Unperfect Souls

by Mark Del Franco

  Solitary fey didn’t fall neatly into any of the major species categories. The Celtic and Teutonic fey each had their own varieties, and the Weird was home to most of them. Scorned and feared for their appearances and odd abilities, it didn’t surprise me that so many worked one of the most thankless jobs in the city. They peered down at a group of police officers clustered near one of the large conveyor belts on the main level.

  The stench hit me as I let myself through a glass door. My body shields activated, patches of near-invisible hardened essence that protected me from essence attacks and reduced the effect of physical ones. They had covered my entire body once, and I could turn them on and off at will. Now they were fragmented, the result of an essence fight that had destroyed most of my abilities and left a black mass in my brain that hurt like hell whenever I tried to use what remained. I could still activate the shields, but doing it on demand was painful. Perversely, they reacted on their own now, which didn’t hurt as much but ratcheted up my anxiety until I could figure out why they had gone on.

  As I walked to where Murdock stood with the other officers, my essence-sensing ability kicked in. My vision filled with streams and clouds of light, the machinery and pipes glowing in multicolored hues of essence. The B Street Headworks acted as a giant filter, pulling essence out of the water and sewage before it reached the more mundane headworks that sifted garbage out of the system. The way some of the essence resonated with indigo and violet indicated a nasty brew that was probably what had triggered my body shields in the first place.

  Murdock wore a B.P.D. parka instead of his usual camel-wool long coat. To the amusement of several workers, the police officers had face masks on. Murdock glanced up from a trough that ran the length of the room. The top of the trough was covered with a glass lid that had quartz wards embedded in it to control the essence inside.

  “Hope you haven’t had lunch,” Murdock said. A putrid stew filled the trough, murky gray water covered with an oily slick. Things floated in it, some of it unrecognizable, but way too much perfectly identifiable. Strands and eddies of essence flickered, more than the natural ambient essence all organic things had. Things intentionally infused with essence pooled in the water, precisely what the B Street Headworks was designed to filter. Unfortunately, one of those things was a male body. He bobbed on the surface, his brawny, naked torso slicked with black grime. His suede trousers had snagged on a seam in the trough, and he pivoted lazily against the side. To up the horror quotient, his head was missing.

  “This has to be one of the most revolting things I’ve ever seen,” I said.

  Murdock raised an eyebrow. “One of? I don’t think I want to ask.”

  A flash of pink in the dim atmosphere caught my attention. Stinkwort walked along the tiny edge of another trough fifteen feet up, peering into its contents. For a diminutive fairy who topped out at twelve inches tall, a one-inch-wide path was not a problem. Stinkwort preferred to go by the name Joe, for obvious reasons. I’ve known him since before I could walk and talk, so I tended to think of him by his real name. “Where the hell did he come from?”

  Murdock followed my gaze to Joe. “He likes odd smells.”

  I nodded. “It’s why he likes your car.”

  “And your apartment,” Murdock said.

  “Touché, my friend. A lie, but touché.”

  Murdock gestured at the body. “We haven’t found the head. The plant manager says this is an essence trough for outflow from the gross-material filter. The body shouldn’t have come through unless it had some kind of essence charge on it. That’s why I called you.”

  I leaned forward. Druids had receptors in the nose and eyes that sensed essence in ways no one understood. My essence-sensing ability had become heightened in the past few months, far beyond the ability I’d had before the accident. My vision sensing was more acute, too. I didn’t have to be near something now to sense essence—I could see it. The essence coming off the body explained why it had ended up in the trough. The corpse radiated differently than normal essence. The filters must have had a fail-safe to kick out anything they didn’t know how to categorize. “He’s Dead, Murdock.”

  Murdock pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “Excellent deduction, Connor. I wasn’t sure what to make of the missing head.”

  I laughed at the dry tone in his voice. “Seriously. He’s Dead, as in TirNaNog Dead. You’ve got a dead Dead guy.”

