Unquiet Dreams cg-2

by Mark Del Franco

  Chapter 11

  My internal alarm clock woke me just before dawn. Gray light filtered into my living room, the cold gray of late fall. The soft hiss of the radiator whispered to me to get out of my nice warm bed. I ached everywhere. Meryl’s healing booster had focused on the shoulder, so every other muscle reminded me that, yes, I had been tossed through the air several times the previous night.

  I eased out of bed feeling every vertebra trying to decide whether it wanted to be closer to its neighbor or farther apart. I didn’t think about the headache. I always have a headache, so I only notice the pain if it’s reaching incapacitating levels. I slipped off my T-shirt and boxers and stood naked at the window, eyes closed, arms upraised. All across the city, hundreds, maybe thousands, of fey stood in the exact same posture, naked and waiting for the sun. I suppose if someone had a good vantage point and decent binoculars, the landscape made for a voyeur’s wet dream.

  Being fey means being in tune with essence on a level that human normals cannot grasp. It means feeling a connection with the world, with nature, with other beings, through the essence that binds everything. Human normals don’t know what that experience is. Some have a vague sense—the sensitive types who get flashes of precognitive warning, or second sight, or dreams that feel important. The reality of the Convergent World, the world I was born in, my reality, never reaches the essence that Faerie has. Had. Still has. No one knows if Faerie is still there, missing the people and places that ended up here. But the fey here remember it and yearn for it. And so, each morning thousands stand facing east, preparing themselves for a ritual that reminds them of their abilities and keeps them connected to lost Faerie. Me, I just want the headaches to stop so I can get back to work.

  I knew the moment the disc of the sun met the horizon. A flush of warmth fluttered in the center of my forehead and in the socket of my shoulder. Meryl’s healing spell continued its work, drawing a boost from the new day. I inhaled, my lungs expanding to their maximum, and I began to chant the ancient words of greeting. As the sun rose higher, I moved through the postures I had learned as a child, pose and voice and essence entwining to realign the pathways within my body that enhanced the ability to manipulate essence. As the sun rose, I moved faster, the chanting became more urgent, my intellectual mind receding as I became one with the flow. That is the core of being fey—the ability to lose oneself completely, to find one’s place in conjunction with the being of all things. As the sun lifted off the horizon, full white blaze above the heaving ocean, I thrust my arms down, my head back, and exhaled in exhilaration.

  The problem with doing the sun ritual after a night of little sleep, is you want to stay up and enjoy the endorphins no matter how tired you are. I hit the coffeemaker and went into the shower. One of the nice things about living in an old warehouse not originally meant for residential use is that the heat and hot water boilers tend to be huge. Everyone in the building can probably shower at the same time and not feel a shiver. I still ached from Moke’s love tap, so I let the water massage my skin. Essence may improve my constitution, but it still didn’t make the bruises go away unless a healer manipulated them.

  I dressed in jeans and a black turtleneck, poured a cup of coffee, and settled back in bed to watch the news. Nothing startling, the usual chaos and mayhem of a big city. Two more gang fights overnight, one not far from my apartment. The news cycled again on the top of the hour, and a name caught my ear. Gerin Cuthbern stood in front of the Guildhouse, a distinct lack of any of the usual Guild public relations lackeys in attendance. Gerin wore an embarrassingly outdated white robe of druidic office, which told me right away whatever he was droning on about had to be good. I turned up the volume.

  “…in this tragic time,” he said into several microphones thrust into his face. “We extend to Eorla Kruge our deepest condolences and our prayers. In what can only be a small gesture of gratitude for all the work Alvud Kruge did for this city, indeed the world, the Boston chapter of the Druidic College offers as a sorrowful gift a place of rest for Alvud’s body. His wish to leave his corporeal remains on these shores speaks volumes about how much he cared for Boston and its people. We can only respond by donating the land in the Forest Hills Cemetery for an appropriate burial and mourning spot for his friends and family.”

