Unfallen Dead

CHAPTER 12

Murdock lay on his back, sweat glistening on his forehead as he breathed with exertion. As I looked down at him, he gave me that smirk, the one that says, “Yeah, I can do this.” His arms came up, his chest expanding with a last burst of energy, and he dropped the bar on the rack. Rolling up from the bench, he shot his elbows out and gave his body a twist first in one direction, then the other.

I slipped a couple of plates off each end of the bar and took his place on the bench press. He came around to spot me. Again with the smirk, he held one hand above the bar to make the point that he wouldn’t need two hands to lift it off me if I lost it. I finished the set and sat up, running a towel over my face. “Are we going to talk about this?”

He grabbed the chin-up bar, lifted himself in the air, and talked without missing a beat in his set. “Why does everyone feel the need to ‘talk about this’?”

I shook my head. “Aren’t you the least bit concerned?”

He dropped to the floor. “You have one more set.”

I lay back. The last two reps threatened to fail, but I would be damned if I let him get the satisfaction of pulling the bar off me. Again. I stood and stretched.

Murdock and I worked out together. It was how we met. Jim’s Gym is low-key, on the edge of the financial district, just over the bridge from the Weird. It wasn’t so far that I talked myself out of going and not so near that I obsessed about working out. Murdock didn’t care where it was because he drives. He parks in front and puts his little “I’m a police officer and can park wherever I want” card on the dashboard. Once we started on a case together, we didn’t discuss it during workouts. It kept some normalcy in our friendship.

We worked our routine at the empty end of the gym. Late afternoons tended to be quiet, and the only other people exercising were out of earshot.

“Murdock, you’re bench-pressing twice your weight.”

He stood at the dumbbell rack re-sorting the weights by size. “I know.”

I leaned against the rack and crossed my arms. “I’m just saying, I think you’re awfully accepting of it.”

He gave me a lopsided grin and picked up a dumbbell set. “What do you want me to do? Go to bed and pull the covers over my head? I got zapped with an essence-bolt that should have killed me and instead made me stronger. What does it mean? Beats me. I can either accept it unless it becomes a real problem, or I can freak out. I’m accepting it.”

He curled the dumbbells with little effort, as if he were only doing toning exercises. With fifty-pound weights. He replaced the dumbbells. “Want to see something?”

I gave him a noncommittal shrug. He faced a wall about fifteen feet away. One moment he stood still; the next he ran full tilt at the wall. Just before he hit, essence flared around him in a full-fledged body shield, stronger than most I had seen. My jaw dropped. He rammed the wall with a crunch, but the crunch came from the cinder blocks cracking. He wasn’t even breathing heavy.

“How the hell did you learn to do that?”

He smiled. “Nigel Martin. He reached inside my mind and somehow switched on the body shield when he needed me to run point for him at Forest Hills. I sort of saw how he did it in my head and figured out how to do it myself. Cool, huh?”

I chuckled. “You know what you just did? When they figure out how to work their body shields, probably every fey runs into a wall to prove it. Usually they’re about twelve years old, though.”

He grinned. “I feel like a kid.”

He pointed at the dumbbells, and I picked up much-much-lighter weights than he had. “Does your father know?”

Murdock scowled. “Now who’s acting twelve? No, my father doesn’t know. You know he doesn’t like the fey. I’m willing to accept what’s happened. He would freak out.”

I let it drop. Murdock kept an open mind until he came to a conclusion. It took an act of Congress to change it after that.

Murdock had dinner plans, so I slipped on my running shoes and waited outside while he hit the showers. An inland breeze took the bite out of the air temperature. When everyone else starts wondering when the weather’s going to change, it’s already changed two weeks earlier in the Weird. Between the channel and the ocean, it’s the first place in the city to get cold or muggy.

Murdock exited the gym smelling like a date. He wore his hair gelled, a department-store cologne, and his camel-hair overcoat. His eyes shifted left and right, taking in the immediate vicinity. I don’t think the cop thing ever turns off for him. We jumped in his car. I tossed his gym bag into the backseat. “Where are you off to?”

He tilted his head to the side to watch the red traffic light he had stopped under. “No place special.”

“Uh-huh.”

He didn’t change his expression. “Uh-huh.”

One of these days, Murdock will tell me about his social life, and it will be a revelation. I can’t complain too much. I hadn’t said a word about what had happened with Meryl. As soon as I could figure it out myself, maybe I’d say something. He drove over the Old Northern Avenue bridge, waving to the cop on duty as we passed the checkpoint. We stopped dead in our tracks behind a traffic jam.

“How ridiculous is it that you had to escort me to the gym?” I asked.

He nodded. “I know.”

“Can’t you say something to your father?”

“I did. Didn’t make a difference.”

