Uncertain Allies Read online

  Eorla glanced at Rand, her bodyguard, who kept tabs on everyone near her. I didn’t count many elves as friends, and, while I didn’t know if Rand was one, I respected the hell out of the guy. In the short time I had known him, he had stepped up in ways I hadn’t expected. Consortium guards weren’t known for defying the king, no matter if they were attached to other royals. A flutter went through the air, indicating that Eorla had done a sending, a mental communication much like telepathy but keyed to personal essence. Rand ushered everyone out of the room, then took a relaxed stance facing the door halfway down the carpet.

  “I’m having trouble bringing people in that end of the neighborhood to my cause. I was hoping you could provide some insight,” she said.

  I sat on the corner of the desk. “No one has ever had much luck with the Tangle, Eorla.”

  “Our goals are aligned, are they not? The Tangle wants to operate outside the influence of the Guild and the Consortium,” she said.

  I shook my head. “The flaw in your thinking is that you’re assuming the Tangle doesn’t want to be the way it is. It already operates outside the law. That’s its point, and no matter who’s in charge—even if it’s you—it will still fill a need outside the rules.”

  She leaned back and steepled her fingers. “I hadn’t thought about it in that way. I wonder, though, that they would not prefer to operate as they do with the knowledge that they won’t be interfered with?”

  “Maybe. But it really is a free-for-all down there. You have no one to make a deal with,” I said.

  She arched an eyebrow. “Connor, I think you are a smart man, but you are not a warrior. When a group has no leader, that is the perfect time for one to arrive.”

  When Eorla made a comment like that—or any of the Old Ones who lived in Faerie—it reminded me that I was dealing with people who had lived in warring, often brutal, times. Growing up in Boston, in a democratic system, I tended to forget that majority rule wasn’t the only way to gain power, only one that did it with a lot less bloodshed than war.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  She rose from her seat and went to the window, gazing toward the horizon. To the east lay the harbor, sparkling in the midday sun. To the south was the Weird, dim, gray, and sad, a jumble of warehouses and office buildings that had seen better days.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.

  “It’s what gets me up in the mornings,” I said. I didn’t always believe that. Once upon a time, the Weird had no more concern for me except as a place to get a little down and dirty. The lives of the people who lived there weren’t an issue when I was flying high and having fun. I used to think people lived their lives by choice. Losing my job and my abilities—my world and way of life—changed all that. Not everyone in the Weird was there because they wanted to be. Not all of them chose to put themselves in a failing situation. Discovering how much the power elite caused their plights made the matter worse to me. It didn’t have to be this way.

  Eorla slipped her hand into mine. “I check on her every day.”

  She meant Meryl. Eorla and Meryl had worked together to stop the rioting in the Weird. They succeeded at Meryl’s expense. When Meryl volunteered to help Eorla, she made me promise to take revenge if she died. She didn’t die. She didn’t live either. I didn’t know what to do about it. I wasn’t sure Meryl would appreciate the nuance. She’d want me to kick someone’s ass. The fact that Eorla followed Meryl’s progress despite everything else she had to deal with told me that she cared. Whether she cared because of me, or on principle, didn’t matter. She cared.

  “I know,” I said. I squeezed her hand, and she returned the pressure.

  3

  Outside the hotel, a bus trundled up Atlantic Avenue toward Avalon Memorial Hospital. I hitched a ride, deciding to visit Meryl earlier in the day than usual. I didn’t like being at the hospital when lots of people were around. Too many people and too many rumors flying around the floors dragged me down, so I visited people after hours.

  The dark underbelly of the elevated highway slid by above, sunlight peering in through the occasional gaps between girders and nearby buildings. The highway formed an enormous barrier across the city, cutting off the North End from the rest of the neighborhoods. It stood ten stories high, double-decked and rust-cancred green—the other Green Monster in Boston. The more well-known one was the wall towering over left field at Fenway Park. At the ballpark, you could get beer. Under the elevated, you could get mugged.

  The bus cut through an intersection and rocked side to side as it settled in at the Haymarket stop. Like so much Boston transportation, the route didn’t quite take me to where I wanted to go. Waiting for a connection would take longer than hoofing it, so I walked the final blocks to Cambridge Street.

