Unquiet Dreams

Chapter 6

I could hear the phone ringing when I was in the shower, as phones tend to do at inconvenient times. I let the machine pick up. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t leap out dripping wet to answer the phone. I don’t always remember to check the answering machine because it’s more or less my junk phone number. Anyone who really knows me and needs to reach me has my cell or knows someone who does. The apartment phone was for strangers and bill collectors, who apparently share it freely. Besides, I don’t have caller ID on that line, and I like to choose whom I talk to when I’m wet and naked.

I hit the answering machine replay as I got dressed. “Hello, Mr. Grey. My name’s Janey Likesmith. I work at the OCME. I have some information about a case you’re involved in. I…um…I don’t always get my messages, so please stop by the office so we can talk. I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but the value of this may not last. I can explain in person. Thank you.”

The OCME is the Office of the City Medical Examiner. At the moment, the only person I knew there was Dennis Farnsworth. Murdock, of course, knew the staff, but how anyone knew me was intriguing. I had to laugh about this Janey Likesmith not getting phone messages. The OCME had been in a slide downward for so long, the fact that the lights were on was a minor miracle. Asking for a decent receptionist was probably out of the question.

At the end of my street, a bitter wind swept up the channel and welcomed me to the outside world. Boston sits on a harbor, of course, and the Charles River frames it to the north, making the city an island of cold misery in the winter. Even in October, wind chills off the water pull the temperatures down in the freezing zone, and when you live in the Weird, you have no choice for decent transportation except your feet. There’s a bus line that does run down Old Northern, but it doesn’t take anyone where they want to go. I made my way over the Northern Avenue bridge with shoulders hunched against the wind, my ears freezing. While I’m not particularly vain about my hair, the least I figure I could save people is the spectacle of hat head. So, my ears freeze. I crossed into the financial district and hopped a bus to the South End.

The bus trundled down Washington Street, weaving in and out of the steel girders of the abandoned elevated subway. It’s a strip of perpetual twilight, the el blocking out the sun during the day, sooty arc lights casting dim illumination at night. I hate buses. They’re slow, irregular, and rank. It’s hard to feel the least bit important if you have to ride a bus. It practically proclaims to the world you can’t afford a car or cab fare. The subway is at least a convenience. A bus, though, a bus says sit in traffic, in discomfort, until you’re late as hell. Fortunately, I didn’t have an appointment.

Boston’s South End is not South Boston. Newcomers make the mistake all the time. The South End is next to Southie, but it’s a whole other world. Where Southie always maintains its identity as a middle-class Irish enclave, the South End is more like an eccentric sister that likes to change her image as often as possible. Sitting at the crossroads of other neighborhoods, it has an eclectic vibe of old Irish, Lebanese, Asian, African-American, Hispanic, gay men and lesbians, rich and poor, college students, artists who can’t be bothered with New York, and, yeah, a lot of fey. It has always been a neighborhood in flux, always interesting, and politically powerless. So, it ends up with a lot of city agencies like free clinics and welfare offices that other areas try their damnedest to keep out. And the OCME. No one ever wants to live next to the city morgue.

The bus left me in a cloud of blue exhaust, and I walked the final two blocks to the OCME. The place looks and feels tired, as though all the human tragedy that revolves through its doors has taken its toll on the building. I pushed through the scarred Plexiglas doors and found the reception desk. Of the four desks behind the main counter, an older woman occupied one and the others were empty. She did not look up.

“Excuse me?” I said. She still did not look, but held up her index finger as she continued reading something.

I felt a tingle of unexpected essence behind me and turned. A dark elf walked purposefully toward me, gave one glance at me, and placed some folders on the counter. As she perused her files, I couldn’t imagine what she was doing at the OCME. Dark elves are rare in Boston, never mind working for human normals. They preferred keeping the peace in the southern parts of the country, particularly Atlanta and Birmingham,

One of the better things about Convergence was the dark elves. They didn’t much care for oppression of people based on skin color, something they found utterly ridiculous conceptually. If there was one thing the Alf and Swart elves agreed on, it was that they were elves first. Elves knew racism, but skin color alone wasn’t something to base it on. Swarts had swiftly become involved in politics and pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1934. I guess Congress didn’t have much hope of defying a bunch of people who could chant their asses to hell and back.