  The video clip vanished and the perky blond anchor-woman popped back on the screen. I laughed and lowered the volume. Keeva, I’m sure, was blowing a fit somewhere. Given that she wasn’t standing by Gerin’s side for his announcement meant he had just thrown a big wrench into her funeral plans. The Guild had their media protocols, which Gerin well knew, and he had just done a great job of breaking them.

  I had to give it to Gerin, though. He knew how to play politics. Staging his announcement in front of the Guildhouse certainly implied their endorsement, although those in the know would know better, and putting Eorla Kruge—a high-ranking Consortium member—in a position to reject a cooperative gesture from the High Druid of Boston was elegant. Neither the Guild nor the Consortium could criticize him without looking like they were using Kruge’s funeral as an excuse to play politics themselves. He was also laying the groundwork to make Eorla look ungrateful if she contested a director’s appointment. A brilliant move. The man knew how to play.

  Getting an essence recharge at dawn is great, but it’s all a wash if I exhaust my physical body. It didn’t help that a dream had bothered me. Dreaming gives me a bit of anxiety these days. Last spring I realized my dreams had taken on a predictive bent, an ability I never had before my accident. After midsummer, the dreams stopped, and I thought they were just a fluke brought on by the possibility that I might die. Sort of a heads-up from the Wheel of World to keep me on my toes.

  Prescient dreams are metaphorical, and since I have little experience with them, I’m not very good at parsing the metaphors. For that matter, I’m still not sure when I’m having a prescient dream or just sleeping on too full a stomach. My morning dream consisted of apples falling and a chain that moved like a snake. That segued into Moke swinging Meryl and me in his hands. I woke just as he was about to smash us together. Nothing that Freud wouldn’t be able to explain, particularly since, I have to admit, I was aroused by how it ended. At the same time, I had a sense of danger that I couldn’t articulate. The last time dreaming felt that way, I almost died.

  I called Meryl. She mumbled something into the phone about death and mornings, but I think she agreed to drop Crystal Finch at my place by noon. Meryl actually hates mornings more than I do. She’s a Daughter of the Moon and avoids sunrise salutations except on the high holidays. I left Murdock a message to meet us.

  She showed up on the dot of noon and summoned me downstairs with her cell phone. The Mini was parked neatly by the door, engine running, with Meryl in her leather and Crystal in her pink. They made an odd couple but were in an animated conversation.

  Meryl powered down the passenger window when she saw me. “Thanks, Meryl. Was she any trouble?”

  “He-llooo. She’s right here, dude,” said Crystal. She even waved. I hate the word “dude” from sixteen-year-old tough girls. I’m not their dude. As soon as I thought that, I felt way old.

  “She can go wait in the vestibule,” I said.

  Crystal glared at me, then turned to Meryl. “Thanks. Again. I really appreciate what you said.” Damned, if the kid didn’t tear up and hug Meryl. And damned if Meryl didn’t hug her back. Without another word, she got out of the car, looked quickly up and down the street, and ran to the front door I had left ajar. She closed it behind her.

  I slipped into the passenger seat to get out of the cold. “That was sweet.”

  Meryl shifted in her seat to look at me. “She’s had it tough, Connor. Cut her some slack.”

  I stopped myself from making another sarcastic comment. Meryl was right. I had no reason to dislike the kid just because she had managed to put me on her schedule instead of mine. She had reason to be afraid.

  “Did she tell you anyt
hing about Kruge?” I asked.

  “No. We talked about Denny. He sounds like he was a nice guy. She didn’t need me interrogating her last night.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, okay. I’m guessing a troll doesn’t have a very good shoulder to cry on.”

  Meryl gave me a stern look. “She’ll help you. Just make sure you protect her.”

  I slouched in the seat. “I’m not made of stone, Meryl. I got into this because a kid got killed. I’m not looking for it to happen to another one.”

  She nodded. “I meant her feelings, Connor. You get a little single-minded sometimes. Remember, you don’t know what she’s been through. She did try to tell me what happened but froze up every time. Today’s not going to be easy for her.”

