Mark Del Franco - Unperfect Souls

Idly, I traced my fingers along the tattoo on my left forearm. Another mystery. It wasn’t really a tattoo. A silver filigree that once decorated a spear decided it preferred being under my skin instead. A delicate pattern of branches wove around each other to form a mesh from my wrist to my elbow. The silver had been forged as part of a spell that bound essence into the metal to perform a very specific function: to allow travel across the veil between here and Faerie. The old stories simply called the resulting talisman a silver branch.

Only, like so many other things since Convergence, it didn’t work the way it was intended. At least, it didn’t only work that way. It did help me get into TirNaNog through the veil and back again. It also seemed to do the opposite of the dark mass in my head. The talisman tattoo absorbed essence and became powerful in its own right. A number of times, it actively struggled against the dark mass for control of surrounding essence. I had no idea what it was intended for or how to use it. And, like the dark mass, it didn’t seem any more inclined to help me gain access to my lost abilities.

My damaged abilities were my problem, but the leanansidhe was another issue altogether. Whatever she was doing beneath the streets of the Weird, she was provoking some serious pain. The Guild had to help this time. Which meant an in-person appeal to Keeva macNeve.

I slipped on my boots and put the daggers in their sheaths. The left one was for my old faithful, a steel blade that had served me well for over a decade. It had seen a lot of action in more than one rough-and-tumble case when I worked at the Guild. I kept it cleaned and polished, but it would show bloodstains under analysis. Briallen ab Gwyll had given me the knife in my right boot. She taught me the druidic path during my teen years before turning me over to Nigel Martin.

Last spring, when she gave me the dagger, she was cryptic about it as a gift as well as as an object. It was old and powerful, laced with spells and inscribed with runes. I tried to piece together what they meant, but they were beyond my knowledge. The best I figured out was that powerful wards protected it, and that protection often extended to me when need be. Except, I didn’t know how it did that. Like the darkness in my head, the blade seemed to work for its own purposes sometimes—even turning into a sword once.

I pulled on a hoodie sweatshirt as lining for my old leather jacket. I had lost my padded leather one in TirNaNog and missed it every day the past few weeks. Winter had settled into Boston with bitter winds and early dustings of snow.

I headed out the door, and from the end of Sleeper Street, I cut over the Old Northern Avenue bridge into downtown proper. It was the fastest way out of my end of the neighborhood. At a hundred years old, the bridge was one of the oldest steel-truss bridges in the world. The swing mechanism even worked, so that at high tides, boats could sail up the channel. People admired it as a piece of old Boston even if they didn’t like the Weird beyond it. Artists painted and photographed it all the time, the four spans of crisscrossing steel making for interesting shapes and shadows. Late at night on a summer evening with the wind kicking up, it hummed and whistled and moaned. In December, I wanted to get off it as quickly as possible. It always felt colder than anything around it.

A typically Boston juxtaposition greeted me at the other end. On one side of the channel sat the Weird, home to a century’s worth of architecturally interesting masonry, then the bridge with its classic erector-set beams, which led smack into the chaotic tangle of asphalt and concrete intersections in the financial district, surrounded by smooth, impersonal skyscrapers. Say what you would about the Weird, but someone was ten times more likely to get mugged at midnight on Summer Street in the business district than on Old Northern at two in the morning.

Despite the cold, I walked through the financial district, then Chinatown, then the theater district. The subway was not the direct route to the Guildhouse and didn’t let off particularly near it anyway. Being chilled waiting in a subway tunnel was little different than being chilled walking. Besides, I was in no hurry to be underground again.

The forbidding presence of the Guildhouse loomed over Park Square. The winter sun bleached the gray stone almost white. Danann security agents circled above the many towers and turrets, while brownie guards moved along the ground perimeter. After the riots of the previous month, everything remained on high alert. A chain of Guild petitioners waited in the cold on the sidewalk. They formed a long, sinuous line that stretched around the far corner. For security, the lobby had been put off-limits to the general public.

Under normal circumstances, I would have challenged the guards and the receptionists for the fun of it. Not so long ago, being barred entrance galled me, but lately, that wasn’t mattering to me so much. I wasn’t the Guild investigator I once was. I was okay with that. Being a Guild investigator didn’t appeal to me anymore anyway. I called Keeva macNeve on my cell.

“I’m downstairs and need to talk to you,” I said, when she picked up.

“And if I say no?” she asked.

“No games, Keev. I’m not in the mood.”

“Fine. I’ll tell them to let you through.”

As she hung up, nearby brownie guards shifted positions, and two led me inside. They escorted me in silence up to the Community Liaison floor and left me in the reception area. The young wood fairy behind the desk stared at me with her pale green eyes as if she had never seen a druid before. I didn’t wait for her to say anything but went down the hall to Keeva’s office.

Keeva was typing aggressively at her computer but threw me a brief glance. I sat while she finished, then she turned to me with a sly smile. “I have to say I’m impressed you came in here.”

I smiled cordially. “That’s high praise coming from you.”

She shook her head. “You do realize the entire building went on alert when you walked in?”

“I’m flattered.”

She snorted. “Yes, I guess you would consider it flattering that people are afraid you’ll cause an interdimensional meltdown.”

I grinned. “And you’re not?”

She shook her head again. “I know better, Connor. You don’t have any other ability than to attract disaster. What do you want?”

“I found a leanansidhe in the Weird,” I said.

She arched an eyebrow. “Oh? I thought you were dating that Meryl Dian person.”

I frowned with amusement. Meryl was not Keeva’s favorite person. The feeling was mutual. “I’m serious. You should send someone down.”

She sighed. “There you go again, telling me how to do my job. We’re stretched thin with all the new security. Frankly, if we’ve got a leanansidhe down there, she’ll probably save us from arresting a few people.”

“That is so not funny,” I said.

She shrugged. “Connor, the solitaries are coming out of the woodwork. I get daily reports from Commissioner Murdock about them. I never realized we had so many in Boston. They’ve become incredibly aggressive.”

“That’s because the Dead are killing them. They’re defending themselves.”

She rubbed her neck. “And whose fault is that, I wonder?”

I pulled in my chin. “Are you really going to lay that on me? I stopped whatever was happening on Samhain. If I hadn’t closed the veil, we’d have a bigger problem than the Dead.”

Keeva looked doubtful. “Let’s see: an underQueen of Faerie died, your old partner Dylan died, several dozen fey and humans died in the rioting, you destroyed a possible way back to Faerie, and, oh, by the way, the Dead of TirNaNog are roaming the streets of Boston. Next time you feel like helping, Connor, stay inside whatever bar you’re in and resist the impulse.”