Undone Deeds cg-6

by Mark Del Franco

  “Whom have you recruited to your cause against Maeve?” I asked.

  “The Seelie Court is made up of many underKings and -Queens who do not love Maeve,” she said.

  “Enough to commit treason?” I asked.

  Ceridwen smiled. “Maeve has violated the most fundamental laws of our Court, Grey. She caused the death of an underQueen. It is not treason to hold her accountable for it.”

  “You’re going to war,” I said.

  “Maeve has moved her forces onto the Continent. Tara is empty. I cannot let the opportunity pass,” she said. She took a pawn out with a rook.

  I reached for another pawn, then withdrew when I realized I would lose my other bishop. “Ceridwen, I know she betrayed you, and, well, you ended up dying, but do you really want to start a war over your death? More people will die.”

  She chuckled. “Wars have been started over lesser things.”

  “This isn’t Faerie,” I said.

  “No, it’s not, but the same rules apply. The threat of war often accomplishes more than war. The Seelie Court never was about one person, but Maeve has made it so. While she wastes time and resources threatening the Teutonic Consortium, the rest of the Celtic fey suffer. It’s time for a change, either with Maeve or without her.”

  “She doesn’t sound like the type for compromise,” I said.

  I moved my remaining knight. Ceridwen glanced down at the board, then at me. “When faced with two courses that will lead to the same result, which would you choose, Connor? The one that causes bloodshed or the one that causes even more?”

  “I guess it depends on one’s principles,” I said.

  “I have you in checkmate in six moves. You lost this game two moves ago. Shall we continue?” she asked.

  I laughed as a knock sounded from the door. Ceridwen glamoured her face with a haze that masked her features as a servant answered the door. A young dwarf entered, cap in hand, his blunt face giving him the appearance of age. He bowed. “Forgive the intrusion. The Lord of the Dead asked to be informed if any scryers were about, ma’am.”

  Ceridwen had kept her identity a secret from even her followers. By wearing the glamour, they thought—or feared—that she was the mythical King of the Dead who rode out on a horse of fire bringing death to the unwary. I think she liked the outfit more than the mystery. “What say you?” Ceridwen asked.

  “A strange woman has entered the Tangle. She scrys as she walks but speaks not,” he said.

  “No one can scry any longer,” Ceridwen said.

  “Indeed. I tremble to err,” the dwarf said.

  I stood. “You know what? I’ll take this. If anyone can tell a true scryer, I can.”

  Ceridwen faced the chessboard, her expression invisible behind the glamour. “You didn’t finish the game.”

  “Save it. I have six moves to prove you wrong,” I said. Her laugh followed me out the door.

  11

  The dwarf led me through an abandoned floor of an old brownstone. All the walls had been blown out, the support structures replaced with essence barriers to hold up the roof. I didn’t like places like it in the Tangle. The barriers often needed to be recharged to keep a building from collapsing, and it was never clear who or why someone maintained the empty buildings. I always worried I was in a building that was about to come down on my head.

  The dwarf stopped at an open window and pointed. “She should be coming through any second. You can see her from here.”

  I looked down into the street, a jagged stretch of a pavement that connected two main avenues. In the middle of the lane, a feminine figure wore a sequined white jumpsuit with red boots. People grouped on the sidewalk, more curious about a large flat package than the strangely dressed figure. The package caught my eye, too—was probably what was catching everyone’s eye down there. It blazed with essence. The strange part under the circumstances was that the essence resonated like scrying. Even four flights up, it pulsed against my senses. I kept my body shield activated as a matter of course in the Tangle. Even though the stone suppressed the problems the dark mass gave me, the darkness still reacted to scrying. It pressed against the stone, a heated wave of pain, struggling to shut me down.

  “That’s a friend of mine. Pull him out of there,” I said.

  The dwarf snorted. “Are you sure that’s a friend?”

  “Bring him to the Hunter’s hall. I’ll meet you there,” I said.

  He looked me askance. “Is that wise?”

