Unperfect Souls

12

The Office of the City Medical Examiner was a long name for a sad place. At night, it was even sadder, a brick building perpetually clothed in gray twilight on a desolate stretch of road. It was open twenty-fours a day, seven days a week. Death made its own appointments, and the city morgue waited like a patient suitor for a date.

In the cool basement, steam rose from Murdock’s coffee. He leaned against a counter, not looking like he’d been up all night. The accident that boosted his essence had boosted his energy levels, too. Not that he needed it. Murdock’s stamina was legendary. As a police officer, he had spent more than enough time on dull surveillance, which came in handy for him since he’d been watching Janey Likesmith and me work through the night. Occasionally, we needed an extra pair of hands, but for the most part he watched.

The OCME handled all the deaths in the city and transferred major fey cases to the Guild only at the Guild’s request. As the lone fey staff member at OCME, Janey worked the rest. All of them. She had to pick and choose which ones to give more attention to than others. Who the decedent was or who they knew or how much money they had in life didn’t matter to her. Producing the best examination results did.

Janey was a dark elf, a member of the Dokkheim clan. The dark elves acknowledged the Elven King, but most of them went their own way in the post-Convergence world. They had never been strong enough to challenge the Teutonic court, but they were skilled enough to have influence over it.

We met on a case together not too long ago. She impressed me with her skills and even temper. The politics of Convergence held no interest for her. Like a child of immigrants, her parents’ stories of the old country—in her case, Elven Faerie—were stories, nothing more. She understood where she came from, but she also understood that Boston was where she was. She had no desire to re-create the past or find a way back to it. She focused her energy on the here and now, trying to help the fey and humans live together.

We worked on opposite sides of an examining table. Janey’s deep brown hands moved with careful skill as she realigned her side of the glass case. On each side of the table, narrow strips of quartz supported glass panels around the decapitated body from the sewer. The body itself lay on one long pane.

We had spent most of the night tuning the stones—turning them into wards—so that they could receive an infusion of essence. The process was one part skill and one part luck. Getting one stone to work in conjunction with another was easy. Getting several to do it depended on understanding the natural contours and densities of the stones so that essence would flow like a smooth current through all of them. It was like aligning a series of magnets of various strengths so that they would all stand up but not reject each other’s shifting polarities.

“I think if you tighten the brace on your side, we’re done,” I said.

She twisted the wing nuts in front of her. The glass plates shifted into place along the side of the table. Janey flicked a strand of her nutmeg-colored hair around the delicate point of her ear. “Perfect.”

“We can put the head in now,” I said.

Murdock stepped aside as Janey opened a cooling locker. She didn’t pull out the drawer but reached in and lifted the head out. It had seen better days. Bloated skin indicated time spent in the water, and missing pieces of flesh evidenced the natural process of sloughing and banging around in sewer pipes. Without a trace of revulsion, Janey carried it to the table and placed it gently inside the box. “How close to the body should it be?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think it matters that much.”

She shifted it closer to the neck stump and stepped back, peeling off her gloves. “Okay, now the lid.”

Murdock put his coffee down. He grabbed one end of the second large glass pane we had, and I took the other. We lifted, and Janey guided it over the table as we lowered it onto the standing walls.

Essentially, we had created a huge glass ward box around the body. Where metal bent essence and sent it in unanticipated directions, glass absorbed and dissipated it into the ambient air. I loved the irony that something so fragile could defeat something so powerful. Janey smiled in satisfaction. “This is amazing. I will have to call Ms. Dian later and thank her.”

“Well, this wouldn’t have been possible if you hadn’t put the body in a ward box in the first place,” I said.

When the Dead regenerated, the body vanished and reanimated somewhere else the next day. Meryl had lots of theories about why—everything from appearing where they died, to where they felt safe, to more complex theories about essence sinkholes or concentrated focal points. Since we worried that we might regenerate the body but not know where it went, Meryl came up with the idea of a barrier spell on a large ward box as a way to prevent the Dead guy’s essence from going anywhere.

Janey discarded her gloves in a hazard bin. “I preserve body essence for evidence as part of my routine. I wasn’t sure it was going to work with a Dead person.”

“The leanansidhe must have done something similar. There’s still significant essence in the head,” I said.

Janey checked her watch. “We have some time until dawn. I’d like to show you something from my examination of the body.”

