Having a conversation with Joe was an art form. I was used to his out-of-the-blue comments, but this was a new one. I’ve known him all my life, but he sometimes forgot that I haven’t known him all his life. He makes strange references and non sequiturs that assume I know what the hell he’s talking about. “Complaints?”
He screwed up his face. “ ’Course. I’m not mind-deaf like some people.”
Not the direction I wanted the conversation to go, but with an opening like that, I had to ask. “Who complains, Joe?”
With a loop in the air, he flew to the window and did a handstand on the sill. I wasn’t impressed. He cheated by using his wings to hold steady. “The ones I’ve killed with their singing all the time. Can you see the queen naked from here?”
I joined him at the window. “No, she pulls the blinds. What singing people did you kill?”
He huffed and looked at me with concern. “Are you daft? Why would I kill singing people? You’re acting strange. Are you okay?”
Said the drunk flit.
“I’m fine, Joe. I’ve had a lot on my mind lately,” I said.
He swooped back to the kitchen for another cookie. “You think too much. Think, think, think, all the time, thinking.”
He flew back to the window. Actually, he flew into the window, banged his head, and fell on his back. “You have a crack in your ceiling,” he said.
“You made it when you flew into it last month.”
“Is that a crack?” he asked.
“Drink, drink, drink, all the time, drinking,” I said.
He rolled with laughter. Laughing myself, I went to the kitchen counter to get a beer. When I turned back to the living room, I froze. Joe lay on the floor chuckling. Above him, the view outside the window was filled with Guild security agents in flight, sweeping across the harbor. “What the hell?” I said.
Joe sat up, his laughter fading when he saw the agents. Without a word, he vanished. I grabbed my coat and ran down to the street. Sirens wailed as I hit the sidewalk. At the corner of Old Northern, at least a dozen police cars swept by. The officer at the security barricade near the bridge pointed at me. “Inside! That’s an order!” he shouted.
I didn’t argue. It wasn’t worth the delay, and he had the badge. When you’re on your own turf, you don’t need to use the main streets. I backtracked around my building to the dockside, across the rotting loading dock to the next street, and cut through an empty warehouse. Two blocks farther, and I was back on Old Northern. Several more blocks down, flashing police lights joined flares of essence-fire.
Joe popped in next to me. “It’s a fight. Dylan’s tearing it up with some gang, and Keeva’s got tin-heads with her.”
Sudden winds buffeted me from every side as I ran toward the commotion. Empty police cars clogged the street. The officers were not in the fight. They stationed themselves in secure positions on the side streets and alleys to keep pedestrians away. The dark mass in my head vibrated, like it was trying to decide whether to stab me in the brain. My essence-sensing ability kicked in on its own. A cloud of Taint filled the sky, tendrils of it dangling into a cluster of people in the street, mostly dwarves and elves, facing outward in a circle. The dwarves were shielding the elves, who were taking shots at the airborne Guild agents.
Calmly facing them, Dylan was wrapped in a dense body shield, white bolts of essence leaping from his hands. He moved forward, his fire intercepting his attacker’s shots, the two streams of essence sparking and dissipating as they tangled. What he missed warped around his shield.
The mass of Taint moved like a balloon made from mist, shuddering and bouncing in the wind as it floated above the fight, the tendrils hanging down fluttering and swaying, leaping from one person to the next. The elves and dwarves were trapped, but not going down without a fight. The Taint would goad them to fight as long as it remained stabilized. Keeva held her agents above the fray to avoid losing control of them to the Taint. She had learned her lessen at Forest Hills. Dylan could hold his own, but the Taint made it all a stalemate.
“Joe, can you get in there and avoid the Taint?” I asked.
He hovered higher, his eyes shifting as he scanned the street. “I think so. Want me to go kill them all?”
I whipped my head around. “What?”
He snickered. “I know they’re not singing, but I’ll kill them if you want. I still don’t know why you hate singing people.”
