Unperfect Souls cg-4

by Mark Del Franco

  I scanned the area. Above us, someone ran along the roofline, too far away for me to sense his essence. I recognized his silhouette, though, and his running style. The Hound was pacing us.

  In the swirling haze far ahead, a dark green light smeared in my sensing vision. A cloud of the Taint rolled toward us, billowing and mixing with other essences. The wind brought the sound of keening pierced by screams and shouts.

  “It’s the Dead,” I said.

  Something huge and dark moved toward us in a loping gait.

  “What the hell is that?” Murdock asked.

  The Taint’s mottled essence light spread across the road, great billows of snow or steam or fog rolling out from its edges. Shay grabbed my arm. “Run! We have to run.”

  He didn’t need to say it again. With that many people bearing down on us, it was the right call. We turned and ran, or tried to, anyway. Tripping through deep drifts of snow, we staggered our way up the street between boarded-up buildings. The next alley was tauntingly far off.

  I threw a glance over my shoulder. The Dead charged up the street, running and jumping through the snow with wild abandon. Dark shapes filled the air, Dead fairies and other things, wheeling in the darkness on ragged wings.

  We weren’t going to make it. The alley was too far away. I pulled Shay against my side as Murdock’s body shield blazed red in the swirling snow ahead of us. Murdock turned, pulling his gun out. For a brief moment, I saw surprise on his face as he lifted his weapon. Then something slammed into my back. Shay and I fell in a tangle, the great black shape of Uno, impossibly huge, pinning us to the ground with paws that threw an emberlike heat. I twisted beneath him, blindly reaching out to ward off his massive jaws. A torrent of snow washed over us. The Taint bent above the dog, and the rampaging Dead swirled to either side of us.

  I craned my neck to see Murdock backing away. He turned to run, but a dim shadow on dark wings dove at him and swept him into the sky. The Taint passed on, rolling up the street, leaving the lane between the buildings empty. The pressure of weight from the dog vanished, and I scrambled to my feet.

  “Murdock!” I yelled. Retreating screams and howls answered me.

  “Leo!” Still no answer. I looked down the alley, but he wasn’t there.

  “Leo, answer me, dammit!”

  No answer. There was no one left but Shay and the black dog.

  Murdock was gone.

  19

  Blood stained the snow in front of the meeting warehouse. Bodies lay crumpled in the gutter. All solitaries. All dead. At the end of the street, police officers huddled in their cars. Motorcycles lay scattered in the snow, some with their lights flashing. No one was outside.

  Shay and I stumbled into the warehouse. Pistols and rifles swung in our direction, and Shay grabbed me by the waist from behind. I held my hands in the air to confused shouts of “get out” and “get on the floor.”

  “Is Detective Lieutenant Leonard Murdock here?” I shouted.

  An officer grabbed my arm and shoved me against the wall. “Get your arms out now,” he shouted.

  I assumed the position. Shay turned a panicked face toward me as an officer pressed him hard against the wall while another fumbled with his oversize coat. “I’m with the Guild,” I shouted.

  The officer patting me down shouted in pain as a flash of heat burned against my ankle. “He’s armed! He’s armed!” he shouted as he fell back with his gun out.

  I kept my hands against the wall. “I’ve got two daggers in my boots. That’s it. One of them’s spelled. I need Lieutenant Murdock.”

  “He’s not here,” someone said.

  “Just throw them out with the others,” someone else yelled.

  I had no idea what was going on. These guys sounded angry and scared. “Call the Guild, dammit! Tell Keeva macNeve that you have Connor Grey!”

  An officer pressed the muzzle of his gun against the back of my neck. I closed my eyes. “Let the kid go,” I said.

  No one answered. I didn’t dare move my head to check on Shay.

  After several agonizing minutes, someone called over. “He’s clear.”

  The pressure of the gun disappeared. I dropped my hands. Shay huddled against me again. “This is no way to treat a lady,” he whispered.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. He nodded against my shoulder.

