Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

About the Author

acknowledgments

Many culprits contributed their time, energy, and ideas to make this book the best it can be. Front and center are Anne Sowards, my editor, whose enthusiasm and insight know no bounds; my kickin’ agent, Rachel Vater, who knows her stuff and gives excellent feedback and support; Cameron Dufty, Ace editorial assistant, who keeps the wheels turning; Sara and Bob Schwager, copyeditors extraordinaire, who have to deal with strange new words and the hyphens that love them (or not); and, of course, all the folks at Ace Books.

Publishing my first novel has given me the pleasure of meeting many new people, notably Melissa Marr and Jeaniene Frost, sage advisors and wicked friends, and the friends and colleagues from the LiveJournal online community of Fangs_Fur_Fey. It’s been inspiring seeing their works and getting to know them as well as all the readers who took the time to come to a signing, drop a note, write a review, and pass the word. Many, many thanks to all of you.

Big thanks to my sisters and parents, who are secretly publicity machines in their spare time. Special thanks to Kelley Horton for her emergency photography and friendship with that guy who used to work down the hall.

And lastly but not leastly, thanks to Francine Woodbury, who had the pleasure of telling me when the manuscript went Horribly, Horribly Wrong, prompting me to revise it in record time. This book literally would not exist if not for her astute, yet evil, eye.

And whispering in their ears

Give them unquiet dreams

—W. B. Yeats

1

No good phone calls come at seven o’clock in the morning. Strike that. No good phone calls from Detective Leonard Murdock come at seven o’clock in the morning. Actually, strike that, too. No good phone calls from Detective Leonard Murdock come at seven o’clock in the morning unless you count the fact that it means I might have a paying job. Of course, it also means someone is dead, too, but that’s where the “no good” part comes in.

That’s how I make my living now. Waiting for the phone to ring. Hoping a crime has been committed. Ideally, one that Murdock needs a little fey expertise on. Some people make the mistake of thinking I used to be a high-powered druid working the crime unit for the Fey Guild. The only “used-to-be” part of that is working for the Guild. I’m still Connor Grey, druid. Just because I’ve lost most of my abilities doesn’t mean I am not what I am. To be fey, to be a member of a species that can manipulate what is superstitiously called magic, is not just a job description. It’s a state of being. And my current state of being was in the backseat of a cab wishing I had a cup of coffee. Murdock had given me an address in the deep end of the Weird. The Weird is not the nicest neighborhood in Boston. It’s certainly not the safest. But it’s where the fey live when they have nowhere else to go. There’s a comfort in that, a community of sorts, that outsiders don’t understand. Especially when so many people end up dead here.

The cab pulled off Old Northern Avenue onto a narrow lane that ran between two burnt-out warehouses. A block away, the lane ended at a desolate field with a small group of people wandering about, which, given the early hour, could only be my destination. I paid the driver, got out, and shivered. It was cold—too cold for early October and much colder than when I got in the cab just a few blocks away. I looked up at the sky and sensed more than saw a faint white haze in the air that was by no means natural.

The early morning sun cast a surreal light, bleaching colors like a faded photograph. At the curb, a police car with its blue lights flashing enhanced the effect with a silvery sheen. Across the field from where I stood, the officers’ uniforms looked almost black and the medical examiner’s coat a stark white. I recognized Murdock immediately by his long trench coat even though it appeared pale beige instead of its normal camel color. The field looked ashen.

I stepped across the remains of a sidewalk and walked toward them. It had rained like hell the night before, and while the field should have been muddy, it was now an uneven surface of frozen ruts. I made my way to the center of activity, a body in dark clothing lying on the ground. Murdock didn’t see me until I was standing next to him. “Bit nippy,” I said. He didn’t startle, but smiled slightly as he cupped his hands over his mouth and blew into them. “That’s part of why I called you.”

I nodded. As a human, Murdock has no fey abilities, but he’s worked the Weird long enough to know when something is, well, weird. He’s good at what he does, and part of what makes him good is that he knows when to ask for help. It’s a lesson I’m still learning.

I bunched my own cold hands into the pockets of my leather jacket. It didn’t occur to me when I left the apartment that I’d need gloves in early October. “What do you have?”

He gestured at the obvious body. “Tell me why I called you.”

I stepped away from him, then between another officer and the medical examiner. On first glance at the body, my chest tightened. “Dammit, Murdock, you could have warned me it was a kid.”

“Late teens, we’re guessing. Haven’t checked for ID yet,” he said. The cop standing next to me nodded without saying anything. When you’re with law enforcement, you see a lot of things you’d rather not. Dead kids are the worst. The younger they are, the worse it is. Even if this guy—this boy—turned out to be eighteen or nineteen, he still had a helluva lot of life to miss out on. And his parents, if he had them, were still going to be heartbroken. Telling the parents is the second-worst thing about it.

I put that aside for now and took in the scene. Lying faceup was a white male with dark brown hair, obviously young, with a pained grimace locked on his face. His head angled up too sharply to one side, which probably meant a broken neck. His arms and legs splayed out haphazardly. One foot had an orange Nike sneaker, the other just a plain white sock. He wore two hooded black sweatshirts, generic-looking jeans, and a bright yellow bandana on his head. The bandana was wrapped so that knotted ends stuck out from his temples. At a guess, I’d go with gangbanger. So far, unremarkable. I swept my eyes up and down the body again. His clothes were frozen. That meant he was out in the rain long enough to get soaked before the air got cold enough to freeze him. And the mud around him. He was embedded in it, sunk a good two or three inches into the ground. I scanned the periphery of the body and gazed outward in concentric circles as I turned. “He ended up here before the mud froze, but there’re no footprints and no indication he was dragged. No sign of a struggle.”

“Bingo,” said Murdock. “Tossed or dropped?”

Now I saw why Murdock had called me. The kid was too far from the edge of the field to have landed in this spot on his own. Either someone with tremendous strength had tossed him in or someone who could fly had dropped him. A fairy dropping him was an obvious possibility. I estimated the shortest distance to the street at fifty feet, well within the range of strength for a troll or even a dwarf. It could have also been an Unseelie, one of the shunned fey that don’t fit easily into any species category. We didn’t see a lot of those in Boston, but it was too early to rule out them out.

“I’d go for dropped,” I said. “There’s no slippage in the mud. He looks like he came straight down. I suppose if he were flung the right way from the street, he wouldn’t slide, but dropped is the easier explanation.”

Murdock nodded as though he had come to the same conclusion. “Naturally, that leads to ‘why?’”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, Murdock. Look at the gear he’s wearing. I think you’re looking at a gang fight.”

He tilted his head to the side as he continued looking at the body. “No physical signs of struggle, no visible bruises. We might find something when he’s stripped, but why would a fey bother with him?”

“Fey gangs are out there, too, Murdock. The xenos figure out how to hold their own against the fey ones. You know that,” I said. “And the human ones have been known to hire freelancers for a little revenge. I’d check that angle.”

He didn’t look convinced, but that’s Murdock’s nature. He wouldn’t be happy until he nailed it down precisely. I know he has more than a few files of unsolved cases that he uses for bedtime reading. He’s the type.

“Can you sense anything off him?” Murdock asked.

At one time, I had the ability to manipulate essence on a high level. I was growing, maturing into my skills to the point where I thought I might end up being one of the most powerful druids alive. It sounds vain and ambitious, which is why I would never have admitted the thought aloud to anyone. I had attracted the attention of some very powerful people, who took me under their wings, some of them literally. The more I learned, the more I saw that I hadn’t peaked yet.

But I fell. More like, “was knocked on my ass.” Hot on the trail of a miscreant terrorist elf named Bergin Vize, I had cornered him in a power plant. Just when I thought I could take him out, Something Happened. No one knows quite sure what, but it involved a lot of essence, a Teutonic ring of power, and a smidge of nuclear energy. I don’t remember anything after catching up to him. I woke up dead inside, with no real ability anymore, a mysterious mass in my head that feels like molten knives stabbing my brain whenever I try to manipulate essence. It gives me a really, really bad headache. Now I have just a few abilities, none of which is extraordinary for someone of my kind. Human normals can replicate most of what I can do with the right accessories. Except for one thing, which is literally sense essence. For some reason, that skill remains strong. It might be because it’s a biological function. Receptors in my nose and eyes are what make it work. Most fey have the ability to some extent, but not as strongly as druids. Researchers have been studying the phenomenon for decades with no real understanding.

So, it was time for my parlor trick. “Can I have everyone step away from the body a moment?” I said. Since working with Murdock, I was beginning to recognize more of the local force. In turn, they were getting used to me being around to help. The officers and medical examiner shuffled back to allow me a clear space.

I crouched over the victim, trying not to think about how young he was. Sometimes when you see dead bodies, you can tell if they knew what was coming. This kid did. He died scared. I shook the thought away and inhaled. The boy had been dead awhile. Between the cold and the rain, most of the essence he had recently come in contact with had faded. What hit me immediately was troll. Trolls have a strong essence that lingers. They also stink. That lingers, too. The next strongest essence was human, but not the victim’s. He had been with another human for an extended period before he died. To complicate matters, I picked up traces of two different elves and a fairy, all weak enough that I could not place the actual clans.

I told Murdock what I had found. “Our victim keeps very strange company.”

“Well, it is the Weird,” he said.

I stood up. “True. But you don’t get elves and fairies hanging out together much. And everyone is creeped out by trolls.”

“That’s Guild talk, Connor. Politics don’t mean shit down here.”

He had a point. Publicly, the Guild was all about fey crime investigation first, politics second. Operatively, it’s the other way around. It makes a show of unity between the fey races—druids and fairies, elves and dwarves all one big happy family. But underneath lies chronic suspicion of each other’s motives. It’s been going on for over a century. The Celtic and Teutonic races had a little war that got out of hand, and somehow it caused the event known as Convergence. Modern reality found itself merged with parts of Faerie that it thought were just myth and legend. And the fight continues, sometimes physically, but mostly in boardrooms now.

Me, I couldn’t care less about Faerie. I was born here. I have no nostalgia for a place I’ve never known. While leaders of both sides talk about return, I’ll take this reality, thank you. Besides, I’ve asked people who would know, and there’s no Guinness in Faerie, so it couldn’t be that great.

“You’re right. But it still complicates things. He came in contact with two of the races that could have dropped him here. If I thought about it, I could probably come up with a way for an elf to do it, too. They’re pretty strong,” I said.

Murdock shrugged. “Hence, the job. We have some leads now. And unless this kid ends up being the son of the president of the United States, you know the Guild is not going to take the case. So it’s mine. Ours, if you want in.”

I didn’t have to think about it. I hate unsolved kid murders, human or fey. “I’m in.”

He turned his face to the sky. “What about this cold? It’s only around here.”

I had a little mind hiccup. Seeing Murdock check out the sky had me thinking for a moment that he could see the residual essence I was seeing, which wasn’t possible for a human. Then I realized he was just doing what everyone does when they talk about the weather; they look up. I scanned the strip of sky above us. The haze of essence covered the entire block we were on. “I’m curious about that myself. There’s a residual haze of essence up there. Let’s check it out.”

I walked across the field, with Murdock a step behind me. We crossed the street to an abandoned warehouse. Grabbing the end of a fire-escape ladder, I gave it a hard tug. It clattered down to within a few feet of the pavement. I gave the metal rungs a good shake to make sure they’d stay attached. Even as I did it, I tried to understand my logic. Why would potentially pulling a fire escape down on top of me be somehow safer than having the fire escape collapse under me? Fortunately, it held. We jogged the six flights without speaking, our breaths streaking warm plumes into the cold air. Murdock and I work out often together. The fire escape was like doing the StairMaster, only colder. At the top, we used a vertical ladder to the roof. Actually, the remains of the roof. Most of it had fallen in, creating an open crater of space with a lovely view of the rubble-strewn top floor. The rising sun hit us full in the face, and I felt a surge of essence from Murdock. Even as I turned to look at him, it faded. As a human normal, Murdock’s essence should register on the low end of the scale. A few months earlier, he had helped me accidentally save the world and caught a nasty blast from an insane fairy. Or elf. It’s hard to describe. Anyway, since then his essence has been mucked up. Everyone’s essence is unique, like fingerprints, and the different species of fey resonate differently. Murdock’s essence fluctuates throughout the day from normal to damn strong. What makes that odd is that usually only the fey have strong essence. Elves and fairies. Trolls and dwarves. Druids and the like. Yet, Murdock always feels human. He says he doesn’t feel any different except for an occasional adrenaline surge. He’s on outpatient from Avalon Memorial Hospital now. I’m no healer, but I have a sneaky suspicion they’re as baffled as I am.

