Unshapely Things (7 page)

First thing Saturday, I took a run along the waterfront. Between the gym and the running, I'd gotten myself in the best physical shape I'd ever been in. I took a complicated path along crumbling sea walls, wooden planks thrown across gaps between piers, cracked-pavement parking lots, and rusting rail tracks. The area's history can be read in the remnants of old buildings and twisted alleys marking the neighborhood's evolution from a fishing ground to a working port to a train yard to a warehouse district to, finally, the Weird.

The neighborhood's current residents left their imprint everywhere. Spirit jars crowded along building gutters; random graffiti resolved itself into ogham if you knew how to read it; boards and stones inscribed with old runes lay obscured by weeds; and spent candle stubs littered the docks like confetti. Sometimes the various charms, tokens, and wards gave off such a resonance that I could feel a static discharge lifting the hairs on my arms and legs.

It was one of those early-June mornings that tease you with the promise of summer, the sunlight warm on your face, the sky a rich blue. The wind off the harbor usually knocks the temperature down to a steady chill, but that day it barely registered. My route took me down into South Boston, which those raised there proudly called Southie. It's an old Irish neighborhood, born of the famine in the old country that brought a deluge of immigrants. No surprise the fey folk gravitated to Boston after them. I ran past men washing their cars and kids playing in the streets while middle-aged women chatted in front of the grocery store. All the things that transpire in a nice neighborhood in a perfect world.

I hit the end of the causeway boulevard out to Fort Independence. The old Revolutionary War fortification sits at the end of a spit with a strategic view of the city. Proper residents call it Castle Island, in deference to the fact that it was once actually an island before all the landfill projects connected it to the rest of the neighborhood. To the uninitiated, the old fort looks like a castle, with its granite sides and five batteries. On summer weekends after Memorial Day, costumed tour guides provide a little local color about the interior portions. Gauging the crowd trooping out for the views, I decided to skip the fort and loop back through Southie to my apartment.

I slid into my chair before the computer. During my run, I had considered whether I might be approaching the ritual aspect of the murder from the wrong direction. The correct solution to a problem is often the simplest one: If a ritual popped up in a murder scene, then there had to be a tidy proscribed ritual written down somewhere to explain it. A fine premise, provided, of course, you had a way of researching every conceivable ritual. That was where the trail became a bramble. Everything is simply not written down.

But a ritual is merely a means to an end. With the right amount of ability, the correct elements at hand, and the will to use them both, any number of people can perform the same ritual, but for very different ends. I had gotten so focused on the "how" of the Tuesday Killer, I had lost track of the "why."

After my accident, I threw myself into figuring out what was wrong with me. Like everyone who has ever had a serious physical ailment, I started reading and researching until I was more of an expert than the experts. And I came to the same conclusion they had: diagnosis unknown. The biggest problem was that I had a physical ailment that wasn't particularly physical. The darkness in my mind had no mass, no real physical manifestation other than an unexplainable blackness that showed up in every conceivable diagnostic available. Whatever it was, it short-circuited my attempts to activate my abilities on any appreciable level. If I pushed it, my mind felt like it was shattering into shards of glass. Push it far enough, and I blacked out. That fact led me to the assumption that the mass was some kind of energy intimately linked to the essence of being fey.

One shelf of my study was crammed with books dedicated solely to the question of essence. In every age people have examined the issue of what made the fey fey. That interest had accelerated in the last century as more and more humans had the opportunity to join the investigation. At the risk of sounding elitist, the modern druids tended to have some of the best philosophical writings on the subject. We have a long history of researching the world around us.

I pulled down a slim volume called The Essence of Essence. Briallen had given it to me long ago because it was a particular favorite of hers. The unknown author, who I suspected was actually Briallen, took a spiritual approach, heavy on the connectivity of all things. The crux of the discussion poses that everything, organic and inorganic, has an intangible form of energy we have come to call essence, from the most powerful fairy queen to the lowliest pebble. Inorganic matter tends to hold essence uniformly throughout. What prompted me to open the book, though, was its claim that living beings, by virtue of their organic nature, have their essence centered in one place. The heart.

