Mark Del Franco - Unperfect Souls

The berserker stared at me while Janey translated. “His name is Jark, son of Ulf,” she said.

I crossed my arms. “Ask him how he died.”

Janey bit her lower lip. “He said, ‘Which time?’ ”

I resisted the urge to wipe the sarcastic grin off his face. “The last time, please.”

He shrugged. “He says it was a solitary named Sekka. A jotunn who hates the Dead.”

Murdock and I exchanged glances. “That’s whose head we found in the sewer, Janey,” I said.

“How’d she lose her head if she took his?” Murdock asked.

By his reaction when Janey asked him—his pleased reaction—Jark hadn’t known Sekka was dead. He evaded Janey’s questioning at first, enjoying her frustration before giving up a tidbit. “The last thing he remembers is the giant attacking him and a brief pain as she swung a sword at his head. He says the last thing he saw was the Hound, so maybe the Hound killed him.”

“And why would the Cwn Annwn want to kill you?” I said to Jark.

He chuckled as Janey translated. Janey blushed at his response. “He says he wasn’t killed by a dog.”

She didn’t mention the part where Jark called me a string of unflattering names reflecting my stupidity, asked why a woman would want to know so much about death, then he had hit on her. “Who is the Hound?” I asked.

“He says ‘no one knows and no one wants to know. The Hound hunts the living and the Dead.’”

By the look on his face, Jark was lying. He was probably already planning his revenge. I caught Murdock’s eye. “Can we hold him?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “For a while. Legal status on the Dead is a mess.”

Jark turned this way and that as he followed our conversation. I pulled Janey aside. “Not, obviously, that you can’t take care of yourself, but I don’t want to leave you alone with him. Is there an officer in the building, maybe more than one?”

“Sure,” she said. We walked with her to a phone by the door and listened while she asked for security. She replaced the receiver. “They’ll be right down.”

Murdock abruptly walked out. “I’ll be outside.”

Janey watched him leave. “Is he okay?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. He’s a Christian. I don’t think any of this is sitting well with him.”

She rubbed her arms as if to warm herself as she looked across the room at Jark. “I can’t say I blame him. I didn’t grow up with the Dead appearing on this side of the veil. I thought those were just stories.”

“At least they were stories that fit your religion,” I said.

She nodded. “I guess. It’s funny. Despite my job, I don’t think about death much on a personal level. My people die by accident or murder. I don’t have—I don’t know, a connection to it in the same way humans do. Maybe that’s why they fear us, Connor. Even death isn’t an end for the fey.”

I nodded at Jark. “I don’t think that’s what the fey expect when they do die.”

“It’s probably why the solitaries are fighting so hard. They used to have an idea of what came after death. Now it’s a mystery,” she said.

I hadn’t thought of it that way. She was right. With TirNaNog closed to the Dead, no one knew what happened to the fey when they died. It hadn’t hit me because I wasn’t a target. For all my fears about a shortened life span because of the dark thing in my head, I hadn’t been confronted with the visceral realization that death might be an end and an end only.

“Thanks for this, Janey. Our friend here might have given us something solid to follow up,” I said.

She crossed her arms. “No, thank you. This has to be one of the more fascinating things I’ve seen here. I’m not used to my cases sitting up and talking to me.”

I smiled slightly. “With any luck, this will be the only one.”

Jark’s anger had subsided to confusion. He was only . . . animated . . . because we intervened. He had no idea how close he had come to an eternal nothingness. If the leanansidhe had drained the remains of the essence in his head, if we hadn’t brought his head and body together, he wouldn’t be sitting in bindings, wearing nothing but a towel, and wondering what the hell we were talking about.

“Maybe this is what Convergence brought the fey here for, Janey—to experience an end to all things they knew and give them the humans to help them cope.”

“I hope that’s not true, Connor. I hope it’s the opposite—that humans can learn the value of thinking beyond their finite lives. The Wheel of the World keeps turning no matter what. It doesn’t stop when we die. If there’s one thing the fey and humans have in common, it’s that neither of us knows why things happen they way they do.”

“Amen to that,” I said.

She laughed.

Murdock waited outside with the car running. How he had managed to get newspaper all over the passenger seat in the short time he’d waited there was beyond me. I tossed it all in back.

“You okay?” I asked, as he drove down Albany Street under the highway.

“Yeah. I needed some air.”

“I wonder if we can count this Jark as an eyewitness to his own murder,” I said.

“Does it matter anymore? He’s not dead, and she is,” he said.

The fey certainly managed to produce entertaining legal puzzles. “Well, we still have Sekka’s murder to deal with.”

He nodded. “At least we have a lead without having to do another resurrection.”

“The animosity between the solitaries and the Dead is going to become a problem with the Taint involved.”

He drove over the Broadway bridge into Southie. “I’ve been warning my father things are spiraling. Some community activist pressured the mayor’s office about it, so they agreed to the neighborhood meeting. My dad doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble.”

“Then what is he doing to reduce the tension?”

Murdock shrugged. “Leaving it to the Guild, I guess. You know how my father is, Connor. The more the fey screw up—especially down in the Weird—the happier he is. He’d like nothing more than for the entire neighborhood to disappear.”

A sinking, guilty feeling hit me. Murdock and I talked about his father all the time because of the political issues he was involved in. After what Manus ap Eagan asked me to do, suddenly the discussion felt like information pumping. It was, in a way, but not for Eagan. I had been meaning to tell Murdock about my conversation with Eagan. I knew Murdock well enough that the longer I held off, the more annoyed he would be with me. “Eagan tells me you’re dating someone.”

Murdock chuckled in surprise. “The Guildmaster talks about my social life?”

I shook my head. “Actually, no. He thought if he told me you were sleeping with someone, and I didn’t know, I would resent it and would wheedle information out of you about planned police actions against the fey and funnel the information to him.”

Murdock’s jaw dropped in a half smile. “What?”

We cruised down to Old Northern Avenue. Out of habit, we both scanned the sidewalks to check out the action. “No lie. Eagan’s worried your father’s playing him for a fool.”

Murdock flicked an eyebrow up and down. “He probably is. Nothing my father likes more than putting one over on the Guild.”

I laughed. “Yeah, that’s about the only thing your father and I have in common. But Eagan might have a point. This thing brewing between the solitaries and the Dead is bound to make someone look bad. It’s too much of a legal tangle not to.”

Murdock pulled up in front of my building. “Are we surprised? The jurisdictional issues are so messed up that nothing’s being handled. Just to spice things up, with all the gang deaths in the last couple of months, there’s a power vacuum on the streets. You know it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”