Above us, a streak of white haze marked a trail of essence. That’s where the cold was coming from. Weather manipulation was probably as old as Faerie itself. Keeping crops growing, protecting livestock, and clearing or clouding the skies for a battle were keen motivation for developing the ability. Boosting existing conditions was simple; changing clear skies to rain was complex. The end result depends on the manipulator’s level of skill and ability.

The after-effect of this particular manipulation was pedestrian in results but grand in execution. The ambient air temperature had been lowered below freezing, something that was fairly easy to do in early October near the open ocean because the air was already cold and changeable. The level of ability applied, however, was impressive. The haze was easily two or three blocks wide, nearly three-quarters of a mile long, and sufficiently long lasting to freeze water. That took Power of the serious kind. The northern edge of the haze, not far from where we stood near Old Northern Avenue, had begun to break up, indicating the effect was not being maintained. As it snaked southward, its density increased. At the far southern end, it appeared uniform. That told me that the spell had been initiated nearby and sent southward—first effects were the first to fade. Even as I watched, the spell eroded away from us.

“I doubt this is related, Murdock,” I said. “It’s a pretty powerful spell and looks like it had a defined purpose. I think the kid just happened to die here. Whoever has the ability to make this level of cold happen probably has more creative ways to kill someone and hide the body.”

“And the powerful don’t really care what happens down here beneath them,” said Murdock. I didn’t respond. I didn’t need to. That statement summarized an entire conversation for Murdock and me. He’s been on the police force a long time, long enough to get out of the Weird. I ended up living in it when I lost everything else, and it opened my eyes. No one cares about the Weird, at least no one official. Sure, around election time politicians will give a nice little speech about making the place better and cleaning out the riffraff. The only problem with that is most people outside the Weird consider everyone in it to be that riffraff. Murdock and I know better. Lots of good people live down here, people who fell through the cracks of everywhere else. And, yeah, some of them are a little shady. But most of them are only trying to get by. They don’t deserve to be ignored. A few nasties poke their heads up every once in a while. When they do, they find Murdock waiting to smack them down again. And if they’re fey, I get to help.

“So, what do you know about gangs?” I asked.

Murdock shrugged. “Just the majors. The Sapiens. The TruKnights. HiFlys. A couple of others. I know mostly snitches. I don’t keep close track of the rivalries unless it’s related to a case I’m on. I’ve got good ties with the gang unit, though. I’ll check to see if yellow and black is a known xeno.”

Xeno was the current catchy moniker for humans, mostly teenagers and early twentysomethings, who don’t like the fey and form a nice little social club whose entertainment involves harassment and, all too often, violence against the fey. The phrase itself doesn’t make sense unless you knew it was evolved from

“xenophobic gangs.” Don’t get me wrong—there are plenty of fey gangs, too, that technically meet the definition of xenophobic. But they are seen as the minority, and so their antagonists earned the xenophobic badge first.

I looked down at the field, then the surrounding area. “Do you know whose turf it is? Nothing’s here but empty buildings.”

I waited while Murdock flipped through his mental files. “Not sure. I don’t think anybody’s. It’s elves to the south. Human and fairies along Oh No. I think this is a noman’s-land.” Oh No was the local nickname for Old Northern Avenue. You hear the phrase used with everything from fear to laughter.

“If a gangbanger dies in an empty field and no one is around to hear it, is he a gangsta?” I said. Murdock didn’t laugh. I wasn’t really trying to be funny.

Murdock blew into his hands again. “I still don’t like this cold. You know I like to rule out anomalies at crime scenes only for good reason. You’re more likely to find out what it was for.”

“Sure,” I said. I had contacts that Murdock couldn’t necessarily cultivate. For one thing, I was fey. While it doesn’t always produce cooperation and honesty among the fey, simple psychology still applies. Like groups are more willing to extend trust to one of their own. I also lived right in the Weird, and people can tell. Places generate their own essence imprints, and if you stay in them long enough, you pick it up, too. Murdock smells like South Boston, not the Weird. That’s not a criticism. It’s like recognizing someone’s accent. Whatever attributes you assign to that is your own prejudice. The sun rose higher, and the temperature went up a little. The erosion of the weather spell seemed to increase. Interesting. That meant sunlight was meant to dissipate it. Whatever it was for, was for last night only.

“Looks like it’s going to be a nice day,” I said.

Murdock’s two-way radio squawked, then emitted a string of gibberish that pretended to be a woman speaking. Murdock cocked his head and lowered the volume. How cops understood those things was beyond me.

Murdock’s eyes flicked up to my face. “We’ve got another body.”

2

I moved several newspapers off Murdock’s passenger seat and got in his car. The man is fastidious about his personal appearance but has slob tendencies that manifest themselves in any vehicle he happens to drive. When the heat came on, I detected the faint whiff of chicken wings.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Down Harbor Street,” he said.

“Harbor? You got pulled off a murder scene for a dead body in the Tangle?”

He nodded. “Code came in possible high profile. We need to get in and assess before the Guild shows up.”

If the Weird is the ass end of Boston neighborhoods, the Tangle is the ass end of the Weird. The place gets its name from the chaotic network of streets that twist around each other, a confusing interplay of real and not-so-real lanes and buildings. To explain Boston’s oddly laid-out streets, an urban legend claims they’re paved over cow paths. In the Tangle, the cows apparently were drunk as hell. Even I admit that it’s a rough place. It’s no wonder the place makes the news. Drugs and the more esoteric types of body trades are the primary commercial ventures. Gangs rule the streets. Spellcasters openly offer their services for questionable enterprises. An inordinate number of people go missing, or at least were often last seen alive there.

If the Guild tends to ignore the happenings in the Weird, it positively pretends the Tangle doesn’t even exist. While I’m no longer the Guild’s biggest fan, they do have a point. Lots of people wish the Tangle didn’t exist. But it does, so there’s no excuse to let what goes on there, go on. And, naturally, the Guild only gets involved if someone important gets caught up.

We pulled onto Harbor Street, not technically the Tangle, but close enough. Murdock just parked in the middle of the street. Police privilege. He wasn’t the first. Two squad cars were already on scene, and an officer was frantically unraveling crime scene tape in a wide arc in front of a building thirty feet away. He looked pale, a little green around the gills even.

We stepped out of the car into more cold. I looked up and saw the southern edge of the weather spell ripple and shift as the last of it evaporated in the morning sun. We walked toward the cordoned-off storefront, two large plate-glass windows with slogans likeHELP US, HELP YOU andWE RISE ONLY

TOGETHER . A multihued sign above the door saidUNITY .

The signs reminded me that not everyone was willing to abandon the Weird. Just like I had come to care about the people down here, others did, too. Along with the sinners, a few hardy saints marched down here, struggling to make a difference. Some of them try to persuade people off the paths they have chosen. Some just hand out bandages to get someone through the day. At best, they make tiny dents. At worst, they get themselves caught up in the shifting alliances. I figured that’s what we were probably walking into now, someone who had poked their nose in a little too deep. We ducked the tape, and the smell hit me immediately. “Damn, Murdock, I can sense a lot of blood from here. It’s an elf.”

Two more officers stood just inside the door. One of them seemed to be concentrating on keeping his jaw clamped shut. The other one nodded at us. “Hope you haven’t had breakfast.”

Not a good sign. The police see a lot, especially in rougher neighborhoods. They deal with most of it with gallows humor. When they openly acknowledge the severity of a murder scene, it is definitely not a good sign.

“That bad?” asked Murdock.

“Worse,” said the officer. He pointed inside. “Nine-one-one call came from a phone in the front room. Door was unlocked when we got here. No one here but the victim.”

Murdock nodded. It is a time-honored tradition to remain anonymous in the Weird. Murdock gave me a quick look and stepped inside. I followed, already tamping down my senses to deaden the scent of blood.

The front room spanned the width of the building and ran back about thirty feet. Several groupings of cast-off furniture filled the near section, behind those was a Ping-Pong table, and behind that were three old metal desks. The walls were painted a jarringly vibrant shade of yellow and covered with posters proclaiming the virtues of friendship, cooperation, and racial harmony. The cynic in me couldn’t help snorting. Not that it wasn’t all well-intentioned. But this close to the Tangle, it smacked of naïveté. Two archways stood on opposite sides of the back wall. “The left side,” I said to Murdock. The stench was unavoidable.

Murdock went first. He stopped in the archway, blocking my view. “Sweet mother of God,” he whispered. He turned away from the door with his eyes closed. I was not going to like it. I stepped into the archway and froze.

Half of my brain began objectively assessing what I was seeing. The other half was screaming. The room was long and narrow, no windows, with a closed door at the rear. A desk had been flipped forward to my right. Everything that had been on it had scattered to the floor. Four of the five chairs in the room were either upturned or broken. The fifth was embedded in the back wall. Every conceivable surface was sprayed with blood. Floors. Walls. Ceiling. At my feet lay a left hand with the lower half of a forearm attached. I could see a right arm under one of the chairs. I assumed a separate bloody mangle near the desk was the lower extremities. Gobbets of body organs appeared to be smeared everywhere. To the right and about eight feet up, a head peered out of a bloody crater in the wall. The face had been flattened. Other than my ability to sense its essence, the only remaining clue to race of the individual was a long, pointed ear that was sticking straight out in the wrong direction. I closed my eyes. I could hear Murdock breathing through his mouth. If I was going to help, I had to use my nose. The scent of blood overwhelmed, the elf essence coating everything. Two things jumped out at me, though. At least one troll had spent a lot of time in the room, and I could sense a second. I moved forward a little.

“Don’t touch anything,” Murdock said. I nodded. Contaminating a crime scene like this would not be looked on tolerantly by anyone.

I could sense fear. The feeling is more intuitive than technical. I’m not a dog. But sometimes strong emotion seems to color how essence feels to me, like salt or pepper on a steak. The odd thing was, I wasn’t sensing the fear from the elf, which suggested to me that whatever happened to him was unexpected. He literally hadn’t seen it coming. But fear permeated the place, a fear intense enough to announce the presence of at least one human normal. That’s the one thing you can always sense from a human.

I turned away from the carnage. “We should get in that back room.”

Murdock led the way back to the front door. “How long ago did this call go out on the wire?” he asked the same officer by the door.

He looked at his watch. “Probably ten minutes or so.”

Murdock looked at me. “We don’t have much time. Let’s go.” We broke into a jog out the door, ducked under the tape again, and made our way to a narrow back alley. For this part of the neighborhood, the alley was surprisingly clean. Probably some do-gooder project. The back door to the building was the self-closing type, but wasn’t quite closed. Murdock pulled out his gun. I don’t carry a gun. Never did. Once I didn’t need to with all the other abilities I had. Now I avoid them because the metal content messes up whatever little ability I do have. I flattened myself against the wall behind Murdock. He stretched forward and tugged quickly at the door handle, simultaneously pulling back into firing stance. The door swung open, briefly revealed a darkened room, then began to close. Murdock grabbed it before it could lock. He scuttled across the face of the door, pulling it open as he moved to the opposite side. No sounds came out. No gunfire, which was good, and no explosive shot of essence, which was even better. Neither of us was equipped to deal with that. I ducked my head into the opening and back.

“Empty,” I mouthed to him.

Gun forward, Murdock leaped into the room to the opposite side again. I could picture him inside, the two of us pressed against the wall between us. I waited a long two seconds, listening. “Clear,” he called out.

I walked in to find Murdock holstering his gun. He kept the holster open. The back room was mainly storage, some stacked chairs and folding tables, boxes and filing cabinets, and some standard office equipment: a fax machine, a photocopier, and some kind of large-size printer. Faint levels of essence from all species permeated the space, in tribute to the apparent ethic of the place. Given that, the strong register of troll and human stood out. The troll was definitely the same one I had sensed in the office space. The human was strong enough to be identifiable, but with the mess in the other room, I couldn’t tell if the fear I had felt there was from the same person.

“I’d say someone hid in here while the action in the other room went on. When everything went down, they ran out the back door,” said Murdock.

Made sense to me. It would explain why the inside door was closed and the back door was open. Someone was in too much of hurry to worry about securing the door.

Murdock’s two-way squawked. It was only one word, so I understood it. “Company.”

Murdock looked around. “Did you touch anything?”

“Okay, second time you’ve done that. I’m not an amateur,” I said.