The woman behind the counter still had her hand up. “Excuse me, I’m looking for Janey Likesmith,” I said. Without moving anything else, the woman dropped her index finger forward and pointed.

“I’m Janey,” the dark elf said, smiling as she extended her hand. She had deep brown skin and warm cocoa-colored eyes. Nutmeg brown hair swept over her delicate ear points and stopped abruptly at the nape of her neck. “You must be Mr. Grey.”

“Connor. How’d you know?”

She leaned against the counter. “No one comes here looking for me unless I call them. Do you have a few minutes to look at something?”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said, smiling back so it wouldn’t sound like sarcasm.

With an almost childlike excitement, she gathered her folders and led me across the hall to a stairwell. She wore chunky shoes that echoed loudly as she descended the steps. “I found something unusual in the Farnsworth case. I called you when I saw you were consulting with Detective Murdock. The Boston P.D. won’t know what to do with it. No one here would get the ramifications.” She paused at the basement door, concern troubling her face. “He won’t mind, will he? That I called you and not him?”

“No, that’s why he calls me, too.”

She relaxed. “Oh, good. This way, please.” She opened the door to another, dimmer hallway, and we were in the morgue area.

“Likesmith isn’t a fey name,” I said.

She threw me a smile. “It’s Dokkheim, actually. I used to say to humans that where I come from it’s ‘like Smith.’ So I changed it. The irony is now I have to explain it to the fey all the time.”

She led me to a small lab with two tables, one empty, the other strewn with instruments, and walls lined with drawers. Without hesitation, she opened a particular drawer and pulled out several large envelopes and plastic bags. I recognized the Farnsworth boy’s clothing in one of the larger ones. She laid them out on the table with care, immediately marking the tracking sheets to indicate the date and time she removed the items and put my name down as well. She lifted an envelope, removed a glass box about four inches square, and placed it on the table.

“You made a ward box?” I said.

She nodded. “As a precaution. I found these stamps in the lining of Dennis Farnsworth’s hoodie.”

Disappointment crawled across my mind. I’d seen stamps like this before. Kids licked them to get high. Farnsworth had drugs on him. The kid was running drugs while wearing Moke’s gang colors.

I leaned closer. Five square stamps wrapped in individual plastic sleeves sat in the box. Each one was pale yellow with the ogham rune for oak on it. Janey opened the box, and I immediately felt the essence wafting off the stamps. With a small tweezers she removed one and placed it on a tray.

“You can feel the essence, can’t you?” she said.

I shrugged. “Lots of drugs in the Weird have essence.”

She nodded and used a second tweezers to remove the stamp from the sleeve. “Come closer, but don’t touch it. I think dermal contact might cause absorption.”

I stood closer to her and saw immediately what she meant. I could feel a rhythmic pulse of essence, and I felt attuned to it. “Oak,” I said.

She smiled. “I thought you’d recognize it. My people are a woodland clan. We’re both people of the Oak.”

I didn’t see the need to argue. All fey have affinities for working with certain types of essence. Druids primarily fall in the earth category, adept at working with plant life, particularly trees and particularly oak. It’s why we like to use staffs and wands. Elves can chant essence out of most anything, but I didn’t know that much about their affinities. That they even had them didn’t surprise me.

“So, we have an essence-based drug derived from oak. I’m still not seeing anything odd.”

“I worked with it for a while before I noticed. Feel it again,” she said.

I concentrated on the stamp, felt the flow, could almost taste it on my tongue. A moment later, my brain felt like someone was squeezing it, and my shields slammed on so fast that I jerked back with grunt. The feeling stopped abruptly, and I opened my eyes. Janey had slipped the stamp back in the sleeve and put it back in the box.

She had concern on her face, confused, but real. “Are you okay?”

