She vanished again. I tracked her with my sensing ability and pressed the knife to her chest as she tried to slip around me. “That’s close enough.”
She dropped her masking glamour to reveal a surprised and frightened face. Thrusting her hands up, she bowed her head and sank to the floor. “Spare me, brother. I seek only kinship.”
“I’m not here to kill you,” I said.
She looked up at me through a tangle of hair, suspicious, yet curious. “I have no quarrel with you either, my brother. Shall we sit, then? I should like that.”
I motioned her away with the dagger, and she scuttled along the floor to an armchair. Curling up in its corner, she pawed at one eye as I eased into the opposite chair. She shoved her hand into a tattered pocket. She withdrew her hand, clenched around something. Tentatively, she reached across the side table and dropped a battered piece of bread. “I have not flesh nor fluid to offer, but crusty things can stem the pangs of hunger.”
She was trying to follow the old rules of hospitality, even if the bread had a couple of colors on it that I didn’t usually associate with freshness. “I’m good. Um. Thanks.”
We observed each other. At least, by the shifting of her unsettling black eyes, she was doing the same thing I was. Such a small being to inspire such a lot of fear. She was barely half my height but had the ability to take down the strongest of fey. Except for her emaciated head, the only parts of her body visible outside layers of clothing were her thin arms and grimy ankles.
I closed my eyes a moment. If I continued the conversation, I was committing to something, or at least admitting to it. I was seeking help from a leanansidhe. I took a deep breath. “You said we touch the Wheel the same. How do you touch the Wheel?”
She threw her hands over her face. “We touch the outside from within, and the Wheel turns.”
I frowned. “If you think I believe you can turn the Wheel, you’re wrong.”
She screeched with laughter and scrambled up the side of the chair. “No one turns the Wheel, brother. It turns and turns, and we touch It where few dare to know. Not all who ride the Wheel ride the Wheel.”
“You’re lying. Even the Dead ride the Wheel the same as everyone else. It’s the Wheel of the World,” I said.
She tangled her hands in her hair. “Ah, stupid druid, sees the surface and sees nothing more. The Wheel is a wheel on both sides.”
The idea landed on me in stunning realization. I had spent my youth in study of the druidic path, learning from my mentors. The test of a true follower of the path was an intuitive understanding of what came next, the ability to move beyond receiving knowledge to attaining it on one’s own. We called it secret knowledge, the knowing of the Wheel in a fundamental way. I left my training years ago and stepped off the path for personal gain, but every once in a while, I was granted a flash of insight to the nature of the Wheel. I laughed in my throat at the realization the leanansidhe handed me. “There are two sides to the Wheel.”
She squealed as she dropped to the floor and clutched my knees. “You see, my brother! You see the within and without, and the Wheel lies between.”
I clenched my jaw at the wave of body odor she emitted. “Show me how you touch the Wheel,” I said.
She gasped in excitement, clutching her hands to her cracked lips. Those dark orbs whirled in their sockets, searching. In the blink of an eye, she vanished, surprising me with her speed. Seconds later, she returned, walking through the door and cradling something in her hands. She knelt in front of me with a rat that fought to escape, its sharp claws scratching her hands. “Shhh, shhh, shhh, little thing. Rest and receive,” she crooned.
Deep violet essence coated her hands. Tendrils formed, lines of purple light that burrowed into the rat. The rat froze in some kind of paralysis. With a moan of pleasure, the leanansidhe brought the filthy rodent to her cheek and closed her eyes. More tendrils waved out of her face where the rat touched skin. They pulsed with light, and the rat flinched as its essence seeped away. Something moved within the leanansidhe, something dark and impenetrable. It reached up from within her essence and sapped the rat’s essence.
I flinched as the dark mass in my head shifted. The vision in my right eye faded as pain stabbed at it. Pain from within. Something black leaped out of my face, an indistinct line of darkness that burned. The leanansidhe screeched and fell back, holding the rat toward me. “Yes, yes, brother, it is yours! Yours! Druse did not mean to take it from you.”
