Unperfect Souls Read online

  “He wasn’t lying about the smell,” said Murdock.

  We both recognized it. Once you knew what it was, no one forgets the rancid smell of body decomposition. If we hadn’t been in the sewer, it would have been overpowering. Something was dead and rotting in there. “We’ve got another crime scene, Detective Murdock.”

  Murdock glanced at me from under his brow. “Is that your way of saying I’m going first again?”

  I stepped aside, then followed as Murdock ducked under the pipe and squeezed through the gap. The passageway was molded from the surrounding earth with supports made from random material—car bumpers, scaffolding, old timber, granite blocks—holding the opening stable. My body signature tingled against my skin. A few months earlier, troll essence had bonded to me, and it had never gone completely away. I’ve had a sensitivity to troll work ever since. “The earth and stone were shaped by a troll using essence, Murdock.”

  Murdock’s flashlight beam was lost in the distance. “We didn’t fare so well last time we encountered a troll. Maybe we should call the Guild.”

  I rubbed my hand along the wall, dirt and stone particles clinging to my body essence as the troll residue attracted it. “It’s old work. I think the troll who made it is long gone. The only fresh body signatures I’m getting are dwarves and solitaries.”

  He leaned his chin into his shoulder and called it in on the radio. “Let’s check it out,” he said.

  “Now?”

  His face was shadowed when he looked over his shoulder. “I’ve got a gun and a body shield.”

  Murdock’s body shield existed in my mind as a curiosity and a failure. On an earlier case we worked together, he had become caught in the backlash from a major spell. When he recovered, he could create a body shield stronger than most fey body shields. No other abilities had manifested, though, and he remained human to my senses. The shield’s existence fascinated me because I had never seen something like that happen to a human. It also made me feel that my own lack of ability had prevented me from protecting him, and I wondered what the change in him boded for the future. “This is the part of the movie where I think, ‘Why the hell are they going in there?’ ” I said.

  He walked up the tunnel. “And this is the part where I say, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ ”

  Joe flew between us. “And this is the part where I wonder if there will be cookies and whiskey when we’re done.”

  Where the sewer had the chill of winter, the air in the tunnel had the tang of steam heat, the faint odor of wet metal and rust. The temperature shifted, warmer and damp, but not hot. A hundred feet in, the troll- worked walls gave way to a wide concrete space with bricked-over archways along one side. The stench of death grew, as did what appeared at first to be homeless squats—piles of clothes, shoes, glasses, pocketbooks. Someone had gathered the items like to like. We passed a mound of cell phones, then a stack of briefcases, and piles and piles of magazines.

  At the end of the concrete passage, we found the first skull. Joe spotted it, his keen eyesight picking out the yellowed bone amid a stack of hats. “Murdock, there’s an awful lot of stuff down here. We should call for backup,” I said.

  Murdock squatted in front of the skull as if he were going to question it. He shined his light in the direction we had been walking. “I think I see stairs. This looks like a sealed-off basement.”

  “We’re in the Weird, Murdock. Basements are either abandoned or you wish they were.”

  We went to the foot of the stairs. Rusted metal steps led up to more darkness, concrete-skimmed walls crackling off to show the brick beneath, paper trash covered in sooty dust lining the sides of the treads. “Up or back?” I asked.

  Murdock stared into the darkness of the stairs. “Back. We need to have this whole place secured.”

  “I found a body!” Joe shouted.

  We swung our lights toward him. Halfway back in the basement, Joe’s essence illuminated a pile of clothes against the brick wall. As we retraced our steps, my sensing ability picked out a null spot below him, an essenceless void. Our lights exposed a small woman propped against the wall, ashen-faced, her dark hair long and greasy. Her skin pulled tightly over her bone structure, as though she had no fat, her prominent face bones in stark relief to the wells of her closed eyes and open mouth. She didn’t look like she had been dead long.

  “There’s a head in her lap. I think it’s the one you’re looking for,” Joe said.

