Uncertain Allies cg-5 Read online

  He considered me with a measured stare. “If that’s the way you feel, I wouldn’t be too sure of your newfound friends if I were you.”

  I pushed Meryl’s chair farther away from him. “Eorla? Is that where you’re going to go? If it weren’t for her, Nigel, things would be worse, and you know it. She’s the only person from the Guild who has done anything to stop the fighting between the Celts and Teuts.”

  The corner of his mouth drooped as he went to the window. “Her role at the Guild is a technical matter. She is as much the Elven King’s creature as Bastian Frye.”

  I would have loved to see him say that to Eorla’s face. Bastian Frye was the Elven King’s master spy and assassin. Eorla liked him less than I did Nigel these days. “And whose creature are you, Nigel?”

  That time he smiled. “I might ask you the same question.”

  “I am no one’s creature,” I said.

  “Really? Do you ever wonder how it is that you ended up fighting the Guild when it was hunting Bergin Vize? Or how it is that you stood at Eorla’s side when the Weird burned down? Do you not find that at all curious?”

  I sighed. “Still seeing Teutonic Consortium agents in the shadows, Nigel?”

  He peered at me with one eye open. “Still pretending they’re not there, Connor?”

  “I don’t pretend anything. I’m trying not to get killed in the cross fire,” I said.

  “You almost killed a few hundred people in the process from what I heard,” he said.

  I snorted. “I figured Ryan macGoren would go running to you. How is the Acting Guildmaster these days? Has he changed his shorts yet?”

  He became solemn, the lecturing old mentor who knew better than I did. “Concerned, Connor. He’s concerned that something potentially dangerous is falling into the hands of the Elven King.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “You.” He smiled at my surprised reaction. “Deny they have offered you asylum. Tell me that old fool Brokke hasn’t whispered his vague portents in your ears.” I didn’t answer him. Both things had happened. Brokke was a dwarf who had a formidable talent for reading the future. Nigel bobbed his head. “Precisely.”

  “So now that I’m supposedly dangerous, you’re interested in me again? Are we friends again, Nigel?”

  “Your petulance is childish,” he said.

  “And your arrogance is insulting,” I said.

  He walked toward the door. “There are fools that believe the Wheel of the World turns, and we hang on until we drop. When you move beyond the framework of someone else’s definition of what the Wheel is, Connor, you stop being a creature.”

  That was the Nigel I remembered, the man with whom I argued through many a night of beer and wine, who expected me to listen to myself as much as him. That Nigel was my mentor and, I’d thought, my friend. That man vanished when my abilities vanished. I was a tool for him before that and didn’t have the brains to realize it. He had even tried to kill me since then, although Briallen, the true mentor in my life, didn’t believe that was his intent. She wasn’t there. She didn’t see the deadly essence strike aimed at my head, blocked only by Murdock’s intervention. “I’m going to ask you again, Nigel. What are you doing here?”

  He paused at the door, glancing at Meryl. “I came to visit a friend, Connor, and perhaps to help her in some way more productive than tucking her into bed.”

  I stared out the window after he left and watched windchopped waves whip past on the Charles River. The warmth of my breath fogged the glass, revealing a circle with a dot in the middle that someone had doodled. I added two eyes and a smile, glancing back at Meryl. She didn’t react, of course, but a small part of me hoped she would. I slipped onto the edge of the bed and held her hand. “He’s a jerk no matter what you say.”

  Her face remained slack, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Silence wasn’t one of Meryl’s strong suits. Seeing her on a bed without a sharp observation or comment was like not seeing her at all. Something had driven away her mind. Gillen Yor, High Healer at AvMem, hadn’t been able to break through the silence. Maybe I was wrong to resist Nigel’s help, but I worried that he would make matters worse.

  Meryl’s hair had been dyed a fiery red. She changed the color regularly, but dark roots had appeared since she had been in the hospital. “Your dye job’s growing out. I’d fix it, but you probably wouldn’t like it.” She didn’t answer.