I shook my head. “No, Joe. No killing unless you have to. I need you to do two sendings. Tell Keeva to circle around behind Dylan and do some weathering to blow the Taint off. Tell Dylan to be ready to hit the fighters. Tell them both to do it the moment you distract them.”
“Me? What am I supposed to do?”
“Give those guys an essence flash in the face and jump out as fast as possible,” I said.
“Ohhhh. Tricksy,” he said. The tickle of a sending brushed against my senses as Joe leaned forward, then frowned. “Ha! Keeva called me a little pest, which is really quite rude, isn’t it?”
“She’s called you worse.” Regardless of what she thought, Keeva complied. She circled down and landed next to Dylan. The air around her vibrated with particles of blue and white as she prepared her spell-casting. I gave her time to build up a charge.
“Now, Joe! Get in and get out!”
He vanished. A fraction of a second later, he appeared in a tangle of Tainted essence strands in front of the fighters, and a fraction after that, released a bright burst of pink essence that spotted my vision. The frontline fighters swung their faces away, disoriented by the flare. Keeva released her spell. A blast of cold air rushed down the street, and the Taint collapsed into itself, then shredded off. A tightly focused bolt of essence shot from Dylan’s hand and knocked the line of fighters off their feet. The elves and dwarves scattered in confusion as Guild agents moved in. I lost sense of what was happening as everyone rushed forward.
Police shouted at me as I ran through the scattered cars. In the aftermath, Guild agents and police officers chased down the fighters who had run off while the rest were immobilized in spellbindings. I joined Keeva and Dylan standing over several inert bodies that agents were binding in cocoons of white essence.
“You’ve still got your fight coordination down. Good work,” Dylan said when he saw me. Nice words, but he didn’t look at me.
Keeva scowled, but the tension between me and Dylan seemed to lighten her mood. “Yeah, thanks,” she said.
Dylan watched Keeva escort her agents to a nearby van as they carried several elves away. “Your friend Carmine was attacked. The primary attacker got away. These were her support team.”
“You were protecting Carmine?”
Dylan kept a professional detachment. Still didn’t look at me. “Not really. Some people were taking an odd interest in him. When you showed up to talk to him at the Fish Pier, Ceridwen was convinced you were part of some conspiracy, so she increased surveillance on him. Lucky for him.”
“Is he okay?” I asked.
Dylan nodded. “Pretty banged up, but he probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer if we weren’t there. I can’t figure what it’s about.”
“Carmine told me some Teutonic guys were looking for a Red Man. What was the attacker wearing?”
By his expression, Dylan thought the question was weird. “Mismatched clothes. She looked like a homeless woman. Why?”
“That sounds like the druidess who visited Carmine a few days ago. She said she was looking for one of the victims in the murder case I’m working on with Murdock, but Carmine said he saw her with these guys and was worried about himself.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I just did. How was I supposed to know you were tracking these guys?” I hesitated, uncertain whether to continue. I hadn’t told anyone but Meryl about my dreams. Given what Carmine told me — and what he looked like — I decided to put my personal feelings aside and act like a professional. “I dreamed of a
red figure fighting a black figure. It looks like someone took out the Red Man.”
Dylan gave me a considering look. “But who is the man in black?”
I was wearing my jeans and leather jacket, both black. “I helped stop the fight. Maybe it’s me.”
Forgetting we were angry with each other, Dylan laughed. “Danu’s blood, Con. Now you’re a Dreamer? Is there no end to this supposed loss of abilities you have?”
I didn’t respond. If I knew the answer to that question, well, I’d know the answer to that question. He watched the rest of the street fighters being led to a police van. “Our cases have crossed. I guess this means we’re working together,” he said.
Dylan’s offer to go to New York was sincere. I knew it was. If I could make being at the Guild again work, going to New York could be the way to make that happen. Maybe this was a sign I was wrong, that maybe everything that had happened to me in Boston didn’t need to be resolved in Boston. Maybe I needed to put everything that had happened at the Boston Guild behind me and stop being so angry. Move on instead of eking out a bare existence. Maybe I needed to trust Dylan’s motives, too. Playing out the case together, seeing how we worked together, might answer some of those questions for me.
