Unperfect Souls (14 page)

Yet they managed to survive. I was willing to bet that the
leanansidhe
sought other essence resources. Those who survived encounters with them were probably unique situations. As Joe likes to say “kings and queens” about things like that, meaning “yeah, that’s one version, but the reality smelled worse and was usually boring.”

It wasn’t enough. Failure to learn more drove me out into the night. The chronic lack of progress in understanding what had happened to my abilities frustrated me—and created situations that put lives at risk. Janey and Murdock could have been seriously injured by Jark—or worse. I hadn’t thought through resurrecting a Dead man with Taint in his body essence. I failed to protect them because I had no abilities to use against him. No matter what people said about using the abilities you had instead of wishing for ones you didn’t, the berserker couldn’t have been stopped without essence abilities. Abilities I didn’t have anymore.

The
leanansidhe
knew something about the dark mass. I had seen it, and the thing inside me had reacted to it. It was in her, too, at least something very much like it. For the first time since my accident, I had something that looked like a clue as to what was wrong with me. I had to know if it meant anything. I had to know if the
leanansidhe
knew something.

Over two years the dark mass had been in my head, blocking my abilities. Over two years of mistaken diagnoses and dead-end treatments. My healer Gillen Yor was at a complete loss. My friend Briallen’s eyes showed more fear every time she examined me. No amount of ibuprofen stopped my chronic pain.

And it was getting worse.

The thing inside me was escaping, for lack of a better word. Whatever it was, it was attracted and repulsed by essence. If essence threatened me, it reacted to protect me, and when it did, it devoured the essence. When a group of the Dead recently attacked me on Samhain, the dark mass absorbed them. I hadn’t really understood that at the time, but it was the only explanation under the circumstances. The only person who seemed to know what it was, was one of the most reviled beings known to human and fey.

Brother. She’d called me brother.

Inside the warehouse, my breath steamed in the shaft of light from my flashlight. Despite the many doors and hallways, the basement door was easy to find. The building had been empty so long that dust on the floor was evolving into dirt. I followed the recently disturbed path that the crime-scene investigators had made. The trail ended at a large door with rusted and dented sheet metal nailed over it. It opened with the whine of metal on metal and exposed stairs going down. The corrugated metal steps rang dully beneath my boots as I descended.

I swept my flashlight beam across the sealed- off basement. The categorized piles had been removed, then tagged and bagged in evidence lockers at police headquarters. All the clothing, the hats, the shoes—everything the
leanansidhe
had picked off her victims—were being sorted and scanned, compared to missing persons reports, maybe analyzed for DNA. Phone calls would go out to doctors and dentists. If anything matched a file description, a police officer would have to make that long, slow walk to the door of the next of kin. With the volume of material I saw, it was going to be a long while before the police processed everything. A lot of cold cases were going to be closed. This being the Weird, a lot of unanswered questions were going to result, too. Not all the missing are missed.

The crime-scene team had enlarged the hole the
leanansidhe
had escaped through. A bone-chilling draft wafted over me from between the jagged bricks. Silence filled the utter darkness beyond. Why the section had been sealed off wasn’t obvious. The columned space inside was devoid of the usual abandoned equipment or stock supplies left by long-gone businesses.

Body signatures from the investigative team lit up in my sensing ability, two fey signatures mixed in with about a dozen human. Keeva macNeve must have sent someone from the Guild. Probably to cover her ass. If the
leanansidhe
went after humans, she’d have a hard time explaining she knew it existed and did nothing.

The team had scoured the basement. Individual trails branched and overlapped throughout the room. The far wall was another bricked-over section. Other than the
leanansidhe
’s bolt-hole, I found no other openings.
Leanansidhes
weren’t stupid. It was no coincidence Joe had found her lying on the floor near an escape route, and she wouldn’t let herself become trapped if someone followed her. An exit had to be in the basement somewhere.

