Unperfect Souls

25

In the cold of the empty street, I swayed in front of the warehouse door. The yellow crime-scene tape across it fluttered and shivered in the wake of small puffs of wind, slashes of color across the entrance that warned people off at the same time they lured me closer. A feeling had been building in me all night as Joe and I drank. I had known him all my life, but there were tales I didn’t know about him. Dark ones that he hinted at in ominous yet nonchalant tones. He had done things he didn’t like to talk about but managed to accept them as part of his history. Whatever those acts were, somehow he remained content with who he was and happy to move on. I wasn’t at the point with myself yet. Certainly not tonight, on a bleak stretch of road where I found myself after leaving Joe snoring in a pretzel bowl.

Two kinds of people walked the streets of the Weird in the middle of the night: those up to no good thing and those down to one last thing. Both had the tinge of desperation about them that drove the need and desire to go out in the darkness and accomplish whatever deed necessary to satisfy them. Standing in front of a warehouse door with crime-scene tape across it, I wasn’t sure which category I fell in. It was easy to rationalize that my motivations were good, which allowed me to slice open the tape and push open the door. It was equally true that I was breaking the law. Which brought me to that one last thing—I didn’t think had a choice.

When I’d faced Jark down by the harbor terminal, I wanted to hurt him. Not hurt him as the side effect of stopping him from committing a crime or hurt him in the process of stopping a fight. I wanted to hurt him for the sake of hurting him. No matter how much I tried to rationalize it, I wanted to hurt him for the pleasure of it. I didn’t know if it was me, though. I didn’t know if on some suppressed animal brain level I wanted to hurt him, and the dark mass exposed that baser instinct, or if the dark mass, for its own reasons, wanted to hurt him and use me as its instrument.

I had to know. I had to go back to the one person who might have that answer.

The leanansidhe’s chamber reflected her sad and solitary life. Dust caked in dark gray on surfaces that weren’t touched. Dirt was tracked everywhere, the side effect of living underground and the leanansidhe’s indifference to it. The glass lamp’s shade speckled the nearby furniture in golds and red. A jumbled assortment of blankets layered a bed in the corner. The stale air held the electric whiff thrown off by a small heater running full blast by the side chair.

The leanansidhe had gathered mundane ephemera throughout the room—a bowl of key chains, a box of gloves, stacks of playing cards. They were either trophies of her kills or the by-products of an obsessive-compulsive mind. Haphazard stacks of books covered three tables. No common theme ran through the titles, everything from pulp detective novels from the 1950s to studies of irrigation systems in the Midwest. They seemed collected for the sake of collecting, many soiled with dirt or blood, their pages swollen from old moisture.

Forlorn. That was the overall impression. The nature of her existence was depressing. We all played the hand we’re dealt, but when that hand made you a murderer and you had a modicum of conscious mind, it had to weigh on you. If it didn’t, that made you something less than humane.

Her essence permeated the room, probably the only place she allowed it to remain, but nothing indicated anything more than a hideout. A lair. The room had a distinct lack of feyness. No grimoires or spell references, no major ward stones. Not even a stray wand. It was as if her entire life was about hiding, with no interest beyond that.

I sat in the same chair that I had the other night and flipped through a well-thumbed decorating magazine by the armchair, imagined her poring over it, wondering about sun-filled windows and flower-stuffed vases. Was she envious? Perplexed? Or was it a safe way of understanding the living environment of her prey? Studying their habitat in order to set a trap for them?

She was watching, I knew. When you fear being killed in your sleep, you made arrangements to protect yourself. I didn’t have wards all over my apartment building for peace of mind alone. Even if she wasn’t there when I arrived, she had to have some kind of warning system that her space had been violated.

“Are you going to watch me all evening?” I asked.

I heard a soft gasp and a chuckle from near the bed. A hand appeared from a narrow fissure in the wall, and she peered in at me, her face tentative, yet avid. “You return, brother.”

“I have more questions,” I said.

