Unperfect Souls cg-4

by Mark Del Franco

  I helped him up. “Easy, let your head settle.”

  His hand jumped to his holster. “Where’s my weapon?”

  Joe pointed. “It’s bending over there.”

  Metal warped essence and screwed around with spells. All fey sensed it, and flits had a keener sense than most. Because they teleport using essence, not being sensitive to metal could have fatal consequences.

  Murdock picked up the other flashlight and found his gun. “What happened?”

  I leaned against a wall. “This is the part where I say I told you so.”

  Murdock leaned against a support and took a deep breath. “What the hell was that thing?”

  “A leanansidhe. It’s a nasty solitary that feeds on living essence. Apparently, you were tasty,” I said.

  He trained his flashlight beam along the wall. “That is undoubtedly the creepiest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  I played my own flashlight around us, illuminating more piles of clothing and shoes. “They’re parasites. I didn’t even know we had one in the Weird. It looks like she’s been down here a long time.”

  “I guess we found our killer,” he said.

  I pulled my jacket around me as a chill wind blew from somewhere. “Maybe not. Leanansidhes aren’t physically strong, but they’re sneaky. She wouldn’t risk a physical confrontation, and the Dead guy at the headworks was big. She’s probably been picking off homeless people down here when they’re sleeping. I bet she found that head down here somewhere.”

  Murdock wandered to where the head lay discarded on the floor. A look of disgust ran over his face. “What the hell was she doing with it?”

  I shrugged. “Not sure. It might have something do with the ability of the Dead to regenerate. Meryl said they can’t come back without their heads. Maybe there’s an essence thing going on.”

  Murdock stepped back from the head. “Well, counting that skull over there, we have three murder cases to close now, and that thing’s our primary suspect. We need to find her.”

  I ran the light over the hole through which the leanansidhe had escaped. “It won’t be easy. People hunt them, so they’re good at hiding. From the look of it, I’d say this one is old, so she’s experienced. Plus, now she’s more dangerous because she’s been discovered.”

  Murdock crouched at a distance from the wall and tried to see into the hole. “Is it okay to bring investigators down here?”

  I followed his gaze. “Yeah, I think so. There’s safety in numbers, even for humans.”

  He stretched. “She had no problem going after the three of us.”

  I nodded. “Flits are composed mostly of essence, so she was stronger than Joe on that level. In fact, flits are ideal victims because of that. She probably wasn’t worried about you because you read human even with your body shield, and, um, I don’t think she realized I was here at first.”

  “Why not?” The play of shadows on his face made his curiosity seem sinister.

  “I’m not sure. Last time I saw Gillen Yor, he said I’m not reading true druid anymore. Maybe she couldn’t read me.” Even though he was High Healer at Avalon Memorial, my case was a challenge for Gillen. Since he hadn’t able to figure out what the dark mass in my head was, I didn’t have much hope anyone else would.

  I didn’t want to tell Murdock what the leanansidhe had said. A leanansidhe calling someone a brother was like a serial killer calling someone a hunting buddy. Not the company I wanted to be included in. They were the fey bogey-men. Bogeywomen. I had never heard of a male one.

  “The Guild should handle this,” he said.

  “I agree, this time more than ever,” I said. Given the Guild’s usual indifference to all matters related to the Weird, it might not care all that much about a leanansidhe with some heads in a basement. On the other hand, an agent might want the challenge of the hunt. Leanansidhe were rare. That was about the only good thing about them.

  Joe popped in over our heads. “Did you stab it?”

  I tilted my head up at him. “No, she got away.”

  He slid his sword back into its scabbard and rubbed his hands together. “All righty, then. Now about that whiskey.”

  I swept my flashlight beam along the wall. “I think we’ve earned it. I have some Oreos at the apartment, too,” I said.

  He shivered as he peered at the dark hole where the leanansidhe had escaped. “Screw the cookies.”