“Sorry. Guild’s here. Let’s go.” He had the good sense to look chagrined. I let it pass, because at the least it showed why I liked working with him. Murdock paid attention to details. We backed out of the room and left the door exactly how we found it. As we walked back up the building, I paused. More troll essence. It led off to the right, into the Tangle. It didn’t surprise me. If I were a troll and needed to blend in with the scenery fast, that’s where I’d go.

When we reached the front of the building, the activity level had increased dramatically in a short period of time. Two more police cars, an EMT van, the medical examiner’s car, a Boston morgue wagon and a Guild one, and a black town car now cluttered the street. The interesting action was occurring at the front door, where several people were arguing.

As we arrived, the officer we had left at the door was blocking the entrance, preventing people from getting inside, including one very attractive and angry fairy. The officer looked relieved when he saw us.

“Here he is now, ma’am. Lieutenant Detective Murdock is ranking officer. Sir, this is Community Liaison Officer macNeve.”

“We’ve met,” said Murdock.

Keeva macNeve spun on her heel to face us in full intimidation mode. She had her wings unveiled and shot a little essence into them to make the silvery gossamer flicker yellow and white. All five-foot-eight of her projected anger and authority. I love Keeva in a lather. She’s very good at it. She even somehow gets her mop of red hair to undulate. And to her credit, it works most of the time to get her what she wants.

“You two. I should have guessed,” she said.

“Hi, Keeva,” I said. “You’re up early. New job keeping you on your toes?” Keeva and I used to work together at the Guild. When I say “work together,” I mean we worked in the same general geographic area trying not to pummel each other as we solved cases. That’s just as much a comment on my behavior as on hers. She recently got promoted to Community Liaison Officer for Community Affairs due to a rather sudden vacancy. It’s a polite title. Internally at the Guild, the job is really Chief of Investigations.

“We have a major situation here, Connor. This is a Guild case.”

“We were just securing the scene,” said Murdock.

“Did you touch anything?” Keeva asked him. I resisted the urge to smirk. Murdock smiled tightly. “No, ma’am. Would you like to fill us in?”

“No,” she said. She turned back to the officer. “Move.” He looked at Murdock, who nodded. Bowing politely, he stepped aside, and Keeva strode through the door, followed by a rather sallow-skinned druid that I guessed was the Guild coroner.

“Left-hand door,” I called out. Through the plate glass, we watched them cross the room and walk directly to the archway. The coroner backed out immediately, even more sickly colored if that were possible, and bolted through the front door. He made sounds behind his vehicle that we all tried to ignore out of professional courtesy as well as our own need not to join him. I could only guess he hadn’t been on the job very long. After several moments, Keeva reappeared and paused at the archway as she obviously pulled herself together. She lifted her head and came outside.

“You could have warned me,” she said. I have to give her credit; she still looked more angry than ill. I feigned innocence. “You seemed in a rush.”

“My people will be here momentarily. You need to pull everyone out,” Keeva said. The coroner returned from behind the car with his kit over his shoulder.

For someone just arriving, she seemed too much in a hurry to get rid of us. “Who do you think the victim is, Keeva?”

She gave me a long tense look, then relaxed. “You’ll know soon enough. It’s Alvud Kruge.”

That gave me a “whoa” moment. If someone told me I would find an elf with international diplomatic ties smeared across the back room of a storefront on the edge of the Tangle, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. My gaze went up to the sign above the storefront. Unity. Of course, he would be here. Alvud Kruge has been an advocate for peace for decades, often at odds with his own people in the Teutonic Consortium back in Germany. Had been. He’d even been on the board of directors at the Boston Guildhouse, something that also didn’t endear him to his compatriots. Murdock rubbed his eyes. “God, I’ve had better mornings.”

“How did you know it was him?” I asked.

Keeva gazed at me without speaking for a long moment. I’ve known her a long time. That look means either she’s weighing how much she wants to share or how much she’s going to lie. “Kruge was a Guild director. His addresses get flagged for security. You know that, Connor.”

That was true. Guild members have a lot of enemies for one reason or another. The higher up in the food chain you go, the more people you have waiting to knock you down. Above all else, the Guildhouse protects its own. Even though they had the ill grace to kick me out when I was down, they still provided me a fair amount of security. Nothing flashy, but enough to let me sleep at night in my own bed in my own apartment without worrying about spells in the dark. As head of the crime unit, Keeva was at the top of the contact list for anything associated with Guild execs. So she went for the plausible. Nothing I could call her on. Yet. But that hesitation before answering intrigued me. As usual with her, more than the obvious was probably going on. I decided to play on her side for the moment.

“Someone used a weather spell last night. It extended almost from this exact location back up to Oh No,” I said.

Keeva looked up at the sky. The sun was fully up, and any trace of the essence haze I had seen earlier was gone.

“I thought the cold might be related. Did you notice anything else?” She even sounded like she was treating me like a colleague. While she’s not given to admitting inadequacies, Keeva knows that druids have higher sensitivity to more types of essence than fairies, even a member of the Danann clan like her. Dananns may be some of the most powerful beings on the planet, but they still can’t find a dwarf in a tunnel without a flashlight.

It was an easy thing to share for now. Her druid coroner would tell her the same thing later anyway.

“Some conflicting troll and human essence in the back room and the alley. I’m getting multispecies hits everywhere. No one I recognized.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Her eyes narrowed. “How did you get here so fast? It may be early for me, but I know damn well you don’t usually roll out of bed until noon.”

“Murdock called me in on another murder nearby when this call came in,” I said.

“It’s a kid. Looks like a fairy might have dropped him,” Murdock said. Keeva nodded absently as she examined the front door. She might have heard Murdock, she might not have. Boston P.D. calls were not that interesting to her or the Guild. She reached out and held the doorknob. It’s a little Danann trick. What they cannot always perceive with their eyes and nose, they can sometimes do by touch. She moved her hand to the doorjamb, then back to the knob. Her brow creased.

“Are you getting something?” I asked.

She looked up. “Hmm? I’ll read your report when it gets sent over, Detective. If you’re only at

‘might-have-dropped,’ it doesn’t sound like something the Guild needs to take. Kruge’s going to suck up a lot of resources.”

Murdock and I exchanged knowing looks. No surprises. Even if the Weird wasn’t involved, Kruge would have taken precedence. It’s the way of the world. His death was going to make international headlines. The kid up the street might make a quick mention on the early news, but after that it would be twenty-four-hour Kruge.

I could hear a low-level hum that was beginning to build. I knew that sound. Keeva and I both looked up, but no one else did yet. They’d catch it in a moment. The hum turned into a whirring noise, and six fairies came into view above us. A Guild security unit. Gods, I miss showing up with them. All tricked out in black leather, chrome helmets, and white energy pulsating in their wings. People get out of the way when they show up. Even cops. Like the cops standing next to us who sidled down to the sidewalk. It only takes “accidentally” getting hit once with a little essence bolt to get the message that you don’t mess with them. They landed in a loose circle around me, Keeva, and Murdock. I could feel Murdock give off one of his odd essence surges.

“It’s fine, guys,” Keeva said to them. “They were just leaving.” She looked at me with a cocked eyebrow.

I smiled. “It was nice seeing you, too, Keeva.”

“We both have work to do, Connor,” she said and walked back into the building. The security unit stepped in a little closer. “Relax. We’re going,” I said. Now came the pissing-game part. They blocked our way to the car, but without even asking Murdock, I knew we were not going to walk around them. With a reasonable look on my face, I stepped up on them and gestured politely with my hands that we wanted to pass. They in turn did not respond immediately to make us think they weren’t going to move. Then two of them stepped apart with barely enough room to walk between them. Murdock and I made sure to rub our shoulders against them as we passed through the gap. We didn’t look back as we went to the car, but as we got in, we almost simultaneously stared back at them. I wasn’t surprised to see all six turned in our direction. Murdock started up the car and slowly drove forward. He reached the crime scene tape and drove through it. The entire time we all stared at each other, which was more difficult for Murdock and me since we couldn’t make eye contact through those chrome helmets. This is how grown men maintain their dignity without breaking noses. It’s silly and important, and most women never understand it. We turned onto Summer Street and headed back to Old Northern.

“I hate those guys,” Murdock said.

“Yeah, I wish I had them as my crew, too,” I said.

Murdock allowed himself a smile. “She’s got her hands full with that. It looks interesting, but it’s going to end up all press conferences.”

That’s Murdock right there. He’s a smart guy who wants to stay a cop. Not a police officer. Not a department flunky. A cop. Cops enforce the law and solve crimes. Everything else is bull to guys like him.

I like the attitude, but I have to confess to a certain ambivalence. Most of us get into law enforcement because we want to make the world a better place. I could have gone the scholar route and run with the Druidic College crowd. Or the diplomatic route and gone to work for the Seelie Court. But I chose the Ward Guild because it gets to do stuff that produces results you can see. And, I have to admit, you sometimes get your picture in the paper. I miss the glory. I’ve been too busy working on purging my old arrogance to give up my vanity.

We pulled up at the first murder scene. The body had been removed, and the medical examiner had left. Just a couple of beat officers were wandering the field taking notes. Murdock turned the car around and drove up to the Avenue.

“Looks like I’ve got paperwork to start. What angle do you want to take?” Murdock asked. I considered for a moment. We really didn’t have much to go on. Multiple unknown essences and a possible gang connection. “I think I’ll start with the gang angle, see if anyone knew of anything going down last night.”

He nodded. “I’ll set you up with some profile. I’m going to try and ID the kid and work his associates, check a few sources.”

Murdock turned down Sleeper Street. I was glad I didn’t have to ask him outright for a ride. Cabs don’t like to pick people up down near the Tangle, and even if I expensed it, the fare would cut into my meager cash flow until the reimbursement check came in. Boston P.D. accounting is wicked slow. I got out of the car. “I’ll call you if I think of anything.”

“Yep,” Murdock said and pulled away. He never says good-bye, not even on the phone. I let myself into my building and felt the security spell as I passed inside. It’s one of the disability benefits from the Guild. Since I lost my abilities in the line of duty, they at least had the decency to provide some protections. Small compensation for kicking me out of my job, but at least I have some chance against some idiot who might come looking for revenge. I can open or close the door with a vocal command, even seal it, if I feel I’m in danger. I haven’t had to activate it, which is fortunate, and, frankly, I would use it only if truly necessary. The Guild would have to come and reset it on-site and that would be a little humiliating. There’s my vanity again.

I entered my two-room apartment and surveyed the mess. I sleep in the living room because I like using the bedroom as an office. An unmade, slept-in futon with a view of the kitchen can be depressing, but it’s mine. The clock on the counter blinked 11:14A.M. Not even noon, and I had had to look at two dead bodies. That’s my surreal life in the Weird. For the start of the mundane part of my day, I made some desperately needed coffee.

3

Coffee is not something that keeps me awake. It just keeps me alive. Whenever I end up working on a case with Murdock, it seems I never get enough sleep. After a short nap, I sat in my study, staring out the window at the planes taking off from the airport. I had dreamed of wandering lost through a field of bones.

For the past few months, I had been having prescient dreams. Lots of fey do, but I never did until recently. They’re not visual in the sense of watching a movie. They involve personal metaphors, and you have to figure out your own. I’m not very good at understanding them, mainly because the ability seems weak. When you’re fey and live in the world where Freud existed, it’s even more difficult to decide if a field of bones is a symbol of a dead kid in a vacant lot or the ruins of a battlefield. And, of course, spicy food gives me nightmares, but I love pepperoni.

After another fortifying cup of coffee, I threw on the trusty leather jacket and went out to make rounds. The neighborhood was in day mode, tired faces running the usual errands. I caught snippets of conversation here and there as I paused at corners or lingered near storefront windows. By far, the major topic was the death of Alvud Kruge. Whether or not Keeva wanted to keep his name quiet for a while, it didn’t matter down in the Weird. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who knew Kruge. No one mentioned the dead kid.

I made way back to the field off Old Northern. The cops had gone, leaving behind nothing but footprints and fluttering crime scene tape that, first, would keep no one out and, secondly, was pointless. The afternoon sun had melted the frozen ground into a muddy slop. Any evidence that had been missed this morning was likely sunken in the muck, leaving any hope of trace evidence gone for good. I strolled the perimeter of the field, trying to get a sense of the scene. As I had noted earlier, not a single building on the block appeared occupied, at least not legally. Most of them had the standard complement of broken windows and boarded-up doors. Some foot traffic had been through since the cops left. I could sense fey, mostly dwarves. Nothing unusual. No mysterious figures lurking in doorways. No black-cloaked man rushing away. No woman with big dark sunglasses leaving a single rose. Just one very pink, excited-looking flit descending toward me.

