Uncertain Allies cg-5

by Mark Del Franco

  I gripped the arms of my chair. Touching someone’s mind in a trance state was an intimate process. If someone you didn’t invite in gets into your mind, your defenses are limited. “I’m going to kill him.”

  Meryl batted her eyes at me. “That’s sweet, Grey, but I took care of it.”

  Briallen stopped moving. “Is he dead?”

  Meryl shook her head. “Nah. I locked him down in a suspended trance. By the way, nice sanctum you got there, Bree. It should keep him there a good long time.”

  “You have to let him out,” Briallen said.

  “No,” she said. Her tone said there was no arguing.

  Briallen back off. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “No. We won’t,” said Meryl. They stared at each other, both defiant. I was surprised when Briallen looked away first. Or maybe I wasn’t.

  “What essence source?” I said to break the silence.

  “I don’t know,” said Meryl. “I only sensed his intent, not his full thoughts. I was kinda busy trying not to lose my mind.”

  I took her hand. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t be too sure about that. I told you I was dreaming. I think the shit’s about to hit the fan.”

  Meryl was the only True Dreamer I’ve ever met. Her future visions were filled with symbol and metaphor, but she always knew what they meant. “What’s going to happen?” I asked.

  “The end of the world, I think. Is there any more tea?” She held out her mug.

  25

  Meryl agreed to come back to my place for the night. She didn’t want to stay at Briallen’s, and I didn’t want her to be alone. Going to her house was out of the question still. Meryl never let anyone in her house, not even me. I didn’t even know she had a house until we argued about where she would sleep. She had always referred to it as her place. She didn’t want me rambling around while she slept, so we went to my apartment. I understood. She was as nosy as I was, but I cared less if she rummaged through my stuff.

  We curled on the futon in the living room, Meryl’s head tucked under my chin, my arms wrapped around her. “I missed this.”

  “It feels like yesterday to me,” she said.

  “Yeah, that was sweet,” I said.

  She poked me with an elbow. “You have no idea how odd this feels, like time travel or something. Who’s president?”

  “It wasn’t that long,” I said.

  She giggled and shifted in my arms. “You know, people wish they can go to bed and wake up three months later and all their problems will be gone. I did, but now there are new problems to contend with.”

  “Don’t think about it yet. No one knows you’re awake except me and Briallen,” I said.

  “And whoever she’s told by now,” she said.

  I ran my hand along her thigh. “You told Eorla.”

  “You said she was upset about what happened. A sending was common courtesy,” she said.

  I tickled her. “Yeah, you’re sooo courteous.”

  She struggled against me, and I stopped. “Yeah, well, the bitch owes me. I lose three months, and she gets to be Queen of the Unseelie Court.”

  I laughed. “That’s a little exaggeration.”

  Meryl rolled and looked up at me. “Grey? The solitaries and the Dead have rallied to her cause. She took leadership against Maeve and Donor. That’s how the Unseelie Court forms. It’s a gestalt fey court with attitude.”

  I traced my finger along her chin. “You’re right. I assumed you had to be a solitary to lead the Court.”

  “Nope. Just angry,” she said.

  “That must be why Maeve’s so freaked out. Donor says she’s moving her troops into defensive postures,” I said.

  “Donor says? Since when do you talk to the Elven King?”

  I leaned over and kissed her. “Since he came to Boston to threaten me and Eorla. He’s much fatter in person.”

  Meryl propped herself up on an elbow. “The Elven King is here. In Boston.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s bad,” she said.

  “Well, yeah,” I said.

  “No, it’s bad because the Elven King was in my dream,” she said.

  Meryl had a geasa on her for her Dreaming. If someone was in her Dreams, she was compelled to tell them. “Damn. Are you going to tell him?”

  She settled down on her side. “Hell, no. I have to tell people what I Dream if I meet them. I don’t have to seek them out unless I want to.”

  “What did you Dream?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer for the longest time. “I don’t remember.”

  Druids never forget unless, like me, something was wrong with them. “What do you mean?”

  “I can see the Dream, but only the shape of it. The details are vague. That’s never happened before,” she said. She didn’t speak for so long, I thought she had fallen asleep. “I’m probably burned-out out from knocking Nigel into the trance.”

  I debated whether to argue. Meryl liked to choose her discussions, and forcing her to talk about something didn’t work. I let it go. I had her back. That was all that mattered. “I wish I had been there.”

  “I took care of it, Grey. Stop with the he-man thing,” she said.

  I chuckled. “Oh, that’s not it. I wish I could have seen the look on his face when you beat him at his own mind game, then slammed the door on his ass. That bastard lied to me. He said it was safe. I don’t care what Briallen says. I’m glad you did what you did.”

  She leaned over and kissed me. Gods, I missed her kiss. For months I had pressed my lips against hers with no response. I pulled her closer. She nestled down against my chest. “I never trusted him, you know.”

  “I warned you,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you were angry and bitter about him. I didn’t trust him because Nigel never does anything without an ulterior motive. I liked talking to him, and I learned a helluva lot from him, but I always knew someday he would disappoint me in some despicable manner short of murder. I underestimated him,” she said.

