Unperfect Souls

by Mark Del Franco

  “I need to see the Guildmaster,” Jones said.

  “This has already been discussed. The Guildmaster is in a coma. You need to coordinate any further inquiries through the governor’s office and the Guild,” Tibbet said.

  “I would like to confirm that he’s really in a coma.” Jones leaned his wide, imposing frame between the guards and toward Tibbet.

  I knew that type of thing didn’t work on Tibbet. To prove my point, she calmly pressed the Danann agents to the side and moved closer. Tibbet is tall for a brownie, but she had to look up into Jones’s face. “I am the Guildmaster’s attorney. My client is unavailable.” She relaxed her stance and placed a sympathetic hand on Jones’s arm. “It’s been a long night, Davis. We all need to rest.”

  Jones dropped his voice. “I’ve got angry men, Tibbet. They want to know why he’s not under arrest.”

  “I’m going in there,” Gerard Murdock said. He pushed past Jones, but a Danann agent stepped in front of him. Leo pulled him back.

  Gerard was not in the best frame of mind. I needed to do something for the Murdocks. “Tibbet, will you let Leo through?” I asked.

  She considered my request and moved aside. Leo stepped between the guards, and I escorted him down the hall. “How are you holding up?” I asked.

  “Barely. They’re already rumbling about diplomatic immunity,” he said.

  “That’s expected, Leo. That’s why I thought you should see Eagan’s out of it. People will know you’re not using political games for a cover-up.”

  I opened the door to the bedroom. The pungent odor of burning herbs hung in the air. Gillen Yor chanted under his breath as he leaned over Eagan’s still body. A mix of druid and brownie assistants worked quietly behind him. On the opposite side of the bed, Briallen moved into the pool of light from the lamp on the nightstand. I hadn’t known she was there. She immediately stopped whatever she was doing and hugged Murdock. “I’m so sorry, Leonard,” she whispered into his ear.

  He cleared his throat. “Thank you. What’s his status?” “Critical. His wasting disease had already compromised his health, and the expenditure of essence almost depleted what was left. He might die,” she said.

  Eagan’s ashen skin pulled over a shrunken frame. His wings—normally large and lit with the powerful reserves of essence of a Danann fairy—curled dim and opaque like swaddling around his body. I had seen something similar before. Briallen once showed me a dead flit. When fairies die, their wings eventually close around them like a cocoon. Eagan was on his way out.

  “Why did he do it, Briallen? Why did he kill my father?” Murdock asked.

  Briallen studied the dying fairy. “We have to hope he wakes up, Leonard. Maybe it was instinctive. Maybe he couldn’t control it because of what’s wrong with him. I don’t know. If nothing else, Manus is a shrewd politician. I cannot imagine why he would have intentionally caused an international incident of this proportion.”

  Murdock nodded, a tiny muscle on his jawline twitching. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and handed me his keys. “Can you get my car? It’s in the driveway somewhere. I need to get my brothers out of here.”

  He left us standing at the foot of Eagan’s bed. Briallen held her hands up to me. “May I?”

  She placed her hands on either side of my face. I closed my eyes as a warm surge of essence flowed through my skull. The dark mass in my head didn’t even react but sat like a pinpoint of pressure deep in my mind. Briallen released me, her face troubled.

  “You have new bone in your jaw and new teeth, if I’m not mistaken,” she said.

  I remembered the sensation of cold washing over my body after the pain of the gunshot. “I think I was paralyzed, too.”

  Briallen crossed her arms and compressed her lips. “The dark mass is smaller, almost as small as it was last summer. Do you think it healed you?”

  I rubbed my hand over my face. “I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like it’s trying to kill me, and sometimes it seems to keep me alive.”

  She rested a hand on the footboard of the bed. “What do you see in him? Your sensing ability is more acute than ours.”

  The mass in my head normally didn’t care if I used my sensing ability, but its low, steady pressure pulsed as if to draw attention to itself. The druids moved in auras of gold and green, the brownies in a more subtle amber. Eagan should have glowed brighter than all of us, except perhaps Gillen and Briallen. Instead, a dim white spark smoldered in his chest and head, casting a shadowed wash of light through the rest of his body. A haze threaded through his aura, speckles of darkness like pinholes in his body signature. I withdrew.