  A nurse stopped short in the doorway. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”

  I hopped off the bed. “I was visiting. Do you know if Gillen Yor is around?”

  The nurse pulled a cart into the room. “He’s down at the desk. Can you excuse us a moment?”

  “Sure.”

  I found the nurses’ station empty. Glancing down, I noticed the file rack for the floor patients. As casually as possible, I craned my neck to see into nearby rooms for Gillen Yor. I pulled Meryl’s file. It was nosy and a violation and wrong, but she didn’t have anyone acting as a health-care proxy. I skimmed through the notes, deciphering Gillen’s scrawl as best I could. I didn’t understand most of it—trance sessions, spell orders, and essence ward boosters mixed with standard physical care like saline fluids and electrolytes. No eureka moments.

  Gillen Yor yanked the chart out of my hands and shoved it back in the rack. “Mind your business.”

  I hadn’t sensed him come up behind me. Even as I turned toward him, he relaxed the body shield that had hidden his essence. He had snuck up on me on purpose. “I’m sorry.”

  Gillen was over a foot shorter than me, a strange man with a halo of gray hair circling his bald spot. He pulled at the hair often when he was thinking. Staring up at me, he tilted his head to the side. “No, you’re not. You want to know what’s going on, ask me.”

  “Okay, what’s going on?”

  He slipped his hands into his doctor’s coat and shrugged. “Nothing. No responses to anything yet. Nigel gave me some things to think about, but I’m not confident.”

  “If it’s coming from Nigel, I’m not either,” I said.

  He peered at me with his usual angry attitude. “I don’t give a damn about your personal opinions, Grey. If the Elven King himself gave me an idea I thought would work, I’d damned well use it.”

  I tamped down my own anger. Given Gillen’s personality, there was no competing with him in the annoyance department anyway. He didn’t care what I thought, didn’t care what anyone thought. He lived and breathed the healing arts and was the best druid healer alive. I was his biggest failure. For years, he had been trying to figure out the dark thing in my head. With Meryl, he had another mystery on his hands, and I suspected he blamed me for it. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t know what I meant.”

  He shook his head. “You look like hell. That thing in your head looks like a dagger. Does it hurt?”

  Like Nigel, Gillen was a powerful enough druid to scan me from a distance. Touching made the exam more refined, but it wasn’t always necessary. “No. Well, yeah, but no different than usual.”

  “I saw video of what you did down in the Weird. Actually, I didn’t see a damned thing, but darkness. Can you control it?” he asked.

  At one point during the riot, I lost control of myself. I thought Meryl was dead, and a fury built inside me that I didn’t know I was capable of. I remembered the dark mass spiraling out of me, becoming a huge cloud of shadow that sucked up essence in its wake. It happened so fast and I was so angry, I don’t know if I made it do that or if the darkness took advantage of my mental state somehow.

  I closed my eyes, touched the dark spot in my mind with a mental nudge from the essence in my body signature. The dark mass didn’t move or respond in any way. I opened my eyes. “Not now. I might have then. I don’t know how.”

  He grunted, pulling his hair on one side as he stalked off. “Stay out of my files, Grey.”

  Back in Meryl’s room, the nurse had gone. Meryl was in the chair by the window again, staring at the glass. T
he smiley face had been wiped away.

  I nudged Meryl legs closer to the chair and pulled at her hand. She rose on unsteady feet. I led her out of the room and to the elevator. She responded to touch, to pushes and pulls. Gillen suggested that I take her for walks and give her exercise she wouldn’t get lying in a hospital bed. The walks made me feel like she was okay. Whatever was wrong, she was still in there, remembering how to walk and how to eat and how to breathe. To my layman’s mind, that was more than reptilian brain.

  Meryl was lost, but not gone. The woman I knew—and loved—was inside this silent shell. If I had faith in anything, it was in her will to survive. I was going to be there for her.

