Mark Del Franco - Unfallen Dead

I eyeballed the missing car door. “Your essence surged. You get an adrenaline boost when that happens.”

He didn’t respond. “Murdock…”

He shook his head. “Not now, Connor.”

I compressed my lips. All summer he had been in and out of Avalon Memorial as one fey healer after another examined him. No one could find any obvious signs that the strange change to his body essence was hurting him. But no one could figure out what had happened to him either. I found it intriguing because I couldn’t tap essence anymore. If we could figure out what happened to Murdock, it might help figure out how to fix me. Not that I was being self-involved. I was worried about Murdock. The whole thing wouldn’t have happened to him if it hadn’t been for me. Briallen thinks I blame myself too much. Sometimes, she’s right. Sometimes, I don’t think I blame myself enough.

The few remaining cars pulled out of the lot as the sound of sirens drew near. Before any official vehicles arrived, a plain black sedan turned in. A dwarf hopped out of the passenger side, while a tall, elderly druid eased himself out of the driver’s seat. They huddled over the elf. The druid’s hands glowed white as he trailed them over the comatose elf. The essence winked off. The two conferred. The dwarf nodded, picked up the elf, and eased him into the backseat of the car while the druid returned to the driver’s seat. They departed as an ambulance and a squad car arrived.

Murdock waved them over. He looked over at me. “Don’t say anything to them about… you know. I don’t want this getting back to my father until I’ve had a chance to talk to him.”

I could live with a little omission of facts. Happens all the time in law enforcement. Commissioner Scott Murdock was riding the current anxiety against the fey in the city for all it was worth. Politically, he had managed to constrain the less-well-off fey in the Weird, leaving the more powerful ones alone. With the city on high alert, he was more than willing to let the Weird burn a little if it meant the rest of the city felt safer. The fact that his own son insisted on patrolling that same neighborhood galled him no end. If he knew about Murdock’s newly acquired body shields, he’d go ballistic and convince himself that the fey were a contagious infection. He’s the type.

As EMTs unloaded the guy in the first car onto a gurney, I left Murdock to handle the situation the way he wanted. I waited in his car while Joe snored in the backseat.

More emergency vehicles arrived. Carmine had to have someone on the police department payroll for this amount of attention. Help in the Weird tended to happen a helluva lot slower otherwise. Secrets were the true currency of the Weird, and, knowing Carmine, he had a long list of secrets that various people didn’t want revealed. It wouldn’t be the first time someone did favors to keep someone else quiet. But, like all secrets, eventually they would be revealed. Then all good hell would break loose, and it would be fun to watch the reputations fall. As long as one wasn’t yours.

The Book Spine was a slice of bookstore on Congress Street. When I say slice, I mean slice. The place was an alley fill-in between two larger buildings, no more than a dozen feet wide. Inside, a checkout counter sat to the right and cubbies for bags and knapsacks rose to the left. You needed the cubbies if you wanted to move around without getting wedged between the stacks or getting a swift kick for bonking someone with a knapsack. There were only three stacks: the right wall, the left wall, and one down the center. The trick was there were five levels. Steep, narrow stairs at the back of the long floor let you up to the first three. The last two were open air. If you couldn’t fly or levitate, you had to rely on the kindness of other browsers or an overworked staff person to lift you.

The symbols carved into Kaspar’s and Merced’s foreheads remained a mystery. I had exhausted my own library, and the Internet had offered little more than amateur sites. It’s impossible to search for a rune if you don’t have a name for it. The symbol had to be a sigil of some kind, either cultic or gang-related. Murdock was looking into the latter, but I jogged around the Weird enough to recognize most of the gang signs and didn’t think that would go anywhere.

I picked up a small dictionary of symbols bound in red leather. The copy was old, handcrafted inside and out. The cramped script flared here and there with essence. Sometimes, when a sufficiently powerful fey writes down a rune, one that needs to exist only as a sigil to activate its purpose, the rune activates. Whoever had written the dictionary had made a classic error by inscribing symbols. Nothing dangerous as far as I could tell, but not the smartest thing to do.

I tucked a larger tome under my arm, a cross-cultural reference on symbols in ancient religions. Depending on one’s view, essence manipulation was either a science or a religion. I had come down on the science side for years, but that was before I met the drys. Druids considered the drys as the incarnate essence of the oak, and therefore sacred. They were something-some one — I had taken for a myth. The old tales from Faerie told of gods and goddesses, minor deities and sacred rites. For most of my life, I assumed they were glorifications of real people lost in the mists of time. Fey people, to be sure, but no more godlike than anyone else who could manipulate essence. After feeling the power of the essence of the drys, I had to wonder if I had been wrong all this time. I still wasn’t sure.

A cell phone rang. It took me a moment to realize it was mine. After breaking my old one at the Kaspar murder scene, I had replaced it and forgotten I changed the ringtone, too. Before losing the call to voice mail, I juggled the books under one arm while avoiding knocking into a small fairy browsing next to me. I didn’t recognize the caller from the ID, which was surprising since I don’t give my cell number out to many people. I answered it, expecting a wrong number.

“I’ll be damned. It is you,” Dylan said.

The fairy next to me returned my courtesy by slapping my face with his wings as he reached for a book on an upper shelf. “Dylan. How’d you get this number?”

“Should I be concerned that a dealer in stolen goods has your private phone number?”

The undercurrent of teasing was so typical of Dylan. “I assume you are talking about Belgor?”

“Is that a guess? Or do you know more than one?”

I eased my way down to the narrow stairs. “Now, now, Dyl. I have my secrets.”

“Mmm. I wouldn’t have guessed. Yes, it’s Belgor. There’s been an incident at his store, and he says he will speak only with you.”

I slid the books onto the counter and smiled an apology at the cashier. I hate when people talk on their cells when they interact with other people. “Sounds like Belgor. Has he been raided again?”

“No. He’s been assaulted. At least, that’s what it looks like.”

The cashier rang up the books, and I handed him three crumpled twenties. The budget gets depleted this way all too often. “Is he hurt?”

“Banged up and angry. I’d appreciate it if you came down here and helped sort it out.”

I gathered my change and purchases and walked outside into the dull light of the late afternoon. “I’m around the corner. I’ll be right there.”

I disconnected. Belgor was a snitch. A big, smelly snitch, but a good snitch. He had owned his store on Calvin Place for as long as anyone could remember. It masqueraded as a convenience store and curiosity shop. At some point, it probably was a legitimate business, but these days his profits all come from the back room. He knew how to play the legal game and cover his tracks, but that didn’t make his wares any less stolen. He did a fair amount of buying and selling that could be considered aboveboard, but he wasn’t particular about asking where things came from.