Mark Del Franco - Unperfect Souls

“Moira Cashel, this is Detective Lieutenant Leonard Murdock,” I said.

Moira stepped into the outside hall and gripped the stair rail.

Murdock nodded. “Ma’am.”

Moira moved to the head of the stairs as Murdock reached the top step. Our conversation had upset her. She paled as Murdock passed. “How do you do?” she said in almost a whisper.

With his back to her, Murdock frowned at me. “Fine, thanks.”

“Thanks for stopping by, Moira. It was interesting,” I said.

Her eyes shifted back to me. Without another word, she descended the stairs. Murdock watched over the railing.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. I went into the apartment and grabbed my coat. I checked that I had my cell and wallet, then pulled the apartment door closed. Murdock continued looking down the stairs as I locked up. I didn’t hear any more footsteps. “What are you looking at?” I asked.

He had a pensive look on his face. “Nothing. Everything okay?”

Murdock preceded me down the stairs two steps ahead. “I think a certain homicide detective was worried about me.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he said.

I laughed. “Oh, you got out of your nice warm car and walked up five flights for the hell of it? Sure, you did.”

He smirked over his shoulder. “I saw the town car downstairs with diplomatic plates. It wouldn’t be the first time you ran into trouble with the Guild.”

“And it won’t be the last time,” I said.

“Who was the woman?”

“I’m not really sure. She’s trying to cure whatever’s killing Manus ap Eagan and is claiming to be someone I knew when I was starting out.”

Murdock pulled open the vestibule door to reveal the first few flakes of another snowstorm. In the dark, his car actually looked good for a change. No town car was in sight.

“Do you believe her?”

I shrugged. “Nope. Mostly, I think she’s a spy from the Seelie Court.”

I sat on a nest of napkins on the passenger seat while Murdock jogged to the driver’s side. He pulled out onto the street. “She had dinner with my father the other night,” he said.

“Really? Curiouser and curiouser.”

He nodded. “My father asked me to pick him up at a restaurant. They came out together.”

“How the hell do they know each other?” I asked.

Murdock shrugged. “He said she was Guild business.”

I pursed my lips. Eagan said she was a spy. Despite her claims otherwise, Moira Cashel was up to something more than ministering to a sick Danann. “I know it isn’t like me to worry about your father, but I would tell him to be careful around her.”

He smirked. “Will do, concerned citizen.”

“Interesting coincidence,” I said.

“Small world,” he said.

“Yeah, with small people in it.”

The Office of the City Medical Examiner was a long name for a sad place. At night, it was even sadder, a brick building perpetually clothed in gray twilight on a desolate stretch of road. It was open twenty-fours a day, seven days a week. Death made its own appointments, and the city morgue waited like a patient suitor for a date.

In the cool basement, steam rose from Murdock’s coffee. He leaned against a counter, not looking like he’d been up all night. The accident that boosted his essence had boosted his energy levels, too. Not that he needed it. Murdock’s stamina was legendary. As a police officer, he had spent more than enough time on dull surveillance, which came in handy for him since he’d been watching Janey Likesmith and me work through the night. Occasionally, we needed an extra pair of hands, but for the most part he watched.

The OCME handled all the deaths in the city and transferred major fey cases to the Guild only at the Guild’s request. As the lone fey staff member at OCME, Janey worked the rest. All of them. She had to pick and choose which ones to give more attention to than others. Who the decedent was or who they knew or how much money they had in life didn’t matter to her. Producing the best examination results did.

Janey was a dark elf, a member of the Dokkheim clan. The dark elves acknowledged the Elven King, but most of them went their own way in the post-Convergence world. They had never been strong enough to challenge the Teutonic court, but they were skilled enough to have influence over it.

We met on a case together not too long ago. She impressed me with her skills and even temper. The politics of Convergence held no interest for her. Like a child of immigrants, her parents’ stories of the old country—in her case, Elven Faerie—were stories, nothing more. She understood where she came from, but she also understood that Boston was where she was. She had no desire to re-create the past or find a way back to it. She focused her energy on the here and now, trying to help the fey and humans live together.

We worked on opposite sides of an examining table. Janey’s deep brown hands moved with careful skill as she realigned her side of the glass case. On each side of the table, narrow strips of quartz supported glass panels around the decapitated body from the sewer. The body itself lay on one long pane.

We had spent most of the night tuning the stones—turning them into wards—so that they could receive an infusion of essence. The process was one part skill and one part luck. Getting one stone to work in conjunction with another was easy. Getting several to do it depended on understanding the natural contours and densities of the stones so that essence would flow like a smooth current through all of them. It was like aligning a series of magnets of various strengths so that they would all stand up but not reject each other’s shifting polarities.

“I think if you tighten the brace on your side, we’re done,” I said.

She twisted the wing nuts in front of her. The glass plates shifted into place along the side of the table. Janey flicked a strand of her nutmeg-colored hair around the delicate point of her ear. “Perfect.”

“We can put the head in now,” I said.

Murdock stepped aside as Janey opened a cooling locker. She didn’t pull out the drawer but reached in and lifted the head out. It had seen better days. Bloated skin indicated time spent in the water, and missing pieces of flesh evidenced the natural process of sloughing and banging around in sewer pipes. Without a trace of revulsion, Janey carried it to the table and placed it gently inside the box. “How close to the body should it be?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think it matters that much.”

She shifted it closer to the neck stump and stepped back, peeling off her gloves. “Okay, now the lid.”

Murdock put his coffee down. He grabbed one end of the second large glass pane we had, and I took the other. We lifted, and Janey guided it over the table as we lowered it onto the standing walls.

Essentially, we had created a huge glass ward box around the body. Where metal bent essence and sent it in unanticipated directions, glass absorbed and dissipated it into the ambient air. I loved the irony that something so fragile could defeat something so powerful. Janey smiled in satisfaction. “This is amazing. I will have to call Ms. Dian later and thank her.”

“Well, this wouldn’t have been possible if you hadn’t put the body in a ward box in the first place,” I said.

When the Dead regenerated, the body vanished and reanimated somewhere else the next day. Meryl had lots of theories about why—everything from appearing where they died, to where they felt safe, to more complex theories about essence sinkholes or concentrated focal points. Since we worried that we might regenerate the body but not know where it went, Meryl came up with the idea of a barrier spell on a large ward box as a way to prevent the Dead guy’s essence from going anywhere.