Unperfect Souls cg-4

by Mark Del Franco

  He shrugged. “He says it was a solitary named Sekka. A jotunn who hates the Dead.”

  Murdock and I exchanged glances. “That’s whose head we found in the sewer, Janey,” I said.

  “How’d she lose her head if she took his?” Murdock asked.

  By his reaction when Janey asked him—his pleased reaction—Jark hadn’t known Sekka was dead. He evaded Janey’s questioning at first, enjoying her frustration before giving up a tidbit. “The last thing he remembers is the giant attacking him and a brief pain as she swung a sword at his head. He says the last thing he saw was the Hound, so maybe the Hound killed him.”

  “And why would the Cwn Annwn want to kill you?” I said to Jark.

  He chuckled as Janey translated. Janey blushed at his response. “He says he wasn’t killed by a dog.”

  She didn’t mention the part where Jark called me a string of unflattering names reflecting my stupidity, asked why a woman would want to know so much about death, then he had hit on her. “Who is the Hound?” I asked.

  “He says ‘no one knows and no one wants to know. The Hound hunts the living and the Dead.’”

  By the look on his face, Jark was lying. He was probably already planning his revenge. I caught Murdock’s eye. “Can we hold him?”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “For a while. Legal status on the Dead is a mess.”

  Jark turned this way and that as he followed our conversation. I pulled Janey aside. “Not, obviously, that you can’t take care of yourself, but I don’t want to leave you alone with him. Is there an officer in the building, maybe more than one?”

  “Sure,” she said. We walked with her to a phone by the door and listened while she asked for security. She replaced the receiver. “They’ll be right down.”

  Murdock abruptly walked out. “I’ll be outside.”

  Janey watched him leave. “Is he okay?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure. He’s a Christian. I don’t think any of this is sitting well with him.”

  She rubbed her arms as if to warm herself as she looked across the room at Jark. “I can’t say I blame him. I didn’t grow up with the Dead appearing on this side of the veil. I thought those were just stories.”

  “At least they were stories that fit your religion,” I said.

  She nodded. “I guess. It’s funny. Despite my job, I don’t think about death much on a personal level. My people die by accident or murder. I don’t have—I don’t know, a connection to it in the same way humans do. Maybe that’s why they fear us, Connor. Even death isn’t an end for the fey.”

  I nodded at Jark. “I don’t think that’s what the fey expect when they do die.”

  “It’s probably why the solitaries are fighting so hard. They used to have an idea of what came after death. Now it’s a mystery,” she said.

  I hadn’t thought of it that way. She was right. With TirNaNog closed to the Dead, no one knew what happened to the fey when they died. It hadn’t hit me because I wasn’t a target. For all my fears about a shortened life span because of the dark thing in my head, I hadn’t been confronted with the visceral realization that death might be an end and an end only.

  “Thanks for this, Janey. Our friend here might have given us something solid to follow up,” I said.

  She crossed her arms. “No, thank you. This has to be one of the more fascinating things I’ve seen here. I’m not used to my cases sitting up and talking to me.”

  I smiled slightly. “With any luck, this will be the only one.”

  Jark’s anger had subsided to confusion. He was only . . . animated . . . because we intervened. He had no idea how close he had come to an eternal nothingness. If the leanansidhe had drained the remains of the essence in his head, if we hadn’t brought his head and body together, he wouldn’t be sitting in bindings, wearing nothing but a towel, and wondering what the hell we were talking about.

  “Maybe this is what Convergence brought the fey here for, Janey—to experience an end to all things they knew and give them the humans to help them cope.”

  “I hope that’s not true, Connor. I hope it’s the opposite—that humans can learn the value of thinking beyond their finite lives. The Wheel of the World keeps turning no matter what. It doesn’t stop when we die. If there’s one thing the fey and humans have in common, it’s that neither of us knows why things happen they way they do.”

  “Amen to that,” I said.

  She laughed.

