Uncertain Allies Read online

  “I didn’t start it,” I said.

  “I didn’t say you did, Connor. Gerry’s been a little temperamental lately,” he said.

  I touched my fingers to a tender cheekbone. Nothing felt broken, but the eye would darken by sunup. “A little? He hit me, Leo. Why the hell isn’t he on desk duty? He shot Moira Cashel.”

  Moira was the reason Scott Murdock, the police commissioner, was dead. He was going to kill her and ended up shooting me by accident. Gerry killed her during the riot that happened afterward. Leo and I walked toward the crime scene. “The force is shorthanded. All internal investigations are on hold.”

  “You need to talk to him, Leo. I didn’t kill your father,” I said.

  He looked tired. I didn’t blame him. “I know. I will. Why was he in your face anyway?”

  “Eorla asked me to check out some disappearances around the Tangle, and I ran into this on my way back. Gerry wasn’t happy to see me.” Eorla Elvendottir had stopped the riot and brought calm to the neighborhood, at least calm by the Weird’s standards. In the process, she broke away from the Elven Court and set up her own, making the Weird her particular area of protection. The human government was having a little problem with that. It didn’t get the connection between Eorla’s standing up for the Weird and the fact that humans did little to protect the people down here.

  “Then we’re both here to work. I’ll talk to Gerry. Stay out of his way for a while,” he said.

  Some terrible things had happened to Murdock—to all the Murdocks—because of me. Leo told me he wasn’t going to hold them against me. He said that what had happened might have been my fault in a sense, but I wasn’t to blame. Other things, other people, had their parts in it. Knowing I wasn’t to blame didn’t help my guilt. People were dead, people Murdock cared about. I was part of it and didn’t know how to fix that. At least Leo believed me about what had just happened with Gerry. Even with a bruise forming under my eye, I had to let it go and let him handle it. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

  I wasn’t the only person Eorla had sent to monitor that the Boston police did its job without prejudice. Across the pit, a red-uniformed elf stood out like a signal beacon against the pale gray sky, one of Eorla’s men. Near him, a thin tree fairy, her skin a pale gray, hair a thick-layered mat, shuffled along the ground.

  Down in the shallow hole, the dark figure of Janey Likesmith busied herself around a dead dwarf. A Dokkheim elf, Janey was the sole fey staffer at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. I admired her dedication. The fey cases the Guild didn’t want landed on her desk, and since the humans didn’t know what to do with them, she had to handle them alone. After the insanity that had almost burned down the Weird, she had more than her share of bodies to sort through. The Guild gave token help, and the OCME focused more on the human remains its staff knew how to handle. Janey needed a break, but I didn’t see one coming anytime soon.

  She had spread a small tarp a few feet from the body; her travel bag, from which she withdrew instruments and laid them at the ready, was open. The police officers at the next crime-scene tape let me pass under without hassle. I picked my way down the slope. Janey smiled at Murdock before she looked at me, the cool night air steaming her breath from her mouth. “Happy Yule.”

  I returned the smile as I crouched next to her. “A few months late.”

  She kept the smile. “I haven’t seen you since the beginning of the year. Despite everything that’s going on, Connor, the return of the light is something to look forward to. That’s what Yule is for.”

  All the fey celebrated Yule with variations on the basic theme of renewal in celebration of the days getting longer. The Teutonic fey focused on peace and the future. I didn’t know the specifics of Janey’s Dokkheim clan, but peace wasn’t a bad thing to hope for. “You’re right. Happy Yule.”

  The dead dwarf didn’t look like he had found much peace and happiness. He knelt on gravel, hands slack to either side and his head dropped back. Milky eyes the shade of raw oyster stared at the sky, and his mouth gaped in horror or shock. As I shifted closer to the body to search for any obvious wounds, the black mass in my head pulsed low and steady, like a headache coming on, or—more accurately—a bigger headache. I always had a headache.