People gathered in the street a few car lengths ahead. Two elves, a fairy, and dwarf had tumbled into the street, blocking traffic and drawing a crowd. They were going at one another with fists and the occasional essence-bolt.

“What did he say?”

Murdock drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “He said the Weird is a threat to the city. Pass the carrots, please.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

The brawlers looked awkward, as if they had never been in a fight before. I guessed that was possible, but not for four different people in the Weird. Murdock leaned on his car horn. “Two more minutes and my siren’s going on.”

“I feel like we should be eating popcorn.”

He sighed. “We’re seeing this almost every day.”

My essence-sensing ability confirmed my suspicion. Green essence with black mottling wafted around the fighters. “They’re in a cloud of Taint.”

The two fairies hit the dwarf with a white bolt of essence, and he barreled down the street. The blow knocked him out of the Taint’s field. He got to his feet in confusion. Taking a step back toward the fight, he shook his head, then walked away.

Murdock nodded. “We’ve been given orders to stand down if fights involve the fey. When the Taint hits, they lose control. A couple of patrol guys have ended up in the hospital.”

“Your father must be fuming.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Yeah, I’m kinda torn about that. On the one hand, I agree with his frustration. On the other, it’s nice when he’s in a froth about something that has nothing to do with me.”

At least I could count on Murdock for some indignation about the situation. Even if it was the dry, sarcastic kind.

One of the fairies drifted out of the green haze and seemed to come to her senses because she didn’t rejoin the fight. Her companion flew up beside her. They hovered in the air arguing. They must have both realized what had happened and flew off. The elf looked ready to take on someone else, but at that point the traffic began moving again, and we drove around him.

Murdock pulled to the corner of Sleeper Street. He stretched his right arm behind my seat and retrieved a folder. “Liz DeJesus found this in Olivia Merced’s apartment.”

The file held document photocopies of an old case dating back at least twelve years. I glanced at the first few pages, then at Murdock. “Merced filed for divorce because her husband was a con artist?”

Murdock nodded. “It gets better.”

I flipped through more pages, but didn’t see anything more than an exhaustive list of contempt charges detailing the case against Liddell Viten, Merced’s husband. The last page held the “gets better” part. The Boston P.D. investigation had been suspended and the case turned over to the Guild. “The husband was fey?”

Murdock made the turn onto Sleeper Street. “Yep. He had everyone fooled with a glamour that made him appear human. His real appearance was anything but.”

I raised an eyebrow. “A solitary?”

Murdock pulled up at my building. “Right again. Something called a kobold. There’s nothing else in the archives because that’s what happens when something gets booted to the Guild. I did some digging in the newspaper morgue. The Guild found Viten. He died in detention. Guess who was the Guild agent in charge of the case?” I shook my head. Murdock flashed me a self-satisfied smile. “Keeva macNeve.”

I dropped my head against the seat. “Great.”

“Now, I could go through channels and request the Guild file, which might take weeks…”

I looked at him. “… or I can ask Keeva.”

He gave me an innocent look. “Not that I’m asking.”

I laughed. “Oh, no, not that you’re asking. Fine. I’ll ask her. Just don’t expect her to be all that forthcoming. Given her suspension, two dead human normals related to an old case she had a prisoner die on won’t be high on her priority list right now.”

“Guess you’ll have to charm her.” He pulled away.

I jogged up the stairs to my apartment, dropped my gym bag and the file, and ran down again. As tempted as I was to read the case, if I started, I wouldn’t do my run. I needed to do my run. I used a telephone pole to do some warm-up stretches.

Running at night in the Weird was more common than one would think. Most of the time, though, healthy exercise was not the reason unless you counted running for your life. If someone is moving fast down here, they’re either running from someone or after someone. It attracted attention, if only from spectators waiting to see if a fight would break out. Lately, that’s becoming more the case. If the Boston P.D. was avoiding the essence battles, the Guild still had security agents patrolling the skies. They interfered only when large groups gathered, but other than that, they were more for show.

I decided on a short route, taking the straight shot up Old Northern Avenue. “Oh No,” as the locals called it, was in its commuter mode. It didn’t have the rush-hour jams of other parts of the city because the Weird isn’t a shortcut to anywhere except maybe Southie. Office workers wandered down after to work for an esoteric errand. The few restaurants that the mainstream knew about had their Samhain specials running. Early Halloween parties would rev up later in the evening, and the neighborhood would do brisk business.

I made it to Harbor Street without incident. I passed the boarded-up offices of Unity, a neighborhood help center that had closed with the murder of its founder, Alvud Kruge. After his widow, Eorla, joined the Guild board as his replacement, the help center had closed. This Samhain would be tough going for her. I didn’t know her well, but I knew she loved her husband and missed him. Between that and her recent travails with the Guild, she had a lot to put behind her.

