Unfallen Dead

CHAPTER 19

Like all hospitals, Avalon Memorial had an odor that told you immediately where you were. In addition to physical ailments, it specialized in fey-related illness and issues. As you walked the corridors, the usual antiseptic odors mingled with mists and vapors that were uniquely fey. It smelled like an herbalist shop set up in an operating room. Dylan had left a message that Keeva had been admitted. He thought I would want to know. That was it. No mention of why. No mention of our argument.

Two voices drifted up the hallway before I reached the room at the end of the fifth floor. Over the years, I had gotten more than familiar with both voices in their raised, annoyed versions.

“Dammit, Gillen, enough’s enough,” I heard Keeva say.

“Shut up and stick your wings out,” he replied. My eyes met those of a nurse at the station desk, and she gave me a little conspiratorial smile. Gillen Yor was High Healer of Avalon Memorial. Irrascible was his middle name, sometimes his first. Usually a workforce despised his type, but Gillen was refreshingly equal-opportunity impatient and rarely arbitrary. It meant a lot to a nurse when he tore a new one into a famous fey regardless of who was around.

The door to Keeva’s room was open. She faced the hallway, arms crossed tightly across her chest. Her wings were, in fact, flexed out as far as they could go. Through the gossamer membranes, Gillen’s silhouette moved as he sent short pulses of yellow essence into her wings. Keeva glared. “You have to leave now, Gillen. I have Guild business.”

Gillen didn’t even bother looking up. “Sit down, Grey, and if I hear one word out of you, I’ll give you a headache.”

I shot a sympathetic shrug at Keeva and sat in the chair by the bed. It would be an exaggeration to call Gillen my personal healer. Since my accident, he had taken my case more for the challenge than out of empathy. Patients did not pick Gillen; he picked them. I kept quiet as he finished examining her, barking questions at Keeva while she barked answers back.

He moved in front of her. I pulled my feet back before he had a chance to give me a hint by stomping on them. I suppressed a smile at the juxtaposition of him and Keeva. Even with her seated, he had to look up at her. He must have been having a frustrating day since the ring of hair around his bald spot was pulled in several directions. By the way he peered at her, he was assessing Keeva with his druid sensing-ability. While the two of them stared at each other, I took a look myself.

Keeva was a Danann fairy related to an old royal line. Dananns have potent levels of essence. It was part of the reason they won the Seelie Court. Any history book will tell you, people and families who lead-rule-did so because some kind of physical advantage lurked in their past. The Dananns may keep their dominance through money and politics these days, but it was founded with a conquering army.

Even someone with weak ability could read Keeva’s body essence. She glowed with Power. To her credit, something I always hated to give, she used the threat of that Power more than its expression. The threat was enough. Only a crazy person would go after her using essence as a weapon. Keeva would not hesitate to respond in kind.

And yet, someone had been crazy enough to go after her. In the midst of all her flaring white-and-golden essence swirls, her head and her chest glimmered with faint orange light. That’s essence damage. A larger anomaly glowed deeper within her essence but resisted the damage. She was healing, but the injury was considerable.

“You need rest and healing. Two weeks in bed, no work,” Gillen said.

Her essence flared bright with emotion. “First I’m confined to my desk; now I’m confined to bed? What is this, a conspiracy?”

“A conspiracy? At the Guild? What is the world coming to?” I said. I couldn’t help myself. Keeva liked to pretend the Guild was an office with management glitches. I preferred to think of it as a fetid swamp of intrigue and backstabbing.

They frowned at me. Gillen’s long eyebrows moved like cat’s whiskers as I became the subject of his scrutiny. “Your essence gets odder all the time,” he said.

Without asking, he grabbed my hand and examined it like it wasn’t attached to the rest of me. Bedside manner was not Gillen’s strong point. He hummed and grunted a few times, but whether he was chanting or thinking was hard to tell. He dropped my hand. “The troll essence has bonded. You’re not reading pure druid.”

I flexed my fingers. A troll had saved my life by infusing me with his essence. Most of it had dissipated, but somehow I had retained the ability to manipulate inorganic matter. I couldn’t burrow through rock like a troll, but inorganic particles clung to me if I touched them too long. “Is that bad?”

Gillen shrugged. “Can’t tell. Maybe if someone would make time in his busy unemployment schedule, I could run some decent tests.”

He pointed a bony finger at Keeva. “Bed!” he said and left.

“You look like you’ve had better days,” I said.

Keeva slid off the bed and rummaged in her designer leather handbag. “I’ve had worse.”