  As he lowered for a closer look, something stirred around the null zone of the body, a purple-black essence forming in my sensing ability where none had been a moment before. The strange haze coalesced into thick ropes undulating in the air a foot or so above the body. “Careful, Joe. Something’s there,” I called out.

  As he reached for the sword that he kept hidden against his side, an essence strand shot at him, and the woman’s eyes flew open, revealing deep black pits with no whites. She hissed with a thick rasp.

  Joe yelped and popped out of sight. Kill it! Kill it! Kill it! he sent from wherever he had vanished to. He materialized behind us. “It’s a leanansidhe. Kill it!”

  Murdock’s body shield flared in dense crimson around us as he pulled his gun. The woman flattened herself against the wall, pressing her head sideways and staring at us with her eerie dark eyes. “What the hell is that?” Murdock said.

  “Holy shit, get out of here, Joe,” I said. He popped out.

  Thick purple strands of essence burst out of the leanansidhe and burrowed into Murdock’s body shield. He grunted and staggered into me. I grabbed him by the waist and pulled. The strands tightened and pulsed, fighting against me.

  “Shoot it!” I shouted.

  Murdock moved in a daze, his arms flailing. He dropped his flashlight. The gun went off, the shot ricocheting into the darkness. A strand of purple essence dove at me, spearing my chest with cold, sharp pain. The dark mass in my head flared, and I screamed.

  The dark mass moved inside my head, plunging downward with a hot, burning surge. A spike of black light ripped from my chest and coiled around the purple essence, leaping along the strand and wrapping around the leanansidhe. Murdock fell from my arms as the darkness yanked me forward. The dark spike lifted the leanansidhe and slammed her against the floor. She screamed and released her essence, the purple strands retracting wildly into her body until she became a strange null void again. The thing in my head sucked the black spike back inside me.

  Gagging, I fell to my knees. Both flashlights lay on the floor, illuminating dust in the air. A growled panting came from the darkness. I shuffled on my knees and retrieved a flashlight, playing the beam along the wall until I spotted the leanansidhe. She winced when the light struck her, but held her ground in a crouch. “My apologies, my brother. Forsooth, I did not know the prey was yours,” she said.

  “He’s not my prey,” I said.

  She chuckled, revealing slick, blue-tinged teeth. “Yes, yes, my brother, I’ve played that game. Spool it in with hope and comfort. ’Tis sweeter in the final strike, no? Pray, bring me a sip of this one before it fades. I’ve never tasted the like before and would savor it again.”

  I slipped a dagger from my boot. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Stand up slowly and keep your hands where I can see them.”

  She jutted her chin out and stretched her head toward me, her nostrils quivering as if she were scenting me. “Ah, you are young, my brother. Denying what you are will change nothing. You will reach from without or die.”

  “I said stand up.”

  “Peace between us, my brother. I leave you to your prey.” She scuttled backwards and vanished into the wall.

  “Stop!” I ran forward. At the bottom of a blocked archway, missing bricks formed a hole. She had escaped to the other side of the wall. I crouched and saw nothing but more darkness. The opening was too small for me to follow.

  Joe flashed into sight high above, then flickered out in less than a breath. A moment later, he reappeared, sword out
and ready. “Is she gone?”

  I hurried over to where Murdock lay prone. “Yeah, she’s gone.”

  With an anxious look, Joe flew over Murdock. “Is he dead?”

  I checked his pulse. “No. Backdraft from the attack.”

  Murdock lay on his side. Joe settled onto his shoulder and flashed a sphere of essence into him. Flits weren’t healers, but they had a knack for enhancing the healing process. Murdock shook his head like someone had thrown cold water over him.

  I helped him up. “Easy, let your head settle.”

  His hand jumped to his holster. “Where’s my weapon?”

  Joe pointed. “It’s bending over there.”

  Metal warped essence and screwed around with spells. All fey sensed it, and flits had a keener sense than most. Because they teleport using essence, not being sensitive to metal could have fatal consequences.