  9

  Joe and I spent the rest of the evening drinking, a not uncommon activity for the two of us. Despite his intentions, he did clean me out of cookies. Given the number of crumbs lying around the apartment, I would swear he had used them as Frisbees more often than food. After puzzling over the leanansidhe, a fey neither of us had encountered before, our conversation turned to the casual chatter of old friends. It was a nice change of pace from all the recent drama, although the hangover in the morning reminded me that our alcoholic camaraderie had its downside. A hot shower beating down on me helped lessen the effects.

  For about the tenth time after drying off from the shower, I examined my chest in the bathroom mirror. The smooth skin showed no sign that hours earlier something dark and ethereal had sliced out of me like a knife. My mind could not reconcile the pain it generated with the lack of evidence of its manifestation.

  The dark mass in my head caused me physical pain. I felt the shape of it, sometimes like a smooth orb, sometimes like a sphere of blades. MRI scans showed a shadowy blur, but it appeared to have no physical substance, as if it was a visual manifestation of a metaphorical concept.

  Despite all the access to modern medicine and technology that never existed in Faerie, no one understood the dynamics of the interface between physical bodies and essence manipulation. It was, in that sense, magic—an occurrence of something powerful, even miraculous, yet unexplainable. Whatever was wrong with me had to do with that mysterious connection. I had a damaged interface, something unseen in Faerie because no one in Faerie ever fought over a nuclear-reactor pool. Bergin used an elven ring of power when we fought at a nuclear power station north of Boston. The best Gillen Yor could guess was that some kind of feedback occurred between the ring and the reactor, and destroyed my ability to tap essence.

  In the last month, something had changed. The thing in my head reacted to outside events. It moved in response to essence intrusions. When essence entered my body from outside, the darkness retaliated against it. It wouldn’t let me use essence, and it wouldn’t let essence touch me. I didn’t want to think it was conscious, and instead hoped that it was some kind of autonomic response. For it to be aware would be like living with a virus or a parasite. If that was true, it was taking something from me in return. What that was, I didn’t know and didn’t want to think about.

  The skin showed no sign of the black shadow’s exit and return. My chest felt sore, not the acute soreness of a wound but the more general pain of a fall. The thing inside me had expelled the leanansidhe’s essence. It had done something like that before. When I was attacked by the Dead a few weeks ago, the darkness came out of me like a thick smoke, an amorphous haze with no definition, that absorbed their essences. Now, though, this thing seemed to have a more defined shape and purpose.

  Idly, I traced my fingers along the tattoo on my left forearm. Another mystery. It wasn’t really a tattoo. A silver filigree that once decorated a spear decided it preferred being under my skin instead. A delicate pattern of branches wove around each other to form a mesh from my wrist to my elbow. The silver had been forged as part of a spell that bound essence into the metal to perform a very specific function: to allow travel across the veil between here and Faerie. The old stories simply called the resulting talisman a silver branch.

  Only, like so many other things since Convergence, it didn’t work the way it was intended. At least, it didn’t only work that way. It did help me get into TirNaNog through the veil and back again. It also seemed to do the opposite of the dark mass in my head. The talisman tattoo absorbed essence
and became powerful in its own right. A number of times, it actively struggled against the dark mass for control of surrounding essence. I had no idea what it was intended for or how to use it. And, like the dark mass, it didn’t seem any more inclined to help me gain access to my lost abilities.

  My damaged abilities were my problem, but the leanansidhe was another issue altogether. Whatever she was doing beneath the streets of the Weird, she was provoking some serious pain. The Guild had to help this time. Which meant an in-person appeal to Keeva macNeve.

  I slipped on my boots and put the daggers in their sheaths. The left one was for my old faithful, a steel blade that had served me well for over a decade. It had seen a lot of action in more than one rough-and-tumble case when I worked at the Guild. I kept it cleaned and polished, but it would show bloodstains under analysis. Briallen ab Gwyll had given me the knife in my right boot. She taught me the druidic path during my teen years before turning me over to Nigel Martin.