  An old brick building overlooking the river had been home to Avalon Memorial Hospital for decades. When the fey got sick, they went to Boston for the best healing expertise. Gillen Yor was chief of staff, and no one knew more about fey medicine than he did. He had been High Queen Maeve’s personal physician until he left for the States. She wasn’t happy about that. He didn’t care.

  I passed through the main entrance, its lintel carved with apples dangling from trees in a nod to its Faerie namesake. Avalon was an island, a place of healing, shrouded in mystery. The island didn’t come through during Convergence, when other parts of Faerie merged with reality. The fey did the next best thing and opened hospitals that specialized in essence-related maladies and injuries.

  The elevator doors opened on Meryl’s floor, and the scent of dill and lavender tickled my nose. It said something about my life that the odors of a hospital had a familiarity that had become a comfort for me. Hawthorn, birch, latex, and bleach mixed in an aroma that meant hope and healing. Healers did the best they could with the knowledge they had, and then some. They didn’t always succeed, but AvMem was the best bet for most anyone.

  Last year, a tainted form of essence had infected the fey down in the Weird. The Taint caused anyone who encountered it to lose control and become violent. It was a major factor in the rioting. With Meryl’s help, Eorla absorbed the Taint and contained it. In the process, they had been bombarded with the Taint and fell into comas. Eorla woke up. Meryl didn’t. Since then, she had been in a trance state, with no explanation or cure in sight.

  Essence was a tool with no will of its own. Depending on the user’s intent, it could heal or kill. In the main hallways of AvMem, stone wards dampened ambient essence. The stones were infused with spells to reduce interference with the delicate precision of healing spells that operated in patient rooms. Powerful wards made even the trace of essence disappear, but those took time and ability. AvMem’s wards ran a middle ground—strong enough to dampen wayward essence from interfering with healing spells but not so strong that the ability necessary to create them wasted energy, which was why I sensed body signatures as I came out of the elevator, a strong one in particular. I quickened my pace to Meryl’s room.

  Seated with his back to the door, Nigel Martin cocked his head to the side as I entered, sensing me as I had sensed him. Meryl faced me from a chair opposite him, her stare the same vacant stare it had been for months. I walked around the bed and stood between them.

  “What are you doing in here?” I asked.

  Nigel tipped his head back, his hands propped on a cane between his knees. The past year had aged him, more white in the dark brown hair that swept over his ears to the nape of his neck, more lines networked in the crow’s-feet of his eyes. As much as I wanted to dismiss the stress he had been under, I had a momentary pang thinking that my former mentor was getting old. It was momentary, though. Nigel and I weren’t on good terms.

  His eyes narrowed. “Your body signature becomes more a mystery to me each time we meet, Connor. Are you in any pain?”

  I’d had my own accident with a spell backlash. Almost three years earlier, I was hunting down a terrorist by the name of Bergin Vize. I caught up
with him at a nuclear power plant north of Boston, and all hell broke loose. Vize had a ring of power—what it was for I still didn’t know—and a feedback loop with the reactor caused an explosion. When I woke up, I had no ability to manipulate essence anymore and the shadowy black mass in my head. It hurt like hell, but as far as I was concerned, it was no longer any of Nigel’s business.

  I gave him my back as I tugged Meryl’s hand. She didn’t have any awareness of her surroundings, but she responded to some stimuli. I slipped my hand along her arm and guided her back to the bed. As she settled against the pillows, I faced Nigel. “I asked you a question.”

  He flicked an eyebrow in annoyance. “There are those, believe it or not, Connor, who seek my help. Gillen Yor told me he cannot detect any brain activity, yet she isn’t vegetative. I came to see for myself.”

  I used my sensing ability—the only ability I had left—to check Meryl. Other than her dimmed body signature, I detected nothing different from my last visit. “Did you do anything to her?”

  He shook his head. “Why does my friendship with her bother you so?”

  I frowned. “I’ve had your friendship, Nigel. It’s a fickle thing.”

  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 hea
d 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. The 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.