Unfallen Dead cg-3

by Mark Del Franco

  We didn’t travel far but pulled up to the Boston Harbor Hotel. If I’d thrown a rock out the window of my study, I’d have hit the place. Before I could get out, another liveried brownie opened the rear door on the driver’s side. I couldn’t help smiling at the confused look on her face when she saw the empty backseat. I thanked the driver and let myself out.

  The second brownie rushed to my side. “I’m sorry, Druid macGrey. The driver should have let you sit in back.”

  She hurried to keep pace with me into the lobby. “I insisted on the front. Are you my escort?”

  “Yes, sir. This way, sir.” Two more liveried servants flanked an elevator. I stepped inside with my anxious escort, and she pressed the floor panel for the Presidential Suite, the best rooms in the place. Despite its name, more royalty than democratically elected officials stayed in the suite.

  The elevator escort turned me over to yet another servant in the suite’s foyer. He was in what might be called uniform casual since he didn’t have a cap or epaulets. If I’d been dealing with anyone else but a royal member of the Seelie Court, I’d have suspected someone was trying to either impress or intimidate me. But I knew the Seelie Court. They took this level of servitude for granted and didn’t care what I thought.

  The house servant bowed and left me in the living room. I supposed the room made some people feel at home, but it looked nothing like my place. The room was decorated in soft shades of blue and beige, with vaguely Asian accents. It had three sofas in a space larger than my entire apartment. The lamps had been lowered to let the harbor lights twinkle in the windows. Quiet music played, a traditional harp-and-flute melody that I assumed was meant to be soothing.

  Ceridwen stepped into the room, stopping in front of the windows to face me with a soft expression that grew into a small smile. She wore casual clothing, a flowing tunic in rust with loose pants. She had gathered her hair in a loose knot at the middle of her back. “I’m glad you came.”

  I strolled to the center of the room, still taking in the surroundings. “I wasn’t sure I had a choice.”

  She laughed, not loud but too long, as she turned to the wet bar and filled two small glasses with whiskey. She handed one to me, held hers up, and we tapped.

  “Sláinte,” she said.

  “And yours,” I responded.

  We sipped. She didn’t say anything but stood with a slight glimmer of the whiskey on her deep maroon lips before gesturing to the sofas. “Let’s sit.”

  She draped herself along the end of a couch, pulling her bare feet up off the floor and toying with her glass. “We seem to have gotten off to a bad start.”

  I leaned back into one of the other sofas. “Are we at the start of something?”

  She smiled through another sip. “We offended… I offended you. I apologize.”

  I chuckled. “You must really want something if you’re willing to apologize.”

  Ceridwen stared at her glass, perhaps deciding how to respond. “I am here for the truth of what happened at Forest Hills. No one here has been cooperative.”

  “Maybe you should try a little less emphasis on commanding presence and a little more on diplomacy.”

  She laughed again, this time honestly. “Yes, well, there is that. I’m not used to having my motives questioned. At Tara, the knowledge that I desire an answer is sufficient to produce results.”

  “This country has a problem with that attitude. We had a little revolution over it.”

  She nodded, continuing to affect a bemused smile. “Yes. I noticed you said ‘we.’ You consider yourself a citizen here?”

  I leaned my elbows on my knees, rolling the glass between my palms. “I’ve never sworn fealty to Maeve, if that’s what you’re asking. Have you?”

  She slid from the couch and retrieved the decanter. She topped off my glass before sitting again. “Of course. All the underKings and — Queens did after Convergence. It was necessary.”

  I eyed her over my glass. “Necessary, but not sincere?”

  She pursed her lips in amusement. “Oh, I don’t think you know me well enough to dare that question. The events of Forest Hills were felt at Tara. There was a dimming of essence. Do you really not remember anything else from Forest Hills?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “What if I said I don’t believe you?”

  I shrugged. “What if I said I don’t care?”

  The appearance of amusement finally slipped from her. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with, Connor macGrey. A druid with no abilities means nothing to the players involved.”

