Uncertain Allies cg-5 Page 11

  After a couple of hours, a dwarf caught my eye. He held a coffee cup, lounging against a wall, watching the crowd in a neutral way that was too practiced to be casual. A sharpeyed customer—or Guild agent—would notice the difference. His gaze lingered on single people—buying essence for the wrong reason was not a group activity—skipping the obvious groups and fey who didn’t need his services.

  An elf in the livery of Eorla’s house guard wandered over and stood next to him. They eyed one another but didn’t speak, at least not aloud. I gestured with my chin. “That’s interesting.”

  Leo and I separated a few feet as we approached. The elf saw us first and lost himself in the crowd. Confused, the dwarf turned and spotted us. He dropped his coffee and made for another pedestrian tunnel. We let him get around the corner before Murdock rushed forward and grabbed his arm. The guy struggled until I flanked them, and Murdock let go. Dwarfs are strong, damned strong. I wouldn’t have been able to hang on to the guy for more than a few seconds before he shrugged me off like a gnat. Murdock’s strength level had become astounding even by druid standards.

  “Leave me alone,” he said.

  “We just want to talk,” I said.

  Incredulous, he frowned at Murdock. “To a cop? You gotta be joking.”

  “No joke. We need some info. It’s about the two dead dwarves,” I said.

  His gaze shifted to either end of the enclosed alley. “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Not saying you did. We’re looking for information,” Murdock said.

  The dwarf craned his neck to see over our shoulders. Rubberneckers were checking us out from the main drag. “You are killing my cred. You want to talk, then walk me outta here like I’m a badass and you’re badder,” he said.

  Happy to oblige, Murdock grabbed his arm again. At the end of the alley, we pushed through the cluster of people that had gathered. The dwarf made a show of looking unhappy, which was fine. The crowd flowed around us, some shouting at us, and not encouragement. Law enforcement in the Tangle was not welcomed by many.

  The crowd closed in tighter. The dwarf yanked his arm from Murdock and shoved me out of his way like a rag doll tossed aside by a child. The push sent me barreling through the crowd. The dwarf darted back the way we had come, with Murdock close on his heels. The dark mass in my head shuddered as Murdock’s body shield slipped away from me. Ignoring the pain, I ran after them.

  Scrying essence bombarded me from all sides. Every step I took intensified the pain in my head. Darkness crept into the edges of my vision as I fought off a faint. I pushed on, focused on Murdock ahead of me. Relieved, I entered the field of his body shield, and the pain diminished.

  The dwarf darted into another pedestrian tunnel. The sudden dimness blinded me after the illumination of the street. I struggled to maintain my footing. Ahead, the dwarf ran toward the exit, but Murdock was nowhere in sight. He had to be there. His body shield was protecting me. I shouted his name and received a muffled response. We were caught in some kind of glamour, invisible to each other.

  Murdock’s shield slipped on and off me, the pain in my head telling me when I was falling behind. With a burst of speed, I ran into the next street. Murdock reappeared, ahead and to my left side, as we chased the dwarf ran down a jagged path of undulating pavement.

  The street stretched, elongating into an impossible long path between tall gray buildings. Far overhead, the stars burned in a narrow strip of sky. Shadows came alive and oozed across the street. I navigated by essence light, the buildings and street etched in faint white shot through with shades of the green and blue. I passed Murdock as the dwarf pulled farther ahead.

  “I can’t see,” Murdock’s voice echoed from behind me.

  “To the left. Stay with me,” I said.

  Darkness danced in the air at the far end of the street, long tendrils that undulated and waved across the pavement, weaving itself into a web. The dwarf stopped running, his hands out to either side in uncertainty. Surprised, I skidded to a halt. Murdock knocked into me, and we jostled away from each other. “Why’d you stop?” he asked.

  I pointed. “Can you see that?”

  Something slithered out of the darkness and reached for the dwarf. He turned to run, but a strand of darkness wrapped around his torso and pulled. The dwarf lifted off his feet and screamed.

