Uncertain Allies

4

I wandered through the deep end of the Weird later that night, testing the air for essence. For weeks, the strange cloud of blue light had been sweeping the neighborhood, a rush of essence that surged into being as if out of nowhere. In its wake, people disappeared. Eorla had expressed concern because a number of Teutonic fey were among the missing. She worried that it might be overzealous supporters of her cause against the Consortium and the Seelie Court.

At first, I considered it might be a new form of the Taint, the virulent corruption of essence that had driven the fey mad. Eorla had been powerful enough to dominate and contain it. I saw no sign that she had been affected by it or that it had become loose again. The Taint was gone. Whatever this new problem was, it was its own thing.

My main challenge was finding it. I had seen it in the distance a number of times, but by the time I reached each location, it had vanished. It followed no decipherable pattern, and while many of its victims were dwarves and druids, plenty of other fey went missing, too. It was hard to get a handle on how many. People in the Weird received little attention from the police when they reported someone missing. Over time, a culture of acceptance evolved, unexplained disappearances another part of what it meant to live in the neighborhood.

Tonight, I had seen it once a few blocks away, a flash of bright blue roaring across a small intersection. There was no trace of it by the time I reached the corner. The intersection was in an out-of-the-way corner of the neighborhood, off the main streets, where few people lived and fewer businesses operated. The four buildings that sat on the corners of the intersection were boarded up, dark and empty observers over an abandoned street.

Druids have a talent for total recall. If I found an essence signature, I could file it away in my memory and recognize it if I ran into it again. Whatever this blue thing was, it was a kind of essence that left no trace behind. I had nothing to tag and had never seen anything like it.

The air had a sharp tang to it, like the aftermath of someone’s firing concentrated essence as a weapon. Essence itself was absent, much like it had been at the murder scene last night. As I moved along the sidewalk, I picked up faded essence from the Dead, which resonated differently from the living.

Essence dissipated in open air. The one consistent thing I had been finding at the sites of the blue essence was old Dead signatures, the faded remnants of their passage. Recognizing a specific essence, I could estimate how long ago the person had passed through. The degradation in the essence intensity gave me a time frame much like Janey Likesmith could estimate how long a body had been dead by taking its temperature.

I suspected the blue essence was following the Dead. In every location I knew, I had found old essence. What I couldn’t make sense of was the time frame between the Dead’s passing through and the blue essence following. The Dead essence had faded much earlier than the blue. I stepped off the curb and crouched in the gutter. Drawing on my body essence, I boosted my sensing ability to examine the Dead essence. The dark mass in my head wouldn’t let me access essence outside my body, but it let me use my sensing ability without any pain. I had learned that seeking essence was what the dark mass did. It wasn’t doing me any favors. If anything, I was doing it one.

With my heightened sensing, the Dead essence burned brighter, allowing me to see farther along the trail. Even that tapered off to nothing a few feet away. I was stumped.

A pink light burst into the air in front of me, and the twelve-inch-tall figure of Stinkwort—Joe, to his friends—made a wobbly somersault. Joe’s a flit, one of the small fairies no more than a foot tall. His wings were longer than he was, a bright pink that he was as self-conscious about as his real name. I’ve known him all my life. He drinks more than anyone I know, doesn’t care if I yell or snore, and has more going on in his head than I dare to contemplate.

“Ah, there you are, my friend, in the gutter where you work best,” he said.

I stretched to my feet. “If it wasn’t for gutters, we’d never see each other.”

He blinked his wide eyes at me. “That’s very touching.”

“Have you seen this blue essence that’s been showing up?”

He tilted his head from side to side. “Up where?”

“Here. Around the Weird. Flashes by, and people disappear,” I said.

He pursed his lips and hovered in a circle. “Are you sure they don’t disappear because you show up? I noticed that happens a lot with you.”

Joe was one part friend, one part reality-checker, and lots of parts drinking buddy. We tore each other down like only best friends can do and still be friends. That also means sometimes we didn’t have the same conversation we thought we were having.