  The black mass plagued me. MRI scans showed a dark shadow in my brain but nothing tangible. A spell feedback during a fight had left the mass behind, and it had damaged my ability to manipulate essence.

  At first, the mass gave me headaches. Then it started to move around, change shape, and hurt like hell. Not long ago, the mass changed again, seeming to have a will or purpose of its own. Sometimes it extended from my body in a way I didn’t understand, but its effect was clear. It drained essence from whatever it touched, and if it touched people, it could kill them. I could kill them. There was no separating me from it in the eyes of the world. Whatever happened to the dwarf caused the dark mass to react.

  Janey set thermometers around the body to get base readings. “I don’t think he’s been here long. No obvious animal damage, and he’s still in rigor. Hard to tell with a fey death, though. If essence is involved, it complicates the physical readings. Plus, this pit creates its own microclimate. We’re out of the wind, so the temperature will scale differently in here.”

  “Isn’t this a bit late for you?” I asked.

  She scribbled a note on her pad: the time of my arrival and where I entered the pit. “I heard the call as I was going off shift and came out to get it done. I would’ve gotten the call anyway. Everyone’s backed up.”

  What she didn’t say is that no one from the OCME would have responded unless no other crimes were happening—a rarity—and her job would have been that much harder with a processing delay.

  At the lip of the pit, the ash fairy huddled on the ground, her head twitching from side to side. To the non-fey, she appeared to be a crazy person sniffing the ground, but the fey recognized the behavior as sensing for the trail of someone. Indentations in the sand led up the slope near her. “Has anyone been that way? I think we have footprints.”

  Janey grabbed her camera. “Good eye. I’m the only one that’s been down here.”

  We climbed out of the pit the way we had come down and circled toward the indentations. The ash fairy peered at me from beneath her dark tangle of hair, then shuffled back as I approached. She pointed a long, pale arm toward the ground. “Dead earth. Doesn’t feel right.”

  All living things emanated essence, the energy that keeps the Wheel of the World turning. Tree fairies were attuned to their clan trees and the earth. Some fey sensed essence as druids did, saw it as shapes of color with a secondary vision that human science hadn’t figured out. People left traces of essence on whatever they touched, even in the air. The longer they remained someplace, the more essence residue accumulated. The footprints leading out of the pit and across the empty lot didn’t shine with essence light. The earth surrounding the prints wasn’t missing its natural essence, making the prints themselves stand out even more. They had no telltale essence signatures that would identify the person or species. Someone powerful was responsible for removing the essence—or responsible for helping someone else do it.

  Janey photographed the area. “So this is likely a murder.”

  We were in the Weird with a dead dwarf that didn’t get reported by whoever was with him when he died. The odds were slim that he died of a heart attack. I gave her shoulder a squeeze. “I’m going to look around. I’ll let you know if I see anything else.”

  She inhaled, resigned. “I’m backlogged, so I don’t know when I’ll get to this autopsy.”

  “You always do your best,” I tried to reassure her with a smile.

  Murdock skirted the edge of the pit. “Find something?”

  “Nothing, actually, and that’s the problem. Essence is missing where it shouldn’t be missing.” From the spot where the footsteps exited the pit, Murdock followed me as I traced the faded spots across the lot.

  “I t
hought everything had essence. How can it be missing?” he asked.

  We reached the broken sidewalk and squatted closer to the ground like the tree fairy had done. “Suppressing essence is possible. Powerful fey, like the Danann fairies and the Alfheim elves, can dissipate essence, scrub an area to eliminate any trace of it.”

  Murdock turned back toward the pit. “Why would someone that powerful be down in the Weird?”

  I pursed my lips. “Why does anyone come down here, Leo? The powerful fey may not live down here, but they do stuff here they don’t want people to know about.”

  The blank trail ended on the sidewalk. The area was one of the worst hit from the fires and rioting during the winter solstice. Buildings were left nothing more than their façades, their main structures slumped behind. They needed to be knocked down. That didn’t stop people from picking through the remains for anything valuable. They wouldn’t find much. The intensity of the fires had destroyed everything. I didn’t have much to offer Murdock either, not when the initial clue at the scene was nothingness.

