“We all have our own metaphors in the visions. Someone told me that once,” I said.
She backed away. “Yeah, but I know my metaphors, and this isn’t one of them.”
The essence shifted and changed again when she stepped away. It cycled in a slow circle, the colors stretching into streamers of red, blue, and yellow. They coiled thinner and thinner, ribbons merging into purples, oranges, and greens. The colors pulled tighter, the main mass of essence in the center fading to pastel, then white. The colors tightened, darkening to gray. The circle spun faster, and the essence intensified around a black center.
Heat flared in my head with intense, pulsing pain. My vision went red, then white as my skin prickled with the jabs of a thousand needles. A maelstrom churned in front of me, a cyclone of white and black. The pain built until I felt nothing but the pain, the sting of it becoming one with my body. The vortex filled my sight, filled the room, filled the world. Nothing else existed but a stunning burn of white and black. The black center blossomed like an angry blot of ink in water, and I trembled.
“Stop,” Meryl shouted.
My sight went black, the sudden shutting down of light as the vibrant essence vanished. I staggered back as the room reasserted itself around me. Meryl stood a few feet away, holding the canvas away from me so I couldn’t see it. “What happened?”
“Your face turned white with essence. Black flames shot around your head,” she said.
I rubbed my eyes. Red and yellow spots danced behind my eyelids. “Sounds kinda cool.”
“It was a negative image of the painting,” she said.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my temples to counteract the pounding. “You saw the same thing? You saw the flamy, whirly thing?”
“Bright and clear, and so were you. I thought something was going to explode,” she said.
“Me, too. It was pretty for a while, but then, it always is,” Joe said.
“What always is?” I asked.
“The Wheel of the World,” he said.
Meryl placed the painting faceup on the floor and pulled the cheap plastic tablecloth off the table. “I’m taking this home. I don’t think you should be around it.”
I wasn’t going to argue. Even if Meryl reactivated Ceridwen’s wards to keep the scrying from hurting, there was little she could do to stop the temptation to look at it. Right then, looking at it was the last thing on my list, but I knew me. I had never been one to resist temptation well. I slumped onto the bed. “When will this be over?”
Joe hovered above the painting, staring at it as Meryl wrapped it. “Looks like Tuesday next, after dinner.”
15
Lunch had to be postponed while Meryl took the canvas back to her place. She refused to let me tag along because she never let me go to her place, but this time she had a point. If I knew where the painting was, knowing me, I’d want to check it out. She wasn’t interested in pretending she wasn’t home while I leaned on the doorbell. Instead, I went to the Guildhouse, which had been our postlunch plan anyway. We both had work to do there, so she met me afterward. We spent most of the day apart, though, me working in various library stacks while Meryl tended to mysterious chores on another floor.
Meryl’s office was a mess. Boxes filled with salvaged items from damaged storage rooms competed for space with her usual stacks and stacks of ephemera. Some things stayed for a few hours while Meryl found a better place for them, but I suspected a good chunk of it was going to hang around for a long time. I wasn’t helping by leaving books on her desk, reference titles I had found in the library section. Under normal circumstances, Meryl would scream at me for unshelving so many items at once, but I was digging in the older sections of the archives that she hadn’t cataloged. No catalog number technically meant no proper place.
I moved some files on the desk to place a stack of histories that I was going to take home. I was about to leave and resume my search when a piece of parchment on Meryl’s chair caught my eye. Hand-painted illuminations weaved up the side margins. At the top of the sheet was a blue heart pierced by a sword with white flames surrounding it. The stone in my head was blue beryl, at least when it had a physical form, and shaped liked a heart to some people’s eyes.
I picked up the sheet and skimmed the text. It was Old Elvish, dense and hard to decipher. The best I could make out was that it was a list of names, a lineage of some kind. Other sheets on the chair seemed to be from the same source. The illustrations and writing looked the same, but my translation skills of the language were rusty.
