Mark Del Franco: Uncertain Allies

He didn’t look happy. “All right, I’ll talk to her.”

“I’ll make the arrangements. In the meantime, I’d keep an eye on your brothers and sisters. If they manifest essence abilities, it could be dangerous without training.”

We didn’t speak for several moments. Murdock wiped a napkin around the table, then crumpled it on his plate. “My parents were married before you met Moira, Connor.”

“I know that,” I said.

He leaned forward, staring in my eyes. “I’m saying it happened before you came along, Connor. She lied to him before you were even part of the picture. Do you understand what I’m saying? This would be happening to me if you and I had never met. It’s not your fault no matter how much you want it to be.”

Uncomfortable and uncertain, I shifted in my seat. “I never said I wanted it to be.”

“You didn’t have to. Stop trying to fix things all the time. You have to know when to let things work out on their own.”

Joe had said as much the night before. “I’ll try. You know it’s not my nature.”

He slid out of the booth and put his coat on. “Yeah, well, I’m planning on not letting nature control how I live my life. You should give it a try.”

The angry drone of my apartment intercom sliced through my brain like a buzz saw. Hangovers and unexpected visitors made a bad combination, especially when the visitor announced himself as a messenger from the Guild. I took my time getting down to the front door. Guild messengers were notorious for their imperiousness, so rushing wasn’t going to make the encounter any better. He handed me a request for my presence at a meeting with Acting Guildmaster Ryan macGoren. True to form, the messenger didn’t wait for a response before spinning on his heel and leaving.

By the time I returned upstairs, Briallen verch Gwyll ab Gwyll had left a message that she was sending a car for me. She had been a member of the Boston Guild almost since its founding, so it was no surprise she had received an invitation to the meeting.

A little more than an hour later, the two of us sat in a black car inching its way down Tremont Street. I missed having driver service. The Guild disability checks didn’t cover it, and neither did the retirement benefits.

Briallen had been prickly from the moment she got in the car. On the opposite side of the seat, she cocked an eye at me. “Stop fidgeting.”

“I am not,” I said.

“You’re picking at a scab. That’s fidgeting,” she said.

I chuckled. I was picking at a scab. A small cut on my hand that I didn’t remember getting had healed over, but a sliver remained behind the skin. “You need to relax.”

“I am relaxed,” she said.

She was lying, of course. Briallen verch Gwyll ab Gwyll did not like to be taken by surprise, and being asked to the Guildhouse on short notice by Ryan macGoren was loaded with the potential for surprise, especially when she found out I was on his dance card, too. I was suspicious of whatever he had in store, but I had nothing else planned for the afternoon. “I’m only going because you said I should,” I said.

“Since when have you ever done anything you’re told?” she said.

Briallen had been my mentor during my teenage years. I had lived at her house a good portion of those years, under her rules. I had been on my own for a long time now, but sometimes she forgot I wasn’t a teenager anymore. I would never admit that I enjoyed it, like when it allowed me to tease her as if she were a cranky nanny. “Maybe if you told me the right thing to do, I would do it.”

She hit me with a playful slap on the arm. “Fine. Don’t talk until we’re leaving.”

“What if someone asks me a question?”

She sighed. “Do you see? Do you see how you don’t listen?”

Stress showed in the tautness of her face. Druids weren’t immortal, but they lived a long time. Briallen was close to a century in age, maybe older if she had lived in Faerie. Many of the Old Ones claimed not to remember Faerie. Briallen would never answer the question about herself, preferring to keep people guessing. She was ageless to me. She didn’t look a day over fifty, her rich chestnut hair worn short, not a touch of gray in its waves.

The Guildhouse rose into view as we entered Park Square. The building had started out life in the eighteen hundreds as an armory, a solid granite fortress for an army cadet group that preceded the National Guard in pre-Convergence Boston. When the group fell on hard financial times after Convergence, the Guild bought the place for its Boston headquarters.

Manus ap Eagan had overseen the reconstruction in those early years. He had expanded the concept of druid hedges—essence barriers—into the formidable shield dome. When activated to the extreme, it was visible as a wall of thickened air, impenetrable to everything short of bunker-buster-level bombs. The fey knew how to protect themselves. The dome acted like a body shield for the building, a transparent layer of essence that protected the Guildhouse from attack. Rumor had it that even a nuke would only dent it. High Queen Maeve loved the idea, particularly early on, when humans were more antagonistic to the arrival of the fey.

In time, floors were added, and the building grew over the Boston skyline, flouting the laws of nature and local zoning. Towers, sky bridges, and random wings joined together in a mishmash of Victorian, Gothic, and fairy architecture. Essence defied the forces of physics, allowing for tall towers to be anchored by slender buttresses or steep-gabled additions to hang off the building with little physical support. Beautiful in a surreal, amusing way, the building had become one part monolith and one part confection. I shuddered to think what a pretender like macGoren would do to the place if given the chance.

The car engine coughed and recovered as we passed through the shield dome. Engines didn’t work well around essence. Brownie security guards in dark maroon uniforms that offset their pale hair and tawny skin gathered along the sidewalk in front of the lobby. Their security role included community relations, which meant making it clear to the local community that if it didn’t comply with their directions, the guard could go boggie. A brownie in its boggart aspect was a fearsome thing, all tooth and claw.

Today, the guards remained attentive and at ease. They worked the street level since the people they encountered were human and solitaries, not powerful in the essence department. They might take Briallen down if there were enough of them, but few were powerful contenders. They had nothing to fear from me, of course, provided the black mass in my head stayed put.

I helped Briallen from the car out of courtesy. She was no invalid. As we walked under the portico to the main entrance, something tickled against me, and my body shield shimmered. It wasn’t a full shield anymore, small patches here and there, and malfunctioned by triggering on its own.

I paused in the archway beneath the great dragon head carved above the lintel. Gargoyles once clustered on the ceiling and columns of the portico. They were fey in the sense they were sentient stone, even the ones that didn’t look human or animal. They appeared after Convergence, moving without being seen, speaking to people on rare occasions. No one ever sensed essence from them, though, which made them an interesting puzzle. They were attracted to essence and sought it out. Every Guildhouse had them anchored to the walls and ceilings. The Boston gargoyles were all gone now. They had moved to Boston Common and taken up residence around a giant stone pillar there that generated enormous amounts of essence.

Briallen glanced at me, but I shook my head. Whatever I was sensing must have been a new security measure. “This isn’t a trap. Tell me again this isn’t a trap,” I said.