“Now I know why you put the ward field on it. It felt like something was trying to stab me in the head.” I did a mental check on myself, but didn’t notice any lingering effects.

She leaned against the table with crossed arms. “How odd. That’s not what happened to me. There were six of these. I used one for testing and didn’t think much about the essence coming off it until I realized I was just staring out the window.” She gestured up at the small, grilled window. Not much to see but the fender of a car.

“Then someone came in and asked me to pick up coffee for the office, and I went. It wasn’t until I was in line at Starbucks that I got annoyed. I usually get annoyed immediately when I get asked to be a gofer.”

I pursed my lips. “So, there’s a suggestive in it.”

She nodded. “That’s a pretty impressive feat to pull off in such a small item. I think more testing should be done, but we don’t have the equipment here.”

I looked around Janey’s processing room. The OCME hardly had the trappings for a fey researcher. Hell, it hardly met the minimum requirements for a forensics lab. And yet here was a dark elf, an apparently intelligent individual, working for them. “Why are you here?”

She smiled. “You mean ‘why am I not at the Guild?’ Everyone asks eventually. The Guild did ask me to join. So did the Consortium. They get enough people to do what I do. At the OCME, I get to do whatever I want because human normals don’t know how to sort through fey material. In a nutshell, I’m here because it helps a lot more than there.”

“Sounds noble,” I said. Lots of people turned down employment with the Guild, most of them for political or career reasons.

She shrugged and laughed. “Not really. My parents are what some people derisively call assimilationists. They think we’re stuck here and are okay with it.”

“And like parent, like daughter?”

Again, she shrugged. “I’m here-born, Mr. Grey. This is the only world I know. Faerie may be where my roots are, but it might as well be Antarctica as far as I’m concerned. It sounds very alien and beautiful, but not someplace I have the urge to live.”

“Why didn’t you call the Guild for help?”

She gave me a knowing look. “Because if the Guild cared, this boy wouldn’t be here in the first place. This is a human murder case, Mr. Grey. At best, it would land in the research labs, not the crime unit.”

“Could you do the tests with the right equipment?”

She shrugged. “Sure, but it’s not likely on our budget.”

I smiled. “Got a piece of paper?”

When Janey brought her hand out of the pocket of her smock, she held a spiral pad with a pen stuck in it. I like someone always ready to take notes. I wrote down Meryl’s name and number and handed the pad back.

“Meryl’s a friend. If she can, she’ll get you to the right equipment.”

Janey’s ears flexed back in surprise. “Oh, I wasn’t asking for that. I just thought you should know about it…”

“It’s fine,” I interrupted. “I wouldn’t have offered if I didn’t think it would help the case. And trust me, if Meryl has a problem with this, she’ll let the both of us know.”

She put the envelopes back in their respective drawers and led the way to the hall. We mounted the steps to the lobby.

“Thanks for calling me, Janey. I mean that. It’s looking more and more like the kid was a drug runner, and things caught up with him.”

She reached out a hand, and we shook. “I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Grey. I’ll call Ms. Dian as soon as I get downstairs. It was a pleasure meeting you.”

“My friends call me Connor.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” She smiled and returned through the lobby to the flight of stairs down.

As I stepped out into the chill of the afternoon, I pulled my collar up around my neck. Farnsworth was running drugs. Murdock’s theory was looking more likely than mine at this point. The kid was dead either way. I just wish once in a while I would find myself investigating an accidental death.

As I approached the corner, I found a pleasant surprise. A Lincoln Town Car sat idling at the curb. A brownie leaned against the front fender, a long, tawny sheepskin coat muffling her body, set off by red boots, red gloves, and a red chauffeur cap. She huddled herself against the cold and bounced on her heels when she saw me.

I felt a wave of pleasure. “Tibs!”

“I thought you’d never come out of there!” she called.

