Unfallen Dead Read online

  The runes on his forehead gave a faint indication of essence. Someone used a spell as they carved them. With yet another jolt of surprise, I realized it had been done by a druid. Essence in and of itself has vague differences based on its source. It’s why certain fey were better at manipulating certain essences than others. Druids were attuned to organics, fairies to ambient air, and so on. Sensing who or what species actually used a particular essence was a separate ability, one I didn’t normally have. A few species, like trolls, could do it—and I had had recent close contact with a troll. I had thought the residual impact of that encounter had dissipated finally, and made a mental note to have myself checked out.

  I stood. “It’s a safe bet you’re looking for a druid.”

  Murdock directed his flashlight toward the guy’s head. “We’re not seeing any obvious trauma. Could those marks have killed him?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure they were done after he was dead.”

  “What do they mean?”

  I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. Easy translation is ‘The way denied.’ It’s got a spell wrapped in it, too, so that could change the meaning. I’ll have to research it. How long has he been here?”

  Murdock inspected the rest of the room with his flashlight. “Probably a few hours. Medical examiner should be here soon. We need a generator, too.”

  The body had fallen with his right arm beneath him. As I walked around the other side, I noted the fingernails on his left hand were blackened. “Can someone shine a light on his shoes?”

  Several someones did. Sure enough, the cheap leather had burnt toes. I lifted one of the victim’s eyelids. My stomach did a little flip at the sight of his destroyed eyes. I backed away, wiping my hand on my pants. “He was killed by essence shock. Someone hit him with a major charge and short-circuited his system. He probably died of a heart attack or organ damage.”

  Murdock directed his flashlight toward the back of the floor. “Looks like his crib’s back there.”

  We walked from the body, the essences of the officers fading away from my senses. The residual essences of the dead man and his druid assailant trailed all the way back to the corner of the room. An old mattress was on the floor under a workbench. Murdock’s flashlight revealed the basics of a squat, a meager collection of personal-care products, several books, candles, a few canned goods. Nothing that would be terribly missed if he were robbed while out on the street. It didn’t look disturbed.

  Another stairwell opened at the rear of the room. We stepped on the landing, Murdock shining the beam down the stairs. Nothing to be seen but years’ accumulation of crumbled debris. The druid essence was more distinct. The killer had lingered here, long enough to leave some residual body essence for me to register her gender. Something about it tugged at my awareness, like searching for a word I knew but couldn’t place.

  I looked back to the body. “The killer was a druidess. She waited here for a while. She either hit him with essence from here when he was coming in the other way, or she spooked him out of his sleep and hit him as he ran off. Who called it in?”

  Even in the half-lit dark, the sour twist to Murdock’s mouth was evident. “Nine one one. Anonymous.”

  Anonymous, the most common surname in the Weird. It’s the Boston neighborhood where the fey go when they’re down-and-out. No one ever saw anything or heard anything in the Weird. I can’t blame folks down here, though. When you had no place else to go and ended up in the Weird, you didn’t want someone more powerful than you breathing down your neck. You had no place else to run except the grave, and most people avoided that. After I lost everything in my life, I moved into the Weird. The implication that I have nowhere else bothers me sometimes.

  Something crunched underfoot. The glow of Murdock’s flashlight reflected off a small and shiny object. I picked up a piece of gold worked in a spiral. Sparkles of essence flickered and died on it, leaving me the same vague sense of someone familiar.

  Murdock tilted his flashlight toward me. “Find something?”

  I rubbed the piece between my thumb and index finger. “Piece of jewelry, I think. I’ll play with it and see if it’s from our druidess.”

  Back by the body, a gleam of essence caught my eye. I inhaled sharply. “What the hell?”

  “What?” Murdock swung his light as I strode back to the crime scene. A strange flicker of essence neared the body.

  “I think he’s still alive, Murdock.” As I approached, the essence vanished.

  I stopped short. Murdock came up beside me. “He’s dead, Connor. I don’t need your sensing ability to know that.”

