Unshapely Things

CHAPTER 10

I've always been fascinated that when I wake up wearing the same clothes from the previous night, they smell a lot worse than I thought they did when I went to bed. Of course, managing to sleep over fifteen hours before waking at four in the morning doesn't help either. I couldn't stand my own stench, so I hauled myself out of a nest of sheets and took a shower. Dried sweat and not a little blood sloughed off like a layer of dead skin. When I came out of the bathroom, I was too awake to go back to bed. I made myself some coffee, slipped on a pair of shorts, and went up to the roof.

Even though I was practically naked and it was still technically nighttime, the air felt hot on my skin. The humidity of the previous day had never fully dissipated, promising an even muggier day to come. I settled into the lawn chair and sipped from my mug. Regardless of the temperature, I always drink my coffee. A day with no caffeine is like a day with no meaning whatsoever.

Across the channel, a muddy haze hung around the docks like a dirty skirt. Lighted windows dotted the office towers where no one would be working for hours to come, empty offices vibrating with stillness. The taillights of cabs silently slipped in and out of sight on mysterious nightly errands. The only sounds were the hollow white noise of the city and the occasional siren off in the distance. After the bars have closed and even the drunks have made it home, the city still rustles like an insomniac. Complete rest hovers just out of reach until dawn arrives, then there's no time left. The city doesn't sleep, but it dreams. It dreams of regrets and promises.

I felt that way too damned much of the time. Ever since my accident, I'd been poised between future hope and past glory. I hated it, hated the unknown state in which I found myself. If I could never regain my abilities, what would I become? Briallen's words kept cycling through my head. What did it mean to be a body without talent? I know she meant that there's no such thing, but that didn't really answer the question.

For the longest time, I'd beaten myself up over my arrogance. How I didn't appreciate what I had until I lost it. How I'd looked down on everyone else who couldn't compete with me. But now I needed to get past the self-flagellation. I had to find my way back to the path, and the only way to do that was to act. Otherwise, I'd end up with nothing better to do but collect disability checks and sit half-naked sipping coffee in the middle of the night.

As me sky began to lighten, I sat in front of the computer. Methodically, I recorded everything that had occurred in the past forty-eight hours. It was the longest single entry in the file. Nothing is harder for an investigator than to become part of his own case. Even though Briallen and Murdock came at me from different angles, they had made the same point: Don't make it personal. It was hard not to. They were right, but it was hard.

The first thing I did was to retire the Tuesday Killer moniker. It had forced me into a mind-set that left me unprepared for what had happened. I had forgotten that Occam's razor is a process, not a solution. By focusing on the obvious weekly cycle, it never occurred to me to look for something else. A cheap bank calendar would have spelled out the phases of the moon for me had I bothered to look.

I had the urge to toss all my analysis for fear that I had constrained myself too much. After Murdock's comment in the car, the whole ska thing was starting to bother me. Did Tansy, with her limited vocabulary, have only a word for wrong birth to describe the nasty essence she felt, or was she on the money? Was I congratulating myself a little too much for connecting the cross-species cases in Gillen's files? Avalon Memorial was the only fey hospital in the Northeast outside of New York. It would have been unusual if I hadn't found any. On top of that, I'd only found the connection by following other links. Computer search engines are notorious for linking completely disparate information because they're set up by people who don't think exactly like you do. I was surprised some pornography hadn't popped up. It usually does, no matter what gets searched.

I called up Murdock's notes on Shay. As far as I could tell, he was born of human parents. The only people from Faerie to appear after Convergence were fey — always some type of druid, fairy, elf, or dwarf — never a normal human without so-called fantastic abilities. According to the stories, humans certainly played a part in Faerie, but they didn't seem to come through in the unexplained merging of the two worlds. Without a distinct connection to Faerie, I could not see how to link Shay into the killer's profile.