  Gillen jerked his head up from the mortar and pestle he had in his hand. “What did you just do?”

  I startled. “Nothing. I just looked. He’s on the edge of death.”

  Gillen peered at Eagan. “His essence dimmed for a moment. Do it again.”

  “Gillen, I don’t want to hurt . . .” I began.

  “I said do it, you idiot. I’m the doctor, not you,” he snapped. Bedside manner is not Gillen’s strong point.

  I pushed my sensing ability to interact with Eagan’s body signature. The pinpoints of darkness blurred, and I jumped out. “Holy shit.”

  Gillen frowned. “I never made the connection.”

  Briallen looked from one of us to the other. “What is it?”

  I took a deep breath and exhaled. “He’s got whatever I have. The dark thing is in him, too.”

  Gillen shook his head. “It’s more subtle than yours, and all throughout his body. Until he expelled so much of his own essence, I didn’t even see it. Which means he’s probably going to die because I don’t know what the hell it is.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  Gillen shrugged. “Leave. You seem to be making it worse.”

  Thunderstruck, I stepped back. “Do you think I . . . ?”

  Briallen hugged me. “Don’t say what I think you’re going to say. It isn’t true. You need to go home and get some sleep.”

  I left the room in a daze and wandered down the back stairs. I didn’t know the layout of the house and ended up back in Eagan’s study. Crime-scene investigators blocked the entrance. One of them took pictures of the disconcertingly large stain on the rug from my miraculously healed wound. I went out a door to the back hall and exited the side of the house.

  I found Murdock’s car and started it. Before I had a chance to process what happened, Murdock opened the passenger door and got in.

  “You want me to drive?” I said in surprise.

  “Yeah, let’s go before someone else talks to me,” he said.

  I guided the car over the thin sheet of ice that had built up on the long exit drive. Murdock dropped his head back and closed his eyes. Joe flashed in and leaned over the seat. We exchanged glances but didn’t say anything, the heater fan making the only noise.

  I drove through middle-of-the-night empty streets, the faint sounds of ambulances and police cars echoing through the city. An occasional lone pedestrian waited at a crosswalk, prompting idle curiosity about what someone would possibly need to do out in the cold and snow in the dead of night. Except for a few streetlights, nothing delayed us from Chestnut Hill to Broadway Bridge into Southie.

  “How the hell did this happen?” Murdock’s tone was soft and hurt.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “I don’t know, Leo. It’s fucked.”

  “But why did he even pull his gun?”

  I crossed an intersection and parked the car on the edge of a curb. “Leo, I want you to hear from me what happened before you read the report. First, believe me when I tell you, Moira Cashel is a manipulative liar. If there’s anyone to blame for this, it’s her.”

  “What does she have to do with my father?”

  I told him. All of it. About what she said and what his father said. About Amy Sullivan. I didn’t tell him things she said that I didn’t share with the police about the commissioner taking bribes. Let her make a
public accusation. By the time I finished, Murdock had his hands clamped firmly over his face.

  “She’s a liar, Leo. Remember that,” I finished. He shook his head, and I realized he was crying. I didn’t know what to think anymore, but at that moment, I refused to believe Moira Cashel was telling the truth—about anything. “It’s not true, Leo.”

  He wiped his face with his hands and let out a deep sigh as he stared out the window. “This is my fault. If I hadn’t called you in on the case, you would have never gone to Eagan.”

  “No. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. I didn’t go to Eagan, he called me. He knew Sekka was hiding Vize, and Vize wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. It’s my fault, Leo. If I had done my job right three years ago, Vize would not be on the loose today.”

  “Vize didn’t make my father pull a gun,” he said.

  “Cashel was planning something anyway, Leo. She wasn’t going to stop until your father was disgraced. This is some Guild trick.”