  I smiled broadly to annoy her. “And yet here is a queen of Faerie serving me drinks.”

  She gave me a measured look, then turned on her bemused smile again. “So it would seem.”

  She rose from the couch and went to the windows. The music played as she stared off to the harbor. One of the ways I can distinguish the difference between the fey and human normals is by the strength of their body essence. The fey have a more pronounced aura around them and, as Ceridwen stood looking out the window, I felt her withdraw hers into herself as much as she could. “Call the spear.”

  I stood. “Why?”

  She didn’t face me, but her eyes shifted to my reflection in the glass. “I want to see if you were able to take it from me because you were in a place of concentrated power. It’s at the Guildhouse now. If it responds to your call from there, it’s bonded to you.”

  I debated whether she was leading me into a trap. I couldn’t see how it would be any more of a risk than walking into her suite. She didn’t need the spear if she were going to overpower me. I lifted my hand. “Ithbar.”

  I felt the coolness of activated essence, and the spear appeared, cold and slick in my hand. The faint odor of ozone tickled my nostrils.

  Ceridwen did not turn but lowered her chin. She held a hand out. “Ithbar.”

  The spear shivered out of my hand and into hers. I clenched my stomach as she turned and planted the butt of the spear on the ground. “We are not pleased by this. The spear is ours, Connor macGrey. It would be foolish of you to forget that.”

  “If you own it, tell it to ignore me,” I said.

  “This spear is key to the defense of Tara, Grey. Maeve is under threat; perhaps the entire Seelie Court is. If you interfere with our security, you could doom yourself as well.”

  “What threat?” I asked.

  She compressed her lips, annoyance flaring in her eyes. “Bergin Vize. That is all you need to know. That should be enough to tell you the danger of Maeve’s situation. I am appealing to your honor as a druid of our people. You must tell me how to control the Taint.”

  I wondered if the mere mention of Vize’s name was expected to throw me into a panicked rage. Maybe a few weeks earlier it might have worked, but at the moment, Ceridwen’s motives were too suspect for me to buy into it. “That’s a pretty clumsy attempt to get me to cooperate. I’ve already told you everything I know. I know nothing more about the Taint and even less about the spear. You brought the spear into this, not me. I have no idea why it bonded to me, but obviously you don’t have the control over it you thought you did. Don’t blame me, and don’t threaten me.”

  Her eyes went cold, the fathomless cold of an ancient fey. “We make a better ally than enemy.”

  As unsettling as her stare was, I wouldn’t let it cow me. “So do I, Ceridwen.”

  I sensed her essence surge, but she held it within instead of releasing it on me. It ebbed away. It probably had occurred to her that a dead body in such a nice hotel would wreck the carpet.

  A faint bitterness crept into her face. “You wouldn’t last long at Court.”

  I gave her my back and walked toward the foyer. “Maybe Court wouldn’t last long around me.”

  I let myself out. The liveried servant startled when I appeared at the elevator. He must have been expecting a sending to tell him we had finished. The elevator opened on the same anxious woman who had ridden up with me. �
�Sir,” she said.

  We didn’t speak until we hit the lobby. I held my hand up and said, “Ithbar.” The spear materialized in my hand. I handed it to the brownie. “Please delivery this to Ceridwen. Tell her to be careful; the point can be sharp.”

  I hated when royalty acted like royalty. It was why I never considered the diplomatic corps. Briallen might have felt comfortable playing their annoying games of privilege, but they made me want to hit the players. If I hadn’t gotten the point across to Ceridwen that she couldn’t intimidate me, she sure as hell would get it when her servant got back upstairs.

  One of the lobby servants started to lead me across the thick carpeting toward the front doors. “This way, sir.”

  At the back end of the lobby, doors led out to the harbor. “No, thanks. I’ll walk.”

  I strolled the dock overlooking the channel. Luxury yachts rested at the pier behind the hotel. In nice weather, the plaza hosted everything from movie nights to concerts to weddings. I could see and hear them from my apartment. Across the mouth of the channel, the Weird shimmered with a rainbow light of essence. I picked out the faint blue glow of my computer in the upper window of my dilapidated warehouse apartment. No boats docked beneath it, but a fair amount of sea wrack clung to the pilings.

