“Let’s open it,” I said.
Murdock helped me to lift the top off and put it aside. The Dead guy grasped the edges of the ward box and sat up. He assessed the three of us with suspicion. In a burst of energy, he leaped up and out of the box. I grabbed Janey as she stumbled into me. As the berserker landed on the floor, he let loose a flying kick. Murdock’s body shield bloomed around him and took the brunt of the blow.
I hustled Janey into a corner. The berserker strode toward Murdock, his own body shield rippling with essence that made his skin expand. The berserker swung, and Murdock ducked. He lost his balance, and the Dead man closed in on him. I jumped him, but he sent me sprawling away like I was a fly on his back. I landed hard on my side, my fragmented body shields taking some of the impact. Not enough. My side hurt like hell.
Angry, I jumped on the berkserker’s back again, wrapping my arm around his neck. He grabbed my forearm with thick fingers, squeezing against the muscle. The tattoo on my arm flashed with a white light as it drew on my body essence. The pressure from the berserker’s grip vanished, but my head felt light with the sudden drop in my body essence. My hold on his neck slackened, and he wrenched my arm away, flinging me against the wall.
Murdock came up out of his crouch and hit the guy in the gut. The berserker staggered, and before he could recover, Murdock followed through with a left to his jaw. He tripped sideways, throwing his leg out again, aiming for Murdock’s abdomen. As Murdock twisted sideways to avoid the hit, the hair on the back of my neck rose as I sensed an essence charge behind me. Confused, I pivoted on my heel, ready to fight, then checked my motion.
Janey stood with her fingers pointed like a gun. A bolt of dark green essence shot from her outstretched hand and hit the berserker. His head snapped forward, and Murdock hit him with a right cross to the cheek. The berserker fell.
As she jabbed with her fingers at the air above him, Janey chanted pinpoints of yellow light into existence. They sparkled and burst, scattering a web of glowing strands that spun and fell in a net. It settled over the berserker and became a binding spell that cinched his arms to his sides. Annoyed, I backhanded him hard across the face and reared back with my fist.
Murdock grabbed my arm. “It’s cool. It’s cool,” he said.
I rubbed at my arm. The tattoo had released the essence back into my body as soon as the berserker had let go, but it was sore. “Sorry. Are you all right?” I asked.
Murdock arched an eyebrow at me as he shook his fist loose. “Yeah, I’m glad I wasn’t holding my coffee.”
I took several breaths to calm myself. Janey had retreated to the other side of the room. “Where the hell did a nice girl like you learn an elf-shot spell like that?” I said.
With hands on hips, she kept her eyes on the berserker. “My mom. She doesn’t like me walking around at night alone in this neighborhood.”
Janey attracted the berserker’s attention when she spoke, and he asked her in German where he was.
“He’s confused,” Janey translated. “He doesn’t understand why he’s here. He’s never woken up in a place he’s never been before.”
I understood German, but for Murdock’s benefit I let her translate. “Who is he?” I asked.
The berserker stared at me while Janey translated. “His name is Jark, son of Ulf,” she said.
I crossed my arms. “Ask him how he died.”
Janey bit her lower lip. “He said, ‘Which time?’ ”
I resisted the urge to wipe the sarcastic grin off his face. “The last time, please.”
He shrugged. “He says it was a solitary named Sekka. A jotunn who hates the Dead.”
Murdock and I exchanged glances. “That’s whose head we found in the sewer, Janey,” I said.
“How’d she lose her head if she took his?” Murdock asked.
By his reaction when Janey asked him—his pleased reaction—Jark hadn’t known Sekka was dead. He evaded Janey’s questioning at first, enjoying her frustration before giving up a tidbit. “The last thing he remembers is the giant attacking him and a brief pain as she swung a sword at his head. He says the last thing he saw was the Hound, so maybe the Hound killed him.”
“And why would the Cwn Annwn want to kill you?” I said to Jark.
He chuckled as Janey translated. Janey blushed at his response. “He says he wasn’t killed by a dog.”
She didn’t mention the part where Jark called me a string of unflattering names reflecting my stupidity, asked why a woman would want to know so much about death, then he had hit on her. “Who is the Hound?” I asked.
“He says ‘no one knows and no one wants to know. The Hound hunts the living and the Dead.’”
By the look on his face, Jark was lying. He was probably already planning his revenge. I caught Murdock’s eye. “Can we hold him?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “For a while. Legal status on the Dead is a mess.”
Jark turned this way and that as he followed our conversation. I pulled Janey aside. “Not, obviously, that you can’t take care of yourself, but I don’t want to leave you alone with him. Is there an officer in the building, maybe more than one?”
“Sure,” she said. We walked with her to a phone by the door and listened while she asked for security. She replaced the receiver. “They’ll be right down.”
Murdock abruptly walked out. “I’ll be outside.”
Janey watched him leave. “Is he okay?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure. He’s a Christian. I don’t think any of this is sitting well with him.”
She rubbed her arms as if to warm herself as she looked across the room at Jark. “I can’t say I blame him. I didn’t grow up with the Dead appearing on this side of the veil. I thought those were just stories.”
“At least they were stories that fit your religion,” I said.
She nodded. “I guess. It’s funny. Despite my job, I don’t think about death much on a personal level. My people die by accident or murder. I don’t have—I don’t know, a connection to it in the same way humans do. Maybe that’s why they fear us, Connor. Even death isn’t an end for the fey.”
I nodded at Jark. “I don’t think that’s what the fey expect when they do die.”
“It’s probably why the solitaries are fighting so hard. They used to have an idea of what came after death. Now it’s a mystery,” she said.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. She was right. With TirNaNog closed to the Dead, no one knew what happened to the fey when they died. It hadn’t hit me because I wasn’t a target. For all my fears about a shortened life span because of the dark thing in my head, I hadn’t been confronted with the visceral realization that death might be an end and an end only.
“Thanks for this, Janey. Our friend here might have given us something solid to follow up,” I said.
She crossed her arms. “No, thank you. This has to be one of the more fascinating things I’ve seen here. I’m not used to my cases sitting up and talking to me.”
I smiled slightly. “With any luck, this will be the only one.”
Jark’s anger had subsided to confusion. He was only . . . animated . . . because we intervened. He had no idea how close he had come to an eternal nothingness. If the leanansidhe had drained the remains of the essence in his head, if we hadn’t brought his head and body together, he wouldn’t be sitting in bindings, wearing nothing but a towel, and wondering what the hell we were talking about.
“Maybe this is what Convergence brought the fey here for, Janey—to experience an end to all things they knew and give them the humans to help them cope.”
“I hope that’s not true, Connor. I hope it’s the opposite—that humans can learn the value of thinking beyond their finite lives. The Wheel of the World keeps turning no matter what. It doesn’t stop when we die. If there’s one thing the fey and humans have in common, it’s that neither of us knows why things happen they way they do.”