Undone Deeds

by Del Franco, Mark

  Meryl held her hand in the air. “Connor, can you hand me the fly swatter?”

  My mother smiled. “It’s okay, dear. I was someone’s hootchie once.”

  “Mother!” I said.

  She stood up. “I must be going. I’d love to have you for dinner, Meryl. You can meet Mr. Grey.”

  “Um…. sure,” Meryl said.

  “This isn’t happening to me,” I muttered.

  My mother hugged me and kissed my cheek. “Get some food in you, Con. Call me later.”

  “I will,” I said.

  She paused on the threshold and looked at Meryl. “Oh, by the way, you look lovely, and I understand the desire not to feel constricted, but, trust me, in a pinch, a bra makes a great sling weapon.”

  “I did not hear that,” I said.

  Meryl tugged at the bottom of her jacket. It didn’t cover anything. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  She patted my chest. “Just girl talk. See you soon.”

  I closed the door behind her and turned toward Meryl. “Do not say a word,” I said.

  She grinned like I’d never seen her do. “What? I liked her.”

  14

  Meryl and Joe pretended to talk to each other while I jumped in the shower. They tolerated each other at best, suspected each other’s motives at worst. Flits had a history of innocent spying, which no one liked, and Meryl had a history of strict privacy, which she made no exceptions for. Joe had a habit of annoying whomever I dated. I thought of it as hazing the new person in my social life, but my dates tended to think he was a pain in the ass. He was, but he was part of the package when someone hung out with me.

  I came out of the bathroom, towel-drying my hair and wondering if I had clean socks. For such an empty room, I had a hard time keeping track of stuff. I opened the top drawer of the small dresser and found Joe sleeping in my underwear. Without waking him, I managed to find two socks that looked the same color. Joe looked comfortable, so I closed the drawer again.

  I overlooked Joe’s less-than-mature antics—didn’t even notice them most of the time. I grew up with him. Joe was who he was. His bad side was irritating, but at least that was the extent of it. Lots of people had bad sides that were worse, Meryl among them. She was grumpy, quick to anger, and an intellectual snob. I wouldn’t have either of them any other way because when they flew, they soared.

  Across the room, Meryl stood in front of the blank canvas, intense concentration on her face. I had pulled it out of the closet and shown her the protection wards Ceridwen had placed. Meryl had stripped them off and let the scrying essence free again. I activated my body shield to keep the more intense radiations from bothering the dark mass.

  The visible surface of the canvas remained white, the dried paint lumped and swirled in random directions. Meryl had slopped the paint on with her hands, evidenced by furrows with obvious finger marks. With sensing ability, though, the canvas came alive, a kaleidoscopic array of moving colored essence that separated and re-formed into shapes and images. It made my head hurt, the darkness pulse in the same way it reacted when someone was scrying.

  “I did this,” Meryl said.

  “Yep.”

  When I first found the stone ward bowl, I asked Shay to take it for safekeeping. He had hidden it at his place, which no one but I knew. A few months earlier, I thought someone was hunting for the bowl, so I went to warn Shay that it was time to hide it somewhere else. I wanted him to move it to the abandoned squat—which he did—but that didn’t happen until after. I had taken Meryl with me to Shay’s studio that day. She was in a mindless trance, then. The next thing I knew, the stone bowl was reacting to her presence and shooting essence into her body. Meryl had grabbed at Shay’s paints and attacked the canvas as if possessed. The result was the scrying-infused artwork in the middle of my room.

  Meryl held her hand close to the surface of the canvas. The essence reacted, the images sharpening into more recognizable shapes. A sword danced into view, then something like flames. “Did I say anything?”

  “No.” She had painted in a trance, fueled by the energies of the stone bowl.

  Meryl stepped back with her hands on her hips. “It’s my dream. I painted my dream from the trance.”

  I pulled on a black T-shirt and tucked it into my jeans. The living room had no mirror, so I fumbled fingers through my hair. It’s what I would have done in the bathroom mirror anyway, to worse results. “The one you couldn’t remember?” I asked.