  I called Keeva. She spoke before I had a chance to say anything. “Stay with the police, Connor. We’re handling this. Don’t tell anyone else you’re there.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Rustling sounds came through as Keeva moved her phone. Muffled voices argued in the background. “It doesn’t matter. Listen, don’t talk to anyone. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  She dropped her voice. “I can’t talk. We’ve got missing police officers. Just do what I say. You’re better off in Guild custody.”

  “Custody?” I said.

  She disconnected. I stared at my phone. Bastian’s words came back to me. I glanced around the room. No one seemed to be watching me. Given a choice between the police and the Guild, I liked neither. I looked out the window. The storm was raging, blinding white snow obliterating the view to the street. I called Meryl.

  “I’m at 264 Summer Street. Can you get me out of here?” I asked.

  “It’s a blizzard out there, Grey,” she said.

  “Murdock’s missing,” I said.

  “Missing? Like missing missing or not returning your phone calls because he has something better to do missing?”

  I told her what happened. “And now I’m surrounded by cops who apparently don’t know they’re supposed to arrest me,” I said.

  She sighed. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Officers watched the storm through the grate-covered windows. The heightened apprehension faded as time went by, but the tension never completely left the room. No one but uniformed officers came inside. Whatever solitaries had been out in the street when the Dead came through were either hiding elsewhere or dead.

  “I’m going to need a distraction,” I said to Shay.

  “I’ve got a pretty good singing voice,” he said.

  I smiled down at him. “I’m sure you do. When I tell you to, go to the back of the room and do something to draw attention.”

  He nodded. “Then what do I do?”

  “Stay here. You’ll be safe.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Really? With the guys with the guns that were pointed at me?”

  “You’ll be fine. This seems to be about the fey,” I said.

  He pouted as he looked around the room. “Maybe I’ll get that guy who groped me to buy me a drink.”

  I grinned. “See? I’m giving you a dating opportunity.”

  A deep, low rumble sounded outside. Everyone moved away from the door and windows except me and Shay. A smudge of light appeared, white and yellow. As the noise grew, the lights brightened and separated into flashing roof lights. A snowplow stopped outside, a massive hulk of yellow steel belching steam out its overhead exhaust.

  A cool spot formed in my mind and a sending came through. You going to stare or get in?

  “Showtime, Shay,” I said.

  He pulled his hood up and wandered toward the back of the room. I sidled toward the door. When Shay reached the table in back, he stooped and picked up the fallen microphone. For a moment, I thought he really was going to sing, but then he let loose with a loud, high-pitched scream. Every head in the room whipped in his direction. I slipped outside.

  Snow swirled around me in thick curtains. In the few feet from the door to the truck, I was covered from head to foot. I hopped on the running board of the plow, then jumped inside the cab. Bundled in a thick black cloak, Meryl waited behind the wheel.

  “Where the hell did you get this?” I asked.

  She put the truck in gear. “Geez, Grey, doesn’t anyone owe you favors?”

  “I got you out in a blizzard, didn’t
I?”

  “This is you owing me another favor, not you calling one in.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To meet Zev. He agreed to have his people look for Murdock.”

  The truck rumbled along Summer Street in its own bubble of light. The warehouses to either side were barely discernible through the storm, less so as we drove deeper into the Weird, and the streetlamps became fewer. We drove through a trail of essence. The storm degraded what lingered, but I got hits on elves, fairies, and all kinds of solitaries and large animals. “This is the direction the Dead came from,” I said.

  The dashboard lights threw a pale yellow glow against Meryl’s face. “I’ve been sensing their trail since the financial district. There were a few live ones, but not Murdock’s.”

  “This is my fault. The Dead wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me,” I said.

  Meryl took a wide turn onto Drydock Avenue in the deep end of the Weird. “No, I’d blame Bergin Vize for that one.”

  “He led them here, but I trapped them,” I said.

  She turned onto Harbor Street and dropped the plow. The snow drifted nearly two feet in front of us. “Eh, that’s debatable and beside the point. They’re here. The point right now is to find Murdock.”