  Murdock pulled his gun. “What the hell is that?”

  I grabbed his arm. “Don’t shoot. You’ll hit the dwarf.”

  He aimed the gun and walked forward. “We can’t just watch.”

  I wasn’t watching. I was fighting off a surge of pain in my head. The dark mass shifted and burned with heat. I fell to one knee as normal vision vanished. The street became a black void. Murdock glowed like a red flame, and, beyond him, the emerald essence of the dwarf flashed and flickered in the air.

  I pushed myself up. “Murdock, wait.”

  He paused, glanced over his shoulder, then swung his gun toward me. “What is that stuff? What do you want me to do?”

  The dark mass was bleeding out of my eye. I held my hand out in a calming gesture, concentrating on forcing the darkness back inside. “It’s the thing in my head. Stay away.”

  Gun focused on me, he circled, a look of horror on his face. “What should I do?”

  “Nothing. Stay out of reach.”

  The darkness in the street swirled with deep violet light. As I forced myself to walk toward it, the dark mass in my head flexed, a finger of pain running along my jaw. The vision dimmed in my right eye as pressure built behind it. I caught the wall as I lost my balance. Pain swarmed the right side of my head. I went blind and tripped as the dark mass sliced out of my right eye.

  The darkness in the street loomed over me like a claw. It paused, tendrils of black vapor waving in the air. The blade of darkness from my eye splintered and reached for the tendrils. The two strands of darkness connected, and a concussive jolt like electricity threw me against the wall. The dark mass whipped back inside my head, and I fell.

  Murdock leaned over me. “You okay?”

  I lifted my head. The darkness in the street had vanished. The street had become dead space, no vestige of essence on it. My head echoed with the emptiness. “Where’s the dwarf?”

  Murdock helped me up. “Over there.”

  The dwarf lay in the street, his body signature dim, his gaze fixed on the sky as he struggled to breathe. We huddled over him. Up close, a faint spark of essence remained in him, but I didn’t see it lasting long. The pavement beneath him was devoid of essence. “Get him against the wall. He might be able to draw essence from the stone.”

  I didn’t know if it would work, but without a healer, he had little hope of surviving. Murdock helped me move the body into a seated position against the wall. The dwarf’s head slumped to his chest. I patted at his face. “Come on, buddy, tap the stone. You need essence.”

  His eyes fluttered. A feeble trickle of essence came out of his chest as he tried to use his body signature to tap the stone. I scanned the wall and street. The darkness had leeched essence from the surroundings. “This whole area is stripped, Leo. There’s nothing for him to pull. Let’s get him farther up the street.”

  With frustrating slowness, we carried him. The pavement was uneven cobbles, and dwarves are heavy.

  “I’m dying,” the dwarf said.

  “Hold on a few more feet,” I said.

  “She wanted the stone,” he said.

  A sense of dread swept over me. “Who?”

  The dwarf wheezed. “She was in my head. She wanted the stone.”

  “We have to move faster,” I said to Murdock.

  “Two druids were chasing me. I don’t know who they are,” said the dwarf.

  “Hang on. We’re almost there,” I said.

  Essence reasserted itself in the street as we neared the pedestrian tunnel. The weight of the dwarf increased with each step. “He’s fading, Leo,” I said.

  A shout rang out, the sound of nearby v
oices calling a death knell. At the same instant, the dwarf fell from of our hands, his weight too great to hold any longer. I rested my hand on his chest. “He’s gone, Leo.”

  Angry, I stalked away, banging my fist on a wall. I glared up the street, searching for some sign of the darkness. Essence was creeping back into the pavement and the walls, thin and weak. At the far end of the street, a burst of bright blue light surged out of a gap between buildings. It filled the street, moved toward me, then stopped. Indiscernible darker blue shapes moved within it. I took a step, intent on chasing after it, when it gathered into itself and retreated the way it had come. It vanished around a corner.

  “Did you see that?” I asked Murdock.