It came down to essence. Essence is like an energy that can be manipulated in different ways. That's one of the things that make the fey races vary from each other. Druids actually join their personal essence to whatever other essence they're working with. It's why we're very good at it, but also why we get tired. Fairies don't have to do that. They can literally pluck essence out of anything with no depletion of their own essence, unless they want to use it. It makes them very powerful, but the trade-off is a lower level of skill in use. And elves manipulate essence only through chanting. They didn't seem to have any direct control of any essence except their own, which they use only in dire circumstances. Humans can activate essence, but only if someone fey has set things up for them. Someone like Shay couldn't do it on his own.

I jumped as my answering machine beeped loudly to indicate it was full. I had turned off the volume and the ringer before passing out the day before. I raised the volume in time to hear Murdock say, "You idiot." He disconnected. I hit playback. The first message was from Murdock telling me he was sending a case file update via email. The next four were also Murdock, all with the same message to call. The last one was the one that had just come in. An annoyed Murdock said, "Call me. Your cell phone's dead, you idiot."

I called, and he picked up immediately.

"The Guild took the case," he said. Good old Murdock, right to the point. I felt like I'd been sucker-punched. "The last victim's father kicked up a stink. I told you he was someone big in New York. I don't think macDuin had a choice."

"That's too easy. MacDuin knows something. I think he's wanted this buried all along," I said.

"Well, it's his case now," said Murdock. "Wrap up your notes and email them to me. I have to turn everything over to the Guildhouse this afternoon."

I could hear in his voice that he was already thinking of something else. "That's it? You're just going to let it go?"

Murdock chuckled dryly. "Welcome to the Boston P.D., Connor. Once the Guild asserts its right, we're out of it. You probably did it to us a couple of times yourself."

He was right. The rules of the game proscribed it. If a crime were fey-related, the Guild could take the case without question. I'd been pissing and moaning that the Guild took only cases it had a political benefit in taking, and they had just proved my point. "Come by for dinner on Sunday," Murdock said into the silence.

"I'll think about it." Personally, I still didn't think the commissioner wanted to see me at his table. I put the phone back on the cradle and stared out the window. Daylight had returned the city to its waking state. Traffic backed up along the elevated highway; planes took off and landed; and people moved lethargically along the streets in the heat. The Guild had taken the case, and the world hadn't ended. I was mildly surprised.

In the past, I would have taken the opportunity to sweep the desktop clear, perhaps throw a book or two or knock a hole in the wall. After a while though, it began to sink in that I didn't have a maid anymore and would have to clean the mess up myself. Instead, I gripped the edge of my desk and counted to ten. It's not as satisfying, but it is tidier.

MacDuin probably was forced to take the case officially if the last victim's father had any pull. That much I could believe. I just had no faith the other victims would have any justice. They were important to no one but themselves and maybe a small circle of friends. All macDuin had to do was find the killer, or at least set up another sucker and connect him to the last case, and that would be the end of it. The Guild would focus on the one case and nothing else would matter. The denizens of the Weird wouldn't matter. And whatever macDuin was trying to pull with the fake perpetrator would get buried.

I checked my records to see which files hadn't been sent to Murdock yet, then checked them again. While I didn't particularly like helping macDuin, I hated not finishing a job more. I dropped everything into an e-mail and sent it off. No sense causing Murdock grief by not closing up the files.

I wandered about the apartment at loose ends, with nothing to do unless Murdock came up with another case. It was an odd feeling — hoping something bad would happen to someone so that you could get work. Frustration gnawed at me. As a general rule, when all else fails, sublimate. Grabbing a sponge, I cleaned the kitchen and bathroom to occupy my mind. As I tossed the remnants of Chinese takeout from the fridge, I jostled the box of glow bees. I decided to warm one up and send it to Stinkwort. I could at least let off steam by yelling at him for his bad behavior at Briallen's. I didn't know how long it would take for him to get the message.

As I found myself crouched on the floor hunting dust bunnies from under the couch, I sat back on my haunches. "Okay, this is getting out of hand," I said aloud. I could care less if there were dust bunnies under my couch. I wiped my hands, grabbed my keys, and left the building. I couldn't let it go. I had to go to the Guildhouse and find out what macDuin was up to.

