Unperfect Souls cg-4

by Mark Del Franco

  I pursed my lips. “I’ll think about it.”

  Eagan closed his eyes and nodded. “Of course, you will. That’s exactly what I want. You may not do what I want, but you will do what you think needs doing. So far, that’s worked in my favor.”

  “Really? How?”

  He laughed, low and raspy. “Because we’re not all dead, are we?”

  I chuckled. “I guess that’s as good an answer as any.”

  “Damn right. Tibbet will give you a way to reach me.”

  “What if I decide not to do it?” I asked.

  Eagan shrugged. “Then you don’t. Part of what I’m relying on is your judgment, Grey. It’s an issue of trust for both of us.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  Eagan’s smile broadened. “It was a pleasure to see you.”

  I bowed cordially. “And you, sir.”

  I walked the wide expanse of carpet to the door. Eagan called my name, and I paused at the door. He fussed with the covers on the bed, not looking at me. “When you see your friend Murdock, you should ask him with whom he’s been sleeping,” he said.

  3

  House staff threw me curious looks as I paused outside the Guildmaster’s door. Whatever his intention, Eagan’s comment amused more than angered me. Implying anything about Murdock didn’t cut much ice with me. I knew where I stood with him. He told me what he wanted to tell me, and we were comfortable with that. Occasionally, my curiosity got the better of me, and I pried. Murdock was a big boy. He ignored it.

  I descended the stairs into the shadowed grand hall. Maeve glared from her portrait, influencing events from across the ocean. She was like one of those giant planets that smaller satellites scurried around. Most large planets were big balls of gas if I remembered rightly.

  On the bottom step, movement near the fireplace caught my eye. Moira Cashel strolled across the hall, the provocative smile she’d worn in Eagan’s bedroom still on her face. “Will you be coming to the Solstice party?”

  The major highlight of the fey social calendar was Eagan’s Winter Solstice celebration. When I was a top agent for the Guild, my attendance was a given. The last couple of years, my invitation seemed to have been lost in the mail. “The hall doesn’t look like a party’s going to happen.”

  She stopped a few feet away, her hands clasped behind her back. “Oh, I heard the staff talking. It’s planned. Will you be coming?”

  I smiled politely. “I’ll have to see.”

  She moved closer and ran her hand along the lapel of my coat. “I seem to remember a young man who liked parties.”

  I glanced down at the hand on my coat. “Excuse me?”

  Her eyes shone with amusement. “Oh, come now, Connor. Don’t tell me you don’t sense me in your memory.”

  With closed eyes, she rose on her toes and kissed me. Surprised, I stumbled back against the elephant. “What the hell, lady?” I said.

  She threw her head back and laughed. A chill went up my spine as the sound stirred an old memory. Her face blurred and shifted, her dark hair lightening to a pale brunette, and her face narrowed. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember Amy, Connor.”

  She held her hands on her hips, an old familiar smile twisted into a smirk.

  I wasn’t buying it. “What kind of game is this? Who the hell are you?”

  She released the glamour and resumed her real face and former dark hair color. Cashel chuckled. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d get a kick out of the surprise. It really is me, Connor, Amy Sullivan. Actually, Amy Sullivan was really me. I couldn’t believe it when you walked into that room.”

  I frowned. “Forgive me, but you don’t think I believe for a minute that Amy Sullivan was the Queen’s Herbalist.”

  She giggled. “I wouldn’t believe that either, now that you mention it. I wasn’t the Queen’s Herbalist back then, silly. What can I do to prove it to you?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing. This is some game Maeve is playing.”

  A crease formed on her forehead. “What interest would Maeve have in you?”

  I moved toward the door. “Now I’m really not believing you. When you report back to Maeve, tell her I said nice try. Insulting, but nice try.”

  I yanked the front door closed behind me. At the bottom of the steps, Tibbet waited in the car. I strode down and got in.

  Tibbet put the car in gear. “What happened?”

  “Do you trust Eagan?” I asked.

  She rocked her head indifferently. “He tries to manipulate me constantly and sometimes succeeds, but, yeah, I trust him.”