  He turned toward me. “What?”

  “The blue light I’ve been tracking. It was at the end of the street. I want to say it was checking out what just happened,” I said.

  Murdock shook his head. “I missed it. I was searching the body. Look what I found.” He held up a stone identical to the ones on the previous victims.

  “Whatever he was selling wasn’t essence, Leo.”

  “That dark stuff that attacked you looked like what came out of the leanansidhe we found,” he said.

  The leanansidhe were fey predators that survived by absorbing essence from people. Leo and I stumbled into one a few months back. When I said stumble, I meant almost were killed by her. “I was thinking the same thing. Same dark tendrils. Same indigo and violet essence light surrounding it. All this time, I thought she was dead.”

  “Dead? You never mentioned the leanansidhe again after you told Keeva about it. I thought the Guild finally stepped up and dealt with a criminal in the Weird,” he said.

  I had gone to Keeva macNeve at the Guild. She had taken it upon herself to hunt down the leanansidhe. She found it, but it got the better of her. She almost died, which was why she had needed to go to Tara to finish out her pregnancy. “I forgot about it. I never checked to make sure it was dead.”

  Hands on his hips, he sighed. “We can go tomorrow.”

  I frowned. “Where?”

  He looked up at me. “Where we found the leanansidhe. Don’t pretend you aren’t thinking about it. Promise me you won’t go without me,” he said.

  “She can’t hurt me, Leo. That’s why the dwarf didn’t die right away. My presence interrupted her feeding.”

  “Promise me,” he said.

  I glared at him. He was with me when we found the leanansidhe. It knocked him on his ass. She wasn’t going to be happy to see me after what happened. “Leo . . .”

  “I will lock you in a cell,” he said.

  I laughed. “You will not.”

  He shook his head. “Fine. I’ll tell Briallen, then. Or Eorla or whoever else I can think of who will tie you up and dump you in a corner until you get some common sense.”

  I chuckled. “You’re as stupid as I am.”

  He grinned. “Maybe, but I have a gun.”

  14

  The leanansidhe were feared by even the powerful Danann fairies. They fed on living essence, preferring the strong essence of people as the primary source for their needs. They lived in obscurity, hidden away from world, finding ways to survive that might go unnoticed. When they were noticed, they were hunted to death. Few people met them and lived.

  I had met one named Druse. She called me her brother. She meant it metaphorically, but she wasn’t that far from the truth. After years of no one understanding what the dark mass in my head was, she knew something. Her fey ability to drain essence used a form of the same darkness. She showed me how it worked and how to find pleasure in it. She showed me a side to myself, a desire within, that disgusted me. She showed me how easy it can be to intend to kill someone. Using the darkness, I had tasted the essence of a living person—Keeva, my old partner at the Guild. That was bad enough. What made it worse was that on some level, I recognized what I was doing and didn’t stop right away. For that, I was ashamed. Many things I’ve done wrong in my life have made me feel guilty, but the night I almost killed Keeva made me truly ashamed.

  When Druse showed me how to use the darkness, I felt pain, but a pain with a twisted pleasure to it. Druse had linked her mind to mine and wouldn’t let go. When we used the darkness in sync with each other, we bonded on an intimate level. When we worked in opposition, the individual darknesses within us rejected each other, and we blacked out, like what had happened to me last night. I had seen the darkness kill again, its waving tendrils of shadow sapping away the life of their victim. The darkness in my head had responded to it.

  The dark tendrils in the alley the previous night were exactly how a leanansidhe siphoned essence from people. I had two explanations for what had happened in the Tangle. Either Druse was alive, or another leanansidhe was loose in the city. One leanansidhe in the neighborhood was a surprise—even a shock. Two stretched the bounds of believability.