  “I saw something.”

  Judging by Murdock’s expression, I must have looked as confused as I felt. “Are you okay?”

  I rubbed my hands over my face and adjusted the knit cap. “Yeah. Maybe I’m just tired.”

  Murdock nodded. “We’ll let the forensic guys take care of the rest. Come on. I’ll give you a ride back to your place.”

  I scanned the body once more but sensed nothing. Maybe I had seen some overlapping essence from the officers around the body. Even with experience, the dual vision of essence and normal sight could be confusing.

  We went down the front stairwell. On the ground floor, the medical examiner brushed by, looking none too happy to be roused in the middle of the night for a homeless guy. He didn’t bother to acknowledge us.

  I opened the passenger door to Murdock’s car and dropped myself onto the pile of newspapers on the seat. Murdock pulled a U-turn and drove onto Old Northern Avenue. The main drag of the neighborhood had the calm of late night, only a car or two coasting along. Even the Weird quieted down at night eventually. The streetwalkers and spell dealers gave up and went home. The partiers stumbled into the decrepit backseats of cabs. The only people still out and about were the die-hard and the desperate.

  Murdock didn’t say anything, and for once I thought he might actually be tired. The man’s a machine and puts in more hours than I want to think about. He pulled up in front of my apartment. “I’ll let you know if we get an ID.”

  I let myself out. “I’ll look into the runes, see if it’s a spell that’ll tell us anything.”

  He leaned across the seat. “Get some sleep first. You look like hell.”

  As I walked up the four flights to my apartment, I couldn’t shake the image of the dead guy. I knew I’d seen his essence before I’d seen his body. I wasn’t that tired. It didn’t make sense. When someone dies, their life essence vanishes. Period. I’d seen it happen enough times. The old faith said we went on to our afterlife in TirNaNog and didn’t come back. Dead is dead.

  I entered my apartment, noting the faint odor of old coffee and empty beer bottles doing battle with fresh laundry and Pine-Sol. Home smells. I’m not the best housekeeper and can’t afford one. I did my best but let the dust bunnies roam where they will.

  I was tired. Too many late nights and too many bars were catching up with me. Maybe Murdock was right. Seeing dead guys walking around dark, empty warehouses might be a sign it was time to get some sleep.

  2

  I cradled a bottle of wine in the backseat of a cab. Guinness is my preferred drink, but Briallen ab Gwyll has a well-known liking for French wines. A dinner on Beacon Hill was always an opportunity for good food and conversation, whether the invitation came via cell phone or sending. Briallen prefers the intimacy of mental contact. Her cool, feathery touch in my mind was a pleasant surprise after so many months.

  The cab pulled up in front of the townhouse on Louisburg Square. In the cool evening air, I admired the old place—five stories of bricks and mullioned windows that dated back to the late 1800s. The gas lamps flanking the entrance made me feel welcome and reminded me of my teenage years when I had been Briallen’s student. I broke one of the lamps once swinging on it, and a welder patched it, slightly off center if you looked closely. Briallen wasn’t happy and made me memorize an entire land registry in Old Irish as punishment. To
this day, I remembered that one Ian macDeare owned all the land from the split oak tree to the ford of a nameless stream by the summer pasture in Ireland’s County Clare.

  I let myself in. Briallen had keyed the door to my essence long ago with a warding spell on it that told her if I entered. As I set one foot on the stairs leading to the second-floor parlor, noise from the kitchen pulled me to the back of the first floor, where I found the lady of the house busy with a pot at the stove. I placed the wine on the counter and pulled off my knit cap as she gave me a broad smile.

  “You look like absolute hell!” She threw her arms around me, tucking her head into the crook of my neck.

  “Thanks. You look wonderful.” The last time I saw Briallen, her hair and skin were bleached white from the stress of a major spell. Her color on both counts had returned, her skin a warm peach and the healthy glow of chestnut in her hair, the close-cropped length she had preferred for the past few years.