“You ruined my surprise,” Meryl said.
Startling at the sound of her voice, I held up the parchment. “What is this?”
She dropped some files on the floor. “I found it this morning. It refers to a faith stone.”
“Why didn’t you show me when I got here?” I asked.
She held her hand out. “I was looking for the rest. Pages are missing.”
I passed the first few sheets to her and picked up the rest. “My Old Elvish is rusty.”
Meryl hummed. “There’s not much here. The illuminations caught my eye. It starts with a recounting of an old German clan’s victories over its rivals. A war breaks out, and the clan chief finds a talisman that stirs the hearts of his followers. Sound familiar?”
“Does it talk about rituals or spells?” I asked.
She dropped the pages on her desk. “Not in this stuff. Maybe in the missing parts. I found them in a hallway upstairs, outside one of the temperature-controlled storage rooms. The ventilation system wasn’t warded inside. It looks like a tornado went through the room when the building came down.”
“Show me,” I said.
She slipped her hands on my chest and tugged at my jacket. “No. I warded the area until I can get someone to straighten it up.”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
“No, you won’t. I’ve seen you do research. You’ll start on it, then get focused on looking for the pages and tossing stuff aside until you make more of mess.”
“Meryl, this could be the answer I’m looking for. I need to know what do about this thing in my head,” I said.
She used the jacket to shake me from side to side. “Could, could, could. We have a few floors of stuff that could answer your questions. This is my playground, not yours. I’ve been pointing you to likely areas first,” she said.
I held up the papers. “This seems likely.”
She glowered at me from under her bangs. “Do not question the Chief Archivist. The Chief Archivist knows all. She will smite you if you ignore her.”
I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her close. “I love when you talk tough.”
“Crotch-grinding will not change my mind. Unlike you, my thinking parts are above the neck,” she said.
“Maybe it will change my mind,” I said.
She laughed. “Really? Maybe?”
I pouted in the best innocent expression I could muster. It wasn’t very good, which occasionally made it cute. “Wouldn’t hurt to try,” I said.
She slipped out of my arms and neatened the parchments on the chair. “No, thanks. That’s taking ‘love among the ruins’ a little too literally. Wanna see a dead body instead?”
I leaned against the doorway. “Now there’s a sexy segue.”
Meryl straightened up and destroyed my view. “I’ve been working upstairs. Druse is up there,” she said.
Meryl knew how to redirect a conversation better than I did. Druse was a leanansidhe, one of the most dangerous fey alive. Fortunately, few existed—and one less did since the night Shay saved my life and accidentally killed Druse. Her body had disappeared until Meryl found it in the ruins of the Guildhouse. Apparently, Nigel Martin had found the corpse and brought it to the Guildhouse.
I had complicated feelings about Druse. Her ability had accessed the same darkness as the one in my head. She used it to survive by draining essence from living beings. I thought I could learn something from her, that sh
e could show me how to use the darkness without being overwhelmed by it. The darkness was seductive, though, and draining essence was addictive. I found myself acting like a drug addict—not caring how I went about getting my essence fix. That road led me to almost killing Keeva macNeve and too many other people. Meryl knew I wouldn’t be able to resist seeing Druse’s body, if only to discover answers from her death that I didn’t get from her in life. “Okay,” I said.
Meryl’s office was in one of the lower subbasements of the Guildhouse. Between its depth and her security shielding, it had sustained little damage when the building came down. The levels above were another matter. The next floor up had survived the collapse with mixed results, mainly because Meryl hadn’t had control of the entire area. The floor was devoted to research and investigations—some of it academic, some the Guild equivalent of the police medical examiner’s morgue. We passed a series of rooms that looked all too familiar.
“When did they put holding cells up here?” I asked.
Meryl glanced at me with a sly grin. “Oh, something about discovering the dungeon had secret trapdoors and passages.”
