Unperfect Souls

19

Blood stained the snow in front of the meeting warehouse. Bodies lay crumpled in the gutter. All solitaries. All dead. At the end of the street, police officers huddled in their cars. Motorcycles lay scattered in the snow, some with their lights flashing. No one was outside.

Shay and I stumbled into the warehouse. Pistols and rifles swung in our direction, and Shay grabbed me by the waist from behind. I held my hands in the air to confused shouts of “get out” and “get on the floor.”

“Is Detective Lieutenant Leonard Murdock here?” I shouted.

An officer grabbed my arm and shoved me against the wall. “Get your arms out now,” he shouted.

I assumed the position. Shay turned a panicked face toward me as an officer pressed him hard against the wall while another fumbled with his oversize coat. “I’m with the Guild,” I shouted.

The officer patting me down shouted in pain as a flash of heat burned against my ankle. “He’s armed! He’s armed!” he shouted as he fell back with his gun out.

I kept my hands against the wall. “I’ve got two daggers in my boots. That’s it. One of them’s spelled. I need Lieutenant Murdock.”

“He’s not here,” someone said.

“Just throw them out with the others,” someone else yelled.

I had no idea what was going on. These guys sounded angry and scared. “Call the Guild, dammit! Tell Keeva macNeve that you have Connor Grey!”

An officer pressed the muzzle of his gun against the back of my neck. I closed my eyes. “Let the kid go,” I said.

No one answered. I didn’t dare move my head to check on Shay.

After several agonizing minutes, someone called over. “He’s clear.”

The pressure of the gun disappeared. I dropped my hands. Shay huddled against me again. “This is no way to treat a lady,” he whispered.

“Are you okay?” I asked. He nodded against my shoulder.

I called Keeva. She spoke before I had a chance to say anything. “Stay with the police, Connor. We’re handling this. Don’t tell anyone else you’re there.”

“What the hell is going on?”

Rustling sounds came through as Keeva moved her phone. Muffled voices argued in the background. “It doesn’t matter. Listen, don’t talk to anyone. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“What the hell is going on?”

She dropped her voice. “I can’t talk. We’ve got missing police officers. Just do what I say. You’re better off in Guild custody.”

“Custody?” I said.

She disconnected. I stared at my phone. Bastian’s words came back to me. I glanced around the room. No one seemed to be watching me. Given a choice between the police and the Guild, I liked neither. I looked out the window. The storm was raging, blinding white snow obliterating the view to the street. I called Meryl.

“I’m at 264 Summer Street. Can you get me out of here?” I asked.

“It’s a blizzard out there, Grey,” she said.

“Murdock’s missing,” I said.

“Missing? Like missing missing or not returning your phone calls because he has something better to do missing?”

I told her what happened. “And now I’m surrounded by cops who apparently don’t know they’re supposed to arrest me,” I said.

She sighed. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Officers watched the storm through the grate-covered windows. The heightened apprehension faded as time went by, but the tension never completely left the room. No one but uniformed officers came inside. Whatever solitaries had been out in the street when the Dead came through were either hiding elsewhere or dead.

“I’m going to need a distraction,” I said to Shay.

“I’ve got a pretty good singing voice,” he said.

I smiled down at him. “I’m sure you do. When I tell you to, go to the back of the room and do something to draw attention.”

He nodded. “Then what do I do?”

“Stay here. You’ll be safe.”

His eyebrows went up. “Really? With the guys with the guns that were pointed at me?”

“You’ll be fine. This seems to be about the fey,” I said.

He pouted as he looked around the room. “Maybe I’ll get that guy who groped me to buy me a drink.”

I grinned. “See? I’m giving you a dating opportunity.”

A deep, low rumble sounded outside. Everyone moved away from the door and windows except me and Shay. A smudge of light appeared, white and yellow. As the noise grew, the lights brightened and separated into flashing roof lights. A snowplow stopped outside, a massive hulk of yellow steel belching steam out its overhead exhaust.

A cool spot formed in my mind and a sending came through. You going to stare or get in?

“Showtime, Shay,” I said.

He pulled his hood up and wandered toward the back of the room. I sidled toward the door. When Shay reached the table in back, he stooped and picked up the fallen microphone. For a moment, I thought he really was going to sing, but then he let loose with a loud, high-pitched scream. Every head in the room whipped in his direction. I slipped outside.

Snow swirled around me in thick curtains. In the few feet from the door to the truck, I was covered from head to foot. I hopped on the running board of the plow, then jumped inside the cab. Bundled in a thick black cloak, Meryl waited behind the wheel.

“Where the hell did you get this?” I asked.

She put the truck in gear. “Geez, Grey, doesn’t anyone owe you favors?”

“I got you out in a blizzard, didn’t I?”

“This is you owing me another favor, not you calling one in.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To meet Zev. He agreed to have his people look for Murdock.”

The truck rumbled along Summer Street in its own bubble of light. The warehouses to either side were barely discernible through the storm, less so as we drove deeper into the Weird, and the streetlamps became fewer. We drove through a trail of essence. The storm degraded what lingered, but I got hits on elves, fairies, and all kinds of solitaries and large animals. “This is the direction the Dead came from,” I said.