“Here you are!” he said.

“Hey, Joe.” Joe’s an old friend. Real old, as in been around since I was born. His real name is Stinkwort, which he doesn’t like to use for obvious reasons. As one of the diminutive fairies known as flits, he has enough hassle over his size and his pink wings. When you’re a foot tall, you manage what you can.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere! Have you heard? Alvud Kruge is dead!” He soared around me, his eyes lit with excitement.

“I know. I saw.”

“You did? I heard he was exploded. Was he exploded? Was it gross?”

I nodded. “That’s a fair description, and, yes, it was gross. How did you find out?”

He did a back loop right in front of me. “Oh, some flits got in before the Guild put up an essence barrier. No one can get in now. I just keep bouncing back.” He paused in a hover and leaned in confidentially.

“They’re getting good at that. I’m going back tonight to find a work-around.”

For want of a better word, flits can teleport. They have their own word for it, but it’s in Cornish and doesn’t flow off the tongue easily. It translates roughly as “I am here, and I want to go there in the time of the now” or something close to that. Ergo, teleport. How they do it is another matter and a mystery. Of all the fey that came through from Faerie after Convergence, the flits have apparently remained as they always were—secretive, happy, and a little crazy. They have little interest, no pun intended, in furthering scientific investigation as to how they exist.

“Sounds a little disrespectful, Joe.”

He shook his head. “Nah. The body will be gone. I just want to annoy those Guild goons by getting past them.”

I smiled. Flits are not the most welcome fey at the Guild, mostly because they don’t respond well to the organizational structure. They have their own loyalties. Besides, they’re easily distracted, which makes them lousy employees.

“I’m working on a case, Joe. A human kid died in this field last night.”

Joe frowned as he looked at the muddy expanse. He fluttered away, hovered right over the spot where the body was, then returned to hang in the air in front of me. “He was dead when he got here.”

That took me by surprise. “How do you know that?”

“There’s no echo. When he left the world, he left his shout somewhere else.”

This was news to me. “I don’t understand.”

He, of course, looked at me like I’m an idiot. “His shout. His last shout. Everyone shouts when they leave, and it echoes for a while. There’s no echo here.”

That’s flits for you. Know one your entire life, and he’ll surprise you with an ability you had no idea he had. It made a sort of logical sense. I knew flits could hear when someone died. I’ve been in Joe’s presence when another flit died nearby. He knew what happened immediately. So did every flit in the vicinity. I didn’t know about the echo, though.

“He had a broken neck. I thought he might have died from being dropped.”

Joe pulled his chin in, a look of doubt on his face. “You think a fairy killed him?” Despite what he has experienced over a very long lifetime, Joe refuses to believe that a fairy—no matter what clan—could possibly have done something wrong. When proved otherwise, he invariably chalks it up to aberrant behavior that couldn’t possibly happen again. It’s amusingly prideful. I glanced around the area. “It would fit with how we found the body. Can you do me a favor? The kid was missing a shoe. Can you check the area from above and look for an orange Nike?”

“Sure,” he said. He flew straight up and turned in a slow circle. After another moment, he came back down. “What’s an orange Nike?” he asked.

“A running shoe, Joe. Soft leather, rubber sole.”

He nodded vigoriously. “Oh, right. Heard about those.”

I shook my head and smiled as he popped back up and circled the field. No sooner did he sail out of sight over a building than three dwarves appeared at the end of the block opposite me. As they surveyed the scene, they stopped when they saw me and stared. I had a feeling I knew what was coming. They all wore the same black hoodies with yellow bandanas. They swaggered their way around the mud toward me.

“Got a problem?” said the one on the left. The other two hung back a little.

“We’ve all got problems,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. When you are alone in a desolate area, and three people wearing the same outfits come up to you, you don’t do two things: act scared or give attitude. The first is like tuna to a cat. The second is like a mouse. Unless, of course, they’re all wearing orange. Then, they’re probably just the late shift getting out of Dunkin’ Donuts.

“I don’t think you belong here,” he said. He didn’t change his voice. Given the way he was scoping me out, I guessed he was trying to figure if I was human or druid or glamoured. Dwarves don’t sense essence very well unless it’s pretty strong. Given my current disabled state, I doubt I gave off much of a druid aura at all. If trouble started, a human would be easy for them to handle; a lone druid would be manageable, even if he was in better shape than me; someone glamoured would be a wild card. It could be a fairy or an elf or some other powerful fey that might have an unpleasant reason for hiding his identity by appearing to be something else. Regardless, being on the receiving end of a dwarf fist is unpleasant for any of them.

“Sometimes I think I don’t belong anywhere,” I said in my best world-weary, leather-jacket-cool tone. It plays well in the Weird.

He moved a step closer. “I’m talking right here, right now.” Evidently, he had decided I was tuna.

“A kid died here last night. I’m working the case.”

Magic words. Of course, I didn’t actually say I was Guild or Boston P.D., but implying was enough. All three of them shifted their postures, not in relief, but with an air of nonchalance meant to convey they weren’t doing anything less legal than strolling down the sidewalk. In the Weird, people with badges are treated cautiously because they’re rarely friends.

“Know anything about that?” I asked into the silence.

Head shaking all around.

“He was wearing a black hoodie and a yellow bandana. Sound familiar?”

Again, more head shaking, with some shoulder shrugging thrown in. From three guys wearing black hoodies and yellow bandanas.

I slipped my hands in my pockets and looked around like I was appraising the real estate. “I heard this territory’s up for grabs.”

“You heard wrong,” said the first dwarf. The other two gave me hard, tough-guy stares.

“So, if I thought someone killed this kid in some kind of turf dispute, I’d be wrong?”

“There’s no dispute. This is Moke’s.”

I nodded as if in agreement. “I think I need to talk to Moke.”

The dwarf shrugged. “Maybe he’ll hear about that. He’s pretty busy, though.”

I smiled. “If you run into him, tell him Connor Grey said hello.”

The dwarf spun on his heel. “We got better things to do,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. The other two gave me one last look and followed him. I decided not to try to keep them talking when they clearly didn’t want to.

I didn’t know of any dwarves named Moke. And I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad one. I didn’t go down this end of the Avenue much, and gangs are diligently territorial. My end of the neighborhood tended to have a lot of human and fairy groups hanging out. They didn’t get on much with dwarves, so this Moke probably stayed on his end.

As I suspected, the whole thing was looking like a gang dispute. It was hard not to be a little disappointed. Gang murders meant not much work. The likelihood of members discussing the situation with the police was small. And the perpetrator probably had more to fear from his rivals than the law. It looked like I would get maybe one or two days’ pay out of it before Murdock had to move on to other things. The case would probably remain unsolved with a gang reprisal that I would never know about. For the second time in a half hour, something came flying down at me. I realized with horror that it was a winged Nike in all its pink and orange glory. As it got closer, Joe’s head appeared over the laces. He was actually sitting inside it.

“Why didn’t you say it was a sneaker? I know what a sneaker is,” he said.

“Joe, I said ‘find it’ not ‘take it.’ You’ve just contaminated evidence in a murder case.” For the record, it’s hard to look angry at someone sitting in a running shoe floating in the air. He pulled a long face. “I’ll put it back then. You could have been clearer.”

“Where was it?”

“On a roof four or five buildings over that way,” he said. As he pointed, he almost lost the shoe. I resisted the urge to grab it.

“Please, put it backexactly where it was and in the same position. I’ll meet you there. Wait for me in front of the right building so I can find it.”

“What if someone sees me?” he said.

“That’s the least of my concerns right now, Joe. No one’s going to see you if you don’t want them to.”

Most flits are shy to the point of reclusiveness. They’ve set themselves up for a vicious circle, though. They’re shy because their size often gives them unwanted attention, but because they’re rarely seen, they attract even more attention when they do appear. It wasn’t so bad in the Weird, since fey of different sizes were hardly unusual. Joe’s usually not so sensitive to it, but I could tell I upset him. He’ll get over it because he understands enough about my job to know he screwed up.

He turned the shoe and flew off. Skipping the shortcut through the mud, I made my way around the field to the next street over. More empty buildings, though a few of these looked like they might be inhabited. Rough curtains hung in warehouse windows, and sometimes people even showed their faces through sooty glass. This end of the Avenue was not known for entertainment. It was close to the Tangle, which meant trouble, so only the truly desperate lived here or, ironically, the kind of people that the desperate feared.

At the top of a building stoop, I found Joe standing defiantly in full view of the street. I knew he’d get over it.

“Sorry,” he said as I walked up the steps.

“Yeah, I know. I didn’t mean to yell. Can I get up to the roof from here?”

He nodded. “It’s empty as far as I can tell. Smells bad, too, and not in a good way.”

I pursed my lips, then decided not to ask for a clarification of that last part. We entered the building through a smashed-open door. Joe hovered over my right shoulder as we ascended the stairs. He was right. The place stank, bodily secretions being the main culprit. The sagging staircase rose dimly before me and would have had the same gray, dingy look should sunlight ever penetrate. Spray-painted graffiti was most evident the first two flights, in several languages and three alphabets, but dwindled as we went upward. The smell faded, too, but that was probably due more to open windows allowing wind through than any diminishment of the source.

The stairs topped out at the roof through a small, doorless penthouse enclosure. The sun blinded me briefly after the dark interior of the building. I examined the roof surface before stepping out. In this part of town, rotting roofs come with the package. This one looked more solid than most. Others had been there before, demonstrated by three mismatched lawn chairs, a wooden telephone cable spool set on its side as a table, and enough empty bottles and cans to open a recycling center.

“Where is it?” I asked.

Joe put on a mock-curious face. “What? You mean that strange orange Nike shoe sneaker over there by the washing machine that I’ve never seen before in my life?”

I can’t stay angry at Joe for long. Annoyed yes, but it’s not in his nature to provoke me, and he always feels bad when he does. “That would be the one,” I said.

I walked over to the incongruity that was a washing machine on a roof. Whenever I see something like that, I wonder about the motivation of the people who put it there, why it occurred to them to lug something so heavy to such an odd place. The Nike lay on its side near it. I could only sense Joe’s essence at the spot, so that was a good sign that no else had been there. It helped confirm my suspicion that the kid lost it in the air.

“Well, at least your essence fades quickly. No one will find it if they look.” Flit essence can be elusive. Flits being so small, their essence fades almost instantly under most conditions. I scanned the nearby buildings. We were about a quarter mile away from the field where the kid had ended up. I couldn’t see any sight lines that might produce witnesses, just other roofs that no one would likely be on in the rain and cold of the previous night. Off to the south, someone floated up into view. Even at this distance, I could see a slight distortion in the air that indicated wings. The sun glinted off something metallic. The chrome helmet of a Guild security guard. He drifted back down. I brought my attention back to the running shoe. Having been out in the rain, it had no more essence on it than the kid’s other clothing. I squatted down to look more closely. A few dark spots flecked the visible side.

“Joe, after you picked this up, did it touch the ground again or did anything drip on it?”

Stinkwort pulled his head out of the washing machine. “No. I picked it up by the laces and put it back exactly how I found it.”

I leaned as close as I could get my nose to the Nike without falling over. When you work for the Guild, no one blinks an eye at what a druid might do to sense essence. When you’re all alone on a roof with nothing to identify you as an investigator, you look like a guy with a shoe fetish. I hoped no one could see me. I waited for any essence to assert itself. After a long moment, just the slightest hint whispered up to me, so faint I was worried I might be imagining it. Elf essence. Only one thing would retain any indication of essence after that much rain. Blood.

I looked back toward the Tangle, then turned to sight the line to the field. The shoe was almost on a straight line between Kruge’s storefront and the dead kid. Could be a coincidence. Or could be this wasn’t just a gang feud.

“Did anyone see you, Joe?”

His eyes narrowed at me. “Just some dwarves.”

“Black hoodies? Yellow bandanas?”

He nodded. “I don’t want to ask. Why?”

I shrugged. “Just curious. There’s some elf blood on the shoe.”

He gave me an exasperated look. “Just some elf blood, he says. Like one of the most famous elves in the city didn’t just get exploded up the street on the same night. Like, oh, did you happen to see a gang of marauding dwarves, he says. Nothing to worry about, Joe. Nope, nope, nothing at all.”

“You’re letting your imagination run away with you, Joe,” I said. “I’m sure it’s just coincidental.”

“Just because it’s a coincidence, doesn’t mean I can’t get killed because I touched some smelly Ikey.”

“Calm down, Joe. And it’s a Nike. And it doesn’t smell. It’s brand-new.”

“Except for the elf blood,” he said.