  Briallen was a good hugger, but one with ulterior motives. As she released me, her hands came up the back of my head, and she stared into my face. I felt a vague pressure as she used her essence to probe the strange dark mass in my mind. Surprise and intrigue flickered across her face.

  “It’s changed. It’s shaped differently. How do you feel?”

  I ran my hand over the scruff of dark hair growing in. “I had a tough time a couple of weeks ago, but I’m okay.”

  She gave a half smile back. “I heard about Forest Hills.”

  Of course she did. Everyone had heard about Forest Hills. When a giant dome of essence implodes and people die, news got around. I stopped the disaster from being worse than it was, but I don’t remember how I did it.

  Briallen waved me to a stool as she stationed herself at the stove. Dinner plates were set on the other end of the kitchen island. For all the room Briallen has in the house, she spends most of her time in the kitchen and the upstairs parlor.

  I noticed three place settings. “Is someone joining us?”

  She nodded, sipping from a spoon. “My nephew showed up this afternoon. I hope you don’t mind.”

  That was a surprise. I didn’t know Briallen had any family. “I don’t remember a nephew.”

  She handed me a corkscrew. “Well, technically he was a fosterling. Long before you showed up.”

  Amused, I lowered my eyes at her as I poured her a glass of wine. “I cannot believe all the things I don’t know about you.”

  She handed me a bottle of Guinness and took the stool on the opposite corner. “People a lot older than you still don’t know everything about me.”

  Her eyes danced above the rim of her wineglass. Briallen verch Gwyll ab Gwyll lived a life most people would envy and the rest would find exhausting. When she wasn’t teaching at Harvard, she was mentoring at the Druidic College, working behind the scenes at the Fey Guild, or serving as an international ambassador for a variety of people and causes. Sometimes she even took vacations, which supposedly was what a recent trip to Asia had been about. I doubted that, though. Briallen may like Thai food, but she didn’t need six months to learn about it on-site.

  I tapped her glass with my bottle. “I’m glad you’re back.” Before either of us could say more, we heard someone coming down the stairs. Briallen slid from the stool and moved to the kitchen door. “I think our guest is joining us.”

  I hadn’t sensed anyone when I had entered the house. Briallen kept dampening wards everywhere to prevent her essence-infused artifacts from interacting with one another. Plus, she valued her privacy and didn’t want anyone walking in and sensing who had been in her home. Even so, moments before the man appeared, I sensed his essence, recognizing first that he was a druid, then, surprisingly, who he was.

  Briallen slipped her arm around his waist and pulled him into the room. “Connor, this is Dylan macBain. Dylan, this is—”

  He stretched out his hand. “We know each other, Auntie Bree.”

  From the look on Briallen’s face, she hadn’t known.

  “Good to see you.” I shook his hand. He hadn’t changed a bit since I had last seen him, still young-looking, dark brown curls snug on his head, dark eyes against pale skin.

  Briallen looked from one to the other of us. “How the hell do you two know each other?”

  Dylan kissed her temple. “Connor and I used to work together in New York.”

  Briallen dropped on her stool while Dylan poured himself wine. “I can’t believe I didn’t know that.”

  I smirked at her. “I guess we all have things we still don’t know about each other.”

  She threw me a grudging smile. “Touché.”

  I looked back at Dylan. “What brings you to Boston?”

  He helped himself to some bread as he sat down. “Work. I’ve been asked to fill in as field director at the Guild.”

  “Keeva macNeve must not be happy about that.” Keeva was the Guild’s Community Liaison Officer for Community Affairs, which everyone knew was a polite title for Director of Investigations. It was Keeva’s job to run field investigations.

  Dylan shrugged. “She’s on suspension while the hearings are going on.”

  I helped myself to another beer. The Guild leadership was a mess. A crazy druid had tried to grab Power at Forest Hills Cemetery and almost succeeded in destroying the fey. Maybe even the world. It was the Guild’s job to keep stuff like that from happening. Instead, Keeva and a lot of other people who should have realized what was going on fell into his trap. “Keeva almost died. I know for a fact she didn’t know what she was doing.”