  A few weeks earlier, the veil between the world of the living and the dead opened on Samhain, the holiday that the non-fey world called Halloween. Under any other circumstances, that would have been cause for celebration, since none of the veils between here and Faerie had opened in over a century. But things went wrong—seriously wrong—and the veil slammed shut. When that happened, the Dead from TirNaNog who happened to be on the living side of the veil became trapped here. They were supposed to vanish at daybreak. They didn’t.

  Murdock’s face went flat. The Dead were not his favorite topic. He was raised in a Roman Catholic home. Mass on Sunday was not a chore for him, but a duty and desire. Fitting the Dead into his worldview was becoming more and more difficult for him. “Why would someone kill a Dead guy?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “For all the same reasons someone would kill the living. When you’ve got an axe to grind against someone who died, I imagine the temptation to kill him is pretty high when you catch him walking around again. Especially since you can do it over and over. The Dead regenerate the next day. Which brings me to this guy. Whoever did this wanted him to never come back. That’s why the head is missing. Since the head is where the fey believe the soul abides, if you remove the head, you acquire the power of the soul, and the Dead guy can’t regenerate. I’d get as much info off the body before dawn as you can. Without the head, it’s going to discorporate into its elemental essence and vanish forever.”

  Murdock looked even less pleased. Resurrection outside his Church was not something he liked to discuss either. “How am I supposed to find a motive for killing a Dead guy who might not have even died this century?” he muttered, more to himself than to me.

  Joe fluttered down and landed on the trough. He peered through the glass at the body, twitching his nose and shaking his head. “I think he died two and a half hours ago.”

  “You can sense that by looking at him?” Murdock asked.

  With a sage expression, Joe pointed. “Of course. See? His watch stopped. It’s probably not waterproof.” A murmur of chuckles rippled through the nearby officers. Murdock cracked a smile. Joe was fascinated by clocks and watches, mostly because he didn’t see their point.

  “Are you going to ask the Guild to look into this?” I asked.

  Murdock scratched his nose. “Not enough reason, not with everything else going on. They’ve already said they take no responsibility for any Dead from TirNaNog unless they become a threat to the city.”

  “Well, at least that makes their position clear for a change.” The Fey Guild theoretically handled fey crime in the city. It failed, mostly owing to politics and indifference. If you had money or any kind of power, they were right there for you. If not, you didn’t get farther than the lobby—especially now, when the Guild had its hands full trying to keep the local human population pacified in the wake of recent controversies. Their usual lack of interest in the Weird had become intense interest—the negative kind. With the mayor and governor pointing their fingers at the Guild, the Guild looked for someone to take the blame and pointed several rungs down the ladder at the Weird. The Dead weren’t even on the ladder.

  An officer stepped closer to Murdock. “They’ve cleared the main intake. No head. They can isolate this channel, but they need to get the rest back online.”

  Murdock nodded. “Tell them okay. And call Janey Likesmith over at the morgue and tell her that Connor Grey says we’ve got a dead Dead guy. She’ll need to work fast. Make sure you say dead twice like that.”

  Janey was a Dokkheim elf and the only fey person who worked for th
e Office of the City Medical Examiner. She didn’t have much support down at the OCME, but these days she was the last hope for fey murder victims the Guild abandoned. She was sharp and intuitive. I doubted we’d get very far on the body, but if there was anything to know, she’d find it.

  Murdock raised an eyebrow. “I hear there’s plenty in the budget to control crime in the Weird at the moment. You want in on this?”

  I stared down at the body. If another Dead guy did the deed, I didn’t know if I cared all that much. The Dead had their own rules that the living didn’t understand. But if the killer wasn’t Dead, that meant a nut job was running around the Weird, and we already had too many of those. “Yeah, I’m in.”

  A long screech went up as machinery restarted. The air shifted, its foul odor changing to a new foul odor as water rushed through pipes. Conveyor belts rumbled to life with a metallic rattling, and a heavy static tickled along my skin as essence filters resumed their work. Two men in headworks hazmat suits approached the trough, body shields hardened and augmented as they lifted the glass to retrieve the body.

