Mark Del Franco - Unperfect Souls

“Will do,” I said.

“Connor . . . does this mean I’m not going to die?”

He said it so quietly and matter-of-factly, it pulled at me. I hadn’t considered what he must have been going through. Given that I now had a hellhound lying on my living-room floor, I had a feeling I was going to find out. “It’ll be all right, Shay. Call me if you need me.”

He didn’t answer right away. “Thanks . . . um . . . you, too.”

I closed the cell. Uno held eye contact with me, calm and steady, long past the point any other dog would have perceived a threat. He didn’t. He stared with a gaze that said he knew damned well who would look away first. As a hound from Hel whose job it was to suck the souls out of the living, I guessed not much threatened him.

After several minutes, neither of us had moved. I gave in for what was left of the night. I was drained and tired and not up for vying for supremacy with a supernatural dog. Uno remained where he was while I went through my going-to-bed routine, turning off the light in the study and setting up the coffee for the morning. I sat on the futon, removed my boots, retrieved the spelled dagger from its sheath, and tucked it into my headboard. I leaned on my knees and looked at Uno. “I suppose if you were going to devour me, you would have done it by now.”

The tufts of hair above his eyes twitched, and he let loose a loud chuff. I reached out and touched his head. He slumped over on his side and wagged his tail. I scratched at the back of his neck, and his tail thumped on the floor. “Just so you know, Uno, petting a soul-sucking hound from Hel is pretty much an unsurprising end to today.”

I peeled off my clothes and slid beneath the covers on the futon. When I turned off the lights, the room filled with the red glow from Uno’s eyes. I stared at the ceiling.

Not the least bit surprising.

Within a few minutes of another early-morning call from Murdock, I was picking my way across an access road overlooking Fort Point Channel. The constant winds off the harbor solidified the snow into dirty banks of gray ice. Tall frozen hills from snowplow deposits ringed a parking lot owned by the Gillette Company. Even with sturdy boots, the thin skin of ice on the ground made walking a challenge. I had to struggle my way to the police cars clustered along the channel side.

Gillette was always referred to as being in South Boston. The razor manufacturer had employed a lot of local people over the years and for a time boasted about its Boston-based status, but no one wanted to be associated with what happened around the plant, never mind brag that they lived next to its parking lots. Maybe when its workers lived in Southie, it was a true part of the neighborhood, but these days it was the outer edge of the Weird, more a barrier for the residential area next door than a part of it.

Emergency vehicles gathered in an empty section of the lot. Beyond them, a number of solitary fey loitered on the seawall by the channel. Seeing that many solitaries in broad daylight made me uneasy. Solitaries don’t like being seen, especially by humans, especially by law enforcement. Forest species with their rough-bark skin and leaf-like hair rarely mingled with the stone-skin denizens of the underground world. Even a few water fey hung over the wall from the channel, their hair rimed with ice. Their odd appearances made them de facto suspects for crimes committed nearby. It was racist, it was unfair, but it was the way it was. They stayed out of sight, worked night shifts, and tried to live their lives without being hassled. Pretty much like everyone else. A group of solitaries, and an odd group at that, hanging around a crime scene signaled something different was happening.

Officers in winter gear stood inside a ring of crime-scene tape. Murdock wore his camel-hair coat and flat ear-muffs that rode around the back of his head. The wind off the channel brought a flush to his cheeks and nose, but he didn’t look particularly cold. A body lay on the ground in the center of the group. A big body.

I ducked under the yellow-and-black tape. A few faces in the group frowned or looked away. The Boston P.D. doesn’t like working with the fey, but I thought I had earned a little respect within their ranks in the last year. “What have we got?” I asked.

“Headless female body,” Murdock said.

I eased my way between two officers, who gave way grudgingly. Murdock’s description pretty much covered it. The body was about six feet long without the head, clad in a simple wool tunic and leggings, and wrapped in a long, soiled leather coat that clearly had been exposed to water. My sensing ability picked up faint traces of her body signature. “She’s a match to the head from the sewer. It’s Sekka,” I said.

Pinned with a long nail to the coat, a sheet of paper flapped in the breeze. The medical examiner held it down a moment. It read: Jark.

“Is that supposed to be some kind of warning?” Murdock asked.

I shrugged. “Or an accusation. Let’s check out the peanut gallery.”

Murdock followed me to the seawall. A few solitaries slunk away as we approached. I didn’t worry about them. The ones who slip off when the police approach are usually petty criminals looking to avoid a hassle. The ones who stand their ground are usually the bigger fish who look forward to antagonizing the law. This group was different. They had the look of curious bystanders rather than lowlifes. I wanted to know if that curiosity tipped into vested interest. By the time we reached the wall, half the group had dispersed.

“Anybody here see anything?” Murdock asked.

“Her name was Sekka,” someone behind me said, one of the tree folk. Tall with brown bark skin and tangled mossy hair. In the dry winter air, he had the odor of dampness and earth.

“How do you know it was her?” Murdock said, gesturing at the little matter of her missing head.

The solitary looked at the body. “I knew her. Those clothes are hers. She’s been missed. Word is the Dead were after her.”

“Anyone in particular?” asked Murdock.

Eyes shifted to the ground or the horizon, anywhere but at us. One of the merrows from the harbor pointed down. Female merrows didn’t speak much, preferring to use their bodies to communicate. More than a few people have drowned trying to understand them. I leaned over the wall. At low tide, the channel sank over a dozen feet, exposing the foundation stones of the wall. A sewer overflow pipe jutted over the water. “Did you see someone come out of there?” I asked.

The merrow nodded, her wide, dark eyes like pools of sadness. No surprise there, although coming out of the sewer made a nice connection to where we found the head.

“Was it anyone you knew?”

She gazed at the hard gray water. “It is the one we call the Hound of the Dead. He hunts the Dead.”

Someone gasped behind me, and one of the solitaries made a hissing sound. Whoever this Hound was, he was doing a pretty good job of scaring the hell out of people. “Sekka wasn’t one of the Dead,” I said.

“No, but I saw him drag her body here,” she said.

“Did you see where he went?” Murdock asked.

The merrow subtly bowed her head, fear creeping into her eyes. Behind you, she sent.

I crouched on the ground, pretending to examine footprints. I pivoted on the balls of my feet to look behind me, as if I were following a trail. On the opposite side of the parking lot, a cloaked figure stood in the alley. He was too far away to get a precise read on his essence.

A solitary’s mossy hair swayed with a shake of his head. “You don’t find the Hound. He finds you.”

“Yeah, well, I’d like to talk to him about that,” Murdock said.