Unfallen Dead

CHAPTER 14

Meryl wasn’t in her office. Given our conversation in my apartment, I was surprised she hadn’t mentioned Viten. I searched the subbasement, but the storerooms were all closed. I called her cell. She still wasn’t answering. I kept pulling my cell phone out to check the ringer volume, but it was fine. She wasn’t calling. Yet. I hoped “yet.” No one I ran into at the Guildhouse had seen her. I tried searching the building, but security spotted me and showed me the door.

I wondered why Meryl hadn’t told me about Viten. Everybody has at least one thing they don’t share. Briallen hinted about dark things in her own past, things she didn’t want to talk about. I kept repeating that to myself. There were things in my own past I hadn’t told Meryl. But I did tell her the worst thing I ever did. She had to know that. I had to shake off the feeling she didn’t trust me. Maybe after Forest Hills, she didn’t think anything else needed to be said.

Which brought me to huddling in the Guildhouse garage bay to see if I could catch her leaving the building. The security guards down on the ramp checked on me at irregular intervals. At some point, they decided I wasn’t a threat, but they still kept tabs on my movements around the garage door. The weather had turned cold, enough to threaten frost in some places around the city. The wind made it feel colder, so I used the building to protect myself as much as I could, which wasn’t much. I was cold.

The evening exodus of Guild employees had passed by at least an hour. Car after car had driven up from the deep basement garage. Drivers eyed me like the security guards had, probably wondering who was the nut with the too-thin leather coat who was bouncing on his heels. Someone handed me a dollar, which was nice.

A high-pitched engine whine echoed up from the garage, and Meryl’s black MINI Cooper appeared. I stepped in the travel lane when the car hit the bottom of the ramp. Meryl’s orange hair was hard to miss in the lurid glare of vapor lights. The car engine revved, then the car surged upward. Meryl’s face was expressionless as she sped toward me. Instinctively, my pointless body shields flashed on as the car neared the top. Meryl slammed on the brakes and stopped within inches of my knees. She waved.

I ignored my racing heart as I walked around to her window. “If I pay, will you go for a drink?”

She grinned. “Get in.”

Meryl kept her car immaculate. She didn’t say anything, but I knew she checked out my shoes as I got in to make sure I wasn’t tracking in dirt. She turned into traffic through Park Square, tore around the monument in the center, and parked in the loading zone in front of the Craic House, an old pub that attracted a lot of Guild employees. We got out of the car, and Meryl tossed her keys to a guy who looked like a bouncer.

“This place has valet service now?” I asked.

Meryl looked at me like I was insane. “No.”

She didn’t elaborate, leaving me to conclude she had a private arrangement with the guy. No surprise. At almost every bar and pub I’d been to with Meryl, she knew either a bouncer or a bartender.

The after-work crowd had thinned, so we landed a table easily. Within moments, the waitress delivered two pints of Guinness. The Craic House, then, was one of those places where she knew the bouncer and the bartender. Meryl could put it away with the best of them, but she never got drunk that I could see.

“We haven’t gone out for a drink in weeks.”

Meryl sipped her beer. “Ceridwen’s pulled me into the hearing four times.”

I smiled down at the table. “It’s not like you don’t enjoy irritating her.”

She made a funny snarl face. “I hate it. I come in to work every day not knowing whether I’m going to be filing or defending myself.”

“That’s a lie. I’ve seen your office. You never file.”

“You sound like Nigel,” she said.

Meryl and Nigel Martin had recently become friends, or at least friendly. I found the situation a little suspicious on both sides. For all her denials about playing Guild politics, she was good at wiggling into the power structure without looking like she was up to anything. Nigel, on the other hand, had motives for everything he did. His sudden interest in Meryl could have been coincidence. It could also be about the fact that he and I were not on the best terms and that Meryl was an available resource for an old mentor to keep tabs on his wayward protégé.

“He must be loving all this court intrigue,” I said.

She snickered. “Gods, yes. Ceridwen’s spear is like catnip for him. He calls me constantly.”

I gulped some beer. “Any clues why it likes me?”

“The spear?” She shrugged. “It’s a pretty powerful artifact. From what I can tell, its original purpose was that of a silver branch.”

“A key to the Magic Kingdom?”

She nodded. “Yeah, you can use it to get into Faerie. Well, maybe once upon a time you could. Since Convergence, there hasn’t been any opportunity to use a true silver branch, so the Seelie Court has been using it for its other capabilities.

“It has properties independent of the holder-like the truth detection. Ceridwen made me touch it when she was interrogating me. When I told the truth, the spear was reacting, not Ceridwen. She just watches for the reaction signs. Nigel’s worried about its being in the hands of the Seelie Court.”

“Are you saying it has a mind of its own?” I asked.