  4

  I wandered through the deep end of the Weird later that night, testing the air for essence. For weeks, the strange cloud of blue light had been sweeping the neighborhood, a rush of essence that surged into being as if out of nowhere. In its wake, people disappeared. Eorla had expressed concern because a number of Teutonic fey were among the missing. She worried that it might be overzealous supporters of her cause against the Consortium and the Seelie Court.

  At first, I considered it might be a new form of the Taint, the virulent corruption of essence that had driven the fey mad. Eorla had been powerful enough to dominate and contain it. I saw no sign that she had been affected by it or that it had become loose again. The Taint was gone. Whatever this new problem was, it was its own thing.

  My main challenge was finding it. I had seen it in the distance a number of times, but by the time I reached each location, it had vanished. It followed no decipherable pattern, and while many of its victims were dwarves and druids, plenty of other fey went missing, too. It was hard to get a handle on how many. People in the Weird received little attention from the police when they reported someone missing. Over time, a culture of acceptance evolved, unexplained disappearances another part of what it meant to live in the neighborhood.

  Tonight, I had seen it once a few blocks away, a flash of bright blue roaring across a small intersection. There was no trace of it by the time I reached the corner. The intersection was in an out-of-the-way corner of the neighborhood, off the main streets, where few people lived and fewer businesses operated. The four buildings that sat on the corners of the intersection were boarded up, dark and empty observers over an abandoned street.

  Druids have a talent for total recall. If I found an essence signature, I could file it away in my memory and recognize it if I ran into it again. Whatever this blue thing was, it was a kind of essence that left no trace behind. I had nothing to tag and had never seen anything like it.

  The air had a sharp tang to it, like the aftermath of someone’s firing concentrated essence as a weapon. Essence itself was absent, much like it had been at the murder scene last night. As I moved along the sidewalk, I picked up faded essence from the Dead, which resonated differently from the living.

  Essence dissipated in open air. The one consistent thing I had been finding at the sites of the blue essence was old Dead signatures, the faded remnants of their passage. Recognizing a specific essence, I could estimate how long ago the person had passed through. The degradation in the essence intensity gave me a time frame much like Janey Likesmith could estimate how long a body had been dead by taking its temperature.

  I suspected the blue essence was following the Dead. In every location I knew, I had found old essence. What I couldn’t make sense of was the time frame between the Dead’s passing through and the blue essence following. The Dead essence had faded much earlier than the blue. I stepped off the curb and crouched in the gutter. Drawing on my body essence, I boosted my sensing ability to examine the Dead essence. The dark mass in my head wouldn’t let me access essence outside my body, but it let me use my sensing ability without any pain. I had learned that seeking essence was what the dark mass did. It wasn’t doing me any favors. If anything, I was doing it one.

  With my heightened sensing, the Dead essence burned brighter, allowing me to see farther along the trail. Even that tapered off to nothing a few feet away. I was stumped.

  A pink light burst into the air in front of me, and the twelve-inch-tall figure of Stinkwort—Joe, to his friends—made a wobbly somersault. Joe’s a flit, one of the small fairies no more than a foot tall. His wings were longer than he was, a bright pink that he was as self-conscious about as his real name. I’ve known him all my life. He drinks more than anyone I know, doesn’t care if I yell or snore, and has more going on in his head than I dare to contemplate.

  “Ah, there you are, my friend, in the gutter where you work best,” he said.

  I stretched to my feet. “If it wasn’t for gutters, we’d never see each other.”

  He blinked his wide eyes at me. “That’s very touching.”

  “Have you seen this blue essence that’s been showing up?”

  He tilted his head from side to side. “Up where?”

  “Here. Around the Weird. Flashes by, and people disappear,” I said.

  He pursed his lips and hovered in a circle. “Are you sure they don’t disappear because you show up? I noticed that happens a lot with you.”

  Joe was one part friend, one part reality-checker, and lots of parts drinking buddy. We tore each other down like only best friends can do and still be friends. That also means sometimes we didn’t have the same conversation we thought we were having.