  “You’re a lot smarter than me.”

  She patted my chest and sighed. “I know.”

  I poked her, and she laughed. “Why did I miss you?”

  “ ’Cause you were bored,” she said.

  “I wish.”

  Her breathing became slow and even. My eyes slipped closed in the dark. For the first time in a long time, I was happy—allowed myself to feel happy. Despite everything, the one thing I feared was not having Meryl with me. I don’t know when that feeling happened and didn’t know where it would lead, but I liked it as much as it scared me.

  “By the way, Grey, I love the plywood curtains,” Meryl said.

  I kissed the top of her head. “That’s why I missed you.”

  26

  A phone ringing in the middle of the night was never a good sign. I groped for my cell as Meryl groaned beside me. The caller ID showed Murdock’s number. Meryl mumbled a hello and pulled the covers over her head. Between the months lying helpless in bed and the huge expenditure of essence at Briallen’s, she was exhausted. Even powerful druids didn’t have the body strength of a Danann fairy. We needed sleep to replenish essence, to say nothing about improving our dispositions.

  “We have another body,” Murdock said, when I opened the phone.

  “Where?”

  “The Tangle. You need to see this one.”

  I dressed in the dark as he gave me directions. He offered to send a squad car to pick me up, but the Tangle was only about a mile off. It was faster to run—maybe walk—than wait for a car to make the lights to my place and back. He didn’t say more because he wanted me to have my own first impression. I kissed Meryl’s head before I left. She answered with a snore. After months of no reaction, she made me smile.

  I jogged down Old Northern Avenue, dogging through late-night crowds on the sidewalk. The party crowds thinned out as I reached the burned-out section of the avenue. No more buildings meant no more business.
Boston’s World Trade Center and its boat terminal had escaped the fire, but it was locked down for the night. Not far past it was where we had found the first body.

  This part of the neighborhood was pretty damaged, but as I neared the Tangle, the rougher crowd that sought its entertainments began to appear. The local gangs had fragmented after last summer, but they existed in small groups. Elf and dwarf thugs eyed each other on opposing corners, flexing their muscles over turf. The groups were smaller, but it was only a matter of time before they started growing and taking over city blocks. Hard-core partiers dressed in leather and vinyl hustled their way along the sidewalk, searching for new clubs and drugs. Solitary fey lurked in doorways, their strange appearances adding an air of menace as they muttered their sales pitches for exotic spells and potions. No matter how beaten down the Weird was, it always managed to rise again in the same desperate ways.

  I paused on the sidewalk and faced the incandescent glow of the Tangle. The directions Murdock had given me led a few blocks in. I had to take a deep breath to prepare myself for the next part. I tapped my body essence and activated what was left of my body shield. Hardened essence covered my head and parts of my chest and arms, nothing like Murdock’s full protection. My body shield had been damaged in my fight with Bergin Vize. When I met him, I discovered Vize didn’t have a shield at all but depended on a blue-skinned nixie named Gretan, one of the small river fey, to protect him.

  My shield served as an early-warning system these days. It activated on its own, reacting to heightened essence like a cat bristling with fear. Hardened essence could protect me from the collateral pain caused by scrying, but without someone else’s shield, I had to rely on my pathetic remnants until I found Murdock. The Tangle was a nest of scrying. Walking into it was going to hurt.

  I took one more calming breath. A street address in the Tangle was pointless since the streets appeared to move. Illusions hid passageways that appeared at certain times or when the light struck from the proper angles. Sometimes the path itself was an illusion that had to be followed in order to find a destination. Murdock had told me to follow a line of dark blue brick buildings and turn up the alley next to the third one.

  I found the building with no problem, turned into the alley, and saw a lamppost with a green light. Ten paces past that I walked through a door that looked like the entrance to a building but actually led to another alley. Over my shoulder, the illusion didn’t exist—the entrance to the alley wasn’t a small door but the typical wide gap between buildings.

  People hurried by, huddled in hood-drawn cloaks or turning away from me. Not everyone wanted to be seen in the Tangle. The end of the second alley let out onto a narrow street. Despite people moving in every direction, some fast, some slow, it wasn’t hard to find Murdock. The cluster a block away had the obvious appearance of crime-scene rubberneckers.

  An electric anticipation filled the air. People ran up and down the street, voices pitched with excitement and anger. Dim light made everything more chaotic as shadows played along the walls. A group of dwarves crowded ahead, shouting in triumph as they shined lights on the wall.

  Two patrol officers kept the crowd back. Murdock had his gun drawn and his body shield up. The fey folk around him threw apprehensive looks at the metal weapon. Murdock didn’t have the whole beware-of-iron baggage the fey had, and a man with a body shield and a gun confused them. The funny part was that because he always had his gun on him, he had intuitively figured out how to compensate for the essence warp the metal created.

  I edged around the crowd for a better view of the wall. At first, my mind didn’t process what I was seeing. It seemed fake, like a strange art installation or even a joke. A thought later, I realized it was no joke.

