Mark Del Franco - Unquiet Dreams

“Are you ready?” I said it nicely. She nodded and followed me to Murdock’s car. I tossed a donut bag into the back and sat down. Crystal pushed away a pile of newspapers on the backseat and made herself comfortable.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” Murdock said. He pulled away from the curb and almost looked in his side view mirror when he did it. He felt different—smooth, for lack of a better word, as if his essence were spread over him in an even layer. Human normals usually feel that way to me because their essence is so weak. The fey tend to have variable flow about them, the essence more intense about their heads and hearts. His midach must have done something to moderate the extreme fluctuations I had been sensing.

“Where to?” I asked Crystal.

“The Tangle,” she said. Of course. Murdock had already turned onto the Avenue, so we just drove in silence through the main part of the Weird. He stopped the car at Harbor Street. We could see the yellow crime scene tape on the Unity storefront. A Guild security guard hovered into view at the far end of the street, then flew back up.

I twisted in my seat. “Okay, Crystal, first you have to tell us what happened at Unity,” I said.

She looked out the window with a look I’ve seen before, a slack look of disbelief at what she had seen. “Mr. K asked Denny to make a run for him. I went with him for the pickup.”

“Do you know what he was running?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It had something to do with Float. Denny bought some somewhere. I found it. I was pissed ’cause I’m clean now, and I didn’t want any drugs around. Denny said he wasn’t using. Mr. K asked him to buy it for him and that he had to bring it to Unity, then do a run.”

“Did Kruge use kids from Unity for runs a lot?”

She shrugged. “Yeah. Regular errands type stuff, if that’s what you mean.”

I looked over at Murdock. He didn’t say anything. At the end of the day, this was still his case. I let the moment hang to give him a chance to jump in, but he didn’t.

“Okay, so you got here and then what?” I said.

She wrapped her arms tightly against her chest. “Mr. K was here with Croda. He asked me to wait in the printing room. I couldn’t hear anything at first, but then there was shouting. I opened the door a crack to see what was going on, and there was this big ugly troll yelling at Mr. K…”

“Would you recognize him?” I interrupted.

“Huh? Yeah, sure. Croda’s the only other troll I met until Moke. Anyway, the troll said something about Denny having something and grabbed him. Mr. K got mad and pushed the troll and told Denny to run. Denny started running toward me, and the troll threw a fey-bolt at him.”

“Wait a minute, a troll threw a bolt of essence?” Crystal nodded. Trolls manipulated essence, but not offensively. They worked it within things, particularly stone, but I’d never heard they could send it through the air. Unless C-Note had figured out how to work around it. And the idea of a troll doing that was pretty scary.

“And then Denny…he…he…” She started to cry.

Even though I’ve seen enough manipulation-by-tears, Crystal’s reminded me to take it easy on her like Meryl asked. “It’s okay, Crystal. Tell us so we can figure out what to do.”

She nodded and took a deep breath. “The bolt hit Denny, and he flew through the air right at me. He hit the door, and we both fell. He didn’t move at all after that. I think…I think that’s when he died.” The last part came out in a whisper. She started to sob again.

“You’re doing good, Crystal. Take a breath and tell me what happened next.”

It took a few moments for her to calm down. Any annoyance I had for her from the previous night was gone. “The next thing I knew, Croda was in the room. I could hear fey-fire and screaming. Croda grabbed me and Denny and ran out the back door. She took us into the Tangle.”

“Can you show us?”

She nodded. “Take a left into the next alley.”

Murdock crossed over Harbor and took the left. We were in the alley across the Avenue from the Unity alley. So far, it made sense. It was the direction I had sensed troll essence trailing away when Murdock and I checked out the back door of Unity. We crept down the narrow lane, large warehouses looming up on each side of us. Sunlight fell in complex patterns on the ground as it filtered through the network of fire escapes above. Old wooden pallets, an array of boxes and bags and tossed papers littered the gutters. At the end of the alley, a rusted car sat to the left.

“Go to the end and take a right,” Crystal said.

We made the turn onto a wider service road between more warehouses. Even though we were more exposed to the sky overhead, the light felt dimmer. We were starting to move into the Tangle.

“Go about three buildings down,” she said.

Murdock guided the car around piles of rubble, trash, and masonry discarded with no fear that anyone would object. The warehouses down here were no longer active, most of them burnt-out and boarded up. It had been a long time since city services ran garbage trucks. Murdock stopped the car.

Crystal leaned forward and peered through the wind-shield, then out the side. She closed her eyes. “Wait here and take the left when the alley appears.”

Murdock craned his neck to look up through the wind-shield. “There’s no alley turn here.”

“There will be,” said Crystal.

I scanned the buildings for the telltale signs of a spell, but there was so much ambient essence, nothing stood out. “The Tangle’s full of illusions, Murdock. People put them up all the time. Sometimes they forget them and leave them running,” I said.

We sat for twenty minutes. “Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yes, it’s about the right place. It didn’t take this long that night. Maybe it’s broken.”

A few minutes later I was about to suggest Crystal rethink the location when the brick wall to our left shimmered and vanished. Without a word, Murdock backed up and turned into the alley that had been hidden. Crystal led us through two more similar illusions and an odd series of turns around buildings that seemed to have been built in the middle of the road.

“We have to get out here and walk,” said Crystal. We were in a stretch of alley that managed to look dark even in the early afternoon.

“You want me to leave the car here?” Murdock said.

“It’s not like it’s a Rolls,” I muttered and let myself out. For such a trash heap, he worried about it an awful lot. Murdock and I walked a few feet behind Crystal as she made tentative steps forward. Ahead, old Jersey barriers lay in a heap like a very large game of pick-up-sticks. Crystal turned to her left and faced a gaping hole torn through the brick wall of a building. She seemed frozen in place.

“Where next, Crystal?” I asked when she didn’t move.

She looked up at me, then back at the hole. “We went through here.”

She didn’t move, so I stepped around her and peered inside. Not much to see, just a large empty room covered with the ruins of the collapsed ceiling. The far wall was just gone. Where we stood, the light felt dim. Out beyond the other side of the building, it looked stark and harsh. I could feel the buzz of essence, an old resonance slithering over my mind. The darkness in my head didn’t like it. Something had happened here, something wrong. There were places like it all over the Tangle. Throughout most of the Weird, people avoided using too much Power for fear of the backlash. But here in the Tangle, all bets were off. No one cared what happened to anyone here.

“You ran straight through,” I said to confirm my thought with her.

“Yes,” she said behind me, her voice small.