  A few blocks away, a burst of blue light lit the sky over the Tangle, the section of the Weird even people who lived here feared because of its deserved reputation for lawlessness. “What the hell was that?” Murdock asked.

  I narrowed my eyes as the light faded. The essence was strong enough for Murdock to see it with natural vision. “I’ve been chasing it all night. Witnesses say it’s like a fastmoving cloud that sweeps up people.”

  “Anyone killed?”

  Death was only a matter of time in the Tangle. “Not yet. Lots of missing, though.”

  An awkward silence settled between us. “I thought I’d run into you at the hospital,” I said.

  A slight smile creased his face. “Are you spanking me?”

  I shifted on my feet. “Sorry. That was passive-aggressive.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah. And that’s one of your better qualities.”

  I frowned. “I was just asking.”

  “Oh, lighten up. Yes, I’ve been to the hospital. Almost every day. Believe it or not, they have morning visiting hours.”

  I was on friendly terms with late-night breakfast at dawn. “I hate seeing her like that.”

  He sighed. “A silent Meryl is a terrible thing.”

  Meryl Dian and I were in a relationship of a sort, but what that sort was eluded me. I didn’t know if it was love or if I didn’t know what love was, but we had something intense going on. During the riots, she’d gotten caught in some kind of spell backlash and had been in a coma ever since. For months, her brain activity had been so minimal, it didn’t even register. All I knew was I missed her terribly and wanted her back.

  “We should have lunch,” Murdock said.

  We hadn’t done anything as normal as have lunch together in weeks. Despite what he said, it was hard not to feel like he was freezing me out, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. “I’d like that.”

  We stepped back as a medical examiner—a human one—arrived. “It never ends, does it, Leo?”

  “Nothing lasts forever, Connor. Things won’t always be like this,” he said.

  After everything that had happened to him, Murdock could still say something like that. Hope drove him and a faith I didn’t have. I tried to hang on, though. I didn’t think I had a choice. It was either that, or let the bad guys win.

  2

  I spent the morning running down contacts, but I didn’t get much information for all my efforts. Morning wasn’t the most popular time of day in the Weird. As I walked the streets, I realized that I had begun to not notice the damage done by the riots a few months earlier. The Guild and the Teutonic Consortium had pitted the Dead and the local solitaries against each other in another of a long chain of proxy wars between the two monarchies. The tension between the two groups flared into a night of rioting that grew while the Weird burned around them. The Guild and the Consortium had lost control of their factions and turned on them, threatening to annihilate the neighborhood.

  If Eorla hadn’t stepped in, a bloodbath would have resulted. With Meryl’s help, she calmed the rioters and stood up to the Guild and the Consortium. A disaster might have been averted, but damage had already been done. Parts of the Weird, a place already falling apart, were now in ruins. And I had almost stopped seeing it. When people stop seeing the neglect around them—decay sets in, and things fall apart. I hoped enough people kept their eyes open.

  As the sun approached noon, I strolled over the Old Northern Avenue bridge toward the financial district—the only bridge left over Fort Point Channel. The other two bridges lay underwater, slumped and broken. During the riots, they had been destroyed by the solitary fey to stop the National Guard from attacking the Weird. The tactic had worked for the most part, but now it made coming and going into the neighborhood difficult. While the government argued about liability and responsibility, no one worried about the inconvenience. At least the Oh No bridge, held together by twisted and warped iron girders, saved a one-mile walk around.

  The atmosphere in the lobby of the Rowes Wharf Hotel had changed since the last time I was there. Then, it had bustled with tourists and businesspeople on the downtown side of the channel. Now, it served as the waiting area for Eorla Elvendottir’s administrative offices. Across town in Back Bay, people waited in poor weather conditions outside the Guildhouse or not at all in front of the Teutonic Consortium consulate. Treating people with dignity and respect was a nice change of pace for the fey. Eorla wasn’t paying lip service to her ideals.

