Mark Del Franco - Uncertain Allies

I took one more calming breath. A street address in the Tangle was pointless since the streets appeared to move. Illusions hid passageways that appeared at certain times or when the light struck from the proper angles. Sometimes the path itself was an illusion that had to be followed in order to find a destination. Murdock had told me to follow a line of dark blue brick buildings and turn up the alley next to the third one.

I found the building with no problem, turned into the alley, and saw a lamppost with a green light. Ten paces past that I walked through a door that looked like the entrance to a building but actually led to another alley. Over my shoulder, the illusion didn’t exist—the entrance to the alley wasn’t a small door but the typical wide gap between buildings.

People hurried by, huddled in hood-drawn cloaks or turning away from me. Not everyone wanted to be seen in the Tangle. The end of the second alley let out onto a narrow street. Despite people moving in every direction, some fast, some slow, it wasn’t hard to find Murdock. The cluster a block away had the obvious appearance of crime-scene rubberneckers.

An electric anticipation filled the air. People ran up and down the street, voices pitched with excitement and anger. Dim light made everything more chaotic as shadows played along the walls. A group of dwarves crowded ahead, shouting in triumph as they shined lights on the wall.

Two patrol officers kept the crowd back. Murdock had his gun drawn and his body shield up. The fey folk around him threw apprehensive looks at the metal weapon. Murdock didn’t have the whole beware-of-iron baggage the fey had, and a man with a body shield and a gun confused them. The funny part was that because he always had his gun on him, he had intuitively figured out how to compensate for the essence warp the metal created.

I edged around the crowd for a better view of the wall. At first, my mind didn’t process what I was seeing. It seemed fake, like a strange art installation or even a joke. A thought later, I realized it was no joke.

Suspended a foot or so off the ground, a woman was embedded in a bricked-over archway. Her twisted body protruded from the bricks as if caught in the act of turning away. One arm dangled limp over the sidewalk, the other lost from sight in the wall. One leg had gone through. The other bent against the stone pavement, its foot twisted sideways against the ground. Her head was turned away from the wall, as if she had paused to look down behind her. Long dark hair draped over her shoulder, obscuring her face.

I stopped next to Murdock. “That’s not a leanansidhe ,” I said.

“I didn’t think so,” he said. Even without sensing her elven body signature, I would have known she wasn’t a leanansidhe . The leanansidhe were around four feet tall, and the woman in the wall was nearly six feet. Now that I was close enough, I sensed a barrier shield, not a literal wall. She had started to pass through the barrier, and it closed on her.

Murdock shouted at the crowd to disperse. They moved back but didn’t leave. The patrol officers did their best to maintain control, but on a good day, people in the Tangle weren’t known for complying with the law.

I lifted the hair from the dead woman’s face and froze in surprise. “Son of a bitch. This is Gerda Alfheim.”

Murdock shuffled closer. “You know her?”

“I saw pictures of her after the Castle Island fiasco,” I said.

He leaned in closer so as not to be overheard. “What did she have to do with Castle Island?”

From her expression, her death had not been pleasant. She was well within the field of the glamour when the barrier spell triggered a shutdown through the door. “She put Gethin macLoren up to what happened, Leo. That’s his mother,” I said.

MacLoren was a terrorist responsible for the first in the string of recent disasters in Boston. He was mentally unbalanced, a damaged soul whose mother, Gerda, was an elf and father a Danann fairy. Gerda had manipulated her son’s desire to heal and used him in an attempt to open a portal into another realm that held some of the scary beings out of Faerie history. It was the first major case Murdock and I had worked together. We both almost died stopping the catastrophe. Gerda Alfheim hadn’t been working alone back then. Anger swept over me as something fell into place for me. “Gerda works with Bergin Vize. This changes everything, Leo.”

I wasn’t the only person who had recognized Gerda Alfheim. Word spread through official and unofficial channels, and law-enforcement agencies from the Guild, the Consortium, and the federal government descended on the Tangle. A dead international terrorist garnered attention. I wasn’t much interested in Gerda, though. I wanted to know about her ally, and I knew one person who might put me on a lead to him.

I nursed my third Guinness in a back booth at Yggy’s. It took more than that for me to get drunk enough to be stupid, but I didn’t know how long I would have to wait for Brokke. I had asked Rand to send Brokke my request to meet. Rand couldn’t promise anything, but he said he would try. Given Gerda’s death, I was pretty sure Brokke’s arrival would be more “when” than “if.” Even so, my patience was wearing thin.

Murdock wanted to be there, but I asked him to let me handle it. Brokke didn’t trust people and was likely to avoid answering questions with anyone else around. I didn’t fool myself into thinking he trusted me. As a scryer, he liked being able to see possible futures. Adding Murdock into the mix would increase the variables and shake up the outcomes.

Brokke showed before dawn, slipping into the booth when the bar was loudest, and people were less attentive. A waitress served him a small glass of claret before he had time to settle in. “I didn’t realize you were known here,” I said.

He sipped. “Yggy’s has been here longer than you’ve been alive, Grey. Some of the staff have been here since it opened.”

I went right to the point. “Where’s Bergin Vize?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Bull. I know he hasn’t left Boston. Why is he here, Brokke?”

Brokke held the stem of his glass between two fingers and moved it back and forth. “That’s a different question. He thinks he’s saving the world.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Brokke pursed his lips. “You know anything I tell you will have ramifications.”

“So will anything you don’t tell me,” I said.

He sipped the claret, playing it around on his tongue. “In my life, I have seen many things I wish I hadn’t. People think knowing the future is an advantage, an opportunity to create something good or avoid something bad. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that not knowing is better than knowing. People rarely make choices that benefit the future.”

People with information always said crap like that. Everyone else was too dumb to be trusted. “I’m not interested in the future. I want to know about the past and the present. You know why Vize is here. I don’t believe it’s for any good reason. Convince me not to hunt him down and kill him with my bare hands.”

“I’ve seen that possibility. It doesn’t end well,” he said.

“For him or me?”

“For anyone,” he said.

I finished off my beer and signaled for another. “Maybe that’s fine by me. Maybe I don’t give a damn anymore.”

He stared at me with an infinite patience that made me want to slap him. “I don’t believe that about you,” he said.

I hunched forward at the table. “Fine. Maybe I’ll kill him to spite you. A world without Vize has to be better than one with him, no matter what you say.”

“A fatal flaw exists in that statement. You assume a world will exist without him,” he said.