Last year, a prisoner had escaped through one of the secret tunnels. Meryl knew more about the Guildhouse than almost anyone, and no one had bothered to ask her about security then. “Was anyone in here when the building collapsed?”
Meryl led me through a hallway strewn with debris. “They were evacuated in time. Some prisoners escaped. I double-checked anyway but didn’t find anyone.”
We entered a section that had not held up as well as the rest of the floor. Cracks had formed in the ceiling and walls. Stone had fallen in places, and walls had collapsed. As I passed a crumbled holding cell, a body signature snagged at my senses. I paused at the remains of a door and scanned the room. “That’s odd. Rand was in here.”
“Eorla’s Rand?” Meryl asked.
I stepped inside the room, which was furnished with a bed, chair, and small table. Deactivated dampening wards were anchored in each corner. Rand’s body signature registered the strongest, as if he had spent time there or expended some essence. “His body signature is all over this room. Do you have any records of who was held here?”
Meryl watched me scan the room. “I haven’t found any. When they closed off this section, they separated the security. Nigel seemed to be running the joint.”
I restrained myself from looking at her. The easy answer would be to ask Nigel, but Meryl had made it clear that she wasn’t going to let him out of Briallen’s sanctum anytime soon. My curiosity was trumped by Meryl’s revenge. I understood where she was coming from on the issue. I wasn’t going to force her to make any more choices because of me.
The room revealed nothing about what had happened in it or who had occupied the cell. Rand’s signature and faint whispers of others told me that people had been in the room, but not why. “I’ll see if Rand will tell me anything.”
We continued down the debris-strewn hallway to the back of the building. The force of the building collapse had shifted the wall and popped a door from its frame, leaving it hanging askew on its hinges. Meryl pushed the door aside to let me by.
Inside, a makeshift examining room had been set up. A small table occupied the center, the better to access the body from all sides. Druse lay on her back, a plain white sheet covering her nude body. The leanansidhe were small of stature, and she looked like a battered child. People always seemed smaller in death than they did in life, which was somehow sadder.
Shay had hit Druse with the stone ward bowl, leaving an indentation on the side of her skull like the dent in a deflated ball. The leanansidhe had lived deep underground, hidden from the people and the light. Nigel had cleaned up the body—even the years of dirt and grime. Her skin was bone white, with dark gray shadows. Her whiteless eyes were half-closed, as was her mouth. I had pitied her when she was alive, even though I found her revolting. Death did little to change my feelings.
Her body hadn’t decomposed. Square stone blocks on each corner of the table had a preservation spell running. I sensed Nigel’s body signature everywhere. “Did you recharge the wards?” I asked.
Meryl opened and closed drawers in a nearby cabinet. “Yeah. I have to figure out how to get the Guild to take her without their figuring out I’m down here. I’m not in the mood for midnight digging.”
I lifted the sheet. Old scars riddled the body, but nothing more recent like the head injury. Whatever Nigel was doing, he hadn’t performed an autopsy. “Why did Nigel have her here?”
Meryl crossed her arms and leaned against a counter. “Most of the stuff in here is for body-signature examination. He was probably trying to figure out what made her tick.”
“And me, by extension,” I said.
Meryl sighed with exasperation. “Ah, yes, it comes back to you.”
I frowned. “It’s not ego. One of the conditions the Guild had for dropping charges against me was that I submit to an exam by Nigel. I refused, but I bet Nigel wanted to investigate his theories.”
Meryl gazed down at the leanansidhe. “I’m teasing. You’re right. Nigel might not have said much to you after you lost your abilities, but he was interested in what happened to you.”
I pulled the cloth over Druse and smoothed it out. “For whatever his latest project was, you mean. It wasn’t me he was interested in but my condition.”
Meryl rubbed my arm with affection. “Can I say something? I know Nigel hurt you, and you guys will probably never be friends again….”
“Especially since you locked him up in Briallen’s attic and won’t let him out,” I said.