  I glanced up at the hotel. Either Ceridwen didn’t have essence-masking security, or she didn’t feel she needed it. I found her suite with no trouble. Her tall figure blazed as she stood at the window, the spear in her hand. I couldn’t make out the details of her face, but I had no doubt she was staring at me. I continued along the dock.

  A cold wind came up the channel as I turned onto the Old Northern Avenue bridge. It’s a swing bridge that pivots to allow boat traffic. Rusted steel beams form trusses in a complex pattern that, depending on your aesthetic, is picturesque or an eyesore. Either way, it makes crossing the channel on foot convenient.

  Someone walked in the roadway about midway across. As he came toward me, I noticed he wore a collared shirt and long pants, a little underdressed for the cold weather. He glared at me, like someone in a bad mood looking for an excuse to get into it with someone on the ass-end of town.

  A gust of wind rushed from the harbor, stirring up sand and debris. Grit flew in my face, and I shielded my eyes against it. The wind moaned across the bridge, the many gaps and crossbeams in the trussing acting like a pipe organ. When the eddies of sand settled, I crossed the bridge. The guy was gone. I checked for essence nearby in case he was a drunk lurking in the shadows, waiting to jump me. Nothing. I chalked it up to his thinking better of it.

  On the Weird end of the bridge, a police car blocked the road leading back into the financial district. A lone patrol officer wearing official outdoor gear stood by the car. We nodded as I passed. A car pulled up, and the officer signaled it to turn back into the neighborhood. Behind his patrol car, a police barrier had been set up with a sign that said BRIDGE CLOSED TO INBOUND TRAFFIC. I looked back along the bridge. I’d come across on the outbound lane and hadn’t noticed anything unusual except the walker. My curiosity piqued, I retraced my steps.

  “Bridge closed, sir,” the officer said.

  “I just walked over it. It’s not blocked on the other end. Is it safe?” I said.

  The officer kept a professional look on his face. “It’s safe to walk on.”

  I cocked my head. “Are you saying I can’t use it from this direction?”

  He gave a curt nod. “No one can use the bridge to enter the financial district without clearance. Order of the police commissioner.”

  I exhaled sharply. “You’re kidding.”

  A subtle change came over him, a hardening of features that cops get when they think they’re about to have trouble with someone. He stared at me, not speaking. I smiled and nodded again. “Thank you.”

  I wasn’t going to argue with him. The guy was only doing his job. If Commissioner Scott Murdock thought barricading the fey in the Weird was going to help, he was the idiot, not the poor patrol officer who had to enforce it. I shook my head. It was window-dressing security. Blocking the bridge might stop foot traffic, but plenty of fey flew and swam. The police would have their hands full trying to stop them.

  I stepped around the police car, glancing back at the officer, the bridge stretching long and empty behind him. I paused again and looked back. The bridge was empty. The officer stared. “Move along, sir,” he said.

  “Did you see anyone else on the bridge?”

  “Sir?”

  “A guy on the bridge, walking out of the Weird. He didn’t pass me on the bridge. Did he come back this way?”

  The officer’s hand nonchalantly dropped near his weapon. “You’re the only person to come through, sir. Please move along. That’s a direct police order to clear the area.”

  I held my hands out and down. “No problem, Officer. Thank you again.”

  I made for my apartment on Sleeper Street. Something about the guy on the bridge felt familiar. I have a good memory for essence signatures of people I know, but he had been too far away for me to sense him. By the time I reached my apartment building, I had convinced myself that the look he gave me meant he knew me, knew me and didn’t particularly like seeing me. I didn’t particularly like not seeing him then, not knowing where he went and why the cop hadn’t seen him. I kept a sharp ear and eye out all the way down Sleeper, but no one followed me.

