Undone Deeds cg-6 Page 3
With a thin smile, my father lifted his head. “Got all that?” he asked.
I chuckled as he walked around to the other side of the car. “Got it.”
The car pulled away. I turned to smile at Murdock. The bags still dangled from his shoulders. With a flick of the wrist, he flung one at me, and I caught it with a laugh. “I wasn’t planning on chauffeuring you to a hotel,” he said.
I picked up the lone bag on the curb and walked to where Murdock had parked his car in the fire lane. “Oh, come on, Leo. It’s not like you don’t want to see more of this.”
He popped the trunk, and we pushed the bags in among his extra police gear, the spare tire, a milk crate filled with cleaning bottles, a pile of books, balled-up blankets, and a closed trash bag I was not going to ask about. It was cleaner than his backseat. “Oh, I think I’ve seen enough to get the picture,” he said.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I said.
We got in the car, and he pulled into the exit lane. “Connie and Callie, huh?”
I glowered at him. “Oh, shut up.”
He giggled.
4
Despite mild pleading and promises of embarrassing family dynamics, Murdock resisted coming into the hotel. He helped unload his car onto a luggage trolley, then slammed the trunk and waved. “I have an appointment.”
“But you can eat all the olives in the minibar,” I said.
He smirked. “Bribing a police officer will get you a jail cell.”
I held out my hands, loosely together at the wrist. “Please?”
“Let me know if you get any leads on the dead elf,” he said, and pulled away. I didn’t mind. I loved my family, but having an independent ally around when we were all together would have been comforting. I pushed the trolley into the lobby, where a bellhop rushed to take it away from me.
The hotel suite had the hushed eloquence of money crossed with the generic style of hotel glamour. My parents weren’t rich, but they were comfortable. My mother appeared from the bedroom. She had removed most of the jewelry from the plane. “Why were you wearing everything you own?” I asked.
She hugged me with a chuckle, then settled onto the couch while the Clure rummaged in the bar. “People run up to you in airports and cut the strap off your carry-on.”
“Mother….” I said.
“They do! I read about it. I didn’t want to take any chances. Your father”—she eyed him dramatically—“thinks I’m alarmist, but here I sit with all my belongings.”
My father checked the view out the window. “Except for the diplomatic pouch with fifty thousand dollars you left in the coffee shop.”
Callin choked on his drink. “What the hell are you doing with fifty thousand dollars in cash?”
“Your mother was afraid the banks would fail while we were in flight,” my father said.
Callin stared at me, another one of our comrade moments, united in the baffling things our parents did. “Please tell me you have the pouch,” he said.
My mother tilted her head in thought. “Grey, you had the pouch last. Remember, I told you to tip the porter?” She used a pet name for my father in conversation, but when she used a name, it was Grey.
“You said give him the pouch,” he said.
My mother gasped in horror. “I said pound! Give him the pound! You had that change in your hand,” she said. When Callin groaned, my mother shot me an impish smile. She was not above playing on her son’s perception of her as crazy. She slapped Callin’s knee and laughed. Chagrined, he dropped his head back as he realized he had fallen for her act.
My mother and Cal worked like that, joking, chastising, teasing. They connected on a comfort level I never had with her. My parents were always my parents, loved and loving. I knew I could rely on them to fulfill certain needs, sometimes needs I didn’t know I had, but our relationships always remained child to parent. We weren’t friends in the sense that some parents became friends to their adult children, like Cal and my mother were. I didn’t resent it. It was who we were to each other.
Cal didn’t have the same relationship with our father that I had, and sometimes I wondered if he felt like I did about him and my mother. Thomas Grey was a man of few words and formidable intellect, someone whom I enjoyed, in the strictest sense of the word, spending an evening with debating politics or history or anything. He absorbed the happenings around him, picking up nuances, making connections that others failed to see. Even then, as Cal and my mother talked, I knew by the tilt of his head he was listening to every word even if he wasn’t cracking a smile. If Cal and my mother were friends of personality, my father and I were friends of the mind.
A burst of pink essence heralded the inevitable appearance of Joe to the gathering. He whooped as he circled the room, then plunged to my mother, wrapping his arms and legs around her neck. “Momma Grey!”
My mother took the assault with good nature. She and Joe were a mutual admiration society that served two members. “I was worried you had forgotten about me, dear.”
Joe reared back, mugging. “You? Forget you? Why I’d sooner forget to dress in the morning.”
My father gave a tired sigh. “Apparently, he did.”
Joe never wore more than his loincloth, and even that was a courtesy to nonflit sensibilities. “At least you don’t have to deal with his snoring,” I said.
My father tilted his head toward me. “And you haven’t seen the two of them in the garden after a few drinks.”
My mother hopped off the couch, tugging Cal’s hand. “Come see what I brought you,” she said. Cal let her lead him away. The Clure followed, throwing us an amused smile as they disappeared into the bedroom.
I poured my father a glass of whiskey and joined him by the window. The hotel overlooked Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. The two buildings had always been major components of Boston commercial businesses, from a sheep auction house to today’s restaurants and shops. “She seems in fine form.”