  Briallen and Dylan exchanged looks. Briallen pulled an envelope from her pocket and slid it to me across the counter. “I was going to give this to you later, Connor. High Queen Maeve is not happy about what happened here. The Guild wants to talk to you.”

  I recognized the form letter. I skipped the legal mumbo jumbo and went right to the point:

  You are hereby ordered to appear before the inquiry board regarding the events at Forest Hills Cemetery in and around October 1 of this year. Advocacy can be arranged if so desired.

  By order of our hand and seal,

  Ceridwen, Queen of Faerie

  Special Director of Internal Investigations

  I let the letter fall to the counter. “Maeve must be pissed if she sent an underQueen.”

  Briallen tilted her head down and eyed me from under her brow. “It’s not a good time to antagonize anyone, Connor.”

  I splayed my hand against my chest. “Me? I wouldn’t think of it.”

  “You’ve had problems with the Guild?” Dylan asked.

  I laughed. “I guess you can say neither I nor the Guild is each other’s biggest fan at the moment.”

  Briallen rolled her eyes. “Boy, did you just hit a long-running argument, Dylan.” She ladled stew for all of us.

  I nodded. “I help the Boston P.D. investigate fey issues the Guild ignores. They ignore a lot.” Which was true. The Guild was supposed to handle all fey-related crime. Any fey species that manipulated essence—fairies, druids, elves, and anyone else who can trace themselves back to Faerie—was supposed to fall under Guild jurisdiction. In reality, though, the Guild ignored anything that didn’t score them political points, especially if it happened in the Weird.

  “I remember someone who thought the Guild was the best thing that ever happened to him,” said Dylan.

  I played with the moisture rings my bottle left on the counter. “A lot has changed since New York.”

  No one spoke. I refused to look up at Dylan. Dylan and I had some uncomfortable history. We both almost died on a mission, and I handled the aftermath less than nobly, at Dylan’s expense. It’s one of those things I regret from the time that I thought more about myself than about anyone else. It’s been on my list of things to fix someday, but I thought I’d get to decide when. I was wrong. Again.

  Briallen looked back and forth between us as she placed bowls on the counter. She sat back onto her stool and lifted a spoon. “Have
either of you ever been to the Orient?”

  And with that, the conversation lightened. Gathered around Briallen’s table, sharing stories and laughs, felt good. Many people I assumed were friends—real friends—had abandoned me after my accident. It was comforting to enjoy a conversation with people whom I had real history with.

  After dessert, Briallen cleared a few dishes, at which point Dylan and I both started doing the same. Apparently when he lived with her, he had been given the same chores I was. Briallen watched us jockeying for position at the sink. “Why don’t the two of you go up to the parlor while I clean up?”

  Amused, we made our way to the second floor. In the parlor, a small blue fire burned in the grate as it always did. Dylan sat in one of the overstuffed chairs. I went to the window overlooking the backyard. The garden had died off with the cooling weather. The oak tree had dropped most of its leaves, and wind had scattered them to the edges of the small space. The still fountain near the back wall sat cold and uninviting.

  “You look good,” Dylan said.

  I didn’t answer right away. I could make out his reflection in the glass in front of me, wavy and blurred. Without looking at him, I crossed to a small table and poured three glasses of tawny port. I handed one to him. As our eyes met, I could see that ten years had not dimmed the issue between us.

  I took the chair opposite him, leaving Briallen’s favorite seat between us. “You seem to have done well.”

  Dylan gave me a thin smile. “Nice weather we’re having.”

  I sipped the port. “I’m not sure if there’s a storm on the horizon.”

  He swirled his glass, watching the light reflect flashes of gold. “No. It’s clear. Everything’s clear.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He met my eyes. “Ten years is a long time, Connor. The past is past.”