We had grown close in the past few months, closer than I would have guessed. Despite her insistence that we weren’t a couple or seeing each other or friends with benefits or whatever I wanted to call it, we had made connections that friends without didn’t have. I could lie. She might believe me. But if I lied, and she knew it, I would damage whatever the hell it was that we did have. I took a deep breath. “Yeah. I had to know what she meant when she called me ‘brother.’ ”
Meryl frowned. “It’s a leanansidhe, Grey. If there’s one thing I do know, it’s that they’re liars. They have to be to survive. She’s playing with your mind. The thing in your head has an explanation, and the answer is within the Wheel of the World. It has to be, by definition. If it’s within the Wheel of the World, it’s part of the Wheel of the World, not outside It.”
I closed my eyes and rubbed them. Even as I did it, I knew it was to hide the fact that I was embarrassed. “She made the dark mass in my head move, Meryl. She showed me how to let it free and it felt wrong and it felt amazing. I used to be afraid it would kill me.” I opened my eyes. “Now I’m just afraid of it. I’m afraid of what it makes me want to do. I’m afraid it’s not really making me feel that way and is just exposing something wrong inside me.”
Meryl came around the desk and sat on my lap. She wrapped her arms around my head and pulled me to her chest. My stomach did a little flip as the dark mass pulsed from being near her strong body essence. She tilted my head up by the chin. “Listen to me, Connor. You were one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever worked worth. That was then. If you were in danger of some weird-ass darkness in you coming out, it was before this thing happened to you, not now. Not from what I’ve seen. You might be caught up in some shit lately, but if I thought for one moment there was something seriously whacked about you, you wouldn’t be here.”
I leaned my head against her shoulder. “I hope you’re right.”
She scrubbed her fingernails through my hair and hopped to her feet. “I am. Besides, in any given personal relationship, I have to be the crazier one. It’s a rule. Now, let’s go have lunch.”
I stood. “I want to go talk to Keeva and see if I can find out what’s going on.”
Meryl rolled her eyes. “Yeah, she loves to confide in you.”
I pushed playfully at her shoulder. “Hey, don’t underestimate me. I know someone who never thought she’d confide in me.”
She looked at her watch. “Okay. Go. If you’re not back in fifteen minutes, I’m getting takeout.”
I took her hands, leaned down, and kissed her. She kissed me back with no games. I tousled her hair. She punched me.
Since I wasn’t officially in the building, I used the freight elevator, which was accessible in the basement but the call buttons on the upper floors were disabled. Which meant no guards riding them for routine security. The added benefit was it opened near Keeva’s office, so I could bypass the floor receptionist as well.
Keeva looked up from her desk when I knocked, and I immediately got her narrow-eyed, compressed-lipped suspicious look. “I don’t remember guards locking down the building. How’d you get in?”
I sat in her guest chair. “Nice to see you, too. How are things going?”
She didn’t change her expression. “Busy.”
I nodded. “Good, good. How’s Ryan?”
Her frown deepened. “Busy.”
I looked around the office, then brought my gaze back to Keeva. “You’re still wearing a glamour.”
She leaned back. “Why are you here, Connor?”
“I have a proposal for you. I have a piece of information you might find helpful. In exchange, I need a favor.”
She smiled. “It would have to be some very good information.”
I smiled back. “Is it a deal?”
She shook her head. “You know better than that. I’m not going to obligate myself without hearing the whole story.”
I nodded. “True. That’s smart, of course. How about this, if you use the information, you don’t have to do the favor if you think it isn’t equitable.”
She grinned. “This should be interesting.”
“I know what Sekka was hiding.”
As Community Liaison Director, Keeva saw all open case reports from the Boston P.D. She twisted her lip in dismissal. “Why should I care about a routine murder case?”
“Because it wasn’t routine, and I know you know that. Sekka was a Consortium agent, and macGoren has people trying to find what she had.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Go on.”