She grinned. “Well, yeah, that, but don’t forget, whatever his motivations, Nigel isn’t inherently evil.”
“I didn’t say he was,” I said.
“Yeah, you kinda do. Don’t mistake his sociopathic tendencies for malice,” she said.
I smiled down at her. “I didn’t think you were that forgiving. He tried to kill both of us.”
She nudged me. “And don’t mistake my position with forgiveness. He can only hurt you if you let him. That doesn’t mean you can’t lock the freak up and throw away the key.”
I hugged her. “I love your brand of tough love.”
As we stood holding each other, I gazed down at Druse. I didn’t know if a leanansidhe could be rehabilitated, but I did know she didn’t have anyone in her life who cared. I was lucky. I did. If I didn’t, I was positive I would end up on a slab like her.
My sensing ability picked up the ghost of her body signature. Nigel’s wards had maintained the residual energies as they were when he found her. It didn’t mean she was alive. Like all fey, her signature was unique to her, but the darkness produced a complicating effect. Her signature was riddled with tiny dark pits. Like the larger disruption in my head, they were entry points for the darkness to come out. I realized I had seen a signature like it before.
Guildmaster Manus ap Eagan was dying. His health had been failing for years, his essence fading away. When Murdock’s father tried to kill me, Eagan had used the last of his energy to defend me. As a result, he had been near death for weeks. I had attended his bedside. My presence provoked a reaction from his body signature. What had been a faint haze erupted into pinpoints of the dark mass. Eagan had had the darkness in him the entire time. It was what was killing him.
As I stood over Druse, I saw the same pattern of darkness. She had spent her life siphoning essence from others to keep the darkness at bay. When she couldn’t get essence from living beings, she sustained herself by using the stone bowl.
“Danu’s blood, Meryl, I think I’ve figured out a way to wake up Manus ap Eagan.”
16
By the time I reached the subway station through Meryl’s secret access tunnel, I had formulated a plan. If Eagan recovered, macGoren would be kncked off his perch at the Guildhouse. Eagan had always gone his own way within the Seelie Court. He had been among the strongest underKings, standing up to Maeve as far as possible w
ithout risking treason. His voice held tremendous sway within the Court, and his recovery would derail Maeve’s plans, at least temporarily.
It was a nice plan, except I hadn’t had much success against Maeve. I’d slipped her noose a few times, but I hadn’t seriously challenged whatever arcane strategy she had.
Sirens were blaring as I emerged from Boylston Street station. In the weeks since the Guildhouse collapse, sirens were sounded whenever a body was found in the wreckage. Search-and-rescue workers stopped their work to honor the dead. This time, a stream of black cars rushed through the streets, followed by the wailing of police cars. Curiosity got the best of me, and I hurried up to Park Square.
The square had become a staging area for debris removal. Construction and fire equipment sat amid the rubble. Stocky, hard-faced workers stood by the idle machinery. The salvage crews were mostly human. The recovered bodies were mostly fey. Even in a disaster, divisions between us were apparent.
When the Guildhouse had come down, it took surrounding buildings with it. Several small shops and restaurants were buried, with no way of knowing who was in them. The Park Plaza Hotel had escaped relatively unscathed except for blown-out windows. Since only the morbidly curious would want a view of the destruction, the hotel had suspended its regular business and become a de facto Guildhouse, housing administrative offices for the Guild as well as the recovery effort. The sidewalk around the hotel was the closest public access to the Guildhouse, and people gathered along the barriers to watch the spectacle of a body’s being carried through the debris.
With sunglasses and a baseball cap as simple camouflage, I went unnoticed in the crowd. In the press, macGoren had made a lot of noise about what a threat I was, but so far he hadn’t made a serious public move against me.
Joe popped in. Flits don’t like crowds—especially human crowds—so he came in low and quiet in order not to attract attention. “Word’s out they found someone important,” he said.
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