Mark Del Franco - Uncertain Allies

“I didn’t start it,” I said.

“I didn’t say you did, Connor. Gerry’s been a little temperamental lately,” he said.

I touched my fingers to a tender cheekbone. Nothing felt broken, but the eye would darken by sunup. “A little? He hit me, Leo. Why the hell isn’t he on desk duty? He shot Moira Cashel.”

Moira was the reason Scott Murdock, the police commissioner, was dead. He was going to kill her and ended up shooting me by accident. Gerry killed her during the riot that happened afterward. Leo and I walked toward the crime scene. “The force is shorthanded. All internal investigations are on hold.”

“You need to talk to him, Leo. I didn’t kill your father,” I said.

He looked tired. I didn’t blame him. “I know. I will. Why was he in your face anyway?”

“Eorla asked me to check out some disappearances around the Tangle, and I ran into this on my way back. Gerry wasn’t happy to see me.” Eorla Elvendottir had stopped the riot and brought calm to the neighborhood, at least calm by the Weird’s standards. In the process, she broke away from the Elven Court and set up her own, making the Weird her particular area of protection. The human government was having a little problem with that. It didn’t get the connection between Eorla’s standing up for the Weird and the fact that humans did little to protect the people down here.

“Then we’re both here to work. I’ll talk to Gerry. Stay out of his way for a while,” he said.

Some terrible things had happened to Murdock—to all the Murdocks—because of me. Leo told me he wasn’t going to hold them against me. He said that what had happened might have been my fault in a sense, but I wasn’t to blame. Other things, other people, had their parts in it. Knowing I wasn’t to blame didn’t help my guilt. People were dead, people Murdock cared about. I was part of it and didn’t know how to fix that. At least Leo believed me about what had just happened with Gerry. Even with a bruise forming under my eye, I had to let it go and let him handle it. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

I wasn’t the only person Eorla had sent to monitor that the Boston police did its job without prejudice. Across the pit, a red-uniformed elf stood out like a signal beacon against the pale gray sky, one of Eorla’s men. Near him, a thin tree fairy, her skin a pale gray, hair a thick-layered mat, shuffled along the ground.

Down in the shallow hole, the dark figure of Janey Likesmith busied herself around a dead dwarf. A Dokkheim elf, Janey was the sole fey staffer at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. I admired her dedication. The fey cases the Guild didn’t want landed on her desk, and since the humans didn’t know what to do with them, she had to handle them alone. After the insanity that had almost burned down the Weird, she had more than her share of bodies to sort through. The Guild gave token help, and the OCME focused more on the human remains its staff knew how to handle. Janey needed a break, but I didn’t see one coming anytime soon.

She had spread a small tarp a few feet from the body; her travel bag, from which she withdrew instruments and laid them at the ready, was open. The police officers at the next crime-scene tape let me pass under without hassle. I picked my way down the slope. Janey smiled at Murdock before she looked at me, the cool night air steaming her breath from her mouth. “Happy Yule.”

I returned the smile as I crouched next to her. “A few months late.”

She kept the smile. “I haven’t seen you since the beginning of the year. Despite everything that’s going on, Connor, the return of the light is something to look forward to. That’s what Yule is for.”

All the fey celebrated Yule with variations on the basic theme of renewal in celebration of the days getting longer. The Teutonic fey focused on peace and the future. I didn’t know the specifics of Janey’s Dokkheim clan, but peace wasn’t a bad thing to hope for. “You’re right. Happy Yule.”

The dead dwarf didn’t look like he had found much peace and happiness. He knelt on gravel, hands slack to either side and his head dropped back. Milky eyes the shade of raw oyster stared at the sky, and his mouth gaped in horror or shock. As I shifted closer to the body to search for any obvious wounds, the black mass in my head pulsed low and steady, like a headache coming on, or—more accurately—a bigger headache. I always had a headache.

The black mass plagued me. MRI scans showed a dark shadow in my brain but nothing tangible. A spell feedback during a fight had left the mass behind, and it had damaged my ability to manipulate essence.

At first, the mass gave me headaches. Then it started to move around, change shape, and hurt like hell. Not long ago, the mass changed again, seeming to have a will or purpose of its own. Sometimes it extended from my body in a way I didn’t understand, but its effect was clear. It drained essence from whatever it touched, and if it touched people, it could kill them. I could kill them. There was no separating me from it in the eyes of the world. Whatever happened to the dwarf caused the dark mass to react.

Janey set thermometers around the body to get base readings. “I don’t think he’s been here long. No obvious animal damage, and he’s still in rigor. Hard to tell with a fey death, though. If essence is involved, it complicates the physical readings. Plus, this pit creates its own microclimate. We’re out of the wind, so the temperature will scale differently in here.”

“Isn’t this a bit late for you?” I asked.

She scribbled a note on her pad: the time of my arrival and where I entered the pit. “I heard the call as I was going off shift and came out to get it done. I would’ve gotten the call anyway. Everyone’s backed up.”

What she didn’t say is that no one from the OCME would have responded unless no other crimes were happening—a rarity—and her job would have been that much harder with a processing delay.

At the lip of the pit, the ash fairy huddled on the ground, her head twitching from side to side. To the non-fey, she appeared to be a crazy person sniffing the ground, but the fey recognized the behavior as sensing for the trail of someone. Indentations in the sand led up the slope near her. “Has anyone been that way? I think we have footprints.”

Janey grabbed her camera. “Good eye. I’m the only one that’s been down here.”

We climbed out of the pit the way we had come down and circled toward the indentations. The ash fairy peered at me from beneath her dark tangle of hair, then shuffled back as I approached. She pointed a long, pale arm toward the ground. “Dead earth. Doesn’t feel right.”

All living things emanated essence, the energy that keeps the Wheel of the World turning. Tree fairies were attuned to their clan trees and the earth. Some fey sensed essence as druids did, saw it as shapes of color with a secondary vision that human science hadn’t figured out. People left traces of essence on whatever they touched, even in the air. The longer they remained someplace, the more essence residue accumulated. The footprints leading out of the pit and across the empty lot didn’t shine with essence light. The earth surrounding the prints wasn’t missing its natural essence, making the prints themselves stand out even more. They had no telltale essence signatures that would identify the person or species. Someone powerful was responsible for removing the essence—or responsible for helping someone else do it.

Janey photographed the area. “So this is likely a murder.”

We were in the Weird with a dead dwarf that didn’t get reported by whoever was with him when he died. The odds were slim that he died of a heart attack. I gave her shoulder a squeeze. “I’m going to look around. I’ll let you know if I see anything else.”