I wasn’t finding anything I hadn’t seen before and decided to call it a night. I walked toward Old Northern Avenue, with Joe flying upside down beside me. “Doesn’t that make you dizzy?” I asked.

He laughed. “Sure, but if I get sick, I’m in the perfect position not to get anything on me. You should try it.”

“I can’t fly, Joe,” I said.

He righted himself. “Oh, great. Another thing for you to complain about.”

“Will you stop? I’m not in the mood,” I said. He pouted but kept silent. We made it to Old Northern without another word. “I’m sorry I snapped,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

He flew beside me, sometimes a few feet ahead, sometimes wandering off to the side. A small smile stayed on his lips, as if he were thinking of something amusing.

“You’re not mad?” I asked.

He flipped backwards in an arc in front of me. “You had a bad day. It happens. Not my fault, right?”

“It’s more than that. It’s Meryl and Nigel and a dead dwarf,” I said.

He frowned in concentration. “Was this at a party you didn’t invite me to?”

To this day, I never know if he was serious when he said things like that. “Different things, but related. Nigel wants to be friends again.”

“And that’s”—he peered at me—“nice?”

“Suspicious. He saw what happened when the black mass came out of me during the riots. I think his wheels are turning about how to exploit it.”

“Well, that’s his job, init? You need to stop trying to make him into something he’s not. You thought you were friends. You weren’t. You worked together. Nigel isn’t anyone’s friend. Haven’t you noticed?”

I stopped walking. “How do you do that?”

He hovered in place. “Do what?”

“Point out the completely obvious that I miss?”

He chuckled as he grabbed the pole of a street sign and spun around it. “Oh, that’s easy. You think too much. That’s from Nigel, always looking for motives and such. Everyone knows how he is, so everyone acts like him when he’s around. Getting sucked up in his world is part of his world. He needs to get laid.”

Flits have a voracious appetite when it comes to sex. “That’s not the answer to everything, you know,” I said.

He waggled his eyebrows at me. “It’s the answer to enough things to make it worthwhile.”

“Not for me anymore.”

He landed on a destroyed telephone box. “Connor, you’ve changed. What happened to that guy who used to have fun?”

I had changed. Once, I would have brushed off the snubs and the drama and gone on my way. The difference was back then I could afford to. I had money, power, and influence. With any one of those things, life was easier. Once they were all gone, I realized not everyone lived like that—more, that most people never had a chance to live like that precisely because of the people who lived like that. It didn’t have to be that way. It made me angry often and, yeah, depressed, but I didn’t think I wasn’t fun to be around.

“Am I really no fun anymore?”

“Only when you’re awake,” said Joe, then grinned from ear to ear. He started wringing his hands. “Oh, woe is me! The world is so awful. People die, and everything is shite, and it’s all my fault.”

I glared at him. “Not funny.”

He hovered up and snapped his fingers in my face. “No kidding. You know what’s going on other places? People are nervous and scared and looking for comfort. And you know what happens next? Lots of sex and alcohol, and you’re moping around like a schoolboy on a date with his hand.”

I rolled my eyes. “Wow. I can’t believe you’d take advantage like that, Joe. That’s a new low even for you.”

He pulled his chin in. “Me? I tell them I’m nervous and scared. You would not believe the action I’ve been getting.”

I laughed, not just because it was funny but because he was that serious, which made it funnier. “Somewhere along the way, the world went seriously wrong.”

He sighed. “Again with the everything-is-wrong.”

Exasperated, I spread out my hands. “All right, all right, I get the message. I’m no fun. I complain. I’m a pessimist. No one likes to be around me. I get it already.”

Joe looked at me with a solemn face. “Boy, do you have a self-esteem problem.”

Laughing, I batted at him, but he flitted away. “I can’t win with you.”

He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Is that an invitation to poker?”

I shook my head in defeat. “You win. Where to?”

He flapped his wings and spun in a circle. “Oh, the places we’ll go!”

He zipped ahead of me on the sidewalk. Sometimes, having Joe as a friend was worth doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.