Unquiet Dreams

Chapter 21

The odor of scorched earth tickled my nose. I opened my eyes and stared at the night sky. The air felt cool on my skin, but the ground felt warm. Pinprick sensations danced all over my body. I sat up slowly, every muscle aching.

A crater surrounded me, charred and deep. Nigel and Eorla lay nearby, still and pale. I winced as I opened my senses. Their essences glowed feebly. They were alive, but barely. I pulled myself painfully to my feet, staring around me in confusion.

At the center of the crater stretched a blackened body. I breathed through my mouth to avoid the rank odor of burnt flesh as I stood over the corpse. Gerin Cuthbern was unrecognizable, but I knew it was him. Even in death, he clutched the oaken staff in his gnarled hands. Ash shivered and flaked off the staff in the light breeze. No essence emanated from it. Without the last vestige of her tree, Hala had dissipated—died, I guess. The realization made me ache inside, knowing that I had come so close to something so sacred. I touched the staff, and it crumbled away from my fingers. After everything that had happened, that made a lump form in my throat.

“That was a fine party,” someone said.

I turned to see the Clure sitting on the edge of the crater, his feet planted in the dirt, elbows propped on his knees. He toasted me with a flask and took a deep drink. Someone was lying next to him and, as I mounted the slope, I realized it was my brother. He looked beaten and worn. But he lived. I could see he lived.

“Is he all right?” I asked when I reached the rim.

The Clure looked down as if surprised to see someone lying next to him. He patted Cal on the chest. “Cal? He’s just fine. More knocks to the head than usual, is all.” He held out the flask. “You look like you could use a drink.”

I took a slug. Smooth, amber whiskey. I smiled. “How’d you know I like Jameson’s?”

The Clure looked at me in shock. “People don’t?”

I laughed as I looked around me. Kruge’s gravesite was gone, replaced by the crater. Dark lines of char spiraled down to the center where Gerin lay. Guild security agents flew over and down to Nigel and Eorla. Across the way, I could see two bodies lying on a grave.

“Tell Cal I said ‘thank you,’ Clure,” I said.

“Will do.” He nodded, sipping from the flask.

I made my way around the crater as more security descended to help. By their essence, I knew the bodies were Meryl and Murdock before I reached them. They lay side by side as if asleep. Alive, though. Thankfully alive. Relieved, I eased myself down beside Meryl and watched as Nigel and Eorla were flown out of the pit on litters.

Meryl sat up. She rubbed her face, looking down at Murdock first, then over at me.

I held my hand out to her. “Are you all right?”

She nodded groggily as she took my hand and swung her feet around to sit next to me. “Yeah. I was just trying to remember the last time I woke up in a graveyard with two guys.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Disbelief etched itself across her face. “You don’t know?”

I cocked my head sideways to try to read her face better. “Did I do something?”

Confused emotions played across her face, as she searched for an answer. “Uh, yeah, you did.”

I looked down at Gerin. “The last thing I remember is you showing up.”

If possible, her eyebrows rose higher. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

She gave me a strange look. “You don’t remember anything after I stopped the fighting?”

I shook my head. A sick, frustrated feeling crawled into my chest. How was I going to deal with the frustration of not remembering again? “Dammit, Meryl, why can’t I remember?”

Meryl gave my arm a squeeze. “Don’t worry about it now. You will.”

“What if I don’t?”

She looked up at me with a small smile. “Then we’ll never know why you’re bald.”

I ran my hand over my head and discovered why the air felt so cold. Smooth skin met my touch. Even my eyebrows had vanished. I pursed my lips. “I guess I missed more than a few things.”

Meryl hopped off the vault. She stooped and picked up something. Her face became still, then stricken. She turned away abruptly, and I realized she was crying. I slid off the vault and wrapped my arms around her. She actually let me. I kissed the top of her head. “What is it?” I asked.

She leaned her head against my chest. “I couldn’t save the drys. I made a choice, and they died because of it.”

I knew Hala was gone, but now I realized that I only felt Meryl’s own essence inside her, not all the drys she had held within when she purged Gerin’s spell. I didn’t know how many there had been. I couldn’t even begin to fathom the loss. “What choice?” I said.

