Mark Del Franco - Uncertain Allies

“I’m okay,” I said.

She searched my face, her eyes troubled. “I will let you leave if you promise me you will call me the moment you feel out of control.”

I took her hand and kissed it. “I promise.”

I thought she wasn’t going to accept my word, but she inhaled and nodded as if resigned. “I’ll take you to her.”

The surface of my skin felt raw and jangly as we stepped off the elevator upstairs. With all the ward baffling in AvMem, there wasn’t much essence in the air. The mass vibrated inside me, testing the area for a hint of essence, but it was more standard procedure for the dark mass than any threat it would activate.

In Meryl’s room, Gillen Yor stood at the foot of the bed, his fists planted on his hips. He glared at the medical and stone ward monitors as if trying to bend them to his will. Knowing Gillen, he probably was. He cocked his head as we entered, his long, shaggy eyebrows animated. “I’ll be bled and drained if I can figure out what the hell is wrong with this woman.”

Meryl sat in bed, her blank expression unchanged from earlier in the day. White paint flecked her hair and spots on her hands and face where someone had missed cleaning them. I picked up her limp hand. “Is she all right?”

Gillen tugged at his hair, adding to the cotton-candy halo around his bald spot. “Better than she was. We’ve got strong brain activity back. It’s trance-state, but it’s there.”

“That’s good, right?”

Gillen chewed at his lips as he narrowed his eyes. “It’s progress, but there’s still not a damned thing I can do to help her.”

I winced. “Do you think it’s okay to say something like that within her hearing?”

That was a mistake. Gillen glowered with utter contempt. “I do not need some lovesick puppy lecturing me on what is or is not okay to say in front of my own Danu-damned patients, Grey. And speaking of which, who the hell let you out of your cage?”

“His episode is over, Gillen,” Briallen said.

He grunted. “Until next time. How did this reaction occur?”

I moved away from the bed. “There was an intense essence surge. The black mass reacted before I could stop it.”

Gillen hummed as he scanned Meryl. “That must have been some surge. I’ve hit her with high enough bursts of essence to kill a troll. What caused it?”

I ignored his question. The fewer people who knew about the stone ward, the better. “Is she going to be okay now?”

He slid his hands into his lab coat. “These trance states can last anywhere from hours to years. Without knowing how the Taint caused it, I have no means to proceed without dropping everything else, and I can’t do that.”

“So, what? You’re giving up on her?” I asked.

He glared. “She’s alive, Grey. That’s more than I can say the future holds for a lot of my patients. I’ll keep working on the problem, but I can’t do it exclusively.”

I stood shocked in the silence that followed. “You’re giving up.”

His eyes flickered with yellow light, and a sharp gust in the air slapped me hard on the side of the head. “Don’t you dare, Grey. I don’t need a patient in a bed in order to treat them. When you start saving lives instead of screwing them up, then you can criticize my methods.”

Briallen spoke in a quiet voice. “I’ll take her back to my house.”

Gillen stared me down like an angry parent until I looked away. “She is one of yours, Briallen,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

Briallen placed the palm of her hand on Meryl’s cheek. “We’re part of the same Circle, Connor. I understand her in ways no one else does. I may be able to wake her.”

Following the druidic path meant being part of the Grove, men and women joining together to understand their place on the Wheel of the World. The masculine and feminine aspects of that journey had their own peculiarities. Briallen was one of the most powerful druidesses in the world. I wanted to believe she could help Meryl, but she hadn’t been able to figure out what was wrong with me. I didn’t want to doubt her, but I didn’t know whether to have hope.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

Gillen headed for the door. “Leave. I have enough headaches.”

Briallen and I stared at the empty doorway. “He’s in a better mood than usual,” I said.

She chuckled. “It’s a mess here. The riots caused so many essence-related injuries, they’ve opened an annex.”

Seeing Meryl so still, so quiet, tore at me. “Whatever you need to do, Briallen, do it. I want her back.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“I saw what happened during the riots, Connor. I saw video footage of a dark cloud that left hundreds of people drained of essence almost to the point of death. What the footage doesn’t show is who was at the center of that darkness,” she said.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I said.

She laughed. “Oh, now it’s not your fault? After taking the blame for things that weren’t your fault, suddenly it’s not your fault when it obviously is?”

The black mass pulsed as anger surged through me. “I couldn’t control it.”

“Bullshit. I watched that black mass move with purpose—with direction. The victims weren’t the solitaries and the Dead of the Weird. They were Guild and Consortium agents and National Guardsmen. Those are the people you blame for everything that’s wrong. Don’t tell me you didn’t have control. I don’t know how or why you stopped, but don’t try to bullshit me that you didn’t almost kill those people. Those were your victims, Connor.”

I hadn’t told Briallen everything. I hadn’t told her that I had talked to the leanansidhe , not after the thing had called me “brother.” The thought that we were related, even conceptually, terrified me. “It’s complicated.”

“It always is,” she said.

“Remember the leanansidhe I found? Her abilities have something to do with the black mass in my head. I asked her for help.”

With cool anger, Briallen glanced down at Meryl. “Did she know about this?”

I looked away. “No. I went alone.”

She grabbed my chin and turned my face toward her. “Did you do this to her, Connor?”

I pulled back. “No! How could you say that?”

She set her chin. “How could you not tell me about the leanansidhe ?”

Exasperated, I rubbed at my face. “You’re right. I should have told you. I was—I don’t know—embarrassed. The leanansidhe showed me that when the black mass gets out, the pain goes away a little. She thought she was controlling it, but that’s only half-true. I don’t want to believe it has a mind of its own, but it has a compulsion that’s hard to resist. It makes me want essence, too.”

“Is it out of control?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I use my body essence to hold it in check.”

Unimpressed, a corner of her mouth curled down. “Yes, I’m sure the two drained agents will appreciate that.”

“I was out when they arrived. I think the darkness is afraid of draining me. If I die, it loses its host. Those agents would have died otherwise.”

“You’re guessing. We need to test it somehow,” she said.

“I haven’t hurt anyone, and I don’t want you to be the first,” I said.

“Let me worry about that. I’ll call you when Meryl is settled in, and we’ll arrange something,” she said.

I hung my head. “I need to find Shay. Are you going to stop me?”

For a moment, I thought she might. “Go, then. If you have any more episodes, I want to know about them. I mean it,” she said.

“Okay.”

She stopped me at the door, wrapping her arms around me. “I’m worried.”