She crept across the floor in plain sight, hid behind one of the tables, and stretched her neck up above the books. “Druse has questions, too, my brother. Why did you flee so? Shall I bring the rat for you? It is yours. It was always yours. Druse swears this.”

The idea that a dead rat was somewhere in the room was not something I wanted to dwell on. “I meant no offense. Please accept the rat as my apology.”

She ducked down behind the books and muttered. Hospitality rules among the old fey were complicated. In certain quarters, offering a guest a gift was required and refusing it brought shame. With matters of honor and apology, the same sort of thing happened. When the rules conflicted, things got interesting. I hoped this particular complication would not end up with a rat in my pocket.

The leanansidhe moved on tiptoe across the floor toward her armchair, shooting looks at me as if she were trying to slip by without attracting my attention. She huddled in the chair, her legs tucked under her, and fidgeted with the hem of one of the several skirts she wore. Her eyes darted to the open book on the table. She flipped it closed and pushed it toward me. “This is a very good book. Druse should like you to have it, yes?”

I picked it up. It was a computer-programming reference work from 1983. “Thank you.”

She clutched her hands to her mouth. “Yes, it’s very exciting. You will enjoy it.”

I leaned forward, and she leaned back, wary. “Druse . . . is that your name?” She nodded vigorously. “Druse . . . I sense in you something akin to what is in me. Do you know what I mean?”

Her eyes went wide as she nodded. “You are my brother. We share that which the others deny.”

“Darkness,” I said.

She shook her head. “No! No, no, no . . . not dark. Rich. It is rich in lack.”

“Does it have a will of its own?” I asked. The question had been gnawing at me for months. The idea that something alive, maybe even malevolent, was in my mind sickened me. Sometimes the dark mass seemed alive and aware, moving in ways that were more than autonomic responses. Sometimes it seemed to protect itself. Sometimes it seemed to protect me. It prevented me from accessing my abilities yet absorbed essence that was thrown at me. On Samhain, it devoured the essence of several Dead people.

Confused, Druse cocked her head to the side. “It is the Wheel, my brother. The will of the Wheel is the will of the World.”

The Wheel of the World. I believed in the existence of the Wheel. It wasn’t a faith in the same way others believed in gods. It was an acceptance of a philosophy and understanding of the world. Some people thought of it as fate, the inexorable unfolding of what is meant to be. For me, it was an eternal now—a constant present that moved from moment to moment, becoming the present even as it became the past. In short, shit happens, and you have to roll with it.

I groped for words. “It’s not a person.”

Druse tangled her fingers in her hair and scratched at her head. “It is the lack. It is the Wheel the others deny.”

I pursed my lips. “The others—do you mean the solitaries or people who aren’t like . . . us?”

She rubbed at her face. “You confuse Druse, my brother. We all touch the light, but the others, it blinds them to its lack.” She pulled her knees up and stared at me. “Only such as we, the chosen of the Wheel, touch the whole of it.”

Essence. She was talking about essence, the light of the Wheel, the force that permeates everything. The fey manipulated it. Their ability to manipulate it defined them as fey. But Druse was talking about something else, something other that existed, too. “Can you work this . . . this lack of essence, Druse? Is that what you do? Like the others manipulate essence?”

Her eyes teared. “Oh, my brother, we are kin, we are. Stay with me, brother. We are not like them. We are apart. We shall bring joy to each other here.”

Not my first choice for retirement. “Show me what you do.”

A joy spread across her face with a slash of gray teeth. She jumped from the chair and tugged at my knee. “This way, brother. First, we reach the safe place. The Wheel is not always kind.”

I followed her to the fissure in the wall, which was wide enough for me to step through sideways. On the other side, an empty chamber rose two stories, empty except for a heaving of dark gray bedrock in the center. On the outcropping, an oval ward stone about a foot wide rested, glowing with essence. More traditional obelisk wards ringed the natural pedestal, protecting the ward stone behind a thin barrier field.

