Uncertain Allies

16

A steady throb pounded my temples. I forced my eyes open. From the ceiling, a wavy distorted image of my body lying on something white reflected from thick glass. Behind the glass, a dull gray smear indicated steel sheathing. Around me, the walls, floor, and lone door were lined the same way. Essence didn’t travel well through glass, and metal warped it back on itself. Putting the two together created an effective barrier against it.

I lifted my head from a pillow, my brain following the motion a second later. I sat up, holding my forehead to ease the rush of blood to my head. To either side, four-foot stone obelisks shimmered with a pearlescent glow. They reacted to my movement, flashing with a slow whirl that danced through the field around the stone. They were dampening wards to monitor my body signature and prevent the accidental or intentional use of essence.

I was on a bed in a containment room. Hospitals used them to protect patients from outside influences that might disrupt healing spells. Mental wards used them to keep patients calm and protect staff against unpredictable essence bursts. Prisons used them as holding cells. Mine was a holding cell.

The thick glass-coated door opened, and four Danann security agents entered. They fanned out, their wings rising and falling with sharp flashes of blue and white, their hands primed with essence and ready to fire. Briallen came in next, her face set with concern as she approached the bed. Outside the door, Joe fluttered in the hallway. He waved.

“Where am I?” I asked.

Briallen stopped at the foot of the bed. “Avalon Memorial holding area. Do you know who you are?”

I smiled through fatigue. “You know I’ve been working on that, Briallen.”

Tension eased out of her. Briallen had spent a good part of the last few years scolding me for whining I wasn’t the person I wanted to be anymore. She took my hand. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

“What the hell happened?”

She placed her free hand on my forehead. She didn’t perform her usual probe but examined my body signature with the gentlest touch of essence. “I was hoping you could tell me. You had some kind of episode. Two agents who arrived on the scene were drained.” Her hand slid to my shoulder as panic ran through me. “I said ‘drained,’ not ‘dead.’ They’re fine. How do you feel?”

“Where’s Meryl?” I asked instead of answering her.

“Upstairs. She’s fine. Tell me what happened.”

I glanced at the guards. “Are they necessary?”

She examined the ward monitors. I wasn’t an expert on them, but I knew they measured things like essence outputs and fluctuation patterns. Are you in control of yourself? she sent.

My body was sore. My chest ached, and my face throbbed as if someone had punched me, but Briallen wasn’t asking about a physical assessment. The black mass in my head smoldered with a heated smoothness, not the jagged edges that appeared when it was agitated. The hungering sensation wasn’t there either. It was sated, for now. I nodded. With the flutter from a sending, Briallen dismissed the agents. Joe flew in over their heads as they filed out.

I swung my legs off the bed. “I want to see Meryl.”

Briallen steadied me as I stood. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

I pushed my way toward the door. “What about Shay?”

She grabbed my arm with a fierce grip that warned me I wasn’t going anywhere. “He called Leonard, then disappeared before help arrived. Do not make me ask what happened again, Connor.”

I forced myself to remain calm. “The dark thing came out of me. It reacted to something in Shay’s apartment. I don’t understand it myself.”

Worry etched her face. “Then why should I let you leave this room?”

Dumbfounded, I stared at her. “What do you mean? Am I under arrest?”

She relaxed her grip but held on. “You’ve committed no crime, Connor, but I saw the agents brought in. There are going to be questions. Convince me you’re not a danger outside this room.”

Her neutral tone unnerved me. Briallen always warned me that sometimes personal relationships had to take a backseat to bigger issues. She’d had pain in her past, details she hadn’t shared except to say she did what needed to be done when necessary. She hadn’t cut me any slack when I was a young kid in training. She wasn’t going to now.

I went with honesty. “I can’t. I can say that at this moment, you have nothing to worry about.”

Not taking her eyes from me, she cocked her head. “Joe?”

He squinted as he fluttered around me, his essence glowing hot pink. Flits sensed essence at a granular level. They needed to in order to be able to teleport without landing in a wall and killing themselves. Joe was doing his own version of a scan. “He’s telling the truth, m’lady. I don’t see anything freaky.”

I dropped my gaze to the floor. “You don’t trust me.”

Briallen rubbed my arm. “I don’t trust myself.”

“I’m okay,” I said.

She searched my face, her eyes troubled. “I will let you leave if you promise me you will call me the moment you feel out of control.”

I took her hand and kissed it. “I promise.”

I thought she wasn’t going to accept my word, but she inhaled and nodded as if resigned. “I’ll take you to her.”

The surface of my skin felt raw and jangly as we stepped off the elevator upstairs. With all the ward baffling in AvMem, there wasn’t much essence in the air. The mass vibrated inside me, testing the area for a hint of essence, but it was more standard procedure for the dark mass than any threat it would activate.

In Meryl’s room, Gillen Yor stood at the foot of the bed, his fists planted on his hips. He glared at the medical and stone ward monitors as if trying to bend them to his will. Knowing Gillen, he probably was. He cocked his head as we entered, his long, shaggy eyebrows animated. “I’ll be bled and drained if I can figure out what the hell is wrong with this woman.”

Meryl sat in bed, her blank expression unchanged from earlier in the day. White paint flecked her hair and spots on her hands and face where someone had missed cleaning them. I picked up her limp hand. “Is she all right?”

Gillen tugged at his hair, adding to the cotton-candy halo around his bald spot. “Better than she was. We’ve got strong brain activity back. It’s trance-state, but it’s there.”

“That’s good, right?”