I fought the pain, pressing my body essence against it. My left forearm burned with the effort, the swirls of my strange tattoo giving off an uncomfortably pleasurable cold burn. The dark thing inside me recoiled, and I gasped. My vision returned to see a dead rat in a filthy hand inches from my face. By force of will, I didn’t slap it away. “Keep it,” I said.
The leanansidhe shook the rat. “No, yours! ’Sokay, ’sokay.”
I turned my head to the side. I didn’t know the ramifications of taking a gift from a leanansidhe, even if it was only a rat. I wasn’t interested in finding out. I stood, and she fell back.
“I said keep it.” I stumbled toward the door.
“No! Stay, my brother! You see the truth of it now! Stay with Druse, and we shall aid and comfort each other. Druse will show you the way beyond the pain to the pleasure of the Wheel,” she called out.
My head pounded beyond a migraine. I held my aching arm against me as I retraced my way in the dark, not thinking of anything but escape. Without the flashlight, I followed the path in my memory, bumping into walls and tripping over changes in levels of the floor. Passing through the masking ward in the warehouse basement, the dark mass in my head gave me one more kick and stopped spiking.
I ran the rest of the way—across the basement, up the stairs, and through the warehouse. The door slammed against the outside wall as I shouldered through it. I landed on my knees on the snow-covered sidewalk and threw up in the street. A wave of dizziness swept over me, and I fell into the blessedly cold snow. My face pressed against it, the icy shock of it soothing the pain in my head.
A light flashed rose against the snow in the dead white night. “Really, Connor, this throwing up in the gutter is a bad habit.”
I tried to talk, but a retching sound came out. Joe grabbed at my jacket collar. “Connor! What’s wrong?”
He flew up, pulling me into a seated position. “I’m okay,” I said.
He hovered in my face. “Screw that, you look like day-old shite. Your essence is . . . I don’t know what it is. It’s rippling like a wave.”
I got my feet under me and forced myself off the ground. Joe grabbed my coat to steady me. “It’s stopping,” he said.
He didn’t have to tell me. The dizziness receded as I took a great gulp of air. “I’m fine. Just didn’t expect that to happen.”
Joe whirled around me. “What to happen? Where the hell have you been?”
I laughed. “Hell might be one answer.”
He leaned closer to me face and sniffed. “Are you drunk?”
I didn’t want to discuss what had happened. Joe can be overprotective, and I didn’t want a scolding. I started walking. “Yeah, I am. I must have taken a wrong turn or something.”
“But what was going on with your essence?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe alcohol poisoning? I feel fine now. Honest.”
He twisted his lips doubtfully. “You’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
He spun around in the air. “So—let me tell you about my night.” I let him chatter on. It was a good distraction from the strange emotions I was having. He talked all the way back to my apartment, a tale of drinks, song, a short wrestle with another flit, an amorous encounter, and more drinks. Joe did know how to have a good time. His busy night was a fortunate coincidence. It didn’t take much trying to get him to go home, so I could be alone.
Inside my building, I hit the elevator call button. The old cage was slow as hell, but I was so tired that I didn’t wan
t to climb the stairs. I heard a clicking sound, but the elevator didn’t move. I peered into the shaft. It was stuck in the basement. I sighed and walked up.
I wanted to reach inside my head and scrub my brain. My gut feeling was right. The leanansidhe had recognized the darkness inside me. Recognized it because it was inside her. I saw it beneath her essence, the black, hungering thing that reached out for the rat’s essence. My eye ached in memory of it. Whatever was inside me responded, wanted what the thing inside the leanansidhe wanted.
The idea revolted me. What the hell had Bergin Vize unleashed when we fought almost three years ago? Maybe unleashed inside both of us? He was damaged, too. I saw that when I met him in TirNaNog. Did he struggle with the same darkness? Did he feel the same frustrations and pain? I hoped to hell he did. If he weren’t so intent on destroying the Seelie Court—hell, destroying the world—none of this would be happening. How someone raised by Eorla Kruge could become so twisted baffled me.