  Murdock picked up the other flashlight and found his gun. “What happened?”

  I leaned against a wall. “This is the part where I say I told you so.”

  Murdock leaned against a support and took a deep breath. “What the hell was that thing?”

  “A leanansidhe. It’s a nasty solitary that feeds on living essence. Apparently, you were tasty,” I said.

  He trained his flashlight beam along the wall. “That is undoubtedly the creepiest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  I played my own flashlight around us, illuminating more piles of clothing and shoes. “They’re parasites. I didn’t even know we had one in the Weird. It looks like she’s been down here a long time.”

  “I guess we found our killer,” he said.

  I pulled my jacket around me as a chill wind blew from somewhere. “Maybe not. Leanansidhes aren’t physically strong, but they’re sneaky. She wouldn’t risk a physical confrontation, and the Dead guy at the headworks was big. She’s probably been picking off homeless people down here when they’re sleeping. I bet she found that head down here somewhere.”

  Murdock wandered to where the head lay discarded on the floor. A look of disgust ran over his face. “What the hell was she doing with it?”

  I shrugged. “Not sure. It might have something do with the ability of the Dead to regenerate. Meryl said they can’t come back without their heads. Maybe there’s an essence thing going on.”

  Murdock stepped back from the head. “Well, counting that skull over there, we have three murder cases to close now, and that thing’s our primary suspect. We need to find her.”

  I ran the light over the hole through which the leanansidhe had escaped. “It won’t be easy. People hunt them, so they’re good at hiding. From the look of it, I’d say this one is old, so she’s experienced. Plus, now she’s more dangerous because she’s been discovered.”

  Murdock crouched at a distance from the wall and tried to see into the hole. “Is it okay to bring investigators down here?”

  I followed his gaze. “Yeah, I think so. There’s safety in numbers, even for humans.”

  He stretched. “She had no problem going after the three of us.”

  I nodded. “Flits are composed mostly of essence, so she was stronger than Joe on that level. In fact, flits are ideal victims because of that. She probably wasn’t worried about you because you read human even with your body shield, and, um, I don’t think she realized I was here at first.”

  “Why not?” The play of shadows on his face made his curiosity seem sinister.

  “I’m not sure. Last time I saw Gillen Yor, he said I’m not reading true druid anymore. Maybe she couldn’t read me.” Even though he was High Healer at Avalon Memorial, my case was a challenge for Gillen. Since he hadn’t able to figure out what the dark mass in my head was, I didn’t have much hope anyone else would.

  I didn’t want to tell Murdock what the leanansidhe had said. A leanansidhe calling someone a brother was like a serial killer calling someone a hunting buddy. Not the company I wanted to be included in. They were the fey bogey-men. Bogeywomen. I had never heard of a male one.

  “The Guild should handle this,” he said.

  “I agree, this time more than ever,” I said. Given the Guild’s usual indifference to all matters related to the Weird, it might not care all that much about a leanansidhe with some heads in a basement. On the other hand, an agent might want the challenge of the hunt. Leanansidhe were rare. That was about the only good thing about them.

  Joe popped in over our heads. “Did you stab it?”

  I tilted my head up at him. “No, she got away.”

  He slid his sword back into its scabbard and rubbed his hands together. “All righty, then. Now about that whiskey.”

  I swept my flashlight beam along the wall. “I think we’ve earned it. I have some Oreos at the apartment, too,” I said.

  He shivered as he peered at the dark hole where the leanansidhe had escaped. “Screw the cookies.”

  9

  Joe and I spent the rest of the evening drinking, a not uncommon activity for the two of us. Despite his intentions, he did clean me out of cookies. Given the number of crumbs lying around the apartment, I would swear he had used them as Frisbees more often than food. After puzzling over the leanansidhe, a fey neither of us had encountered before, our conversation turned to the casual chatter of old friends. It was a nice change of pace from all the recent drama, although the hangover in the morning reminded me that our alcoholic camaraderie had its downside. A hot shower beating down on me helped lessen the effects.