  Murdock waited outside with the car running. How he had managed to get newspaper all over the passenger seat in the short time he’d waited there was beyond me. I tossed it all in back.

  “You okay?” I asked, as he drove down Albany Street under the highway.

  “Yeah. I needed some air.”

  “I wonder if we can count this Jark as an eyewitness to his own murder,” I said.

  “Does it matter anymore? He’s not dead, and she is,” he said.

  The fey certainly managed to produce entertaining legal puzzles. “Well, we still have Sekka’s murder to deal with.”

  He nodded. “At least we have a lead without having to do another resurrection.”

  “The animosity between the solitaries and the Dead is going to become a problem with the Taint involved.”

  He drove over the Broadway bridge into Southie. “I’ve been warning my father things are spiraling. Some community activist pressured the mayor’s office about it, so they agreed to the neighborhood meeting. My dad doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble.”

  “Then what is he doing to reduce the tension?”

  Murdock shrugged. “Leaving it to the Guild, I guess. You know how my father is, Connor. The more the fey screw up—especially down in the Weird—the happier he is. He’d like nothing more than for the entire neighborhood to disappear.”

  A sinking, guilty feeling hit me. Murdock and I talked about his father all the time because of the political issues he was involved in. After what Manus ap Eagan asked me to do, suddenly the discussion felt like information pumping. It was, in a way, but not for Eagan. I had been meaning to tell Murdock about my conversation with Eagan. I knew Murdock well enough that the longer I held off, the more annoyed he would be with me. “Eagan tells me you’re dating someone.”

  Murdock chuckled in surprise. “The Guildmaster talks about my social life?”

  I shook my head. “Actually, no. He thought if he told me you were sleeping with someone, and I didn’t know, I would resent it and would wheedle information out of you about planned police actions against the fey and funnel the information to him.”

  Murdock’s jaw dropped in a half smile. “What?”

  We cruised down to Old Northern Avenue. Out of habit, we both scanned the sidewalks to check out the action. “No lie. Eagan’s worried your father’s playing him for a fool.”

  Murdock flicked an eyebrow up and down. “He probably is. Nothing my father likes more than putting one over on the Guild.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, that’s about the only thing your father and I have in common. But Eagan might have a point. This thing brewing between the solitaries and the Dead is bound to make someone look bad. It’s too much of a legal tangle not to.”

  Murdock pulled up in front of my building. “Are we surprised? The jurisdictional issues are so messed up that nothing’s being handled. Just to spice things up, with all the gang deaths in the last couple of months, there’s a power vacuum on the streets. You know it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

  I slumped against the door. “You know what I really want to know?”

  Murdock frowned with curiosity. “What?”

  “Who you’re sleeping with.”

  He laughed. “No comment.”

  I didn’t care who he was dating. Curious, sure, but at the end of the day, Murdock told me what he wanted to tell me, and that was okay. I respected him enough to accept what he decided. He’s done a lot for me in the two years that I’ve known him, not least of which was save my life. If anyone de
served some slack from me, it was him.

  I punched him playfully in the arm. “Jerk.”

  13

  I spent the day catnapping and reading, my curiosity about the leanansidhe prompting more reading and Internet surfing. Everything I knew about the leanansidhe filled one small volume on my bookshelf. Internet searches picked up no reliable primary references. Few leanansidhe existed, and those that did spent their lives hidden and alone. By nature, they were not forthcoming, never mind social. Their reputation was too well-known for them to live openly. By all accounts, they absorbed the essence of the living. As with most legends, the whole truth lay beneath hyperbole and falsehoods. If the only essence the leanansidhe survived on was living essence, their presence would be determined quickly. Just look for the dead, essenceless bodies.

  Yet they managed to survive. I was willing to bet that the leanansidhe sought other essence resources. Those who survived encounters with them were probably unique situations. As Joe likes to say “kings and queens” about things like that, meaning “yeah, that’s one version, but the reality smelled worse and was usually boring.”