“I know where it is.”
She swiveled her chair in a small arc. “Assuming this is accurate, and I’m interested, what’s the favor?”
“I want you to capture the leanansidhe,” I said.
Her suspicious look returned. “You’re not telling me everything. Assuming what you say is true about the Guild’s interest in Sekka, capturing the leanansidhe pales in comparison. Why are you offering something so important for something so not important?”
“Honestly?” I asked.
“Honestly,” she said.
I took a deep breath. “Because the leanansidhe scares the hell out of me, and I don’t have the power or ability to bring her in. I’m afraid of what will happen to me if she’s left running free.”
Keeva’s jaw dropped in surprise. “Whoa! When you said ‘honestly,’ I wasn’t expecting . . . honesty.”
I laughed. “Yeah, well, that’s how much I need you to do this, Keeva. In fact, to make it even easier for you, the leanansidhe has what Sekka was hiding. It’s in her cave.” I picked up a pen from her desk and pulled a sheet of note-paper toward me. “This is where she’s hiding.”
I handed Keeva a rough map of the tunnel route from the abandoned warehouse. She stared down at the scribble, then at me. “Do you want to tell me why you’re so scared?”
I smiled. “Do you want to talk about your glamour?”
She tossed the map on her desk. “Assuming your theory is correct—and I’m not saying it is—I’ll take your request under advisement. You need to leave now. I don’t want anyone seeing you in here if you’re not officially in the building.”
Keeva and I had a long history, not all of it good. We both had egos, and we had clashed often when we were partners. But at the end of the day, I thought we believed the other would do the right thing. Not necessarily what both of us thought was the right thing, but the right thing in some respect. Now, though, this gulf existed between us that I didn’t think we could bridge anymore. She worked for an organization I no longer believed in. I worked outside the chain of command in a way she couldn’t condone. And that was okay with me. She had a career to think about. If I didn’t think someday we’d see eye to eye, I wouldn’t have bothered talking to her. I gave her a wink and left without argument.
As I rode the freight elevator back to the basement, relief and regret fought in my stomach. The urge to make another visit to the leanansidhe bordered on overwhelming. Asking Keeva to do something to take that option off the table was the right thing to do. I didn’t like how the leanansidhe made me feel precisely because I liked how she made me feel. Keeva could get the leanansidhe into the Guildhouse, a controlled environment. Maybe then Briallen or Gillen Yor would have something to work with. If the leanansidhe held the key to the dark mass in my head, I would rather that someone other than her turned it.
27
The ring of my cell phone startled me out of a dreamless sleep. After leaving the Guildhouse the previous afternoon, I had gathered my resource materials and holed up in my living room in a fruitless quest to figure out a way to get rid of Uno. Squinting against the light in my living room, I pushed aside the nest of books that surrounded me as I groped for the phone. Uno rose from the floor at the foot of the bed, a physical reminder that my research had gone nowhere, the dry, academic prose of many of the books lulling me into a bored stupor. The dog vanished as my hand closed on the phone, probably fading off to Shay’s apa
rtment again.
“I need you,” Murdock had said.
The man didn’t return my calls all day and night, then rang me at five o’clock in the morning like it was a perfectly normal time for either of us to be awake. Granted, I spent more of my waking hours in the middle of the night than most people, but I was surprised Murdock was up that early—so early that I had to take a cab down to the morgue to meet him because the subway wasn’t open.
I went around the back to the back of the OCME. The building was open twenty- four hours, but the main door was locked before 6:00 A.M. The loading dock, though, remained open for business twenty-four/seven. Dead bodies didn’t much care about regular office hours.
A morgue in the middle of the night is exactly how you imagine it would be. Dim atmosphere, cold light, dark corners, empty corridors, and dead bodies in freezers. Under normal circumstances, I would write off the notion of a dead person leaping out of a darkened room as the product of an overactive imagination. Boston after the Samhain catastrophe, though, made the idea not only plausible, but even likely.
