Unperfect Souls

13

I spent the day catnapping and reading, my curiosity about the leanansidhe prompting more reading and Internet surfing. Everything I knew about the leanansidhe filled one small volume on my bookshelf. Internet searches picked up no reliable primary references. Few leanansidhe existed, and those that did spent their lives hidden and alone. By nature, they were not forthcoming, never mind social. Their reputation was too well-known for them to live openly. By all accounts, they absorbed the essence of the living. As with most legends, the whole truth lay beneath hyperbole and falsehoods. If the only essence the leanansidhe survived on was living essence, their presence would be determined quickly. Just look for the dead, essenceless bodies.

Yet they managed to survive. I was willing to bet that the leanansidhe sought other essence resources. Those who survived encounters with them were probably unique situations. As Joe likes to say “kings and queens” about things like that, meaning “yeah, that’s one version, but the reality smelled worse and was usually boring.”

It wasn’t enough. Failure to learn more drove me out into the night. The chronic lack of progress in understanding what had happened to my abilities frustrated me—and created situations that put lives at risk. Janey and Murdock could have been seriously injured by Jark—or worse. I hadn’t thought through resurrecting a Dead man with Taint in his body essence. I failed to protect them because I had no abilities to use against him. No matter what people said about using the abilities you had instead of wishing for ones you didn’t, the berserker couldn’t have been stopped without essence abilities. Abilities I didn’t have anymore.

The leanansidhe knew something about the dark mass. I had seen it, and the thing inside me had reacted to it. It was in her, too, at least something very much like it. For the first time since my accident, I had something that looked like a clue as to what was wrong with me. I had to know if it meant anything. I had to know if the leanansidhe knew something.

Over two years the dark mass had been in my head, blocking my abilities. Over two years of mistaken diagnoses and dead-end treatments. My healer Gillen Yor was at a complete loss. My friend Briallen’s eyes showed more fear every time she examined me. No amount of ibuprofen stopped my chronic pain.

And it was getting worse.

The thing inside me was escaping, for lack of a better word. Whatever it was, it was attracted and repulsed by essence. If essence threatened me, it reacted to protect me, and when it did, it devoured the essence. When a group of the Dead recently attacked me on Samhain, the dark mass absorbed them. I hadn’t really understood that at the time, but it was the only explanation under the circumstances. The only person who seemed to know what it was, was one of the most reviled beings known to human and fey.

Brother. She’d called me brother.

Inside the warehouse, my breath steamed in the shaft of light from my flashlight. Despite the many doors and hallways, the basement door was easy to find. The building had been empty so long that dust on the floor was evolving into dirt. I followed the recently disturbed path that the crime-scene investigators had made. The trail ended at a large door with rusted and dented sheet metal nailed over it. It opened with the whine of metal on metal and exposed stairs going down. The corrugated metal steps rang dully beneath my boots as I descended.

I swept my flashlight beam across the sealed-off basement. The categorized piles had been removed, then tagged and bagged in evidence lockers at police headquarters. All the clothing, the hats, the shoes—everything the leanansidhe had picked off her victims—were being sorted and scanned, compared to missing persons reports, maybe analyzed for DNA. Phone calls would go out to doctors and dentists. If anything matched a file description, a police officer would have to make that long, slow walk to the door of the next of kin. With the volume of material I saw, it was going to be a long while before the police processed everything. A lot of cold cases were going to be closed. This being the Weird, a lot of unanswered questions were going to result, too. Not all the missing are missed.

The crime-scene team had enlarged the hole the leanansidhe had escaped through. A bone-chilling draft wafted over me from between the jagged bricks. Silence filled the utter darkness beyond. Why the section had been sealed off wasn’t obvious. The columned space inside was devoid of the usual abandoned equipment or stock supplies left by long-gone businesses.

Body signatures from the investigative team lit up in my sensing ability, two fey signatures mixed in with about a dozen human. Keeva macNeve must have sent someone from the Guild. Probably to cover her ass. If the leanansidhe went after humans, she’d have a hard time explaining she knew it existed and did nothing.

