Mark Del Franco - Unquiet Dreams

The bus left me in a cloud of blue exhaust, and I walked the final two blocks to the OCME. The place looks and feels tired, as though all the human tragedy that revolves through its doors has taken its toll on the building. I pushed through the scarred Plexiglas doors and found the reception desk. Of the four desks behind the main counter, an older woman occupied one and the others were empty. She did not look up.

“Excuse me?” I said. She still did not look, but held up her index finger as she continued reading something.

I felt a tingle of unexpected essence behind me and turned. A dark elf walked purposefully toward me, gave one glance at me, and placed some folders on the counter. As she perused her files, I couldn’t imagine what she was doing at the OCME. Dark elves are rare in Boston, never mind working for human normals. They preferred keeping the peace in the southern parts of the country, particularly Atlanta and Birmingham,

One of the better things about Convergence was the dark elves. They didn’t much care for oppression of people based on skin color, something they found utterly ridiculous conceptually. If there was one thing the Alf and Swart elves agreed on, it was that they were elves first. Elves knew racism, but skin color alone wasn’t something to base it on. Swarts had swiftly become involved in politics and pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1934. I guess Congress didn’t have much hope of defying a bunch of people who could chant their asses to hell and back.

The woman behind the counter still had her hand up. “Excuse me, I’m looking for Janey Likesmith,” I said. Without moving anything else, the woman dropped her index finger forward and pointed.

“I’m Janey,” the dark elf said, smiling as she extended her hand. She had deep brown skin and warm cocoa-colored eyes. Nutmeg brown hair swept over her delicate ear points and stopped abruptly at the nape of her neck. “You must be Mr. Grey.”

“Connor. How’d you know?”

She leaned against the counter. “No one comes here looking for me unless I call them. Do you have a few minutes to look at something?”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said, smiling back so it wouldn’t sound like sarcasm.

With an almost childlike excitement, she gathered her folders and led me across the hall to a stairwell. She wore chunky shoes that echoed loudly as she descended the steps. “I found something unusual in the Farnsworth case. I called you when I saw you were consulting with Detective Murdock. The Boston P.D. won’t know what to do with it. No one here would get the ramifications.” She paused at the basement door, concern troubling her face. “He won’t mind, will he? That I called you and not him?”

“No, that’s why he calls me, too.”

She relaxed. “Oh, good. This way, please.” She opened the door to another, dimmer hallway, and we were in the morgue area.

“Likesmith isn’t a fey name,” I said.

She threw me a smile. “It’s Dokkheim, actually. I used to say to humans that where I come from it’s ‘like Smith.’ So I changed it. The irony is now I have to explain it to the fey all the time.”

She led me to a small lab with two tables, one empty, the other strewn with instruments, and walls lined with drawers. Without hesitation, she opened a particular drawer and pulled out several large envelopes and plastic bags. I recognized the Farnsworth boy’s clothing in one of the larger ones. She laid them out on the table with care, immediately marking the tracking sheets to indicate the date and time she removed the items and put my name down as well. She lifted an envelope, removed a glass box about four inches square, and placed it on the table.

“You made a ward box?” I said.

She nodded. “As a precaution. I found these stamps in the lining of Dennis Farnsworth’s hoodie.”

Disappointment crawled across my mind. I’d seen stamps like this before. Kids licked them to get high. Farnsworth had drugs on him. The kid was running drugs while wearing Moke’s gang colors.

I leaned closer. Five square stamps wrapped in individual plastic sleeves sat in the box. Each one was pale yellow with the ogham rune for oak on it. Janey opened the box, and I immediately felt the essence wafting off the stamps. With a small tweezers she removed one and placed it on a tray.

“You can feel the essence, can’t you?” she said.

I shrugged. “Lots of drugs in the Weird have essence.”

She nodded and used a second tweezers to remove the stamp from the sleeve. “Come closer, but don’t touch it. I think dermal contact might cause absorption.”

I stood closer to her and saw immediately what she meant. I could feel a rhythmic pulse of essence, and I felt attuned to it. “Oak,” I said.

She smiled. “I thought you’d recognize it. My people are a woodland clan. We’re both people of the Oak.”

I didn’t see the need to argue. All fey have affinities for working with certain types of essence. Druids primarily fall in the earth category, adept at working with plant life, particularly trees and particularly oak. It’s why we like to use staffs and wands. Elves can chant essence out of most anything, but I didn’t know that much about their affinities. That they even had them didn’t surprise me.

“So, we have an essence-based drug derived from oak. I’m still not seeing anything odd.”

“I worked with it for a while before I noticed. Feel it again,” she said.

I concentrated on the stamp, felt the flow, could almost taste it on my tongue. A moment later, my brain felt like someone was squeezing it, and my shields slammed on so fast that I jerked back with grunt. The feeling stopped abruptly, and I opened my eyes. Janey had slipped the stamp back in the sleeve and put it back in the box.

She had concern on her face, confused, but real. “Are you okay?”

“Now I know why you put the ward field on it. It felt like something was trying to stab me in the head.” I did a mental check on myself, but didn’t notice any lingering effects.

She leaned against the table with crossed arms. “How odd. That’s not what happened to me. There were six of these. I used one for testing and didn’t think much about the essence coming off it until I realized I was just staring out the window.” She gestured up at the small, grilled window. Not much to see but the fender of a car.

“Then someone came in and asked me to pick up coffee for the office, and I went. It wasn’t until I was in line at Starbucks that I got annoyed. I usually get annoyed immediately when I get asked to be a gofer.”

I pursed my lips. “So, there’s a suggestive in it.”

She nodded. “That’s a pretty impressive feat to pull off in such a small item. I think more testing should be done, but we don’t have the equipment here.”

I looked around Janey’s processing room. The OCME hardly had the trappings for a fey researcher. Hell, it hardly met the minimum requirements for a forensics lab. And yet here was a dark elf, an apparently intelligent individual, working for them. “Why are you here?”

She smiled. “You mean ‘why am I not at the Guild?’ Everyone asks eventually. The Guild did ask me to join. So did the Consortium. They get enough people to do what I do. At the OCME, I get to do whatever I want because human normals don’t know how to sort through fey material. In a nutshell, I’m here because it helps a lot more than there.”

“Sounds noble,” I said. Lots of people turned down employment with the Guild, most of them for political or career reasons.

She shrugged and laughed. “Not really. My parents are what some people derisively call assimilationists. They think we’re stuck here and are okay with it.”

“And like parent, like daughter?”