  For about the tenth time after drying off from the shower, I examined my chest in the bathroom mirror. The smooth skin showed no sign that hours earlier something dark and ethereal had sliced out of me like a knife. My mind could not reconcile the pain it generated with the lack of evidence of its manifestation.

  The dark mass in my head caused me physical pain. I felt the shape of it, sometimes like a smooth orb, sometimes like a sphere of blades. MRI scans showed a shadowy blur, but it appeared to have no physical substance, as if it was a visual manifestation of a metaphorical concept.

  Despite all the access to modern medicine and technology that never existed in Faerie, no one understood the dynamics of the interface between physical bodies and essence manipulation. It was, in that sense, magic—an occurrence of something powerful, even miraculous, yet unexplainable. Whatever was wrong with me had to do with that mysterious connection. I had a damaged interface, something unseen in Faerie because no one in Faerie ever fought over a nuclear-reactor pool. Bergin used an elven ring of power when we fought at a nuclear power station north of Boston. The best Gillen Yor could guess was that some kind of feedback occurred between the ring and the reactor, and destroyed my ability to tap essence.

  In the last month, something had changed. The thing in my head reacted to outside events. It moved in response to essence intrusions. When essence entered my body from outside, the darkness retaliated against it. It wouldn’t let me use essence, and it wouldn’t let essence touch me. I didn’t want to think it was conscious, and instead hoped that it was some kind of autonomic response. For it to be aware would be like living with a virus or a parasite. If that was true, it was taking something from me in return. What that was, I didn’t know and didn’t want to think about.

  The skin showed no sign of the black shadow’s exit and return. My chest felt sore, not the acute soreness of a wound but the more general pain of a fall. The thing inside me had expelled the leanansidhe’s essence. It had done something like that before. When I was attacked by the Dead a few weeks ago, the darkness came out of me like a thick smoke, an amorphous haze with no definition, that absorbed their essences. Now, though, this thing seemed to have a more defined shape and purpose.

  Idly, I traced my fingers along the tattoo on my left forearm. Another mystery. It wasn’t really a tattoo. A silver filigree that once decorated a spear decided it preferred being under my skin instead. A delicate pattern of branches wove around each other to form a mesh from my wrist to my elbow. The silver had been fo
rged as part of a spell that bound essence into the metal to perform a very specific function: to allow travel across the veil between here and Faerie. The old stories simply called the resulting talisman a silver branch.

  Only, like so many other things since Convergence, it didn’t work the way it was intended. At least, it didn’t only work that way. It did help me get into TirNaNog through the veil and back again. It also seemed to do the opposite of the dark mass in my head. The talisman tattoo absorbed essence and became powerful in its own right. A number of times, it actively struggled against the dark mass for control of surrounding essence. I had no idea what it was intended for or how to use it. And, like the dark mass, it didn’t seem any more inclined to help me gain access to my lost abilities.

  My damaged abilities were my problem, but the leanansidhe was another issue altogether. Whatever she was doing beneath the streets of the Weird, she was provoking some serious pain. The Guild had to help this time. Which meant an in-person appeal to Keeva macNeve.

  I slipped on my boots and put the daggers in their sheaths. The left one was for my old faithful, a steel blade that had served me well for over a decade. It had seen a lot of action in more than one rough-and-tumble case when I worked at the Guild. I kept it cleaned and polished, but it would show bloodstains under analysis. Briallen ab Gwyll had given me the knife in my right boot. She taught me the druidic path during my teen years before turning me over to Nigel Martin.

  Last spring, when she gave me the dagger, she was cryptic about it as a gift as well as as an object. It was old and powerful, laced with spells and inscribed with runes. I tried to piece together what they meant, but they were beyond my knowledge. The best I figured out was that powerful wards protected it, and that protection often extended to me when need be. Except, I didn’t know how it did that. Like the darkness in my head, the blade seemed to work for its own purposes sometimes—even turning into a sword once.