Uncertain Allies Read online

  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 would 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!”

  He zipped ahead of me on the sidewalk. Sometimes, having Joe as a friend was worth doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

  5

  In a booth halfway to the back of the Rose Rose the next day, I nursed a mug of coffee. Somehow, despite all the riot mess that had happened right around the corner on Old Northern Avenue, the old bar and grill hadn’t been damaged. Having one thing in my life remain the same was small comfort, but I took it where I could.

  Midday in the Weird was the start of the day in the neighborhood. The only people showing energy were the waitstaff as they hustled late breakfast specials to customers making a grudging attempt to face the day. I sensed Murdock enter behind me, his body signature an unmistakable combination of druid and human. He hung his coat on a peg and slid into the booth. “Is it bright in here?”

  I took my sunglasses off. “I had a long night.”

  Murdock sipped a soda I had ordered for him. “Were you looking into those essence surges?”

  “For a while. I met up with Joe later, had a few beers.”

  Murdock seemed off, distracted, as he skimmed the menu. “I wanted to talk to you about something. Bernard is going to run for city council in the fall.”

  Bernard was the second oldest Murdock sibling and a police officer who wanted to make a transition into civilian life, if politics could be called civilian. I didn’t know him well since he worked down in Dorchester, the large Boston neighborhood to the south. “His wife must be happy he’s getting out.”

  A waitress refilled my coffee and took our food order.

  “She is, but you might not be,” he said.

  I leaned away from a sunbeam that was playing havoc with my headache. “Meaning?”

  Murdock met my eyes. “Meaning he’s not going to be a fey advocate. He’s going to be saying things you’re not going to like. I wanted you to hear it from me before you get all why-didn’t-you-tell-me on me.”

  The coffee tasted bitter, but I drank it. “You make me sound whiny.”

  With practiced indifference, Murdock checked out the bar. “You are sometimes.”

  I let the comment slide. I was whiny sometimes, like when I got bad news when I have a hangover headache and the caffeine hasn’t kicked in yet. “Isn’t that going to be a problem for him?”

  “It’ll probably be a plus in the current situation,” he said.

  The waitress reappeared and landed a burger the size of my head on the table with a plate of fries. They smelled like heaven. “So what happens when people find out Bern’s halfdruid?” I asked.

  For years, the Murdock family believed that their mother, Amy, died in a car accident after Kevin, her youngest, was born. She didn’t, and she wasn’t a human named Amy. Through my natural tendency to rip people’s guts out, I had exposed the whole sorry tale.

  A druidess named Moira Cashel had glamoured herself as Amy Sullivan, met and married Scott Murdock, and bore him children—five sons and two daughters, all cops except Kevin, who became a firefighter. When Scott Murdock found out who—and what—she was, he disowned Amy and threatened to kill her if she ever again set foot in Boston. The commissioner was a Catholic of the old school who believed the fey were demons. You weren’t supposed to marry them, but threatening to kill them was okay.

  Twenty-plus years later, Amy returned in her true identity of Moira Cashel. She seduced Scott Murdock—again—and brought about his downfall. Scott tried to kill her, but the Guildmaster, Manus ap Eagan, killed him in what I hoped was an accident.

  Murdock rearranged his grilled chicken sandwich on his plate. I had a twinge of guilt at all the fat and oil in front of me, but my stomach demanded that a night of beer be salved with salt and fried food.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said.

  He became intent on his sandwich and avoided making eye contact. “Damn, Leo. You haven’t told them, have you?”

  He dropped his sandwich on the plate and slumped in his seat. “What am I supposed to say? Mom was a lying druid who abandoned her kids, then came back to cause Da’s death? And, oh, by the way, Gerry, that was her you shot in the face?”

  In the confusion of the riot, Gerry Murdock had fired on Cashel and killed her. It wasn’t quite cold blood—she was breaking the law—but it wasn’t the cleanest police shooting. I didn’t think Gerry murdered her like I had taunted him the other night. It was an accident, an impulsive act that shouldn’t have happened. I dropped my gaze. “Danu’s blood, Leo, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  He picked at his fingernails. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . I don’t know what to say or do. They already think you had something to do with my father’s death. What are they going to think when they find about . . . the other thing?”

  The other thing was a big thing. I had had an affair with Moira when I was much younger and, unbeknownst to me, was the catalyst for the breakup of the Murdock marriage. I didn’t know Amy was married. I was too dumb to suspect it. I was blinded by my emotions, too young to understand the difference between hormones and love.

  Once Scott Murdock found out about the affair, the rest of Amy’s—Moira’s—secrets came out. I wasn’t privy to all the details of that because I didn’t believe Moira was who she said she was until too late. “Leo, I can’t begin to know what you or your family are going through, but don’t hide this from them. Your father lied all those years about your mother and became a bitter man. I don’t want that to happen to you.”

  A pained smile flickered on his face. “I don’t want to make a choice between family and friends.”

  I faked throwing a fry at him, but they tasted too good to waste. “There is no choice, Leo. Besides, I’m used to a Murdock or two hating me. It’s my shit, not yours. I’ll deal with it.”

  “Right now it’s easier to blame you than my dad. Maybe they’ll come around,” he said. Maybe, but I doubted it. I wasn’t a particularly close friend of the family to begin with and had made more than one faux pas around them. Being involved in the deaths of both their parents was not high on anyone’s list of friendship criteria. It was a miracle in my book that Leo still talked to me. He told me he didn’t blame me and that it was more important to forgive my involvement. It was a matter of faith for him. I didn’t want to let that friendship go, but I didn’t want it to cause more pain in his life either.

  When I had first met Murdock, he asked me to help him with some minor fey-related crime cases, giving advice and pointing him in the right direction. His body signature read straight-up human, no doubt about it. We partnered on what came to be known as the Castle Island case. Murdock got hit with a spell backlash. His body signature started reading druid, and he also began to exhibit fey abilities like a body shield and physical strength. For almost a year, I had beaten myself up thinking I had caused the problem and that somehow his health might be at risk.

  Since Moira Cashel died, Murdock’s body signature had become more druidlike. I wasn’t an essence expert, but the logical conclusion was that the stronger signature wa
s somehow related to her death. I had sensed something fey around Gerry the other night, too, but other fey were around then, and I hadn’t thought to probe. For a lot of reasons, I hadn’t been around his other siblings. I had no idea if their signatures had changed, too.

  “Has anyone else shown fey abilities?” I asked.

  He frowned. “My brothers and sisters? Why would they?”

  I finished the last of my fries. “Leo, since Cashel died, your body signature has been more intense. I thought maybe I was getting a more precise reading on you because of my own ability issues, but now I think I’m sensing your true essence for the first time. And if your abilities have increased, then maybe something might show up in the rest of your family, too.”

  He became still, staring at the table as the thought sunk in. “I didn’t consider that. Damn.”

  “I’m no expert, but Cashel might have used a masking spell on her children that failed when she died. It wouldn’t surprise me given your father’s feelings about the fey. I think we should talk to Briallen. She’s the essence expert.”

  Upset, he rubbed at his mouth. “This isn’t a sneaky way of getting me to see a fey doctor again?”

  On more than one occasion, I had tried to get Murdock to see a fey healer. He refused, content that the fey essence he exhibited wasn’t a problem. He was right in one respect. The essence hadn’t affected his health except to make it better. What had worried me were potential long-term effects. Now that we knew his mother was fey, I was more concerned about his use of ability than his health. “I am suggesting you talk to someone who has experience as a druidic mentor, Leo. Briallen taught me more about understanding my abilities than anyone.”

  He didn’t look happy. “All right, I’ll talk to her.”