Unperfect Souls

32

Only in the Weird will a bar let you sit quietly in the corner wearing a bloodstained jacket and drink yourself blind. Of course, Joe would know such a place. It had no name or windows or, for that matter, respectability. A neighborhood guy by the name of Carmine ran a number of places like it—hidden, quiet, and invitation-only. The music was killer blues, the smoke was thick, and the dancers came in all shapes, sizes, sexes, and species. A vaguely sweet scent filled the air, an aromatic happy drug that skirted close enough to legal that the law let it slide. It helped patrons focus on their beer and their dates and numbed the ache of whatever drove them to such places.

When we first walked in, I thought it was a bad idea. The next day would be tough on Murdock, between the press and the funeral arrangements and being the rock of the family. Joe deduced the situation better than I did. He said Murdock needed the breathing room and would crash before he became too drunk. He was right. Once the liquor started flowing, the waves of emotions sapped his strength, and he was done in a little over an hour.

As dawn neared, a small sober part of my brain convinced me to put Murdock in a cab home. Joe went along for the ride, convincing the driver to skip the fare in exchange for some flit karma. I watched the broken taillights of the cab coast away and stumbled through the mounds of snow. If Murdock was half-asleep by then, I wasn’t. Mental images continued flashing through my mind: the commissioner’s gun going off, Moira Cashel’s bitter face, Eagan slumped on the floor. The commissioner dead. Scott Murdock was dead. The idea staggered me so much, and yet it paled next to whatever Leo was feeling.

“And for what?” I said. My own voice startled me as the close-in buildings amplified it. I wasn’t prone to talking to myself, but everything that had happened pissed me off.

I’d lied to Murdock. I needed to tonight, needed to help him believe for a few more hours that his father was a good man. I never liked the commissioner because he always—always from the beginning—had treated me like crap. And I never knew why until now. I lied to Murdock because the truth was so appalling I didn’t want to admit to it.

I believed Moira Cashel.

It wasn’t her uncanny Amy Sullivan glamour or the pitch-perfect voice or even the small, trivial facts she knew about how I had met her. A skilled fey with the right information mimicked things like that all the time. I didn’t put it past the Guild to play with my mind that way for some gain.

But tonight had changed my thinking. The look on the commissioner’s face as he pulled the gun convinced me. No one pulled a gun over such stupid and obvious lies, at least not someone like Scott Murdock. But he did because he believed her, and he believed her because she wasn’t lying. She had betrayed him as Amy Sullivan and had suckered him as Moira Cashel.

Scott Murdock was taking bribes. It was the only explanation for how the Guild was getting away with what was happening in the Weird. He had cut some deal with Ryan macGoren for some mutual benefit.

He was dirty.

I had slept with his wife.

“Danu’s motherfreakin’ blood,” I said.

Uno appeared in the road.

“What the hell do you want?” The dog cocked its head as I walked around it. He reappeared in front of me.

“Leave me alone, dammit.” I went around him again, then walked backwards. “You’re a lousy harbinger of doom, you know that? I got shot in the face, and you didn’t even bother to show up.”

He loped around me and stopped again, dodging as I tried to pass. “Go away, dammit. Go bother Shay.”

I shoved him with my leg. He stumbled sideways with a snarl that rose into a bark, then he vanished. I circled in place, waiting for him to come back. A cold wind swept down the street, but he was gone. “Good,” I muttered.

The dark mass in my head shifted, and I pressed the heel of my hand against my temple. I laughed. I practically kicked a hound from Hel, it ran away, and the worst I had to show for it was a headache. I pulled my jacket tighter, the flimsy silk doing little to warm me.

My memory skipped to Eagan’s bedroom and the faint dark haze in his essence. It was and wasn’t like mine. I couldn’t see mine in a visual sense, but I could feel it and had seen MRIs of it. It was a dense thing, a black concentration of shadow at the base of my skull, pressing right on the old brainstem. From what I saw of Eagan’s condition, the darkness was more a dull haze.

I turned the next corner, and the damned dog was back. Uno shied before I took another step, then faded away.

The dark mass blocked my abilities, but Eagan didn’t have that problem. Clearly. Gillen Yor thought the haze was responsible for his weakness. My dark mass devoured essence, but Eagan’s seemed to just drain it away.

I stopped. I had seen that before. I had seen the darkness drain off essence like it was feeding on it. The leanansidhe did it on demand. She might not know what it truly was, but she wasn’t dying from it, and it wasn’t blocking her abilities. She knew how to use it.

Uno appeared, sat in the middle of the sidewalk, and barked once. I frowned. “If you’re only good for stopping muggings, go back to bed, you stupid mutt. It’s ten degrees, and the only things out here are me and you.”

He faded. Insulting mysterious beings from the Land of the Dead was a defense I never knew worked. It didn’t work with Jark, but I guessed it did with dogs.

I cut through an alley. Petty street crime goes down in the winter, and the Weird was no different on that score. The damned cold bothered murderers and thieves like anyone else, so I wasn’t too worried. Besides, I wasn’t joking with the dog. I wasn’t stupid. I had my sensing ability ticking away. No one was out, especially not by a section of abandoned warehouses where they weren’t likely to find anyone to mug.

I slowed to a stop. In the gray and white of the street, a bright orange sticker stood out like a flare. The crime-scene warning on the warehouse door. The one I slit open. I looked up and down the street for anyone. Empty. Uno flashed into view at my side but disappeared before I fully looked at him.

Did he herd me there? Could he hear my thoughts? Did he know I was thinking about the leanansidhe or sense that I was about to? The possible connection between my dark mass and Eagan’s haze had simmered in the back of my mind all night. Could Uno know that? Or did I lead myself to the door, my subconscious pushing me there because of what I was thinking, the sensual pleasure I got from using the dark mass’s abilities bubbling up in some mental center of desire.