  He shook his head. “No, no. It’s my fault. I argued with my father about his meeting with Jark. He admitted he was letting it happen, Connor. He liked seeing the fey tear each other apart. That’s when I confronted him about her. And then I told him about me, Connor. I threw it in his face that his son had a fey ability. I told him about my body shield. I primed his anger at the fey, and the last words I spoke to my father were angry. It’s my fault.”

  “Dammit, Leo. Don’t let her do this. Don’t let whatever Maeve and the Guild are planning do this to you. That’s what they want.”

  He covered his eyes as the tears flowed again. “I can’t fix this.”

  I grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled us together. He broke down when I did, sobbing into my chest as I rocked him. Joe crept from the backseat and draped himself on Leo’s shoulder. “Let me take you home, Leo. You need to rest.”

  He shook his head against me. “I can’t go back there tonight. I can’t face them. I can’t be who they need right now.”

  “They’re your family, Leo. They love you.”

  He kept shaking his head. “I can’t do it tonight.”

  Joe picked up his head. I know a place.

  32

  Only in the Weird will a bar let you sit quietly in the corner wearing a bloodstained jacket and drink yourself blind. Of course, Joe would know such a place. It had no name or windows or, for that matter, respectability. A neighborhood guy by the name of Carmine ran a number of places like it—hidden, quiet, and invitation-only. The music was killer blues, the smoke was thick, and the dancers came in all shapes, sizes, sexes, and species. A vaguely sweet scent filled the air, an aromatic happy drug that skirted close enough to legal that the law let it slide. It helped patrons focus on their beer and their dates and numbed the ache of whatever drove them to such places.

  When we first walked in, I thought it was a bad idea. The next day would be tough on Murdock, between the press and the funeral arrangements and being the rock of the family. Joe deduced the situation better than I did. He said Murdock needed the breathing room and would crash before he became too drunk. He was right. Once the liquor started flowing, the waves of emotions sapped his strength, and he was done in a little over an hour.

  As dawn neared, a small sober part of my brain convinced me to put Murdock in a cab home. Joe went along for the ride, convincing the driver to skip the fare in exchange for some flit karma. I watched the broken taillights of the cab coast away and stumbled through the mounds of snow. If Murdock was half-asleep by then, I wasn’t. Mental images continued flashing through my mind: the commissioner’s gun going off, Moira Cashel’s bitter face, Eagan slumped on the floor. The commissioner dead. Scott Murdock was dead. The idea staggered me so much, and yet it paled next to whatever Leo was feeling.

  “And for what?” I said. My own voice startled me as the close-in buildings amplified it. I wasn’t prone to talking to myself, but everything that had happened pissed me off.

  I’d lied to Murdock. I needed to tonight, needed to help him believe for a few more hours that his father was a good man. I never liked the commissioner because he always—always from the beginning—had treated me like crap. And I never knew why until now. I lied to Murdock because the truth was so appalling I didn’t want to admit to it.

  I believed Moira Cashel.

  It wasn’t her uncanny Amy Sullivan glamour or the pitch-perfect voice or even the small, trivial facts she knew about how I had met her. A skilled fey with the right information mimicked things like that all the time. I didn’t put it past the Guild to play with my mind that way for some gain.

  But tonight had changed my thinking. The look on the commissioner’s face as he pulled the gun convinced me. No one pulled a gun over such stupid and obvious lies, at least not someone like Scott Murdock. But he did because he believed her, and he believed her because she wasn’t lying. She had betrayed him as Amy Sullivan and had suckered him as Moira Cashel.

  Scott Murdock was taking bribes. It was the only explanation for how the Guild was getting away with what was happening in the Weird. He had cut some deal with Ryan macGoren for some mutual benefit.

  He was dirty.

  I had slept with his wife.

  “Danu’s motherfreakin’ blood,” I said.

  Uno appeared in the road.

  “What the hell do you want?” The dog cocked its head as I walked around it. He reappeared in front of me.

  “Leave me alone, dammit.” I went around him again, then walked backwards. “You’re a lousy harbinger of doom, you know that? I got shot in the face, and you didn’t even bother to show up.”

  He loped around me and stopped again, dodging as I tried to pass. “Go away, dammit. Go bother Shay.”