Because of the nature of the murders, I had speculated to Murdock that the ritual might involve the giving or taking of power. Most fey know intuitively that the heart holds the essence of their being. The mind might activate our abilities, but the power is drawn from one of the most protected organs in the body. We can feel it whenever we cast the yew rod, breathe over a scrying pool, or summon a friend.

But I had sensed no ritual residue at either the second or third murder scenes. Murdock hadn't called me in until the second murder, but given how things had been playing out, I doubted there was anything at the first scene I would have picked up. The key, as far as I was concerned, was that the hearts were taken. On the basest level, serial killers like to keep souvenirs of their deeds. It gives them a sense of accomplishment and power. Factor in the essence issue and the fact that the removed hearts would retain their power for quite a while, and Power in a more real sense came into play.

My chair protested with a loud squeal as I sat bolt upright. There was no residual ritual magic at the scenes. Maybe the killings weren't the ritual. I had been sitting around trying to understand the reason why the garden was weeded when the herbs were in the pot. The murders could have merely been a means of acquiring hearts for something else. I spun my chair back to the books lining the far wall, ready to dive into researching this new line of thought, when I heard the very loud sound of someone clearing his throat in the next room. As I jumped up, my body warding came up so suddenly the back of my head screamed in protest. I stepped into the living room.

Stinkwort sat on the edge of the kitchen counter with a half-eaten Oreo in his hand. "Got any milk?" he asked around a mouthful of cookie.

Anger and relief swept over me as I murmured the short incantation that dissipated the body ward. It was one of a very few spells I could still work. "Can't you knock?" I said.

He took another bite. "I suppose if I used doors, I would," he said. While he had no problem going in my cabinets, Joe hated touching the refrigerator, claiming something about the cold felt unnatural. It was just a bunch of bull as far as I was concerned. He just likes it when I serve him things. I poured him some milk in a shot glass.

"Make that two glasses," he said.

I crossed my arms and looked down at him munching away. "Why?"

Joe stopped and looked around puzzled. He put the remains of his cookie down, stood up, and began walking along the counter, peering among the canisters. He stopped on the side of the coffeemaker and said something too softly for me to hear. He reached his hand out. "No, really, it's okay," he said.

A bright yellow wing moved into view. A small face darted out, then back.

"Come, there's milk," Joe said in Cornish.

A small flit stepped out. She had bright yellow wings, larger in proportion to her body than Joe's were to his, but she had only a little over half his height. Very pale blond hair hung smoothly down to her waist, almost obscuring her light green tunic. Her skin was so white, it seemed translucent. She regarded me gravely with large green eyes but didn't move any farther.

"This is Tansy," Stinkwort said.

At the sound of her name, she glanced at Joe. Spreading her hands out from her waist with the palms forward, she bowed toward me, and said, "De da."

"De da. Tansy," I said, returning the formal bow when Joe introduced me.

Joe looked up at me. "She doesn't speak English very well."

I smiled reassuringly at her. "She's a wee thing, isn't she? Are you sure she's the right one?"

Joe rolled his eyes in annoyance. "I have spent the last quarter day listening to her ramble about the merits of spring grass. Trust me, I wouldn't have bothered if she weren't the right one."

"Pan wreugh why debry?" she said in a thick rustic accent

"Cookies and milk," Joe said, snapping his fingers at me.

I pinched my lips and smiled at him at the same time as I poured another shot glass. I pulled the open package of cookies out of the cabinet and put them on the counter. Tansy immediately took one and began eating as she stared around the apartment.

I watched her trail to the coffeemaker, sniff it, and wrinkle her nose. "I can barely understand her. What's her clan affiliation?"

Joe shrugged and shook his head in unconcealed disdain. "Her clan name has something to do with wattle and daub, which fits because she's as thick as mud."

I couldn't help chuckling. While Stinkwort would never concede a pecking order among the fairy races, he had no problem using one in his own species. Flits are pretty tight-lipped about their social structures, but I had long ago surmised that Stinkwort came from an important family. Not royalty—I'm sure he would have let me know that—but important in some way.

"Can she understand me?"