Gillen chewed at his lips as he narrowed his eyes. “It’s progress, but there’s still not a damned thing I can do to help her.”

I winced. “Do you think it’s okay to say something like that within her hearing?”

That was a mistake. Gillen glowered with utter contempt. “I do not need some lovesick puppy lecturing me on what is or is not okay to say in front of my own Danu-damned patients, Grey. And speaking of which, who the hell let you out of your cage?”

“His episode is over, Gillen,” Briallen said.

He grunted. “Until next time. How did this reaction occur?”

I moved away from the bed. “There was an intense essence surge. The black mass reacted before I could stop it.”

Gillen hummed as he scanned Meryl. “That must have been some surge. I’ve hit her with high enough bursts of essence to kill a troll. What caused it?”

I ignored his question. The fewer people who knew about the stone ward, the better. “Is she going to be okay now?”

He slid his hands into his lab coat. “These trance states can last anywhere from hours to years. Without knowing how the Taint caused it, I have no means to proceed without dropping everything else, and I can’t do that.”

“So, what? You’re giving up on her?” I asked.

He glared. “She’s alive, Grey. That’s more than I can say the future holds for a lot of my patients. I’ll keep working on the problem, but I can’t do it exclusively.”

I stood shocked in the silence that followed. “You’re giving up.”

His eyes flickered with yellow light, and a sharp gust in the air slapped me hard on the side of the head. “Don’t you dare, Grey. I don’t need a patient in a bed in order to treat them. When you start saving lives instead of screwing them up, then you can criticize my methods.”

Briallen spoke in a quiet voice. “I’ll take her back to my house.”

Gillen stared me down like an angry parent until I looked away. “She is one of yours, Briallen,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

Briallen placed the palm of her hand on Meryl’s cheek. “We’re part of the same Circle, Connor. I understand her in ways no one else does. I may be able to wake her.”

Following the druidic path meant being part of the Grove, men and women joining together to understand their place on the Wheel of the World. The masculine and feminine aspects of that journey had their own peculiarities. Briallen was one of the most powerful druidesses in the world. I wanted to believe she could help Meryl, but she hadn’t been able to figure out what was wrong with me. I didn’t want to doubt her, but I didn’t know whether to have hope.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

Gillen headed for the door. “Leave. I have enough headaches.”

Briallen and I stared at the empty doorway. “He’s in a better mood than usual,” I said.

She chuckled. “It’s a mess here. The riots caused so many essence-related injuries, they’ve opened an annex.”

Seeing Meryl so still, so quiet, tore at me. “Whatever you need to do, Briallen, do it. I want her back.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“I saw what happened during the riots, Connor. I saw video footage of a dark cloud that left hundreds of people drained of essence almost to the point of death. What the footage doesn’t show is who was at the center of that darkness,” she said.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I said.

She laughed. “Oh, now it’s not your fault? After taking the blame for things that weren’t your fault, suddenly it’s not your fault when it obviously is?”

The black mass pulsed as anger surged through me. “I couldn’t control it.”

“Bullshit. I watched that black mass move with purpose—with direction. The victims weren’t the solitaries and the Dead of the Weird. They were Guild and Consortium agents and National Guardsmen. Those are the people you blame for everything that’s wrong. Don’t tell me you didn’t have control. I don’t know how or why you stopped, but don’t try to bullshit me that you didn’t almost kill those people. Those were your victims, Connor.”

I hadn’t told Briallen everything. I hadn’t told her that I had talked to the leanansidhe, not after the thing had called me “brother.” The thought that we were related, even conceptually, terrified me. “It’s complicated.”

“It always is,” she said.

“Remember the leanansidhe I found? Her abilities have something to do with the black mass in my head. I asked her for help.”

With cool anger, Briallen glanced down at Meryl. “Did she know about this?”

I looked away. “No. I went alone.”

She grabbed my chin and turned my face toward her. “Did you do this to her, Connor?”

I pulled back. “No! How could you say that?”

She set her chin. “How could you not tell me about the leanansidhe?”

Exasperated, I rubbed at my face. “You’re right. I should have told you. I was—I don’t know—embarrassed. The leanansidhe showed me that when the black mass gets out, the pain goes away a little. She thought she was controlling it, but that’s only half-true. I don’t want to believe it has a mind of its own, but it has a compulsion that’s hard to resist. It makes me want essence, too.”

“Is it out of control?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I use my body essence to hold it in check.”

Unimpressed, a corner of her mouth curled down. “Yes, I’m sure the two drained agents will appreciate that.”

“I was out when they arrived. I think the darkness is afraid of draining me. If I die, it loses its host. Those agents would have died otherwise.”

“You’re guessing. We need to test it somehow,” she said.

“I haven’t hurt anyone, and I don’t want you to be the first,” I said.

“Let me worry about that. I’ll call you when Meryl is settled in, and we’ll arrange something,” she said.

I hung my head. “I need to find Shay. Are you going to stop me?”

For a moment, I thought she might. “Go, then. If you have any more episodes, I want to know about them. I mean it,” she said.

“Okay.”

She stopped me at the door, wrapping her arms around me. “I’m worried.”

I smoothed her hair. “I know. And thank you. Sometimes I forget to ask for help when I should.”

She squeezed tighter, then released me. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

As I rode the elevator down, I called Shay on my cell, and he answered immediately. “Where are you?”

“I had a problem. Where are you?” I asked.

“I . . . Where you first met me,” he said.

Shay had enough paranoia to worry someone might be listening in. “I’m on my way.”