I tried to give him a reasonable look. “It’s just a little. Hardly any. I can’t even tell if it’s Alvud Kruge’s.”

He rolled his eyes. “I feel so reassured.”

“Look, Joe, it’s a gang feud, pure and simple. He could have picked up the elf blood anywhere. He had an odd mix of essence on him, so there’s no telling where he got it. Murdock and I are running the gang angle, and once he gets some gang names to contact, this will be all over. No one even knows you were involved.”

He looked at me unconvinced. “You forget the marauding dwarves.”

“They weren’t marauding, and unless dwarves can suddenly fly, there’s no reason for them to connect you to a shoe on a roof they couldn’t even see.”

He nodded. A sly look came over his face. “I bet you want to know about gangs.”

“That’s the plan.”

He smiled knowingly. “I know someone who can help you. Knows all the gangs from here to Southie. Want me to set up a meeting?”

Joe is not a poker player. Every once in a while, he gets it in his head that I’m lonely. So he finds some poor soul that he thinks is just perfect for me. The problem is, most of the time “just perfect” to Joe means “odd person I met that no one else will go out with.” All evidence to the contrary, I tend to be a little more discriminating. “I don’t need a date, Joe.”

“No! Honor spit! I really know someone who knows gangs and would be juiced to talk to you.”

“Okay, set it up, then. I’ll bring Murdock.”

He hesitated for a moment, which made me think he might be fibbing about a date. “Okay. That’s okay. Just don’t say Murdock’s a cop. He might not be happy about that.”

“Fine,” I said. I pulled out my cell phone and called Murdock. He was not going to like how I was about to complicate the case.

4

In spite of being amused by Stinkwort’s paranoia, I was getting uncomfortable standing in front of the building waiting for Murdock. Clearly, word had spread about our presence on the street. An assortment of people found time to stroll by with no apparent errand in mind. A few peered at us curiously, as if a stranger hanging out in front of an abandoned building was surprising in this part of town. To a certain extent, it probably was. Around that part of the neighborhood, strangers didn’t like to attract too much attention unless they were trying to send a message. I hoped ours said keep away until the cops show up. Most people looked at us suspiciously, though. Joe’s marauding dwarves showed themselves down at the one corner. They numbered six now. One more, and they’d be a cliché. Murdock’s voice mail had picked up when I called, and he hadn’t called back yet. He usually called me back right away, but it had been almost twenty minutes. I didn’t want to leave a message about the running shoe at the station house without talking to him, though. It was his case, and he should be on-site when a unit came to pick up the evidence.

Joe fidgeted about the stoop. “Do I have to stay? The windows across the street have eyes in them, and they’re not an even number.”

“Yes, we have to see if Murdock wants to arrest you.”

“What?” he shrieked. Several heads turned in an avid hope that some action was about to happen. We disappointed them.

“Just kidding, Joe. We do need to tell him what happened. It’s up to him what he wants to report.”

“Well, I wish he’d hurry up. I’m bored.”

I just nodded. I was used to Joe’s definition of interesting. It had no logic to it, so I gave up trying to understand it years ago. I have seen him stare at a patch of grass for hours with an avidity I couldn’t fathom. And yet, here we were in one of the more sketchy parts of the Weird with a veritable parade of fey folk slinking by, and he was bored.

I idly wondered if the Tangle were a taste of what Faerie was like, if the old country still existed. Few humans lived down this end of the neighborhood. Humans did live in Faerie, but none seemed to have come through the Convergence. The concentration of fey folk had to have been high in Faerie, by definition. With all that power, all that essence manipulation, it’s no surprise that legends portray the place as dangerous and precarious. Even in the short time we stood on the sidewalk, I could feel little spell pings tossed our way. I could no longer actively discern their exact nature, but having been in places like this before my accident, I could guess.

Some people were probably checking to see if we were glamoured, most likely me. Flits don’t lend themselves to glamouring. They’re too small to pretend to be something else. Occasionally, they might glamour themselves as small animals or even plants, but it was much easier for them so use their own essence to fade from sight if they were trying to blend into their surroundings. Besides, they don’t really like using essence outside themselves, which is what a glamour is—essence concentrated in something like a necklace or a stone or a ring that operates almost independently of the user. Sometimes glamours are harmless, like enhancing one’s appearance. Everyone has something they wish they could change about themselves, and some people prefer glamours to a nip and tuck. Even that has its limits, though. More than a few people have gone home with a hot babe only to discover later they were with a woman in the geriatric league. Sometimes they are used for privacy, like when someone just wants to just go about their business without having to interact with people they know. Sometimes they’re meant to deceive, which I admit has come in handy with investigative work on occasion. Ultimately, glamours are lies. They go to the crux of relationships. If you can’t trust what you’re seeing, then maybe you can’t trust that person at all. And that’s why I kept getting pinged. When you live in a dangerous neighborhood, you want to know who is who and how much to be on guard around them. Beside me, Joe made a growling sound. A moment later, he threw a broadcast sending.We don’t have drugs!

I chuckled. Half of the people who went by were using sendings to ask us for drugs. Certain sciences call it telepathy, but conceptually sendings are different. You impress auditory thoughts on essence and direct them where you want them to go. That’s a fey ability up and down. You get used to the little whispers in your mind, unless, of course, you’re annoyed because you’re bored. Joe flinched. “Ow! Did you feel that?”

“Yeah.”

“Idiots,” he muttered.

A short spasm in my head told me that someone had cast a spell nearby. Since my accident, some spells feel like a nail in my brain. I haven’t tracked the types that have the most effect to detect a pattern, but scrying definitely tops the list. Someone starts trying to predict the future, and it’s migraine hell. Whatever spell just went off wasn’t scrying, but the fact that Joe felt it as pain meant it was hard and crude in execution, the equivalent of someone blowing a whistle in your ear. It usually indicated someone who had little training or was in a big hurry.

I looked at my watch. A half hour had gone by since I called Murdock. He tended not to call me only when he was either in a meeting or on radio silence. Then and during the occasional private recreational activity. It was a little early in the day as far as the latter, even for him, and he still called me if he were not too, let’s say, intimately distracted. It annoys the hell out of his dates. A waft of something acrid tickled my nose. “You smell that, Joe?”

“That burning smell? I thought it was just part of the natural aroma of the street.”

Others had picked up the scent. Heads turned, craning to look up at the buildings, consternation fixed on faces. I did it myself, but couldn’t see anything. The wind shifted, and the odor increased. A huge gust of wind came up, and a cloud of thick black smoke engulfed us from the doorway behind us. Tears burned in my eyes as I stumbled down the steps to the sidewalk. The wind shifted again, and I was able to see again. Joe popped into view directly in front of me. He must have winked out as soon as he sensed the smoke coming.

I wiped my eyes and turned around. Smoke spewed from the upper stories of the building. Along the cornice, I could see flames. “Dammit! Joe, the shoe! Get the shoe!”

He vanished, then reappeared immediately. “Okay, just to be clear this time, you want me to pick it up and bring it here, right?”

“Yes. Go! Go!”

I swore under my breath as he vanished again. It was the spell. Someone had been watching, someone who actually had a reason to watch us. Given the time delay, I’d go the minion route. Someone reported back to someone, and that someone ordered up a fire spell. I spun around to the street. In the gathering crowd, I could see the six dwarves that had lingered up the street. That didn’t mean there hadn’t been one I missed. Hell, they could have just used a cell phone.

I stalked across the street toward them. It’s a measure of how my face must have looked, because the small crowd parted as I came up on the curb. I went up to the first dwarf, the same one whom I had spoken to earlier, and poked him on the shoulder. “Who’d you call? Moke?”

At the mention of Moke, several onlookers moved farther back. A couple even turned heel and walked away. The dwarf looked down at his shoulder, then back at me. “Nobody.”

I poked him again. “Was it Moke?”

He grabbed my forearm with a hand like a vise grip, and my body shields activated. They’re not much good anymore, just enough to blunt the force of a blow, but I would still feel it. In my anger, I’d forgotten. You don’t poke a dwarf if you can’t follow through with a fight.

“I said nobody.” He flung me away from him, and I sprawled into the street. As I got to my feet, he moved toward me. Before he reached me, a blur of pink light flashed between us, and he stopped. Joe hovered in front of the dwarf. In one hand, the charred remains of the Nike dangled. In the other, the sharp white flame of his sword pointed directly at the dwarf’s nose.

“Got a problem, shorty?” Joe asked. He grinned, a tough, cold line across his face. Joe has a repertoire of grins. This one was for sending chills down the spine, and it works like you wouldn’t believe. The dwarf didn’t move and didn’t take his eyes off the blade. To the casual observer, it doesn’t look like much, just a few inches of narrow white light with flickers of blue flame surrounding it. But anyone who has ever faced a flit with a blade knows better. It’s sharp as a thought and burns with essence.

“Let it go, Banjo. We’ve got company,” said one of the other dwarves. Banjo shifted his gaze to Joe’s face, then mine. He stepped back. A siren cut through the sounds the burning building was making. I felt more than saw a car pull up behind us quickly and stop.

“We got better things to do,” Banjo said. He walked off, with his cadre of boys fast on his heels. Joe hovered after them a bit just to make sure they didn’t change their minds.

“Everything okay here?”

I turned to see Murdock leaning against his car. A collection of tough-looking elves and fairies wearing red and black leather posed on the other side of the car, an amusing visual effect he had no idea was going on. “Yeah, just a little arson and a smidge of street fighting.”

Murdock smiled and nodded up the street at Joe. “He’s better than a Doberman.”

I nodded, rubbing my shoulder. “Yeah, and more fun to drink with.”

A deep horn blast announced the arrival of a fire truck. Murdock looked up at the burning building. “I’m going to guess that has something to do with the evidence you mentioned.”

“Yeah. Did.”

Joe took that moment to return. He smiled—much more pleasantly—and handed me a smoldering lump of rubber and canvas. “I’m not bored anymore.”

I took the shoe by its laces and held it out to Murdock. “This is the kid’s. It had some elf blood on it, but it’s gone now obviously.”

Murdock leaned in his car window to retrieve an evidence bag. Murdock held the bag open, and I dropped in the shoe. He zipped the bag closed and held it up, waiting for the smoldering to die off for lack of air.

“Elf blood,” he said. He looked at me with a knowing smirk. “Why do I not like the implications of that?”

“Because you know I think it was Kruge’s, even though I couldn’t definitively sense it, and now I can’t prove it. And because you don’t like coincidences any more than I do, we’re going to have to figure out how the cases are connected without missing other evidence in case they’re not.”

He pursed his lips, nodding. “Yep.”

That’s why I like working with Murdock. No bickering without a good reason. Oh, sure, we disagree, sometimes a lot. We debate, though, not argue, and usually end up at a place we’re both comfortable with. Just like he knew where my thinking was heading, I knew he wasn’t going to discourage me until he thought the trail was dead cold.

“This is the first time I touched it,” Joe blurted.

Murdock looked at Joe, then me. “Oh?”

I shook my head in amused exasperation. “He sat in it.” I told Murdock what happened. No surprise, he shrugged.

“Doesn’t matter now. The bigger question is when you were spotted.”

Two cop cars appeared on either end of the block. Another fire truck pulled up, followed by an ambulance van. “Um, Murdock, shouldn’t you be doing something?”

He craned his neck over the roof of his car. “Yeah. Get in. If we don’t leave now, they’ll box us in.”

“Leave? Don’t you have to police something?”

He walked around his car and got in. “Homicide, Connor. Is there anyone in the building?”

I looked at Joe. “Nope,” said Joe.

“Then get in before my clothes start smelling like smoke.”

“I’m going to watch the fire,” said Joe.

“Suit yourself. Let me know about your gang contact,” I said. I don’t think he heard me, though. He was already drifting higher up for a better view. I tossed some juice bottles off the passenger seat and got in. Murdock backed all the way up the street to the corner and bounced the car around. He coasted over to Summer Street and made his way back toward downtown.

“What took you so long?” I asked.

“Doctor’s appointment. New healer.”

“What did he say?”

“He says what they all say. He can’t find anything wrong with me except my essence is suped-up. I told him I’m fine, it’s only the fey who seem to think I’m not.”

I nodded. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with you, Murdock. Remember that kid, Shay? How I kept telling you he had an oddly strong essence for a human? He still felt like a human normal to me. You feel like a fey human, if there’s such a thing. You feel like what I bet a human from Faerie would feel like. It’s never been seen post-Convergence, and they don’t understand it.”

As he stopped for a red light, he gave me a sideways glance and smiled. “Sounds familiar.”