To shake up the run, I chose an alley route back. The alleys were the most unsafe parts of the Weird-but they made a fun run if you were vigilant and kept out of them too late at night. Lanes weaved in and out and appeared to go nowhere, only to open up into more twists and turns. It was early enough that I wasn’t likely to run into anything nefarious.

The back sides of warehouses sported a riot of graffiti. All of the Weird was gang territory to some extent, and gang members tagged the walls with their sigils to warn off rivals. Lately, the gangs had been in transition. Lots of strife from recent deaths and retaliations. New symbols had cropped up in the past few weeks, blotting out the old, challenging the existing rulers of the streets. The Taint wasn’t helping. New gangs formed, old ones merged, but the rivalries were still the same old petty posturing and grievances.

The alleys represented what people feared about the Weird, the signs of decay that threaten an entire city. Politicians claimed that the poverty and danger down here made the well-meaning citizens of the city vulnerable, which was why they did stupid things like put up police checkpoints. In reality, poverty and danger were filling the void left when prosperity and hope receded. The battered warehouses stood as forlorn reminders of better times. Shattered glass littered the ground, the evidence of windows no one cared to maintain or replace. It was all part of the life-and-death cycle of a neighborhood. What had once been vibrant and alive was now dark and still. Someday it will change course, but not today and not soon. And as with all cycles of change, pain would feed the process.

I heard the first whisper about a quarter mile from home. When you’re running, and you hear a whisper, you know it’s not natural. I reached a desolate stretch of alley paralleling Stillings Street, a dumpster-lined gauntlet behind bars that catered to the down-market crowd. At first, I thought it was the wind. Then it became louder, words on the edge of hearing. My skin prickled, and I slowed to a light jog.

The alley angled in such a way that I couldn’t see far in either direction. A limp breeze moved, barely enough to rustle the papers and garbage that lined the building foundations. The whispers rose, a run-on of voices tripping over one another almost rhythmically, like they had that morning in the Guildhouse storeroom. I turned in place, trying to locate the source of the essence. Nothing registered. The whispers faded.

I started running again. My skin prickled, and I had the sensation of someone coming up behind me. I dodged to the right and flattened myself against a wall between piles of trash. Empty alley. Not a sign of anyone. In my peripheral vision, flickers of essence moved, but whenever I looked toward them, they vanished.

I felt foolish, jumping at shadows among shadows. The whispers resumed, rising and falling in a pained cadence. Twice I jogged backwards a few feet, and still saw no one. The strange sensation faded. I relaxed, chalking it up to the general atmosphere. The Weird has a history and sometimes it likes to remind people. On the corner of the last block before my apartment, I skidded to a halt.

A fairy hovered in the air in front of me, his face suffused with anger. He blazed with an indigo essence, so intense he looked translucent. It took me a moment to realize he was an Inverni, a powerful clan the Dananns had conquered when they took over the Seelie Court.

The temperature dropped as the field of his essence swirled near. He folded his sharp wings back and dove at me. I threw myself to the ground as he swept over. My body shields flickered on, small patches of hardened essence softening my impact with the asphalt, but not by much.

I scrambled to my feet. My body shields were no defense against an Inverni. I ran, knowing it was pointless. I couldn’t outrun him, but I didn’t want to be another dead body in an alley in the Weird. The main avenue was less than a block away. My lungs burned with cold air as I sprinted, hoping he would leave me alone in front of witnesses.

He came up behind me, his essence preceding him like a fog. At the end of the alley, he hit me between the shoulder blades. Pain lanced through my torso as something pierced my spine, burning with cold fire. I stumbled against a wall, unable to draw breath. The pain intensified, and I watched in shock as the Inverni emerged from my chest. His forward momentum carried him into the air. He looked back at me with hatred and faded from view.

Clutching at the sore spot in my chest, I staggered the last few feet to Old Northern Avenue. Reality reasserted itself in a blare of traffic noise. People walked by as if nothing were amiss. I gulped for air, easing the tension in my lungs. My sweat-damp face felt cold as I made my way on unsteady feet to Sleeper Street. Leaning against a light pole, I glanced back. No one took an interest in me, no furtive looks or unnatural nonchalance. I had been attacked, and no one had seen it.

Baffled, I walked the last stretch of sidewalk to my apartment. Inverni fairies couldn’t make themselves intangible. And they didn’t teleport like flits. I had no idea what to make of it. Whatever mess the Taint was creating with essence was getting worse if stuff like this was happening.

I scanned the empty street one more time. Whoever it was had vanished. The security ward snapped into place as I closed the vestibule door behind me. It didn’t make me feel any more secure. If someone could literally slip through my body, I had my doubts a warding spell would keep anything out of my building.