I turned off the flashlight and allowed my sensing ability free rein. The investigative team’s residual signatures brightened. Down the center of the room, directly from the bolt-hole if I judged the angle right, their signatures masked a thin layer of violet essence, the faint trace of the
leanansidhe
’s body signature. At the far end of the basement, a thin purple haze splashed up against the solid brick wall. I turned on the flashlight.

The wall showed no breaks. The
leanansidhe
’s essence danced on my fingers like static when I touched the surface. She had hidden her exit with a strong-yet-subtle masking ward. Frustrated, I slapped my hand against the wall. The dark mass in my head clenched, and my hand slipped beneath the surface of the bricks. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Masking wards were keyed to specific essences for access, usually the spellcaster and whoever else the ’caster allowed. The
leanansidhe
wouldn’t have keyed the wall for me, never mind known my essence well enough to do it without me.

I pressed at the bricks. The dark mass in my head danced in short pulses of pain as my hands sank below the surface. A pit of anxiety formed in my stomach. The
leanansidhe
must have set the ward to something she thought unique to herself. The dark mass was the key. I felt open space on the other side of the wall. I stepped forward, a pounding in my mind as I passed through the ward. I stumbled into the other side and took deep breaths as the pain settled.

A narrow section of basement mirrored the one that Murdock and I had found. A sense of pain permeated the air in this one, the echoes of long-past deaths. Tragedy lingered in spaces, the emotion of the moment seeping into the surroundings like a memory stain. It was the
leanansidhe
’s dining room. People died there, drained of their essence to feed another’s hunger.

Ignoring the emotions vying for attention, I searched the area. Another staircase led to the warehouse above, but an avalanche of dirt and trash blocked access. No one had used it for a long, long time. At the other end, a door was shaped in the stone wall, more handiwork of the troll who had made the sewer tunnel. The
leanansidhe
must have taken over the space after the troll left or died. More likely, she had used the troll to create the tunnels and killed it when the work was completed.

I hesitated. No one knew where I was. I had no abilities to defend myself, and I was about to seek out a monster. I found assurance in the fact that the
leanansidhe
had tried to absorb my essence and failed—an irony that the one fey with no abilities to defend himself was the one fey she apparently couldn’t feed on. I crossed the threshold.

The smooth earthen tunnel led down, the
leanansidhe
’s signature strong enough to be evident even to a normal sensing ability. The path twisted and turned, branched and widened. I walked through at least a quarter mile of turnings before I found a series of chambers. I hung back from the entrance to a furnished room.

Warmth radiated against my face. That was it as far as welcome went. The chamber was a living room of sorts, if a room buried three floors beneath the ground could be considered living. A generation’s worth of furniture filled the space, old sofas and bookcases, tables and chairs. A many-joined extension cord trailed from the ceiling, providing electricity for a glass-shade lamp by a reading chair. A book lay open on the table next to it.

I pressed flat against the wall, my dagger out of its sheath and in my hand without a conscious thought. Sendings don’t have directional indications like sound. The
leanansidhe
had to have me in her line of sight to know I was in the room. “Where are you?”

A fluctuation in the air passed over me. Definitely someone moving in the room. Some fey can cloak themselves, but I didn’t know it was an ability the
leanansidhe
had.
Come, brother. Make peace. There is no blade at your throat.

I flinched from the brief icy touch of steel against my neck. A soft chuckle came from the middle of the room. The air rippled, and the
leanansidhe
appeared, crouched on an old Persian rug. In her outstretched hand, she held a dagger. She grinned through matted tangles of hair and opened the hand wide to let the dagger fall. “You see, brother? No harm from me for such as we.”

She eased back as I entered.

“You keep calling me ‘brother,’” I said.

She moved behind a table stacked with books, her pale, stained hands caressing the covers though she kept her whiteless eyes on me. “Kin or akin matters not between us. We touch the Wheel the same.”

“I’m not like you.”

Her large dark eyes shifted to my dagger. “Aye, ’struth. I could not touch such a thing as that. Lay it aside, brother, and rest in my home.”

“And leave myself unarmed? If you violate the rules of hospitality, to whom shall I complain?”