  Suspended a foot or so off the ground, a woman was embedded in a bricked-over archway. Her twisted body protruded from the bricks as if caught in the act of turning away. One arm dangled limp over the sidewalk, the other lost from sight in the wall. One leg had gone through. The other bent against the stone pavement, its foot twisted sideways against the ground. Her head was turned away from the wall, as if she had paused to look down behind her. Long dark hair draped over her shoulder, obscuring her face.

  I stopped next to Murdock. “That’s not a leanansidhe,” I said.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said. Even without sensing her elven body signature, I would have known she wasn’t a leanansidhe. The leanansidhe were around four feet tall, and the woman in the wall was nearly six feet. Now that I was close enough, I sensed a barrier shield, not a literal wall. She had started to pass through the barrier, and it closed on her.

  Murdock shouted at the crowd to disperse. They moved back but didn’t leave. The patrol officers did their best to maintain control, but on a good day, people in the Tangle weren’t known for complying with the law.

  I lifted the hair from the dead woman’s face and froze in surprise. “Son of a bitch. This is Gerda Alfheim.”

  Murdock shuffled closer. “You know her?”

  “I saw pictures of her after the Castle Island fiasco,” I said.

  He leaned in closer so as not to be overheard. “What did she have to do with Castle Island?”

  From her expression, her death had not been pleasant. She was well within the field of the glamour when the barrier spell triggered a shutdown through the door. “She put Gethin macLoren up to what happened, Leo. That’s his mother,” I said.

  MacLoren was a terrorist responsible for the first in the string of recent disasters in Boston. He was mentally unbalanced, a damaged soul whose mother, Gerda, was an elf and father a Danann fairy. Gerda had manipulated her son’s desire to heal and used him in an attempt to open a portal into another realm that held some of the scary beings out of Faerie history. It was the first major case Murdock and I had worked together. We both almost died stopping the catastrophe. Gerda Alfheim hadn’t been working alone back then. Anger swept over me as something fell into place for me. “Gerda works with Bergin Vize. This changes everything, Leo.”

  27

  I wasn’t the only person who had recognized Gerda Alfheim. Word spread through official and unofficial channels, and law-enforcement agencies from the Guild, the Consortium, and the federal government descended on the Tangle. A dead international terrorist garnered attention. I wasn’t much interested in Gerda, though. I wanted to know about her ally, and I knew one person who might put me on a lead to him.

  I nursed my third Guinness in a back booth at Yggy’s. It took more than that for me to get drunk enough to be stupid, but I didn’t know how long I would have to wait for Brokke. I had asked Rand to send Brokke my request to meet. Rand couldn’t promise anything, but he said he would try. Given Gerda’s death, I was pretty sure Brokke’s arrival would be more “when” than “if.” Even so, my patience was wearing thin.

  Murdock wanted to be there, but I asked him to let me handle it. Brokke didn’t trust people and was likely to avoid answering questions with anyone else around. I didn’t fool myself into thinking he trusted me. As a scryer, he liked being able to see possible futures. Adding Murdock into the mix would increase the variables and shake up the outcomes.

  Brokke showed before dawn, slipping into the booth when the bar was loudest, and people were less attentive. A waitress served him a small glass of claret before he had time to settle in. “I didn’t realize you were known here,” I said.

  He sipped. “Yggy’s has been here longer than you’ve been alive, Grey. Some of the staff have been here since it opened.”

  I went right to the point. “Where’s Bergin Vize?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Bull. I know he hasn’t left Boston. Why is he here, Brokke?”

  Brokke held the stem of his glass between two fingers and moved it back and forth. “That’s a different question. He thinks he’s saving the world.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  Brokke pursed his lips. “You know anything I tell you will have ra
mifications.”

  “So will anything you don’t tell me,” I said.

  He sipped the claret, playing it around on his tongue. “In my life, I have seen many things I wish I hadn’t. People think knowing the future is an advantage, an opportunity to create something good or avoid something bad. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that not knowing is better than knowing. People rarely make choices that benefit the future.”

  People with information always said crap like that. Everyone else was too dumb to be trusted. “I’m not interested in the future. I want to know about the past and the present. You know why Vize is here. I don’t believe it’s for any good reason. Convince me not to hunt him down and kill him with my bare hands.”

  “I’ve seen that possibility. It doesn’t end well,” he said.

  “For him or me?”

  “For anyone,” he said.

  I finished off my beer and signaled for another. “Maybe that’s fine by me. Maybe I don’t give a damn anymore.”

  He stared at me with an infinite patience that made me want to slap him. “I don’t believe that about you,” he said.

  I hunched forward at the table. “Fine. Maybe I’ll kill him to spite you. A world without Vize has to be better than one with him, no matter what you say.”

  “A fatal flaw exists in that statement. You assume a world will exist without him,” he said.

  I scoffed. “I don’t buy that anyone’s that important.”

  “It’s all ramifications, Grey. Vize’s death will lead to inevitabilities. One of them is too dark to entertain,” he said.

  I gave him a cold smile. “ ‘One of them.’ I’ll risk other possibilities.”

  Brokke surprised me by shuddering. “There is truth in your words. I would not have believed it.”

  I thought I had been bluffing, playing his game of words, but what he said was true. I felt it in my gut. I was more than prepared to kill Vize and damn the consequences. “Now tell me why Vize is here.”