  “Are we going where I think we’re going?” I asked.

  “If you guessed the Tangle, you get to go to the bonus round,” she said, as we crossed Old Northern.

  The Tangle is where the worst of the Weird meets the worst of everything. The original layout of the streets was buried under shifting lanes and buildings that created a maze with no beginning and no end. Bad things happened in the Tangle, from knife-throwing target practice on the unwary to full-blown essence battles. Blood and sadness soaked the streets, the memories of rage and waste. Human law enforcement gave up on it long ago. It had to. If the fey had to be on guard in the Tangle, a person with only a gun and a badge had no hope of surviving.

  Tiny streaks of white lightning danced over the truck as it passed through a warding barrier. The engine coughed, and Meryl muttered a shield spell as she downshifted. The deeper we drove into the area, the more spells pinged against the shield, bursts of essence in green and white across the hood of the truck, streaks of yellow and brilliant hazes of blue and white. The engine whined higher, and Meryl hit the brake. “We need to get out here. The engine can’t take any more hits. I don’t want to lose it and have to walk home in this mess.”

  My head started aching. The dark mass in my mind hated whenever someone tried to read the future, and the Tangle was a hotbed for scrying. As I trudged through the snow behind Meryl, I fought off the nausea that welled up. My vision blurred as the pain increased. “I don’t know if I can do this, Meryl. There’s too much scrying, and I’m getting hit with sensor spells.”

  She reached out a gloved hand. Her body shield shimmered around her, a faint yellow glow in the thick snow. The essence flowed off her fingers and up my arm. The dark mass flared, sharp little spikes of darkness reacting to the body shield’s intrusion. The mass in my head resisted, intent on blocking outside essence. Including me in her body shield wasn’t a true interaction of the kind the dark mass resisted—Meryl’s shield wrapped around me more like a blanket than a merging of our body signatures. Meryl jerked her head up at me, surprised at the resistance the mass pressed back with. When her shield blocked the emanations from the scryings, the dark mass settled down and didn’t attempt to reject her help.

  “That was different,” she said.

  “I think it’s overly sensitive to being in the Tangle,” I said. I hoped. It was doing a lot of things lately it hadn’t done before.

  We shuffled through the drifts and wind without speaking. Few people were out in the storm except the usual suspects—fey solitaries with weather abilities who didn’t mind the cold and the wind. They ignored us for the most part, though occasionally one of the highland fairies threw an extra gust of wind at us. We circled a block built on a tight crescent, five- and six-story warehouses leaning back from the street. Eccentric additions cast dark shadows over the windows, twisted bricks rising in sinuous lines across the facades, spikes of stone hanging in the air. They radiated with strong currents of essence.

  “We’re walking in circles,” I said through panting breaths.

  Meryl focused in front of her. “It’s the path. Once more around the block, and we should be there.”

  We turned for the third time around a slumped pile of stone. Someone had died under it, the pain of their passing gnawing at the edges of my sensing ability. The rear of the warehouses were no better. Death always leaves a footprint behind, one that can take years to fade.

  Meryl stopped. We stood on the front side of the block in the middle of the crescent. The center building had changed. A door that hadn’t been visible the first two times we passed yawned above us in a white stone carved to resemble oak leaves. Unlike the brick used on the rest of the walls, large blocks of granite in an irregular pattern surrounded the entrance. Clinging to the stones were several vitniri, their lupine faces lifting into howls as we approached. Two jumped down from the lintel and barred our way.

  The Teutonic vitniri were known for their skills at guarding homes. Whether they were humans with wolflike features or wolves with human characteristics was hard to tell. They walked on their hind legs or all fours as it suited them, their limbs ending in rough pawlike clawed hands.

  Meryl took off a glove and held out her hand. “I am Meryl Dian. Connor Grey is with me. We are invited.”

  I took off a glove, too. The vitniri on the walls barked and yipped. The two in front of us rose on their hind legs and came closer. They sniffed at our hands and licked our fingers. A few moments of more sniffing, and they backed away. “You may enter,” one said, his voice a raspy growl. They scrambled back up the sides of the door.