  “It’ll be fine. It’s shielded, so people will lose interest.” The hall was Ceridwen’s receiving room, where she appeared as the Hunter to her people.

  The dwarf crawled out onto the fire escape. I didn’t watch him descend but made my way back through the building. The next floor down had a missing wall into the next building, which had a crumbling sky bridge across the alley behind it. From there, I hit the roof and walked the length of the block, then down a stairwell into the basement and into a tunnel. Secret and convoluted paths riddled the Tangle, which made it possible for so much illegal activity to occur. I had been learning the routes, more for expediency than secrecy. People knew I was down here, but I didn’t have to make it easy for them to track my movements.

  I reached Ceridwen’s hall several minutes later. The room held a chair, which only Ceridwen sat in. Essence lanterns hung from the ceiling to throw dim light. Old-fashioned wooden torches soaked in kerosene lined the walls. They were lit for atmosphere when Ceridwen was rallying her troops or intimidating the hell out of someone.

  The entrance shimmered open—an opaque essence barrier that was stronger than any door would be. The dwarf leaned in and cocked his eyebrow at me, but I nodded for him to leave. Ceridwen’s people were protective of me, but I wasn’t worried.

  Shay strolled in with his crazy outfit and the package like he had come from shopping on Newbury Street. The two of us had a complicated and unexpected history. Through some residual arrogance from my Guild days, I had gotten his boyfriend killed during a murder investigation. Shay had almost died a couple of times since then because he had gotten sucked up in my wake.

  No matter how hard I tried to leave him alone, something conspired to bring us together, and not in a good way for Shay. He had saved my life, but committed murder to do it. He hid the stone bowl for me, and I had almost killed him in his own apartment. I knew his boyfriend, Robin, was hiding in the city, one of the many Dead, but kept the information from him. He didn’t deserve what I had done, and I didn’t deserve his friendship.

  He flipped his long hair over his shoulder. “That was faster than I thought it would be.”

  “Are you insane coming into the Tangle dressed like that?” I asked.

  Shay held his hands out dramatically from the waist. “Exactly, Connor. Anyone who shows up in the Tangle looking like this is either too crazy to deal with or too powerful to screw over. I made more people nervous than the other way around.”

  “How did you know how to find me?” I asked.

  He leaned the package against the chair. Essence radiated off it—the paper was insufficient to block it. I didn’t look directly at it. It shifted and swirled and made my head hurt. “Process of elimination. Your apartment’s being watched. I didn’t think you’d abandon the bowl, so I figured you were still somewhere in the Weird. The end of Oh No is too close to the police and stuff, and you don’t strike me as the type to hide out in a burned-out building. The Tangle was the only thing left.”

  Shay was too smart for his own good sometimes. “What’s in the package?”

  Shay ripped the brown paper to reveal a painting canvas. “It’s your friend Meryl’s painting.”

  He flipped it around to show me the plain white surface, but plain only in the visible sense. “That doesn’t look like much of a painting to me, Shay.”

  He pursed his lips in appraisal. “Color blocking is a bit passé, although she did use some interesting fingerwork.”

  Essence swirled and danced across the surf
ace. Multicolored shapes bent and twisted, dancing like clouds on the wind. They reacted as I approached, and the dark mass in my head threw little pain spikes down my neck. “It’s infused with Meryl’s essence.”

  Shay stepped back, still staring as if he could see what I was talking about. Shay was human, though, with no fey abilities. Sometimes he seemed to exhibit a fey sensitivity, but it appeared more intuition than talent. “I thought something was up. It won’t take paint. Every time I painted on it, the paint ran off onto the floor. Uno wouldn’t stay in the same room with it. It’s been taking up room in the studio, and I figured you would want it.”

  Uno was a dog, of sorts, a big black dog whose eyes glowed red in the dark. He was the Cu Sith, the hunter of souls, demon dog of TirNaNog. After he died, Robin sent the dog to protect Shay, but Uno spent an uncomfortable amount of time watching me. In history and legends, the Cu Sith was a harbinger of death. For Shay and me, he was an overgrown puppy that drooled a lot and occasionally protected us from getting killed. At least the drool vanished on its own by the next day.