  “Why?”

  She glanced sideways at me with a wry smile. “Because more often than not—way more often—his instincts are right. I’ve known him a long time, Connor. He can be a frustrating man, but I wouldn’t have stayed if I didn’t believe in him.”

  “How do you know when he’s lying?”

  She shrugged. “I assume he is and go from there. It’s easier that way. Fewer disappointments and, honestly, more fun. Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “Eagan implied I shouldn’t trust Moira Cashel. When I ran into her on my way out, she claimed she was someone from my past,” I said.

  Tibbet considered. “Are those two things mutually exclusive?”

  “No. But if she really is the person she claims, then I’m not sure whether I should believe her or Eagan.”

  Tibbet nodded. “Who is she claiming to be?”

  “A woman I knew when I was younger.”

  Tibbet merged the car onto Storrow Drive and wound along the edge of Back Bay to reach the expressway. She’d lived in Boston a long time. On the map, the route might look ridiculous, but it was the fastest way to the Weird. We slowed as the traffic on the elevated struggled out of the merging of three lanes.

  Tibbet smiled comfortingly. She rubbed my thigh. “Connor, I’m not going to ask who she was to you, but if you’re worried about memories being destroyed, don’t be. They’re your memories. If Moira Cashel is this person she claims to be, that doesn’t mean she gets to destroy who she once was to you.”

  “But if Eagan is right, maybe she had an ulterior motive for coming into my life then,” I said.

  Tibbet coasted off the elevated down to Atlantic Avenue. “Did something bad happen?”

  I chuckled. “No. The opposite, actually.”

  “Then let it be. Brownies have an old saying: ‘Don’t go bogey until you have to.’ ”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “Is that a real saying?”

  Tibbet snickered as she pulled the car to the curb in front of my building. “Yes. It sounds more dramatic and true in Gaelic. But you get the point, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. I’ve got enough to worry about without getting all anxious about something this old.”

  “Good!” She withdrew a flat round stone from her inside coat pocket. A tingle of essence itched my palm as I took it. “It’s a calling ward. Say my name, and I’ll come pick you up,” she said.

  I slipped the stone in my jacket. “Can’t I call your cell?”

  She grinned. “Anytime. But if you have something for the Old Man, use the stone. It never drops calls and doesn’t depend on area coverage.”

  I kissed her just below the ear. “See you, gorgeous.”

  She ruffled my hair. “Later, handsome.”

  Tibs and I have never had an argument. We had a strange and wonderful random relationship. We didn’t seek each other out, but we didn’t avoid each other. We never criticized each other, but always knew the right thing to say at the right time to move the other along in a decision, not necessarily the one either of us wanted to make. We used to have incredible sex until we stopped. Seeing each other always prompted smiles.

  And yet, as she drove away, I realized that for the first time since I’d known her, she had said something that wasn’t true. Not that she lied. But I knew memories could be destroyed. Mine already had been. I had blank spots. I thought the memory loss started with
the damage to my abilities two and a half years previously, but an old friend recently mentioned something from earlier than that, and I had no recollection of it. It made me uneasy. It meant there might be more things I didn’t remember that I didn’t have the slightest notion I’d forgotten.

  I remembered Amy Sullivan, though, and the memory brought a smile. I remember seeing her for the first time in a store, lost in thought as she stared at something on a shelf. She was older than me—much older—but that was part of her appeal. She was a woman, a beautiful woman, and when I spoke to her that first time, she became the first adult woman who didn’t dismiss me as a child, who treated me like the man I thought I was. She opened a world to me that my mentors didn’t. Couldn’t, precisely because they were mentors. Amy taught me things about life, and I didn’t understand that until much later. I thought I was in love, and I thought she was, too. I realized afterward that it was something less than that for both of us, yet something important in a different way. When she disappeared without a trace, I was devastated, but even that made me smile in hindsight. Amy taught me that learning wasn’t just about knowing, but growing. Maturing. And the gift she left me was understanding that life had a lot more to offer me than I ever imagined from reading books.