  I heard a car come up and looked out the rear window. Murdock pulled in behind us and parked. I leaned forward and brushed Meryl’s nose with my finger. “Thanks. You’re a regular Jiminy Cricket sometimes.”

  She smiled. “Do that again, and I will bite you.”

  I chuckled. “I’ll call you later, crazy woman.”

  I got out of the car, and she drove off. When I banged on the vestibule door, Crystal opened it and peered out.

  “Are you ready?” I said it nicely. She nodded and followed me to Murdock’s car. I tossed a donut bag into the back and sat down. Crystal pushed away a pile of newspapers on the backseat and made herself comfortable.

  “Good afternoon, everyone,” Murdock said. He pulled away from the curb and almost looked in his side view mirror when he did it. He felt different—smooth, for lack of a better word, as if his essence were spread over him in an even layer. Human normals usually feel that way to me because their essence is so weak. The fey tend to have variable flow about them, the essence more intense about their heads and hearts. His midach must have done something to moderate the extreme fluctuations I had been sensing.

  “Where to?” I asked Crystal.

  “The Tangle,” she said. Of course. Murdock had already turned onto the Avenue, so we just drove in silence through the main part of the Weird. He stopped the car at Harbor Street. We could see the yellow crime scene tape on the Unity storefront. A Guild security guard hovered into view at the far end of the street, then flew back up.

  I twisted in my seat. “Okay, Crystal, first you have to tell us what happened at Unity,” I said.

  She looked out the window with a look I’ve seen before, a slack look of disbelief at what she had seen. “Mr. K asked Denny to make a run for him. I went with him for the pickup.”

  “Do you know what he was running?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “It had something to do with Float. Denny bought some somewhere. I found it. I was pissed ’cause I’m clean now, and I didn’t want any drugs around. Denny said he wasn’t using. Mr. K asked him to buy it for him and that he had to bring it to Unity, then do a run.”

  “Did Kruge use kids from Unity for runs a lot?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. Regular errands type stuff, if that’s what you mean.”

  I looked over at Murdock. He didn’t say anything. At the end of the day, this was still his case. I let the moment hang to give him a chance to jump in, but he didn’t.

  “Okay, so you got here and then what?” I said.

  She wrapped her arms tightly against her chest. “Mr. K was here with Croda. He asked me to wait in the printing room. I couldn’t hear anything at first, but then there was shouting. I opened the door a crack to see what was going on, and there was this big ugly troll yelling at Mr. K…”

  “Would you recognize him?” I interrupted.

  “Huh? Yeah, sure. Croda’s the only other troll I met until Moke. Anyway, the troll said something about Denny having something and grabbed him. Mr. K got mad and pushed the troll and told Denny to run. Denny started running toward me, and the troll threw a fey-bolt at him.”

  “Wait a minute, a troll threw a bolt of essence?” Crystal nodded. Trolls manipulated essence, but not offensively. They worked it within things, particularly stone, but I’d never heard they could send it through the air. Unless C-Note had figured out how to work around it. And the idea of a troll doing that was pretty scary.

  “And then Denny…he…he…” She started to cry.

  Even though I’ve seen enough manipulation-by-tears, Crystal’s reminded me to take it easy on her like Meryl asked. “It’s okay, Crystal. Tell us so we can figure out what to do.”

  She nodded and took a deep breath. “The bolt hit Denny, and he flew through the air right at me. He hit the door, and we both fell. He didn’t move at all after that. I think…I think that’s when he died.” The last part came out in a whisper. She started to sob again.

  “You’re doing good, Crystal. Take a breath and tell me what happened next.”

  It took a few moments for her to calm down. Any annoyance I had for her from the previous night was gone. “The next thing I knew, Croda was in the room. I could hear fey-fire and screaming. Croda grabbed me and Denny and ran out the back door. She took us into the Tangle.”

  “Can you show us?”

  She nodded. “Take a left into the next alley.”

