Mark Del Franco - Unquiet Dreams

“Yeah, I just confirmed Ryan macGoren is an ass.”

She laughed as she started up the car. “I could have told you that, ya big silly.”

I didn’t say anything as we pulled back onto the riverside drive. Bone white trees stood guard over the thin strip of park. It was beautiful and empty. I stared and watched it go by.

“So you really met a drys?” Meryl asked, nudging me out of my brooding.

“Yeah, I did,” I said. “She was…I don’t know. Beautiful seems like such a lame word. I could feel the purity of essence in her. It was like the stories they told us when we were kids. She’s what we strive to be, Meryl.”

She nodded. “I’ve met a couple a long time ago. I don’t think we can ever be that. They’re more than human, Grey. We’re just flawed vessels for essence. They are essence.”

“That’s why I’m going to the funeral. C-Note’s tampering with essence on a fundamental level. He’s torturing that drys. If he shows up, we have to get that staff away from him.”

She sighed. “He said ‘we.’”

A small flush of anger swept over me. “You have a problem with that?”

She shrugged and cut someone off. “No. You just assume I’m jumping on this bandwagon.”

Sometimes Meryl’s flipness grated on me. “Is anything important to you?”

She frowned. “You know, when people say that, what they really mean is why isn’t what’s important to me important to you? Yeah, Grey, things are important to me. I hate to break it to you, but I get to decide what those things are.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She cut the wheel hard to make the off-ramp. “Sure it is. Pick me up here. Get me this. Hide this chick. Help me get out of here. I live by the moon, Grey. That doesn’t make me your satellite.”

I clenched my jaw and didn’t respond. A drys was the female aspect of the oak. As a druidess, she should be the one fired up over what C-Note had done even more than I was. “It’s a drys, Meryl.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m driving to the cemetery. But it’s my choice, Grey, not yours. I decide for myself whether I help or not. You don’t get to judge that. You haven’t earned it.”

I dropped my head back and closed my eyes. Counted to ten. Shooed arrogant and controlling personality traits back into the closet. Smiled. “You’re right. I did it again. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” she said, and pulled into a line of cars waiting to get into the cemetery.

I gave her a big-eyed smile. “That was our first fight.”

She rolled her eyes. “No. Our first fight was about five years ago when you forgot to do some research and tried to cover your ass by telling people I lost the request form.”

I patted her hand on the stick shift. “No. I meant as a couple.”

She turned and looked at me, keeping her face completely blank. “If you don’t move your hand, I will gnaw my own off at the wrist.”

I did move it. “You will succumb to my charms eventually.”

She smirked. “Let me know when you have some.”

“I will never have the last word, will I?”

She parked the car and smiled. “Not my style.”

The street swarmed with activity. A high-profile fey dying, never mind murdered, simply did not happen often. Everyone from street kids to ranking politicos roamed about, checking out the crowd and trying to get in the background of the live-TV camera shots. Meryl and I skirted around the rubberneckers and walked up the driveway to the cemetery.

Forest Hills Cemetery covers almost three hundred acres in the city of Boston. If there’s one thing the old Brahmins did well, it was die in style. Fine landscaping, rolling hills, public art, and even a lake with an island. The trust that ran the place even encouraged the public to use the grounds as long as the graves were respected. I liked the attitude of life and death coexisting.

We went through the first security checkpoint at the main gate. I didn’t know what Keeva’s criteria were for access, but Guild members and guests were all allowed through with no questions. Once inside, the volume of curiosity seekers went down considerably. At a turn off the main path, the Boston P.D. had its own checkpoint for humans. Murdock strolled out from behind a van.

“I have some seats for us,” he said as he fell into step with us.

“You’re not on duty?” I asked.

He smiled. “I’m always on duty. They’re only letting bodyguards into the main site. I said I was yours.”

“Who’s going to protect you from him?” Meryl asked.

He grinned at her. “I thought that’s why you came.”

“Don’t go there,” I said. Meryl jabbed me in the side.

He checked his watch. “Almost dark. The ceremony’s going to start soon.”

We walked briskly along the tidy lanes as dusk fell. Monuments stared at us with solemn gravity, growing luminous in the fading light. The essence of a cemetery is a strange thing. It’s tinged with melancholy, of course, but also an unsettling amount of want and even rage. Not everyone goes gentle into the good night, and they leave a resonance behind them. I couldn’t sense individual essence like Joe apparently did. It’s more like a stew of emotion, each new voice adding to it, changing it, inflecting it. Ultimately, getting lost in it. Because that’s how we end. Lost in the mix.

The mix ramped up as we came around a curve in the path and walked through an essence barrier. Murdock didn’t feel it. From our brief passing, I could tell it had a sensory ability, registering the essence of everyone who passed through. Whoever was monitoring the shield must have been puzzled by a high-powered druidess, a human normal who felt fey, and a druid who reeked of troll traveling together.

The path rose between two oaks. With all the members of the Grove wandering through, the trees gave off a low hum, their essence glowing with the Power of the wood. I looked up at a majestic white oak, its many limbs branching and tangling, its thick roots gnarling into the ground, and thought of Hala, trapped in the last living bit of a tree, confined to nothing more than a sliver of a memory.

The crowd thickened over the rise. All manner of fey had come to pay homage to Kruge, a fitting final tribute to a man who had advocated unity. If anything summed up the difference between Seelie Court and the Teutonic Consortium, their approach to death did. Fairies dimmed their wings and walked, eyes downcast, as if acknowledging that even in their immortality, death was always hovering in the shadows. The elves, though, they strode forward, heads up, singing dirges, honoring life and defying death. Brownies and dwarves were not as dramatic as their more powerful cousins, but brought their own drama to the party.

A surprising assortment of solitary fey haunted the edges the crowd. Usually they avoid being noticed, fearing the domination games that go on among them. In the gathering shadows beneath the trees, I could see them furtively moving, their limbs glistening silver or red or green. Most solitaries make people uncomfortable. To human eyes, they resemble the stuff of nightmares, long-snouted faces and horned heads, hairy coats instead of skin or oddly jointed arms and legs that spoke of birds or lizards. Some wore smiles that sent chills and others held such sadness that no comfort could touch. Their eyes glittered in the dark, streaks of red and yellow as they moved among the graves, clawed fingers leaving white lines on tombstones.

Human normals make the mistake of thinking all solitaries are Unseelie, standing in opposition to High Queen Maeve. It’s more complicated than just that. The Unseelie Court exists, but it shifted alliances more often than the weather, with solitaries moving in and out as the wind blew. Only when they all stood together did they form a true Court, and when they did, wars broke out. Of all the fey, they enjoyed Convergence most, if only because Seelie and the Consortium were too involved with each other to bother them. Kruge’s unity message had to have rung deeply with them.