Unperfect Souls

31

I waited on the second floor of the Guildmaster’s house. At either end of the hall, Danann security agents guarded the stairs. The Guild and police had locked down the entire property while the local police went through the list of guests and released them one by one. Commissioner Murdock’s body was long since gone. Ryan macGoren had arrived shortly after the first responders, along with the mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts. They spent time behind closed doors in a meeting room downstairs, emerging hours later with grim faces.

Tibbet came out of Eagan’s bedroom, and we hugged. As a fey, she could count on a resilient physical constitution, but that didn’t prevent deep worry lines from forming around her eyes. She idly rubbed my arm. “I’ve had a room prepared for you upstairs.”

I adjusted some of her braids away from her forehead. “I’ve been thinking about that, Tibs, and decided I should go home. Eagan had his reasons for keeping a public distance from me. I don’t think he’d want me here. You have enough to deal with anyway without me complicating things.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“I’m sure,” I said.

A commotion at the top of the main stairs drew our attention. Several police officers—Leo and Gerard among them—were arguing with the Danann agents. I trailed after Tibs as she rushed toward them. Halfway down the flight of stairs, Barnard and Kevin Murdock waited with intent, angry faces. Davis Jones, the Superintendent in Chief and the commissioner’s second-in-command, gestured for the officers to step back as Tibbet approached.

“I need to see the Guildmaster,” Jones said.

“This has already been discussed. The Guildmaster is in a coma. You need to coordinate any further inquiries through the governor’s office and the Guild,” Tibbet said.

“I would like to confirm that he’s really in a coma.” Jones leaned his wide, imposing frame between the guards and toward Tibbet.

I knew that type of thing didn’t work on Tibbet. To prove my point, she calmly pressed the Danann agents to the side and moved closer. Tibbet is tall for a brownie, but she had to look up into Jones’s face. “I am the Guildmaster’s attorney. My client is unavailable.” She relaxed her stance and placed a sympathetic hand on Jones’s arm. “It’s been a long night, Davis. We all need to rest.”

Jones dropped his voice. “I’ve got angry men, Tibbet. They want to know why he’s not under arrest.”

“I’m going in there,” Gerard Murdock said. He pushed past Jones, but a Danann agent stepped in front of him. Leo pulled him back.

Gerard was not in the best frame of mind. I needed to do something for the Murdocks. “Tibbet, will you let Leo through?” I asked.

She considered my request and moved aside. Leo stepped between the guards, and I escorted him down the hall. “How are you holding up?” I asked.

“Barely. They’re already rumbling about diplomatic immunity,” he said.

“That’s expected, Leo. That’s why I thought you should see Eagan’s out of it. People will know you’re not using political games for a cover-up.”

I opened the door to the bedroom. The pungent odor of burning herbs hung in the air. Gillen Yor chanted under his breath as he leaned over Eagan’s still body. A mix of druid and brownie assistants worked quietly behind him. On the opposite side of the bed, Briallen moved into the pool of light from the lamp on the nightstand. I hadn’t known she was there. She immediately stopped whatever she was doing and hugged Murdock. “I’m so sorry, Leonard,” she whispered into his ear.

He cleared his throat. “Thank you. What’s his status?” “Critical. His wasting disease had already compromised his health, and the expenditure of essence almost depleted what was left. He might die,” she said.

Eagan’s ashen skin pulled over a shrunken frame. His wings—normally large and lit with the powerful reserves of essence of a Danann fairy—curled dim and opaque like swaddling around his body. I had seen something similar before. Briallen once showed me a dead flit. When fairies die, their wings eventually close around them like a cocoon. Eagan was on his way out.

“Why did he do it, Briallen? Why did he kill my father?” Murdock asked.

Briallen studied the dying fairy. “We have to hope he wakes up, Leonard. Maybe it was instinctive. Maybe he couldn’t control it because of what’s wrong with him. I don’t know. If nothing else, Manus is a shrewd politician. I cannot imagine why he would have intentionally caused an international incident of this proportion.”

Murdock nodded, a tiny muscle on his jawline twitching. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and handed me his keys. “Can you get my car? It’s in the driveway somewhere. I need to get my brothers out of here.”

He left us standing at the foot of Eagan’s bed. Briallen held her hands up to me. “May I?”

She placed her hands on either side of my face. I closed my eyes as a warm surge of essence flowed through my skull. The dark mass in my head didn’t even react but sat like a pinpoint of pressure deep in my mind. Briallen released me, her face troubled.

“You have new bone in your jaw and new teeth, if I’m not mistaken,” she said.

I remembered the sensation of cold washing over my body after the pain of the gunshot. “I think I was paralyzed, too.”

Briallen crossed her arms and compressed her lips. “The dark mass is smaller, almost as small as it was last summer. Do you think it healed you?”

I rubbed my hand over my face. “I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like it’s trying to kill me, and sometimes it seems to keep me alive.”

She rested a hand on the footboard of the bed. “What do you see in him? Your sensing ability is more acute than ours.”