He didn’t answer right away, caught by some activity in the street below. An elf in Consortium livery was standing in the plaza. He had a falcon on his hand. “She’s had a difficult year.”
I hadn’t heard about anything wrong from them in the few phone conversations we had had. “What happened?”
He pursed his lips. “No matter how I answer that, it will hurt your feelings.”
“Me?”
He smiled into his glass as he sipped. “See?”
I clenched my jaw. “What has Maeve done?”
“Nothing overt, per se. We are members of the Seelie Court, Con. You know that the winds of preference are fickle. You saw what happened to you when the Guild kicked you out. This last year, a chill spread, invitations declined or not offered, whispers behind closed doors, ranks closed. The Seelie Court is all about privilege. I’ve shielded your mother from the more vile things, but she’s no fool. Her receiving room has been quite empty of late, and now we are banished.”
The elf removed the bird’s hood and released it. The falcon wheeled above an appreciative crowd, swooping back down to the elf’s proffered glove.
I gripped my glass to keep from trembling. I had issues with the Guild and the Seelie Court. I had been vocal with my opinions about High Queen Maeve. I stood by everything I had said and done, but, dammit, this was my mom. She had done nothing to deserve being dragged into Maeve’s manipulations. “I’m sorry,” I said.
My father glanced at my reflection in the window. “You have nothing to be sorry for. Regula’s a big girl. No one goes to Court thinking it’s all fun and dances. She has never once blamed you. No matter what, you are our son.”
“I’m still sorry. If I can figure out a way to get Maeve off my back, I will. I hope she pays for all the damage she’s created,” I said.
My father finished off his drink. “There are no angels wearing crowns, son. Donor’s hands are no cleaner.”
“Were,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Then the rumor is true?
The Elven King is dead?”
I nodded. “I tried to stop him from destroying the Guildhouse. It would be nice to say I didn’t mean to kill him, but I kinda threw a spear at him.”
I tried to make light of it, but my father didn’t laugh. “I don’t know what you faced that day. There is a difference between murder and causing death, and the line between them can be difficult. All deaths have ramifications. All births do, too. It makes me sad that you have to live with that.”
My father had killed people. He didn’t talk about it often, but he had been a Guild agent himself once upon a time. Pressure bore down on my chest. I had caused the death of another living thing. I had also murdered in my life. Those things could not be waved away as learning experiences, despite what I had learned. The best thing I could do—had been trying to do for years now—was make amends for it. Some people believed that there was no way to atone for the taking of a life. I didn’t know if that was true, but I also didn’t know it wasn’t. Until I did know either way, I was going to do the best I could to achieve forgiveness, if only from myself.
“I hope I stopped him from doing worse than he did,” I said.
“We all do,” he said.
A crow wheeled against the sallow light of the city night sky. It landed on the weather vane of Faneuil, a giant gold-leafed grasshopper. The bird hunched forward and made a jerking motion with its beak. The thick glass made it impossible to tell if it had called to its fellows for the night, but no others joined it. Instead, the elf’s falcon swept up and knocked the crow from its perch. My father gestured with his glass. “Did you see that?”
The falcon settled on the vane while the crow wheeled around it. Below, the elf raised his glove, but the falcon remained perched, indifferent to the call of its falconer. The crow dove, and the falcon leaped to meet it. They rose higher in the sky, diving and dodging until we couldn’t see them.
A laugh from the other room drew my attention away.
5
On my way back to the Tangle later in the afternoon, Murdock’s reminder about the elf murder prompted me to stop at the Rowes Wharf Hotel. The place had seen better days. Once one of the city’s most luxurious hotels, in a few short months, it had become a battered shadow of its former glory. Eorla Elvendottir had taken over the building as the headquarters for her renegade court. Some people called her the Queen of the Unseelie Court because she opposed both High Queen Maeve and Donor Elfenkonig. I liked to call her friend.
I picked my way through the mess in front of the building. Sandbags and sawhorses lined the sidewalk and blocked the street. Every floor had chunks of masonry missing. The fallen brick and cement was piled into hills around the front entrance.
The day the Guildhouse fell, Donor had staged an attack against Eorla. He had wanted to make it seem like she was attacking the Guild, and he had been helping defend it. The ruse worked for the most part. The human government had sent in the National Guard. Together with the Consortium, they had pounded the hotel with elf-shot and mortar fire. Eorla held them off, but the building looked like it belonged in the Weird now instead of the financial district.
Consortium agents across the street took occasional shots at the building. They were careful not to hit anyone but tried to provoke an armed response. Eorla’s people restrained themselves. They knew the Consortium was looking for a legitimate excuse to move on them in force. Guards surrounded me as soon as I neared the entrance. My presence tended to invite notice. As if on cue, three or four arrows landed in the masonry over my head, raining dust down on us. Our body shields kept most of it off, but I wasn’t going to pretend getting shot at wasn’t unnerving.
The lobby of the hotel was a marked contrast to the street. The level of tension dropped as people went about their business regardless of the barricades out front. Despite filling her ranks with a local mix of other estranged Celtic and Teutonic fey, Eorla still ran her business with an elven efficiency.