She waited until I was almost upon her, then took two steps and wrapped me in a hug, pressing a warm kiss on my lips. Her eyes glittered with affection as she stepped back. Tibbet was an old, sweet friend, a brownie by nature, but all woman. We met years ago at the Guild when I first joined. I was just coming into my own, and Tibs and I moved in the same party circles for a while. To call our affair romantic would be an exaggeration, but it was definitely mutual and fun. The fey have fewer hang-ups about sex than human normals. We don’t stress about falling into bed unless a reason intrudes. Whenever Tibs and I weren’t seeing other people, we were quite comfortable spending time together. We had a mutually satisfying thing for a while that ended as casually and friendly as it began.

She ruffled my hair. “Still handsome, I see.”

I tugged her nut-brown ponytail. “Still gorgeous, I see.”

She nodded at the car. “Hop in. The Old Man wants to see you.”

I slid into the passenger seat of the stifling hot car.

“I will never get used to the winters here,” Tibbet said as she settled into the driver’s seat.

“It’s hardly winter, Tibs.”

She chuckled. “I lived in the Land of Summer, remember? I don’t even like cold rain.” She pulled into traffic and headed west.

“How’d you know I was here?”

“The Old Man told me. He said it’s a sad place I wouldn’t like, and he was right. I could feel it standing outside.”

“It is, but it’s also a helpful place, sometimes a hopeful one,” I said. And it is. No one wants to end up in the OCME. But, if someone does, at least they try to figure out what happened to you. They don’t always do it right, and they don’t always get it right. But they always try. It’s one of those places that you wonder how people can choose to work there. Then you meet them and understand.

“How’s he doing?” I said.

Tibbet didn’t answer for a long moment. Guildmaster Manus ap Eagan has been ill for almost a year. Fairies getting sick is rare, Danann fairies even rarer. It does happen, though.

“Not good,” she said. “He gets weaker all the time. He hardly ever leaves the house.” Her voice almost cracked. Tibbet has been with the Guildmaster since before Convergence. She’s not quite a secretary, not quite a messenger or driver. Aide-de-camp comes to mind. Like all brownies, she’s fiercely loyal to her chosen task, and after so much time, there’s an understandable emotional connection. I placed my hand on the back of her neck and gave it a slight squeeze.

She smiled. “What about you?”

“The same,” I said. “I’ve been exercising, but my abilities are still dead.” I never like to talk about my condition. You can only tell people “no change” so many times. Doing ritual sun salutations at dawn has strengthened my essence, but at best it’s made what little I can do work better. I haven’t regained any more abilities.

Tibbet guided the car through the chaos of Kenmore Square, a confusing knot of five major roads pretending to be a traffic exchange. Boston streets are infamous for confusing the unwary visitor. Signage is poor, the squares are anything but, and the layout philosophy seems to be “try not to kill anybody.” Tibbet’s a pro, though, and we made it through with minimal terror or terrorizing. She took Brookline Avenue out of the city.

It is the nature of large cities to consume the smaller towns around them, usually for economic advantage. Boston acquired several towns, but not Brookline, which didn’t see any advantage to joining a city of lower-class immigrants. To this day, it remains a place of privilege, one of the richest in the country, where anyone with enough money can find a place, even the fey. Manus ap Eagan had lived there for over half a century.

Tibbet took me into the exclusive Chestnut Hill neighborhood, location of some of the most expensive homes in the States. The landscaping is perfect, the acreage per house substantial, and not a stickball game to be seen. It’s another world entirely from where I grew up in the rough and tumble South Boston. It’s the kind of place where you keep expecting people to whisper for fear of disturbing deep, moneyed thoughts.

The Eagan estate began with a wrought-iron gate that opened without any prompting as we approached. Tibbet didn’t use a remote. Likely, the whole place was warded to allow certain people to come and go and most people to not. The driveway wound in a stately curve lined with cedars that stood guarded reserve over the passing car. When the view opened up, you could see what some might call a house, while most everyone else would call it a heaping estate manor.

Tibbet pulled up to the enormous front doors, and we got out. Above the doors, a stained-glass panel depicted a man in a resplendent chair leaning back with his feet on the lap of a beautiful woman. As Tibbet held the door for me, I nodded upward. “Did you pose for that?”

