Mark Del Franco - Unquiet Dreams

I nodded. Angry dwarves are almost as bad as angry trolls. “Thanks. I don’t plan on hanging around.”

He tapped his forehead and bowed. “Nice working with you.”

I went up, and he went down. At the top of the flight, I came to a standard wooden door that opened into a small vestibule. I could feel a warding spell snap into place as soon as the door closed behind me. I opened another door opposite the first and found myself standing under a flight of brownstone stairs, daylight streaming in from the sides. I stepped out from under the steps onto the sidewalk in front of a boarded-up building.

A prickling sensation swept over me. I held up my hand to see fine swirls of earth-toned particles radiating essence. I rubbed the back of my hand, feeling a resistance layered over the skin. I allowed my sensing abilities to open to check it out. I didn’t have much experience with stonework, but I recognized silica and calcium embedded into my hands. I pushed my body essence at it, and the layer moved. I pushed harder, and a fine layer of dust rippled up on my hands. Moke’s spell had wrapped me in stone at Carnage, and I could see how it worked now by attracting stone particles to bond with my own essence.

I recognized Fargo Street, just south of the Tangle. It wasn’t a long walk from my apartment. As I started up the street, Joe appeared so close to my face with his sword drawn that I jumped. His fierce look quickly turned to relief. “Where the hell were you?” he asked.

“I went underground. Literally.”

He narrowed his eyes and hovered in close. “Are you okay? You’ve got troll essence all over you.”

I nodded. “It’s a long story.”

He looked up and down the street like he expected a horde of Visigoths to charge at him. Seeing none, he sheathed the sword.

Where are you? Burst into my mind so sharply I stumbled. “Tell Meryl I’m fine, Joe. Is she okay?”

He paused a moment. “She says you owe her a new pair of Doc Martens.”

I smiled. Whether she realized it or not, I could tell she was concerned enough to be upset. “Tell her I said ‘deal.’ Where did you go last night, Joe?”

Joe looped and dipped around me as I walked. “I couldn’t get in. They had awesome security on that place. Tell me what happened.”

He circled around me as I gave him the rundown, peering at passersby with suspicion. His head whipped around to face me as I got to the end of the story. “You took a shower in a troll’s bathroom?”

“Uh, Joe, did you miss what I said? I met a drys, almost died, and found out C-Note is going to attack the Guild.”

He nodded. “No, I heard that. How bad did it smell?”

“What?”

“The bathroom.”

I decided not to argue. “Actually, it didn’t. It was very clean.”

He nodded in puzzled consideration. “Really. I wouldn’t’ve thought. Were there dead things?”

We turned onto D Street and made for Summer. “Not obvious, though I did smell something not very fresh as I was leaving.”

Murdock cruised up on the left and stopped. I cocked an eyebrow at Joe. “Just how many people did you do a sending to?”

He smiled. “Just two. We thought you were dead, you know. Meryl saw you fall before the whole building went down. That woman should go into demolition. You should have seen her tear into the place looking for you.”

I had a recollection of someone screaming when I fell. “She did?”

He nodded. “I had to force her to leave. I couldn’t see you at all. I thought you were dead, but she didn’t.”

I opened the car door and tossed a paperback novel and some newspapers off the passenger seat and sat down next to Murdock. Joe fluttered into the backseat and began rummaging through the mess. “Hi,” I said.

Murdock pulled away from the curb. “So you’re not dead,” he said.

“You either.”

He smirked. “I run fast.”

I smirked back. “I fall slow. What happened to you?”

“I ran to get Meryl, but we couldn’t get back up because the whole back of the building was in flames. Then it started falling apart.”

“Your essence got pretty strong in there,” I said.

He turned onto Summer Street. “I don’t feel any different.”

“Murdock, think about the other night at Yggy’s. Didn’t you notice how fast you were moving? Hell, you laid out an elf with one punch.”

He pursed his lips. “I guess I did. I still don’t feel any different.”

He might not feel anything, but I did. I had met very few fey whose essence oscillated in strength like Murdock’s did. It cycled from slightly elevated human normal to wildly strong to, like now, somewhere in the middle. “What’s the midach say?”

“Nothing. Meryl insisted I get checked out this morning. I was at AvMem when Joe called me. Where are we going?”

I considered a moment. “The Guildhouse. I need to talk to Keeva.”

Murdock goosed the accelerator. “What happened after I took off?”

“He met a drys, almost died, and learned C-Note’s evil plans,” Joe’s voice came from somewhere under a pile of papers.

“Oh, be quiet,” I said.

He snickered. “I told you I was paying attention.”

I gave Murdock a few more details than Joe had. A curious look came over his face. “Explain the drys.”

“It’s like I said last night. They’re legends. The belief is that real entities are obligated to keep the flows of essence balanced. A drys is a keeper of the wood and is the source of Power that druids tap. When a druid asks for a blessing, he’s asking the drys.”

“A goddess,” he concluded.

I stole a look at him, but couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. Murdock’s Roman Catholicism is one of the wonderful contradictions about our friendship. He is a believer who wants to understand the crazy pagans. “Not quite. More an extension of a goddess. The Goddess, if that’s where your belief lies.”

“Is that what you believe?”

I paused, not expecting the question. What did I believe? If he had asked me the day before, I would have talked a lot about energy and reason. I knew what I was supposed to believe as a druid, but my rational mind always resisted. Essence was just there. I could tap it like an energy source. Whether I believed it was the extension of some higher power seemed beside the point. And yet, standing in the Bosnemeton, in a grove of oak with my brothers, I did feel Something. Feeling the purity of essence that Hala generated when I had held her, I felt Something. I knew what I was supposed to believe, even wanted to believe it, but I still hovered on the edge of that precipice, suspicious of taking that leap of faith. Maybe that was the missing key to my problem. Maybe allowing the old beliefs to become real in my mind was the step I needed to take to heal the darkness in my head.

“Let’s just say I hope all of this has a reason,” I said finally.

He nodded. “Hope is the beginning of faith.”

I laughed. “I thought I was the one who just had a near-death experience.”

Murdock shrugged. “Trust me. When you have a building collapsing on your ass, you find time for faith.” He leaned over and pulled a manila folder out of the glove compartment. “I had a busy day.”

I flipped the file open to a sheaf of notes with a photocopy of a store receipt for orange Nike running shoes. “You traced the Nikes?”

He nodded. “They were brand-new. I’d never seen them before, so I figured it might be easy to track them down. Newbury Street, of all places.”

I shook my head. A poor kid from the wrong side of Southie ends up dead while wearing shoes from the most expensive stretch of pavement in Boston.

“They were bought with a credit card, so I ran the number,” he said.