My escorts took me to the crowded ballroom where Eorla met with administrators and the public. She worked the volume of paperwork on her desk table like an orchestra, noting my entrance with a brief flick of her dark eyes. Her black hair coiled about the back of her head, accentuating her long neck and narrow face. She still wore mourning green for her husband, who had been murdered last year.
To her right, Rand acknowledged me with a nod. He rarely left her side, acting as both bodyguard and confidante. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he slept in his red uniform. Despite his formal manner and unreadable elven face, he had let me see flashes of the person inside him. He seemed like a good guy.
After a few moments, Eorla dismissed the other people in the room with a firm gesture to the guards. They ushered everyone out and closed the three of us behind the doors. Eorla stood, took my hands, and kissed my cheek. “You look well.”
“I avoided getting shot on the way in,” I said.
She gazed up at me. “Ah, you arrived through the front door, then. My apologies for the sniper fire. I do hope someone held the door for you.”
I chuckled. “Several, in fact. You treat me too well.”
“And how might I treat you today?” she asked.
I pulled out a small snapshot of the dead elf. Murdock had sent it to me with a short note that the apartment had been devoid of any evidence. As expected, his identity didn’t match anything in the usual databases. In fact, the victim didn’t have any legal history at all, which reinforced my belief that he was a spy. “I’m helping Murdock with another murder. We think the victim might have been an undercover Consortium agent, and I was wondering if you might know him.”
Eorla examined the photo. “He does have the look of one of Donor’s people, but I don’t recognize him.” She handed the photograph to Rand. “How did he die?”
“Elf-shot execution-style in his apartment. No disturbances,” I said.
Rand narrowed his gaze at the photograph, then arched an eyebrow. “His name was Alfen. He was one of Vize’s followers.”
Bergin Vize had been a renegade Consortium agent. He had turned terrorist, causing hundreds of deaths, all in the name of returning the fey folk to Faerie. Publicly, the Elven King had repudiated him. Privately, he used Vize to further his own ends and the acquisition of power. Donor might have destroyed the Guildhouse with his own abilities, but Vize had set the whole thing in motion. In the end, Donor discarded him like a tool no longer needed. I watched Vize fall into the collapsing building, his body lost beneath the rubble of the Guildhouse. His followers remained, though, scattered throughout the city.
“The Consortium had spies in Vize’s group?” I asked.
“Alfen wasn’t a spy for the Consortium. He joined Vize after the Consortium discovered he was a double agent for the Guild,” Rand said.
Eorla returned to her desk. “It sounds like this gentleman had issues with loyalty.”
“He was a Guild agent?” I asked.
Rand shook his head. “‘Agent’ is too strong a word. He was an informant for them.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “And you know this how?”
He hesitated before speaking, glancing at Eorla. “At one time, it was my duty to investigate the loyalty of Her Majesty’s officers. The Guild worked to undermine her support.”
I snorted. Despite her philanthropic work, Eorla had always been a target of the Guild. Her royal bloodline and elevated diplomatic profile made her motives suspect to Maeve. It came as no surprise that the Guild had tried to place spies on her staff. Back in my early days in New York, my old partner Dylan and I had done our duty and turned our fair share of elven agents. Dylan had been particularly good at it. I learned a lot from him, which was why I had picked up on the dead elf’s circumstances.
“Is it asking too much to know who his handler was?” I asked.
Rand shrugged. “That I don’t know. I knew Alfren from the old days. He came to Boston because the Guild offered refuge and relocation. Once he left Germany, he wasn’t a priority.”
Eorla had raised Bergin Vize, and his descent into terrorism pained her. Vize had tried to leverage her personal feelings for him to gain protection, but she declined, which also pained her. She knew I had wanted Vize captured. While I wasn’t sorry he was dead, I had forgotten that she must be feeling differently.
“Never. I kept tabs on a few of Vize’s people, but I would have informed you immediately if it became necessary,” Rand said, fast and to the point. I liked his “if necessary” caveat, the age-old plausible-deniability defense all heads of state enjoyed. Basically, he was saying he didn’t but maybe he did. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter to me. I wanted to help Murdock out, nothing more.
“I didn’t mean for the conversation to go in this direction,” I said.
Eorla nodded slowly. “They have not recovered Bergin’s body yet. A part of me holds out hope that he escaped death. Even though I know he would continue on his chosen path, I still wish him alive.”
“You don’t need to apologize for loving him,” I said. I startled myself by saying it. I hated Vize. I hoped he had died an excruciating death. Eorla, on the other hand, I cared about. While I didn’t share her feelings, I did understand them.
Her eyes glistened, but she didn’t cry. I took it as a compliment that this woman—one of the most powerful in the world—felt comfortable showing her vulnerability in front of me. She took a deep breath and moved some papers on her desk. “Have you spoken with Bastian?”
I grunted in amusement. “No. Chatting up the Consortium is not in my best interest at the moment.”
She leaned back in her chair. “Bastian is not one to let his pups stray too far even when they’ve misbehaved. If Rand recognizes this man, Bastian will.”
“I’d call him, but there’s the little matter of accusing me of killing Aldred Core,” I said.