She grinned. “Not likely.”

The entry hall to the Guildmaster’s house rose a full two stories and could hold a small army. Every year Eagan holds a kick-ass Winter Solstice party in the space. If you count the bathroom, it’s the second room in the house I’ve been in. At the east wall, in the curve of a freestanding staircase, stood a rearing Asian elephant, the stuffed relic of a more unenlightened time.

In the middle of the west wall a massive fireplace stood. Above the mantel hung a larger-than-life portrait of High Queen Maeve of Tara, her deep black eyes staring out of a pale face, a cold majestic beauty. Maeve had posed for John Singer Sargent on her one and only visit to Boston almost a century ago. He had captured her perfectly. She looked like someone had just told her she couldn’t have Europe for dessert.

At the back end of the hall, French doors gave onto a rolling lawn of brown grass. At the bottom of the lawn, topiary boxwoods had been torn ragged by the wind. The skeletal frame of a greenhouse sat in the white afternoon light.

“He’s out back. He says the moisture makes him feel better,” Tibbet said. She led me to the French doors and held one open for me.

“You’re not coming?”

She shook her head. “I’ll give you a ride back.”

I walked down a brick path to the greenhouse. Its entrance worked like an air lock. Stepping through the inside door, humid air swept over me. Dense foliage smelled of decay, and I could hear low voices. Thick leaves dripped with water. I removed my jacket. I followed a sodden path through overgrown plants wilting with the heat. Long, spindly fronds left wet streaks on my arms. At the base of my skull, I felt a buzz like sleeping bees; the greenhouse had protection wards on it.

In the center of the greenhouse was a clearing. A maroon Persian rug had been rolled out. Ancient wing chairs sat with their backs to me and faced a graying wicker chair. The Guildmaster leaned out from one of the chairs and looked in my direction, then struggled up on his feet. “Here he is,” he said.

“You should sit,” said whoever was sitting in the opposite wing chair. I couldn’t sense who or what he was with all the wards in the place.

The Guildmaster answered him with a dismissive wave of his hand. He stood tall, with the stiff posture of someone in pain. His hawk nose stood out sharply between dark eyes nestled in sockets hollow from too much weight loss too fast. Gray-streaked dark hair hung lankly to his shoulders. The disturbing part, though, was the limp flutter of his wings, dim and lifeless against the backdrop all the fecund plant life. “Hello, Connor, I’m glad you could make it.”

As if I would have refused the invitation. “It’s good to see you again, sir.”

He waved an open palm toward the wicker chair. “Sit, please.”

As I made my way around the armchairs, I found myself face-to-face with High Druid Gerin Cuthbern. I did an excellent job of not rocking back on my heels. As a former Guild agent, I routinely worked with the upper echelons of society. Cuthbern, on the other hand, was upper echelon to the upper echelons. As High Druid of the Bosnemeton, he led all the druids and druidesses of the Grove for New England. His word was law. We did nothing without his say-so.

As soon as I realized it was him, I stopped, crossed my hands across my chest, and bowed slightly at the waist. “High Druid, it is an honor.”

The old man nodded his shaggy mane of white hair. He had that solemn look important people get when they deign to notice the peasants. Gnarled hands loosely held an oak staff against his chest. Truth to tell, while I respect Gerin, I thought he was a bit of a prig. He was an Old One, to be sure, but one that sometimes didn’t get that the old ways were gone.

“I remember you from your training, Connor. Such a shame what’s become of you,” he said.

It was hard not taking offense. I had heard Gerin make such blunt statements to others in open meetings of the Grove. Tact wasn’t his strong point. Power was. I draped my jacket over the chair and sat. The wicker had the soft give of too much dampness. Eagan settled himself back into his armchair.

“One more Guild director and we’d have a quorum,” Eagan said.

Gerin frowned “Not funny, Manus.”

Eagan rolled his eyes and leaned toward me. “He’s been like this all afternoon. He can’t understand how a sick old fairy can tire of talking politics.”