“Touché,” I said. At Avalon Memorial, they didn’t understand my condition either. “Who’s the doctor?”

He accelerated with the light change. “I don’t think he’s a doctor, actually. He said he was a medic. Do the fey have army medics?”

I laughed. “That’s his title.Midach. He must be old school. You should ask Gillen Yor his name. He’ll know.”

“Why so interested?”

“Beyond the obvious that I hope you’re okay, if he can figure out what’s going on with you, maybe he can figure out what’s going on with me. We sort of have opposite problems. The source might be the same.”

“I knew this would end up being about you,” he said.

I felt anger rise. “I said I hoped you’re okay, didn’t I? Don’t you think I feel enough guilt about it?”

As usual, Murdock put me right in my place. He laughed. “I’m joking, ya fool. I knew it would irritate you. It’s not your fault I have some freaky essence now, just like if you got shot on another case, it wouldn’t be my fault. Unless, of course, I shot you. By accident, I mean. Let it go, Connor. I’m fine.”

“Jerk,” I said. I slouched deeper in my seat. He was right, of course. But I had put a lot of people in danger on that case, especially him. I had involved him—a human normal—in a situation where ability was being manipulated on an enormous scale. It could have killed him. It almost did. I’m still not sure if it was ego or error. Either way, I didn’t like doubting myself. I’m not used to it. I didn’t say anything more. I know what it feels like to have something wrong that no one knows how to fix.

“Anyway, we ID’d the kid,” Murdock said. “Dennis Farnsworth. Sixteen years old. Some petty shoplifting charges. All dropped. No big trouble.”

I knew it. Sixteen. “Until now.”

“Until now,” Murdock repeated.

“Any family?”

He nodded. “Mother. Two sisters. They live on D Street.” He turned onto D Street. My stomach gave a slight clench. I knew what was coming. “Have they been notified?”

“Yeah. We get the easy part. All we have to do is question her while she’s in shock.”

I hate talking to parents about their dead kids. You knock on a door. It opens. They take one look at you with your solemn face, and they know. They always know. You don’t even have to be wearing a uniform. They can smell cop a mile a way. Doesn’t matter what rung of the social ladder they’re on. They know a cop who has that look isn’t stopping by for the Auxiliary Association’s annual donation drive. The last thing they want to talk about is how maybe their kid was not hanging with the right crowd. Sunset was coming on, the sky turning a deep purple. The streetlights hadn’t kicked on yet, but already house lights burned more visibly, the taillights of cars standing out a little more. You travel far enough down D Street, you get out of the Weird and into South Boston. If you don’t travel that far, you end up in the twilight zone between the two neighborhoods. Not dangerous with a capital “D,” but barely safe with a small “s.”

It was easy to spot where the Farnsworths lived. The triple-decker wooden townhouse shone with light. One lone news van from the local cable station had parked not too far away. I could lay odds I knew where the network stations were. Murdock parked by a fire hydrant.

We walked up the sidewalk to the house, nodded to the beat officer who was keeping an eye on things, and mounted the porch steps. Several kids stared at us, an unusual mix of fey and human, street kids, with hard stares and harder lives. No gang colors that I could see. We went through the open door into the house, the heat of many people wafting over us. To the right, a staircase led to the upper apartments. The Farnsworth place was on the first floor, another open door that met the entryway on the landing.

Murdock stepped in first, pausing to take in the scene. Over his shoulder I could see people clustered in a modest living room. On the couch a red-eyed woman sat, stout, thin, dyed blond hair clipped to one side with a child’s red barrette. She had her arm wrapped around a small girl, who half lay in her lap, maybe seven years old, with solemn eyes roaming the room. Another young girl, a few years older, sat on her other side, her face pressed against her mother’s shoulders, eyes as red as the woman’s.

“Mrs. Farnsworth?” Murdock spoke softly.

The woman lifted her head in our direction without speaking.

“Mrs. Farnsworth, I’m Detective Leonard Murdock. I’m very sorry for your loss today.”

She didn’t so much nod as rock back and forth slightly. “Thank you.”

“Is there somewhere we can talk?”

Another woman crossed the room, sat on the couch, and with gentle hands took the younger child into her own lap. Mrs. Farnsworth squeezed her other daughter’s hand and stood. Without speaking, she led us through a crowded hallway lined with more people. Their conversations fell away as we passed, their faces tracking with questions.

We entered a back bedroom, obviously her room, crowded with a bedroom set too large for the space. Everything was neat and orderly, the faint odor of dime-store rose water in the air. She sat on the bed.

“Mrs. Farnsworth, when was the last time you spoke to Dennis?”

“Last night before I went to work. He was supposed to be watching his sisters. Molly said he went out about eleven o’clock and made her swear not to tell. He said he’d be back in an hour.”

“Did he seem different? Preoccupied? Worried?”

She shook her head. “He seemed fine. Happy. It was just a regular day.”

“Do you know if he was in any kind of trouble?” Murdock asked.

She shook her head again. “Not that I knew. He’s that age when it isn’t cool to confide in his mother.”

“What about his father?”

Her voice and face went flat. “Gone. Ten years.”

“What about friends? A lot of kids on the porch.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know his friends anymore. I work two jobs. Denny was quiet. He was trying to stay out of trouble.”

“Was it working?” I asked. Murdock shot me a look, but I ignored him.

“I don’t know,” she said in a tiny voice.

I crouched down so that she could look down at me. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Farnsworth, I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Connor Grey. I’m helping to investigate any unique aspects to this…situation. Do you know why Dennis was on Summer Street?”

She shrugged. “He hung around up the Weird. Found some group that he liked.”

“A gang?”

Finally, she stirred out of her lethargy. “He is not in a gang! Denny hated gangs. That’s how he got in trouble—some gang trying to recruit him. His high school counselor got him involved in a community group.”

I liked and didn’t like where this was going. “Unity?”

She nodded. “That’s it. He seemed to like it there. His grades went up.”

“Did Dennis know Alvud Kruge?”

Her eyes searched the carpet. “He talked about Mr. K. all the time. He liked him.”

“Do you know what happened to Alvud Kruge today?”

She closed her eyes. “Yes. My son couldn’t have done something like that.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that.”

“Mrs. Farnsworth, did Dennis confide in anyone?” Murdock asked.

Her face hardened a bit as she looked at him. “He had a girlfriend. Crystal. Crystal Finch.”

“Do you have an address or phone number?”

“No. Somewhere on E Street. He ended the relationship.”

“Why’s that?” Murdock asked.

“Because I asked him to. That girl was bad news. Bad family. Trouble.”

“Is there anyone you can think of that might have wanted to cause Dennis harm?”

She exhaled sharply through her nose. “Look where we live. I work two jobs, and this is the best I can do. No one needs a reason to harm you around here. And I can’t think of a single reason why someone would…why someone would…” She teared up. “No, I don’t know.” The tears began to spill.

“Mrs. Farnsworth…” Murdock began.

She bunched a tissue under her nose. “I want my girls. Please, get my girls. I don’t want to talk anymore.”

Murdock pulled a business card out of his pocket. “Okay. Here, please call me if you think of anything. I’ll call on you tomorrow to see if you need anything.”

She took the card wordlessly, not looking at it. I stood and backed out of the room with Murdock. He turned back a moment. “If I may ask one more question, Mrs. Farnsworth, did Denny have a pair of orange Nikes?”

She shook her head. “No. He had white sneakers. I don’t know what kind.”

“Thank you,” Murdock said. We made our way back through the apartment. Murdock paused by the couch and squatted in front of the older girl. “Are you Molly?” She nodded.

“Did Denny say where he was going last night?”

She stared at Murdock with wide, solemn eyes. “No. He said he had something important to do.”

“Did he say what?”

Molly glanced at the woman cradling her sister. She leaned close to Murdock. “No, but he went with Crystal,” she whispered. “I saw her up the street. Don’t tell Mum or she’ll be mad.”

Murdock smiled to reassure her. “I won’t. Your mum’s asking for you and your sister.”

We left the apartment. The porch was decidedly emptier than when we had arrived. The fey kids were gone. Of the ones left, Murdock started asking about their relationship to Dennis. I stepped down to the sidewalk. He was just covering the bases. I was willing to bet that the kids who really knew Denny Farnsworth had left when they saw us. Tough kids don’t talk to cops if they can avoid it. I wandered back to Murdock’s car. As I leaned against the fender, I noticed a woman a couple of houses down. If the height of her skirt were any indication, she had not taken into account the coming night chill. And if the flash of her sequin top was any indication, she had wandered into the wrong end of the neighborhood. She wasn’t watching the street, though. She watched the Farnsworth house, craning her neck every time a girl stepped onto the porch. Just the girls. A gut-level intuition kicked in. I strolled over. As I got closer, I could see the heavy makeup, the overdyed hair. She had that look that said early thirties, trying to cover up enough wear and tear for someone in her forties desperately hoping she looked in her twenties. It probably worked later in the evening. Without looking at me, she said, “Not now, hon. I got business.”

“Mrs. Finch?” I said.

Her head whipped around fast on that. She eyed me up and down, then turned back to watch the house.

“Not hardly.”

“Looking for Crystal?”

She bit her lower lip and looked at me sideways. “You know where she’s at?”

“That answers my next question. She’s not here, Mrs. Finch. I got the feeling inside she wouldn’t be welcome.”

She flipped her hair and stared directly at me know. Cool, hard eyes, not the type I would find comforting if I were looking for a little short-term company. “Ain’t no Mrs. Finch. That was Crystal’s daddy’s name. You a cop?”

“Not really. But I’d still like to talk to Crystal.”

“Oh, you’d ‘like to talk to Crystal,’” she mimicked. “Get in line, buddy. I haven’t seen her in three days. When I heard about Denny, I thought I might get her here.”

I glanced up at the house. Murdock had made his way onto the steps and was talking to the last couple of kids remaining. “You don’t seem very upset.”

She shrugged. “Not my kid. Shit happens.”

“What can you tell me about Crystal?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Crystal? How about she’s an ungrateful little bitch who owes me seventy-five bucks, and if she don’t turn up real soon, she can just stay wherever she’s landed. How’s that?”

“Very maternal,” I said.

She curled her upper lip. “Go to hell, Mr. Not-really-a-cop. You see Crystal, you tell her I want my cash.” She walked away, her high heels boring holes into the sidewalk. I watched her go and thought you don’t have to be fey to land on the wrong side of the street around here. I went back to Murdock’s car to wait for him. Night descended on the city, a darker night than usual. Death may be the great equalizer, but the Weird is a close second. That two people died there, one so prominent, the other so not, demonstrates it. The fact that they had a connection to each other shows how the high and low can both find the same knock on the door.

5

A high-pitched ringing jolted me out of sleep. I knew that sound and dreaded it every time I heard it. One of my protection wards had gone off. I slid out of bed into my jeans in one smooth motion. In less than two seconds, I was across the room and standing to the side of the door with a classic Louisville slugger in my hand. The bat had two functions: it was charged with a deflector spell that would activate if someone threw essence at me, and it hurt like hell if I whomped someone with it. In either case, the idea was to give me some breathing space to call for help if I needed it. Several wards protect my apartment. Some of them are passive—they act like barriers against charged essence. Some are reactive—like those that test for an individual’s essence to determine whether that person is someone I trust. That’s how people like Murdock and Joe can come and go without freaking out the wards. And some are active, doing a regular scan for any unusual activity. None of them will completely protect me. That’s where the signal wards come in. They’re scattered around the building and keyed to my essence. I touch one, and an emergency signal shoots to the Guild. Only I know where they all are. They are my fail-safe, presuming I live long enough for help to arrive. My apartment is on a dead-end hallway, so anyone making the turn at the top of the stairs has only my place to go to. The alarm that had gone off was a simple proximity alert at the end of the outside hall. It’s a silent alarm—only I can hear it in my head. I felt another alarm go off, the one within five feet of the door, followed immediately by a banging.

“UBS,” a voice called out.

I relaxed, but only a little. It wouldn’t be the first time someone pretended to be a delivery service before they turned all assassin on you.

“Got any ID?” I called back. I did not move to look through the peephole. That would be expected. Whoever was on the other side of the door would know where I was standing at that moment and could take it as an opportunity to, oh, blow a hole in my head.

“Hello?” the voice said with an edge of annoyance.

