Hands on his hips, he sighed. “We can go tomorrow.”
I frowned. “Where?”
He looked up at me. “Where we found the leanansidhe. Don’t pretend you aren’t thinking about it. Promise me you won’t go without me,” he said.
“She can’t hurt me, Leo. That’s why the dwarf didn’t die right away. My presence interrupted her feeding.”
“Promise me,” he said.
I glared at him. He was with me when we found the leanansidhe. It knocked him on his ass. She wasn’t going to be happy to see me after what happened. “Leo . . .”
“I will lock you in a cell,” he said.
I laughed. “You will not.”
He shook his head. “Fine. I’ll tell Briallen, then. Or Eorla or whoever else I can think of who will tie you up and dump you in a corner until you get some common sense.”
I chuckled. “You’re as stupid as I am.”
He grinned. “Maybe, but I have a gun.”
14
The leanansidhe were feared by even the powerful Danann fairies. They fed on living essence, preferring the strong essence of people as the primary source for their needs. They lived in obscurity, hidden away from world, finding ways to survive that might go unnoticed. When they were noticed, they were hunted to death. Few people met them and lived.
I had met one named Druse. She called me her brother. She meant it metaphorically, but she wasn’t that far from the truth. After years of no one understanding what the dark mass in my head was, she knew something. Her fey ability to drain essence used a form of the same darkness. She showed me how it worked and how to find pleasure in it. She showed me a side to myself, a desire within, that disgusted me. She showed me how easy it can be to intend to kill someone. Using the darkness, I had tasted the essence of a living person—Keeva, my old partner at the Guild. That was bad enough. What made it worse was that on some level, I recognized what I was doing and didn’t stop right away. For that, I was ashamed. Many things I’ve done wrong in my life have made me feel guilty, but the night I almost killed Keeva made me truly ashamed.
When Druse showed me how to use the darkness, I felt pain, but a pain with a twisted pleasure to it. Druse had linked her mind to mine and wouldn’t let go. When we used the darkness in sync with each other, we bonded on an intimate level. When we worked in opposition, the individual darknesses within us rejected each other, and we blacked out, like what had happened to me last night. I had seen the darkness kill again, its waving tendrils of shadow sapping away the life of their victim. The darkness in my head had responded to it.
The dark tendrils in the alley the previous night were exactly how a leanansidhe siphoned essence from people. I had two explanations for what had happened in the Tangle. Either Druse was alive, or another leanansidhe was loose in the city. One leanansidhe in the neighborhood was a surprise—even a shock. Two stretched the bounds of believability.
The dwarf’s dying whisper that “she” wanted the stone made it more plausible that Druse was alive. She had a stone ward she was willing to kill for—a rare ward shaped like a bowl that had the ability to generate essence from its surroundings and return it tenfold. Druse used it to stave off her hunger during the low periods when she couldn’t acquire living prey. The ward stone had a geasa—an essence-enhanced restriction—that only a virgin could move it. A virgin-only geasa was old-school Faerie stuff, and the stone was definitely old-school. The essence it emitted had the distinct signature of the Faerie that existed before Convergence. A fortuitous blow to the head with that same stone bowl stopped Druse and, I thought, killed her. If she had survived, she would want the bowl back and would stop at nothing until she had it.
After I escaped Druse, I hid the stone with a street kid named Shay, who had a rather funny advantage in the virgin department. No one knew Shay had the stone, but Druse was attuned to it and would find it eventually.
Shay had been through a lot of heartache because of me, and I didn’t want to panic him with a theory. If whatever was haunting the Weird and the Tangle was not Druse, Shay would be safe—or at least safer. Before I told him anything, I wanted to see Druse’s body for myself, and the way to do that was to return to her lair. Murdock had known what I wanted to do before I did. I had to go back and confirm whether the body was there.
I waited in the cool early-morning air outside the warehouse where we had first found the leanansidhe. Murdock arrived all tricked out in a police tactical uniform but with his regular Boston P.D. jacket over it so there was no mistaking where he worked. I wore jeans and a short leather jacket. “You look like you mean business,” I said.
“I do. I’m not walking in blind this time.” Druse had been feeding on one of her victims when we stumbled on her in a tunnel. She’d attacked Murdock and knocked him on his ass. She would have drained him to death, too, if I hadn’t been there.
The building remained a crime scene after Murdock and I had found skeletons in the basement. Druse had been around a long time before we found her. The Weird was the perfect place for her to operate. Since it was routine for people to disappear in the neighborhood without explanation, she survived without notice for years.
Murdock produced a key out from the pocket of his black tactical vest and unlocked the warehouse door. The inside had not changed since my last—unauthorized—visit. An upper corridor led to a hammered-metal basement door. We descended into the gloom of the basement. Murdock activated his body shield at the bottom of the metal stairs. It burned crimson in my vision. Under normal circumstances, the layer of hardened essence protected him from a fey attack, with the exception of a leanansidhe. Heightened essence was what she sought, and a shield served as an appetizer to her.
A narrow passage stretched fifty feet to a tunnel that led to the sewer system. That was the route we used to find the basement when we were investigating another case. Unlike our first visit, the space was empty, swept clean of the possessions and remains of Druse’s victims. The police had been processing the large volume of evidence for months.
On the right, a hole broken through a bricked-over archway led to the basement proper, a vast space that was empty when we found it and empty still. At the far end, an opening in the wall gaped like a wound. “You couldn’t see this opening a month ago, Leo. The leanansidhe had a glamour on it that made it look like the rest of the wall.”
He directed the beam of his flashlight into the opening. “It looks clear.”
“I’ve been in there. There’s a few blind turns, but mostly a straight shot to her room. Watch out for binding spells,” I said.
Despite my foray into the various tunnels around the city, I wasn’t a big fan of urban exploration. It was dangerous in general, and in the Weird, it was asking for trouble. Through the hole, the walls and ceiling had a smooth, organic feel to them, an indication that they had been shaped long ago by trolls and dwarves. The path wound deep beneath the Weird, branching off to parts unknown.
“You came down here alone and unarmed?” Murdock asked.
“Yep.”
He chuckled in my ear. “Man, you are crazier than I thought.”
“Well, I wasn’t down here for the best possible reasons.” As understatements go, that was a big one. Druse knew things about the dark mass in my head, maybe not how it got there or how to get rid of it, but she showed me how to—and I hated to admit it even to myself—enjoy it. The pleasure it gave me was hard to describe, but the kick and the kink of a sexual addiction didn’t come close. No matter how I tried to stop myself, I gave in to the desire at the risk of my life and people I cared about. I had managed to keep it under control all these months by staying away from powerful essence sources.