  “I need to get Meryl to take a look at this. I keep hearing no one can scry, but I’m getting a scrying buzz off it,” I said.

  Shay turned his attention to me with the same appraising eye he had trained on the painting. “You look like hell.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Seriously. Are you all right? Your eyes look funny.”

  “It happened at the Guildhouse,” I said. My irises were crystallized like stained glass. With the faith stone emanating its energies in my head, I had the look of an Old One out of Faerie. It made me feel ancient.

  Shay licked his lips and turned away. “I knew some people who died. Not a lot.”

  “One’s enough, isn’t it?” I asked.

  He played with the sequins on his sleeve. Shay wasn’t one to dwell on sadness or misery. “Well, you could use some sun anyway.”

  I walked him to the door. “Will do. You keeping out of trouble?”

  He slipped a strand of hair around his ear and smiled. “Actually, yes. My life is quite boring at the moment. I could use a little excitement,” he said.

  The essence barrier faded open to reveal a bustling alley camp outside. “Well, please don’t find it here. I’m trying to keep a low profile.”

  He paused at the door. “If you keep leaving important stuff at my apartment”—he leaned in and tapped his finger on my lips for the next words—“people will talk.”

  I tweaked him on the nose. Shay had flirted with me since the moment we met. It flattered and amused me, but it was all good-natured. “Get going. Don’t stop until you’re well into the Weird. I don’t want to hear that you caused a riot.”

  He laughed and walked into the alley. Uno faded into view, his dark form slipping in behind Shay. People pulled away, uncertain. Not everyone could see Uno, but they could feel him. It wasn’t a good feeling. Shay and I didn’t have the same reaction to him as everyone else. It always made me worry. About the both of us.

  12

  After Shay left, I had the painting brought up to Ceridwen’s rooms. I didn’t know what to make of it, but leaving it around unattended was not an option. Ceridwen was subdued as she stared at the whirling essence but didn’t say why. She agreed to put dampening wards on the canvas so that whatever scrying was operating wouldn’t split my head open with pain.

  Afterward, I decided to pretend my life was normal. The Tangle was living in a stew of essence. People who remembered claimed the atmosphere reminded them of Faerie, but with urban buildings and no positive relief. After weeks in the neighborhood, I understood what they meant. Essence saturated everything in the World but intensified in the Tangle. Part of that was the high concentration of fey, but it also was what those fey did.

  Essence in the Tangle was activated in all its forms—spells, wards, incantations, shields, glamours, barriers. To my mind, the difference between the Tangle and Faerie was in kind. The Tangle was about warped uses of defense and offense, of catering to baser impulses and exploiting the weak or unsuspecting. I didn’t doubt that Faerie had all those things, but they wouldn’t define it so narrowly. It had been a place where people lived, good people and bad, but not a place that was inherently exhausting. Wearing a body shield all day in the Tangle was not unusual. Wearing one in Faerie to plow a field was probably unnecessary.

  As a here-born, someone who had never lived in Faerie, I had the added difference of being attuned to the modern world. I had lived in places where essence was ambient, not a regular tool for the locals. I had friends who were not fey, who didn’t resonate with body signatures after standing in the sun too long. I noticed the difference between life in the city and life in the Weird. I liked the relief of the city sometimes.

  I went for a nice long run in a stocking cap and sunglasses in the cool evening air, unnoticed and unrecognized. For a half hour, I was a guy in running shoes, not a suspected murderer. I did my favorite route down the waterside of the Weird, hopping over gaps between docks and balancing up and down old planking. I left the Weird and made for the loop down at Castle Island, feeling the harbor wind on my face.

  During the day, Castle Island was a favorite public park for nearby Southie. It was devoid of people at night, not a safe place for anyone. It wasn’t crime-ridden, per se, but sometimes an opportunistic mugger took advantage of the abandonment.

  I slowed as I approached the parking lot. The land sloped up to an old fort from the 1800s, when the park was an actual island not connected to the mainland by fill.