I gave a quick look through the peep. He looked like a brownie—tawny skin, curly hair, button nose. The essence trickling through the door verified it as well. And he had the standard brown UBS uniform with the yellow shield sewn into the pocket, though that could have been filched. Brownies aren’t the most powerful of the fairies. They didn’t have enough essence to make much of a living charging wards or serving as useful bodyguards. They are good at helping with simple tasks that people hate doing, like house-cleaning. A lot of brownies actually did market themselves as housekeepers. The one drawback is their tendency to take insult over the slightest matters. At which point, they mutate into boggarts and become obsessed with vindication. Where they could be quite shy and pleasant as brownies, their boggart aspect is relentlessly annoying. Some bright guy turned that into an advantage by starting the United Brownie Service, one of the most reliable delivery services in the world. When UBS comes calling, you either answer or risk being stalked by an angry boggart.

“How’d you get in the building?” I asked.

“The door was open. Look, I’m double-parked. I’ve got a letter for Connor Grey. Are you him?”

“Just leave it,” I said.

“I need a signature.” Definitely annoyed now. I gave another look-see. His eyes were bulging a little. If I teased him out a bit more, he’d go boggie. I once knew a guy in a divorce case who lived on the run for three months with a screaming, maniacal boggart chasing him down with a subpoena. Not pretty. I decided to risk it and open the door. You can’t live your life assuming every nutty fairy at your door wants to kill you. The brownie gave me a grudging, almost relieved, smile. I doubt they like going boggart any more than someone likes being on the receiving end of it. Going boggie is a mania and has got to be exhausting.

“Are you Connor Grey?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I need to see your ID.” I didn’t argue. It would just make him upset, so I pulled out my wallet. He nodded and made a notation on his clipboard. “An emergency meeting of the Guild board of directors has been called for tomorrow.”

I leaned against the doorjamb. “And that concerns me because…?”

He looked down at his clipboard. “You are the druid Connor Grey, right?”

“Yeah, but…”

“So I have you listed as Lady Briallen ab Gwyll’s alternate. She’s out of town.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “You’re kidding.”

He gave me an annoyed look and held his clipboard up. There it was, an official notice from Guildmaster Manus ap Eagan for a board of directors’ meeting tomorrow. Sure enough, there I was, listed as Briallen’s alternate.

“Sign here,” the brownie said, pointing. I chuckled and signed. The brownie handed me an envelope and snatched the clipboard back. “Thanks.”

“Please shut the front door for me.”

“Sure!” He gave me a ridiculous smile. I could not fathom being that happy doing errands. They prefer their brownie aspect over the boggart. By their very nature, they can swing between the two in moments, so having the opportunity to be helpful to me probably took the edge off his initial annoyance with me. Briallen was an old friend and mentor. She had been on the Boston Guildhouse board of directors since its founding. I knew she was traveling in the Far East over the summer on some obscure educational junket that I could never quite clarify no matter how often I asked. I remember a discussion with her years ago about listing me as a temporary alternate director. I couldn’t believe she had never changed it, especially after the events of the last two years. It wasn’t like her to overlook something like that. On the other hand, what would be like her, though, is to remember exactly that and purposely not change it. For all her professions of being a scholar, which she is, she’s not above a little politicking here and there. Since the accident that left me ability-impaired, I had effectively been banned from the Guildhouse. The envelope contained a copy of the meeting notice and a Guildhouse building pass. Normally, I couldn’t get in the front door of the Guildhouse without an escort, and here I was being invited to a governing board meeting. I couldn’t wait to see the look on Keeva’s face.

I could guess what the meeting was about. Alvud Kruge had been a board member. While the Guildhouse board had become more and more ineffectual over the years, fractured as it was by partisanship, with any luck it should be able to muster a coherent statement of condolences. Now that I had the keys to the palace, I thought I’d drop in and surprise a couple of people. It would give me a chance to fill Keeva in on what had happened with the running shoe evidence and see what leads she was following for Kruge. If she would tell me. I never knew with her. I spent the rest of the morning doing what I could to research gangs off the Internet. Not much help, really. Mostly newspaper articles talking about gangs on the Web. I did find a couple of local sites on the Weird, but they just referenced the usual suspects in the neighborhood in an odd travel guide style. By early afternoon, I stood in the wide foyer of Boston’s Ward Guildhouse. To the left, applicants snaked through a queue, a litany of the fey world’s woes etched on their faces. This is how the fey deals with the world: A bad thing happens; you can’t solve it yourself; you go to the Guildhouse and fill out an application for assistance; then you go home and never hear from them again unless you’re really wealthy, really powerful, or really, really in trouble. In other words, most people don’t get their fey problems resolved.

I didn’t have to go through the rigmarole since I had a bona fide building pass. Which meant I could go through the much shorter queue to the right. It didn’t mean all that much. I still didn’t get to use the private employee entrance without a live employee with me. I used to. And I used to feel so cool doing it. That’s the problem with being arrogant. Lame-ass things make you feel cool. But since I don’t have much of anything to be arrogant about anymore, it’s all about my lack of patience. The elf at the desk checked my driver’s license against the pass. Not a flicker of recognition passed over her face. So much for past glories. She returned the license and pass with a little clip I’d seen people use to hang their passes on their jackets. I slipped it into my pocket and strolled through security to the elevator lobby, checking myself out in the mirrored hallway.

As much as I despise the Guild these days, the Guildhouse itself is still a fascinating place. As the local Boston headquarters for the fey world, all manner of folk work in the building. You get a heady mix of politics and scholarship and even some danger. No one leaves their animosities at the door. Old grievances play themselves out through misplaced memos or nuanced wordplay or meeting roulette. Despite its egalitarian philosophy, it’s still a Seelie Court animal, though. The Celts hold sway. Sure they let in the elves and dwarves, but most of them get relegated to minor diplomatic meetings or, if they are actually employed by the Guild, rarely progress beyond midlevel positions. It’s the same story on the other side of town at the Teutonic Consulate, only in reverse. One day the fairies and the elves will settle their disputes and immediately start arguing over whose building to use for a unified fey world. The elevator descended so slowly it felt like it wasn’t moving at all. The numbers lit up, flashed past the lobby and down. The third subbasement light flashed on, and the doors opened to the sound of blaring heavy-metal guitar. I walked down the long, vaulted corridor, idly running my finger along the bricks. Halfway to an opened door, thick oak on iron hinges, the music cut off, and I could here the unmistakable laugh of Meryl Dian.

“Stop making that face. I’m telling you that’s Grieg’s 54-3,” she said.

“Then why not listen to the Grieg?” A deep, male voice replied. As Meryl laughed again, I froze in midstep. I hadn’t heard that voice in a long time.

“Thisis listening to Grieg, only fresher,” she said.

I started walking again and stopped at the open door.

“I like the stale version,” said the man in her guest chair. He cocked his head back to look at me, then stood with a fluid, casual movement that belied his age.

Nigel Martin stood a little shorter than me, thin, his mostly silvered, wavy brown hair thrust back from his hair-line to graze the top of his collar. He had that solid presence of someone sure of himself, gained from years of experience, which in his case was at least a century. His eyes were at once youthful and deep, and green like a sea storm. He wore regular street clothes—simple brown chinos, a white button-down with a hound’s-tooth jacket. He could usually be mistaken for a stuffy professor at an Ivy League school.

Meryl gave me a broad smile. “Hey! Who let you in?”

“Hello, Nigel,” I said, looking at him. I could feel how uncertain the smile was on my face as I extended my hand and almost breathed in relief when he clasped it.

“Connor. Meryl tells me you’ve been doing well.”

I looked at her quickly. She remained seated, leaning back in her chair behind her desk piled high with the usual assortment of papers. Her eyes shifted back and forth between Nigel and me, a curious, observant look on her face.

“Yes, thanks. I didn’t know you were back,” I said.

He smiled a careful, warm smile. “I’ve been busy.” He tilted his head toward Meryl. “Ms. Dian, it was a pleasure as always, but I must go.” He turned back to me. “Don’t be late tomorrow, Connor.” He stepped forward, and I backed awkwardly into the hallway to let him pass.

“I won’t,” I said.

“’Bye, Nigel,” Meryl called out, the enthusiasm trailing out of her voice. I watched him walk the length of the corridor in his signature steady stride that showed of many foot journeys. He reached the elevator and hit the button. The doors opened, and he stepped inside. Not once did he glance back at me, even when he pressed the inside panel. The doors closed on his back. I looked at Meryl. She wore one of her customary black outfits, a lace top with a formless V-neck sweater. She had decided to let her hair grow longer this year, almost shoulder-length. Today it was blond with magenta bangs. I thought it was cute, though I wouldn’t admit it and deny myself the chance to rib her about it.

She furrowed a brow. “That was strange. Was that strange?”

I dropped myself into the vacated guest chair. “That was strange.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I said, frowning. It hit me immediately. Nigel was pissed because I had done nothing. Here I was, two years after my accident, and I had not made any effort to deal with it until recently. Nigel is, maybe “was” now, my mentor. I had been his prize pupil. Briallen verch Gwyll ab Gwyll had initiated me into the mysteries throughout most of my teen years. When I hit a strapping eighteen years old, she turned me over to Nigel.

Nigel wasn’t in the States when I had my accident. He didn’t come back either. I didn’t take it personally. He often disappeared for months at a time. It didn’t occur to me, though, that this had been the longest stretch of time between our meetings. “When did he come back?”

Meryl closed one eye as she thought. “July.”

“Three months! And you didn’t tell me?”

She looked annoyed. “I wasn’t aware I was your social secretary. Besides, I assumed you knew.”

“And yet you never mentioned him.”

She gave me a level stare. “Uh, excuse me, neither did he, and it’s not my job to keep you up-to-date on my social life.”

I playfully curled my lip at her. “Fine, fine. I’m just annoyed. I can’t believe he didn’t call.”

“If I remember correctly, a lot of people don’t call you,” she said sweetly.

“Ha-ha. Guess why I’m here.”

She rolled her eyes. “You need something.”

“Funny.” I smiled and held up the building pass. “I’m attending a Guildhouse board meeting tomorrow as Briallen’s alternate.”

She chuckled and shook her head. “Priceless. The place really is going to hell.”

“Go ahead, keep that up, and I won’t invite you for coffee,” I said. She leaned back in her chair. “I hear you got tossed from the Kruge investigation.”

I love the Guild. Like all organizations with secrets, it’s a huge rumor mill. “I didn’t get tossed because I was never on it. I just happened to get to the crime scene before Keeva, and she pulled rank.”

Meryl nodded. “I heard she wasn’t too happy about it. She’s been desperately trying to impress Manny. It’s driving him crazy.”

“Manny? Since when do you call Manus ap Eagan ‘Manny’?”

“We’re old friends. He wasn’t always Guildmaster, you know.”

That gave me pause. Manus ap Eagan had been Guildmaster almost my entire life. I searched Meryl’s face for some hint of her age, but she looked no older than late twenties, early thirties. I didn’t sense any glamour about her either. It was even possible she was over fifty. Druids and druidesses live extremely long lives, and our physical appearance changes very slowly compared to human normals. I was almost forty years old, but looked and felt like a human normal in my twenties. I could tell she knew what I was thinking by the smirk on her face. Questioning her would be useless. I smirked. “My, my. Guildmaster Eagan. Nigel Martin. Pretty impressive company you’re keeping these days.”

Her eyes went wide. She leaned forward and grabbed her phone. “Shoot! That reminds me. I was supposed to call Maeve back.”

“What!”

She punched in a phone number. “She called duringBuffy . I almost forgot.”

My jaw dropped. “The High Queen of Tara called, and you let the machine pick up because you were watchingBuffy ?!”

She held her hand over the receiver and pitched her voice low. “It was the ‘Dark Willow’ one. I don’t have it on DVD.”

We stared at each other. The corner of her mouth twitched, then she broke into a grin.

“You’re a jerk,” I said.

She laughed and hung up the phone. “Way too easy, Grey. So tell me about Kruge.”

I filled her in on what I knew, including Dennis Farnsworth. “…and I think this gangbanger might be related,” I finished.

She tilted her head in thought. “I guess it’s possible in a ‘golly gee I hope I can figure out how to get involved with the most important murder case in the world’ kind of way.”

“I can never thank you enough for your support,” I said.

“I think the dwarves are your best bet. They’re very territorial, especially down that end of the Weird.”

“Yeah, I agree. I was wondering if…”

“…I could do you a favor,” she said with an smug, matter-of-fact tone. I glowered at her. “Yes. Any chance you can score me some gang files?”

She laughed. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”

“So, how long have you known Nigel Martin?” I asked.

She sighed. “I thought you let that go too quickly.”

I threw my hands in the air in feigned innocence. “What? I’m having a casual conversation about a mutual friend.”

