Unperfect Souls (33 page)

“And for what?” I said. My own voice startled me as the close-in buildings amplified it. I wasn’t prone to talking to myself, but everything that had happened pissed me off.

I’d lied to Murdock. I needed to tonight, needed to help him believe for a few more hours that his father was a good man. I never liked the commissioner because he always—always from the beginning—had treated me like crap. And I never knew why until now. I lied to Murdock because the truth was so appalling I didn’t want to admit to it.

I believed Moira Cashel.

It wasn’t her uncanny Amy Sullivan glamour or the pitch-perfect voice or even the small, trivial facts she knew about how I had met her. A skilled fey with the right information mimicked things like that all the time. I didn’t put it past the Guild to play with my mind that way for some gain.

But tonight had changed my thinking. The look on the commissioner’s face as he pulled the gun convinced me. No one pulled a gun over such stupid and obvious lies, at least not someone like Scott Murdock. But he did because he believed her, and he believed her because she wasn’t lying. She had betrayed him as Amy Sullivan and had suckered him as Moira Cashel.

Scott Murdock was taking bribes. It was the only explanation for how the Guild was getting away with what was happening in the Weird. He had cut some deal with Ryan macGoren for some mutual benefit.

He was dirty.

I had slept with his wife.

“Danu’s motherfreakin’ blood,” I said.

Uno appeared in the road.

“What the hell do you want?” The dog cocked its head as I walked around it. He reappeared in front of me.

“Leave me alone, dammit.” I went around him again, then walked backwards. “You’re a lousy harbinger of doom, you know that? I got shot in the
face
, and you didn’t even bother to
show up
.”

He loped around me and stopped again, dodging as I tried to pass. “Go away, dammit. Go bother Shay.”

I shoved him with my leg. He stumbled sideways with a snarl that rose into a bark, then he vanished. I circled in place, waiting for him to come back. A cold wind swept down the street, but he was gone. “Good,” I muttered.

The dark mass in my head shifted, and I pressed the heel of my hand against my temple. I laughed. I practically kicked a hound from Hel, it ran away, and the worst I had to show for it was a headache. I pulled my jacket tighter, the flimsy silk doing little to warm me.

My memory skipped to Eagan’s bedroom and the faint dark haze in his essence. It was and wasn’t like mine. I couldn’t see mine in a visual sense, but I could feel it and had seen MRIs of it. It was a dense thing, a black concentration of shadow at the base of my skull, pressing right on the old brainstem. From what I saw of Eagan’s condition, the darkness was more a dull haze.

I turned the next corner, and the damned dog was back. Uno shied before I took another step, then faded away.

The dark mass blocked my abilities, but Eagan didn’t have that problem. Clearly. Gillen Yor thought the haze was responsible for his weakness. My dark mass devoured essence, but Eagan’s seemed to just drain it away.

I stopped. I had seen that before. I had seen the darkness drain off essence like it was feeding on it. The
leanansidhe
did it on demand. She might not know what it truly was, but she wasn’t dying from it, and it wasn’t blocking her abilities. She knew how to use it.

Uno appeared, sat in the middle of the sidewalk, and barked once. I frowned. “If you’re only good for stopping muggings, go back to bed, you stupid mutt. It’s ten degrees, and the only things out here are me and you.”

He faded. Insulting mysterious beings from the Land of the Dead was a defense I never knew worked. It didn’t work with Jark, but I guessed it did with dogs.

I cut through an alley. Petty street crime goes down in the winter, and the Weird was no different on that score. The damned cold bothered murderers and thieves like anyone else, so I wasn’t too worried. Besides, I wasn’t joking with the dog. I wasn’t stupid. I had my sensing ability ticking away. No one was out, especially not by a section of abandoned warehouses where they weren’t likely to find anyone to mug.

I slowed to a stop. In the gray and white of the street, a bright orange sticker stood out like a flare. The crime-scene warning on the warehouse door. The one I slit open. I looked up and down the street for anyone. Empty. Uno flashed into view at my side but disappeared before I fully looked at him.

