Uncertain Allies

28

I woke alone at midday. Meryl, praise be, had set up the coffeemaker. She left a note to join her for lunch if I managed to get up before the sun went down. The funny part was she wasn’t being sarcastic. We were both night owls and cast no stones in the waking-up-late department. I took a leisurely shower, then walked over the Oh No bridge to catch the subway.

At Boylston Street, the train left me with a screech of metal on metal as it rode a sharp turn out of the station. When no one on the platform or in the token booth was paying attention, I slipped through the break in the fencing near the stairs. I walked the access curbing beside the tracks toward the next station in Copley Square. I had told Murdock that Boston was riddled with tunnels—some official and legal like the subways and some not so much. Not far into the tunnel was a concrete niche that wasn’t concrete but a glamour hiding a not-so-official tunnel that led to Meryl’s office in the Guildhouse.

Meryl had been with the Guild a long time. She had worked her way up in the archives division until she became the Chief Archivist. Despite doing important work, she isn’t respected by the investigative division the way she should be. I should know. I was one of those jerks once. I knew Meryl before I lost my abilities and made assumptions about her that weren’t fair. I thought she was lazy and grumpy. Once I was bounced out of the Guildhouse, I learned she was neither—far from it. Taken advantage of at work, sure, but not lazy. I still think she’s grumpier than she claims, but a lot of that has its reasons. I wouldn’t have her be any other way.

In the course of her career, she had discovered things in the Guildhouse—beneath the Guildhouse—that had been forgotten or lost. Tunnels layered their way into the earth, complicated mazes of stone and brick that only dwarven crafters could have produced. Long-hidden rooms filled with rare treasures lay dormant until Meryl had found them. She had made a few improvements of her own along the way, like the secret bolt-hole out of her office into the subway system.

As our bond grew, Meryl had given me privileges she gave to no one else—like tuning some of her wall illusions to my body signature so that I could enter or leave the Guildhouse unseen. I eased down the steps that led from the concrete niche. At the bottom, a long, narrow tunnel ended at her office, a bright rectangle of light in the distance.

The wall glamour included a warning anytime someone passed through, so Meryl knew I was coming. She worked at her desk, her face intent as she read her computer screen. Both Gillen Yor and Briallen had given her a clean bill of health, and seeing her back in action was an enormous relief.

From the office side, the tunnel exit appeared to be a blank space between a filing cabinet and a credenza. Meryl spun her chair as I stepped through. I leaned over a stack of manuals and kissed her on the lips. She had trimmed her hair and dyed it lemon yellow

“You look great,” I said.

“Comas are very refreshing,” she said.

The office was a shambles, filing drawers half-open, with papers jumbled in them, stacks of reports spilled across the floor, the guts of Meryl’s backdoor computer spewed out across the credenza. “What the hell are you doing?”

She blew a puff of air that fluttered her bangs. “Not me. It was like this when I came in this morning. I’ve been looking for patterns.”

I picked my way over a mess of e-mail printouts and tossed a box of old CDs off a chair to sit. “Of what?”

“What they were looking for,” she said.

“Let’s start with who,” I said.

“Let’s call it macGoren, et al. Various agents have been in and out, but the directives are coming from macGoren,” she said.

“Now the what,” I said.

“The who again, actually. You,” she said.

“Me? Why would they be searching your office for information about me?” I asked.

She shrugged. “We’re boinking.”

“We boink?”

“Not for at least three months”—she narrowed her eyes at me—“that I know of.”

I chuckled. “No worry. It’s been that long.” I watched her read through something on her computer screen. “You said Nigel was looking for something you knew, too.”

“I did,” she said, and kept reading.

“So, macGoren and Nigel both think you know something important about me,” I said.

“They do,” she said.

“Aaaaand . . . we’re not really having a conversation, are we?” I asked.

She glanced at me. “They want their weapon back.”

Meryl had made a connection between me and Nigel I had never considered before I lost my abilities. When I didn’t understand Nigel’s coldness, she pointed out that I was his number one soldier in the fight against the Elven King. When I lost my abilities, he lost what he considered his advantage. “I’m not a weapon,” I said.

“But you were a tool and didn’t know it,” she said.

“Regardless, I’m neither now,” I said.

She pursed her lips. “Maybe not a weapon but maybe still a tool.”

I scrunched my face at her. “Are you continuing this metaphor or are you insulting me?”

She grinned. “I so love that you’re uncertain.”

I folded my arms against my chest. “Why does that amuse you so much?”

“Because you used to be this arrogant prick who thought he knew everything even when he didn’t, and now you act sorta human, and that baffled look you sometimes get on your face is incredibly adorable,” she said.

“And you like to kick puppies, too,” I said.

“Gee, Grey. I might be brutally honest, but I don’t think I’m cruel,” she said.

“So, be honest. What have you found?” I asked.

“A lot of chatter about the night of the riots and what you did at the Old Northern bridge. I have to confess to being intrigued by that, too.”

“That’s what I came to talk to you about. I spoke to Brokke last night. He thinks I have the ability to access a primordial darkness he calls the Gap,” I said.

“Nigel talked about that a lot. It’s part of the Teutonic creation myth,” she said.

“Do you think it’s a myth?”

She shrugged. “What’s a myth except a creative explanation for something people don’t understand? Something that is cloaked in myth doesn’t mean it isn’t about something real.”

“We don’t have a myth like that,” I said.

“Myths are created when something is important to a culture, Grey. The beginning and the end of the world isn’t something the Celts focus on. We care about the world as we find it, not as it was or will be. The Teuts took a different approach,” she said.

“So, Brokke could be wrong,” I said.

She shifted her eyes from side to side, pretending to check if anyone was listening. “If anyone ever heard me say this, Grey, I’d get kicked out of the Grove. Celts are interested in questions about the world. Teuts are interested in answers. Either one could be the right path, but that’s not important. Finding a path is. Only you can decide what to believe.”

I sighed. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

A small smile slipped onto Meryl’s lips. “You know what, sweetie? You just made another step on your own path.”

I set my chin. “Then my next step is to kill Bergin Vize.”

Meryl stared, a long, blank stare while she turned something over in her mind. Silence filled the room as we looked at each other, as if a turning point had been reached. Whether it was in our relationship or something greater, I couldn’t tell, but I felt it coming.

“Let it go, Connor,” she said.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Maybe that’s why you should,” she said.

“I can’t. I unleashed something in Vize that can’t be stopped by anyone else,” I said.

“What if you release something in yourself that can’t be stopped?” she asked.

“I’ve never wanted to end the world,” I said.

“Are you sure? Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been trying to stop something. Every time you do, the world as it is ends and becomes something different, something new,” she said.

Her words twisted in my gut. What was change but the end of one thing for another? “That’s how the Wheel of the World works,” I said.

She looked down, and muttered, “Dammit.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She looked me in the eye then. “What do you want me to do?”

“First, we call Murdock. Then we hit Vize when he least expects it.”