  Last spring, when she gave me the dagger, she was cryptic about it as a gift as well as as an object. It was old and powerful, laced with spells and inscribed with runes. I tried to piece together what they meant, but they were beyond my knowledge. The best I figured out was that powerful wards protected it, and that protection often extended to me when need be. Except, I didn’t know how it did that. Like the darkness in my head, the blade seemed to work for its own purposes sometimes—even turning into a sword once.

  I pulled on a hoodie sweatshirt as lining for my old leather jacket. I had lost my padded leather one in TirNaNog and missed it every day the past few weeks. Winter had settled into Boston with bitter winds and early dustings of snow.

  I headed out the door, and from the end of Sleeper Street, I cut over the Old Northern Avenue bridge into downtown proper. It was the fastest way out of my end of the neighborhood. At a hundred years old, the bridge was one of the oldest steel-truss bridges in the world. The swing mechanism even worked, so that at high tides, boats could sail up the channel. People admired it as a piece of old Boston even if they didn’t like the Weird beyond it. Artists painted and photographed it all the time, the four spans of crisscrossing steel making for interesting shapes and shadows. Late at night on a summer evening with the wind kicking up, it hummed and whistled and moaned. In December, I wanted to get off it as quickly as possible. It always felt colder than anything around it.

  A typically Boston juxtaposition greeted me at the other end. On one side of the channel sat the Weird, home to a century’s worth of architecturally interesting masonry, then the bridge with its classic erector-set beams, which led smack into the chaotic tangle of asphalt and concrete intersections in the financial district, surrounded by smooth, impersonal skyscrapers. Say what you would about the Weird, but someone was ten times more likely to get mugged at midnight on Summer Street in the business district than on Old Northern at two in the morning.

  Despite the cold, I walked through the financial district, then Chinatown, then the theater district. The subway was not the direct route to the Guildhouse and didn’t let off particularly near it anyway. Being chilled waiting in a subway tunnel was little different than being chilled walking. Besides, I was in no hurry to be underground again.

  The forbidding presence of the Guildhouse loomed over Park Square. The winter sun bleached the gray stone almost white. Danann security agents circled above the many towers and turrets, while brownie guards moved along the ground perimeter. After the riots of the previous month, everything remained on high alert. A chain of Guild petitioners waited in the cold on the sidewalk. They formed a long, sinuous line that stretched around the far corner. For security, the lobby had been put off-limits to the general public.

  Under normal circumstances, I would have challenged the guards and the receptionists for the fun of it. Not so long ago, being barred entrance galled me, but lately, that wasn’t mattering to me so much. I wasn’t the Guild investigator I once was. I was okay with that. Being a Guild investigator didn’t appeal to me anymore anyway. I called Keeva macNeve on my cell.

  “I’m downstairs and need to talk to you,” I said, when she picked up.

  “And if I say no?” she asked.

  “No games, Keev. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Fine. I’ll tell them to let you through.”

  As she hung up, nearby brownie guards shifted positions, and two led me inside. They escorted me in silence up to the Community Liaison floor and left me in the reception area. The young wood fairy behind the desk stared at me with her pale green eyes as if she had never seen a druid before. I didn’t wait for her to say anything but went down the hall to Keeva’s office.

  Keeva was typing aggressively at her computer but threw me a brief glance. I sat while she finished, then she turned to me with a sly smile. “I have to say I’m impressed you came in here.”

  I smiled cordially. “That’s high praise coming from you.”

  She shook her head. “You do realize the entire building went on alert when you walked in?”

  “I’m flattered.”

  She snorted. “Yes, I guess you would consider it flattering that people are afraid you’ll cause an interdimensional meltdown.”

  I grinned. “And you’re not?”

  She shook her head again. “I know better, Connor. You don’t have any other ability than to attract disaster. What do you want?”

  “I found a leanansidhe in the Weird,” I said.

  She arched an eyebrow. “Oh? I thought you were dating that Meryl Dian person.”

