Undone Deeds

by Del Franco, Mark

  I pointed at the area around the entry wound. “There’s another telltale right here. Elf-shot forms with a bowfront of essence around the arrowhead. When it lands, the essence hits first and makes a circular burn mark before the arrow pierces the target. This guy’s got some burning, but it’s too small. The victim was likely sleeping, stabbed, then hit with a burst of essence down the arrow shaft to make sure he was dead. Janey should be able to confirm with a pathway analysis.”

  Janey Likesmith was the fey specialist down at the Office of the City Medical Examiner. She was good at her job—great, in fact—though underappreciated. She was the lone fey forensics staff member in an agency that did not hold the fey in the highest esteem. The human staff resented taking care of jobs that the Guild or the Consortium should take, so they perceived fey cases as a drain on limited resources. Janey had helped solve more cases than most examiners, so they grudgingly gave her the space she needed.

  “I’ll make a note to see her later,” Murdock said.

  I checked under the bed. “Are you working a lot of cases together?”

  He compressed his lips. “Yeah. Mostly routine.”

  When Murdock stood, I noticed that the windows behind him shimmered with security wards. Wards could be made in all shapes, sizes, and materials to perform pretty much any function. Pump something up with essence, add a little directional spell work, and you had a ward. Glass was a strong essence retardant, but it could still break. The fey—at least those with reason enough to be paranoid—created wards around property entry points. They reflected sight and sound, and even enhanced the properties of glass to prevent essence-fire.

  I walked around the bed and examined the window casements. The wood was much newer than the rest of the framing, recently installed. It had been charged with essence to create a barrier shield. “I think our victim was a professional.”

  “Undercover?” Murdock asked.

  I wandered back to the bedroom door. The living-room windows had wards, too. “The apartment’s nondescript, not many personal effects, and the security wards on these windows are pretty sophisticated for someone who lives in the Weird.”

  “Consortium?” Murdock asked.

  I pushed my lower lip out as I considered it. “It’s a reasonable guess. The Consortium has as many spies down here as the Guild does. The guy could’ve been freelance, but it won’t hurt to ask around.”

  I stared out the window. A few blocks away, another warehouse rose above its surroundings. A tall tower of wood-and-steel scaffolding stood on the roof, a nest of aged red air-raid sirens clustered together at the top. Murdock and I had found someone hanging from it not long ago. The victim had been someone who had played on too many sides of the game. In the end, no one was on his side.

  Whoever the dead elf was, he thought he was doing the right thing for the right reason, even if it might have been for the money. That was the seduction of a life like his. People gave up much in the hope that they would contribute to something so much more. It didn’t matter which side of the law they were doing it for, at least not at the end. In the end, they either gave up and walked away, or someone made the decision for them.

  A squad car pulled up in the street below. Gerry Murdock got out of the driver’s side. No love existed between me and Murdock’s brother. He blamed me for the death of their father. I didn’t kill the man, but through no intention of my own, the entire Murdock family had gotten messed up.

  “Gerry’s here. I’m not in the mood for him today. You mind if I skip out the back?” I asked.

  Murdock’s gaze swept the room. “Yeah, you might as well. The higher-ups are not going to be cutting any consulting checks to you anytime soon. Thanks for the favor.”

  I knew my consulting days were over. Ever since I lost my abilities, I had been surviving on disability checks from the Guild and the occasional consulting fee from the Boston P.D. The Guild had stopped paying me a few months earlier, and I didn’t have the resources to force them to pay me. I figured it was just a matter of time before the police department dumped me, too. It was no surprise.

  “Actually, I could use a favor myself. I’m meeting some people at the airport tomorrow and could use a ride,” I said.

  “Sure.” He didn’t look up. His tone wasn’t enthusiastic. Murdock was having a hard time with my involvement in his life, too. The difference between him and his brothers was that he didn’t routinely threaten to beat me up. As much as I would have loved to normalize things with him, dinner would have been asking too much.