Did he herd me there? Could he hear my thoughts? Did he know I was thinking about the
leanansidhe
or sense that I was about to? The possible connection between my dark mass and Eagan’s haze had simmered in the back of my mind all night. Could Uno know that? Or did I lead myself to the door, my subconscious pushing me there because of what I was thinking, the sensual pleasure I got from using the dark mass’s abilities bubbling up in some mental center of desire.

I didn’t care. I was there, and the creature in the tunnel held a key to possibly saving the Guildmaster’s life. I hadn’t heard from Keeva. I didn’t think I would now, not after what Moira said. There was no way Ryan macGoren wasn’t involved in her game, and Keeva wasn’t likely to do me any favors over her boyfriend’s objections. The
leanansidhe
was going to be down there. I pushed aside the thought that I was rationalizing going inside. No law said I couldn’t learn something that might help Eagan and get off on the feeling at the same time.

The door popped open easily. Between the cold and the walk, the edge of my drunk was blunted by the time I reached the walled-off basement. Uno took care of the rest. He appeared near the back wall, suddenly there in the dark, and let out a howl that shook the walls. Adrenaline surged through me at the sound, burning off the rest of the alcohol in my system. When I reached the hidden opening in the wall, the dog was gone.

I hesitated. Maybe the dog was trying to warn me off. Maybe I wasn’t as secure against the
leanansidhe
because of the thing in my head as I thought I was. I pushed the thought aside. The dog was messed up, a lost Dead animal with no more purpose, twisted like any other Dead fey. How could it portend my journey to TirNaNog if there was no TirNaNog anymore? It should have shown up at Eagan’s when I apparently died and was reborn, but it didn’t. I walked into the tunnel.

The dark mass pulsed in my head, a throb of pressure against the back of my eyes. I flushed with warmth despite the cold in the tunnel. The air rubbed against my skin, an itchy pleasure of temperature difference. My peripheral vision narrowed as the dark mass moved, and I navigated the tunnel by instinct and memory.

The
leanansidhe
’s room was a shambles. Books scattered across the floor where they had fallen from overturned tables. Burn marks seared the fabric of the armchair Druse used, and her reading lamp lay shattered next to it. I sensed nothing, no essence, the dull, sterile aftermath of the
leanansidhe
’s ability. At the back of the room, a white-and-silver essence glow drew me to the fissure in the wall.

Druse hunched over the bloodstone bowl in the chamber. No barrier field prevented me from approaching; the ward stones that generated it lay broken on the floor. The dark mass shifted, a burning sensation down my neck moving with the slow ooze of hot metal. My tongue grew thick with anticipation, a physical reaction to my desire for essence. Or the dark mass’s desire. The difference between what I wanted and what the dark mass wanted blurred in the light of the bloodstone bowl.

Druse lifted her head, her eyes half-closed in a stupor. Her essence field shimmered in shades of purple, thick, pulpy tendrils of light hanging from her face, their tips silver with fading essence as she absorbed it. Her lips lifted in a lazy smile. “Ah, my brother, come, taste, and sup with me. I feel the need within you.”

Speech refused to come. Something pierced my right hand with exquisite pain. Something pierced my chest with exquisite pain. Something pierced my cheek with exquisite pain. Dark essence snaked out of me, hungry darkness that danced in ropes of darkness. I stumbled against the bedrock pedestal beside Druse and drank, strands of darkness dipping into the ward stone, eclipsing the essence. Blood pounded in my temples, a steady, sensual rhythm that reverberated throughout my body, my chest filling as I inhaled through blood-gorged lips.

Druse touched me—with her hand, with her essence—a languid caress on my forehead. “Yes, my brother, surrender to the need, let the desire guide you. It’s not pain, is it? It’s the pleasure in the pain, yes?”

Her face pressed near mine, her eyes luminous with excitement, and I smiled. I understood her, the pulsing dark things slicing out of me, pulsing with rich essence, a pleasure that demanded payment. My skin shivered, every pore alive with feeling, with need and desire. My face grew hot, blood rushing through me in waves, prickling my skin to life, arousing me like nothing I had ever known.

