Unfallen Dead (15 page)

I glanced up at the hotel. Either Ceridwen didn’t have essence-masking security, or she didn’t feel she needed it. I found her suite with no trouble. Her tall figure blazed as she stood at the window, the spear in her hand. I couldn’t make out the details of her face, but I had no doubt she was staring at me. I continued along the dock.

A cold wind came up the channel as I turned onto the Old Northern Avenue bridge. It’s a swing bridge that pivots to allow boat traffic. Rusted steel beams form trusses in a complex pattern that, depending on your aesthetic, is picturesque or an eyesore. Either way, it makes crossing the channel on foot convenient.

Someone walked in the roadway about midway across. As he came toward me, I noticed he wore a collared shirt and long pants, a little underdressed for the cold weather. He glared at me, like someone in a bad mood looking for an excuse to get into it with someone on the ass-end of town.

A gust of wind rushed from the harbor, stirring up sand and debris. Grit flew in my face, and I shielded my eyes against it. The wind moaned across the bridge, the many gaps and crossbeams in the trussing acting like a pipe organ. When the eddies of sand settled, I crossed the bridge. The guy was gone. I checked for essence nearby in case he was a drunk lurking in the shadows, waiting to jump me. Nothing. I chalked it up to his thinking better of it.

On the Weird end of the bridge, a police car blocked the road leading back into the financial district. A lone patrol officer wearing official outdoor gear stood by the car. We nodded as I passed. A car pulled up, and the officer signaled it to turn back into the neighborhood. Behind his patrol car, a police barrier had been set up with a sign that said BRIDGE CLOSED TO INBOUND TRAFFIC. I looked back along the bridge. I’d come across on the outbound lane and hadn’t noticed anything unusual except the walker. My curiosity piqued, I retraced my steps.

“Bridge closed, sir,” the officer said.

“I just walked over it. It’s not blocked on the other end. Is it safe?” I said.

The officer kept a professional look on his face. “It’s safe to walk on.”

I cocked my head. “Are you saying I can’t use it from this direction?”

He gave a curt nod. “No one can use the bridge to enter the financial district without clearance. Order of the police commissioner.”

I exhaled sharply. “You’re kidding.”

A subtle change came over him, a hardening of features that cops get when they think they’re about to have trouble with someone. He stared at me, not speaking. I smiled and nodded again. “Thank you.”

I wasn’t going to argue with him. The guy was only doing his job. If Commissioner Scott Murdock thought barricading the fey in the Weird was going to help,
he
was the idiot, not the poor patrol officer who had to enforce it. I shook my head. It was window-dressing security. Blocking the bridge might stop foot traffic, but plenty of fey flew and swam. The police would have their hands full trying to stop them.

I stepped around the police car, glancing back at the officer, the bridge stretching long and empty behind him. I paused again and looked back. The bridge was empty. The officer stared. “Move along, sir,” he said.

“Did you see anyone else on the bridge?”

“Sir?”

“A guy on the bridge, walking out of the Weird. He didn’t pass me on the bridge. Did he come back this way?”

The officer’s hand nonchalantly dropped near his weapon. “You’re the only person to come through, sir. Please move along. That’s a direct police order to clear the area.”

I held my hands out and down. “No problem, Officer. Thank you again.”

I made for my apartment on Sleeper Street. Something about the guy on the bridge felt familiar. I have a good memory for essence signatures of people I know, but he had been too far away for me to sense him. By the time I reached my apartment building, I had convinced myself that the look he gave me meant he knew me, knew me and didn’t particularly like seeing me. I didn’t particularly like not seeing him then, not knowing where he went and why the cop hadn’t seen him. I kept a sharp ear and eye out all the way down Sleeper, but no one followed me.

No fancy yachts or doormen or limos waited outside my building. The Boston Harbor Hotel glowed with yellow light across the channel. I didn’t bother trying to see if Ceridwen was still watching. She had likely gotten bored by now and moved on to some other power scheme. I hadn’t helped myself by irritating her, but at this point, there wasn’t anything she could do to me.