Druse approached the field. “You have a bowl, brother, yes?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

She trotted back to me and patted my left arm, clenching my forearm up and down its length. “Here, ah, not a bowl, no. Something different, but the same. Good, good. Nice to carry it in you. Druse should like that. You should show Druse how to make such as this.”

The tattoo on my arm tingled as she probed at it through the sleeve. I gently pulled away from her. “Show me yours, Druse.”

I bit back a nervous chuckle at the reminder of the “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours” game that children play. Despite wanting to know how her abilities worked, that particular situation wasn’t a line I was willing to cross.

She pinched my sleeve between two fingers. Her essence slipped over my arm, not a full envelope, but enough to allow the wards on the ground to recognize me. The dark mass shifted in my head as we entered the contained haze of essence around the stone pedestal. My ears popped from a sudden pressure against the inside of my skull.

Druse trailed around the pedestal, staring at me, waiting for a reaction. On the natural outcropping sat a rough-worked ward stone shaped like a bowl, a rich green color with dark red splotches. Heliotrope, an ancient jasper stone used for a variety of rituals, mostly involving healing and balance. The spots gave it its more dramatic name: bloodstone.

“This is beautiful, Druse. Where did you get it?”

She placed her hands to either side of the stone and rubbed at it. Essence pooled inside, a silvered white that coiled and swirled like liquid clouds. “It’s mine, brother. She gave it to me, didn’t she? Long ago. She had no need of it anymore. I found it and kept it.”

Sounded like an interesting story, rife with contradiction. And beside the point. “What do you do with it?”

She dipped two fingers in and withdrew them dripping with the translucent essence. “Save it to save Druse. In the slack time, the danger time, when they seek Druse, the bowl feeds and nurtures. They will seek you, my brother, and bring you harm. You must hide then, hide and wait and drink from the bowl to live.”

I paced around the pedestal, Druse mimicking my steps on the opposite side. “Where does the essence come from?”

“It gives it, it does. Druse gives to it, and it returns tenfold. It is a good thing, no?” she said.

A fine quality piece of jasper that beautiful was worth a fortune. That it was some kind of capacitor and amplifier ward pushed its price off the charts. Something this big could potentially output unlimited essence over time. I allowed myself a small smile. Now I understood what Zev meant the night Murdock vanished. He said to tell Jark the solitaries didn’t have what he was seeking. The bowl in front of me was a powerful artifact, the kind that could have only come originally from Faerie. And it was sitting in an unguarded room with a simple barrier field around it. A fey with moderate abilities could collapse Druse’s shield. Sekka’s body had been found nearby. She must have been guarding it. “You leave it out like this?”

She laughed, a raspy bark of sound. “No one can touch Druse’s bowl. Try it, my brother. Try to take it.”

I reached out a hesitant hand. A hot burning sensation ran down my right arm from the dark mass in my head, and a cold constriction pulsed through the tattoo on my left forearm. I’ve learned those are warnings of more pain. Before the silver tattoo appeared, the dark mass in my head rejected external essence and contained my own inherent essence within me. It was why I couldn’t touch my abilities. The silver tattoo seemed to want the opposite, hungering for essence and releasing it. Something about the bowl was confusing both of them.

An electric static ran over me when I touched the stone. Nothing more painful than surprise. I put my other hand on the opposite side and tried to lift it, but it wouldn’t budge. Not a fraction of an inch. I dropped my hands. “Is it bonded to the bedrock?”

Druse laughed as if I had made an incredible joke. She lifted the bowl off the pedestal with no more effort than necessary for its weight. She replaced it. “Only the pure can take the bowl, my brother, and only the unpure ever seek it.”

I frowned. I might not have the best moral record going, but I liked to think I was at least several notches above a leanansidhe. “The pure,” I said.

She ducked her head, caressing the side of the bowl. “Yes, yes, of course. The pure, the innocent, the chaste, my brother.”