  A thin haze floated over the fort like a mist, not unusual since it was on the harbor, but the mist seemed only above the fort. My sensing ability picked up ambient essence stronger than usual, too.

  Castle Island was where things first fell apart last year, where Shay and Keeva had almost died, and Murdock’s family history started to crack open. A madman under Vize’s control had almost destroyed a dimensional barrier and released a race of beings called Fomorians, or what might politely be called monsters. The impact of those events lingered—much as nasty things lingered in the Weird and the Tangle—and took a long time to fade.

  I jogged in place, searching the air. Other than the mist, nothing seemed wrong. I shrugged off the feeling as paranoia. A bunch of fairies could have been doing aerials up there before I arrived. They liked playing around in the conflicting air currents.

  I circled around the parking lot and back up the access road. Before turning for the Weird, I made a detour into the edge of Southie. The Tangle wasn’t known for its coffee shops, and a place around the corner made some excellent mud.

  I came around the corner and almost barreled into Murdock and Janey Likesmith. Janey held a coffee-to-go cup away from her, checking to see if any had spilled on her while Murdock stared at the half of scone on the sidewalk that I had knocked out of his hand. “Can I expense that?” I asked.

  “Please tell me you’re not being chased by a marauding horde of something,” Murdock said.

  I stretched my hamstrings against the side of the building. “Nah. Went for a run. What’s up? You guys get a call over here?”

  Awkward looks flashed between them, then Janey sipped her coffee. Murdock picked up the fallen scone and tossed it in a bin. “No. We…. uh…. met for coffee.”

  I pulled my foot up behind me to finish the stretch. “Oh, are you going over the elf case?”

  Janey started laughing and threw Murdock a wide-eyed expression. “Yeah, that’s it. Tell him about the case, Leo.”

  Murdock blushed, and I finally got it. Janey and Murdock, together, having a coffee in a part of the neighborhood neither of them lived. Murdock was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Janey was wearing a long casual dress with a sweater over her shoulders. In other words, neither of them was working, and I was an idiot for not seeing it. “Oh…. um…. oh,” I said.

  Murdock focused on wiping crumbs off his hands. “Yeah, um, Janey says there’s something up with that arrow.”r />
  “Did you get a signature off it?” I asked. I cringed at the overly polite tone in my voice, like I had just met them.

  Janey kept the wide smile on her face. “Several actually, mostly residual, but the odd part was that it wasn’t elf-shot. The charge sent through the arrow had some kind of solitary essence on it. Isn’t that right, Leo?”

  Murdock smiled uncomfortably. “Yep. That’s what the report said.”

  “The one I wrote. Right? Was there something about coffee in there?” asked Jane, then laughed.

  “I don’t remember,” he mumbled.

  “Did you get that ID I sent?” I asked.

  Janey tilted her head, waiting for Murdock to respond. He slipped his hands in his pockets. “It’s unofficial, but I was able to confirm that Alfren was working for the Guild. Mostly, he passed information about the Tangle and movements of Eorla’s people.”

  “Has the Guild taken over the case?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “He’s still in the morgue. No one wants him.”

  “That sounds like political dodgeball. I guess we wait and see who picks him up. That’ll tell us who has more to hide,” I said. I wanted to bite back my words, but they were out.

  Janey could not keep the smile off her face. She was loving Murdock’s discomfort. “Maybe everyone should go out for coffee.”

  Clearly defeated, Murdock eyed her with amusement. “Coffee is good for a lot of things.”

  I decided to let them off the hook. “Speaking of which, I could use a cup. You guys want anything?”

  “No, thanks. I’m meeting someone for dinner,” Janey said.

  “Yeah, me, too,” Murdock said.

  I rubbed my hands together. “Okay, then. I guess I’ll check in with you later. Let me know if something comes up.”

  Janey lost it. She backed away, laughing. Murdock glared at me in a way that told me I would pay for that. Amused, I watched them walk away. When they reached the corner, Murdock held Janey’s arm above the elbow as they crossed the street.