  She withdrew her hand, and the essence shapes disintegrated and swirled again. “You know how when you’re trying to remember something and you have this vague idea of what it is and then it comes to you and you’re, like, yeah, that’s it? That’s what looking at this is like. It’s like a blurry memory coming into focus.”

  I came up behind her and leaned my chin on her head. “You said you didn’t remember doing this. Do you know how you did it now?”

  She walked to one side of the canvas, then the other. “The paint’s infused with essence. Can you feel it?”

  “I can see it,” I said.

  She whipped her head toward me. “You can see it? My dream?”

  I gestured at the canvas. “Well, I don’t know if it’s your dream, but, yeah, I can see the essence with my sensing ability. That’s why I brought you up here.”

  She moved away again. “Huh. What do you see?”

  “Right now? Mostly nothing but smears of essence light.”

  She pointed at a space near the center. “What about here?”

  “A patch of silvery essence,” I said.

  She pursed her lips. “I see a war helm.”

  I moved closer. The silvery essence changed and sharpened. “I see a pair of eyes.”

  “And now I see a silvery patch,” she said. She put her hand against my chest and pushed me away gently. “And now, the helm’s back.”

  Banging sounded from inside the dresser, followed by creative swearing in Gaelic. Joe flashed in over our heads. “What’s all the freakin’ noise out here?”

  Meryl and I exchanged glances. “We weren’t making noise, Joe.”

  He shook his head like a dog coming out water. “There’s shouting and screaming and banging and booming.”

  I craned my neck up, as Joe became more agitated. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Joe. Calm down.”

  Meryl tugged at my sleeve. “Hold on a sec. Joe, take a look at this painting, and tell me what you see.”

  Joe swept up to the canvas, tilting his head back and forth. From where I stood, the essence swirled and shifted in shades of blue and white, but nothing resolved into focus. “I see beer and tiny breasts,” he said.

  “What do you see in the painting, Joe, not wherever you were last night,” I said.

  His spun his head toward me in surprise. “Yggy’s serves quail?”

  “What?”

  He pointed. “There’s a lovely quail on a plate next to a pint of beer. Who painted this? It looks delicious.”

  “I did, sort of,” Meryl said.

  He crossed his arms and nodded, impressed. “I had no idea. Very good.”

  “That’s it? You see food?” I asked.

  Joe went back to the canvas. “Well, there’s a few burning buildings and something that looks like a tornado. Oh! And roasted potatoes!”

  Meryl glowered at me. I shrugged. “You asked him, not me,” I said.

  Joe frowned. “She doesn’t like potatoes?”

  Meryl ignored him. “We’re all seeing something different.”

  “Our own futures?” I asked.

  “That would seem logical,” she said.

  Joe whirled in a circle. “Oh, good. I hope it’s tonight. That blueberry sauce looks amazing.” He hovered closer to the canvas. “Or are they currants?”

  “Can we focus on the fire-and-disaster images, Joe?” I asked.

  He sighed heavily. “Fine. But you shouldn’t let them get in the way of a fine meal. I mean, the world ends all the time, b
ut it’s a terrible thing to waste a good quail.”

  “Glad he has his priorities straight,” Meryl muttered.

  Joe turned his back to her and faced me. He crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue as he pointed at Meryl. “Someone woke up on the wrong side of the coma.”

  Meryl glared but didn’t respond. I moved closer. A line of silver bled down the center, sprouted two branches, and became a sword. “So, it seems to be working like some kind of mirror, a future for whoever stands in front of it.”

  Meryl paced behind me. “And I haven’t had a dream or vision since I woke up.”

  “Maybe you still haven’t recovered fully.”

  She watched from a distance as the essence continued to morph. “It’s bigger than that. No one is seeing the future. It’s like the visions have been turned off…. except for that thing.”

  The sword that had appeared reconfigured itself into a crescent, then a heart. “The Guildhouse’s falling wasn’t the blockage.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” she said.