The mass in my head normally didn’t care if I used my sensing ability, but its low, steady pressure pulsed as if to draw attention to itself. The druids moved in auras of gold and green, the brownies in a more subtle amber. Eagan should have glowed brighter than all of us, except perhaps Gillen and Briallen. Instead, a dim white spark smoldered in his chest and head, casting a shadowed wash of light through the rest of his body. A haze threaded through his aura, speckles of darkness like pinholes in his body signature. I withdrew.

Gillen jerked his head up from the mortar and pestle he had in his hand. “What did you just do?”

I startled. “Nothing. I just looked. He’s on the edge of death.”

Gillen peered at Eagan. “His essence dimmed for a moment. Do it again.”

“Gillen, I don’t want to hurt . . .” I began.

“I said do it, you idiot. I’m the doctor, not you,” he snapped. Bedside manner is not Gillen’s strong point.

I pushed my sensing ability to interact with Eagan’s body signature. The pinpoints of darkness blurred, and I jumped out. “Holy shit.”

Gillen frowned. “I never made the connection.”

Briallen looked from one of us to the other. “What is it?”

I took a deep breath and exhaled. “He’s got whatever I have. The dark thing is in him, too.”

Gillen shook his head. “It’s more subtle than yours, and all throughout his body. Until he expelled so much of his own essence, I didn’t even see it. Which means he’s probably going to die because I don’t know what the hell it is.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

Gillen shrugged. “Leave. You seem to be making it worse.”

Thunderstruck, I stepped back. “Do you think I . . . ?”

Briallen hugged me. “Don’t say what I think you’re going to say. It isn’t true. You need to go home and get some sleep.”

I left the room in a daze and wandered down the back stairs. I didn’t know the layout of the house and ended up back in Eagan’s study. Crime-scene investigators blocked the entrance. One of them took pictures of the disconcertingly large stain on the rug from my miraculously healed wound. I went out a door to the back hall and exited the side of the house.

I found Murdock’s car and started it. Before I had a chance to process what happened, Murdock opened the passenger door and got in.

“You want me to drive?” I said in surprise.

“Yeah, let’s go before someone else talks to me,” he said.

I guided the car over the thin sheet of ice that had built up on the long exit drive. Murdock dropped his head back and closed his eyes. Joe flashed in and leaned over the seat. We exchanged glances but didn’t say anything, the heater fan making the only noise.

I drove through middle-of-the-night empty streets, the faint sounds of ambulances and police cars echoing through the city. An occasional lone pedestrian waited at a crosswalk, prompting idle curiosity about what someone would possibly need to do out in the cold and snow in the dead of night. Except for a few streetlights, nothing delayed us from Chestnut Hill to Broadway Bridge into Southie.

“How the hell did this happen?” Murdock’s tone was soft and hurt.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “I don’t know, Leo. It’s fucked.”

“But why did he even pull his gun?”

I crossed an intersection and parked the car on the edge of a curb. “Leo, I want you to hear from me what happened before you read the report. First, believe me when I tell you, Moira Cashel is a manipulative liar. If there’s anyone to blame for this, it’s her.”

“What does she have to do with my father?”

I told him. All of it. About what she said and what his father said. About Amy Sullivan. I didn’t tell him things she said that I didn’t share with the police about the commissioner taking bribes. Let her make a public accusation. By the time I finished, Murdock had his hands clamped firmly over his face.

“She’s a liar, Leo. Remember that,” I finished. He shook his head, and I realized he was crying. I didn’t know what to think anymore, but at that moment, I refused to believe Moira Cashel was telling the truth—about anything. “It’s not true, Leo.”

He wiped his face with his hands and let out a deep sigh as he stared out the window. “This is my fault. If I hadn’t called you in on the case, you would have never gone to Eagan.”

“No. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. I didn’t go to Eagan, he called me. He knew Sekka was hiding Vize, and Vize wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. It’s my fault, Leo. If I had done my job right three years ago, Vize would not be on the loose today.”

“Vize didn’t make my father pull a gun,” he said.

“Cashel was planning something anyway, Leo. She wasn’t going to stop until your father was disgraced. This is some Guild trick.”

He shook his head. “No, no. It’s my fault. I argued with my father about his meeting with Jark. He admitted he was letting it happen, Connor. He liked seeing the fey tear each other apart. That’s when I confronted him about her. And then I told him about me, Connor. I threw it in his face that his son had a fey ability. I told him about my body shield. I primed his anger at the fey, and the last words I spoke to my father were angry. It’s my fault.”

“Dammit, Leo. Don’t let her do this. Don’t let whatever Maeve and the Guild are planning do this to you. That’s what they want.”

He covered his eyes as the tears flowed again. “I can’t fix this.”

I grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled us together. He broke down when I did, sobbing into my chest as I rocked him. Joe crept from the backseat and draped himself on Leo’s shoulder. “Let me take you home, Leo. You need to rest.”

He shook his head against me. “I can’t go back there tonight. I can’t face them. I can’t be who they need right now.”

“They’re your family, Leo. They love you.”

He kept shaking his head. “I can’t do it tonight.”

Joe picked up his head. I know a place.