My essence-sensing ability jumped as something moved in the apartment. The security wards hadn’t gone off, but something was there. Several wards were keyed to alert the Guild, but considering their more-intense-than-usual annoyance with me lately, whether anyone would show up these days was a good question. The wards wouldn’t stop a truly powerful fey person, but they would slow him down long enough for me to figure out how to protect myself.
Both daggers were out and in my hands in seconds. The dagger that Briallen gave me felt heavier than usual, and a few runes on the blade glowed a soft yellow. I peered into the living room, and every hair on my body bristled at a faint red light in the room. Two glowing eyes stared back. I turned on the reading lamp.
Uno’s massive head tweaked to one side in curiosity. He relaxed and dropped his jaw, his thick, dark tongue flapping out the end of his muzzle to the rhythm of his panting.
“Okay, you can’t be good news,” I said aloud.
I picked up my cell phone. Shay answered on the first ring. “Say ‘Hi, Dad,’ if you’re in trouble.”
“You don’t strike me as the daddy type, Connor,” he said.
Relief swept over me. I never knew what Shay was going to say. I don’t think he did either. “Is Uno with you?” I asked.
“I was debating whether to call you so late. I heard a bark and woke up, and he’s gone.”
“He’s here.”
“He’s there? You mean your apartment?”
“Drooling at the end of my bed as we speak,” I said.
“Don’t worry about that. The drool disappears at dawn. What do you think it means?”
Uno dropped to the floor and lowered his head between outstretched paws. “I don’t know. Has anything odd happened to you recently?”
There was a chuckle. “I can’t believe you just asked me that.”
Shay’s daily life was pretty damned odd. “Okay, odder than usual.”
“No. What about you?” he asked.
When I saw Uno, I assumed something had happened to Shay. Until he asked, it didn’t occur to me that the dog could have appeared because of me. “I had a strange night.”
I heard a soft clank of metal on the other end of the phone, then water running. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Shay was less than half my age, and here he was offering me a sympathetic ear. I wanted to laugh, but didn’t. He was being sincere and concerned. The kid was sweet, too naïve and too worldly, all at the same time. I worried about people like Shay in the Weird, people on the edge who could fall with the slightest nudge. Shay was dancing near that edge when we first met, but he seemed to be finding his way to safer ground. Except for Uno. “No, that’s all right. I’ll work it out on my own.”
“Call me if you change your mind.”
“Will do,” I said.
“Connor . . . does this mean I’m not going to die?”
He said it so quietly and matter-of-factly, it pulled at me. I hadn’t considered what he must have been going through. Given that I now had a hellhound lying on my living-room floor, I had a feeling I was going to find out. “It’ll be all right, Shay. Call me if you need me.”
He didn’t answer right away. “Thanks . . . um . . . you, too.”
I closed the cell. Uno held eye contact with me, calm and steady, long past the point any other dog would have perceived a threat. He didn’t. He stared with a gaze that said he knew damned well who would look away first. As a hound from Hel whose job it was to suck the souls out of the living, I guessed not much threatened him.
After several minutes, neither of us had moved. I gave in for what was left of the night. I was drained and tired and not up for vying for supremacy with a supernatural dog. Uno remained where he was while I went through my going-to-bed routine, turning off the light in the study and setting up the coffee for the morning. I sat on the futon, removed my boots, retrieved the spelled dagger from its sheath, and tucked it into my headboard. I leaned on my knees and looked at Uno. “I suppose if you were going to devour me, you would have done it by now.”
The tufts of hair above his eyes twitched, and he let loose a loud chuff. I reached out and touched his head. He slumped over on his side and wagged his tail. I scratched at the back of his neck, and his tail thumped on the floor. “Just so you know, Uno, petting a soul-sucking hound from Hel is pretty much an unsurprising end to today.”
I peeled off my clothes and slid beneath the covers on the futon. When I turned off the lights, the room filled with the red glow from Uno’s eyes. I stared at the ceiling.