If Ceridwen continued hassling me, I’d have to figure out a game plan to get her off my back. And if Commissioner Scott Murdock thought he could keep people from the Weird out of the city, he was in for a surprise. I didn’t know what I would do, but I wasn’t going to sit back and take it. I thought I’d let the two of them play it out, then cross that bridge when I came to it. And no police officer or Faerie queen was going to stop me.

Murdock lay on his back, sweat glistening on his forehead as he breathed with exertion. As I looked down at him, he gave me that smirk, the one that says, “Yeah, I can do this.” His arms came up, his chest expanding with a last burst of energy, and he dropped the bar on the rack. Rolling up from the bench, he shot his elbows out and gave his body a twist first in one direction, then the other.

I slipped a couple of plates off each end of the bar and took his place on the bench press. He came around to spot me. Again with the smirk, he held one hand above the bar to make the point that he wouldn’t need two hands to lift it off me if I lost it. I finished the set and sat up, running a towel over my face. “Are we going to talk about this?”

He grabbed the chin-up bar, lifted himself in the air, and talked without missing a beat in his set. “Why does everyone feel the need to ‘talk about this’?”

I shook my head. “Aren’t you the least bit concerned?”

He dropped to the floor. “You have one more set.”

I lay back. The last two reps threatened to fail, but I would be damned if I let him get the satisfaction of pulling the bar off me. Again. I stood and stretched.

Murdock and I worked out together. It was how we met. Jim’s Gym is low-key, on the edge of the financial district, just over the bridge from the Weird. It wasn’t so far that I talked myself out of going and not so near that I obsessed about working out. Murdock didn’t care where it was because he drives. He parks in front and puts his little “I’m a police officer and can park wherever I want” card on the dashboard. Once we started on a case together, we didn’t discuss it during workouts. It kept some normalcy in our friendship.

We worked our routine at the empty end of the gym. Late afternoons tended to be quiet, and the only other people exercising were out of earshot.

“Murdock, you’re bench-pressing twice your weight.”

He stood at the dumbbell rack re-sorting the weights by size. “I know.”

I leaned against the rack and crossed my arms. “I’m just saying, I think you’re awfully accepting of it.”

He gave me a lopsided grin and picked up a dumbbell set. “What do you want me to do? Go to bed and pull the covers over my head? I got zapped with an essence-bolt that should have killed me and instead made me stronger. What does it mean? Beats me. I can either accept it unless it becomes a real problem, or I can freak out. I’m accepting it.”

He curled the dumbbells with little effort, as if he were only doing toning exercises. With fifty-pound weights. He replaced the dumbbells. “Want to see something?”

I gave him a noncommittal shrug. He faced a wall about fifteen feet away. One moment he stood still; the next he ran full tilt at the wall. Just before he hit, essence flared around him in a full-fledged body shield, stronger than most I had seen. My jaw dropped. He rammed the wall with a crunch, but the crunch came from the cinder blocks cracking. He wasn’t even breathing heavy.

“How the hell did you learn to do that?”

He smiled. “Nigel Martin. He reached inside my mind and somehow switched on the body shield when he needed me to run point for him at Forest Hills. I sort of saw how he did it in my head and figured out how to do it myself. Cool, huh?”

I chuckled. “You know what you just did? When they figure out how to work their body shields, probably every fey runs into a wall to prove it. Usually they’re about twelve years old, though.”

He grinned. “I feel like a kid.”

He pointed at the dumbbells, and I picked up much—much—lighter weights than he had. “Does your father know?”

Murdock scowled. “Now who’s acting twelve? No, my father doesn’t know. You know he doesn’t like the fey. I’m willing to accept what’s happened. He
would
freak out.”

I let it drop. Murdock kept an open mind until he came to a conclusion. It took an act of Congress to change it after that.

Murdock had dinner plans, so I slipped on my running shoes and waited outside while he hit the showers. An inland breeze took the bite out of the air temperature. When everyone else starts wondering when the weather’s going to change, it’s already changed two weeks earlier in the Weird. Between the channel and the ocean, it’s the first place in the city to get cold or muggy.