  A time existed not too long ago when I thought my life was getting back on track. I had given up trying to solve the problem of having no abilities. I had shed my desire to return to the Guild as a top investigator. I even had let go of the anger over the downward turn my life had taken. Yet, here I was again, without many friends or any means of support, with no clear path out of the situation.

  “Do you ever feel like your life is going in circles, Leo?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “All the time.”

  “I don’t think I have many circles of hell left to go through,” I said.

  Murdock tilted his head. “You know what people forget about all those circles of hell? They’re followed by the spheres of heaven.”

  I snorted. “And purgatory’s in the middle. Heaven’s a long way off.”

  Murdock shrugged. “Patience is a virtue, Connor. It all makes sense in the end.”

  2

  Later that afternoon, I sat amid piles of books and dust deep underground in an old section of the Guildhouse subbasements. I had lost myself in an old book. Its thick, cracked-leather covers showed evidence of poor rebinding, and some of the ink had faded to indecipherable. The pages rubbed dry against my fingertips, as if pulling the oils from them. It might have been. Grimoires were not casual reading. They told histories and parables, but their true value was in the lessons. Manipulating essence was inherent to the fey, different species being proficient in different areas. Becoming a true practitioner required study and practice. Grimoires were the textbooks to the art and science of being fey.

  The Boston Guildhouse was gone, destroyed in a terrorist attack by the Elven King. The surviving Guild staff were struggling to get back to business from buildings scattered across the city. They weren’t keen about taking on new investigations at the moment.

  Several stories above me, the ruins of the Guildhouse pressed down, a shattered heap of stone. Donor Elfenkonig, the Elven King, had destroyed the building by using a talisman known as the faith stone. He broke the bonds that held the building together with essence. I tried to stop him, tried to prevent the disaster, but failed. Donor was one of the most powerful fey in the world. I didn’t have much of a chance against him and survived by fate or dumb luck. The building came down anyway. I had killed the Elven King in the process, though I’m not sure if I meant to.

  The faith stone survived. The problem was that it was inside my head. A chunk of blue crystal the size of my fist had passed through my skull and embedded itself in my brain. How I survived and why it could happen had brought me to a tiny storeroom of old books that most people had forgotten existed.

  It wasn’t the first room like it I had been in. The worn, wooden table on thick, rounded legs teetered a fraction of an inch, enough to irritate me every time I leaned forward or shifted a pile of books. Stacks of bound parchment surrounded me in a narrow, vaulted alcove no larger than a monk’s cell. Most of the stuff was crap, apocryphal writings on subjects people wished they knew about. Here and there, though, true writings were buried like diamonds in the rough. Or a faith stone in a thick head.

  A door slammed off in the distance, followed by the sound of glass breaking, then louder swearing. I hurried into the hall. “Meryl?”

  Something heavy slid against a gritty floor. “I’m fine . . . ish.”

  The hallway curved and dipped, one of the original tunnels beneath the Guildhouse that conformed to earthen energies. Between layers of protecti
on spells and the original foundation, the archives had survived the destruction of the building above mostly intact. It was the not-intact sections that were a problem.

  Meryl Dian stood over a fallen box, hands on her hips and annoyance on her face. She wore tight black jeans and old maroon high-top Docs. A dark red lace top set off her black hair as she glared down at the broken glass. “The buffer spell went down. I just lost about a grand worth of crystal inhibitors.”

  I slipped my arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “It’s just stuff. You’re working too hard.”

  She leaned into me, honeysuckle and clove. “Did you find anything today?”

  “I’ve learned how to sicken a flock of sheep from the next town over. It’ll come in handy if I ever get my abilities back and need revenge on a wool farmer,” I said.

  She craned her neck to look at me. “Let’s get out of here. I’m hungry and annoyed.”

  I took her hand as we returned up the hallway. “Great. My two favorite moods of yours.”

  Meryl gave me a playful shove. “I’ve been working down here all by myself.”