The dashboard lights threw a pale yellow glow against Meryl’s face. “I’ve been sensing their trail since the financial district. There were a few live ones, but not Murdock’s.”

“This is my fault. The Dead wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me,” I said.

Meryl took a wide turn onto Drydock Avenue in the deep end of the Weird. “No, I’d blame Bergin Vize for that one.”

“He led them here, but I trapped them,” I said.

She turned onto Harbor Street and dropped the plow. The snow drifted nearly two feet in front of us. “Eh, that’s debatable and beside the point. They’re here. The point right now is to find Murdock.”

“Are we going where I think we’re going?” I asked.

“If you guessed the Tangle, you get to go to the bonus round,” she said, as we crossed Old Northern.

The Tangle is where the worst of the Weird meets the worst of everything. The original layout of the streets was buried under shifting lanes and buildings that created a maze with no beginning and no end. Bad things happened in the Tangle, from knife-throwing target practice on the unwary to full-blown essence battles. Blood and sadness soaked the streets, the memories of rage and waste. Human law enforcement gave up on it long ago. It had to. If the fey had to be on guard in the Tangle, a person with only a gun and a badge had no hope of surviving.

Tiny streaks of white lightning danced over the truck as it passed through a warding barrier. The engine coughed, and Meryl muttered a shield spell as she downshifted. The deeper we drove into the area, the more spells pinged against the shield, bursts of essence in green and white across the hood of the truck, streaks of yellow and brilliant hazes of blue and white. The engine whined higher, and Meryl hit the brake. “We need to get out here. The engine can’t take any more hits. I don’t want to lose it and have to walk home in this mess.”

My head started aching. The dark mass in my mind hated whenever someone tried to read the future, and the Tangle was a hotbed for scrying. As I trudged through the snow behind Meryl, I fought off the nausea that welled up. My vision blurred as the pain increased. “I don’t know if I can do this, Meryl. There’s too much scrying, and I’m getting hit with sensor spells.”

She reached out a gloved hand. Her body shield shimmered around her, a faint yellow glow in the thick snow. The essence flowed off her fingers and up my arm. The dark mass flared, sharp little spikes of darkness reacting to the body shield’s intrusion. The mass in my head resisted, intent on blocking outside essence. Including me in her body shield wasn’t a true interaction of the kind the dark mass resisted—Meryl’s shield wrapped around me more like a blanket than a merging of our body signatures. Meryl jerked her head up at me, surprised at the resistance the mass pressed back with. When her shield blocked the emanations from the scryings, the dark mass settled down and didn’t attempt to reject her help.

“That was different,” she said.

“I think it’s overly sensitive to being in the Tangle,” I said. I hoped. It was doing a lot of things lately it hadn’t done before.

We shuffled through the drifts and wind without speaking. Few people were out in the storm except the usual suspects—fey solitaries with weather abilities who didn’t mind the cold and the wind. They ignored us for the most part, though occasionally one of the highland fairies threw an extra gust of wind at us. We circled a block built on a tight crescent, five- and six-story warehouses leaning back from the street. Eccentric additions cast dark shadows over the windows, twisted bricks rising in sinuous lines across the facades, spikes of stone hanging in the air. They radiated with strong currents of essence.

“We’re walking in circles,” I said through panting breaths.

Meryl focused in front of her. “It’s the path. Once more around the block, and we should be there.”

We turned for the third time around a slumped pile of stone. Someone had died under it, the pain of their passing gnawing at the edges of my sensing ability. The rear of the warehouses were no better. Death always leaves a footprint behind, one that can take years to fade.

Meryl stopped. We stood on the front side of the block in the middle of the crescent. The center building had changed. A door that hadn’t been visible the first two times we passed yawned above us in a white stone carved to resemble oak leaves. Unlike the brick used on the rest of the walls, large blocks of granite in an irregular pattern surrounded the entrance. Clinging to the stones were several vitniri, their lupine faces lifting into howls as we approached. Two jumped down from the lintel and barred our way.

The Teutonic vitniri were known for their skills at guarding homes. Whether they were humans with wolflike features or wolves with human characteristics was hard to tell. They walked on their hind legs or all fours as it suited them, their limbs ending in rough pawlike clawed hands.

Meryl took off a glove and held out her hand. “I am Meryl Dian. Connor Grey is with me. We are invited.”

I took off a glove, too. The vitniri on the walls barked and yipped. The two in front of us rose on their hind legs and came closer. They sniffed at our hands and licked our fingers. A few moments of more sniffing, and they backed away. “You may enter,” one said, his voice a raspy growl. They scrambled back up the sides of the door.

I resisted the urge to wipe my hand before putting the glove back on. As long as the scent-marking remained, we would be unharmed. By unharmed, I meant not ripped to shreds and maybe eaten. If nothing else, vitniri are dedicated watchmen.

Meryl pushed open the door. “At least they didn’t pee on me this time,” she muttered.