She rubbed long fingers down her face, watching me out of the corners of her eyes. “Keep it, then.” She vanished and reappeared at my side. “It will avail you naught.” She vanished again and peered at me from behind a tall grandfather clock, clutching the edges of the wood with cracked gray nails. “Unless I will it.”

She vanished again. I tracked her with my sensing ability and pressed the knife to her chest as she tried to slip around me. “That’s close enough.”

She dropped her masking glamour to reveal a surprised and frightened face. Thrusting her hands up, she bowed her head and sank to the floor. “Spare me, brother. I seek only kinship.”

“I’m not here to kill you,” I said.

She looked up at me through a tangle of hair, suspicious, yet curious. “I have no quarrel with you either, my brother. Shall we sit, then? I should like that.”

I motioned her away with the dagger, and she scuttled along the floor to an armchair. Curling up in its corner, she pawed at one eye as I eased into the opposite chair. She shoved her hand into a tattered pocket. She withdrew her hand, clenched around something. Tentatively, she reached across the side table and dropped a battered piece of bread. “I have not flesh nor fluid to offer, but crusty things can stem the pangs of hunger.”

She was trying to follow the old rules of hospitality, even if the bread had a couple of colors on it that I didn’t usually associate with freshness. “I’m good. Um. Thanks.”

We observed each other. At least, by the shifting of her unsettling black eyes, she was doing the same thing I was. Such a small being to inspire such a lot of fear. She was barely half my height but had the ability to take down the strongest of fey. Except for her emaciated head, the only parts of her body visible outside layers of clothing were her thin arms and grimy ankles.

I closed my eyes a moment. If I continued the conversation, I was committing to something, or at least admitting to it. I was seeking help from a
leanansidhe
. I took a deep breath. “You said we touch the Wheel the same. How do you touch the Wheel?”

She threw her hands over her face. “We touch the outside from within, and the Wheel turns.”

I frowned. “If you think I believe you can turn the Wheel, you’re wrong.”

She screeched with laughter and scrambled up the side of the chair. “No one turns the Wheel, brother. It turns and turns, and we touch It where few dare to know. Not all who ride the Wheel ride the Wheel.”

“You’re lying. Even the Dead ride the Wheel the same as everyone else. It’s the Wheel of the World,” I said.

She tangled her hands in her hair. “Ah, stupid druid, sees the surface and sees nothing more. The Wheel is a wheel on both sides.”

The idea landed on me in stunning realization. I had spent my youth in study of the druidic path, learning from my mentors. The test of a true follower of the path was an intuitive understanding of what came next, the ability to move beyond receiving knowledge to attaining it on one’s own. We called it secret knowledge, the knowing of the Wheel in a fundamental way. I left my training years ago and stepped off the path for personal gain, but every once in a while, I was granted a flash of insight to the nature of the Wheel. I laughed in my throat at the realization the
leanansidhe
handed me. “There are two sides to the Wheel.”

She squealed as she dropped to the floor and clutched my knees. “You see, my brother! You see the within and without, and the Wheel lies between.”

I clenched my jaw at the wave of body odor she emitted. “Show me how you touch the Wheel,” I said.

She gasped in excitement, clutching her hands to her cracked lips. Those dark orbs whirled in their sockets, searching. In the blink of an eye, she vanished, surprising me with her speed. Seconds later, she returned, walking through the door and cradling something in her hands. She knelt in front of me with a rat that fought to escape, its sharp claws scratching her hands. “Shhh, shhh, shhh, little thing. Rest and receive,” she crooned.

Deep violet essence coated her hands. Tendrils formed, lines of purple light that burrowed into the rat. The rat froze in some kind of paralysis. With a moan of pleasure, the
leanansidhe
brought the filthy rodent to her cheek and closed her eyes. More tendrils waved out of her face where the rat touched skin. They pulsed with light, and the rat flinched as its essence seeped away. Something moved within the
leanansidhe
, something dark and impenetrable. It reached up from within her essence and sapped the rat’s essence.