We met on a case together not too long ago. She impressed me with her skills and even temper. The politics of Convergence held no interest for her. Like a child of immigrants, her parents’ stories of the old country—in her case, Elven Faerie—were stories, nothing more. She understood where she came from, but she also understood that Boston was where she was. She had no desire to re-create the past or find a way back to it. She focused her energy on the here and now, trying to help the fey and humans live together.
We worked on opposite sides of an examining table. Janey’s deep brown hands moved with careful skill as she realigned her side of the glass case. On each side of the table, narrow strips of quartz supported glass panels around the decapitated body from the sewer. The body itself lay on one long pane.
We had spent most of the night tuning the stones—turning them into wards—so that they could receive an infusion of essence. The process was one part skill and one part luck. Getting one stone to work in conjunction with another was easy. Getting several to do it depended on understanding the natural contours and densities of the stones so that essence would flow like a smooth current through all of them. It was like aligning a series of magnets of various strengths so that they would all stand up but not reject each other’s shifting polarities.
“I think if you tighten the brace on your side, we’re done,” I said.
She twisted the wing nuts in front of her. The glass plates shifted into place along the side of the table. Janey flicked a strand of her nutmeg-colored hair around the delicate point of her ear. “Perfect.”
“We can put the head in now,” I said.
Murdock stepped aside as Janey opened a cooling locker. She didn’t pull out the drawer but reached in and lifted the head out. It had seen better days. Bloated skin indicated time spent in the water, and missing pieces of flesh evidenced the natural process of sloughing and banging around in sewer pipes. Without a trace of revulsion, Janey carried it to the table and placed it gently inside the box. “How close to the body should it be?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think it matters that much.”
She shifted it closer to the neck stump and stepped back, peeling off her gloves. “Okay, now the lid.”
Murdock put his coffee down. He grabbed one end of the second large glass pane we had, and I took the other. We lifted, and Janey guided it over the table as we lowered it onto the standing walls.
Essentially, we had created a huge glass ward box around the body. Where metal bent essence and sent it in unanticipated directions, glass absorbed and dissipated it into the ambient air. I loved the irony that something so fragile could defeat something so powerful. Janey smiled in satisfaction. “This is amazing. I will have to call Ms. Dian later and thank her.”
“Well, this wouldn’t have been possible if you hadn’t put the body in a ward box in the first place,” I said.
When the Dead regenerated, the body vanished and reanimated somewhere else the next day. Meryl had lots of theories about why—everything from appearing where they died, to where they felt safe, to more complex theories about essence sinkholes or concentrated focal points. Since we worried that we might regenerate the body but not know where it went, Meryl came up with the idea of a barrier spell on a large ward box as a way to prevent the Dead guy’s essence from going anywhere.
Janey discarded her gloves in a hazard bin. “I preserve body essence for evidence as part of my routine. I wasn’t sure it was going to work with a Dead person.”
“The leanansidhe must have done something similar. There’s still significant essence in the head,” I said.
Janey checked her watch. “We have some time until dawn. I’d like to show you something from my examination of the body.”
We followed her up the hall to her lab room. The layout looked the same as the last time I had visited, but the instruments on the two tables were more sophisticated. The city budget didn’t allow for much in the way of fey-related diagnostic tools. A little enforced guilt toward Ryan macGoren and the Guild helped buy a few things. Janey handed me a small glass box—a miniversion of the one we had built in the morgue. Inside the box, a wafer of quartz glowed with essence. “I made an imprint of the Dead victim’s essence for the files. Notice anything?” she asked.
The essence glowed with the vibration of the Dead body in the next room, the dull ochre signature of a Teutonic berserker clan. Splotches of a vibrant green with black mottling mingled in his essence. “The Taint.”
Janey retrieved the box and examined it under an essence magnifier. “It’s bonded to his essence.”
“And if it affects the Dead the same way as the living . . .” I said.
“It reinforces their baser instincts. When the Dead die, they’re coming back as killing machines,” she finished. She slid the boxed wafer inside a marked envelope and placed it in an evidence drawer in a large wall cabinet.
We returned to the examining room and spread around the table, Murdock and I on opposite sides. Janey stood at the foot of the ward box and placed her hands on the corner quartz strips. She looked at me. “Ready?”
“As we’re ever going to be,” I said.
In the guttural dialect of her clan, she chanted the soft words of a rejuvenation spell. Normally, such a spell worked to boost someone’s energy. Janey had made a few tweaks to it to encourage the essence to mimic whatever it came in contact with, which would be crucial in a situation where the residual essence in the dead body was nearly gone. Pale green essence flowed from her fingers, seeping into the stone strips. It flowed along the edges until the box’s entire frame glowed. As the essence penetrated the stones, they flashed once with the charge, and Janey ended the spell.
No one spoke. Janey checked her watch again as my gaze slipped to the clock on the wall. Dawn would arrive in moments. Murdock had his hands in his pockets and was staring down at the floor. He said little when I explained the process we were trying, and it didn’t take much deduction to understand why. Retrieving a body from the dead—a soul, in his mind—flew in the face of his religion. Maybe even spat in it.
“Something’s happening,” Janey said.
The Dead man’s dull, yellowed essence seeped out of his chest and forehead. The two spots hovered like mist over his skin, tendrils of essence spreading up from the chest toward the neck and spooling down from his head over the chin. They met at the gap in the neck, coiling and merging into a collar of soft light. More essence welled out of his body, thinning over the corpse in a sheet. Whatever the volume of essence he had when animate, it had diminished after the decapitation. The leanansidhe probably absorbed some as well. As if sensing another source, the haze sent tentative feelers out of the sides of the body. One by one, they found the stone frame that Janey had charged with essence. The feelers drew down the essence charge into the body. With renewed energy, the body essence pulsed and thickened, enveloping the body in a cocoon of light.
Janey hopped back a step when the head rocked. A dirty, hazy yellow essence clustered at the neck. The head swayed. Essence pooled in puncture wounds in the face and gathered on the various injuries on the torso. The charged-stone frame of the ward box faded to dullness. The haze around the body swirled and undulated, then contracted and vanished into the skin.
The berserker lay whole, no sign of the decapitation, no torn and rotted flesh. Janey stared, her lips parted in amazement. The Dead man’s eyes opened. Janey gasped, and Murdock stepped closer, his hand on his gun. The berserker looked at me, then at Murdock and Janey. Confused, he pressed his hands against the box lid, his fingertips whitening against glass.