We followed her up the hall to her lab room. The layout looked the same as the last time I had visited, but the instruments on the two tables were more sophisticated. The city budget didn’t allow for much in the way of fey-related diagnostic tools. A little enforced guilt toward Ryan macGoren and the Guild helped buy a few things. Janey handed me a small glass box—a miniversion of the one we had built in the morgue. Inside the box, a wafer of quartz glowed with essence. “I made an imprint of the Dead victim’s essence for the files. Notice anything?” she asked.

The essence glowed with the vibration of the Dead body in the next room, the dull ochre signature of a Teutonic berserker clan. Splotches of a vibrant green with black mottling mingled in his essence. “The Taint.”

Janey retrieved the box and examined it under an essence magnifier. “It’s bonded to his essence.”

“And if it affects the Dead the same way as the living . . .” I said.

“It reinforces their baser instincts. When the Dead die, they’re coming back as killing machines,” she finished. She slid the boxed wafer inside a marked envelope and placed it in an evidence drawer in a large wall cabinet.

We returned to the examining room and spread around the table, Murdock and I on opposite sides. Janey stood at the foot of the ward box and placed her hands on the corner quartz strips. She looked at me. “Ready?”

“As we’re ever going to be,” I said.

In the guttural dialect of her clan, she chanted the soft words of a rejuvenation spell. Normally, such a spell worked to boost someone’s energy. Janey had made a few tweaks to it to encourage the essence to mimic whatever it came in contact with, which would be crucial in a situation where the residual essence in the dead body was nearly gone. Pale green essence flowed from her fingers, seeping into the stone strips. It flowed along the edges until the box’s entire frame glowed. As the essence penetrated the stones, they flashed once with the charge, and Janey ended the spell.

No one spoke. Janey checked her watch again as my gaze slipped to the clock on the wall. Dawn would arrive in moments. Murdock had his hands in his pockets and was staring down at the floor. He said little when I explained the process we were trying, and it didn’t take much deduction to understand why. Retrieving a body from the dead—a soul, in his mind—flew in the face of his religion. Maybe even spat in it.

“Something’s happening,” Janey said.

The Dead man’s dull, yellowed essence seeped out of his chest and forehead. The two spots hovered like mist over his skin, tendrils of essence spreading up from the chest toward the neck and spooling down from his head over the chin. They met at the gap in the neck, coiling and merging into a collar of soft light. More essence welled out of his body, thinning over the corpse in a sheet. Whatever the volume of essence he had when animate, it had diminished after the decapitation. The leanansidhe probably absorbed some as well. As if sensing another source, the haze sent tentative feelers out of the sides of the body. One by one, they found the stone frame that Janey had charged with essence. The feelers drew down the essence charge into the body. With renewed energy, the body essence pulsed and thickened, enveloping the body in a cocoon of light.

Janey hopped back a step when the head rocked. A dirty, hazy yellow essence clustered at the neck. The head swayed. Essence pooled in puncture wounds in the face and gathered on the various injuries on the torso. The charged-stone frame of the ward box faded to dullness. The haze around the body swirled and undulated, then contracted and vanished into the skin.

The berserker lay whole, no sign of the decapitation, no torn and rotted flesh. Janey stared, her lips parted in amazement. The Dead man’s eyes opened. Janey gasped, and Murdock stepped closer, his hand on his gun. The berserker looked at me, then at Murdock and Janey. Confused, he pressed his hands against the box lid, his fingertips whitening against glass.

“Let’s open it,” I said.

Murdock helped me to lift the top off and put it aside. The Dead guy grasped the edges of the ward box and sat up. He assessed the three of us with suspicion. In a burst of energy, he leaped up and out of the box. I grabbed Janey as she stumbled into me. As the berserker landed on the floor, he let loose a flying kick. Murdock’s body shield bloomed around him and took the brunt of the blow.

I hustled Janey into a corner. The berserker strode toward Murdock, his own body shield rippling with essence that made his skin expand. The berserker swung, and Murdock ducked. He lost his balance, and the Dead man closed in on him. I jumped him, but he sent me sprawling away like I was a fly on his back. I landed hard on my side, my fragmented body shields taking some of the impact. Not enough. My side hurt like hell.

Angry, I jumped on the berkserker’s back again, wrapping my arm around his neck. He grabbed my forearm with thick fingers, squeezing against the muscle. The tattoo on my arm flashed with a white light as it drew on my body essence. The pressure from the berserker’s grip vanished, but my head felt light with the sudden drop in my body essence. My hold on his neck slackened, and he wrenched my arm away, flinging me against the wall.