We made a good team. We always had. As long as I knew I could trust him. After our argument at the fairy ring, I didn’t know what to think, but not trusting him didn’t sit well.
“Yeah, I guess we need to work together,” I said.
Dylan stretched his arm out. “Damn, you don’t happen to know a good reweaver in town, do you?”
His coat sleeve had caught some essence flashback. A slash of blackened material marred the rich maroon fabric. As we stood there, me in my black jacket and Dylan in his deep red coat, the imagery in my dream floated through my mind again. A cold feeling crept into my gut that had nothing to do with the wind off the harbor.
CHAPTER 19
Like all hospitals, Avalon Memorial had an odor that told you immediately where you were. In addition to physical ailments, it specialized in fey-related illness and issues. As you walked the corridors, the usual antiseptic odors mingled with mists and vapors that were uniquely fey. It smelled like an herbalist shop set up in an operating room. Dylan had left a message that Keeva had been admitted. He thought I would want to know. That was it. No mention of why. No mention of our argument.
Two voices drifted up the hallway before I reached the room at the end of the fifth floor. Over the years, I had gotten more than familiar with both voices in their raised, annoyed versions.
“Dammit, Gillen, enough’s enough,” I heard Keeva say.
“Shut up and stick your wings out,” he replied. My eyes met those of a nurse at the station desk, and she gave me a little conspiratorial smile. Gillen Yor was High Healer of Avalon Memorial. Irrascible was his middle name, sometimes his first. Usually a workforce despised his type, but Gillen was refreshingly equal-opportunity impatient and rarely arbitrary. It meant a lot to a nurse when he tore a new one into a famous fey regardless of who was around.
The door to Keeva’s room was open. She faced the hallway, arms crossed tightly across her chest. Her wings were, in fact, flexed out as far as they could go. Through the gossamer membranes, Gillen’s silhouette moved as he sent short pulses of yellow essence into her wings. Keeva glared. “You have to leave now, Gillen. I have Guild business.”
Gillen didn’t even bother looking up. “Sit down, Grey, and if I hear one word out of you, I’ll give you a headache.”
I shot a sympathetic shrug at Keeva and sat in the chair by the bed. It would be an exaggeration to call Gillen my personal healer. Since my accident, he had taken my case more for the challenge than out of empathy. Patients did not pick Gillen; he picked them. I kept quiet as he finished examining her, barking questions at Keeva while she barked answers back.
He moved in front of her. I pulled my feet back before he had a chance to give me a hint by stomping on them. I suppressed a smile at the juxtaposition of him and Keeva. Even with her seated, he had to look up at her. He must have been having a frustrating day since the ring of hair around his bald spot was pulled in several directions. By the way he peered at her, he was assessing Keeva with his druid sensing-ability. While the two of them stared at each other, I took a look myself.
Keeva was a Danann fairy related to an old royal line. Dananns have potent levels of essence. It was part of the reason they won the Seelie Court. Any history book will tell you, people and families who lead-rule-did so because some kind of physical advantage lurked in their past. The Dananns may keep their dominance through money and politics these days, but it was founded with a conquering army.
Even someone with weak ability could read Keeva’s body essence. She glowed with Power. To her credit, something I always hated to give, she used the threat of that Power more than its expression. The threat was enough. Only a crazy person would go after her using essence as a weapon. Keeva would not hesitate to respond in kind.
And yet, someone had been crazy enough to go after her. In the midst of all her flaring white-and-golden essence swirls, her head and her chest glimmered with faint orange light. That’s essence damage. A larger anomaly glowed deeper within her essence but resisted the damage. She was healing, but the injury was considerable.
“You need rest and healing. Two weeks in bed, no work,” Gillen said.
Her essence flared bright with emotion. “First I’m confined to my desk; now I’m confined to bed? What is this, a conspiracy?”
