Uncertain Allies

26

A phone ringing in the middle of the night was never a good sign. I groped for my cell as Meryl groaned beside me. The caller ID showed Murdock’s number. Meryl mumbled a hello and pulled the covers over her head. Between the months lying helpless in bed and the huge expenditure of essence at Briallen’s, she was exhausted. Even powerful druids didn’t have the body strength of a Danann fairy. We needed sleep to replenish essence, to say nothing about improving our dispositions.

“We have another body,” Murdock said, when I opened the phone.

“Where?”

“The Tangle. You need to see this one.”

I dressed in the dark as he gave me directions. He offered to send a squad car to pick me up, but the Tangle was only about a mile off. It was faster to run—maybe walk—than wait for a car to make the lights to my place and back. He didn’t say more because he wanted me to have my own first impression. I kissed Meryl’s head before I left. She answered with a snore. After months of no reaction, she made me smile.

I jogged down Old Northern Avenue, dogging through late-night crowds on the sidewalk. The party crowds thinned out as I reached the burned-out section of the avenue. No more buildings meant no more business. Boston’s World Trade Center and its boat terminal had escaped the fire, but it was locked down for the night. Not far past it was where we had found the first body.

This part of the neighborhood was pretty damaged, but as I neared the Tangle, the rougher crowd that sought its entertainments began to appear. The local gangs had fragmented after last summer, but they existed in small groups. Elf and dwarf thugs eyed each other on opposing corners, flexing their muscles over turf. The groups were smaller, but it was only a matter of time before they started growing and taking over city blocks. Hard-core partiers dressed in leather and vinyl hustled their way along the sidewalk, searching for new clubs and drugs. Solitary fey lurked in doorways, their strange appearances adding an air of menace as they muttered their sales pitches for exotic spells and potions. No matter how beaten down the Weird was, it always managed to rise again in the same desperate ways.

I paused on the sidewalk and faced the incandescent glow of the Tangle. The directions Murdock had given me led a few blocks in. I had to take a deep breath to prepare myself for the next part. I tapped my body essence and activated what was left of my body shield. Hardened essence covered my head and parts of my chest and arms, nothing like Murdock’s full protection. My body shield had been damaged in my fight with Bergin Vize. When I met him, I discovered Vize didn’t have a shield at all but depended on a blue-skinned nixie named Gretan, one of the small river fey, to protect him.

My shield served as an early-warning system these days. It activated on its own, reacting to heightened essence like a cat bristling with fear. Hardened essence could protect me from the collateral pain caused by scrying, but without someone else’s shield, I had to rely on my pathetic remnants until I found Murdock. The Tangle was a nest of scrying. Walking into it was going to hurt.

I took one more calming breath. A street address in the Tangle was pointless since the streets appeared to move. Illusions hid passageways that appeared at certain times or when the light struck from the proper angles. Sometimes the path itself was an illusion that had to be followed in order to find a destination. Murdock had told me to follow a line of dark blue brick buildings and turn up the alley next to the third one.

I found the building with no problem, turned into the alley, and saw a lamppost with a green light. Ten paces past that I walked through a door that looked like the entrance to a building but actually led to another alley. Over my shoulder, the illusion didn’t exist—the entrance to the alley wasn’t a small door but the typical wide gap between buildings.

People hurried by, huddled in hood-drawn cloaks or turning away from me. Not everyone wanted to be seen in the Tangle. The end of the second alley let out onto a narrow street. Despite people moving in every direction, some fast, some slow, it wasn’t hard to find Murdock. The cluster a block away had the obvious appearance of crime-scene rubberneckers.

An electric anticipation filled the air. People ran up and down the street, voices pitched with excitement and anger. Dim light made everything more chaotic as shadows played along the walls. A group of dwarves crowded ahead, shouting in triumph as they shined lights on the wall.

Two patrol officers kept the crowd back. Murdock had his gun drawn and his body shield up. The fey folk around him threw apprehensive looks at the metal weapon. Murdock didn’t have the whole beware-of-iron baggage the fey had, and a man with a body shield and a gun confused them. The funny part was that because he always had his gun on him, he had intuitively figured out how to compensate for the essence warp the metal created.

I edged around the crowd for a better view of the wall. At first, my mind didn’t process what I was seeing. It seemed fake, like a strange art installation or even a joke. A thought later, I realized it was no joke.

Suspended a foot or so off the ground, a woman was embedded in a bricked-over archway. Her twisted body protruded from the bricks as if caught in the act of turning away. One arm dangled limp over the sidewalk, the other lost from sight in the wall. One leg had gone through. The other bent against the stone pavement, its foot twisted sideways against the ground. Her head was turned away from the wall, as if she had paused to look down behind her. Long dark hair draped over her shoulder, obscuring her face.

I stopped next to Murdock. “That’s not a leanansidhe,” I said.

“I didn’t think so,” he said. Even without sensing her elven body signature, I would have known she wasn’t a leanansidhe. The leanansidhe were around four feet tall, and the woman in the wall was nearly six feet. Now that I was close enough, I sensed a barrier shield, not a literal wall. She had started to pass through the barrier, and it closed on her.

Murdock shouted at the crowd to disperse. They moved back but didn’t leave. The patrol officers did their best to maintain control, but on a good day, people in the Tangle weren’t known for complying with the law.

I lifted the hair from the dead woman’s face and froze in surprise. “Son of a bitch. This is Gerda Alfheim.”

Murdock shuffled closer. “You know her?”

“I saw pictures of her after the Castle Island fiasco,” I said.

He leaned in closer so as not to be overheard. “What did she have to do with Castle Island?”

From her expression, her death had not been pleasant. She was well within the field of the glamour when the barrier spell triggered a shutdown through the door. “She put Gethin macLoren up to what happened, Leo. That’s his mother,” I said.

MacLoren was a terrorist responsible for the first in the string of recent disasters in Boston. He was mentally unbalanced, a damaged soul whose mother, Gerda, was an elf and father a Danann fairy. Gerda had manipulated her son’s desire to heal and used him in an attempt to open a portal into another realm that held some of the scary beings out of Faerie history. It was the first major case Murdock and I had worked together. We both almost died stopping the catastrophe. Gerda Alfheim hadn’t been working alone back then. Anger swept over me as something fell into place for me. “Gerda works with Bergin Vize. This changes everything, Leo.”