Not the least bit surprising.
14
Within a few minutes of another early-morning call from Murdock, I was picking my way across an access road overlooking Fort Point Channel. The constant winds off the harbor solidified the snow into dirty banks of gray ice. Tall frozen hills from snowplow deposits ringed a parking lot owned by the Gillette Company. Even with sturdy boots, the thin skin of ice on the ground made walking a challenge. I had to struggle my way to the police cars clustered along the channel side.
Gillette was always referred to as being in South Boston. The razor manufacturer had employed a lot of local people over the years and for a time boasted about its Boston-based status, but no one wanted to be associated with what happened around the plant, never mind brag that they lived next to its parking lots. Maybe when its workers lived in Southie, it was a true part of the neighborhood, but these days it was the outer edge of the Weird, more a barrier for the residential area next door than a part of it.
Emergency vehicles gathered in an empty section of the lot. Beyond them, a number of solitary fey loitered on the seawall by the channel. Seeing that many solitaries in broad daylight made me uneasy. Solitaries don’t like being seen, especially by humans, especially by law enforcement. Forest species with their rough-bark skin and leaf-like hair rarely mingled with the stone-skin denizens of the underground world. Even a few water fey hung over the wall from the channel, their hair rimed with ice. Their odd appearances made them de facto suspects for crimes committed nearby. It was racist, it was unfair, but it was the way it was. They stayed out of sight, worked night shifts, and tried to live their lives without being hassled. Pretty much like everyone else. A group of solitaries, and an odd group at that, hanging around a crime scene signaled something different was happening.
Officers in winter gear stood inside a ring of crime-scene tape. Murdock wore his camel-hair coat and flat ear-muffs that rode around the back of his head. The wind off the channel brought a flush to his cheeks and nose, but he didn’t look particularly cold. A body lay on the ground in the center of the group. A big body.
I ducked under the yellow-and-black tape. A few faces in the group frowned or looked away. The Boston P.D. doesn’t like working with the fey, but I thought I had earned a little respect within their ranks in the last year. “What have we got?” I asked.
“Headless female body,” Murdock said.
I eased my way between two officers, who gave way grudgingly. Murd
ock’s description pretty much covered it. The body was about six feet long without the head, clad in a simple wool tunic and leggings, and wrapped in a long, soiled leather coat that clearly had been exposed to water. My sensing ability picked up faint traces of her body signature. “She’s a match to the head from the sewer. It’s Sekka,” I said.
Pinned with a long nail to the coat, a sheet of paper flapped in the breeze. The medical examiner held it down a moment. It read: Jark.
“Is that supposed to be some kind of warning?” Murdock asked.
I shrugged. “Or an accusation. Let’s check out the peanut gallery.”
Murdock followed me to the seawall. A few solitaries slunk away as we approached. I didn’t worry about them. The ones who slip off when the police approach are usually petty criminals looking to avoid a hassle. The ones who stand their ground are usually the bigger fish who look forward to antagonizing the law. This group was different. They had the look of curious bystanders rather than lowlifes. I wanted to know if that curiosity tipped into vested interest. By the time we reached the wall, half the group had dispersed.
“Anybody here see anything?” Murdock asked.
“Her name was Sekka,” someone behind me said, one of the tree folk. Tall with brown bark skin and tangled mossy hair. In the dry winter air, he had the odor of dampness and earth.
“How do you know it was her?” Murdock said, gesturing at the little matter of her missing head.
The solitary looked at the body. “I knew her. Those clothes are hers. She’s been missed. Word is the Dead were after her.”
“Anyone in particular?” asked Murdock.
Eyes shifted to the ground or the horizon, anywhere but at us. One of the merrows from the harbor pointed down. Female merrows didn’t speak much, preferring to use their bodies to communicate. More than a few people have drowned trying to understand them. I leaned over the wall. At low tide, the channel sank over a dozen feet, exposing the foundation stones of the wall. A sewer overflow pipe jutted over the water. “Did you see someone come out of there?” I asked.
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