Murdock exited the gym smelling like a date. He wore his hair gelled, a department-store cologne, and his camel-hair overcoat. His eyes shifted left and right, taking in the immediate vicinity. I don’t think the cop thing ever turns off for him. We jumped in his car. I tossed his gym bag into the backseat. “Where are you off to?”

He tilted his head to the side to watch the red traffic light he had stopped under. “No place special.”

“Uh-huh.”

He didn’t change his expression. “Uh-huh.”

One of these days, Murdock will tell me about his social life, and it will be a revelation. I can’t complain too much. I hadn’t said a word about what had happened with Meryl. As soon as I could figure it out myself, maybe I’d say something. He drove over the Old Northern Avenue bridge, waving to the cop on duty as we passed the checkpoint. We stopped dead in our tracks behind a traffic jam.

“How ridiculous is it that you had to escort me to the gym?” I asked.

He nodded. “I know.”

“Can’t you say something to your father?”

“I did. Didn’t make a difference.”

People gathered in the street a few car lengths ahead. Two elves, a fairy, and dwarf had tumbled into the street, blocking traffic and drawing a crowd. They were going at one another with fists and the occasional essence-bolt.

“What did he say?”

Murdock drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “He said the Weird is a threat to the city. Pass the carrots, please.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

The brawlers looked awkward, as if they had never been in a fight before. I guessed that was possible, but not for four different people in the Weird. Murdock leaned on his car horn. “Two more minutes and my siren’s going on.”

“I feel like we should be eating popcorn.”

He sighed. “We’re seeing this almost every day.”

My essence-sensing ability confirmed my suspicion. Green essence with black mottling wafted around the fighters. “They’re in a cloud of Taint.”

The two fairies hit the dwarf with a white bolt of essence, and he barreled down the street. The blow knocked him out of the Taint’s field. He got to his feet in confusion. Taking a step back toward the fight, he shook his head, then walked away.

Murdock nodded. “We’ve been given orders to stand down if fights involve the fey. When the Taint hits, they lose control. A couple of patrol guys have ended up in the hospital.”

“Your father must be fuming.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Yeah, I’m kinda torn about that. On the one hand, I agree with his frustration. On the other, it’s nice when he’s in a froth about something that has nothing to do with me.”

At least I could count on Murdock for some indignation about the situation. Even if it was the dry, sarcastic kind.

One of the fairies drifted out of the green haze and seemed to come to her senses because she didn’t rejoin the fight. Her companion flew up beside her. They hovered in the air arguing. They must have both realized what had happened and flew off. The elf looked ready to take on someone else, but at that point the traffic began moving again, and we drove around him.

Murdock pulled to the corner of Sleeper Street. He stretched his right arm behind my seat and retrieved a folder. “Liz DeJesus found this in Olivia Merced’s apartment.”

The file held document photocopies of an old case dating back at least twelve years. I glanced at the first few pages, then at Murdock. “Merced filed for divorce because her husband was a con artist?”

Murdock nodded. “It gets better.”

I flipped through more pages, but didn’t see anything more than an exhaustive list of contempt charges detailing the case against Liddell Viten, Merced’s husband. The last page held the “gets better” part. The Boston P.D. investigation had been suspended and the case turned over to the Guild. “The husband was fey?”

Murdock made the turn onto Sleeper Street. “Yep. He had everyone fooled with a glamour that made him appear human. His real appearance was anything but.”

I raised an eyebrow. “A solitary?”

Murdock pulled up at my building. “Right again. Something called a kobold. There’s nothing else in the archives because that’s what happens when something gets booted to the Guild. I did some digging in the newspaper morgue. The Guild found Viten. He died in detention. Guess who was the Guild agent in charge of the case?” I shook my head. Murdock flashed me a self-satisfied smile. “Keeva macNeve.”

I dropped my head against the seat. “Great.”

“Now, I could go through channels and request the Guild file, which might take weeks . . .”

I looked at him. “. . . or I can ask Keeva.”

He gave me an innocent look. “Not that I’m asking.”

I laughed. “Oh, no, not that you’re asking. Fine. I’ll ask her. Just don’t expect her to be all that forthcoming. Given her suspension, two dead human normals related to an old case she had a prisoner die on won’t be high on her priority list right now.”