  The dwarf’s dying whisper that “she” wanted the stone made it more plausible that Druse was alive. She had a stone ward she was willing to kill for—a rare ward shaped like a bowl that had the ability to generate essence from its surroundings and return it tenfold. Druse used it to stave off her hunger during the low periods when she couldn’t acquire living prey. The ward stone had a geasa—an essence-enhanced restriction—that only a virgin could move it. A virgin-only geasa was old-school Faerie stuff, and the stone was definitely old-school. The essence it emitted had the distinct signature of the Faerie that existed before Convergence. A fortuitous blow to the head with that same stone bowl stopped Druse and, I thought, killed her. If she had survived, she would want the bowl back and would stop at nothing until she had it.

  After I escaped Druse, I hid the stone with a street kid named Shay, who had a rather funny advantage in the virgin department. No one knew Shay had the stone, but Druse was attuned to it and would find it eventually.

  Shay had been through a lot of heartache because of me, and I didn’t want to panic him with a theory. If whatever was haunting the Weird and the Tangle was not Druse, Shay would be safe—or at least safer. Before I told him anything, I wanted to see Druse’s body for myself, and the way to do that was to return to her lair. Murdock had known what I wanted to do before I did. I had to go back and confirm whether the body was there.

  I waited in the cool early-morning air outside the warehouse where we had first found the leanansidhe. Murdock arrived all tricked out in a police tactical uniform but with his regular Boston P.D. jacket over it so there was no mistaking where he worked. I wore jeans and a short leather jacket. “You look like you mean business,” I said.

  “I do. I’m not walking in blind this time.” Druse had been feeding on one of her victims when we stumbled on her in a tunnel. She’d attacked Murdock and knocked him on his ass. She would have drained him to death, too, if I hadn’t been there.

  The building remained a crime scene after Murdock and I had found skeletons in the basement. Druse had been around a long time before we found her. The Weird was the perfect place for her to operate. Since it was routine for people to disappear in the neighborhood without explanation, she survived without notice for years.

  Murdock produced a key out from the pocket of his black tactical vest and unlocked the warehouse door. The inside had not changed since my last—unauthorized—visit. An upper corridor led to a hammered-metal basement door. We descended into the gloom of the basement. Murdock activated his body shield at the bottom of the metal stairs. It burned crimson in my vision. Under normal circumstances, the layer of hardened essence protected him from a fey attack, with the exception of a leanansidhe. Heightened essence was what she sought, and a shield served as an appetizer to her.

  A narrow passage stretched fifty feet to a tunnel that led to the sewer system. That was the route we used to find the basement when we were investigating another case. Unlike our first visit, the space was empty, swept clean of the possessions and remains of Druse’s victims. The police had been processing the large volume
of evidence for months.

  On the right, a hole broken through a bricked-over archway led to the basement proper, a vast space that was empty when we found it and empty still. At the far end, an opening in the wall gaped like a wound. “You couldn’t see this opening a month ago, Leo. The leanansidhe had a glamour on it that made it look like the rest of the wall.”

  He directed the beam of his flashlight into the opening. “It looks clear.”

  “I’ve been in there. There’s a few blind turns, but mostly a straight shot to her room. Watch out for binding spells,” I said.

  Despite my foray into the various tunnels around the city, I wasn’t a big fan of urban exploration. It was dangerous in general, and in the Weird, it was asking for trouble. Through the hole, the walls and ceiling had a smooth, organic feel to them, an indication that they had been shaped long ago by trolls and dwarves. The path wound deep beneath the Weird, branching off to parts unknown.

  “You came down here alone and unarmed?” Murdock asked.

  “Yep.”

  He chuckled in my ear. “Man, you are crazier than I thought.”

  “Well, I wasn’t down here for the best possible reasons.” As understatements go, that was a big one. Druse knew things about the dark mass in my head, maybe not how it got there or how to get rid of it, but she showed me how to—and I hated to admit it even to myself—enjoy it. The pleasure it gave me was hard to describe, but the kick and the kink of a sexual addiction didn’t come close. No matter how I tried to stop myself, I gave in to the desire at the risk of my life and people I cared about. I had managed to keep it under control all these months by staying away from powerful essence sources.