The team had scoured the basement. Individual trails branched and overlapped throughout the room. The far wall was another bricked-over section. Other than the leanansidhe ’s bolt-hole, I found no other openings. Leanansidhes weren’t stupid. It was no coincidence Joe had found her lying on the floor near an escape route, and she wouldn’t let herself become trapped if someone followed her. An exit had to be in the basement somewhere.

I turned off the flashlight and allowed my sensing ability free rein. The investigative team’s residual signatures brightened. Down the center of the room, directly from the bolt-hole if I judged the angle right, their signatures masked a thin layer of violet essence, the faint trace of the leanansidhe’s body signature. At the far end of the basement, a thin purple haze splashed up against the solid brick wall. I turned on the flashlight.

The wall showed no breaks. The leanansidhe’s essence danced on my fingers like static when I touched the surface. She had hidden her exit with a strong-yet-subtle masking ward. Frustrated, I slapped my hand against the wall. The dark mass in my head clenched, and my hand slipped beneath the surface of the bricks. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Masking wards were keyed to specific essences for access, usually the spellcaster and whoever else the ’caster allowed. The leanansidhe wouldn’t have keyed the wall for me, never mind known my essence well enough to do it without me.

I pressed at the bricks. The dark mass in my head danced in short pulses of pain as my hands sank below the surface. A pit of anxiety formed in my stomach. The leanansidhe must have set the ward to something she thought unique to herself. The dark mass was the key. I felt open space on the other side of the wall. I stepped forward, a pounding in my mind as I passed through the ward. I stumbled into the other side and took deep breaths as the pain settled.

A narrow section of basement mirrored the one that Murdock and I had found. A sense of pain permeated the air in this one, the echoes of long-past deaths. Tragedy lingered in spaces, the emotion of the moment seeping into the surroundings like a memory stain. It was the leanansidhe ’s dining room. People died there, drained of their essence to feed another’s hunger.

Ignoring the emotions vying for attention, I searched the area. Another staircase led to the warehouse above, but an avalanche of dirt and trash blocked access. No one had used it for a long, long time. At the other end, a door was shaped in the stone wall, more handiwork of the troll who had made the sewer tunnel. The leanansidhe must have taken over the space after the troll left or died. More likely, she had used the troll to create the tunnels and killed it when the work was completed.

I hesitated. No one knew where I was. I had no abilities to defend myself, and I was about to seek out a monster. I found assurance in the fact that the leanansidhe had tried to absorb my essence and failed—an irony that the one fey with no abilities to defend himself was the one fey she apparently couldn’t feed on. I crossed the threshold.

The smooth earthen tunnel led down, the leanansidhe’s signature strong enough to be evident even to a normal sensing ability. The path twisted and turned, branched and widened. I walked through at least a quarter mile of turnings before I found a series of chambers. I hung back from the entrance to a furnished room.

Warmth radiated against my face. That was it as far as welcome went. The chamber was a living room of sorts, if a room buried three floors beneath the ground could be considered living. A generation’s worth of furniture filled the space, old sofas and bookcases, tables and chairs. A many-joined extension cord trailed from the ceiling, providing electricity for a glass-shade lamp by a reading chair. A book lay open on the table next to it.

Welcome, brother. Enter and be at peace.

I pressed flat against the wall, my dagger out of its sheath and in my hand without a conscious thought. Sendings don’t have directional indications like sound. The leanansidhe had to have me in her line of sight to know I was in the room. “Where are you?”

A fluctuation in the air passed over me. Definitely someone moving in the room. Some fey can cloak themselves, but I didn’t know it was an ability the leanansidhe had. Come, brother. Make peace. There is no blade at your throat.

I flinched from the brief icy touch of steel against my neck. A soft chuckle came from the middle of the room. The air rippled, and the leanansidhe appeared, crouched on an old Persian rug. In her outstretched hand, she held a dagger. She grinned through matted tangles of hair and opened the hand wide to let the dagger fall. “You see, brother? No harm from me for such as we.”

She eased back as I entered.

“You keep calling me ‘brother,’” I said.

She moved behind a table stacked with books, her pale, stained hands caressing the covers though she kept her whiteless eyes on me. “Kin or akin matters not between us. We touch the Wheel the same.”

“I’m not like you.”