  I resisted the urge to wipe my hand before putting the glove back on. As long as the scent-marking remained, we would be unharmed. By unharmed, I meant not ripped to shreds and maybe eaten. If nothing else, vitniri are dedicated watchmen.

  Meryl pushed open the door. “At least they didn’t pee on me this time,” she muttered.

  20

  Inside, heat and chaos enveloped us. In the flickering half-light, fey of all stripes filled an industrial cathedral of interlocking steel beams and arches. Shouts filled the air with the roaring vibration of cheering spectators. The clank and crash of metal on metal created a shrieking bass line. The air smelled of oil and chemicals, the burnt-ozonelike residue of spent essence and the reek of unwashed bodies. Rhythmic screams of someone in deep pain pierced through it all.

  “Cozy,” I said.

  “You should be here on a busy night,” Meryl said.

  Half the time I thought Meryl said things like that to emphasize the point that I didn’t know everything about her. The other half of the time, I hoped that was true. The reality was I didn’t know everything about Meryl, and I never would. It was the nature of the fey to move in and out of each other’s lives without knowing who the other person had been a generation ago. Long lives trailed long histories, some good, some bad. The fey either accepted that about each other, or they ended up being alone.

  No one paid us any attention as we threaded through the crowd on the main floor. I had been to a few places like it before, underground clubs and safe houses where the persecuted hid to be themselves among their own kind. I loved being part of the fey subculture, but I had the luxury of not needing it. I shared a certain sensibility with the lost and shunned in the Weird, but in places like this, I realized a level of acceptance existed that I would never achieve among the solitaries. I was a druid, an acceptable fey to the mainstream. My face wasn’t scarred or scaled, feathered or furred. My skin color fell into the peach to brown spectrum the outside human world understood and accepted.

  I brought my own prejudices, too. I recoiled instinctively at times, thought entire species unattractive, or feared people simply by
virtue of their race. I could tell myself all I wanted that my attitudes weren’t the same thing as the human racism that was based solely, inexplicably, on skin color. All trolls did like their meat raw and weren’t particular where they got it. Merfolk occasionally did drown air-breathing lovers in the throes of passion. The fey—all fey—were filled with as many of the vicious as the virtuous. My fears and biases might be more reality based, but they were still fears and biases.

  “What the hell?” Meryl swung her pocketbook around to her chest and pulled up the flap.

  Joe crawled out. “You really need to clean out your purse.”

  “It’s not called the Bag of Doom for nothing,” she said.

  “How long have you been in there?” I asked.

  He fluttered between us, taking in the sight of the ranks of solitaries hanging in the framework of the warehouse. “Just now. I had to come in tight because of all the security these guys have. Last time a vitniri licked me, I licked him back. They’ve had it in for me ever since.”

  “Any word on Murdock?” Meryl asked.

  Joe shook his head. “I’ve been looking for him ever since your sending. No dice.” He ducked as someone threw a beer bottle across our path. He swooped down, picked it up, and threw it back. “I don’t think he’s dead,” he continued. “His signature vanishes right where you last saw him, Connor. There should have been something for me to follow. Wherever he is, he’s masked by something powerful.”

  The crowd thickened, and we pushed toward the center of attention. The screams grew louder. “There were a lot of Dead.”

  “They have a knack for hiding stuff,” Joe shouted over the noise.

  Chains dangled from the ceiling ahead, the heavy-duty kind for lifting machinery. They swayed and tangled as the crowd cheered. Meryl was a foot shorter than I was. I gripped her hand tighter when I saw over the heads of the crowd.

  A Dead man hung by his wrists from the chains, both his shoulders dislocated and his feet just touching the floor. By his essence, he belonged to one of the lesser elven clans I didn’t know well. By what remained of his clothes and his wild, long blond hair, he was a warrior from a few centuries ago. His shirt and boots had been stripped, leaving his torso and feet bare. Blood trickled down his body from numerous slashes, and thick clots of it matted his hair.