While I liked living in the Weird, its one drawback was inconvenient public transportation. Nothing goes anywhere in the middle of the day except downtown, then you have to make a connection to get anywhere else. For a small city, it can take way too long to get to where you're going. More often than not, it's easier to walk. I got lucky and caught the number seven bus on Congress Street, which got me to the Orange Line station in fifteen minutes. As I stood at Downtown Crossing, I opted to walk up Washington Street the rest of the way instead of taking the sweltering subway.

Washington Street used to run right through the old Combat Zone, some urban planner's brilliant idea of a legal human sewer. Now the area consisted of boarded-up buildings and the occasional social service office. Prostitutes still prowled the area at night, which infuriated the residents of nearby Chinatown. Their only consolation was that one of the remaining theaters ran decent chop-socky movies. The other two theaters still catered to the raincoat crowd. During the day the businessmen from the Financial District spent their lunch hours looking for a quick thrill in the peep booths while trying not to soil their suits. It was like the Weird, only for humans. It was an entertaining walk if you didn't think about it too much.

I turned toward Park Square and paused at the corner of Charles Street The noonday traffic flowed briskly past me. Even with my sunglasses on, the bright sunlight felt like knives in my eyes. All the sleep I had gotten helped, but I still felt like I'd been run over by a truck. I couldn't imagine how I would have felt if Briallen hadn't propped me up a little.

Across the way, the Park Plaza Hotel retained the air of an old Brahmin stronghold, with its prim cornice and orderly tan blocks of hewn granite. Like so many city buildings situated at the intersection of six or seven streets, it pointed into the square like a ship coming into port. As the traffic slowed for the light, I craned my head up at the building next to me.

The Guildhouse looked like anything but an old Boston building. Slab upon slab of Portland brownstone towered up haphazardly into crenellated towers that reached heights unheard of back in Faerie. A little fey ability and modern structural engineering knowledge will do that to an architect. Gargoyles perched on every conceivable surface. They weren't part of the original design, but had accumulated over the years, attracted by the levels of power emanating from the building.

I made my way to the arched main entry facing the square. The sharp end of a portcullis hung suspended over the huge glass doors. I didn't know if it was operational or just kitsch. Directly over the main doors, a stone dragon's head jutted out, its mouth agape, long sinuous tongue curling over needlelike teeth. Unlike the other gargoyles, the dragon was part of the original design of the building but never seemed to attract a resident spirit. Too stressful a position, I guessed.

I felt a flutter across my mind, like a cool dry puff of wind. The feeling was familiar but one I hadn't experienced in a long time. It came again, followed by a sound like stone grating against sand. You return, whispered the dull dry voice in my head. I leaned back, scanning the upper vault of the entry way. Hundreds of gargoyles clustered in the recesses of the arcli- demons, animals, reptiles, and the occasional human joke all staring back at me.

Here, said the voice. I stepped back from the building and examined the pillars near the front. After a moment, I spotted him — a squat little man, no bigger than a house cat, nestled in among the acanthus leaves of a capital. He was chubby, naked, and enormously endowed for his size. A single eye stared out from the center of his forehead, right under a small spiraled horn, and his ash gray face bore a noncommittal expression. As gargoyles went, he was a nice guy.

I relaxed my mind and thought, Hello, Virgil. It wasn't quite a sending. You didn't so much send your thoughts to gargoyles. They just listened if they chose to. Virgil was an old friend of sorts. At one time, he sat on the ledge outside my office window in the Guildhouse. The first time he spoke to me, I was rereading Dante, hence the name. I have no idea what his real name is or even if he has one. I was surprised to find him in such a conspicuous place.

Have waited, he said.

For me? I asked.

Yes.

Gargoyles are the damnedest things. They come from their own tradition out of Europe, but you can find them most anywhere. It's not clear if the animated ones became animated post-Convergence, but they definitely went on the move at about the same time. They love Guildhouses especially. The first Guildhouse in New York collapsed from their weight, so later Guildhouses were all built with the eventuality of a couple tons of stones sitting on them.