Murdock came up out of his crouch and hit the guy in the gut. The berserker staggered, and before he could recover, Murdock followed through with a left to his jaw. He tripped sideways, throwing his leg out again, aiming for Murdock’s abdomen. As Murdock twisted sideways to avoid the hit, the hair on the back of my neck rose as I sensed an essence charge behind me. Confused, I pivoted on my heel, ready to fight, then checked my motion.

Janey stood with her fingers pointed like a gun. A bolt of dark green essence shot from her outstretched hand and hit the berserker. His head snapped forward, and Murdock hit him with a right cross to the cheek. The berserker fell.

As she jabbed with her fingers at the air above him, Janey chanted pinpoints of yellow light into existence. They sparkled and burst, scattering a web of glowing strands that spun and fell in a net. It settled over the berserker and became a binding spell that cinched his arms to his sides. Annoyed, I backhanded him hard across the face and reared back with my fist.

Murdock grabbed my arm. “It’s cool. It’s cool,” he said.

I rubbed at my arm. The tattoo had released the essence back into my body as soon as the berserker had let go, but it was sore. “Sorry. Are you all right?” I asked.

Murdock arched an eyebrow at me as he shook his fist loose. “Yeah, I’m glad I wasn’t holding my coffee.”

I took several breaths to calm myself. Janey had retreated to the other side of the room. “Where the hell did a nice girl like you learn an elf-shot spell like that?” I said.

With hands on hips, she kept her eyes on the berserker. “My mom. She doesn’t like me walking around at night alone in this neighborhood.”

Janey attracted the berserker’s attention when she spoke, and he asked her in German where he was.

“He’s confused,” Janey translated. “He doesn’t understand why he’s here. He’s never woken up in a place he’s never been before.”

I understood German, but for Murdock’s benefit I let her translate. “Who is he?” I asked.

The berserker stared at me while Janey translated. “His name is Jark, son of Ulf,” she said.

I crossed my arms. “Ask him how he died.”

Janey bit her lower lip. “He said, ‘Which time?’ ”

I resisted the urge to wipe the sarcastic grin off his face. “The last time, please.”

He shrugged. “He says it was a solitary named Sekka. A jotunn who hates the Dead.”

Murdock and I exchanged glances. “That’s whose head we found in the sewer, Janey,” I said.

“How’d she lose her head if she took his?” Murdock asked.

By his reaction when Janey asked him—his pleased reaction—Jark hadn’t known Sekka was dead. He evaded Janey’s questioning at first, enjoying her frustration before giving up a tidbit. “The last thing he remembers is the giant attacking him and a brief pain as she swung a sword at his head. He says the last thing he saw was the Hound, so maybe the Hound killed him.”

“And why would the Cwn Annwn want to kill you?” I said to Jark.

He chuckled as Janey translated. Janey blushed at his response. “He says he wasn’t killed by a dog.”

She didn’t mention the part where Jark called me a string of unflattering names reflecting my stupidity, asked why a woman would want to know so much about death, then he had hit on her. “Who is the Hound?” I asked.

“He says ‘no one knows and no one wants to know. The Hound hunts the living and the Dead.’”

By the look on his face, Jark was lying. He was probably already planning his revenge. I caught Murdock’s eye. “Can we hold him?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “For a while. Legal status on the Dead is a mess.”

Jark turned this way and that as he followed our conversation. I pulled Janey aside. “Not, obviously, that you can’t take care of yourself, but I don’t want to leave you alone with him. Is there an officer in the building, maybe more than one?”

“Sure,” she said. We walked with her to a phone by the door and listened while she asked for security. She replaced the receiver. “They’ll be right down.”

Murdock abruptly walked out. “I’ll be outside.”

Janey watched him leave. “Is he okay?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. He’s a Christian. I don’t think any of this is sitting well with him.”

She rubbed her arms as if to warm herself as she looked across the room at Jark. “I can’t say I blame him. I didn’t grow up with the Dead appearing on this side of the veil. I thought those were just stories.”

“At least they were stories that fit your religion,” I said.

She nodded. “I guess. It’s funny. Despite my job, I don’t think about death much on a personal level. My people die by accident or murder. I don’t have—I don’t know, a connection to it in the same way humans do. Maybe that’s why they fear us, Connor. Even death isn’t an end for the fey.”

I nodded at Jark. “I don’t think that’s what the fey expect when they do die.”

“It’s probably why the solitaries are fighting so hard. They used to have an idea of what came after death. Now it’s a mystery,” she said.

