Mark Del Franco - Uncertain Allies

The dark tendrils in the alley the previous night were exactly how a leanansidhe siphoned essence from people. I had two explanations for what had happened in the Tangle. Either Druse was alive, or another leanansidhe was loose in the city. One leanansidhe in the neighborhood was a surprise—even a shock. Two stretched the bounds of believability.

The dwarf’s dying whisper that “she” wanted the stone made it more plausible that Druse was alive. She had a stone ward she was willing to kill for—a rare ward shaped like a bowl that had the ability to generate essence from its surroundings and return it tenfold. Druse used it to stave off her hunger during the low periods when she couldn’t acquire living prey. The ward stone had a geasa—an essence-enhanced restriction—that only a virgin could move it. A virgin-only geasa was old-school Faerie stuff, and the stone was definitely old-school. The essence it emitted had the distinct signature of the Faerie that existed before Convergence. A fortuitous blow to the head with that same stone bowl stopped Druse and, I thought, killed her. If she had survived, she would want the bowl back and would stop at nothing until she had it.

After I escaped Druse, I hid the stone with a street kid named Shay, who had a rather funny advantage in the virgin department. No one knew Shay had the stone, but Druse was attuned to it and would find it eventually.

Shay had been through a lot of heartache because of me, and I didn’t want to panic him with a theory. If whatever was haunting the Weird and the Tangle was not Druse, Shay would be safe—or at least safer. Before I told him anything, I wanted to see Druse’s body for myself, and the way to do that was to return to her lair. Murdock had known what I wanted to do before I did. I had to go back and confirm whether the body was there.

I waited in the cool early-morning air outside the warehouse where we had first found the leanansidhe . Murdock arrived all tricked out in a police tactical uniform but with his regular Boston P.D. jacket over it so there was no mistaking where he worked. I wore jeans and a short leather jacket. “You look like you mean business,” I said.

“I do. I’m not walking in blind this time.” Druse had been feeding on one of her victims when we stumbled on her in a tunnel. She’d attacked Murdock and knocked him on his ass. She would have drained him to death, too, if I hadn’t been there.

The building remained a crime scene after Murdock and I had found skeletons in the basement. Druse had been around a long time before we found her. The Weird was the perfect place for her to operate. Since it was routine for people to disappear in the neighborhood without explanation, she survived without notice for years.

Murdock produced a key out from the pocket of his black tactical vest and unlocked the warehouse door. The inside had not changed since my last—unauthorized—visit. An upper corridor led to a hammered-metal basement door. We descended into the gloom of the basement. Murdock activated his body shield at the bottom of the metal stairs. It burned crimson in my vision. Under normal circumstances, the layer of hardened essence protected him from a fey attack, with the exception of a leanansidhe . Heightened essence was what she sought, and a shield served as an appetizer to her.

A narrow passage stretched fifty feet to a tunnel that led to the sewer system. That was the route we used to find the basement when we were investigating another case. Unlike our first visit, the space was empty, swept clean of the possessions and remains of Druse’s victims. The police had been processing the large volume of evidence for months.

On the right, a hole broken through a bricked-over archway led to the basement proper, a vast space that was empty when we found it and empty still. At the far end, an opening in the wall gaped like a wound. “You couldn’t see this opening a month ago, Leo. The leanansidhe had a glamour on it that made it look like the rest of the wall.”

He directed the beam of his flashlight into the opening. “It looks clear.”

“I’ve been in there. There’s a few blind turns, but mostly a straight shot to her room. Watch out for binding spells,” I said.

Despite my foray into the various tunnels around the city, I wasn’t a big fan of urban exploration. It was dangerous in general, and in the Weird, it was asking for trouble. Through the hole, the walls and ceiling had a smooth, organic feel to them, an indication that they had been shaped long ago by trolls and dwarves. The path wound deep beneath the Weird, branching off to parts unknown.

“You came down here alone and unarmed?” Murdock asked.

“Yep.”

He chuckled in my ear. “Man, you are crazier than I thought.”

“Well, I wasn’t down here for the best possible reasons.” As understatements go, that was a big one. Druse knew things about the dark mass in my head, maybe not how it got there or how to get rid of it, but she showed me how to—and I hated to admit it even to myself—enjoy it. The pleasure it gave me was hard to describe, but the kick and the kink of a sexual addiction didn’t come close. No matter how I tried to stop myself, I gave in to the desire at the risk of my life and people I cared about. I had managed to keep it under control all these months by staying away from powerful essence sources.

In the upper section of the tunnel, we passed rooms that were basements to other buildings. As we descended, the path sloping deeper underground, the rooms were shaped out of the earth and became more rough-hewn, empty of trash or other debris. “What the hell is this place?” Murdock asked.

“Boston is almost four hundred years old, and it’s riddled with tunnels. Someone’s dug a hole in the ground in every one of those years,” I said. Access tunnels, subway tunnels, sewage tunnels, utility tunnels, escape tunnels—name it, and there’s a tunnel for it somewhere in the city. At least once a month, someone doing construction or renovation stumbles on one or more passageways, some impressive enough to make the news. The ones that don’t make the news are the scary ones, small bolt-holes that were used to get out of sight fast and secure.

We arrived at Druse’s room without any surprises. At one point, she had rigged the tunnels with binding spells, webs of essence that trapped intruders. Without her, the spells had dissipated. The lack of them raised my anxiety as I waited for an attack that hadn’t come.

We stood to either side of the entrance, searching for signs of movement within. A stained-glass lamp had provided the main lighting, but it lay broken on the floor, smashed in the fight between Druse and Keeva. A bare bulb dangling from an extension cord along the ceiling cast enough light to see by after the darkness of the tunnel. Murdock entered first, his shooting arm extended as he scanned the room.

I panned the beam of my flashlight into darker corners. “I don’t feel anyone,” I said.

Murdock remained in a crouch as he worked his way across the room. “You didn’t the first time we met her. Remember? We thought she was dead.”

My light picked out the random assortment of furniture Druse had collected over the years. Judging by the volume, she had been down there for a long time. Books lay everywhere. When I first saw the room, the books had no discernible organization—stacks of them on tables and chairs, shoved into leaning bookcases and piled on the floor. That was orderly compared to now. Now, the room was in shambles. It hadn’t changed since the night I almost killed Keeva.

“She’s not here, Leo. The room hasn’t been touched since the night Shay killed her,” I said.

He swung his flashlight beam toward me. “What the hell did you say?”