  I shoved him with my leg. He stumbled sideways with a snarl that rose into a bark, then he vanished. I circled in place, waiting for him to come back. A cold wind swept down the street, but he was gone. “Good,” I muttered.

  The dark mass in my head shifted, and I pressed the heel of my hand against my temple. I laughed. I practically kicked a hound from Hel, it ran away, and the worst I had to show for it was a headache. I pulled my jacket tighter, the flimsy silk doing little to warm me.

  My memory skipped to Eagan’s bedroom and the faint dark haze in his essence. It was and wasn’t like mine. I couldn’t see mine in a visual sense, but I could feel it and had seen MRIs of it. It was a dense thing, a black concentration of shadow at the base of my skull, pressing right on the old brainstem. From what I saw of Eagan’s condition, the darkness was more a dull haze.

  I turned the next corner, and the damned dog was back. Uno shied before I took another step, then faded away.

  The dark mass blocked my abilities, but Eagan didn’t have that problem. Clearly. Gillen Yor thought the haze was responsible for his weakness. My dark mass devoured essence, but Eagan’s seemed to just drain it away.

  I stopped. I had seen that before. I had seen the darkness drain off essence like it was feeding on it. The leanansidhe did it on demand. She might not know what it truly was, but she wasn’t dying from it, and it wasn’t blocking her abilities. She knew how to use it.

  Uno appeared, sat in the middle of the sidewalk, and barked once. I frowned. “If you’re only good for stopping muggings, go back to bed, you stupid mutt. It’s ten degrees, and the only things out here are me and you.”

  He faded. Insulting mysterious beings from the Land of the Dead was a defense I never knew worked. It didn’t work with Jark, but I guessed it did with dogs.

  I cut through an alley. Petty street crime goes down in the winter, and the Weird was no different on that score. The damned cold bothered murderers and thieves like anyone else, so I wasn’t too worried. Besides, I wasn’t joking with the dog. I wasn’t stupid. I had my sensing ability ticking away. No one was out, especially not by a section of abandoned warehouses where they weren’t likely to find anyone to mug.

  I slowed to a stop. In the gray and white of the street, a bright
orange sticker stood out like a flare. The crime-scene warning on the warehouse door. The one I slit open. I looked up and down the street for anyone. Empty. Uno flashed into view at my side but disappeared before I fully looked at him.

  Did he herd me there? Could he hear my thoughts? Did he know I was thinking about the leanansidhe or sense that I was about to? The possible connection between my dark mass and Eagan’s haze had simmered in the back of my mind all night. Could Uno know that? Or did I lead myself to the door, my subconscious pushing me there because of what I was thinking, the sensual pleasure I got from using the dark mass’s abilities bubbling up in some mental center of desire.

  I didn’t care. I was there, and the creature in the tunnel held a key to possibly saving the Guildmaster’s life. I hadn’t heard from Keeva. I didn’t think I would now, not after what Moira said. There was no way Ryan macGoren wasn’t involved in her game, and Keeva wasn’t likely to do me any favors over her boyfriend’s objections. The leanansidhe was going to be down there. I pushed aside the thought that I was rationalizing going inside. No law said I couldn’t learn something that might help Eagan and get off on the feeling at the same time.

  The door popped open easily. Between the cold and the walk, the edge of my drunk was blunted by the time I reached the walled-off basement. Uno took care of the rest. He appeared near the back wall, suddenly there in the dark, and let out a howl that shook the walls. Adrenaline surged through me at the sound, burning off the rest of the alcohol in my system. When I reached the hidden opening in the wall, the dog was gone.

  I hesitated. Maybe the dog was trying to warn me off. Maybe I wasn’t as secure against the leanansidhe because of the thing in my head as I thought I was. I pushed the thought aside. The dog was messed up, a lost Dead animal with no more purpose, twisted like any other Dead fey. How could it portend my journey to TirNaNog if there was no TirNaNog anymore? It should have shown up at Eagan’s when I apparently died and was reborn, but it didn’t. I walked into the tunnel.