She wiped her nose with the sleeve. “It doesn’t matter. It had to be done.”

She held her hand out to show me a small silvered acorn resting in her palm. “Seed of an oak.”

“The promise of the Grove,” I added. Even without touching it, I could feel that spark of essence within it, the potential for new life.

Meryl let it fall from her hand into the crater. It rolled down into the barren remains of what had happened there, a hope awaiting the right moment to become something more. We didn’t say anything for the longest time.

Meryl looked up at me. “Want a lift?”

I grinned. “I didn’t want to ask.”

We wound our way through the gathering police and Guild agents and slipped in among the trees. As we walked into the silence of the graveyard, Meryl slipped her arm through mine. “Just so you know, Connor, this date totally kicked ass.”

“Not a date,” I said. She jabbed me in the ribs.

As I dozed listening to the steady rhythm of the heart monitor, I scratched my head for the umpteenth time. A week’s worth of growth made a good stubble, but it itched like hell under a knit cap. At least I had some eyebrows back.

“Where’s Ryan?”

I lifted my head and smiled. “He’ll be here soon. I told him I would wait.”

Keeva looked at me from her hospital bed, eyes dim, face pale. “Gerin?”

“Dead.”

“Good,” she said. She pushed herself up into a sitting position. “How long have I been out?”

“About a week. You took a nasty hit to the head,” I said. Joe had made me promise not to stell her. He hated when someone didn’t like him.

“I can’t believe what I did,” she said.

I stretched in the chair. “You weren’t yourself. Gerin was apparently poisoning you for weeks. We found Float all over your office.”

She stared at the ceiling. “This puts the Guild in a shambles, which probably makes you happy.”

“Don’t blame me. I just pointed out the cracks. You guys didn’t bother to fill them,” I said.

“How’s Manus?” she asked.

“Fine. His house was attacked, but they managed to fight it off.” I was glad Tibbet considered me a friend. I had never seen her go boggart. The reports I had read said it was not pretty when she was done.

“Nigel?” Keeva asked.

I nodded. “Recovering.”

“You’re awake,” Ryan macGoren said as he came through the door with the kind of flower bouquet hotel lobbies used. He set it on the nightstand and leaned down to kiss Keeva. She smiled up at him. I considered how frightening it was that the two of them had found each other.

I stood. “I’m going to go. Get better, Keeva. You’ve got a Guild to rebuild.”

Keeva sighed, then grimaced at some pain. “Thanks.”

I paused at the door. “Oh, and macGoren? Call the Office of the City Medical Examiner and speak to Janey Likesmith. Donate any equipment she asks for.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Is that my penance for being bad?”

I smiled as coldly as I knew how. “It’s just a start.”

I found Nigel’s room two flights up. He lay in a stone crèche that was highly charged with essence. He smiled when he saw me. “I wondered if you’d stop in.”

“Thought I’d return the favor.” I couldn’t resist the dig.

He nodded, the smile slipping. “I deserved that, I guess. Gillen Yor tells me you remember nothing.”

“Again,” I said. I leaned against the wall just outside the field generated by the crèche.

He nodded. “Bad habit, that.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“I remember Eorla and me entering the field of Gerin’s spell. He was already lost. Eorla and I stabilized it, but we couldn’t control it.”

“How did you convince Eorla to help?”

He rubbed the edge of the sheet that lay across him. “I appealed to her nature and her desire. Eorla and I have the same goals. We’re just on opposite sides of the debate,” he said.

I frowned. “In other words, you made a deal.”

He quirked his lips with a cagey smile. “Compromise, Connor. That’s how we get things done.”

I didn’t want to get into that particular conversation. “You’ll need all the compromising you can get. Gerin set back Seelie/Consortium relations fifty years.”

Nigel nodded. “Maybe not a bad thing. The Consortium needed a slap down.”

“So did the Guild,” I said.

It was his turn to frown. “I wish you wouldn’t take what happened between you and the Guild so personally, Connor. It’s shortsighted.”

I laughed. “Really? You guys didn’t seem to be very long-viewed when you were attacking each other.”