  A shimmer of essence scraped across my mind, signaling that someone fey was about to use a mental communication called a sending.

  He’s not the first.

  My gaze swept the catwalks. The solitaries who had been watching had returned to work. No one made eye contact with me, and I had no idea which direction the sending had come from. Solitaries didn’t trust many people, authority figures least of all. I may not be a member of the Guild anymore, but people knew I used to be one of its best druid investigators.

  Whoever did the sending didn’t trust me either.

  2

  The wind slapped me in the face as I stepped out to B Street. I backed out of the way as two men from the OCME hustled a gurney through the door. Squinting against the sudden light of the noonday sun, I inhaled fresh cold air. Only a few police cars remained, the interest level dropping once the word went out that the dead guy was nobody interesting.

  Hey, handsome. This time the sending was smooth and familiar and brought a smile to my face. I recognized the sender’s body signature bound up in the message. Up the street, a black car idled at the curb, its exhaust coiling vapor into the air.

  I slid into the passenger seat. “Hey, gorgeous.”

  Despite the intense heat in the car, Tibbet wore her favorite red hat and gloves with a fur- lined tawny suede coat that almost matched her skin. She knew what looked good on her. She leaned across the seat and kissed me, her lips soft and lingering. She smiled when she pulled away. “I find you in the oddest places these days.”

  Amused, I settled against the headrest. “Me, too. How’ve you been?”

  She pulled onto the street. Her smile faltered, but she kept it. “It’s been rough. I had a bad week in October, but bounced back.”

  She didn’t need to say more. Tibs and I went way back. The Guildmaster’s house, where she lived and worked, had been attacked in October, and Tibs had held off the intruders alone. She had to shed her docile brownie nature to do it and went full-blown boggart in the process. Going boggart was like a mania for her kind, and depending on how deep they went into it, recovery from the transition took some time.

  “Am I right in guessing that you didn’t just happen to be in my neighborhood?” I asked.

  From Summer Street, she drove into the city. “He asked to see you.”

  “In broad daylight? The Old Man must not care about appearances anymore.” Manus ap Eagan had been Guildmaster of the Boston Guildhouse all my life and then some. Tibs had worked for him a lot longer than that as far as I knew. She served a number of roles for Eagan, from driver to assistant to legal advocate.

  Tibs compressed her lips, her eyes tearing up. I brushed her hair over her ear. “Hey! I was joking.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s a joke anymore, Connor. He’s bad. He’s had a parade of people coming through the house against Gillen Yor’s orders. I don’t like to think what it means.”

  Eagan’s wasting disease had baffled everyone for over a year. Danann fairies were among the most powerful fey beings, and they didn’t get sick like other species. That High Queen Maeve hadn’t replaced him was testament to his abilities to lead. That she moved Ryan macGoren onto the Guildhouse board of directors sent the message that she was waiting for the right moment.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  Tibs inhaled deeply to still her visibly rising emotion. “He was arguing with Nigel. I didn’t like the sound of his voice, so I went in to stop it. As I entered, Nigel was saying to Manus that things could not be more black-and-white, and it was time to decide. The boss looked at me and laughed. He said, ‘The Wheel of the World turns the way It will. I could use Grey, Tibs.’ ”

  I exhaled sharply through my nose. Nigel Martin was my old mentor. We’d gone our separate ways after the loss of most of my abilities, and the relationship had slid further downhill ever since. “What did Nigel say to that?”

  Tibbet glanced at me. “He said a fool for a fool’s errand.”

  I chuckled. “Sounds like Nigel hasn’t changed his mind about me.”

  As Tibbet drove into Brookline, she tickled my ear with a red-gloved hand. “I haven’t either.”

  I grabbed her hand and kissed it. When Tibbet and I were together, it was sometimes about comfort, sometimes about convenience. It was always mutual. I don’t think I would have called it love back then, but I thought we loved each other now—a truer, former- lovers-who-get-along kind. Not the kind of thing I had going on with Meryl Dian at the moment, which was all passion and frustration and, yeah, hotness. And unexpectedness. “I’m not the man I was.”