  “No one said you had to keep the archives a secret. That was your choice. You have a staff,” I said. With all the debris from the collapsed building, wrecking crews were still clearing the street above. The operation had become complicated by the residual essence interacting in the rubble. No one was worried about the basements yet, and Meryl had decided to keep her domain private for a while.

  “Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be able to move around down here if macGoren found out it was accessible,” she said.

  Ryan macGoren was Acting Guildmaster, a title he had by default since the actual Guildmaster, Manus ap Eagan, had gone into a coma. MacGoren and I didn’t get along at all. I tried to warn him about the Elven King, but he had ignored me. When the Guildhouse fell, he looked like the fool that he was and didn’t want me running around telling the truth of the matter.

  “I wasn’t complaining. You don’t have to do all this work by yourself is all I meant. The city’s been declared a national disaster area. No one’s going to know if you knew the archives were accessible. You deserve a break. I’m a big boy. I can find what I need by myself.”

  She tugged at my jacket. “Are you saying you don’t need me?”

  I pulled her close. “You, my love, are hungry and arbitrary. What say I get some food in you?”

  She laughed and pushed away. “Okay. Let’s do Chinatown. It’s about the only neighborhood left that hasn’t been trashed.”

  An hour later, we were sitting on cheap metal chairs at a wobbly table for two. Meryl was digging into a bowl of pho as big as a tureen. “You’re awfully slurpy,” I said.

  “You’re supposed to slurp. It’s a cultural thing,” she said around a mouthful of noodles.

  I picked at my tempura. “Yes, tell me more about your Chinese heritage.”

  “Vietnamese. County Clare,” she said. I laughed. Meryl had a comeback for everything. “How’s your research going?”

  “Boring. I’m not finding anything in the construction files about the faith stone. I know there has to be something there. Eagan knew about the stone and never told anyone. I want to know why,” I said.

  Eagan had the stone built into the structure of the Guildhouse. Its power was obvious. What was less obvious was why Eagan didn’t want it known where it was. I hoped the answer was somewhere in the archives, lost in years of neglect. For a century, Eagan had watched over the dwarf—now dead—who had given or sold him the stone. Meryl had found documents dating back decades that proved Eagan protected the guy. If those records existed, others had to.

  “You can question his methods, but Manny always had good reasons,” she said.

  “Well, he better have had a good one. I’ve got a rock in my head,” I said. At the moment of his death, Donor had lost control of the faith stone. In the resulting explosion, the stone tore through my head and into my mind.

  Meryl squirted more hot sauce into her pho. “If it was a real rock, you’d be dead. It would have crushed your skull and smooshed your brain into pulp, although sometimes I do wonder.”

  “You told me Gillen Yor said it was the stone,” I said. Gillen was my healer, my frustrated healer who had no idea how to help me. Meryl had been acting as go-between for us since people had a tendency to take a shot at me whenever I showed my face near any secure facilities.

  “The stone is a metaphor for essence that has somehow become bonded to you. It’s a stone, and it’s not a stone,” she said.

  “Okay, that hurts my brain more than having the stone in there,” I said.

  Meryl produced a distinct snicker. It was cute when it was because she was amused. It was embarrassing when it was because she thought you had said something stupid. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which. “That’s what you get for abandoning your druidic training when you did. What we do, Grey, is not just manipulate essence. We interact with the Wheel of the World, and that’s a much bigger deal. It’s about faith and balance and fate as much as it is knocking someone on his ass with a bolt of essence. Whatever the faith stone is, it is also something tied to the Wheel of the World. That’s power on a level we can’t understand because it’s starting to touch the ineffable, so we try to reduce it to a concept we do understand.”

  “Like a stone,” I said.

  “Precisely. The stone is a metaphor for an idea with a purpose wrapped in essence,” she said.