The bright light from the cooling room cast a stark blue beam into the dark basement hallway. When I reached the door, Janey and Murdock looked at me with relief and irritation. They stood on opposite sides of an examining table—a large examining table—with Sekka’s body laid out on it. Her head had been placed above the neck.
“I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been trying to talk sense to him for an hour,” said Janey.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Murdock rested his hands on his hips. “I was thinking the best way to find out if Jark was telling the truth about the night he died was to ask Sekka.”
I joined them at the table. “You want to reanimate her.”
“Exactly,” he said.
I opened my sensing ability and looked at Sekka. “I think we’re too late for that. Her body essence is long gone.”
“Well, then, where is it? You keep saying the Dead are here because TirNaNog is gone. If that’s true, where are the dead solitaries going?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have an answer for that, Murdock. But I do know that there is no more essence in this body, and without essence, there is no reanimation.”
Janey crossed her arms. “I already told him Jark killed Sekka.”
That surprised me. “He’s an eyewitness to his own murder. How do we refute that he said she killed him?”
Janey gestured at Sekka’s body. “Physical evidence. Jark left here with a city-issued coverall as clothing. He didn’t want what he was wearing when he died.”
“I don’t blame him. It did go through the sewer,” I said.
Janey nodded. “But that didn’t wash out the DNA evidence in his clothes. I tested it. They were soaked in Sekka’s blood and his own.”
I pursed my lips. “You’re suggesting he couldn’t have Sekka’s blood on him if she killed him first.”
“Right.”
“But if she was near him when she was killed, her blood could have gotten on him if she was close enough.”
Janey nodded again. “True. But if she killed Jark first like he said she did, she’d have his blood on her. It’s virtually impossible to decapitate someone and not get blood on you. I checked everywhere. The only blood on Sekka is her own. The blood on Jark is hers and his.”
“He killed her first,” Murdock said.
“Which leaves the Hound,” I said.
Murdock stared down at Sekka. “You’re sure this won’t work?”
I shrugged and looked at the clock. “Yeah, but we can wait until dawn if you want.”
He nodded. “I’d like that.”
Janey and I exchanged a bewildered look. Murdock usually deferred matters of the fey world to me. He never disputed the things I told him. For someone who had been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, Janey seemed a lot more understanding than I was. As the only fey person on staff at the OCME, Janey was used to humans making odd requests and ignoring her expertise.
“Okay. We’re here, so we might as well,” I said.
Another twenty minutes would decide the issue either way, and waiting was a small thing compared to contributing to Murdock’s anger and frustration. I didn’t see the need to get into an argument about it.
“You want to tell us what’s going on, Murdock?”
He spread his hands over the body. “Let’s see what happens. I need to see what happens.”
“Okay,” I said.
The clock ticked off the minutes as we waited in silence. Murdock stared at Sekka’s body like it was going to reveal something important to him. Maybe it was. He didn’t like the whole reanimation thing, didn’t like the questions about his faith it created. Yet now he wanted to make it happen.
Dawn arrived. Sekka lay still, no sign of movement. No sign of essence. Murdock continued staring as Janey checked her watch. “It would have happened by now,” she said.
Murdock had a strange look on his face, at once relieved and frustrated. A polite smile flickered on and off his face as he looked at Janey. “I’m sorry. I had to take the chance.”
Janey pulled a sheet over the body. “Don’t apologize. Part of my job is research. We answered a question.”
We didn’t speak as we left Janey to close up the lab. Murdock pulled out of the parking lot and into early- morning rush hour. We crept along the access road to the highway, waiting to cut over to the Southie side of the channel.
“Are you going to tell me what that was all about?” I asked.
“My father ordered the stand-down the night the Dead attacked the neighborhood meeting,” he said.
I nodded. “I thought so. I didn’t want to say anything because I thought you might think I was being cynical.”