Pure and innocent meant one thing, but in the same sentence with the word “chaste,” their meanings shifted in one direction. “Are you telling me only a virgin can move it?”

Druse clutched her hands in excitement and brought them to her lips. “You are my brother, my brother. You see true. Druse will protect you in need. Druse will let you use the bowl in need.”

My responding chuckle confused Druse, but finding a virgin geasa in a hole in the ground in a modern city was so surreal, I had to laugh. The geasa bans were powerful taboos, hard to create and harder to break. The virgin geasa served many purposes, the least of which a pretty good indicator of how few virgins there were around. In the old days—the real old days—virginity was something lost almost as soon as puberty was gained. I wondered if Druse ever heard of teen abstinence programs. I knew that the failure rate for them was high, but there had to be a danger of at least one naïve teen who didn’t know everyone else was lying.

“What does this have to do with the darkness, Druse?”

Her hand trembled over the bowl. Purple essence welled up from within her, coating her fingers. It undulated across her palm, forming bumps that stretched and grew into wormlike tendrils. They waved in the air then dipped toward the essence. Druse closed her eyes and parted her lips as the tendrils drew up the essence. Something moved within her, an oozing behind her essence, a darkness that called to the thing in my mind.

I swayed with a touch of vertigo as the burning sensation in my right arm tightened and stretched. Druse gasped as her darkness touched the silvered essence from the bowl. The essence vanished, enveloped in darkness, no intermediate mingling or change. Just gone.

I clenched my jaw in pain as a sharp blade of darkness pierced my palm. The blade had no substance, a solid shadow that snaked and twined itself around Druse’s fingers. The sharp tip cut through her body signature, and a hot pleasure ran through me as I sensed her essence like a flavor in my mind. Druse slumped against the pedestal with a groan. The thing from my hand moved deeper, and the darkness within her rose to meet it. The two modes of darkness touched in a burst of black shadow. I shouted and wrenched my arm away, my silvered tattoo blazing through my jacket as the dark thing whipped back into my hand. I tripped backwards and fell, red and white lights flashing in my eyes.

Druse leaned over me. “My brother?” she whispered, her voice a raspy tremble.

She reached for my face. I shoved her away. “Don’t touch me.”

She cowered back, an uncertain smile flickering on and off her lips. “It is fine, my brother. The Wheel’s touch burns with ignorance at first, but in time it cuts with joy. You are strong, my brother. Druse slept many days after her first touch.”

I grabbed the edge of the pedestal and pulled myself up. “What did you do to me?”

Druse yanked at her hair. “Nothing, my brother! You asked to see. We are akin. We touch the light and bring the lack. It is the Way of the Wheel.”

I rubbed my arms. They were sore with the pain of heat and cold. “Can it be controlled?”

Druse crawled behind the pedestal and raised her head above the bowl. “The solitaires seek Druse, and Druse must answer. Enough for today, my brother. Return again and learn.”

She cloaked herself and vanished. Her essence trail faded into the far end of the chamber where the light didn’t reach. She was gone. I examined my hands and found smooth unbroken skin. My sensing ability traced a faded area in the middle of my right hand that wasn’t there before. Tiny flashes of silver essence winked here and there along my fingers. Bits of jasper from the bowl had attached themselves to me. In spite of the pain, I pushed my body essence against them, and they sifted to the floor like fine dust.

I backed away, not turning until I reached the room’s exit. My chest constricted as I strode away from Druse’s room. I wasn’t going to be stomach sick this time. As I wound through the tunnels to the exit above, my face burned with a feverish warmth. Yearning desire raced through me, my skin tingling with an almost carnal hunger for more of what happened—to savor and, yes, devour essence as if it were the only thing I needed for sustenance. The sensation of that moment had a kick like a chemical high, only deeper and more profound, as if nothing else would matter if I could have it again. It felt wrong, corrupt. In the cold slap of the winter air outside, I refused to release the shocked emotion hovering inside me. What had happened felt wrong.

I wanted to go back even as I staggered away.