  Which brought me back to Moira Cashel. If she was Amy Sullivan all those years ago, nothing sprang to mind that hinted at a hidden agenda back then. If she was playing mind games with me, it worked, but probably not in the way she intended. It wasn’t like she thought I’d trust her because she was Amy. If she was Amy, revealing that she lied to me years ago and oh-by-the-way happened to be a current member of Maeve’s court was not the way to endear herself to me now.

  Of course, I couldn’t ignore the Guildmaster’s role in all of it. Eagan typically knew more than he let on and never made a move without a calculation. He wanted both Nigel and Moira to see me at the house and me to see them. Whether I wanted to be or not, he’d put me in play.

  My various mentors taught me many different things, but they all agreed that the first move in avoiding a trap was recognizing that a trap existed. The second was deciding whether to step out of the trap or turn it on whoever set it. But first I had to figure out whose trap it was and whether it was for me or someone else.

  4

  Snow crystals pelted against my face as I hustled down Old Northern Avenue. The street had started life as an industrial service road, and it still was. That made it wide and open to accommodate trailer trucks and other large vehicles. Which meant it was one big wind tunnel connecting Fort Point Channel with the Reserve Channel. Whichever way the wind blew, it blasted its way down the street.

  A bank of clouds had descended on the city as night fell. We hadn’t had a real snowstorm yet, but in New England storms weren’t as much a question of when as how much. The tiny ice particles whirling about weren’t real precipitation but a condensation of harbor and channel air that was still cold and annoying.

  The Avenue met Congress Street at a vague boundary between the commercial end of the street, where fey folk also lived, and the industrial end, where people worked. I had seen more than a few fistfights along these sidewalks, more so in recent days.

  Tainted essence floated through the Weird, the residue of a major spell that had gone wrong earlier this year at a place called Forest Hills. The Taint was the last thing the neighborhood needed, yet was the one thing it seemed to have in abundance. When fey folk came in contact with it, the damaged essence provoked their worst aggressions. In the Weird, that made bad things worse, especially with the stresses caused by the police crackdown.

  The Taint avoided me. Something about the dark mass in my head made it recoil. Like the cloud that curled around me near the end of Congress Street. In my sensing ability, the green essence with black splotches looked like a dirty wave. It didn’t touch me.

  The Weird comes alive at night. It’s when most of the neighborhood plies its trade, either legal or not. I’ve never been a morning person, so it suits me. After I got back from Eagan’s place, I put the word out that I was interested in the dead body at the headworks. That meetings often get set up in bars suits me fine as well, so when Meryl Dian came through with a connection, Murdock and I made plans to meet her at one of my regular haunts.

  Congress ended at a small side street with no name that leads to a soot-stained door with a “Y” painted in the middle of it. Yggy’s started out life as a tavern long before Convergence. Some claimed the place had a certain air of otherness even before the fey arrived. Whatever the truth of it, the bar had been in continuous operation for over a century and appealed to a rough-and-tumble crowd that occasionally wanted a drink without worrying about a knife in the gut. I nodded to the coat-check girls who guarded an empty cloakroom. People used the coat check to ogle the girls and not much else. If you crossed someone at Yggy’s, the last thing you had time for was picking up your coat as you ran out the door.

  By midnight, patrons filled the seats at the large square bar, and only cramped standing space remained. The crowd spilled onto the unused dance floor while a cluster of regulars worked the pool tables. The place smelled of old cigarette smoke and beer, wet clothing and a singed-fabric odor that was the essence-fire equivalent of gunshot residue.

  My essence-sensing ability made it easy to find a human signature at Yggy’s, but I didn’t see Murdock. Humans were welcome—everyone was—as long as they weren’t tourists, gawking tourists, or gawking tourists with cameras. The clientele consisted mostly of fey folk. That was one of the attractions of the bar—the one place in the Weird, if not the entire city, where the fey could gather on neutral territory.