  A reflective look came over her as she turned through the opening wrought-iron gate to the Guildmaster’s house. “No. But you’re more so.”

  The gates closed behind us. Tibbet guided the car through the tall cedars that lined the drive. Manus ap Eagan’s house loomed above an expanse of dead lawn. In the stark December light, it sat forlorn and faded, its facings of brick and shingle worn white and ashen.

  Tibbet pulled up to the front steps. “Left at the top of the stairs, last door on the right. He’s waiting.”

  I tapped her nose. “Thanks for the lift.”

  She grinned. “See you later, handsome.”

  “Later, gorgeous.”

  I let myself in the house. Despite windows at its north end, the grand entry hall had an air of twilight about it, the clerestory windows above casting sharp beams of white sunlight through shadow and dust. I climbed the wide freestanding staircase to the right, its banister curving around the hulking stuffed mass of a real Asian elephant, a trophy from Eagan’s less-enlightened days. In the middle of the flight of steps, the portrait above the fireplace on the opposite wall came into full view. High Queen Maeve stared at me, eye level. A shiver of recognition ran over me. I never knew how true-to-life John Singer Sargent had captured the bitch until I met her.

  Met her was an overstatement. We had come close to each other not long ago, in our minds, if not geographically. Her coal black eyes held no warmth, either then or in the painting. Her sharp-planed face showed the commanding personality she was. She had to be in order to hold the Celtic fey together after Convergence. Her strength kept her adversaries—particularly the Teutonic fey led by Donor Elfenkonig—in check.

  I despised her. For all the good she served, she valued life by a strange set of criteria skewed to the strong and powerful. Nothing else mattered. Only I knew she had sabotaged one of her own underQueens, a Danann fairy named Ceridwen, and risked the lives of everyone in Boston to save her own skin. I hadn’t told anyone—yet. As far as the High Queen knew, Ceridwen kept her secret and remained faithful until her death.

  But I knew, and I wouldn’t forget. I had no hope of challenging one of the most powerful beings on the planet. But somehow, when the time was right, I would expose her for what she was and make her suffer if I could. People died because of her. She had to
be held accountable for it.

  The upper floor had the soft, hushed quality of a house with too many empty rooms. As I reached the end of the hall, muffled voices intruded into the silence. The last door on the right wasn’t Manus ap Eagan’s study but his bedroom. He lay propped on several pillows, his wings spread flat and wide to either side. A bare glimmer of essence flickered in their gray gossamer, startlingly feeble for a powerful Danann like Eagan. Nigel Martin sat in an oversize leather club chair to the left, his imperious academic face touched with annoyance. Normally, Nigel maintained a calm air about himself, a cultivated look designed to give his emotional moments more impact. Opposite him, a tall, dark-haired druidess leaned against the bedpost, her head tilted to emphasize the flirtatiousness in her smile. A long mohair sweaterdress managed to show off a body to go with the flirt. Her eyes widened briefly when she saw me enter. I took it as a compliment.

  Eagan appeared worse than when I had seen him two months earlier. His long dank hair clung to his pale face, his sunken eyes shadowed. He grinned, a vulpine slash that would have unnerved anyone who didn’t realize he was ill. Reports of his declining health were far from exaggeration. He hadn’t been in the Guildhouse for any length of time in more than three months and had reduced his activities long before that. “Grey! Come in. I’ve been provoking Nigel all afternoon and was running out of ideas. Can you carry on for a bit while I take a nap?”

  I stopped at the foot of the bed. “Nothing would please me more, Guildmaster.”

  Eagan’s eyebrows shot up. He started laughing, but then coughed from deep in his chest. The druidess placed a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off. Wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, he smirked at Nigel. “I’m not sure he’s joking, old friend.”

  Nigel kept his eyes on Eagan. “Yes, well, Grey’s thought process eludes me as well these days.”

  I pursed my lips. “Really, Nigel? After you took a shot at me, I would think my thoughts about you would be fairly obvious.”