“What happened?”

She pulled makeup out of the bag. Leaning toward the mirror on the wall next to the bed, she applied eye shadow. When a woman puts on makeup in front of a man, she’s not putting it on for him. “I was attacked in my bedroom.”

“Oh? How is Ryan, by the way?” Ryan macGoren was Keeva’s current lover. The stomach-churning rumor had it that the feelings were real and mutual.

She didn’t bat an eyelash. “Funny man. Funny, funny man.”

“Seriously, what happened?”

She sorted through lipsticks and picked one. “I was asleep. Someone entered my suite and set off the proximity wards.”

“Suite? You weren’t home?”

Her eyes flicked toward me in the mirror and back to her lips. “In case you haven’t noticed, Connor, it’s been a little busy since the fey no-go zones went up. I was working late, so I stayed at the Four Seasons.”

“How long have you been doing that?”

She brushed her hair. “A week or so.”

“That sounds like a lot of work,” I said.

She paused, then turned toward me. “I’ve been getting threats. I killed a few people at Forest Hills, Connor. There are people who aren’t happy about that.”

Keeva had been manipulated into attacking people — poisoned, actually. Joe had stopped her with a head shock of essence. He didn’t want her to know he did it. “I was there, Keeva. You didn’t know what you were doing.”

She resumed fixing her hair. “But it happened, and I have to deal with it. Including dodging angry people on the street.”

“So, someone could have been following you for days,” I said.

She gathered her cosmetics and tossed them in her bag. “Right. Probably a thousand people saw me go back and forth from the Guild to the hotel.”

“So give me details. What happened?”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “I woke up. The alarms were going off. Someone rushed in firing essence-bolts at me. I was already on the move. We exchanged fire. He got a lucky shot in. By the time I got up, security had arrived, and he was gone.”

“He?”

Keeva considered. “Actually, it could have been a woman. It was dark. I don’t even know what kind of fey it was.”

I thought about it for a moment. “You were definitely followed. It sounds like security and escape routes were scoped out. The timing was off for the kill.”

Her face relaxed with a smile as something occurred to her. “The wards. With all the threats, I set up extra wards. Whoever knew my routine wasn’t expecting that.”

I nodded. “You were lucky. Whoever it was knew how to get past your basic security. You should probably have a security detail for a while.”

She arched an eyebrow. “I am security detail, remember?” She gathered her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “And speaking of which, I have to get back to work.”

I followed her to the elevator. “Gillen said rest, Keeva. He’s right. Between the head shock at Forest Hills and whatever happened to you last night, you need to rest.”

She punched the DOWN button. “I think I can handle myself, thank you.”

We rode the elevator down. “Fine. Then who knows enough about your security warding to get all the way into your bedroom?”

Keeva didn’t slow down as we walked through the main lobby. “Whoever it was got lucky, Connor. Leave me alone.”

I grabbed her arm. “Okay, then what about me? You set up the security in my apartment. Are you confident I’m protected?”

A sneer curled on her lips as she looked at my hand. “Is the great Connor Grey afraid?”

I let her go and threw my hand in the air. “Play it your way, Keeva. You get overconfident, you get killed. Sorry I was concerned for both of us.”

“This isn’t your problem,” she said. She pushed through the revolving door and jumped in a cab. By the time I hit the curb, the yellow car had pulled away. Murdock’s car rolled up from the fire lane, where he had been waiting for me. I slouched in the passenger seat without bothering to toss the newspapers. He edged into traffic.

“She didn’t look bad. I’m glad I didn’t bring flowers,” he said.

I snorted. “She’s in denial. All the damage is on the inside.”

“How’d it go down?”

I briefed him on her attack.

“We should put protection on Ardman and Meryl,” he said.

“You think it’s related to Viten?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Just covering the bases. That’s four attacks related to the case.”

“I count only three, assuming Keeva’s is related.”

He gave me his oh-so-patient look. “Did you read the Guild file on Ardman?”

“Of course,” I said. He looked doubtful. “Okay, I read most of it.” He gave me the look again. “Okay, okay, I skimmed. I was bored. It was financial crap.”

He sighed. “Josef Kaspar needed independent verification that Viten was fey; otherwise, the Guild would have dismissed his complaint. He tracked Viten for a few days and made a connection. Your buddy Belgor.”

My mouth dropped open. “Belgor ratted Viten out to the Guild?”

“Hard to believe from such a paragon of virtue,” he said.