She pinched her lips. “I wouldn’t go that far, no. But it reacts to things on a level I don’t think we’re capable of understanding. Whoever made it was either a genius or a madman, and whoever tinkered with it was just plain stupid.”

“Tinkered?”

She nodded. “Nigel’s been very intrigued, so he asked me to research it. The spearhead was either changed or added later. The silver filigree was bonded even later, and it also has silver-branch properties on its own. It fades in and out of history. You wouldn’t believe where it’s been. It was probably with the elves in Alfheim at one point. The elven armies do love their spears. I think they were the ones who changed the spearhead.”

I leaned back, impressed. “How do you find this stuff?”

She flipped her hands up at the wrists and batted her eyelashes. “I’m just a girl with a computer.”

“Yeah, right. With more stealthware than the Pentagon.”

She checked to see if anyone around us could listen in. “I almost got caught in Austria. I hacked a museum server, and the next thing I knew, I was chased across the Web. It was cool. They were good.”

I knew that wasn’t the end of the story. “But not good enough.”

She shook her head, clearly proud. “Nope. Before I lost the connection, I was able to confirm the filigree was done in Britain after the spear disappeared from Germany. The spear has its own silver-branch properties, but someone decided to enhance them with the silver filigree. If I had to guess, it was for a spell that allows multiuser interface functionality with a primary dimensional portal via a single active administrator.”

I laughed out loud. “You so just overgeeked yourself.”

She made this cute I’m-so-embarrassed face. “Um… I meant to say that there was probably a spell that allowed whoever used the spear for a silver branch to take as many people as they wanted across a veil between the realms.”

“Much better, thank you.”

She scrunched up her nose. “So, how’s your case going, Mr. Smart Guy?”

I swirled the dregs of my beer. “Strange. Unlike you, the most exciting thing that’s happened in my search is bumping into a crabby fairy in a bookstore. I have a rune spell I can’t figure out. I was wondering if you could look into it for me. It might distract you from Ceridwen.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, golly, Mr. Grey, really? I’d love to do your consulting work for you. When can I start?”

I pouted playfully. “Hey, I’m paying for the beer, aren’t I?”

She pursed her lips. “It’ll take more than a round to convince me.”

I doodled the rune spell on a bar napkin, breaking the runes across two lines to keep them from accidentally activating something. Like Meryl said, even though I didn’t have my abilities anymore, sometimes tools simply react to their environment. “Two dead bodies with the same ogham runes. They read like ‘grave denied’ or ‘the way to death denied.’ Considering the dead bodies, I don’t get what they’re supposed to accomplish.”

Meryl circled three runes. “You’re probably being too literal, which is how the modern mind works. You’re translating those runes as ‘death-home,’ which logically means grave or graveyard. But the word used here for death is not a definite form-it’s more like ‘not mortal living,’ which could be an invocation to a god or goddess.”

I turned the napkin toward me. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

Meryl nudged her glass. “Ask me about kennings.”

I signaled the waitress for another round. “I know what kennings are.”

Meryl hummed and bobbed her head as if she were listening to music. When the waitress delivered the Guinness, she stopped humming and leaned forward. “And we’re back from our commercial break. Every dru-kid knows kennings are poetic metaphors, but that’s different from figuring out whether you’re looking at a kenning and what it could mean. There’s intuition and cultural context to take into account. This is the part where you say, ‘That’s bloody brilliant, Meryl. You should have some hot, spicy chicken tenders.’ ”

To prove I’m not dense, I waved the waitress back. “That’s bloody brilliant, Meryl. You should have some hot, spicy chicken tenders. In fact, let me order and pay for them.”

She winked and lifted her glass. “Excellent. I don’t usually like ad-libbing, but that’s good. Anyway, given what I know of the cultural context of the Old Irish, and this ogham spell looks Old Irish in form, I’d say death-place is a kenning for Mag Mell.”

She downed the remainder of her beer as the waitress arrived. “Another round, please, and I believe the gentleman is adding onion rings to his order.”

I added onion rings to my order. “Why Mag Mell?”

She shrugged. “It’s a place-name kenning from the text position, and given that you found it at a painful murder scene, the type of otherworld would be the opposite of pain. Mag Mell-the plain of joy-where the dead living is easy. Plus, it’s Samhain. Murderers aren’t very creative about their timing.”

Impressed, I shook my head and smiled. “You really are brilliant.”

She stood. “Yes, well, now I have to pee. When I come back, remind me to tell you about the time I killed Liddell Viten.”

She walked off into the crowd. My entire body felt like it was sinking into the chair. I couldn’t speak when the waitress served our order, but stared at the food and wondered what to say when Meryl came back.

Meryl returned, took an onion ring, and chewed it with a caustic smile.

I licked my lips. “You talked to Keeva.”