  It wasn’t enough. Failure to learn more drove me out into the night. The chronic lack of progress in understanding what had happened to my abilities frustrated me—and created situations that put lives at risk. Janey and Murdock could have been seriously injured by Jark—or worse. I hadn’t thought through resurrecting a Dead man with Taint in his body essence. I failed to protect them because I had no abilities to use against him. No matter what people said about using the abilities you had instead of wishing for ones you didn’t, the berserker couldn’t have been stopped without essence abilities. Abilities I didn’t have anymore.

  The leanansidhe knew something about the dark mass. I had seen it, and the thing inside me had reacted to it. It was in her, too, at least something very much like it. For the first time since my accident, I had something that looked like a clue as to what was wrong with me. I had to know if it meant anything. I had to know if the leanansidhe knew something.

  Over two years the dark mass had been in my head, blocking my abilities. Over two years of mistaken diagnoses and dead-end treatments. My healer Gillen Yor was at a complete loss. My friend Briallen’s eyes showed more fear every time she examined me. No amount of ibuprofen stopped my chronic pain.

  And it was getting worse.

  The thing inside me was escaping, for lack of a better word. Whatever it was, it was attracted and repulsed by essence. If essence threatened me, it reacted to protect me, and when it did, it devoured the essence. When a group of the Dead recently attacked me on Samhain, the dark mass absorbed them. I hadn’t really understood that at the time, but it was the only explanation under the circumstances. The only person who seemed to know what it was, was one of the most reviled beings known to human and fey.

  Brother. She’d called me brother.

  Inside the warehouse, my breath steamed in the shaft of light from my flashlight. Despite the many doors and hallways, the basement door was easy to find. The building had been empty so long that dust on the floor was evolving into dirt. I followed the recently disturbed path that the crime-scene investigators had made. The trail ended at a large door with rusted and dented sheet metal nailed over it. It opened with the whine of metal on metal and exposed stairs going down. The corrugated metal steps rang dully beneath my boots as I descended.

  I swept my flashlight beam across the sealed-off basement. The categorized piles had been removed, then tagged and bagged in evidence lockers at police headquarters. All the clothing, the hats, the shoes—everything the leanansidhe had picked off her victims—were being sorted and scanned, compared to missing persons reports, maybe analyzed for DNA. Phone calls would go out to doctors and dentists. If anything matched a file description, a police officer would have to make that long, slow walk to the door of the next of kin. With the volume of material I saw, it was going to be a long while before the police processed everything. A lot of cold cases were going to be closed. This being the Weird, a lot of unanswered questions were going to result, too. Not all the missing are missed.

  The crime-scene team had enlarged the hole the leanansidhe had escaped through. A bone-chilling draft wafted over me from between the jagged bricks. Silence filled the utter darkness beyond. Why the section had been sealed off wasn’t obvious. The columned space inside was devoid of the usual abandoned equipment or stock supplies left by long-gone businesses.

  Body signatures from the investigative team lit up in my sensing ability, two fey signatures mixed in with about a dozen human. Keeva macNeve must have sent someone from the Guild. Probably to cover her ass. If the leanansidhe went after humans, she’d have a hard time explaining she knew it existed and did nothing.

  The team had scoured the basement. Individual trails branched and overlapped throughout the room. The far wall was another bricked-over section. Other than the leanansidhe ’s bolt-hole, I found no other openings. Leanansidhes weren’t stupid. It was no coincidence Joe had found her lying on the floor near an escape route, and she wouldn’t let herself become trapped if someone followed her. An exit had to be in the basement somewhere.

  I turned off the flashlight and allowed my sensing ability free rein. The investigative team’s residual signatures brightened. Down the center of the room, directly from the bolt-hole if I judged the angle right, their signatures masked a thin layer of violet essence, the faint trace of the leanansidhe’s body signature. At the far end of the basement, a thin purple haze splashed up against the solid brick wall. I turned on the flashlight.