“There are matters of weight you know nothing about, Connor. Truly important matters that are more than just one man’s problem.” He used that superior tone he has when he’s lecturing the ignorant. I’d heard it often during my training. It didn’t intimidate me anymore.

Exasperated, I shook my head. “I’ve been thinking about what to say to you for a week, Nigel. Sometimes I thought I’d let it go, and sometimes I thought I was being petty. But you know what? I can’t let it go.

“Look at you. And the Guild. And the Consortium. Some of the most powerful fey in the world, who think they know better than anyone else, and one man was able to bring it all crashing down.”

I ticked off the list with my hands. “Gerin knew just how to manipulate each and every one of you. He waited until Briallen was away because he knew she would have sensed the drys in his staff. He turned Keeva into the good soldier because he knew her ambitions. He played Manus’s fear of competition to distract him. And you, Nigel, he laid little crumbs that led to the Consortium, because he knew your obsession with beating them. And you know what? A dead human boy and a druid with no ability wrecked everything for him. Not the ones with so-called ability.”

He shifted uncomfortably in the crèche. “That’s simplifying things a bit.”

“Is it? You’ve said to me on more than one occasion that I’ve left the path. Let me give you a bit of wisdom, Nigel. When you pick one path and never reconsider, you never know when you’re lost. That’s what’s happened to the fey.”

He pursed his lips. “If that’s what makes you feel better over the loss of your abilities, Connor, then you really are lost.”

I shook my head and smiled. “Here’s something else I’m starting to learn, Nigel. Ability isn’t just what you can do with essence. You’ve let your fey ability define you and your world. Without it, you’re the one who’s lost. Ability is a state of mind, too. If you consider nothing else, consider this: Somehow I succeeded against Gerin where you failed.”

One side of his mouth dipped down in anger. “Happenstance.”

I shrugged. “Call it what you like. Luck. Fate. Whatever. The Wheel of the World turns as it will, Nigel. You don’t turn It. One of these days you’ll figure that out. And when you do? That’s when you’ll really start learning.”

And then I just left. Didn’t wait for him to respond. Didn’t wait for his permission to leave. I just left. As I passed through the door, I felt oddly elated. I meant every word I said. Better yet, I believed every word I said. Life gave me things, then took them away. It gave me a chance to reconsider everything. Luck or not, I was on a new path, one I didn’t hate so much anymore. Not after finally understanding where and how I learned my arrogance and what it could do to twist you.

Guild security agents were hovering high overhead, still on high alert, as I left the hospital. Down in Back Bay, their Consortium counterparts patrolled the streets. Both the Guildhouse and the Consortium consulate were armed camps until who killed whom and why got sorted out, if it ever did. Even the Boston mayor had gotten into the act, declaring wide swathes of the city as no-fey zones to ease the human fears that it wasn’t safe to be around the fey. Temporary, he says. We’ll see.

No one would rest easy for a while. Gerin’s spell had damaged essence, twisting it here, erasing it there, and weakening it everywhere. Uncertain tomorrows weighed on the minds of the great and the small. Deep-seated desires for power and control cluttered everything. The Consortium feared Seelie Court. Seelie Court feared the Consortium. They nursed angry grievances over Convergence and blamed each other for it happening. Humans fear the fey, and the fey fear the humans. And every night, everywhere, they all go to bed, fearing the dawn, tossing restlessly as they plot or worry about the new day, their sleep disrupted by unquiet dreams of power and hope and fear. Not a one of them knows what will happen. Some people look forward to that. Some dread it.

Joe flashed into the air next to me. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. You?”

He put on quite the show of considering the answer. “Actually, I’m feeling a little faint.”

He somersaulted in the air, screaming with laughter. We had been doing this routine all week.

“You know, Joe, you’re obviously hiding your fear of death with jokes.”

He stopped and looked at me doe-eyed. “Am I that transparent?”

I smiled. “I can see right through you, buddy.”

He squealed and did loops. I glanced up at Avalon Memorial, grateful that for once I wasn’t lying inside. As we turned in the direction of the Weird, I shook my head at the turns my life had taken. Things change. The Wheel of the World turns the way It will. I had to get up in the morning, had to face the day and hope for the best. That’s just the way it is. One door closes; another opens. A shiver went through me.