Her large dark eyes shifted to my dagger. “Aye, ’struth. I could not touch such a thing as that. Lay it aside, brother, and rest in my home.”

“And leave myself unarmed? If you violate the rules of hospitality, to whom shall I complain?”

She rubbed long fingers down her face, watching me out of the corners of her eyes. “Keep it, then.” She vanished and reappeared at my side. “It will avail you naught.” She vanished again and peered at me from behind a tall grandfather clock, clutching the edges of the wood with cracked gray nails. “Unless I will it.”

She vanished again. I tracked her with my sensing ability and pressed the knife to her chest as she tried to slip around me. “That’s close enough.”

She dropped her masking glamour to reveal a surprised and frightened face. Thrusting her hands up, she bowed her head and sank to the floor. “Spare me, brother. I seek only kinship.”

“I’m not here to kill you,” I said.

She looked up at me through a tangle of hair, suspicious, yet curious. “I have no quarrel with you either, my brother. Shall we sit, then? I should like that.”

I motioned her away with the dagger, and she scuttled along the floor to an armchair. Curling up in its corner, she pawed at one eye as I eased into the opposite chair. She shoved her hand into a tattered pocket. She withdrew her hand, clenched around something. Tentatively, she reached across the side table and dropped a battered piece of bread. “I have not flesh nor fluid to offer, but crusty things can stem the pangs of hunger.”

She was trying to follow the old rules of hospitality, even if the bread had a couple of colors on it that I didn’t usually associate with freshness. “I’m good. Um. Thanks.”

We observed each other. At least, by the shifting of her unsettling black eyes, she was doing the same thing I was. Such a small being to inspire such a lot of fear. She was barely half my height but had the ability to take down the strongest of fey. Except for her emaciated head, the only parts of her body visible outside layers of clothing were her thin arms and grimy ankles.

I closed my eyes a moment. If I continued the conversation, I was committing to something, or at least admitting to it. I was seeking help from a leanansidhe. I took a deep breath. “You said we touch the Wheel the same. How do you touch the Wheel?”

She threw her hands over her face. “We touch the outside from within, and the Wheel turns.”

I frowned. “If you think I believe you can turn the Wheel, you’re wrong.”

She screeched with laughter and scrambled up the side of the chair. “No one turns the Wheel, brother. It turns and turns, and we touch It where few dare to know. Not all who ride the Wheel ride the Wheel.”

“You’re lying. Even the Dead ride the Wheel the same as everyone else. It’s the Wheel of the World,” I said.

She tangled her hands in her hair. “Ah, stupid druid, sees the surface and sees nothing more. The Wheel is a wheel on both sides.”

The idea landed on me in stunning realization. I had spent my youth in study of the druidic path, learning from my mentors. The test of a true follower of the path was an intuitive understanding of what came next, the ability to move beyond receiving knowledge to attaining it on one’s own. We called it secret knowledge, the knowing of the Wheel in a fundamental way. I left my training years ago and stepped off the path for personal gain, but every once in a while, I was granted a flash of insight to the nature of the Wheel. I laughed in my throat at the realization the leanansidhe handed me. “There are two sides to the Wheel.”

She squealed as she dropped to the floor and clutched my knees. “You see, my brother! You see the within and without, and the Wheel lies between.”

I clenched my jaw at the wave of body odor she emitted. “Show me how you touch the Wheel,” I said.

She gasped in excitement, clutching her hands to her cracked lips. Those dark orbs whirled in their sockets, searching. In the blink of an eye, she vanished, surprising me with her speed. Seconds later, she returned, walking through the door and cradling something in her hands. She knelt in front of me with a rat that fought to escape, its sharp claws scratching her hands. “Shhh, shhh, shhh, little thing. Rest and receive,” she crooned.

Deep violet essence coated her hands. Tendrils formed, lines of purple light that burrowed into the rat. The rat froze in some kind of paralysis. With a moan of pleasure, the leanansidhe brought the filthy rodent to her cheek and closed her eyes. More tendrils waved out of her face where the rat touched skin. They pulsed with light, and the rat flinched as its essence seeped away. Something moved within the leanansidhe, something dark and impenetrable. It reached up from within her essence and sapped the rat’s essence.