  I frowned with amusement. Meryl was not Keeva’s favorite person. The feeling was mutual. “I’m serious. You should send someone down.”

  She sighed. “There you go again, telling me how to do my job. We’re stretched thin with all the new security. Frankly, if we’ve got a leanansidhe down there, she’ll probably save us from arresting a few people.”

  “That is so not funny,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Connor, the solitaries are coming out of the woodwork. I get daily reports from Commissioner Murdock about them. I never realized we had so many in Boston. They’ve become incredibly aggressive.”

  “That’s because the Dead are killing them. They’re defending themselves.”

  She rubbed her neck. “And whose fault is that, I wonder?”

  I pulled in my chin. “Are you really going to lay that on me? I stopped whatever was happening on Samhain. If I hadn’t closed the veil, we’d have a bigger problem than the Dead.”

  Keeva looked doubtful. “Let’s see: an underQueen of Faerie died, your old partner Dylan died, several dozen fey and humans died in the rioting, you destroyed a possible way back to Faerie, and, oh, by the way, the Dead of TirNaNog are roaming the streets of Boston. Next time you feel like helping, Connor, stay inside whatever bar you’re in and resist the impulse.”

  I slouched in the chair. It sounded pretty awful when she put it like that, but, really, it wasn’t my fault. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. “Don’t change the subject. I can’t believe I told you there’s a leanansidhe out there, and you’re not itching to hunt it down yourself.”

  A conflicted look came over her. “I’m too busy. If I can, I’ll get an agent to help your buddy Murdock for a day or two, but no guarantees.”

  “Busy? It’s a leanansidhe, Keeva. You can’t tell me you’re not concerned or interested.”

  She pursed her lips. “Is there anything else, Connor?”

  Keeva’s body signature rippled. I tapped my essence-sensing ability and sensed a thin layer of additional essence around her. “Are you wearing a glamour, Keeva?”

  Her eyebrows drew together. “It’s rude to look at my essence without permission.”

  “You are wearing a glamour! I’ve known you for years, Keeva macNeve. I know what your body signature looks like. Why are you wearing a glamour?”

  She became decidedly uncomfortable. “I don’t want people asking me about my health, Connor. I’m here to do my job, not answer questions abou
t my body signature.”

  I leaned forward, concerned. Genuinely. Keeva and I didn’t agree on a lot of things, but I didn’t hate her enough to wish her ill. “Are you all right? Have you seen Gillen Yor?”

  She pulled herself in toward the desk. “Connor, I said I didn’t want to talk about my health. Yes, I’m fine. Yes, I’ve seen Gillen Yor. My condition is no one’s business and doesn’t affect my ability to do my job. Next subject.”

  She had taken some serious essence hits in the last few months. I had walked in on her exam at Avalon Memorial a few weeks earlier and seen the damage. Danann fairies were strong—incredibly strong. I thought she’d be recovered by now. “Does macGoren know?”

  Ryan macGoren was powerful, but essence sensing was not an ability Danann fairies worked well. They could do it with physical touch—and I assumed he touched her, since they had been a couple for months—but if he wasn’t looking for something and Keeva didn’t want him to know, she would have no problem hiding it from him.

  “That’s even more off base. If I promise to send someone down to the Weird, will you drop it?”

  “Okay.” Keeva’s temper was short normally, but she was more on edge than usual. Actively helping the human police force against fey people couldn’t be sitting well with her. Keeva might enjoy the privileges of her position, but she was still fey and took pride in that.

  I changed the subject. “Any idea when this curfew is going to end?”

  “That’s Commissioner Murdock’s call. The Guild board supports his decisions.”

  “And you agree with it?” I asked.

  She sighed with impatience. “I don’t have to agree with it. Ryan is Acting Guildmaster, and I act under his direction. It’s the job.”

  She didn’t say she agreed with it. “Since when is Ryan Acting Guildmaster? I didn’t hear he was named.”

  She shrugged. “He is in everything but name. Eagan hasn’t gotten around to making it official.”