Mark Del Franco - Unperfect Souls

I slumped against the door. “You know what I really want to know?”

Murdock frowned with curiosity. “What?”

“Who you’re sleeping with.”

He laughed. “No comment.”

I didn’t care who he was dating. Curious, sure, but at the end of the day, Murdock told me what he wanted to tell me, and that was okay. I respected him enough to accept what he decided. He’s done a lot for me in the two years that I’ve known him, not least of which was save my life. If anyone deserved some slack from me, it was him.

I punched him playfully in the arm. “Jerk.”

I spent the day catnapping and reading, my curiosity about the leanansidhe prompting more reading and Internet surfing. Everything I knew about the leanansidhe filled one small volume on my bookshelf. Internet searches picked up no reliable primary references. Few leanansidhe existed, and those that did spent their lives hidden and alone. By nature, they were not forthcoming, never mind social. Their reputation was too well-known for them to live openly. By all accounts, they absorbed the essence of the living. As with most legends, the whole truth lay beneath hyperbole and falsehoods. If the only essence the leanansidhe survived on was living essence, their presence would be determined quickly. Just look for the dead, essenceless bodies.

Yet they managed to survive. I was willing to bet that the leanansidhe sought other essence resources. Those who survived encounters with them were probably unique situations. As Joe likes to say “kings and queens” about things like that, meaning “yeah, that’s one version, but the reality smelled worse and was usually boring.”

It wasn’t enough. Failure to learn more drove me out into the night. The chronic lack of progress in understanding what had happened to my abilities frustrated me—and created situations that put lives at risk. Janey and Murdock could have been seriously injured by Jark—or worse. I hadn’t thought through resurrecting a Dead man with Taint in his body essence. I failed to protect them because I had no abilities to use against him. No matter what people said about using the abilities you had instead of wishing for ones you didn’t, the berserker couldn’t have been stopped without essence abilities. Abilities I didn’t have anymore.

The leanansidhe knew something about the dark mass. I had seen it, and the thing inside me had reacted to it. It was in her, too, at least something very much like it. For the first time since my accident, I had something that looked like a clue as to what was wrong with me. I had to know if it meant anything. I had to know if the leanansidhe knew something.

Over two years the dark mass had been in my head, blocking my abilities. Over two years of mistaken diagnoses and dead-end treatments. My healer Gillen Yor was at a complete loss. My friend Briallen’s eyes showed more fear every time she examined me. No amount of ibuprofen stopped my chronic pain.

And it was getting worse.

The thing inside me was escaping, for lack of a better word. Whatever it was, it was attracted and repulsed by essence. If essence threatened me, it reacted to protect me, and when it did, it devoured the essence. When a group of the Dead recently attacked me on Samhain, the dark mass absorbed them. I hadn’t really understood that at the time, but it was the only explanation under the circumstances. The only person who seemed to know what it was, was one of the most reviled beings known to human and fey.

Brother. She’d called me brother.

Inside the warehouse, my breath steamed in the shaft of light from my flashlight. Despite the many doors and hallways, the basement door was easy to find. The building had been empty so long that dust on the floor was evolving into dirt. I followed the recently disturbed path that the crime-scene investigators had made. The trail ended at a large door with rusted and dented sheet metal nailed over it. It opened with the whine of metal on metal and exposed stairs going down. The corrugated metal steps rang dully beneath my boots as I descended.

I swept my flashlight beam across the sealed-off basement. The categorized piles had been removed, then tagged and bagged in evidence lockers at police headquarters. All the clothing, the hats, the shoes—everything the leanansidhe had picked off her victims—were being sorted and scanned, compared to missing persons reports, maybe analyzed for DNA. Phone calls would go out to doctors and dentists. If anything matched a file description, a police officer would have to make that long, slow walk to the door of the next of kin. With the volume of material I saw, it was going to be a long while before the police processed everything. A lot of cold cases were going to be closed. This being the Weird, a lot of unanswered questions were going to result, too. Not all the missing are missed.

The crime-scene team had enlarged the hole the leanansidhe had escaped through. A bone-chilling draft wafted over me from between the jagged bricks. Silence filled the utter darkness beyond. Why the section had been sealed off wasn’t obvious. The columned space inside was devoid of the usual abandoned equipment or stock supplies left by long-gone businesses.

Body signatures from the investigative team lit up in my sensing ability, two fey signatures mixed in with about a dozen human. Keeva macNeve must have sent someone from the Guild. Probably to cover her ass. If the leanansidhe went after humans, she’d have a hard time explaining she knew it existed and did nothing.

The team had scoured the basement. Individual trails branched and overlapped throughout the room. The far wall was another bricked-over section. Other than the leanansidhe ’s bolt-hole, I found no other openings. Leanansidhes weren’t stupid. It was no coincidence Joe had found her lying on the floor near an escape route, and she wouldn’t let herself become trapped if someone followed her. An exit had to be in the basement somewhere.

I turned off the flashlight and allowed my sensing ability free rein. The investigative team’s residual signatures brightened. Down the center of the room, directly from the bolt-hole if I judged the angle right, their signatures masked a thin layer of violet essence, the faint trace of the leanansidhe ’s body signature. At the far end of the basement, a thin purple haze splashed up against the solid brick wall. I turned on the flashlight.

The wall showed no breaks. The leanansidhe ’s essence danced on my fingers like static when I touched the surface. She had hidden her exit with a strong-yet-subtle masking ward. Frustrated, I slapped my hand against the wall. The dark mass in my head clenched, and my hand slipped beneath the surface of the bricks. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Masking wards were keyed to specific essences for access, usually the spellcaster and whoever else the ’caster allowed. The leanansidhe wouldn’t have keyed the wall for me, never mind known my essence well enough to do it without me.

I pressed at the bricks. The dark mass in my head danced in short pulses of pain as my hands sank below the surface. A pit of anxiety formed in my stomach. The leanansidhe must have set the ward to something she thought unique to herself. The dark mass was the key. I felt open space on the other side of the wall. I stepped forward, a pounding in my mind as I passed through the ward. I stumbled into the other side and took deep breaths as the pain settled.

A narrow section of basement mirrored the one that Murdock and I had found. A sense of pain permeated the air in this one, the echoes of long-past deaths. Tragedy lingered in spaces, the emotion of the moment seeping into the surroundings like a memory stain. It was the leanansidhe ’s dining room. People died there, drained of their essence to feed another’s hunger.