “I will get this done with less annoyance if you stop reading over my shoulder,” she said.

  I perched at the far end of the credenza. “You don’t want me to see how you get in.”

  She smirked. “If you can’t figure it out yourself, you don’t deserve to know.”

  She sorted through screens, leaning back now and then as she waited for something to run. “Okay, here’s a problem. Veinseeker’s alert was assigned by Manny.”

  “Eagan? The Guildmaster never put stuff in the system himself,” I said.

  “Maybe not these days. The alert goes back decades. There are even scans of old paper memos in here that predate computers,” she said.

  I read over her shoulder. “No reason given for the flag.”

  Another screen popped open. “Here’s something: Veinseeker worked on the Guildhouse,” she said.

  “When? As far as I know, dwarves never worked here,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Not like that. He helped build the place, Grey. Looks like he used to own a quarry.”