I hadn’t thought of it that way. She was right. With TirNaNog closed to the Dead, no one knew what happened to the fey when they died. It hadn’t hit me because I wasn’t a target. For all my fears about a shortened life span because of the dark thing in my head, I hadn’t been confronted with the visceral realization that death might be an end and an end only.

“Thanks for this, Janey. Our friend here might have given us something solid to follow up,” I said.

She crossed her arms. “No, thank you. This has to be one of the more fascinating things I’ve seen here. I’m not used to my cases sitting up and talking to me.”

I smiled slightly. “With any luck, this will be the only one.”

Jark’s anger had subsided to confusion. He was only . . . animated . . . because we intervened. He had no idea how close he had come to an eternal nothingness. If the leanansidhe had drained the remains of the essence in his head, if we hadn’t brought his head and body together, he wouldn’t be sitting in bindings, wearing nothing but a towel, and wondering what the hell we were talking about.

“Maybe this is what Convergence brought the fey here for, Janey—to experience an end to all things they knew and give them the humans to help them cope.”

“I hope that’s not true, Connor. I hope it’s the opposite—that humans can learn the value of thinking beyond their finite lives. The Wheel of the World keeps turning no matter what. It doesn’t stop when we die. If there’s one thing the fey and humans have in common, it’s that neither of us knows why things happen they way they do.”

“Amen to that,” I said.

She laughed.

Murdock waited outside with the car running. How he had managed to get newspaper all over the passenger seat in the short time he’d waited there was beyond me. I tossed it all in back.

“You okay?” I asked, as he drove down Albany Street under the highway.

“Yeah. I needed some air.”

“I wonder if we can count this Jark as an eyewitness to his own murder,” I said.

“Does it matter anymore? He’s not dead, and she is,” he said.

The fey certainly managed to produce entertaining legal puzzles. “Well, we still have Sekka’s murder to deal with.”

He nodded. “At least we have a lead without having to do another resurrection.”

“The animosity between the solitaries and the Dead is going to become a problem with the Taint involved.”

He drove over the Broadway bridge into Southie. “I’ve been warning my father things are spiraling. Some community activist pressured the mayor’s office about it, so they agreed to the neighborhood meeting. My dad doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble.”

“Then what is he doing to reduce the tension?”

Murdock shrugged. “Leaving it to the Guild, I guess. You know how my father is, Connor. The more the fey screw up—especially down in the Weird—the happier he is. He’d like nothing more than for the entire neighborhood to disappear.”

A sinking, guilty feeling hit me. Murdock and I talked about his father all the time because of the political issues he was involved in. After what Manus ap Eagan asked me to do, suddenly the discussion felt like information pumping. It was, in a way, but not for Eagan. I had been meaning to tell Murdock about my conversation with Eagan. I knew Murdock well enough that the longer I held off, the more annoyed he would be with me. “Eagan tells me you’re dating someone.”

Murdock chuckled in surprise. “The Guildmaster talks about my social life?”

I shook my head. “Actually, no. He thought if he told me you were sleeping with someone, and I didn’t know, I would resent it and would wheedle information out of you about planned police actions against the fey and funnel the information to him.”

Murdock’s jaw dropped in a half smile. “What?”

We cruised down to Old Northern Avenue. Out of habit, we both scanned the sidewalks to check out the action. “No lie. Eagan’s worried your father’s playing him for a fool.”

Murdock flicked an eyebrow up and down. “He probably is. Nothing my father likes more than putting one over on the Guild.”

I laughed. “Yeah, that’s about the only thing your father and I have in common. But Eagan might have a point. This thing brewing between the solitaries and the Dead is bound to make someone look bad. It’s too much of a legal tangle not to.”

Murdock pulled up in front of my building. “Are we surprised? The jurisdictional issues are so messed up that nothing’s being handled. Just to spice things up, with all the gang deaths in the last couple of months, there’s a power vacuum on the streets. You know it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

I slumped against the door. “You know what I really want to know?”

Murdock frowned with curiosity. “What?”

“Who you’re sleeping with.”

He laughed. “No comment.”

I didn’t care who he was dating. Curious, sure, but at the end of the day, Murdock told me what he wanted to tell me, and that was okay. I respected him enough to accept what he decided. He’s done a lot for me in the two years that I’ve known him, not least of which was save my life. If anyone deserved some slack from me, it was him.

I punched him playfully in the arm. “Jerk.”