“And yet, he’s well enough to meet with underlings. No offense, Connor,” said Gerin.

“None taken, sir” I said. My ass.

Manus wagged a finger at me exaggeratedly. “Gerin’s here as a Guild director, Connor. No ‘sir-ring’ to the High Druid allowed.” The smile of a man used to having his way. I decided the best response was to smile myself.

A sudden cough racked Eagan. He took several moments to get under control. Gerin instinctively placed his hand on his back, but didn’t do anything else as far as I could tell. Eagan wiped his hand across his forehead.

“A drink,” he said, gasping.

Gerin sighed and pointed to a sago palm. “He hides whiskey in there from his brownie.”

I got up and stepped to the large frond plant. Rummaging in the stalks, I found a flask, which I handed to Eagan. Gerin had the stern lecturing look I hated as a kid. Dananns had a wicked propensity for alcoholism. I didn’t know whether Eagan had a problem or not, but Gerin’s reference to Tibs as “his brownie” made me want to break out the booze just to annoy him.

Eagan chuckled through a swig. “It’s medicinal.”

Gerin just shook his head.

Eagan directed his gaze at me. “I need to ask you a favor. Ryan macGoren had some dealing with Alvud Kruge. I want to know what it was.”

Ryan macGoren, the golden boy of the Danann fairy social set. Handsome, powerful, rich, and a Guild director on top of it all. The whole package for the right woman. A couple of years ago, I probably would have been hanging out with him. Now, his type annoyed me. Did not see this coming. “Why don’t you just ask him?” I asked.

Eagan leaned toward me for emphasis. “Because I need him as an ally right now, and the question coming from me might be considered insulting under the circumstances.”

I could see his point. Asking a supporter about his relationship with a savagely murdered colleague might put a damper on a friendship. At the same time, the Danann clan of fairies has its share of internecine politics. MacGoren was powerful in his own right, and given that he was made a director at the Guild in a relatively short time, he had powerful friends that Eagan might not like. “Why me?” I said.

Eagan glanced at Gerin. “You have a certain reputation that could be used to advantage.”

“I think this is ill-advised, Manus,” said Gerin.

“I know you do. But you can’t ask either without risking insulting him.”

“It could appear I’m interfering in the Kruge investigation,” I said.

Eagan smiled slyly. “You’ve dealt with Keeva macNeve before.”

Gerin shifted in his seat. He had managed to spend the entire conversation not acknowledging me. “Manus, Connor is powerless. As strong a fey as Alvud Kruge was, he died horribly. If this inquiry gets tangled in the murder case, Connor will have no chance if he stumbles across the murderer.”

I didn’t know whether to be touched that Gerin cared or insulted that he didn’t think I could handle the situation. That he likely was right was beside the point. Either way, his attitude annoyed me.

Eagan took a swig from the flask and grimaced. “He did a fair job of surviving Castle Island last spring.”

Gerin snorted. “I’ve read those reports, Manus. He’s lucky he’s not dead. He’s lucky we’re not all dead.”

Eagan gave Gerin a wolfish grin. “I like luck.”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

Gerin frowned and sat back in the chair. He rubbed his staff as if he were agitated. “You know his coming here was observed. Everything you do is observed. People will ask questions.”

Eagan raised an eyebrow at me. “Ah, yes, well, how’s Tibbet, Connor?”

I chuckled. He may be ill, but he was sharp. An old flame taking me to the big house while the master was ill was not the worst cover I’d ever heard. “I hope she’s at least driving me home afterward.”

“Of course,” said Eagan.

“I still object to this, Manus. He has no abilities. He has no Guild authority…”

Eagan held up a hand. “He has a Guild director’s ID.”

“Purely by chance. Let’s not let Briallen’s propensity for not following the rules cause us to break rules ourselves. If I may say so, you seemed fixated on macGoren. I don’t know that I’m comfortable with one of my people being pulled into your personal politics.”

“It’s not that personal, Gerin. These questions need to be asked. Normally, I would ask Keeva macNeve to look into this, but it would not be appropriate in this case. I want an objective ally here.”