I didn’t care. I was there, and the creature in the tunnel held a key to possibly saving the Guildmaster’s life. I hadn’t heard from Keeva. I didn’t think I would now, not after what Moira said. There was no way Ryan macGoren wasn’t involved in her game, and Keeva wasn’t likely to do me any favors over her boyfriend’s objections. The leanansidhe was going to be down there. I pushed aside the thought that I was rationalizing going inside. No law said I couldn’t learn something that might help Eagan and get off on the feeling at the same time.

The door popped open easily. Between the cold and the walk, the edge of my drunk was blunted by the time I reached the walled-off basement. Uno took care of the rest. He appeared near the back wall, suddenly there in the dark, and let out a howl that shook the walls. Adrenaline surged through me at the sound, burning off the rest of the alcohol in my system. When I reached the hidden opening in the wall, the dog was gone.

I hesitated. Maybe the dog was trying to warn me off. Maybe I wasn’t as secure against the leanansidhe because of the thing in my head as I thought I was. I pushed the thought aside. The dog was messed up, a lost Dead animal with no more purpose, twisted like any other Dead fey. How could it portend my journey to TirNaNog if there was no TirNaNog anymore? It should have shown up at Eagan’s when I apparently died and was reborn, but it didn’t. I walked into the tunnel.

The dark mass pulsed in my head, a throb of pressure against the back of my eyes. I flushed with warmth despite the cold in the tunnel. The air rubbed against my skin, an itchy pleasure of temperature difference. My peripheral vision narrowed as the dark mass moved, and I navigated the tunnel by instinct and memory.

The leanansidhe’s room was a shambles. Books scattered across the floor where they had fallen from overturned tables. Burn marks seared the fabric of the armchair Druse used, and her reading lamp lay shattered next to it. I sensed nothing, no essence, the dull, sterile aftermath of the leanansidhe’s ability. At the back of the room, a white-and-silver essence glow drew me to the fissure in the wall.

Druse hunched over the bloodstone bowl in the chamber. No barrier field prevented me from approaching; the ward stones that generated it lay broken on the floor. The dark mass shifted, a burning sensation down my neck moving with the slow ooze of hot metal. My tongue grew thick with anticipation, a physical reaction to my desire for essence. Or the dark mass’s desire. The difference between what I wanted and what the dark mass wanted blurred in the light of the bloodstone bowl.

Druse lifted her head, her eyes half-closed in a stupor. Her essence field shimmered in shades of purple, thick, pulpy tendrils of light hanging from her face, their tips silver with fading essence as she absorbed it. Her lips lifted in a lazy smile. “Ah, my brother, come, taste, and sup with me. I feel the need within you.”

Speech refused to come. Something pierced my right hand with exquisite pain. Something pierced my chest with exquisite pain. Something pierced my cheek with exquisite pain. Dark essence snaked out of me, hungry darkness that danced in ropes of darkness. I stumbled against the bedrock pedestal beside Druse and drank, strands of darkness dipping into the ward stone, eclipsing the essence. Blood pounded in my temples, a steady, sensual rhythm that reverberated throughout my body, my chest filling as I inhaled through blood-gorged lips.

Druse touched me—with her hand, with her essence—a languid caress on my forehead. “Yes, my brother, surrender to the need, let the desire guide you. It’s not pain, is it? It’s the pleasure in the pain, yes?”

Her face pressed near mine, her eyes luminous with excitement, and I smiled. I understood her, the pulsing dark things slicing out of me, pulsing with rich essence, a pleasure that demanded payment. My skin shivered, every pore alive with feeling, with need and desire. My face grew hot, blood rushing through me in waves, prickling my skin to life, arousing me like nothing I had ever known.

Druse whispered in my ear—words, sounds—I was no longer sure. Her essence pressed against me, bulbous tendrils worrying at my face, my eyes. They pressed inward, and I gasped as they cut through, cut through and merged with my own, coiled around my darkness and my need and . . .

. . . yes yes I feel us we are us and the essence is ours and the want and the need and the same so good so strong so much so more we need more yes more the bowl empties and still we want and still we need and and and still there is more always more we need the prize the treasure the hidden gem we do not need to save it now to cherish it we need it now we want it now we reach for it now . . . oh myself my brother . . . oh there yes there yes it is there oh yes oh yes oh yes here it is so rich so lush we must have it must have it all drink of it take it all in the more the more we will have more and find more and more and . . .

Something broke in my mind, and I screamed at the pain. Druse vanished out of my mind like an extinguished candle. I opened my eyes. Dark ropelike lines trailed out of me across the floor, trailing off into the darkness of an exit from the chamber.

“Connor!” someone shouted.

Essence shivered and oozed through the shadow lines, the living essence of someone fey. As it seeped through me, my sensing ability touched it, and I recognized fairy essence.

Someone shook my arm. “Connor!”

I touched the fairy essence through the darkness, Danann fairy essence. Something hit me in the face, jarring the darkness out of the vision in one eye. A haze lifted off my awareness. I shook my head. The dark mass burned with a flow of essence, Danann essence from the next room. I shook my head again. Horrified by what I was doing, I recognized the essence that I was absorbing.

The dark ropes undulated as the silver mesh in my left arm flared and lit with essence. Like the dark mass, the actions and reactions of the tattoo seemed to have their own agenda, one I didn’t understand and couldn’t control. I shuddered as blades of ice sliced through me, tangling with the streams of darkness from my head. The dark mass convulsed and retreated. The white light from my arm flickered and went out. The backlash of the force and the pain threw me off my feet.