They almost never speak. I don't know if all of them can, but the ones that do, do so rarely. They move only at night, very slowly unless under extreme duress, and never when anyone is watching. I once monitored the progress of a winged frog from my window ledge to the floor below. It took him a month and a half. He stayed there a day or two, then disappeared. I still don't know why.

Can I help you with something? I asked. I couldn't imagine how I could help a spirit-inhabited lump of stone that had been around for centuries. Gargoyles didn't need a lot of taking care of. A dry, rasping sound answered me, which I think might have been laughter.

Not your moon, Virgil said.

I don't understand, I thought.

Do not know. Will.

Will? Do you mean you will or I will? I thought as loudly as I could. Even though none moved, I felt the attention of several other gargoyles. Virgil didn't respond. I stood patiently, waiting for him to say more, but he just stared resolutely down at me. When it became clear he wasn't going to speak again, I nodded courteously. Thank you.

A cold knot formed in my stomach. Had I leaped to yet another wrong conclusion? Was the lunar cycle yet another too-convenient theory? I had never quite figured out why Virgil spoke to me at all and whether it was supposed to help. His words only made sense after the fact and usually referred to something incredibly obvious I had missed. I knew I would end up kicking myself when I finally understood.

For the first time in almost a year, I walked into the Guildhouse. The vaulted marble foyer rose two stories, lit by wall sconces resembling torches. A tour group huddled to one side while their guide pointed out the nondescript space. The Guildhouse is a working building, not a museum, but that doesn't stop people from wondering what it looks like. They don't get any farther than the foyer most of the time unless they're lucky.

To the left of the entrance, a long curving line of fey and humans waited, their faces in various stages of desperation or fear or hope. I used to call them supplicants. Some were looking for lost loved ones, others had a grievance against a iey, and still others had nowhere else to turn for help in whatever dire circumstances they found themselves. They came every day to wait in line to fill out audience requests that were rarely granted. What most people don't realize is that they have better odds of getting into Harvard than getting an appointment with a Guild member. When I bothered to notice them before, they annoyed me. I was like everyone else who worked upstairs; I couldn't care less if it didn't help my career. Now I just saw them as people who could probably use some help.

I moved around the line to get to main reception. Two women, both elves, worked the desk. I didn't recognize either of them. As I approached, the one with the ponytail and too much blue eye shadow held out a clipboard. "Fill out the application and deposit it in the bin on the end of the desk."

"Connor Grey to see Keeva macNeve."

"Do you have an appointment card?"

"No."

"We don't just call up without a card, sir. You can fill out an application if you like." She turned back to her paperwork.

I glanced at the people waiting. I was breaking the monotony, and some were paying particular attention. Leaning over the desk, I grabbed a pen and wrote Keeva's phone number on the form. She'd kill me if anyone overheard it. "This is Keeva's direct line. If I didn't know her, I wouldn't have it. Call her please."

She looked at the number dubiously, but I could tell she knew it was an internal line. With several shades of annoyance, she picked up the phone and dialed. "Her voice mail's picking up. Do you want to leave a message?"

"No. Can I just go up to her office and see if she's in?" I said.

"No." She hung up the phone and turned back to her paperwork again. Once I'd had a sweet office in an end turret overlooking the Common. Now I couldn't get past the first floor without an appointment. As I debated what to say next, a familiar figure pushed through the front door with double slices of pizza. She glared at someone who came too near as she passed. She wore a black lacy shawl draped over one shoulder, a black sundress, and combat boots. Her skin had the white pallor of someone who rarely went outside. The only real color about her was her hair. I'd seen it black, red, plum, and one entire week it was blue. Today it was orange and clipped in a spiky bowl that set off her pleasantly round features.

Meryl stopped short when she saw me. Wary eyes looked up at me from under her bangs. She only came up to my shoulder, but she had enough attitude for someone twice her height. She bit the tips off both slices of pizza simultaneously. "Grey. Need another favor?"