  Over the last year, one disaster after another had struck Boston. I had been a focal point. I almost died. Meryl almost died. And Eorla and Joe and Murdock. Lots of people did die. Each time, scryers and dreamers in the city had lost their ability to see the future. That happened when cataclysmic events were unfolding and the outcome was uncertain. The future became so muddied on such a grand scale, no one could predict it.

  “Well, nobody’s admitting that the Elven King is dead. Maybe that’s it,” I said.

  Meryl moved to the same distance from the painting as I was. My vision hazed back to kaleidoscope swirls. “Now I’m seeing Joe’s tornado. I don’t get it.”

  “We all have our own metaphors in the visions. Someone told me that once,” I said.

  She backed away. “Yeah, but I know my metaphors, and this isn’t one of them.”

  The essence shifted and changed again when she stepped away. It cycled in a slow circle, the colors stretching into streamers of red, blue, and yellow. They coiled thinner and thinner, ribbons merging into purples, oranges, and greens. The colors pulled tighter, the main mass of essence in the center fading to pastel, then white. The colors tightened, darkening to gray. The circle spun faster, and the essence intensified around a black center.

  Heat flared in my head with intense, pulsing pain. My vision went red, then white as my skin prickled with the jabs of a thousand needles. A maelstrom churned in front of me, a cyclone of white and black. The pain built until I felt nothing but the pain, the sting of it becoming one with my body. The vortex filled my sight, filled the room, filled the world. Nothing else existed but a stunning burn of white and black. The black center blossomed like an angry blot of ink in water, and I trembled.

  “Stop,” Meryl shouted.

  My sight went black, the sudden shutting down of light as the vibrant essence vanished. I staggered back as the room reasserted itself around me. Meryl stood a few feet away, holding the canvas away from me so I couldn’t see it. “What happened?”

  “Your face turned white with essence. Black flames shot around your head,” she said.

  I rubbed my eyes. Red and yellow spots danced behind my eyelids. “Sounds kinda cool.”

  “It was a negative image of the painting,” she said.

  I pressed the heels of my hands into my temples to counteract the pounding. “You saw the same thing? You saw the flamy, whirly thing?”

  “Bright and clear, and so were you. I thought something was going to explode,” she said.

  “Me, too. It was pretty for a while, but then, it always is,” Joe said.

  “What always is?” I asked.

  “The Wheel of the World,” he said.

  Meryl placed the painting faceup on the floor and pulled the cheap plastic tablecloth off the table. “I’m taking this home. I don’t think you should be around it.”

  I wasn’t going to argue. Even if Meryl reactivated Ceridwen’s wards to keep the scrying from hurting, there was little she could do to stop the temptation to look at it. Right then, looking at it was the last thing on my list, but I knew me. I had never been one to resist temptation well. I slumped onto the bed. “When will this be over?”

  Joe hovered above the painting, staring at it as Meryl wrapped it. “Looks like Tuesday next, after dinner.”

  15

  Lunch had to be postponed while Meryl took the canvas back to her place. She refused to let me tag along because she never let me go to her place, but this time she had a point. If I knew where the painting was, knowing me, I’d want to check it out. She wasn’t interested in pretending she wasn’t home while I leaned on the doorbell. Instead, I went to the Guildhouse, which had been our postlunch plan anyway. We both had work to do there, so she met me afterward. We spent most of the day apart, though, me working in various library stacks while Meryl tended to mysterious chores on another floor.

  Meryl’s office was a mess. Boxes filled with salvaged items from damaged storage rooms competed for space with her usual stacks and stacks of ephemera. Some things stayed for a few hours while Meryl found a better place for them, but I suspected a good chunk of it was going to hang around for a long time. I wasn’t helping by leaving books on her desk, reference titles I had found in the library section. Under normal circumstances, Meryl would scream at me for unshelving so many items at once, but I was digging in the older sections of the archives that she hadn’t cataloged. No catalog number technically meant no proper place.