  No fancy yachts or doormen or limos waited outside my building. The Boston Harbor Hotel glowed with yellow light across the channel. I didn’t bother trying to see if Ceridwen was still watching. She had likely gotten bored by now and moved on to some other power scheme. I hadn’t helped myself by irritating her, but at this point, there wasn’t anything she could do to me.

  If Ceridwen continued hassling me, I’d have to figure out a game plan to get her off my back. And if Commissioner Scott Murdock thought he could keep people from the Weird out of the city, he was in for a surprise. I didn’t know what I would do, but I wasn’t going to sit back and take it. I thought I’d let the two of them play it out, then cross that bridge when I came to it. And no police officer or Faerie queen was going to stop me.

  CHAPTER 12

  Murdock lay on his back, sweat glistening on his forehead as he breathed with exertion. As I looked down at him, he gave me that smirk, the one that says, “Yeah, I can do this.” His arms came up, his chest expanding with a last burst of energy, and he dropped the bar on the rack. Rolling up from the bench, he shot his elbows out and gave his body a twist first in one direction, then the other.

  I slipped a couple of plates off each end of the bar and took his place on the bench press. He came around to spot me. Again with the smirk, he held one hand above the bar to make the point that he wouldn’t need two hands to lift it off me if I lost it. I finished the set and sat up, running a towel over my face. “Are we going to talk about this?”

  He grabbed the chin-up bar, lifted himself in the air, and talked without missing a beat in his set. “Why does everyone feel the need to ‘talk about this’?”

  I shook my head. “Aren’t you the least bit concerned?”

  He dropped to the floor. “You have one more set.”

  I lay back. The last two reps threatened to fail, but I would be damned if I let him get the satisfaction of pulling the bar off me. Again. I stood and stretched.

  Murdock and I worked out together. It was how we met. Jim’s Gym is low-key, on the edge of the financial district, just over the bridge from the Weird. It wasn’t so far that I talked myself out of going and not so near that I obsessed about working out. Murdock didn’t care where it was because he drives. He parks in front and puts his little “I’m a police officer and can park wherever I want” card on the dashboard. Once we started on a case together, we didn’t discuss it during workouts. It kept some normalcy in our friendship.

  We worked our routine at the empty end of the gym. Late afternoons tended to be quiet, and the only other people exercising were out of earshot
.

  “Murdock, you’re bench-pressing twice your weight.”

  He stood at the dumbbell rack re-sorting the weights by size. “I know.”

  I leaned against the rack and crossed my arms. “I’m just saying, I think you’re awfully accepting of it.”

  He gave me a lopsided grin and picked up a dumbbell set. “What do you want me to do? Go to bed and pull the covers over my head? I got zapped with an essence-bolt that should have killed me and instead made me stronger. What does it mean? Beats me. I can either accept it unless it becomes a real problem, or I can freak out. I’m accepting it.”

  He curled the dumbbells with little effort, as if he were only doing toning exercises. With fifty-pound weights. He replaced the dumbbells. “Want to see something?”

  I gave him a noncommittal shrug. He faced a wall about fifteen feet away. One moment he stood still; the next he ran full tilt at the wall. Just before he hit, essence flared around him in a full-fledged body shield, stronger than most I had seen. My jaw dropped. He rammed the wall with a crunch, but the crunch came from the cinder blocks cracking. He wasn’t even breathing heavy.

  “How the hell did you learn to do that?”

  He smiled. “Nigel Martin. He reached inside my mind and somehow switched on the body shield when he needed me to run point for him at Forest Hills. I sort of saw how he did it in my head and figured out how to do it myself. Cool, huh?”

  I chuckled. “You know what you just did? When they figure out how to work their body shields, probably every fey runs into a wall to prove it. Usually they’re about twelve years old, though.”

  He grinned. “I feel like a kid.”

  He pointed at the dumbbells, and I picked up much-much-lighter weights than he had. “Does your father know?”

  Murdock scowled. “Now who’s acting twelve? No, my father doesn’t know. You know he doesn’t like the fey. I’m willing to accept what’s happened. He would freak out.”