The crowd closed in tighter. The dwarf yanked his arm from Murdock and shoved me out of his way like a rag doll tossed aside by a child. The push sent me barreling through the crowd. The dwarf darted back the way we had come, with Murdock close on his heels. The dark mass in my head shuddered as Murdock’s body shield slipped away from me. Ignoring the pain, I ran after them.
Scrying essence bombarded me from all sides. Every step I took intensified the pain in my head. Darkness crept into the edges of my vision as I fought off a faint. I pushed on, focused on Murdock ahead of me. Relieved, I entered the field of his body shield, and the pain diminished.
The dwarf darted into another pedestrian tunnel. The sudden dimness blinded me after the illumination of the street. I struggled to maintain my footing. Ahead, the dwarf ran toward the exit, but Murdock was nowhere in sight. He had to be there. His body shield was protecting me. I shouted his name and received a muffled response. We were caught in some kind of glamour, invisible to each other.
Murdock’s shield slipped on and off me, the pain in my head telling me when I was falling behind. With a burst of speed, I ran into the next street. Murdock reappeared, ahead and to my left side, as we chased the dwarf ran down a jagged path of undulating pavement.
The street stretched, elongating into an impossible long path between tall gray buildings. Far overhead, the stars burned in a narrow strip of sky. Shadows came alive and oozed across the street. I navigated by essence light, the buildings and street etched in faint white shot through with shades of the green and blue. I passed Murdock as the dwarf pulled farther ahead.
“I can’t see,” Murdock’s voice echoed from behind me.
“To the left. Stay with me,” I said.
Darkness danced in the air at the far end of the street, long tendrils that undulated and waved across the pavement, weaving itself into a web. The dwarf stopped running, his hands out to either side in uncertainty. Surprised, I skidded to a halt. Murdock knocked into me, and we jostled away from each other. “Why’d you stop?” he asked.
I pointed. “Can you see that?”
Something slithered out of the darkness and reached for the dwarf. He turned to run, but a strand of darkness wrapped around his torso and pulled. The dwarf lifted off his feet and screamed.
Murdock pulled his gun. “What the hell is that?”
I grabbed his arm. “Don’t shoot. You’ll hit the dwarf.”
He aimed the gun and walked forward. “We can’t just watch.”
I wasn’t watching. I was fighting off a surge of pain in my head. The dark mass shifted and burned with heat. I fell to one knee as normal vision vanished. The street became a black void. Murdock glowed like a red flame, and, beyond him, the emerald essence of the dwarf flashed and flickered in the air.
I pushed myself up. “Murdock, wait.”
He paused, glanced over his shoulder, then swung his gun toward me. “What is that stuff? What do you want me to do?”
The dark mass was bleeding out of my eye. I held my hand out in a calming gesture, concentrating on forcing the darkness back inside. “It’s the thing in my head. Stay away.”
Gun focused on me, he circled, a look of horror on his face. “What should I do?”
“Nothing. Stay out of reach.”
The darkness in the street swirled with deep violet light. As I forced myself to walk toward it, the dark mass in my head flexed, a finger of pain running along my jaw. The vision dimmed in my right eye as pressure built behind it. I caught the wall as I lost my balance. Pain swarmed the right side of my head. I went blind and tripped as the dark mass sliced out of my right eye.
The darkness in the street loomed over me like a claw. It paused, tendrils of black vapor waving in the air. The blade of darkness from my eye splintered and reached for the tendrils. The two strands of darkness connected, and a concussive jolt like electricity threw me against the wall. The dark mass whipped back inside my head, and I fell.
Murdock leaned over me. “You okay?”
I lifted my head. The darkness in the street had vanished. The street had become dead space, no vestige of essence on it. My head echoed with the emptiness. “Where’s the dwarf?”
Murdock helped me up. “Over there.”
The dwarf lay in the street, his body signature dim, his gaze fixed on the sky as he struggled to breathe. We huddled over him. Up close, a faint spark of essence remained in him, but I didn’t see it lasting long. The pavement beneath him was devoid of essence. “Get him against the wall. He might be able to draw essence from the stone.”
I didn’t know if it would work, but without a healer, he had little hope of surviving. Murdock helped me move the body into a seated position against the wall. The dwarf’s head slumped to his chest. I patted at his face. “Come on, buddy, tap the stone. You need essence.”
His eyes fluttered. A feeble trickle of essence came out of his chest as he tried to use his body signature to tap the stone. I scanned the wall and street. The darkness had leeched essence from the surroundings. “This whole area is stripped, Leo. There’s nothing for him to pull. Let’s get him farther up the street.”
With frustrating slowness, we carried him. The pavement was uneven cobbles, and dwarves are heavy.
“I’m dying,” the dwarf said.
“Hold on a few more feet,” I said.
“She wanted the stone,” he said.
A sense of dread swept over me. “Who?”
The dwarf wheezed. “She was in my head. She wanted the stone.”
“We have to move faster,” I said to Murdock.
“Two druids were chasing me. I don’t know who they are,” said the dwarf.
“Hang on. We’re almost there,” I said.
Essence reasserted itself in the street as we neared the pedestrian tunnel. The weight of the dwarf increased with each step. “He’s fading, Leo,” I said.
A shout rang out, the sound of nearby voices calling a death knell. At the same instant, the dwarf fell from of our hands, his weight too great to hold any longer. I rested my hand on his chest. “He’s gone, Leo.”
Angry, I stalked away, banging my fist on a wall. I glared up the street, searching for some sign of the darkness. Essence was creeping back into the pavement and the walls, thin and weak. At the far end of the street, a burst of bright blue light surged out of a gap between buildings. It filled the street, moved toward me, then stopped. Indiscernible darker blue shapes moved within it. I took a step, intent on chasing after it, when it gathered into itself and retreated the way it had come. It vanished around a corner.
“Did you see that?” I asked Murdock.
He turned toward me. “What?”
“The blue light I’ve been tracking. It was at the end of the street. I want to say it was checking out what just happened,” I said.
Murdock shook his head. “I missed it. I was searching the body. Look what I found.” He held up a stone identical to the ones on the previous victims.
“Whatever he was selling wasn’t essence, Leo.”
“That dark stuff that attacked you looked like what came out of the leanansidhe we found,” he said.
The leanansidhe were fey predators that survived by absorbing essence from people. Leo and I stumbled into one a few months back. When I said stumble, I meant almost were killed by her. “I was thinking the same thing. Same dark tendrils. Same indigo and violet essence light surrounding it. All this time, I thought she was dead.”
“Dead? You never mentioned the leanansidhe again after you told Keeva about it. I thought the Guild finally stepped up and dealt with a criminal in the Weird,” he said.
I had gone to Keeva macNeve at the Guild. She had taken it upon herself to hunt down the leanansidhe. She found it, but it got the better of her. She almost died, which was why she had needed to go to Tara to finish out her pregnancy. “I forgot about it. I never checked to make sure it was dead.”