I flinched as the dark mass in my head shifted. The vision in my right eye faded as pain stabbed at it. Pain from within. Something black leaped out of my face, an indistinct line of darkness that burned. The leanansidhe screeched and fell back, holding the rat toward me. “Yes, yes, brother, it is yours! Yours! Druse did not mean to take it from you.”

I fought the pain, pressing my body essence against it. My left forearm burned with the effort, the swirls of my strange tattoo giving off an uncomfortably pleasurable cold burn. The dark thing inside me recoiled, and I gasped. My vision returned to see a dead rat in a filthy hand inches from my face. By force of will, I didn’t slap it away. “Keep it,” I said.

The leanansidhe shook the rat. “No, yours! ’Sokay, ’sokay.”

I turned my head to the side. I didn’t know the ramifications of taking a gift from a leanansidhe, even if it was only a rat. I wasn’t interested in finding out. I stood, and she fell back.

“I said keep it.” I stumbled toward the door.

“No! Stay, my brother! You see the truth of it now! Stay with Druse, and we shall aid and comfort each other. Druse will show you the way beyond the pain to the pleasure of the Wheel,” she called out.

My head pounded beyond a migraine. I held my aching arm against me as I retraced my way in the dark, not thinking of anything but escape. Without the flashlight, I followed the path in my memory, bumping into walls and tripping over changes in levels of the floor. Passing through the masking ward in the warehouse basement, the dark mass in my head gave me one more kick and stopped spiking.

I ran the rest of the way—across the basement, up the stairs, and through the warehouse. The door slammed against the outside wall as I shouldered through it. I landed on my knees on the snow-covered sidewalk and threw up in the street. A wave of dizziness swept over me, and I fell into the blessedly cold snow. My face pressed against it, the icy shock of it soothing the pain in my head.

A light flashed rose against the snow in the dead white night. “Really, Connor, this throwing up in the gutter is a bad habit.”

I tried to talk, but a retching sound came out. Joe grabbed at my jacket collar. “Connor! What’s wrong?”

He flew up, pulling me into a seated position. “I’m okay,” I said.

He hovered in my face. “Screw that, you look like day-old shite. Your essence is . . . I don’t know what it is. It’s rippling like a wave.”

I got my feet under me and forced myself off the ground. Joe grabbed my coat to steady me. “It’s stopping,” he said.

He didn’t have to tell me. The dizziness receded as I took a great gulp of air. “I’m fine. Just didn’t expect that to happen.”

Joe whirled around me. “What to happen? Where the hell have you been?”

I laughed. “Hell might be one answer.”

He leaned closer to me face and sniffed. “Are you drunk?”

I didn’t want to discuss what had happened. Joe can be overprotective, and I didn’t want a scolding. I started walking. “Yeah, I am. I must have taken a wrong turn or something.”

“But what was going on with your essence?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe alcohol poisoning? I feel fine now. Honest.”

He twisted his lips doubtfully. “You’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

He spun around in the air. “So—let me tell you about my night.” I let him chatter on. It was a good distraction from the strange emotions I was having. He talked all the way back to my apartment, a tale of drinks, song, a short wrestle with another flit, an amorous encounter, and more drinks. Joe did know how to have a good time. His busy night was a fortunate coincidence. It didn’t take much trying to get him to go home, so I could be alone.

Inside my building, I hit the elevator call button. The old cage was slow as hell, but I was so tired that I didn’t want to climb the stairs. I heard a clicking sound, but the elevator didn’t move. I peered into the shaft. It was stuck in the basement. I sighed and walked up.

I wanted to reach inside my head and scrub my brain. My gut feeling was right. The leanansidhe had recognized the darkness inside me. Recognized it because it was inside her. I saw it beneath her essence, the black, hungering thing that reached out for the rat’s essence. My eye ached in memory of it. Whatever was inside me responded, wanted what the thing inside the leanansidhe wanted.

The idea revolted me. What the hell had Bergin Vize unleashed when we fought almost three years ago? Maybe unleashed inside both of us? He was damaged, too. I saw that when I met him in TirNaNog. Did he struggle with the same darkness? Did he feel the same frustrations and pain? I hoped to hell he did. If he weren’t so intent on destroying the Seelie Court—hell, destroying the world—none of this would be happening. How someone raised by Eorla Kruge could become so twisted baffled me.