  Murdock crossed over Harbor and took the left. We were in the alley across the Avenue from the Unity alley. So far, it made sense. It was the direction I had sensed troll essence trailing away when Murdock and I checked out the back door of Unity. We crept down the narrow lane, large warehouses looming up on each side of us. Sunlight fell in complex patterns on the ground as it filtered through the network of fire escapes above. Old wooden pallets, an array of boxes and bags and tossed papers littered the gutters. At the end of the alley, a rusted car sat to the left.

  “Go to the end and take a right,” Crystal said.

  We made the turn onto a wider service road between more warehouses. Even though we were more exposed to the sky overhead, the light felt dimmer. We were starting to move into the Tangle.

  “Go about three buildings down,” she said.

  Murdock guided the car around piles of rubble, trash, and masonry discarded with no fear that anyone would object. The warehouses down here were no longer active, most of them burnt-out and boarded up. It had been a long time since city services ran garbage trucks. Murdock stopped the car.

  Crystal leaned forward and peered through the wind-shield, then out the side. She closed her eyes. “Wait here and take the left when the alley appears.”

  Murdock craned his neck to look up through the wind-shield. “There’s no alley turn here.”

  “There will be,” said Crystal.

  I scanned the buildings for the telltale signs of a spell, but there was so much ambient essence, nothing stood out. “The Tangle’s full of illusions, Murdock. People put them up all the time. Sometimes they forget them and leave them running,” I said.

  We sat for twenty minutes. “Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Yes, it’s about the right place. It didn’t take this long that night. Maybe it’s broken.”

  A few minutes later I was about to suggest Crystal rethink the location when the brick wall to our left shimmered and vanished. Without a word, Murdock backed up and turned into the alley that had been hidden. Crystal led us through two more similar illusions and an odd series of turns around buildings that seemed to have been built in the middle of the road.

  “We have to get out here and walk,” said Crystal. We were in a stretch of alley that managed to look dark even in the early afternoon.

  “You want me to leave the car here?” Murdock said.

  “It’s not like it’s a Rolls,” I muttered and let myself out. For such a trash heap, he worried about it an awful lot. Murdock and I walked a few feet behind Crystal as she made tentative steps forward. Ahead, old Jersey barriers lay in a heap like a very large game of pick-up-sticks. Crystal turned to her left and faced a gaping hole torn through the brick wall of a building. She seemed frozen in place.

  “Where next, Crystal?” I asked when she didn’t mov
e.

  She looked up at me, then back at the hole. “We went through here.”

  She didn’t move, so I stepped around her and peered inside. Not much to see, just a large empty room covered with the ruins of the collapsed ceiling. The far wall was just gone. Where we stood, the light felt dim. Out beyond the other side of the building, it looked stark and harsh. I could feel the buzz of essence, an old resonance slithering over my mind. The darkness in my head didn’t like it. Something had happened here, something wrong. There were places like it all over the Tangle. Throughout most of the Weird, people avoided using too much Power for fear of the backlash. But here in the Tangle, all bets were off. No one cared what happened to anyone here.

  “You ran straight through,” I said to confirm my thought with her.

  “Yes,” she said behind me, her voice small.

  I think I knew what was out there. We were close to the end. “I’ll go first,” I said.

  Murdock pulled his gun and covered us. I walked across the room, feeling pain whispers all around me. When I reached the far wall, I stopped with Murdock at my side. We faced a long narrow courtyard, more an oversize air shaft. Opposite, a storage shed had been built into the side of the adjoining warehouse. Not much remained, its left and right walls still standing, but its front and roof gone.

  Between the crumbled walls, in the midst of raw debris, Croda stood. She was about eight feet tall, stout, and thick-limbed. Her right arm was thrust up above her head, and her back was arched. Her face was bulbous, a small round tusk sprouting from each side of her wide, flat nose. And her mouth—her mouth was stretched wide in terror, sharp teeth visible, thick tongue protruding. The sun shone hard and white on her dead, petrified face. Now I knew why I had made Moke so angry.

  We walked across the broken stones until we stood next to her. Crystal stayed back, refusing to come any closer than the perimeter of the shed.