  The wall showed no breaks. The leanansidhe’s essence danced on my fingers like static when I touched the surface. She had hidden her exit with a strong-yet-subtle masking ward. Frustrated, I slapped my hand against the wall. The dark mass in my head clenched, and my hand slipped beneath the surface of the bricks. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Masking wards were keyed to specific essences for access, usually the spellcaster and whoever else the ’caster allowed. The leanansidhe wouldn’t have keyed the wall for me, never mind known my essence well enough to do it without me.

  I pressed at the bricks. The dark mass in my head danced in short pulses of pain as my hands sank below the surface. A pit of anxiety formed in my stomach. The leanansidhe must have set the ward to something she thought unique to herself. The dark mass was the key. I felt open space on the other side of the wall. I stepped forward, a pounding in my mind as I passed through the ward. I stumbled into the other side and took deep breaths as the pain settled.

  A narrow section of basement mirrored the one that Murdock and I had found. A sense of pain permeated the air in this one, the echoes of long-past deaths. Tragedy lingered in spaces, the emotion of the moment seeping into the surroundings like a memory stain. It was the leanansidhe ’s dining room. People died there, drained of their essence to feed another’s hunger.

  Ignoring the emotions vying for attention, I searched the area. Another staircase led to the warehouse above, but an avalanche of dirt and trash blocked access. No one had used it for a long, long time. At the other end, a door was shaped in the stone wall, more handiwork of the troll who had made the sewer tunnel. The leanansidhe must have taken over the space after the troll left or died. More likely, she had used the troll to create the tunnels and killed it when the work was completed.

  I hesitated. No one knew where I was. I had no abilities to defend myself, and I was about to seek out a monster. I found assurance in the fact that the leanansidhe had tried to absorb my essence and failed—an irony that the one fey with no abilities to defend himself was the one fey she apparently couldn’t feed on. I crossed the threshold.

  The smooth earthen tunnel led down, the leanansidhe’s signature strong enough to be evident even to a normal sensing ability. The path twisted and turned, branched and widened. I walked through at least a quarter mile of turnings before I found a series of chambers. I hung back from the entrance to a furnished room.

 
; Warmth radiated against my face. That was it as far as welcome went. The chamber was a living room of sorts, if a room buried three floors beneath the ground could be considered living. A generation’s worth of furniture filled the space, old sofas and bookcases, tables and chairs. A many-joined extension cord trailed from the ceiling, providing electricity for a glass-shade lamp by a reading chair. A book lay open on the table next to it.

  Welcome, brother. Enter and be at peace.

  I pressed flat against the wall, my dagger out of its sheath and in my hand without a conscious thought. Sendings don’t have directional indications like sound. The leanansidhe had to have me in her line of sight to know I was in the room. “Where are you?”

  A fluctuation in the air passed over me. Definitely someone moving in the room. Some fey can cloak themselves, but I didn’t know it was an ability the leanansidhe had. Come, brother. Make peace. There is no blade at your throat.

  I flinched from the brief icy touch of steel against my neck. A soft chuckle came from the middle of the room. The air rippled, and the leanansidhe appeared, crouched on an old Persian rug. In her outstretched hand, she held a dagger. She grinned through matted tangles of hair and opened the hand wide to let the dagger fall. “You see, brother? No harm from me for such as we.”

  She eased back as I entered.

  “You keep calling me ‘brother,’” I said.

  She moved behind a table stacked with books, her pale, stained hands caressing the covers though she kept her whiteless eyes on me. “Kin or akin matters not between us. We touch the Wheel the same.”

  “I’m not like you.”

  Her large dark eyes shifted to my dagger. “Aye, ’struth. I could not touch such a thing as that. Lay it aside, brother, and rest in my home.”

  “And leave myself unarmed? If you violate the rules of hospitality, to whom shall I complain?”

  She rubbed long fingers down her face, watching me out of the corners of her eyes. “Keep it, then.” She vanished and reappeared at my side. “It will avail you naught.” She vanished again and peered at me from behind a tall grandfather clock, clutching the edges of the wood with cracked gray nails. “Unless I will it.”