“You are cynical. It gets worse. He as much as admitted he’s letting the Guild operate with no oversight,” he said.
“Why the change? He never likes the Guild to get the upper hand,” I said.
“They persuaded him that the issue was critical. The solitaries are hiding something the Guild wants. In exchange for allowing them in to get what they needed, the Guild offered to take care of the solitary leadership.”
I turned my head toward Murdock in disbelief. “Are you telling me your father—the police commissioner—took out contracts on fey people?”
Murdock grunted. “I asked the same thing. My father said the Guild assured him it meant the solitary leaders would be taken into legal custody. Then he said, of course, if someone dies in the attempt, it serves the same purpose. He smiled when he said it.”
“What does Sekka have to do with this?” I asked.
He glanced in the rearview mirror as he cut across the traffic lane. “She knows who killed her. We make an arrest, we expose the whole damn scheme.”
“You’ll expose your father, too,” I said.
“He’ll survive. That’s the point of their plan, Connor. It’s set up so that everyone can deny what’s going on.”
“So why bother?”
Murdock smiled. “Because it will stop. I don’t care what game the Guild is playing. I never have. I just want the killing stopped.”
“So, we’re back to square one, then. Sekka didn’t reanimate,” I said.
He pulled up in front of my apartment building. “Maybe not.” He gave me a sly smile. “So, who’s the Guildmaster sleeping with these days?”
I chuckled. “That’s funny. That’s very funny.”
I pulled the sending stone out of my pocket. The palm of my hand tingled as my body signature interacted with the ward spell on it. I held it near my mouth. “Hey, gorgeous. I have something for the Old Man.”
Her voice floated softly out of the stone. I hear you, handsome. I’ll let you know when a car’s ready.
28
As luck would have it—my luck anyway—my request to see Eagan fell on the same day as his annual Winter Solstice party. When Tibbet called back and told me Eagan thought the party would be a conven
ient cover for the meeting, I tried to beg off and arrange another time. Eagan wouldn’t hear of it.
It had been over three years since my last invitation to the party. Three years ago, I was a sought-after party ornament. I realized after I lost my abilities that’s what it really was all about: who could get the prize guest. I was riding high then, solving big-time cases, the go-to guy for advice, and the role model for a career on a rocket. Any host who snagged me with a party invite could bask in my coveted reflected glory. Receiving Eagan’s invitation to the Solstice party put me on the must- have list for everyone else’s events. Getting dropped from his list had the opposite effect. No one wanted to preen over last year’s favorites, and now I was not even that.
The cedar-lined driveway to the Guildmaster’s mansion was a postcard-perfect Yule scene. The car headlights reflected off the snowbanks to either side, and the soft crunch of tires rolling over the snow-softened pavement evoked a warm nostalgia for winters past. At the top of the drive, the cedars ended, opening to the wide vista of the front lawn, a meadowlike expanse of untrodden white velvet. A soft yellow glow lit the windows in the house with telltale flashes of blues, pinks, and yellows from flits dancing in the air.
Dozens of cars and a few limos lined the drive, where brownie security guards jockeyed them into place. They cleared the front as my car approached, and the driver stopped at the front steps. Someone opened the rear door for me, and I got out of Eagan’s official Guildhouse limo. Eagan wanted people to notice me arrive and had used his own car to send the message that he had invited me. Whatever his reasons, he wasn’t bothering with subtlety.
Despite the cold, the front doors were flung open to the outside, framing the party within. People danced and swayed and flew in the grand hall. Enough greenery had been brought in to create a forest. Cedar and fir garlands adorned the doorways and ceiling cornices. Branches were twined around pillars and woven through the balustrades of the staircase leading to the second floor. Sprays of mistletoe hung from the enormous chandelier, and white roses overflowed from tall crystal vases. On the upper balcony overlooking the room, an orchestra played traditional Yule music with flutes.
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