  “And the dark mass is the opposite,” I said. The dark mass had been the bane of my existence for over three years. When I was working for the Guild, I had tried to capture a terrorist named Bergin Vize. I cornered him at a nuclear power plant north of the city. Something went wrong. I woke up weeks later in the hospital with my memory and my abilities gone, and Vize still on the loose. A dark mass had appeared in my brain, preventing me from manipulating essence. I went from being one of the most powerful druids to come along in a long time to a guy living on disability checks.

  The dark mass in my head drained essence from anything it touched. When the faith stone hit me in the head, it achieved a coexistence with the darkness. They pulsed against each other in my mind—one hot pain, the other cold. The plus side to the whole thing was my body shield came back. I could form a full one again, thickened essence around my body that slowed physical objects and deflected essence-fire.

  “Nothing can be in the World and not be in the World. The dark mass can’t be devoid of essence and be in the World. The World, by definition, is essence,” she said.

  I smiled. “Teacher, teach thyself. It’s no different than saying a stone can be a stone and not a stone at the same time.”

  She twisted her lips in thought. “I’m not buying it. The stone and the idea of faith are things that we can define. You’re defining the dark mass as something that can’t be defined.”

  “It has a definition, though. It’s the Gap.”

  Meryl frowned with dismissiveness. “Don’t forget who your source was for that idea, Grey. Brokke worked for the Elven King and protected Bergin Vize.”

  Brokke was a dwarf who had been a high-level advisor to Donor. He was also one of the most powerful seers in the world. The only thing he didn’t see coming was his own death when the Guildhouse collapsed. I watched him die. As much as he frustrated me, I took no joy in his death.

  He gave me somewhat of an answer to what the black mass in my head was. He called the darkness the Gap, an indescribable force that existed as nonexistence. It devoured the essence that made the World possible. It drained the life out of people. It had the potential to destroy the World, which meant I had that power. Brokke claimed I couldn’t control it, that no one could. I didn’t believe that—yet. While I lived, I believed I had a choice to let the darkness overwhelm me or to find a way to stop it.

  “Brokke understood the darkness, Meryl. He told me he had been studying it for years. That’s why I’m down in the archives. If Brokke found answers, I can find t
hem, too.”

  “If he understood it, why didn’t he lift a finger to stop Vize? He knew Vize has the darkness in him, too,” she said.

  “Just because he didn’t understand it doesn’t mean he was wrong. I can’t dismiss him. I might not agree with his methods and motives, but Brokke told me more about the dark mass than anyone else did,” I said.

  “And you’re still no closer to the answer,” she said.

  “So what am I supposed to do? Sit around with a dark mass and a stone in my head, and pretend they’re not there?”

  “Not acting is just as much of a choice as acting,” she said. “Maybe you need to take a break. You’re stressed. You’re tired. You’re the target of every law-enforcement agency in the city. Maybe doing nothing for a while is what you need. The dark mass hasn’t killed you in over three years. The faith stone has been in there a few weeks. Enjoy not being dead for a while.”

  “Maybe you’re right. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s doing nothing,” I said.

  She leaned across the table and patted my hand. “Sounds like someone needs some self-esteem sex.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, and someone needs I’m-right-again sex.”

  She grinned with basil in her teeth. “Are we the perfect couple or what?”

  3

  The next morning, Murdock and I waited inside the doors of the international terminal at Logan Airport as armed security positioned themselves nearby. The plane from Ireland had landed over an hour earlier, and its passengers had not been processed through customs yet. More guards filled the concourse, and the baggage area had been closed to the public. Only people on an approved list had been let inside, and we had been ID-checked several times. With the number of high-level Guild staff and important members of the Seelie Court aboard the plane, the government was not taking any chances.

  Before he died, Donor Elfenkonig had been going to great pains to blame the solitary fairies under the leadership of Eorla Elvendottir for the attack on the Boston Guildhouse. He had come to Boston in disguise in order to discredit Eorla. It worked, to an extent, but Eorla was a member of the elven royal house, and many people made no distinction between her and her deceased cousin, the king. The general public didn’t know that Donor was dead.