My essence-sensing ability jumped as something moved in the apartment. The security wards hadn’t gone off, but something was there. Several wards were keyed to alert the Guild, but considering their more-intense-than-usual annoyance with me lately, whether anyone would show up these days was a good question. The wards wouldn’t stop a truly powerful fey person, but they would slow him down long enough for me to figure out how to protect myself.

Both daggers were out and in my hands in seconds. The dagger that Briallen gave me felt heavier than usual, and a few runes on the blade glowed a soft yellow. I peered into the living room, and every hair on my body bristled at a faint red light in the room. Two glowing eyes stared back. I turned on the reading lamp.

Uno’s massive head tweaked to one side in curiosity. He relaxed and dropped his jaw, his thick, dark tongue flapping out the end of his muzzle to the rhythm of his panting.

“Okay, you can’t be good news,” I said aloud.

I picked up my cell phone. Shay answered on the first ring. “Say ‘Hi, Dad,’ if you’re in trouble.”

“You don’t strike me as the daddy type, Connor,” he said.

Relief swept over me. I never knew what Shay was going to say. I don’t think he did either. “Is Uno with you?” I asked.

“I was debating whether to call you so late. I heard a bark and woke up, and he’s gone.”

“He’s here.”

“He’s there? You mean your apartment?”

“Drooling at the end of my bed as we speak,” I said.

“Don’t worry about that. The drool disappears at dawn. What do you think it means?”

Uno dropped to the floor and lowered his head between outstretched paws. “I don’t know. Has anything odd happened to you recently?”

There was a chuckle. “I can’t believe you just asked me that.”

Shay’s daily life was pretty damned odd. “Okay, odder than usual.”

“No. What about you?” he asked.

When I saw Uno, I assumed something had happened to Shay. Until he asked, it didn’t occur to me that the dog could have appeared because of me. “I had a strange night.”

I heard a soft clank of metal on the other end of the phone, then water running. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Shay was less than half my age, and here he was offering me a sympathetic ear. I wanted to laugh, but didn’t. He was being sincere and concerned. The kid was sweet, too naïve and too worldly, all at the same time. I worried about people like Shay in the Weird, people on the edge who could fall with the slightest nudge. Shay was dancing near that edge when we first met, but he seemed to be finding his way to safer ground. Except for Uno. “No, that’s all right. I’ll work it out on my own.”

“Call me if you change your mind.”

“Will do,” I said.

“Connor . . . does this mean I’m not going to die?”

He said it so quietly and matter-of-factly, it pulled at me. I hadn’t considered what he must have been going through. Given that I now had a hellhound lying on my living-room floor, I had a feeling I was going to find out. “It’ll be all right, Shay. Call me if you need me.”

He didn’t answer right away. “Thanks . . . um . . . you, too.”

I closed the cell. Uno held eye contact with me, calm and steady, long past the point any other dog would have perceived a threat. He didn’t. He stared with a gaze that said he knew damned well who would look away first. As a hound from Hel whose job it was to suck the souls out of the living, I guessed not much threatened him.

After several minutes, neither of us had moved. I gave in for what was left of the night. I was drained and tired and not up for vying for supremacy with a supernatural dog. Uno remained where he was while I went through my going-to-bed routine, turning off the light in the study and setting up the coffee for the morning. I sat on the futon, removed my boots, retrieved the spelled dagger from its sheath, and tucked it into my headboard. I leaned on my knees and looked at Uno. “I suppose if you were going to devour me, you would have done it by now.”

The tufts of hair above his eyes twitched, and he let loose a loud chuff. I reached out and touched his head. He slumped over on his side and wagged his tail. I scratched at the back of his neck, and his tail thumped on the floor. “Just so you know, Uno, petting a soul-sucking hound from Hel is pretty much an unsurprising end to today.”

I peeled off my clothes and slid beneath the covers on the futon. When I turned off the lights, the room filled with the red glow from Uno’s eyes. I stared at the ceiling.

Not the least bit surprising.