Mark Del Franco: Uncertain Allies

The bus cut through an intersection and rocked side to side as it settled in at the Haymarket stop. Like so much Boston transportation, the route didn’t quite take me to where I wanted to go. Waiting for a connection would take longer than hoofing it, so I walked the final blocks to Cambridge Street.

An old brick building overlooking the river had been home to Avalon Memorial Hospital for decades. When the fey got sick, they went to Boston for the best healing expertise. Gillen Yor was chief of staff, and no one knew more about fey medicine than he did. He had been High Queen Maeve’s personal physician until he left for the States. She wasn’t happy about that. He didn’t care.

I passed through the main entrance, its lintel carved with apples dangling from trees in a nod to its Faerie namesake. Avalon was an island, a place of healing, shrouded in mystery. The island didn’t come through during Convergence, when other parts of Faerie merged with reality. The fey did the next best thing and opened hospitals that specialized in essence-related maladies and injuries.

The elevator doors opened on Meryl’s floor, and the scent of dill and lavender tickled my nose. It said something about my life that the odors of a hospital had a familiarity that had become a comfort for me. Hawthorn, birch, latex, and bleach mixed in an aroma that meant hope and healing. Healers did the best they could with the knowledge they had, and then some. They didn’t always succeed, but AvMem was the best bet for most anyone.

Last year, a tainted form of essence had infected the fey down in the Weird. The Taint caused anyone who encountered it to lose control and become violent. It was a major factor in the rioting. With Meryl’s help, Eorla absorbed the Taint and contained it. In the process, they had been bombarded with the Taint and fell into comas. Eorla woke up. Meryl didn’t. Since then, she had been in a trance state, with no explanation or cure in sight.

Essence was a tool with no will of its own. Depending on the user’s intent, it could heal or kill. In the main hallways of AvMem, stone wards dampened ambient essence. The stones were infused with spells to reduce interference with the delicate precision of healing spells that operated in patient rooms. Powerful wards made even the trace of essence disappear, but those took time and ability. AvMem’s wards ran a middle ground—strong enough to dampen wayward essence from interfering with healing spells but not so strong that the ability necessary to create them wasted energy, which was why I sensed body signatures as I came out of the elevator, a strong one in particular. I quickened my pace to Meryl’s room.

Seated with his back to the door, Nigel Martin cocked his head to the side as I entered, sensing me as I had sensed him. Meryl faced me from a chair opposite him, her stare the same vacant stare it had been for months. I walked around the bed and stood between them.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked.

Nigel tipped his head back, his hands propped on a cane between his knees. The past year had aged him, more white in the dark brown hair that swept over his ears to the nape of his neck, more lines networked in the crow’s-feet of his eyes. As much as I wanted to dismiss the stress he had been under, I had a momentary pang thinking that my former mentor was getting old. It was momentary, though. Nigel and I weren’t on good terms.

His eyes narrowed. “Your body signature becomes more a mystery to me each time we meet, Connor. Are you in any pain?”

I’d had my own accident with a spell backlash. Almost three years earlier, I was hunting down a terrorist by the name of Bergin Vize. I caught up with him at a nuclear power plant north of Boston, and all hell broke loose. Vize had a ring of power—what it was for I still didn’t know—and a feedback loop with the reactor caused an explosion. When I woke up, I had no ability to manipulate essence anymore and the shadowy black mass in my head. It hurt like hell, but as far as I was concerned, it was no longer any of Nigel’s business.

I gave him my back as I tugged Meryl’s hand. She didn’t have any awareness of her surroundings, but she responded to some stimuli. I slipped my hand along her arm and guided her back to the bed. As she settled against the pillows, I faced Nigel. “I asked you a question.”

He flicked an eyebrow in annoyance. “There are those, believe it or not, Connor, who seek my help. Gillen Yor told me he cannot detect any brain activity, yet she isn’t vegetative. I came to see for myself.”

I used my sensing ability—the only ability I had left—to check Meryl. Other than her dimmed body signature, I detected nothing different from my last visit. “Did you do anything to her?”

He shook his head. “Why does my friendship with her bother you so?”

I frowned. “I’ve had your friendship, Nigel. It’s a fickle thing.”

He considered me with a measured stare. “If that’s the way you feel, I wouldn’t be too sure of your newfound friends if I were you.”

I pushed Meryl’s chair farther away from him. “Eorla? Is that where you’re going to go? If it weren’t for her, Nigel, things would be worse, and you know it. She’s the only person from the Guild who has done anything to stop the fighting between the Celts and Teuts.”

The corner of his mouth drooped as he went to the window. “Her role at the Guild is a technical matter. She is as much the Elven King’s creature as Bastian Frye.”

I would have loved to see him say that to Eorla’s face. Bastian Frye was the Elven King’s master spy and assassin. Eorla liked him less than I did Nigel these days. “And whose creature are you, Nigel?”

That time he smiled. “I might ask you the same question.”

“I am no one’s creature,” I said.

“Really? Do you ever wonder how it is that you ended up fighting the Guild when it was hunting Bergin Vize? Or how it is that you stood at Eorla’s side when the Weird burned down? Do you not find that at all curious?”

I sighed. “Still seeing Teutonic Consortium agents in the shadows, Nigel?”

He peered at me with one eye open. “Still pretending they’re not there, Connor?”

“I don’t pretend anything. I’m trying not to get killed in the cross fire,” I said.

“You almost killed a few hundred people in the process from what I heard,” he said.

I snorted. “I figured Ryan macGoren would go running to you. How is the Acting Guildmaster these days? Has he changed his shorts yet?”

He became solemn, the lecturing old mentor who knew better than I did. “Concerned, Connor. He’s concerned that something potentially dangerous is falling into the hands of the Elven King.”

“And what might that be?”

“You.” He smiled at my surprised reaction. “Deny they have offered you asylum. Tell me that old fool Brokke hasn’t whispered his vague portents in your ears.” I didn’t answer him. Both things had happened. Brokke was a dwarf who had a formidable talent for reading the future. Nigel bobbed his head. “Precisely.”

“So now that I’m supposedly dangerous, you’re interested in me again? Are we friends again, Nigel?”

“Your petulance is childish,” he said.

“And your arrogance is insulting,” I said.

He walked toward the door. “There are fools that believe the Wheel of the World turns, and we hang on until we drop. When you move beyond the framework of someone else’s definition of what the Wheel is, Connor, you stop being a creature.”

That was the Nigel I remembered, the man with whom I argued through many a night of beer and wine, who expected me to listen to myself as much as him. That Nigel was my mentor and, I’d thought, my friend. That man vanished when my abilities vanished. I was a tool for him before that and didn’t have the brains to realize it. He had even tried to kill me since then, although Briallen, the true mentor in my life, didn’t believe that was his intent. She wasn’t there. She didn’t see the deadly essence strike aimed at my head, blocked only by Murdock’s intervention. “I’m going to ask you again, Nigel. What are you doing here?”