I could feel heat rise on my cheeks. "As a matter of fact…" I gestured at the desk. "They're being officious and won't let me in."

The receptionist overheard and glared at me.

Meryl looked me up and down. "Are you armed?"

"I have a knife."

She nodded once. "Good. I can claim self-defense if I have to kill you." She walked past the reception desk. "He's with me," she said over her shoulder.

"I need to see your pass," said the receptionist.

Meryl turned slowly. "On average, I pass you four times a day. I think you're a twit. You think I'm a bitch. Ring a bell?" She resumed walking. I trailed along behind her.

"Did you find the stones you lost?" she asked.

We arrived at the elevator bank just as the doors opened, and I followed her in. "I didn't lose them. This place did."

The elevator descended. "Whatever," she said around a mouthful of pizza. "They got checked in. Made it to macDuin's department. No one remembers seeing them after that."

Three levels below the street, the doors opened onto a long, brick-lined, vaulted hallway. Closed doors were set in the walls at regular intervals, and every other light in the ceiling was out. A dry musty smell hung in the air.

Meryl walked out of the elevator. "Are you following me?"

"Well, I did want to talk to you."

We stopped at an old oaken door with ornate iron hinges and a huge old lock. "Oh, I thought you just wanted to run loose in the building. Did you know no one can hear you scream down here?"

She screamed.

The lock jiggled and popped open as the hair on my head stood on end. No one came running. She giggled and opened the door. "I've been playing with sonic cantrips. They work pretty well, except last week I had sinus congestion, and it took me twenty minutes to get the pitch right."

After the dimness of the hall, I blinked at the bright white walls in her office. Blue lateral file cabinets lined the right side of the room, while boxes of various sizes leaned against the left. The center of the room was dominated by an old gray army desk on which sat a computer that looked like its guts had blown out the side of the hard drive. Wires and cables snaked from it to a credenza on the back wall, where another computer sat. Something told me she had a nice little black box operation working into the building mainframe.

"Sit down and don't touch anything," she said. She scooted sideways around the desk to her chair, tossing her empty pizza plate into the wastebasket.

I picked up a stack of papers on her guest chair and lowered them to the floor. As I leaned back in the chair, I noticed the bulletin board on the wall over her head. Magazine photos and news articles covered almost the entire surface. Dumbfounded, I realized notes tucked in here and there had ogham writing on them with numbers scrawled along the bottom. More of the same littered her desk.

"Damn. Meryl, what are these?"

Annoyance crossed her face. "If you had occasionally done your own research instead of sending one of your minions down here, you'd know."

I smiled playfully at her. "I have a knife, remember."

She smiled right back. "And there's a stick of dynamite taped under your chair and my body shields work."

"That's a low blow," I said. It was such a bad pun, I could taste it.

She laughed. "It's my filing system. The Dewey Decimal system doesn't quite work in a place where putting the wrong things next to each other can cause hair to grow in unsightly places. You have to balance the energies to keep everything flowing peacefully. I've tried to get the other Houses to adopt it, but they're waiting for a full chthonic breakdown before they'll admit it works."

I grabbed a pen and drew the ogham script from the flyer in Murdoch's car. "Does this mean anything?"

She looked at the paper, then back at me. "What? Are you becoming a mineralogist in your old age? Those stones went missing last winter."

"What stones?"

She tossed the paper on her desk and gestured at the glyph. "Those stones. Five of them. High-quality selenite. Pre-Convergence. Seized in an illegal container shipment a few years back."

"You know that just by looking at the glyph?"

She nodded. "That's where they were filed. I found them missing. I was using them to anchor a couple of wards. When I walked in the room, there was a hum that told me the wards weren't working anymore. I checked. They were gone. I had to file a cartload of forms over it. You think you found them and lost them again?"

"I didn't lose them," I said.

"Whatever."

"Can you show me?"

We left the office. Meryl led me farther down the hall to a spiral staircase. We went down another level to a hallway identical to the one upstairs and walked deeper into the building. All kinds of resonant essences bounced through the air. My head began to buzz.

