Mark Del Franco: Uncertain Allies

He paused at the door, glancing at Meryl. “I came to visit a friend, Connor, and perhaps to help her in some way more productive than tucking her into bed.”

I stared out the window after he left and watched windchopped waves whip past on the Charles River. The warmth of my breath fogged the glass, revealing a circle with a dot in the middle that someone had doodled. I added two eyes and a smile, glancing back at Meryl. She didn’t react, of course, but a small part of me hoped she would. I slipped onto the edge of the bed and held her hand. “He’s a jerk no matter what you say.”

Her face remained slack, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Silence wasn’t one of Meryl’s strong suits. Seeing her on a bed without a sharp observation or comment was like not seeing her at all. Something had driven away her mind. Gillen Yor, High Healer at AvMem, hadn’t been able to break through the silence. Maybe I was wrong to resist Nigel’s help, but I worried that he would make matters worse.

Meryl’s hair had been dyed a fiery red. She changed the color regularly, but dark roots had appeared since she had been in the hospital. “Your dye job’s growing out. I’d fix it, but you probably wouldn’t like it.” She didn’t answer.

A nurse stopped short in the doorway. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”

I hopped off the bed. “I was visiting. Do you know if Gillen Yor is around?”

The nurse pulled a cart into the room. “He’s down at the desk. Can you excuse us a moment?”

“Sure.”

I found the nurses’ station empty. Glancing down, I noticed the file rack for the floor patients. As casually as possible, I craned my neck to see into nearby rooms for Gillen Yor. I pulled Meryl’s file. It was nosy and a violation and wrong, but she didn’t have anyone acting as a health-care proxy. I skimmed through the notes, deciphering Gillen’s scrawl as best I could. I didn’t understand most of it—trance sessions, spell orders, and essence ward boosters mixed with standard physical care like saline fluids and electrolytes. No eureka moments.

Gillen Yor yanked the chart out of my hands and shoved it back in the rack. “Mind your business.”

I hadn’t sensed him come up behind me. Even as I turned toward him, he relaxed the body shield that had hidden his essence. He had snuck up on me on purpose. “I’m sorry.”

Gillen was over a foot shorter than me, a strange man with a halo of gray hair circling his bald spot. He pulled at the hair often when he was thinking. Staring up at me, he tilted his head to the side. “No, you’re not. You want to know what’s going on, ask me.”

“Okay, what’s going on?”

He slipped his hands into his doctor’s coat and shrugged. “Nothing. No responses to anything yet. Nigel gave me some things to think about, but I’m not confident.”

“If it’s coming from Nigel, I’m not either,” I said.

He peered at me with his usual angry attitude. “I don’t give a damn about your personal opinions, Grey. If the Elven King himself gave me an idea I thought would work, I’d damned well use it.”

I tamped down my own anger. Given Gillen’s personality, there was no competing with him in the annoyance department anyway. He didn’t care what I thought, didn’t care what anyone thought. He lived and breathed the healing arts and was the best druid healer alive. I was his biggest failure. For years, he had been trying to figure out the dark thing in my head. With Meryl, he had another mystery on his hands, and I suspected he blamed me for it. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t know what I meant.”

He shook his head. “You look like hell. That thing in your head looks like a dagger. Does it hurt?”

Like Nigel, Gillen was a powerful enough druid to scan me from a distance. Touching made the exam more refined, but it wasn’t always necessary. “No. Well, yeah, but no different than usual.”

“I saw video of what you did down in the Weird. Actually, I didn’t see a damned thing, but darkness. Can you control it?” he asked.

At one point during the riot, I lost control of myself. I thought Meryl was dead, and a fury built inside me that I didn’t know I was capable of. I remembered the dark mass spiraling out of me, becoming a huge cloud of shadow that sucked up essence in its wake. It happened so fast and I was so angry, I don’t know if I made it do that or if the darkness took advantage of my mental state somehow.

I closed my eyes, touched the dark spot in my mind with a mental nudge from the essence in my body signature. The dark mass didn’t move or respond in any way. I opened my eyes. “Not now. I might have then. I don’t know how.”

He grunted, pulling his hair on one side as he stalked off. “Stay out of my files, Grey.”

Back in Meryl’s room, the nurse had gone. Meryl was in the chair by the window again, staring at the glass. The smiley face had been wiped away.

I nudged Meryl legs closer to the chair and pulled at her hand. She rose on unsteady feet. I led her out of the room and to the elevator. She responded to touch, to pushes and pulls. Gillen suggested that I take her for walks and give her exercise she wouldn’t get lying in a hospital bed. The walks made me feel like she was okay. Whatever was wrong, she was still in there, remembering how to walk and how to eat and how to breathe. To my layman’s mind, that was more than reptilian brain.

Meryl was lost, but not gone. The woman I knew—and loved—was inside this silent shell. If I had faith in anything, it was in her will to survive. I was going to be there for her.

I wandered through the deep end of the Weird later that night, testing the air for essence. For weeks, the strange cloud of blue light had been sweeping the neighborhood, a rush of essence that surged into being as if out of nowhere. In its wake, people disappeared. Eorla had expressed concern because a number of Teutonic fey were among the missing. She worried that it might be overzealous supporters of her cause against the Consortium and the Seelie Court.

At first, I considered it might be a new form of the Taint, the virulent corruption of essence that had driven the fey mad. Eorla had been powerful enough to dominate and contain it. I saw no sign that she had been affected by it or that it had become loose again. The Taint was gone. Whatever this new problem was, it was its own thing.

My main challenge was finding it. I had seen it in the distance a number of times, but by the time I reached each location, it had vanished. It followed no decipherable pattern, and while many of its victims were dwarves and druids, plenty of other fey went missing, too. It was hard to get a handle on how many. People in the Weird received little attention from the police when they reported someone missing. Over time, a culture of acceptance evolved, unexplained disappearances another part of what it meant to live in the neighborhood.

Tonight, I had seen it once a few blocks away, a flash of bright blue roaring across a small intersection. There was no trace of it by the time I reached the corner. The intersection was in an out-of-the-way corner of the neighborhood, off the main streets, where few people lived and fewer businesses operated. The four buildings that sat on the corners of the intersection were boarded up, dark and empty observers over an abandoned street.

Druids have a talent for total recall. If I found an essence signature, I could file it away in my memory and recognize it if I ran into it again. Whatever this blue thing was, it was a kind of essence that left no trace behind. I had nothing to tag and had never seen anything like it.

The air had a sharp tang to it, like the aftermath of someone’s firing concentrated essence as a weapon. Essence itself was absent, much like it had been at the murder scene last night. As I moved along the sidewalk, I picked up faded essence from the Dead, which resonated differently from the living.