The crime-scene team had enlarged the hole the leanansidhe had escaped through. A bone-chilling draft wafted over me from between the jagged bricks. Silence filled the utter darkness beyond. Why the section had been sealed off wasn’t obvious. The columned space inside was devoid of the usual abandoned equipment or stock supplies left by long-gone businesses.
Body signatures from the investigative team lit up in my sensing ability, two fey signatures mixed in with about a dozen human. Keeva macNeve must have sent someone from the Guild. Probably to cover her ass. If the leanansidhe went after humans, she’d have a hard time explaining she knew it existed and did nothing.
The team had scoured the basement. Individual trails branched and overlapped throughout the room. The far wall was another bricked-over section. Other than the leanansidhe ’s bolt-hole, I found no other openings. Leanansidhes weren’t stupid. It was no coincidence Joe had found her lying on the floor near an escape route, and she wouldn’t let herself become trapped if someone followed her. An exit had to be in the basement somewhere.
I turned off the flashlight and allowed my sensing ability free rein. The investigative team’s residual signatures brightened. Down the center of the room, directly from the bolt-hole if I judged the angle right, their signatures masked a thin layer of violet essence, the faint trace of the leanansidhe’s body signature. At the far end of the basement, a thin purple haze splashed up against the solid brick wall. I turned on the flashlight.
The wall showed no breaks. The leanansidhe’s essence danced on my fingers like static when I touched the surface. She had hidden her exit with a strong-yet-subtle masking ward. Frustrated, I slapped my hand against the wall. The dark mass in my head clenched, and my hand slipped beneath the surface of the bricks. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Masking wards were keyed to specific essences for access, usually the spellcaster and whoever else the ’caster allowed. The leanansidhe wouldn’t have keyed the wall for me, never mind known my essence well enough to do it without me.
I pressed at the bricks. The dark mass in my head danced in short pulses of pain as my hands sank below the surface. A pit of anxiety formed in my stomach. The leanansidhe must have set the ward to something she thought unique to herself. The dark mass was the key. I felt open space on the other side of the wall. I stepped forward, a pounding in my mind as I passed through the ward. I stumbled into the other side and took deep breaths as the pain settled.
A narrow section of basement mirrored the one that Murdock and I had found. A sense of pain permeated the air in this one, the echoes of long-past deaths. Tragedy lingered in spaces, the emotion of the moment seeping into the surroundings like a memory stain. It was the leanansidhe ’s dining room. People died there, drained of their essence to feed another’s hunger.
Ignoring the emotions vying for attention, I searched the area. Another staircase led to the warehouse above, but an avalanche of dirt and trash blocked access. No one had used it for a long, long time. At the other end, a door was shaped in the stone wall, more handiwork of the troll who had made the sewer tunnel. The leanansidhe must have taken over the space after the troll left or died. More likely, she had used the troll to create the tunnels and killed it when the work was completed.
I hesitated. No one knew where I was. I had no abilities to defend myself, and I was about to seek out a monster. I found assurance in the fact that the leanansidhe had tried to absorb my essence and failed—an irony that the one fey with no abilities to defend himself was the one fey she apparently couldn’t feed on. I crossed the threshold.
The smooth earthen tunnel led down, the leanansidhe’s signature strong enough to be evident even to a normal sensing ability. The path twisted and turned, branched and widened. I walked through at least a quarter mile of turnings before I found a series of chambers. I hung back from the entrance to a furnished room.
Warmth radiated against my face. That was it as far as welcome went. The chamber was a living room of sorts, if a room buried three floors beneath the ground could be considered living. A generation’s worth of furniture filled the space, old sofas and bookcases, tables and chairs. A many-joined extension cord trailed from the ceiling, providing electricity for a glass-shade lamp by a reading chair. A book lay open on the table next to it.
Welcome, brother. Enter and be at peace.
I pressed flat against the wall, my dagger out of its sheath and in my hand without a conscious thought. Sendings don’t have directional indications like sound. The leanansidhe had to have me in her line of sight to know I was in the room. “Where are you?”
A fluctuation in the air passed over me. Definitely someone moving in the room. Some fey can cloak themselves, but I didn’t know it was an ability the leanansidhe had. Come, brother. Make peace. There is no blade at your throat.
I flinched from the brief icy touch of steel against my neck. A soft chuckle came from the middle of the room. The air rippled, and the leanansidhe appeared, crouched on an old Persian rug. In her outstretched hand, she held a dagger. She grinned through matted tangles of hair and opened the hand wide to let the dagger fall. “You see, brother? No harm from me for such as we.”
She eased back as I entered.
“You keep calling me ‘brother,’” I said.
She moved behind a table stacked with books, her pale, stained hands caressing the covers though she kept her whiteless eyes on me. “Kin or akin matters not between us. We touch the Wheel the same.”
“I’m not like you.”
Her large dark eyes shifted to my dagger. “Aye, ’struth. I could not touch such a thing as that. Lay it aside, brother, and rest in my home.”
“And leave myself unarmed? If you violate the rules of hospitality, to whom shall I complain?”
She rubbed long fingers down her face, watching me out of the corners of her eyes. “Keep it, then.” She vanished and reappeared at my side. “It will avail you naught.” She vanished again and peered at me from behind a tall grandfather clock, clutching the edges of the wood with cracked gray nails. “Unless I will it.”
She vanished again. I tracked her with my sensing ability and pressed the knife to her chest as she tried to slip around me. “That’s close enough.”
She dropped her masking glamour to reveal a surprised and frightened face. Thrusting her hands up, she bowed her head and sank to the floor. “Spare me, brother. I seek only kinship.”
“I’m not here to kill you,” I said.
She looked up at me through a tangle of hair, suspicious, yet curious. “I have no quarrel with you either, my brother. Shall we sit, then? I should like that.”
I motioned her away with the dagger, and she scuttled along the floor to an armchair. Curling up in its corner, she pawed at one eye as I eased into the opposite chair. She shoved her hand into a tattered pocket. She withdrew her hand, clenched around something. Tentatively, she reached across the side table and dropped a battered piece of bread. “I have not flesh nor fluid to offer, but crusty things can stem the pangs of hunger.”
She was trying to follow the old rules of hospitality, even if the bread had a couple of colors on it that I didn’t usually associate with freshness. “I’m good. Um. Thanks.”
We observed each other. At least, by the shifting of her unsettling black eyes, she was doing the same thing I was. Such a small being to inspire such a lot of fear. She was barely half my height but had the ability to take down the strongest of fey. Except for her emaciated head, the only parts of her body visible outside layers of clothing were her thin arms and grimy ankles.