Mark Del Franco - Unperfect Souls

Janey discarded her gloves in a hazard bin. “I preserve body essence for evidence as part of my routine. I wasn’t sure it was going to work with a Dead person.”

“The leanansidhe must have done something similar. There’s still significant essence in the head,” I said.

Janey checked her watch. “We have some time until dawn. I’d like to show you something from my examination of the body.”

We followed her up the hall to her lab room. The layout looked the same as the last time I had visited, but the instruments on the two tables were more sophisticated. The city budget didn’t allow for much in the way of fey-related diagnostic tools. A little enforced guilt toward Ryan macGoren and the Guild helped buy a few things. Janey handed me a small glass box—a miniversion of the one we had built in the morgue. Inside the box, a wafer of quartz glowed with essence. “I made an imprint of the Dead victim’s essence for the files. Notice anything?” she asked.

The essence glowed with the vibration of the Dead body in the next room, the dull ochre signature of a Teutonic berserker clan. Splotches of a vibrant green with black mottling mingled in his essence. “The Taint.”

Janey retrieved the box and examined it under an essence magnifier. “It’s bonded to his essence.”

“And if it affects the Dead the same way as the living . . .” I said.

“It reinforces their baser instincts. When the Dead die, they’re coming back as killing machines,” she finished. She slid the boxed wafer inside a marked envelope and placed it in an evidence drawer in a large wall cabinet.

We returned to the examining room and spread around the table, Murdock and I on opposite sides. Janey stood at the foot of the ward box and placed her hands on the corner quartz strips. She looked at me. “Ready?”

“As we’re ever going to be,” I said.

In the guttural dialect of her clan, she chanted the soft words of a rejuvenation spell. Normally, such a spell worked to boost someone’s energy. Janey had made a few tweaks to it to encourage the essence to mimic whatever it came in contact with, which would be crucial in a situation where the residual essence in the dead body was nearly gone. Pale green essence flowed from her fingers, seeping into the stone strips. It flowed along the edges until the box’s entire frame glowed. As the essence penetrated the stones, they flashed once with the charge, and Janey ended the spell.

No one spoke. Janey checked her watch again as my gaze slipped to the clock on the wall. Dawn would arrive in moments. Murdock had his hands in his pockets and was staring down at the floor. He said little when I explained the process we were trying, and it didn’t take much deduction to understand why. Retrieving a body from the dead—a soul, in his mind—flew in the face of his religion. Maybe even spat in it.

“Something’s happening,” Janey said.

The Dead man’s dull, yellowed essence seeped out of his chest and forehead. The two spots hovered like mist over his skin, tendrils of essence spreading up from the chest toward the neck and spooling down from his head over the chin. They met at the gap in the neck, coiling and merging into a collar of soft light. More essence welled out of his body, thinning over the corpse in a sheet. Whatever the volume of essence he had when animate, it had diminished after the decapitation. The leanansidhe probably absorbed some as well. As if sensing another source, the haze sent tentative feelers out of the sides of the body. One by one, they found the stone frame that Janey had charged with essence. The feelers drew down the essence charge into the body. With renewed energy, the body essence pulsed and thickened, enveloping the body in a cocoon of light.

Janey hopped back a step when the head rocked. A dirty, hazy yellow essence clustered at the neck. The head swayed. Essence pooled in puncture wounds in the face and gathered on the various injuries on the torso. The charged-stone frame of the ward box faded to dullness. The haze around the body swirled and undulated, then contracted and vanished into the skin.

The berserker lay whole, no sign of the decapitation, no torn and rotted flesh. Janey stared, her lips parted in amazement. The Dead man’s eyes opened. Janey gasped, and Murdock stepped closer, his hand on his gun. The berserker looked at me, then at Murdock and Janey. Confused, he pressed his hands against the box lid, his fingertips whitening against glass.

“Let’s open it,” I said.

Murdock helped me to lift the top off and put it aside. The Dead guy grasped the edges of the ward box and sat up. He assessed the three of us with suspicion. In a burst of energy, he leaped up and out of the box. I grabbed Janey as she stumbled into me. As the berserker landed on the floor, he let loose a flying kick. Murdock’s body shield bloomed around him and took the brunt of the blow.

I hustled Janey into a corner. The berserker strode toward Murdock, his own body shield rippling with essence that made his skin expand. The berserker swung, and Murdock ducked. He lost his balance, and the Dead man closed in on him. I jumped him, but he sent me sprawling away like I was a fly on his back. I landed hard on my side, my fragmented body shields taking some of the impact. Not enough. My side hurt like hell.

Angry, I jumped on the berkserker’s back again, wrapping my arm around his neck. He grabbed my forearm with thick fingers, squeezing against the muscle. The tattoo on my arm flashed with a white light as it drew on my body essence. The pressure from the berserker’s grip vanished, but my head felt light with the sudden drop in my body essence. My hold on his neck slackened, and he wrenched my arm away, flinging me against the wall.

Murdock came up out of his crouch and hit the guy in the gut. The berserker staggered, and before he could recover, Murdock followed through with a left to his jaw. He tripped sideways, throwing his leg out again, aiming for Murdock’s abdomen. As Murdock twisted sideways to avoid the hit, the hair on the back of my neck rose as I sensed an essence charge behind me. Confused, I pivoted on my heel, ready to fight, then checked my motion.

Janey stood with her fingers pointed like a gun. A bolt of dark green essence shot from her outstretched hand and hit the berserker. His head snapped forward, and Murdock hit him with a right cross to the cheek. The berserker fell.

As she jabbed with her fingers at the air above him, Janey chanted pinpoints of yellow light into existence. They sparkled and burst, scattering a web of glowing strands that spun and fell in a net. It settled over the berserker and became a binding spell that cinched his arms to his sides. Annoyed, I backhanded him hard across the face and reared back with my fist.

Murdock grabbed my arm. “It’s cool. It’s cool,” he said.

I rubbed at my arm. The tattoo had released the essence back into my body as soon as the berserker had let go, but it was sore. “Sorry. Are you all right?” I asked.

Murdock arched an eyebrow at me as he shook his fist loose. “Yeah, I’m glad I wasn’t holding my coffee.”

I took several breaths to calm myself. Janey had retreated to the other side of the room. “Where the hell did a nice girl like you learn an elf-shot spell like that?” I said.

With hands on hips, she kept her eyes on the berserker. “My mom. She doesn’t like me walking around at night alone in this neighborhood.”

Janey attracted the berserker’s attention when she spoke, and he asked her in German where he was.

“He’s confused,” Janey translated. “He doesn’t understand why he’s here. He’s never woken up in a place he’s never been before.”

I understood German, but for Murdock’s benefit I let her translate. “Who is he?” I asked.