“Well, at least that makes their position clear for a change.” The Fey Guild theoretically handled fey crime in the city. It failed, mostly owing to politics and indifference. If you had money or any kind of power, they were right there for you. If not, you didn’t get farther than the lobby—especially now, when the Guild had its hands full trying to keep the local human population pacified in the wake of recent controversies. Their usual lack of interest in the Weird had become intense interest—the negative kind. With the mayor and governor pointing their fingers at the Guild, the Guild looked for someone to take the blame and pointed several rungs down the ladder at the Weird. The Dead weren’t even on the ladder.
An officer stepped closer to Murdock. “They’ve cleared the main intake. No head. They can isolate this channel, but they need to get the rest back online.”
Murdock nodded. “Tell them okay. And call Janey Likesmith over at the morgue and tell her that Connor Grey says we’ve got a dead Dead guy. She’ll need to work fast. Make sure you say dead twice like that.”
Janey was a Dokkheim elf and the only fey person who worked for the Office of the City Medical Examiner. She didn’t have much support down at the OCME, but these days she was the last hope for fey murder victims the Guild abandoned. She was sharp and intuitive. I doubted we’d get very far on the body, but if there was anything to know, she’d find it.
Murdock raised an eyebrow. “I hear there’s plenty in the budget to control crime in the Weird at the moment. You want in on this?”
I stared down at the body. If another Dead guy did the deed, I didn’t know if I cared all that much. The Dead had their own rules that the living didn’t understand. But if the killer wasn’t Dead, that meant a nut job was running around the Weird, and we already had too many of those. “Yeah, I’m in.”
A long screech went up as machinery restarted. The air shifted, its foul odor changing to a new foul odor as water rushed through pipes. Conveyor belts rumbled to life with a metallic rattling, and a heavy static tickled along my skin as essence filters resumed their work. Two men in headworks hazmat suits approached the trough, body shields hardened and augmented as they lifted the glass to retrieve the body.
A shimmer of essence scraped across my mind, signaling that someone fey was about to use a mental communication called a sending.
He’s not the first.
My gaze swept the catwalks. The solitaries who had been watching had returned to work. No one made eye contact with me, and I had no idea which direction the sending had come from. Solitaries didn’t trust many people, authority figures least of all. I may not be a member of the Guild anymore, but people knew I used to be one of its best druid investigators.
Whoever did the sending didn’t trust me either.
2
The wind slapped me in the face as I stepped out to B Street. I backed out of the way as two men from the OCME hustled a gurney through the door. Squinting against the sudden light of the noonday sun, I inhaled fresh cold air. Only a few police cars remained, the interest level dropping once the word went out that the dead guy was nobody interesting.
Hey, handsome. This time the sending was smooth and familiar and brought a smile to my face. I recognized the sender’s body signature bound up in the message. Up the street, a black car idled at the curb, its exhaust coiling vapor into the air.
I slid into the passenger seat. “Hey, gorgeous.”
Despite the intense heat in the car, Tibbet wore her favorite red hat and gloves with a fur-lined tawny suede coat that almost matched her skin. She knew what looked good on her. She leaned across the seat and kissed me, her lips soft and lingering. She smiled when she pulled away. “I find you in the oddest places these days.”
Amused, I settled against the headrest. “Me, too. How’ve you been?”
She pulled onto the street. Her smile faltered, but she kept it. “It’s been rough. I had a bad week in October, but bounced back.”
She didn’t need to say more. Tibs and I went way back. The Guildmaster’s house, where she lived and worked, had been attacked in October, and Tibs had held off the intruders alone. She had to shed her docile brownie nature to do it and went full-blown boggart in the process. Going boggart was like a mania for her kind, and depending on how deep they went into it, recovery from the transition took some time.
“Am I right in guessing that you didn’t just happen to be in my neighborhood?” I asked.
From Summer Street, she drove into the city. “He asked to see you.”
“In broad daylight? The Old Man must not care about appearances anymore.” Manus ap Eagan had been Guildmaster of the Boston Guildhouse all my life and then some. Tibs had worked for him a lot longer than that as far as I knew. She served a number of roles for Eagan, from driver to assistant to legal advocate.
Tibs compressed her lips, her eyes tearing up. I brushed her hair over her ear. “Hey! I was joking.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s a joke anymore, Connor. He’s bad. He’s had a parade of people coming through the house against Gillen Yor’s orders. I don’t like to think what it means.”
Eagan’s wasting disease had baffled everyone for over a year. Danann fairies were among the most powerful fey beings, and they didn’t get sick like other species. That High Queen Maeve hadn’t replaced him was testament to his abilities to lead. That she moved Ryan macGoren onto the Guildhouse board of directors sent the message that she was waiting for the right moment.
“Why me?” I asked.
Tibs inhaled deeply to still her visibly rising emotion. “He was arguing with Nigel. I didn’t like the sound of his voice, so I went in to stop it. As I entered, Nigel was saying to Manus that things could not be more black-and-white, and it was time to decide. The boss looked at me and laughed. He said, ‘The Wheel of the World turns the way It will. I could use Grey, Tibs.’ ”
I exhaled sharply through my nose. Nigel Martin was my old mentor. We’d gone our separate ways after the loss of most of my abilities, and the relationship had slid further downhill ever since. “What did Nigel say to that?”
Tibbet glanced at me. “He said a fool for a fool’s errand.”
I chuckled. “Sounds like Nigel hasn’t changed his mind about me.”
As Tibbet drove into Brookline, she tickled my ear with a red-gloved hand. “I haven’t either.”
I grabbed her hand and kissed it. When Tibbet and I were together, it was sometimes about comfort, sometimes about convenience. It was always mutual. I don’t think I would have called it love back then, but I thought we loved each other now—a truer, former-lovers-who-get-along kind. Not the kind of thing I had going on with Meryl Dian at the moment, which was all passion and frustration and, yeah, hotness. And unexpectedness. “I’m not the man I was.”
A reflective look came over her as she turned through the opening wrought-iron gate to the Guildmaster’s house. “No. But you’re more so.”
The gates closed behind us. Tibbet guided the car through the tall cedars that lined the drive. Manus ap Eagan’s house loomed above an expanse of dead lawn. In the stark December light, it sat forlorn and faded, its facings of brick and shingle worn white and ashen.
Tibbet pulled up to the front steps. “Left at the top of the stairs, last door on the right. He’s waiting.”
I tapped her nose. “Thanks for the lift.”
She grinned. “See you later, handsome.”
“Later, gorgeous.”
I let myself in the house. Despite windows at its north end, the grand entry hall had an air of twilight about it, the clerestory windows above casting sharp beams of white sunlight through shadow and dust. I climbed the wide freestanding staircase to the right, its banister curving around the hulking stuffed mass of a real Asian elephant, a trophy from Eagan’s less-enlightened days. In the middle of the flight of steps, the portrait above the fireplace on the opposite wall came into full view. High Queen Maeve stared at me, eye level. A shiver of recognition ran over me. I never knew how true-to-life John Singer Sargent had captured the bitch until I met her.