  I moved some files on the desk to place a stack of histories that I was going to take home. I was about to leave and resume my search when a piece of parchment on Meryl’s chair caught my eye. Hand-painted illuminations weaved up the side margins. At the top of the sheet was a blue heart pierced by a sword with white flames surrounding it. The stone in my head was blue beryl, at least when it had a physical form, and shaped liked a heart to some people’s eyes.

  I picked up the sheet and skimmed the text. It was Old Elvish, dense and hard to decipher. The best I could make out was that it was a list of names, a lineage of some kind. Other sheets on the chair seemed to be from the same source. The illustrations and writing looked the same, but my translation skills of the language were rusty.

  “You ruined my surprise,” Meryl said.

  Startling at the sound of her voice, I held up the parchment. “What is this?”

  She dropped some files on the floor. “I found it this morning. It refers to a faith stone.”

  “Why didn’t you show me when I got here?” I asked.

  She held her hand out. “I was looking for the rest. Pages are missing.”

  I passed the first few sheets to her and picked up the rest. “My Old Elvish is rusty.”

  Meryl hummed. “There’s not much here. The illuminations caught my eye. It starts with a recounting of an old German clan’s victories over its rivals. A war breaks out, and the clan chief finds a talisman that stirs the hearts of his followers. Sound familiar?”

  “Does it talk about rituals or spells?” I asked.

  She dropped the pages on her desk. “Not in this stuff. Maybe in the missing parts. I found them in a hallway upstairs, outside one of the temperature-controlled storage rooms. The ventilation system wasn’t warded inside. It looks like a tornado went through the room when the building came down.”

  “Show me,” I said.

  She slipped her hands on my chest and tugged at my jacket. “No. I warded the area until I can get someone to straighten it up.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “No, you won’t. I’ve seen you do research. You’ll start on it, then get focused on looking for the pages and tossing stuff aside until you make more of mess.”

  “Meryl, this could be the answer I’m looking for. I need to know what do about this thing in my head,” I said.

  She used the jacket to shake me from side to side. “Could, could, could. We have a few floors of stuff that could answer your questions. This is my
playground, not yours. I’ve been pointing you to likely areas first,” she said.

  I held up the papers. “This seems likely.”

  She glowered at me from under her bangs. “Do not question the Chief Archivist. The Chief Archivist knows all. She will smite you if you ignore her.”

  I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her close. “I love when you talk tough.”

  “Crotch-grinding will not change my mind. Unlike you, my thinking parts are above the neck,” she said.

  “Maybe it will change my mind,” I said.

  She laughed. “Really? Maybe?”

  I pouted in the best innocent expression I could muster. It wasn’t very good, which occasionally made it cute. “Wouldn’t hurt to try,” I said.

  She slipped out of my arms and neatened the parchments on the chair. “No, thanks. That’s taking ‘love among the ruins’ a little too literally. Wanna see a dead body instead?”

  I leaned against the doorway. “Now there’s a sexy segue.”

  Meryl straightened up and destroyed my view. “I’ve been working upstairs. Druse is up there,” she said.

  Meryl knew how to redirect a conversation better than I did. Druse was a leanansidhe, one of the most dangerous fey alive. Fortunately, few existed—and one less did since the night Shay saved my life and accidentally killed Druse. Her body had disappeared until Meryl found it in the ruins of the Guildhouse. Apparently, Nigel Martin had found the corpse and brought it to the Guildhouse.

  I had complicated feelings about Druse. Her ability had accessed the same darkness as the one in my head. She used it to survive by draining essence from living beings. I thought I could learn something from her, that she could show me how to use the darkness without being overwhelmed by it. The darkness was seductive, though, and draining essence was addictive. I found myself acting like a drug addict—not caring how I went about getting my essence fix. That road led me to almost killing Keeva macNeve and too many other people. Meryl knew I wouldn’t be able to resist seeing Druse’s body, if only to discover answers from her death that I didn’t get from her in life. “Okay,” I said.