Uncertain Allies

34

I jumped when Meryl bolted upright in bed. In the dim light of the living room, her dark shape appeared featureless and unmoving. “What is it?”

She threw back the covers. “We need to take a walk.”

As I was reaching for the alarm clock, we both squinted when she turned on the light. “It’s almost four A.M.”

She hopped in place getting into her jeans. “Heydan said we should go down to the bar,” she said.

I was next to her in an instant, pulling on my pants. “Is it Nar?”

“Probably. He didn’t say. He said we—you, actually—would want to be there,” she said.

I pulled on a T-shirt. “It’s Nar. I wonder why Rand didn’t call me.” She flashed me a concerned look. “What? Did Heydan say something about Rand? Is he okay?

She disappeared into the bathroom. “He didn’t say anything. I was being ominous.”

I put on my jacket and held Meryl’s while I waited for her. “Should I call Leo?”

She came out brushing her hair. “Let’s see what it is. No sense waking everyone up in the middle of the night.”

As I locked the apartment, the security wards Eorla had installed for me activated. The elven essence shimmered across the door, an odd sensation for me since I had spent so much of my life fighting the Teutonic fey. We skipped the old elevator and quick-stepped down the stairs to Sleeper Street.

At 4:00 A.M., the Weird was a perilous place. The late-night revelers had thinned, taking the protection of a large crowd with them, and the more mundane working crews had not hit the streets yet. The hard-core partiers were the only ones out, the ones who had no legal jobs to go to in the morning and the desperate still out looking for a fix or an adrenaline rush. They weren’t shy, but prone to confrontation or threat to whoever stood in their path. They sensed their own kind on some instinctual level, eyeing each other in the street, granting a wide berth on the sidewalk out of professional courtesy. It wasn’t fear. It was respect. Anyone else was fair game.

Meryl waved hello to a group of guys, who waved back with tight smiles. “What are those guys doing on this end of the street?”

I hugged her from the side as we hurried down the sidewalk and kissed her on the top of the head. “Uh . . . the neighborhood caught on fire down the other end, buildings exploded, people died, and martial law went into effect,” I said.

Her eyes widened in realization. “Oh, right. I thought a decent club opened around here I didn’t know about.”

The alley down to Yggy’s was empty, the lone light over the beat-up metal door illuminating a small pool of asphalt. The door clanked open, and someone walked off in the opposite direction toward the harbor. Rand drifted out of the shadows as we reached the entrance. “He’s still in there,” he said.

“Are you sure? We got a sending to come down,” I said.

Puzzled, Rand glanced at the door. “He hasn’t come out. Yggy’s doesn’t have a back door.”

One of Heydan’s rules was that you left through the door you came in. It cut down on games and forced the clientele to behave themselves. No one wanted to deal with the bouncers if something started. “Nar told me I’d be surprised at how close his hidey-hole was. Maybe he has some kind of arrangement with Heydan. Let’s see what’s up,” I said.

Inside, the music filled the bar more than the patrons. Liquor service was supposed to shut down at 2:00 A.M., but no cops ever bothered Heydan. Still, people tended to move on to more raucous venues after hours. Nar wasn’t in sight. We went to the back hall, where the restrooms were.

“I’ll check,” Rand said, in answer to my unspoken thought. A moment later, he emerged and shook his head.

Meryl walked toward a roped-off staircase. “Heydan said the roof.”

“I didn’t know he allowed people anywhere else in the building,” I said.

Meryl glanced over her shoulder. “Yeah, people. Not everyone.”

I followed her up the dark stairs, winding through the building. Rand brought up the rear, summoning up a light body shield. The thump of the bar faded below as we passed closed doors, each floor painted black from floor to ceiling and covered with dust. The last flight was steep, and a door to the sky stood open at the top. Outside, years of debris littered the roof, old asphalt embedded with pea gravel. Beer bottles, condoms, broken ward stones, and shattered glass created their own layer of waste. In all the years I had been drinking at Yggy’s downstairs, I had no idea so much action happened on the roof.