Druse whispered in my ear—words, sounds—I was no longer sure. Her essence pressed against me, bulbous tendrils worrying at my face, my eyes. They pressed inward, and I gasped as they cut through, cut through and merged with my own, coiled around my darkness and my need and . . .

Something broke in my mind, and I screamed at the pain. Druse vanished out of my mind like an extinguished candle. I opened my eyes. Dark ropelike lines trailed out of me across the floor, trailing off into the darkness of an exit from the chamber.

“Connor!” someone shouted.

Essence shivered and oozed through the shadow lines, the living essence of someone fey. As it seeped through me, my sensing ability touched it, and I recognized fairy essence.

Someone shook my arm. “Connor!”

I touched the fairy essence through the darkness, Danann fairy essence. Something hit me in the face, jarring the darkness out of the vision in one eye. A haze lifted off my awareness. I shook my head. The dark mass burned with a flow of essence, Danann essence from the next room. I shook my head again. Horrified by what I was doing, I recognized the essence that I was absorbing.

The dark ropes undulated as the silver mesh in my left arm flared and lit with essence. Like the dark mass, the actions and reactions of the tattoo seemed to have their own agenda, one I didn’t understand and couldn’t control. I shuddered as blades of ice sliced through me, tangling with the streams of darkness from my head. The dark mass convulsed and retreated. The white light from my arm flickered and went out. The backlash of the force and the pain threw me off my feet.

 

 

 

 

Wetness touched my face. I wiped at it, feeling something slick and sticky. I opened my eyes and stared into Uno’s fetid, gaping mouth. He barked once softly and sat back on his haunches. The
leanansidhe
lay beside me, blood smeared across her forehead, the bloodstone bowl on the floor by her head. No essence emanated from her.

I sat up and reached for the ward stone. It wouldn’t budge.

“Is it dead?” In his long white coat, hood thrown back, Shay stood near the pedestal nibbling at a fingernail.

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

He brushed at dirt and blood smears on his coat. “You know, my friends said I’d never be able to keep this clean.”

“Shay!”

Startled, he met my eyes. “What?”

I stood. A heavy pounding filled my head. The dark mass moved like a restless sleeper at the base of my skull. “How did you find me?”

He looked down at Uno sitting beside him. “He forced me outside and chased me down the street. I thought he was taking me to . . . to wherever he was going to kill me.”

“Something’s screwy with that dog,” I said.

Shay moved closer and stared at Druse. “That thing could use some hair conditioner.”

I shook my head, too weak to laugh. “Not anymore.”

Shay froze, blood draining from his face. “I killed it?”

“What happened?”

He pointed. “It was hanging off your back. All this black stuff was coming out of you. You wouldn’t answer me. Then that . . . that thing spun its head around and hissed at me. I grabbed the bowl and hit it.

“What was that black stuff?” Shay asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

“It was running into that hole in the wall over there,” he said.

Memory rose, the darkness pulling in essence, an essence I knew, and gorge rose in my throat at the thought. In two long strides, I reached the exit and found Keeva on the ground. Her pulse beat strongly beneath my fingers, but her essence flickered like a dying lightbulb. Another essence signature glowed inside her, strong and vibrant. Burn marks on her skin and wings showed the remains of a binding spell.

I patted her cheek. “Keeva?” No response. I pinched her.

“Help me get her up,” I said.

Shay gave the
leanansidhe
a wide berth. Keeva groaned as we turned her over and pulled her into a seated position. I rubbed her arms. “Keeva? It’s Connor. Can you hear me?”

She lifted her head, her eyelids fluttering. “Danu,” she whispered.

Relief swept over me. “Keeva, wake up. You’re okay.”

She opened her eyes, struggling to focus on me. “Connor?”

“Yeah. Don’t move. You were attacked by the
leanansidhe
. I think she infected you with a parasite or something,” I said.