She shook her head and gazed up at the ceiling. “No, I didn’t. I got several messages from you and a request from macNeve to send the Ardman file to Murdock. Whatever could have occurred in the complex mind of Connor Grey for him to be calling me so frantically?”

“Why are you acting so offended?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Are you going to tell me you weren’t going to ask me about it?”

I felt like a schoolkid caught skipping out. “No, but I don’t know why you’re making me feel guilty about it.”

She piled some chicken on her plate. “You’re right. You shouldn’t feel guilty about asking. You should feel guilty about being passive-aggressive. You could have left a message about it or asked me when we first sat down. Instead, you do this ‘please, please, call me’ crap and ‘aren’t these interesting runes’ crap when I know damned well all you really want to do is ask about how I killed someone.”

I reached across and grabbed her arm as she was stabbing a chicken tender. Someone might call me brave. “Hey! Knock it off! You are being so out of line right now. First off, I’ve been calling you since before I knew about Viten. And second off, excuse me for respecting the fact that you know a helluva lot more about runes than I do.”

She tried to pull her arm away. I made her work at it before releasing her. “You don’t know anything, Grey. All I’ve ever done is my job, and I don’t think it includes watching coworkers injured, or killing an escaped prisoner, or getting attacked by flying knives, or feeling like I did something wrong because I happened to be in the wrong place at the right time and helped stop a major interdimensional meltdown.”

I stabbed my finger at the table. “You work for the Guild, Meryl. It’s in your job description under ‘other duties as necessary. ’ ”

She threw herself back against her chair. “That’s not even funny.”

I still had my fingertip jammed against the tabletop. I took a deep breath and let my hand fall flat. “Why are we arguing?”

Meryl rubbed her hands up under her bangs. “You’re right. It’s not your fault. It’s the Guild’s. I’m just tired that after all these years, I’m still looking for recognition. That place owes me, big-time.”

I put a sickly-sweet smile on my face. “I can’t fault them. Your attraction for me started because of our mutual disgust at the Guild.”

She leaned her head on her hand and popped a piece of chicken in her mouth. “Now that’s funny.”

“Tell me about Viten so we can drop it,” I said.

She toyed with a water ring on the table before looking up at me. “There’s not much to tell. I was in my office alone. It was just after I had been promoted, actually.”

“That’s recognition,” I said.

She shrugged. “Sure, if getting the job only because the chief archivist left is considered recognition.”

“Anyway…”

She smiled grudgingly, which faded. “Anyway, I heard a scream, then I heard essence-fire. When I reached the door, I saw a body in the elevator and two more down in the hallway. I didn’t know if they were alive or dead. Coming toward me was Viten. I didn’t know his name then. In fact, I didn’t think he was the attacker. He seemed so calm, I actually thought he was some kind of security guard coming to evacuate me. He acted like he didn’t see me. I asked him what was going on. All of sudden he grabbed me by the neck. My body shields came on, and he started to lose his grip. I could feel him charging essence into his hands.”

She took a deep breath. “I grabbed him by the head and let loose with everything I had.”

She frowned, playing with the water rings.

“You essence shocked him,” I said.

She met my eyes. I saw no doubt, no trauma. Just the direct stare of someone who had done something to survive. “If I had to do it again, Grey, I would do it exactly the same.”

I nodded once in agreement. I had been there, too. You did what you had to do to get through. “I’m sorry. It’s not just morbid curiosity, you know. I have a murder investigation, and I need to cover all the bases.”

“I get it. You need to work on your delivery,” she said.

I fussed with an onion ring to avoid making eye contact. “So, I was worried you weren’t returning my phone calls.”

“Yeah, sorry about that, too. It really has been crazy.”

I played my index finger across the back of her hand. “Yeah. Yeah, sure. I thought, you know, after…”

A slow smile cut across her face. “Oh, shit. It was a day-after call, wasn’t it?”

I hoped I wasn’t blushing. She’d never let me forget it. “Yeah.”

She leaned across the table and kissed my cheek. “Thank you. That was sweet.” She settled back and began eating again.

“That’s it?” I asked.

Her eyebrows went up. “What?”

“Meryl, we had sex.”

She nodded. “I was there, remember? I’m not going to turn into some kind of call-me, call-me chick, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not holding you to anything for it.”

I took a deep breath. “What if I want to be held to something?”

Her face became unreadable. “We had a moment, Grey. We needed each other. It was good for both of us, but I don’t want it to get blown out of proportion.”

I nodded, knowing I was nodding too much and feeling stupid. “Sure, sure. Fine.”

She took my hand in hers. “Will you stop? Geez, we’re not virgins here. Lighten up.”

I forced myself to smile. “Okay. I don’t want to play games.”

She lifted her beer, and a vicious curl came to her lip. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

I had no idea why I wanted to be with this woman.