Gerin did look at me then. I felt an odd probing sensation, though whether he was actually trying to do something to me or it was his innate force of will I could not tell. “If I recall, allies do not fare well with this man,” he said.

I wish I could say I was insulted, but I really shouldn’t be. I knew I’d left a few pissed off people in my wake at the Guild. It’s why no one comes around anymore now that I’d lost my abilities. They were willing to put up with me when it might help their careers. Now, I’m yesterday’s news. I didn’t need to be reminded of that, though.

Eagan looked at me a long time before he spoke. “People expect unpopular people to ask unpopular questions, Gerin. They often don’t think beyond the annoyance of the questions and forget to wonder about the reasons behind them. It’s an advantage. I think Connor will know what to do to protect himself.”

I hoped I did. “I can take care of myself.”

Gerin shook his head and sighed. “If your course is set, then it must play itself out.”

“Yes, it must. Tibbet is waiting outside, Connor. It was a pleasure talking to you,” Eagan said by way of dismissal.

It didn’t seem like I had been very much a part of the conversation. I stood and picked up my jacket. As I shook Eagan’s hand, it felt cold and damp. I turned to Gerin and bowed again. Apparently, the High Druid didn’t think much of me. I tried not to look as humiliated as I felt.

“I’ll let you know what I find,” I said and walked out. As I stepped into the cold October air, Tibbet waited in the car near the back of the greenhouse. Eagan must have done a sending to let her know the meeting was ending. I jumped in to get out of the cold.

“You don’t look happy,” she said as she pulled around the house.

“It’s nothing. I just feel like a mouse that’s been tossed between two cats.”

She chuckled. “Those two can do that to you. Do you want me to drop you anyplace special?”

“Home. Home would feel special right now.”

She rubbed my thigh. “Oh, dear. It must have been bad. Just ignore them, Connor. That’s what I do. They play too many games between them.”

“Sage advice.”

We indulged in catch-up conversation through the rest of the drive. She had not really been doing much since Eagan fell ill. That was fine. Other than almost dying and saving the world last spring, things had pretty much settled down to boredom for me, too.

When she arrived at my building, Tibbet put the car in park and slid across the seat. She wrapped her arms around me and hugged. I let my nose nestle in her hair. One of the things I love about Tibs is her scent. She always smells like warmth and comfort.

“Everything works out eventually,” she said.

“Thanks.”

She pulled back, a playful smile on her lips. “Do you want me to come up?”

“You don’t have to do that, Tibs.”

She eyed me with the hint of confusion. “I know that.”

By that, I guessed she didn’t realize Eagan had asked her to pick me up to cover our meeting. I should have realized. If she knew, Tibbet would have told me immediately when I got in the car at the OCME. “I’m sorry, Tibs. Bad timing. I didn’t mean anything by that.”

She ruffled my hair. “No harm. Take care of yourself, handsome.”

I tugged her hair. “You, too, gorgeous.”

Once inside my apartment, I went straight to the computer. During a case, I keep meticulous files. I logged the information from my visit with Janey Likesmith, cross-referencing it to Moke’s drug-running gang. I leaned back, the desk chair letting out a squeal I never remembered to oil. Farnsworth had been running drugs. Which meant he was probably a gang hit. Which meant we were likely never going to find the perpetrator.

I sighed and started a file on Ryan macGoren. After watching any connection between Farnsworth and the Kruge murder evaporate, Eagan had handed me a back door into the murder investigation. No one could blame me for looking into Kruge as part of researching macGoren.

I paused and considered. Pride was rearing its head again. I missed the Guild. Not the political crap Eagan and Gerin were pulling me into, but the chance to work on big cases. It’s where I belonged. I could feel that in my bones. But as Gerin had made abundantly clear, I wasn’t in the big leagues anymore. I could get hurt. I pushed the thought roughly aside. I didn’t care. If I had to risk my life to prove them wrong, I didn’t have a problem with that. Because if I wasn’t willing to risk everything, Gerin was right that I had no abilities. At all.