“A conspiracy? At the Guild? What is the world coming to?” I said. I couldn’t help myself. Keeva liked to pretend the Guild was an office with management glitches. I preferred to think of it as a fetid swamp of intrigue and backstabbing.
They frowned at me. Gillen’s long eyebrows moved like cat’s whiskers as I became the subject of his scrutiny. “Your essence gets odder all the time,” he said.
Without asking, he grabbed my hand and examined it like it wasn’t attached to the rest of me. Bedside manner was not Gillen’s strong point. He hummed and grunted a few times, but whether he was chanting or thinking was hard to tell. He dropped my hand. “The troll essence has bonded. You’re not reading pure druid.”
I flexed my fingers. A troll had saved my life by infusing me with his essence. Most of it had dissipated, but somehow I had retained the ability to manipulate inorganic matter. I couldn’t burrow through rock like a troll, but inorganic particles clung to me if I touched them too long. “Is that bad?”
Gillen shrugged. “Can’t tell. Maybe if someone would make time in his busy unemployment schedule, I could run some decent tests.”
He pointed a bony finger at Keeva. “Bed!” he said and left.
“You look like you’ve had better days,” I said.
Keeva slid off the bed and rummaged in her designer leather handbag. “I’ve had worse.”
“What happened?”
She pulled makeup out of the bag. Leaning toward the mirror on the wall next to the bed, she applied eye shadow. When a woman puts on makeup in front of a man, she’s not putting it on for him. “I was attacked in my bedroom.”
“Oh? How is Ryan, by the way?” Ryan macGoren was Keeva’s current lover. The stomach-churning rumor had it that the feelings were real and mutual.
She didn’t bat an eyelash. “Funny man. Funny, funny man.”
“Seriously, what happened?”
She sorted through lipsticks and picked one. “I was asleep. Someone entered my suite and set off the proximity wards.”
“Suite? You weren’t home?”
Her eyes flicked toward me in the mirror and back to her lips. “In case you haven’t noticed, Connor, it’s been a little busy since the fey no-go zones went up. I was working late, so I stayed at the Four Seasons.”
“How long have you been doing that?”
She brushed her hair. “A week or so.”
“That sounds like a lot of work,” I said.
She paused, then
turned toward me. “I’ve been getting threats. I killed a few people at Forest Hills, Connor. There are people who aren’t happy about that.”
Keeva had been manipulated into attacking people — poisoned, actually. Joe had stopped her with a head shock of essence. He didn’t want her to know he did it. “I was there, Keeva. You didn’t know what you were doing.”
She resumed fixing her hair. “But it happened, and I have to deal with it. Including dodging angry people on the street.”
“So, someone could have been following you for days,” I said.
She gathered her cosmetics and tossed them in her bag. “Right. Probably a thousand people saw me go back and forth from the Guild to the hotel.”
“So give me details. What happened?”
She let out an exasperated sigh. “I woke up. The alarms were going off. Someone rushed in firing essence-bolts at me. I was already on the move. We exchanged fire. He got a lucky shot in. By the time I got up, security had arrived, and he was gone.”
“He?”
Keeva considered. “Actually, it could have been a woman. It was dark. I don’t even know what kind of fey it was.”
I thought about it for a moment. “You were definitely followed. It sounds like security and escape routes were scoped out. The timing was off for the kill.”
Her face relaxed with a smile as something occurred to her. “The wards. With all the threats, I set up extra wards. Whoever knew my routine wasn’t expecting that.”
I nodded. “You were lucky. Whoever it was knew how to get past your basic security. You should probably have a security detail for a while.”
She arched an eyebrow. “I am security detail, remember?” She gathered her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “And speaking of which, I have to get back to work.”
I followed her to the elevator. “Gillen said rest, Keeva. He’s right. Between the head shock at Forest Hills and whatever happened to you last night, you need to rest.”
She punched the DOWN button. “I think I can handle myself, thank you.”
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