Mark Del Franco - Unperfect Souls

She reached for my face. I shoved her away. “Don’t touch me.”

She cowered back, an uncertain smile flickering on and off her lips. “It is fine, my brother. The Wheel’s touch burns with ignorance at first, but in time it cuts with joy. You are strong, my brother. Druse slept many days after her first touch.”

I grabbed the edge of the pedestal and pulled myself up. “What did you do to me?”

Druse yanked at her hair. “Nothing, my brother! You asked to see. We are akin. We touch the light and bring the lack. It is the Way of the Wheel.”

I rubbed my arms. They were sore with the pain of heat and cold. “Can it be controlled?”

Druse crawled behind the pedestal and raised her head above the bowl. “The solitaires seek Druse, and Druse must answer. Enough for today, my brother. Return again and learn.”

She cloaked herself and vanished. Her essence trail faded into the far end of the chamber where the light didn’t reach. She was gone. I examined my hands and found smooth unbroken skin. My sensing ability traced a faded area in the middle of my right hand that wasn’t there before. Tiny flashes of silver essence winked here and there along my fingers. Bits of jasper from the bowl had attached themselves to me. In spite of the pain, I pushed my body essence against them, and they sifted to the floor like fine dust.

I backed away, not turning until I reached the room’s exit. My chest constricted as I strode away from Druse’s room. I wasn’t going to be stomach sick this time. As I wound through the tunnels to the exit above, my face burned with a feverish warmth. Yearning desire raced through me, my skin tingling with an almost carnal hunger for more of what happened—to savor and, yes, devour essence as if it were the only thing I needed for sustenance. The sensation of that moment had a kick like a chemical high, only deeper and more profound, as if nothing else would matter if I could have it again. It felt wrong, corrupt. In the cold slap of the winter air outside, I refused to release the shocked emotion hovering inside me. What had happened felt wrong.

I wanted to go back even as I staggered away.

All the next morning I nursed the mother of hangovers, the combined effects of alcohol and the flood of essence I had absorbed in Druse’s chamber. The pounding in my head left little room to think of much else for hours. As the cloud of pain lifted, I debated calling Murdock, trying to decide if it would be pushing him to talk when he obviously didn’t want to, or if he wasn’t talking because he wanted me to push. It’s hard to read him sometimes. As I sat on the subway train, I checked my cell, scrolling through the caller ID in case I had missed his call. I hadn’t.

The train stopped at Boylston Street, and I got out with several students. I lingered behind them as we neared the stairs. When I was sure no one was paying attention, I slipped into the train tunnel. About fifty feet in, the barrier between inbound and outbound tracks ended, and I crossed over to the opposite side. Hopping onto the narrow concrete ledge, I listened to the distant, hollow sound of a train. I had plenty of time before it arrived. At regular intervals, shallow niches opened in the concrete walls, safety spots for transit workers to stand if they were caught on the tracks when a train approached. I reached one shallower than the others and walked into the concrete wall.

The wall let me through, a static resistance running over my body as I slipped to the other side. Feeling along the edge of the first step leading down, I found the small flashlight Meryl had promised to leave for me. I turned the light on and descended the stone stairs. At the bottom, I turned right into a long, narrow tunnel. Sometimes it was lined with bricks or granite blocks, sometimes with bedrock. Few people knew that an entire network of tunnels existed under the streets of Boston. Meryl made sure no one knew about this one, her secret way out of the Guildhouse.

Light appeared ahead, and I turned off the flashlight. The end of the tunnel gave a transparent view into Meryl’s office. An archway framed the desk area where she was working, seemingly oblivious to my approach. I knew better. No one sneaks up on Meryl Dian. We’re clear. Come on through, she sent.

I slipped through another field of static into her office. From her perspective, it looked like I had emerged from a solid wall. I sat in the messy guest chair as she finished reading something on her computer. She swiveled toward me. “Sorry. Minor catastrophe with the network.”

“Anything I can help with?” I understood a big chunk of the Guildhouse’s computer network from my days helping the IT department build security. Meryl, on the other hand, apparently spent her free time shredding through it with ease.

She shook her head. “It’s resolved. We’ve been getting a lot of intrusion attempts for the last month. MacGoren thinks it’s the Consortium, of course. I’m pretty sure it’s a bunch of college kids from BU.”

With a self-satisfied smile, she turned her monitor so I could see the screen. “Check this out.”

I leaned over the desk and skimmed through an agent briefing notice. “Sekka was a Consortium agent?”

She nodded. “I found that in an archived alert file from two months ago. All references to her were wiped from the system the day after you found Jark.”

I stared at the screen. “The day Jark killed Sekka. And now you’re going to tell me who deleted the files.”

Meryl’s eyebrows disappeared under her bangs. “Keeva.”

Keeva followed the rules. She bent them occasionally, but only when she felt a situation forced it. Or her. Wiping internal files didn’t sound like something she would do unless it was so serious, she needed to cover her own ass. Or she was ordered to do it. “They’re trying to bury something, and it isn’t dead bodies.”

Meryl leaned forward. “Here’s the juicy part. Keeva hasn’t had any assignments related to the Weird. MacGoren has a contained group of agents working down there under confidential directive. Rumor has it that Keeva and macGoren have been arguing behind closed doors.”

“I told Keeva about the leanansidhe . That could be what they’re working on.”

Meryl shook her head. “MacGoren’s boys have been down there since before you found the leanansidhe .”

I looked down at my hand. The spot where my essence had faded last night was normal again, my body signature intact. I scratched my palm. “Meryl, I have to ask you something. What do you know about leanansidhes’ abilities?”

She bobbed her head slowly from side to side. “You mean besides the whole soul-sucking thing?” I nodded. She shrugged. “Not much. They’re rare. I don’t think anyone’s studied them much.”

“What do you know about the other side of the Wheel?” I asked.

She pursed her lips. “The Wheel is what is, Grey. It’s all there is. There is no other side.”

“What about beneath the Wheel?”

She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it in thought. “There is no beneath. It’s not a wheel like a ribbon. It’s a Wheel like a movement.”

“You’re changing the metaphor,” I said.

She shrugged. “Only sorta kinda. There are no sides. There are relative relationships—that’s what we mean when we talk about paths—but talking about sides is taking the metaphor too literally.”

I shifted in my chair. “Okay, let me put it this way. What’s not the Wheel?”

She shrugged slowly. “Nothing. Chaos. The Void. Utter Meaninglessness. Something we cannot define because we can only define things in terms of the known, and what’s not the Wheel is so inconceivable we can’t begin to describe it.”