Lifting his head from the shot glass, Joe gulped, a little drop of milk suspended from his nose. "She's trying to learn English. If you have a few decades, I'm sure you will be able to communicate quite effectively."

"Are you here to help or just eat?" I said.

Joe threw his hands in the air. "You said find her. You said nothing about liking her."

"Okay, fine. Ask her if she knew Gamelyn Danann Sidhe." At the mention of the third victim's name, Tansy straightened up and looked at me.

"I think she understood that one," said Joe dryly.

"Ask her if she was with him last Tuesday," I said.

"A wrussta gweles Gamelyn war Tuesday?" Joe said.

Tansy stared intently at her hand, counting on her fingers. After a long pause, she nodded vigorously. "Me a wrug gweles."

"Did she see the man Gamelyn left with?" I asked.

"A wrussta gweles an den gans Gamelyn?'' asked Joe.

"Me a wrug gweles," she said again.

"What did he look like?"

She paused after listening to Joe, screwing her face up in thought. "Bras ha ska ew den," she said, then in halting English, "He ... sick me ... yes?. .. ef a wrug ow clafvy."

"She says he was a big man that made her sick," Joe said.

"Was he fey?"

"Ska," Tansy spat.

Joe fluttered off the counter in surprise, then settled back down. "She says he was just wrong," said Joe.

"Wrong? How?"

For a few moments, they argued, Joe seeming to insist on something and Tansy repeating herself. She began flailing her arms and shouting in angry frustration. "Ska! Ska na ew an den. Ska ew an pysky! Ska ew an aelfl Ska! Me na wra gothvos!"

Joe and I backed away from her. Her rapid-fire speech was indecipherable to me. Joe shook his head in confusion. "She says he was wrong like a fey, not human, I think. She's an idiot, Connor. All she keeps saying is that he's bad."

"Did she see him kill Gamelyn?"

Tansy covered her face when Joe asked her. She began to cry as she spoke, her words garbled by sobs. Joe leaned in to listen, straining to make out what she was saying. "She says Gamelyn asked her to wait for him outside the bar, but she followed him anyway. When she found them in the alley, Gamelyn was on the ground and the man had a knife. He saw her and sent her away."

It took me a moment for that to sink in. "Sent her away? You mean he spelled her away?" I said. Joe nodded. "Well, that definitely rules out human." I went into my study and retrieved Shay's artist sketch from the folder. Coming back to the kitchen, I held it up for Tansy. "Is this the man?"

She hissed at the paper and backed away, muttering and waving her hands. Joe's eyes went wide. "Stop! Stop!" he yelled at her. The sketch burst into flames in my hands. I dropped it and stamped out the fire on the floor. When I looked up they were both gone. Joe came back almost instantly.

"She's upset," he said. He took another cookie.

I fell into a chair in the living room and stared at the ceiling. "I guess we know Shay's sketch is accurate."

"Either that or she's afraid of paper," Joe said.

I didn't rise to his bait. "Would you be able to find her again?"

Joe dropped his jaw. "Whatever for? She's got a head like a bubble."

"She's a witness, Joe. She might be a better witness than Shay." I told him what the bartender had said about him.

Joe shrugged. "So—he didn't lie. He just didn't tell you everything. That's a crime?"

"No," I conceded. "But it undermines his credibility. He's already got one strike against him as a prostitute."

"Oh, I see. Mud brain will be much better in a court. It's no wonder the fey find this country so amusing."

I closed my eyes and rubbed them. "I am not about to debate the American judicial system with you, Joe. If Murdock needs her, can you find her again?"

"Sure. I found her when I didn't know her, didn't I? She won't be hard to keep track of."

I looked at him in thought for a moment. "You don't happen to know how someone might use a fairy heart for its essence, do you?"

He looked down at the floor, idly swinging his feet. If there's one thing flits like less than being around people larger than they are, it's talking about dead fey. As near immortals, it's not a subject they find captivating. "There is no honor in such a thing, Connor. No fey would do it, not even the sad brothers of Unseelie would break such a rule. Destroying someone in the nobility of battle is just. Enslaving their spirit is outside the turning of the Wheel. It would destroy everything."