A small addition leaned against the abutting warehouse. At one time it had served as a greenhouse, maybe a respite for whoever owned the building in the days it had harbored a sweatshop. Now, the south-facing wall was an expanse of dirty, cracked windowpanes, and the door hung askew.

The financial district shone overhead across the channel, office buildings lights on for no one. To the east, signals blinked blue and red on empty runways at Logan Airport. The roof gravel crunched beneath our feet as we walked toward a tall wooden scaffolding, part wood, part metal pipe, that supported old civil-defense horns thirty feet above the roof. The scaffolding was a remnant from World War II, when the East Coast had feared a massive invasion across the Atlantic. The invasion never came, but the horns remained, their original red paint fading over time to black-pitted maroon. Some were still used for emergencies around the city, but I never heard the ones in the Weird go off. They would probably go off constantly if they still worked.

Nar’s body swayed in the breeze from the harbor, the leather cord around his neck making a soft squeak as it rubbed against a wooden brace. His right eye had been removed, a stain of blood and viscera trailing down his cheek. A glossy round stone bulged in the socket where the eye used to be.

Meryl had to tilt her head far back as we stood beneath the body. “There are so many bad jokes running through my head right now, but instead I’ll question the wisdom of his meeting you in a bar.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Rand circled around the other side of the tower. “I failed you and apologize. My understanding was that those back stairs were warded, and no one was allowed elsewhere in the building.”

“No blame from me. That’s what I thought, too. Did you see Vize tonight?” I asked.

He shook his head. “None of the Elven King’s operatives entered while I watched.”

“Vize has a nixie companion. She can cloak him,” I said. Gretan was taller than Joe, but not by much. She might have been able to slip past Rand, but I doubted she had the ability to overwhelm a dwarf.

“I didn’t detect any unusual body signatures. I will check the alley again,” he said.

“Don’t bother. It was Vize,” I said.

“What makes you so sure?” Meryl asked.

I gestured at the roof. Meryl sensed essence like I did. “The dead spots of essence around the tower. Vize used the darkness to absorb his body signature and hide his trail,” I said.

“Can you do that?” she asked.

I nodded. I wasn’t ready to tell her that I had almost absorbed some of her essence at Shay’s studio. “What do you make of the stone in his eye?”

Before she answered, a welling of essence built beneath us like the shock wave of something huge surfacing from within the building. Meryl and Rand felt it, too, and we all turned toward the door. No one came out of the stairwell, but the decrepit greenhouse glowed with a deep blue light that faded. The tall figure of Heydan appeared in the doorway.

I had to admit, Heydan gave me the shivers. The power he emanated was subtle yet immense, like a placid mountain pool that hid unfathomable depths. Ridged bone showed beneath the skin of his forehead, rising from his temples and back over his bare head. His calm, dark eyes beneath a heavy brow focused over our heads at Nar’s body. With ponderous steps, he moved out of the ruined greenhouse and joined us beneath the tower, keeping his gaze on the dead body.

“This is deep work and bodes no good thing,” he said.

“What happened to his eye?” I asked.

Heydan shifted, moving his body away from tower. “It was taken for what it had seen. The stone conveyed the memory.”

I looked at Meryl. “He knows where it is now.”

Heydan lowered his gaze to me. “You know what was sought?”

I gestured at the swinging body. “Veinseeker hid a stone of power. A terrorist named Bergin Vize wants it to take down the Seelie Court.”

Heydan stepped to the edge of the roof, peering off into the night sky above the harbor. Seeing such a large person one step from the six-story drop made me a little queasy. He remained silent and unmoving for so long that I wondered if he had forgotten we were there. “It is the nature of power to invite its own destruction. Shadows grow and ebb against the future as ever. I listen and wait.”

“Do you know where Vize is?” I asked.

He didn’t answer for another few minutes, then stepped back from the edge. “I do not know this man. It matters not who he is.”

“It matters to me, maybe a lot of other people. I would appreciate the help,” I said.

Heydan’s deep eyes gleamed beneath his shadowed brow. “I watch and listen. I heard a shadow move like to the one within you. The Wheel of the World turns, and I hear the sighing of Its passage. What say you to a hanging man?”

“I warned him this would happen. He didn’t listen,” I said.

“No one ever does,” he said.