  Behind the bar, Meryl Dian flipped glasses and poured shots. Apparently, in addition to her talents as archivist extraordinaire, formidable druidess, and scathing intellect, she knew how to sling booze. Even if she weren’t on center stage, it would have been hard to miss her in a black leather bustier and black jeans. Plus, she had let her hair grow to her shoulders. Red. This week. A bright red, a hue short of fire truck.

  A gust of cold wind rolled in as the door opened and closed, and I sensed Murdock before I saw him. His dark eyes swept the bar, assessing the layout and the patrons. “Meryl need to moonlight?” he asked.

  “You never know with Meryl,” I said.

  I didn’t know which was stranger. Finding Meryl bartending at Yggy’s or Murdock wearing a Red Sox hoodie and jeans. He downright looked like an average Southie guy. Last time I brought him to Yggy’s, he wore clothes that screamed police officer. Our friendship started out as a way for him to understand the people who lived where he worked. While the fey tended to accept people despite appearances, they also reacted accordingly. Cops were not their best friends down there. Murdock was starting to get it.

  A tall wood-ash fairy from one of the minor Irish clans paused in front of us with two glasses on a tray. She handed me a Guinness and a glass of seltzer with lime to Murdock. Meryl caught my eye as she rang up a sale and nodded toward the back of the room. Murdock and I threaded our way through the crowd and found an empty booth near the pool table. He took the corner because he liked to face the room whenever he was in a bar.

  I plucked the stir straw from his nonalcoholic drink and tossed it at him. “You’re not on duty.”

  He pulled the napkin from under his glass and wiped up a few spots of moisture on the table. “Technically, no. But it’s not a bad habit.”

  I sipped my beer. Perfect temperature, not too cold or warm. “I like my bad habits.”

  Murdock shook his head. “You do not. You rationalize them.”

  Meryl arrived with her own Guinness and dropped into the seat next to Murdock. “That was fun.”

  “Making a little extra money for the holidays?” Murdock asked.

  She grinned. “Just flexing some old muscles.” She dropped her eyes to his clothes. “I didn’t know Brooks Brothers sold jeans.”

  He feigned insulted disbelief. “Hey! They’re Levi’s!”


  She wiggled her shoulders. “Oooo, trendy! Was your Members Only jacket in the wash?”

  Murdock tilted his brow toward me. “Some help here would be nice.”

  I laughed. “Not me. I get in enough trouble with her.”

  Meryl nudged him with an elbow. “You should let me trick you out with some clothes, Murdock. Shake up your image a little.”

  He sipped his seltzer. “I have enough image problems at the moment.”

  “Your father again?” I asked. We had Police Commissioner Scott Murdock to thank for the aggressive curfews in the Weird. He pushed for them, and the mayor jumped.

  Murdock slipped the napkin back under his glass. “He wants me to transfer to Back Bay.”

  Meryl pursed her lips. “Not a lot of murder in Back Bay.”

  “Exactly. He wants me out of the Weird. It’s undermining his image,” Murdock said.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  I let it drop. Talking about his father was a touchy subject at the best of times. Murdock had caught the backlash of a spell a few months ago and somehow ended up with the fey ability to produce a body shield. It wasn’t something he’d shared with his father, as the commissioner hated the fey. The way things went between them, I guessed he wouldn’t tell him for a long, long time.

  “Is your friend coming?” I asked Meryl. Meryl knew more people in town than anyone. How she juggled her impressively busy social life with work was a mystery to me. After telling her earlier about the sending I had received at the headworks, she offered to connect me with a contact in the solitary community.

  She sipped her beer. “Oh, he’s here. He’s being careful. Yggy’s makes for strange bedfellows, but people still speculate about who talks to whom in here.” She leaned out of the booth, then back. “He’s coming.”

  My essence-sensing ability did the looking. Essence sensing worked as a field around the body, so fey folk that have it literally can see behind themselves. Through the clutter of signatures, I recognized one moving toward the booth. A moment later, a solitary named Zev sat next to me. He was a friend—or maybe just an acquaintance—of Meryl’s, another in a series of mysterious connections she had the habit of making with unlikely people.