  I wasn’t finding anything I hadn’t seen before and decided to call it a night. I walked toward Old Northern Avenue, with Joe flying upside down beside me. “Doesn’t that make you dizzy?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Sure, but if I get sick, I’m in the perfect position not to get anything on me. You should try it.”

  “I can’t fly, Joe,” I said.

  He righted himself. “Oh, great. Another thing for you to complain about.”

  “Will you stop? I’m not in the mood,” I said. He pouted but kept silent. We made it to Old Northern without another word. “I’m sorry I snapped,” I said.

  “I know,” he said.

  He flew beside me, sometimes a few feet ahead, sometimes wandering off to the side. A small smile stayed on his lips, as if he were thinking of something amusing.

  “You’re not mad?” I asked.

  He flipped backwards in an arc in front of me. “You had a bad day. It happens. Not my fault, right?”

  “It’s more than that. It’s Meryl and Nigel and a dead dwarf,” I said.

  He frowned in concentration. “Was this at a party you didn’t invite me to?”

  To this day, I never know if he was serious when he said things like that. “Different things, but related. Nigel wants to be friends again.”

  “And that’s”—he peered at me—“nice?”

  “Suspicious. He saw what happened when the black mass came out of me during the riots. I think his wheels are turning about how to exploit it.”

  “Well, that’s his job, init? You need to stop trying to make him into something he’s not. You thought you were friends. You weren’t. You worked together. Nigel isn’t anyone’s friend. Haven’t you noticed?”

  I stopped walking. “How do you do that?”

  He hovered in place. “Do what?”

  “Point out the completely obvious that I miss?”

  He chuckled as he grabbed the pole of a street sign and spun around it. “Oh, that’s easy. You think too much. That’s from Nigel, always looking for motives and such. Everyone knows how he is, so everyone acts like him when he’s around. Getting sucked up in his world is part of his world. He needs to get laid.”

  Flits have a voracious appetite when it comes to sex. “That’s not the answer to everything, you know,” I said.

  He waggled his eyebrows at me. “It’s the answer to enough things to make it worthwhile.”

  “Not for me anymore.”

  He landed on a destroyed telephone box. “Connor, you’ve changed. What happened to that guy who used to have fun?”

  I had changed. Once, I wou
ld have brushed off the snubs and the drama and gone on my way. The difference was back then I could afford to. I had money, power, and influence. With any one of those things, life was easier. Once they were all gone, I realized not everyone lived like that—more, that most people never had a chance to live like that precisely because of the people who lived like that. It didn’t have to be that way. It made me angry often and, yeah, depressed, but I didn’t think I wasn’t fun to be around.

  “Am I really no fun anymore?”

  “Only when you’re awake,” said Joe, then grinned from ear to ear. He started wringing his hands. “Oh, woe is me! The world is so awful. People die, and everything is shite, and it’s all my fault.”

  I glared at him. “Not funny.”

  He hovered up and snapped his fingers in my face. “No kidding. You know what’s going on other places? People are nervous and scared and looking for comfort. And you know what happens next? Lots of sex and alcohol, and you’re moping around like a schoolboy on a date with his hand.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Wow. I can’t believe you’d take advantage like that, Joe. That’s a new low even for you.”

  He pulled his chin in. “Me? I tell them I’m nervous and scared. You would not believe the action I’ve been getting.”

  I laughed, not just because it was funny but because he was that serious, which made it funnier. “Somewhere along the way, the world went seriously wrong.”

  He sighed. “Again with the everything-is-wrong.”

  Exasperated, I spread out my hands. “All right, all right, I get the message. I’m no fun. I complain. I’m a pessimist. No one likes to be around me. I get it already.”

  Joe looked at me with a solemn face. “Boy, do you have a self-esteem problem.”

  Laughing, I batted at him, but he flitted away. “I can’t win with you.”

  He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Is that an invitation to poker?”

  I shook my head in defeat. “You win. Where to?”

  He flapped his wings and spun in a circle. “Oh, the places we’ll go!”