"Man, what the hell do you have down here?"

"Just about everything: weapons, armor, crystals, books. You name it, we got it. Some of it's evidence for ongoing investigations; some of it's archives for research. A lot of it's crap. Did I mention you'd know that if you bothered to do your own research occasionally?"

"Not that you're bitter about it or anything," I said.

She held up her hands in a warding gesture. "Touchy-touchy. I'm sorry I mentioned it."

We stopped in front of a door. Meryl positioned her palm outward on the wall near the lock. She muttered something in what sounded like Middle English. A momentary shimmer of light bounced from her hand to the wall, and a keypad appeared. I turned my back and out of habit automatically memorized the sound of the tones. "Don't waste the brain cells. I'm changing the code after you leave," she said.

We entered a high, dimly lit storeroom. I whistled in appreciation. Rack upon rack of steel shelving marched to the right and left and up twenty feet. The lower levels held cabinets and drawers. Judging from the length of the aisles branching out to either side and in front of me, the room had to cover an acre. It had to be deep under the subway system even to exist in that much space.

My head still buzzed, but I had a cottony feeling as well, which told me dampening wards were in place. "Now I know why you like your job," I said.

She grinned. "I don't like my job. I just like where it is."

Weaving our way around boxes on the floor, we walked down an aisle of meticulously labeled drawers. My foot connected with something, and it skittered across the floor with a clunking sound.

I leaned down and picked up a small bowl. It was carved from a single piece of wood and fit perfectly cupped in my hands. "This is nice. Olive wood, isn't it?"

Meryl sighed loudly. "That damned Parker. He's a new temp who can't file his own fingernails. You'd think he'd be a little more careful, considering."

"Considering?"

She pointed at the bowl. "That's the Holy Grail."

Shocked, I held it away from me as though it were ready to bite. "The Holy Grail!"

Laughing, she plucked it out of my hands. She pulled open a drawer, revealing several more bowls, and dropped it inside. "And so are these. Can you believe some dope managed to sell a few of them? I mean, really, anyone can see the wood's not even two hundred years old. If we ever have another clearance auction, I might take them home for salad bowls." She hip-checked the drawer closed and walked away humming. I have to admit her attitude was growing on me.

I joined her at a bank of drawers. She pulled open a small one and hopped back, looking at me in surprise. "Did you feel that? Something just went off."

I shook my head. "My abilities aren't great under the best of circumstances, and you've got this place heavily warded."

We peered into the drawer. An inset of black velvet filled the entire space with five cupped indentations. Two of them were occupied. A white stone and a black one. I recognized both. "Are these the same stones that went missing last year?"

She nodded. "I've stared at their photos enough."

"Mine, too."

"But why put them back?" said Meryl.

I smiled. "The best place to hide something is where they're missing from. No one looks once they're gone."

"So where are the rest of them, smart guy?"

"A gray one's upstairs with macDuin in the case file for the bogus killer; another gray one's at Boston P.D., probably on its way to macDuin as we speak. And the last one's with the killer."

"It's black," Meryl said.

"I know. I thought the killings were a weekly cycle until I realized that they're keyed to the phases of the moon. White for the full, gray for the quarters, and black for the new."

"We just had a quarter moon two nights ago."

"And I found a gray stone in a dead fairy's chest."

Meryl shook her head. "Damn! Who'd've thought my stones would turn up this way."

As she finished speaking, I heard the distinctive sound of a door closing. Judging from Meryl's reaction, she heard it, too. I held my finger to my lips.

She frowned at me. "Bob? Parker, is that you?" she called out.

"Shhh!" I hissed.

"You shhh. I'm supposed to be here," she said. "Don't move." She went quickly back down the aisle and out of sight. Moments later, I heard her call Parker's name again, but no one answered. I could hear her footsteps fading away and a door latch opening. She called out a few more times, her voice becoming more and more faint. After a long stretch, I realized I didn't hear anything anymore.