She cocked her head again. “There’s really not much to tell. As far as I know, he showed up at the Guildhouse sometime in July—and no, don’t ask me, I am not going to check the ID scanner logs for the precise date. He came to my office one day to ask me about Scandinavian relics. He comes by every couple of weeks to see what I find. We shoot the shit. End of story.”

“What do you talk about?”

“I don’t know. At first it was just business. Lately it’s been music. He has the most archaic taste. I’ve been trying to convince him that the best thing to happen to Faerie music was Convergence.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You were in Faerie?”

She laughed. “Goat’s blood, Grey. I hope this isn’t an example of the investigative skills your reputation claims.”

“Where were you born?” is a game the fey like to play. The fey that came from Faerie were known as the Old Ones: Maeve, the High Queen at Tara; Donor Elfenkonig, the self-styled Elven King; Briallen, though she won’t discuss it; Gillen Yor, High Healer at Avalon Memorial. Certainly, Nigel Martin, but he’d never said anything about it, and no one seems to remember him from there. Lots of others. Some people believe the Old Ones, the ones directly from Faerie, are more powerful and adept at manipulating essence than their offspring. True or not, most people believe it, so to impress people, more fey than possible claim to have been born in Faerie. While druids and druidesses hold their age extremely well, I doubted Meryl could be that old.

“What kind of relics?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Rune stakes, mostly.”

Rune stakes. Nigel certainly knew enough about Celtic rune stakes. He’d taught me everything I know about them. You get a stick, you scratch some ogham on it, you poke it somewhere. They were like stone wards, only much more precise since you can get pretty detailed with them. Scandinavian rune stakes used old Teutonic runes. So, that meant elf research most likely. Nigel is a political animal as well as a powerful druid. Know your enemy are the watchwords for both.

“Anything interesting?”

She toyed with a strand of her hair. “Sure. Tribal territory markers and a couple of evil eye type of things. I’m definitely going to try one of the evil eye things. I’m infested with Christian missionaries lately.”

“So, let’s go for coffee, and you can tell me all about it.”

She shook her head. “Can’t. I’ve got stuff I have to take care of.”

“Maybe I could come by your place later. You could make dinner. Food’s the fastest way to a man’s heart, you know.”

She cocked her head to the side. “Really? I thought it was the fourth intercostal space between the ribs.”

I shook my head, looking at the ceiling. I pulled myself up out of the chair. “Fine. I’ll just have to catch you when you don’t have ‘stuff.’”

She quirked an eyebrow up. “I’ve got lots of stuff.”

“Okay! Okay! I’m leaving!” I said.

“Give my regards to Manny,” she called as I walked out. I gave her the finger and smiled at the sound of her laugh all the way to the elevator.

The previous spring, I had stopped a madman from destroying reality and gotten my ass kicked. Between the strain of fighting powerful entities and the physical battering I took in the process, I’d almost died again. Meryl had stopped in often at the hospital to see me. Of course, she made a point of reminding me that she had healing abilities and always asked about my health, my treatment, and my essence. When I was discharged and went home, we developed an avid email correspondence. Which led to drinking together. Which led to the occasional lunch or dinner. I didn’t know what was going on with her. I liked being around her. I liked getting to know her. I liked that she gave me shit at every opportunity. Normally, I don’t start getting those feelings until after I’ve slept with someone and, even then, not usually. This was different. I hadn’t even had a good fevered dream about her, never mind gotten her naked. And it gave me an odd pleasure that if she knew that, she would act all annoyed and dismissive.

I hit theUP button. Due to the odd nature of the Guildhouse, with its towers and arches and spires, the doors opened on the fifteenth or the eighteenth floor, depending on how you counted. In any case, it was the Community Liaison Department, my old haunt where Keeva macNeve now held sway. Since my accident helped boot me out of the Guild, I had been back only a few times and even then, insultingly, under escort. As I stood in the hall, knowing that Keeva had her job only because I saved her ass on her last major assignment, it finally struck home that I was never going to be back at the Guild as an investigator. The only place to do that was where I was standing, and there was no way in hell I could stomach Keeva as my boss.

The floor was surprisingly quiet. As I looked in at empty office after office, the only person I saw I didn’t know. He didn’t look up as I passed. I was about to turn around, when I found myself outside my old office. I didn’t need a psychology course to get why I had ended up in front of the closed door. Seeing the empty nameplate next to it, I entertained the momentary thought that perhaps they were holding it for me even after all this time.

I pushed the door open and laughed. My desk was still there. My bookshelves. The floor lamp that I banged into every time I pushed my desk chair back. My desk chair was there, too. The credenza that I special ordered out of spite when accounting was giving me a hard time about my budget overruns. And every single flat surface was stacked with boxes. My office had become a storage room for old case files. So much for preserving the memory of me.

In another time, I would have nurtured a furious bitterness. Seeing that office, though, I really did have to laugh. What else could I do? The Wheel turns as It will, one of my favorite mentors likes to say. Who am I to rage against It?

I walked up to the window. At least the view had not changed and was still worth every penny. Boston Common at any time of year looks amazing. The oldest public park in the United States, and a fairy hill sits smack-dab in the middle of it. What’s not to love?

I glanced down. Tucked between a chimney pot and the bottom of a flying buttress, a small cyclopean gargoyle squatted, a horn coming out of his forehead and his oversize genitalia proudly displayed. He’s never told me his name, so I keep calling him Virgil. He shows up at unexpected times and places. Gargoyles have a knack for omen and given that he could only be seen from this angle, I was willing to bet he knew I would decide to visit my old office. I waited to see if he would say anything. He rarely does, and after a few minutes, he still hadn’t spoken. I knew I would spend the rest of the day, if not longer, wondering if his presence alone was supposed to indicate something.

“Are you lost?”

I turned at the sound of Keeva’s voice. The Guildhouse has dampening wards everywhere, so I didn’t sense her behind me. “No, just needed some paper clips.”

She leaned against the door, her de rigueur black jumpsuit fitting snugly over a body that was made for things to fit snugly over. Keeva is without a doubt attractive and knows it. At the same time, she has that look, slightly bitter, like she’s sure any moment she’s going to smell something bad. It knocks her down the hotness scale in my book. Today, though, she just looked stressed, even pale. “How did you get in?”

I perched myself on the corner of the desk.My desk. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” I had a perfectly legitimate reason to be in the building, but she didn’t have to know that.

“Look, Connor. I’m busy. I am in no mood to talk about your visa.”

I nodded. My visa. In all the action of the last twenty-four hours, I had actually not thought about it, which is amazing considering how obsessed with it I’ve been. I’ve been trying to go to Germany to track down the elf who almost killed me two years ago and again indirectly this past spring. I’m hoping for a little payback. Somehow I’ve been mysteriously put on the German no-entry list and can only get past it with a diplomatic visa, which only the Guild can provide. I guess I didn’t have to put “want to kill someone in the Black Forest” on my application for them to figure out why I wanted to go.

“Come on, Keeva. Bergin Vize is running free. He obviously has some powerful connections there, or I wouldn’t need the visa. Someone has to bring him in, and I think I deserve to be the one to do it.”

She shook her head. “Connor, you ran around all summer telling anyone within earshot that you wanted to kill Bergin Vize. You know the Guild can’t endorse that. Do not think for one moment I am distracted enough by Kruge’s murder to sign off on a visa.”

I shrugged. She wasn’t willing to the first six times I asked. I didn’t think she would be this time either.

“You don’t look so good.”

She nodded instead of taking offense. “I haven’t had much sleep in the last three days. Eorla Kruge has decided to bury her husband here, and I have two diplomatic delegations to coordinate in addition to the investigation.”

“How is the Kruge investigation?”

She pursed her lips, crossed her arms, and looked down at her toes. “It’s complicated. Troll essence everywhere, more than one, but the MO is all wrong. We’re thinking some kind of rogue. Maybe the cleaning woman Kruge employed. Her name’s Croda. She hasn’t been seen since the murder. She has known drug gang connections, and Kruge was doing everything he could to take down the gangs.”

“A troll cleaning lady? Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

Keeva looked up, unamused. “Is there something you came up here for besides bothering me?”

“Actually, no. Do the names Dennis Farnsworth or Crystal Finch mean anything to you?”

She nodded. “Farnsworth is the kid that got killed the same night as Kruge. Murdock’s report got passed to me this morning.”

That surprised me. I keep forgetting how efficient Murdock can be. “You got the report? So the Guild’s taking the case?”

She shrugged. “No. I got the report because Murdock thinks the Guild should take it. In fact, I have an entire Murdock file. He thinks all his cases are fey-related. He’s worse than you are.”

“Keeva, the kid had Kruge’s blood on him. How can you ignore that?”

She gave me that long look again. “Correct me if I’m misquoting, but I believe the report says ‘due to concurrent circumstances, elf blood evidence on running shoe may be related to Kruge case.’ Also correct me if I’m misremembering, but I believe this blood evidence has also been destroyed. Is that what you’re claiming I’m ignoring? Even if the kid was there, he’s dead, so he’s no help. I’m not seeing anything on the police report to follow up on. Is there something you know that’s not in the report?”

“The kid was wearing gang gear. You have to look at that angle, too.”

She nodded. “Kruge was a gang mediator. Practically everyone related to his outreach office has some gang history. He wasn’t killed by some street kid, Connor. It was someone fey and someone powerful. If I start assuming every gang member is Kruge’s killer, I’d be hauling in a third of the population from your end of town. If the kid’s death becomes relevant, I might take the case. Right now, he’s just collateral damage. I’ll feed Murdock any info that might close what is, and remains, his case.”

Keeva’s focus on fey-only crimes was exactly what frustrated me about the Guild these days. She didn’t even want to entertain the notion that a dead human kid was something to be upset about. “But…”

Annoyance crossed her face. “But, nothing, Connor. Look, whoever killed Kruge would have no problem killing Farnsworth. Why would he bother going through the effort of flying him almost a mile away and dropping him? It doesn’t make sense. I think the kid saw what happened, ran, and got caught in his own little problems. I’ll tell you this if only to get you out of my hair: I have another report on my desk. A gang fight happened two days ago involving elves. Your kid was wearing the colors of one of the gangs. You want to find a motive for your case, it’s right there. Instead of trying to tell me how to do my job, why don’t you go tell Murdock to do his and talk to the Boston gang unit.”

I could tell by the self-satisfied smirk on Keeva’s face that I did a bad job of hiding my surprise. I couldn’t believe Murdock didn’t tell me about the gang fight. It didn’t change my gut feeling, but it certainly didn’t help me get Keeva interested in the case.

“Can I see the file?”

“Ask Murdock. You have to leave now.” Her voice was neutral. She wasn’t just being obstinate this time. I knew the drill. She probably had every power player in the city breathing down her neck. Instead of pushing her buttons some more, I decided to enjoy her discomfort vicariously for now.

“Okay. Let me know if I can help,” I said.

Nigel Martin appeared at the door. “Here you are,” he said to Keeva. She smiled at him. “Sorry, Nigel. Look who I bumped into.”

He smiled thinly. “Connor.”

“Twice in one day, Nigel. Almost like old times.” I couldn’t resist injecting a little sarcasm into my voice.

“Much has happened since then,” he said.

“Maybe we can have dinner. Catch up,” I said.

He glanced at Keeva. “Other things are more pressing at the moment. Perhaps another time.”

I tried to appear unperturbed. “What brings you back to Boston?”

“Research,” he said.

I waited a beat for him to ask me what I was doing. Then another beat. And another. “I’m working cases for the Boston P.D.,” I finally said.

“Yes, I had heard that. I’m sorry, Connor, but we don’t have time to socialize right now. Keeva and I have work to do,” he said.

I tried to mask my embarrassment with a neutral face. I doubt I did it very well. Not in front of two people who knew me well enough to know the difference between my neutral face and my upset-but-hiding-it face. Nigel knew damn well how I would react to what he said. Sure enough, Keeva now had on her I’m-pretending-not-to-be-enjoying-this face.

“Sure, no problem. I just stopped by to say hello,” I said.

Keeva stepped back to let me pass by the two of them as I went into the hallway. I continued walking without saying anything. As I was about to turn the corner to the elevator, she called my name. I looked back. They continued walking away from me as she spoke over her shoulder.

“Just so you know, I’m not going to screw up the Kruge investigation to spite you. If anything pans out on Farnsworth, let me know.”

I smiled and nodded once. She turned and walked in the other direction. I knew she wouldn’t screw up the investigation to spite me. If I found any key evidence, she would take credit for solving the case to spite me.

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.