I let the comment go. Murdock used snitches as much as I did, but Belgor annoyed him. Since the elf didn’t traffic in the kind of stolen goods the human-normal judicial system cares about, it was a waste of time for Murdock to charge him with anything, assuming he had something. Belgor knew it and didn’t deal him any dirt. “He’s been working on something for me. This sounds like a good time for a visit.”

Murdock made the quick turn onto the elevated highway that would loop us back to the Weird. We pulled onto Calvin Place. The plate-glass windows of Belgor’s shopfront had been replaced. Fingerprints and streaks covered them and would probably never be cleaned if Belgor kept his usual standards. I was surprised he didn’t spray dust on them to fit the rest of the décor.

The little bell above the door rang when we entered. To all outward appearances, the shop seemed the same room full of oddities. While a certain amount of ambient essence filled the space-the echoes of times past in used wands or ward stones, the vibrant hint from a sealed jar of strange herbs used in potions-none approached the level of potency that normally lurked in Belgor’s merchandise.

The old elf stood behind the counter at the rear, leaning meaty hands palm down on the countertop. He didn’t look happy to see me. He never did. The feeling was mutual. We weren’t friends and never would be. Despite helping each other on occasion, our entire interaction was based on friendly opposition.

“You’ve cleaned out the place,” I said.

He worried his thick lips. “I cleaned up, Mr. Grey.” So his recent slip-up with the museum goods was forcing Belgor to be careful. He was immortal. He could afford to lose money for a while. That should mollify Murdock.

He hit me with a sending. They are listening. His eyes shifted to the curtained door to the back room. My sensing ability got an immediate hit of a Danann fairy signature, a Guild security agent judging by the strength. I caught Murdock’s eye and nodded toward the door.

I leaned against the counter. “We thought we’d stop by and see if you remembered anything more about your attacker.”

His neck wattles gave a little shimmy as he shook his head. “Unfortunately, no, Mr. Grey. My mind has been quite occupied with repairing the damage.”

I have learned that the gentleman who acquired the museum merchandise and the courier who brought it here were both paid by an Inverni fairy.

I trailed my finger through the dust on the counter. “Maybe you screwed her out of a deal?”

Belgor glowered. “Occasionally, my needs do not coincide with my clients’ needs, Mr. Grey. But I do not believe I’ve ever done anything to provoke anyone to kill me.”

Murdock snorted at that. If he hadn’t been a cop, he probably would have taken a shot at Belgor himself. I wrote “Viten” in the dust. “Maybe you ratted on someone, and a little revenge came into play?”

His ears flexed down, long, pointy hairs sticking out the ends. He looked at the name for a long moment before wiping it away. “A much more likely scenario, though I prefer to use the term ‘information-sharing.’ ”

Interesting. I did not find a name, but perhaps you have, he sent.

There weren’t many Inverni fairies in Boston, and Rosavear Ardman was the only one related to the Viten case. The idea that she was involved in attacking a slovenly stolen goods dealer in the Weird made my head whirl. “Maybe I have.”

I realized I had responded to his sending by Belgor’s nervous glance at the curtained doorway. I mouthed, “Sorry.”

“I assure you, Mr. Grey, as soon as I remember anything more, I will contact you or the Guild.”

I dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter. “Thanks, Belgor. Sorry to bother you. We only stopped in because Detective Murdock wanted a lottery ticket.”

Belgor waved a hand toward the thick roll of scratch tickets for the state lottery. “What would you like, Detective?”

Murdock shot me an annoyed look. He’s not a fan of gambling, even if it is state-sponsored. He pointed at one of the numbered rolls. Belgor tore off a ticket and slid it across the counter. “Good luck, sir.”

We returned to Murdock’s car. He tossed the ticket at me. “The Guild’s got a babysitter on him?”

“Danann security agent,” I said. “Belgor came through with some interesting information, though. He said an Inverni fairy paid for the museum heist.”

Murdock pushed his lower lip out. “Ha. I knew something was up with that Ardman woman. After we interviewed her, I double-checked the Viten files. Viten used a different alias and glamour to hide his identity in New York. The Guild made the connection through financial records.”

I thumbnail-scratched at the silver patches on the ticket. “So?”

A sly look came over him, the one he gets when something clicks. “According to the file, Ardman didn’t know about the affair with Powell, but the other day she said she did. I thought it was odd but didn’t have a reason to follow it up.”

“Huh. I’m still not seeing a motive for the murders. What’s Ardman get out of it?”

“Maybe we need another visit with her, too.”

“I hope we have better luck with her,” I said. I held the scratch ticket up. We didn’t win the lottery.