  No one stopped me. Two elves followed me across the lobby at a discreet distance, both in the green livery of the Kruge clan, which Eorla had led since her husband was murdered. After years of working for the Celtic-run Fey Guild, it felt odd to have elves providing me with protection. They used to be the enemy. Most of them were, but the line between who hated me and who hated me more was getting blurred.

  Boston was under martial law. It had to be. When half the city went on a rampage and the other half was terrified, no one complained about curfews. Despite all the security, I didn’t need to show identification. Everyone in the building knew my name, and most people knew my face, one of the perks of being suspected of causing the disaster. It wasn’t because I was popular except among a select group of people. Those people weren’t popular either.

  Eorla held court on the third floor of the hotel in a meeting room that had been decorated to reflect an elven sensibility—woven tapestries featuring woodland scenes and large oaken chairs with intricate carvings lined the walls. Down the center, a long, wide, wool carpet in deep green led to a library table where Eorla received visitors. Courtiers—there was no other word for them—busied themselves along the perimeter of the room, reviewing documents and comparing notes.

  A wood fairy stood by himself in front of Eorla. His crackled gray skin gave him a forlorn air, but all his clan looked like that. “. . . and I’ve lost everything, ma’am.”

  “I can’t replace what you’ve lost, but I can give you work. Can you work?” Eorla asked.

  The fairy lowered his gaze. “I can if it will give me a home.”

  Eorla gestured to an aide. “We need help shoring up damaged buildings. Some of your clan are already lending their skills to the effort. You’ll be provided room and board while you work.”

  The fairy bowed. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Eorla had formed a court that wasn’t divided between Celtic and Teutonic fey. She accepted people from all backgrounds and species as long as they understood her goals. She wanted to bring the fey beyond their eternal bickering and find a new path in the modern world. She had tried to do that through the elven Teutonic Consortium, then the Celtic Guildhouse, but she was one woman against entrenched bureaucracies. In the firestorm of the riot, she had discovered she didn’t have to make change from the top but could make something happen from the bottom. Fey were flocking to her cause—particularly the solitaries of both the Celts and Teuts, who never caught a break from
either monarchy.

  The aide escorted the fairy to the side of the room as I approached the table. “Not that I’m against it, but how long can you afford to do this?”

  Eorla looked up at me with amusement. Many fey, including elves, had skin tones that diverged from the human norm. Sometimes it was disconcerting. Eorla’s skin glowed with a subtle green light, a result of containing the spell that had driven people to riot. Green wasn’t a color that appealed to me; but on Eorla, it had a strange effect of enhancing her beauty with a warm tone that accentuated her upswept dark hair and deep brown eyes. “You’d be surprised at the income resources that have appeared. More than a few people support what I’m doing—even among the Celts.”

  Many people supported her cause, but the big money was waiting to see how Donor Elfenkonig would handle what was essentially Eorla’s personal revolt against his rule. “I hope it’s enough.”

  She gestured at the paperwork on the table. “I hope it’s temporary. After everything that’s happened here, I hope the Guild and the Consortium see the error of their ways and change.”

  “What are the odds?”

  Eorla chuckled. “I have more hope than you do, Connor. Change works faster when it’s a long time coming. How did things go last night?”

  I shrugged. “Couldn’t catch a break. No one’s talking down near the Tangle. I saw the essence everyone says shows up before people go missing. It moves fast. I haven’t been able to get a good tag on it yet, but there are definitely some of the Dead involved.”

  “They do continue to be a problem,” she said.

  The Dead had harassed the city for months. They had arrived from the Celtic land of the dead and become trapped in Boston. They were a rambunctious lot, prone to violence—no surprise since each day they woke fully healed of their wounds from the previous day, even fatal ones. People who were already dead had little to fear. They didn’t like authority figures either. “I think they’ve retreated to the Tangle. I haven’t seen them in other parts of the neighborhood.”