It occurred to me that Meryl might have set off an alarm spell when she opened the drawer. Whoever had cast it would eventually make their way to the aisle I was standing in. I looked around, but that end of the room was too neat, and there was nothing to hide behind. Quietly, I closed the drawer that contained the stones and opened another one enough to get my foot on the edge. As silently as possible, I boosted myself up to the first set of shelves. From there I climbed the remaining shelves like a ladder until I reached the top. I lay flat in the thick dust and peered over.

Seconds stretched into minutes which stretched into eons. I could almost hear my own heartbeat without trying. A cool waft of air washed over me. With all the wardings in the room, I couldn't tell if it had essence tangled in it or if it was just the ventilation system. Moments later I could hear footsteps coming down the aisle, and I slid back. They came closer, a steady gait with a firm destination. They stopped right below me.

I startled as a voice whispered in my ear. "Do you want to come down from there?"

I raised my head and looked below. With her hands on her hips and clearly amused, Meryl looked back at me. I swung my legs over, clambered down the shelves, and dropped the last ten feet to the floor. I brushed at the dust and cobwebs that completely covered me.

"Nothing," she said. "Someone was definitely there, but I couldn't make heads or tails of the essence."

We stood in silence for a moment. "It was Bob," Meryl decided.

"Why didn't he answer?"

"Because he's a temp, and he thinks he's being paid to sleep in the storeroom when I'm not looking."

"Someone who wanted to lead me to that drawer left me those ogham runes, Meryl, and they set an alarm on it to see if I figured it out."

"I led you to the drawer, Grey. Someone who didn't want to get involved remembered the burglary and slipped you a tip that panned out."

I retrieved the stones. Pointedly, Meryl held out her hand. After a moment's hesitation, I dropped them into her palm. I had no authority to keep them, and if she wanted to be a bitch about it, Meryl could have me detained before I even got to the elevator.

"We can't tell anyone about this," I said.

"Are you kidding? Do you have any idea of the hell I caught over these babies?"

"Meryl, someone didn't want those stones found, and someone else did. We can't tell anyone until I figure out who and why."

She considered for a long moment. "I'll give you until Monday."

"Only if I find the killer. Otherwise, I'll need until the new moon on Wednesday."

An exasperated look came over her face. "Haven't you learned anything, Grey? The phases don't care about the calendar. The new moon's next Thursday."

A cold feeling of dread settled over me. Next Thursday. Midsummer's Eve. And thousands of people would be filling the Weird for the festivities.

Meryl escorted me back to the elevator. "Before you go, I have to tell you about a dream I had about you."

Great, I thought. This could be awkward. Intriguing, but awkward. "You had a dream about me?" I said as neutrally as possible.

"Not just a dream. I'm a Dreamer. I have a geas on me to share my True dreams," she said.

That startled me. Most of the fey had some kind of geas. It's an obligation placed on you that you can't ignore. If you do, really bad things can happen. You end up with a geas all kinds of ways. Some people get them when a vision comes upon someone present at their birth. Some people get them like a curse, when uiey've wronged someone. They're not given lightly and have a bit of fate bound up in them. What surprised me was that Meryl just out and told me hers. Given the compelling obligation, most people keep them secret so that they can't be manipulated. I have a couple on me myself, and only a handful of people know some of them, and no one knows all of them. "I can't believe you just told me your geas."

She shrugged. "It's hardly a secret when the geas is to tell." She smiled wickedly. "Don't worry. I doubt you'll ever figure out my secret ones."

"So what did you Dream?"

"I dream in metaphors. I've seen you bound in chains, but you break free. I've seen you sinking in a pool of ogham runes — I think we just figured that part out. I've seen you surrounded by knives and stars and hearts. You enter the Guildhouse through a black hole and roam empty corridors. And I saw you broken and alone, surrounded by dead bodies. And I'll tell you this, even though it's not part of the Dream: I haven't Dreamed a single thing since. Every Dream I have these days ends with you crushed on the ground."

"Shit," I said.

The elevator bell toned, and the doors opened.

Meryl smiled. "Yeah. Anyway, nice seeing you."