As dawn neared, a small sober part of my brain convinced me to put Murdock in a cab home. Joe went along for the ride, convincing the driver to skip the fare in exchange for some flit karma. I watched the broken taillights of the cab coast away and stumbled through the mounds of snow. If Murdock was half-asleep by then, I wasn’t. Mental images continued flashing through my mind: the commissioner’s gun going off, Moira Cashel’s bitter face, Eagan slumped on the floor. The commissioner dead. Scott Murdock was dead. The idea staggered me so much, and yet it paled next to whatever Leo was feeling.
“And for what?” I said. My own voice startled me as the close-in buildings amplified it. I wasn’t prone to talking to myself, but everything that had happened pissed me off.
I’d lied to Murdock. I needed to tonight, needed to help him believe for a few more hours that his father was a good man. I never liked the commissioner because he always—always from the beginning—had treated me like crap. And I never knew why until now. I lied to Murdock because the truth was so appalling I didn’t want to admit to it.
I believed Moira Cashel.
It wasn’t her uncanny Amy Sullivan glamour or the pitch-perfect voice or even the small, trivial facts she knew about how I had met her. A skilled fey with the right information mimicked things like that all the time. I didn’t put it past the Guild to play with my mind that way for some gain.
But tonight had changed my thinking. The look on the commissioner’s face as he pulled the gun convinced me. No one pulled a gun over such stupid and obvious lies, at least not someone like Scott Murdock. But he did because he believed her, and he believed her because she wasn’t lying. She had betrayed him as Amy Sullivan and had suckered him as Moira Cashel.
Scott Murdock was taking bribes. It was the only explanation for how the Guild was getting away with what was happening in the Weird. He had cut some deal with Ryan macGoren for some mutual benefit.
He was dirty.
I had slept with his wife.
“Danu’s motherfreakin’ blood,” I said.
Uno appeared in the road.
“What the hell do you want?” The dog cocked its head as I walked around it. He reappeared in front of me.
“Leave me alone, dammit.” I went around him again, then walked backwards. “You’re a lousy harbinger of doom, you know that? I got shot in the face, and you didn’t even bother to show up.”
He loped around me and stopped again, dodging as I tried to pass. “Go away, dammit. Go bother Shay.”
I shoved him with my leg. He stumbled sideways with a snarl that rose into a bark, then he vanished. I circled in place, waiting for him to come back. A cold wind swept down the street, but he was gone. “Good,” I muttered.
The dark mass in my head shifted, and I pressed the heel of my hand against my temple. I laughed. I practically kicked a hound from Hel, it ran away, and the worst I had to show for it was a headache. I pulled my jacket tighter, the flimsy silk doing little to warm me.
My memory skipped to Eagan’s bedroom and the faint dark haze in his essence. It was and wasn’t like mine. I couldn’t see mine in a visual sense, but I could feel it and had seen MRIs of it. It was a dense thing, a black concentration of shadow at the base of my skull, pressing right on the old brainstem. From what I saw of Eagan’s condition, the darkness was more a dull haze.
I turned the next corner, and the damned dog was back. Uno shied before I took another step, then faded away.
The dark mass blocked my abilities, but Eagan didn’t have that problem. Clearly. Gillen Yor thought the haze was responsible for his weakness. My dark mass devoured essence, but Eagan’s seemed to just drain it away.
I stopped. I had seen that before. I had seen the darkness drain off essence like it was feeding on it. The leanansidhe did it on demand. She might not know what it truly was, but she wasn’t dying from it, and it wasn’t blocking her abilities. She knew how to use it.
Uno appeared, sat in the middle of the sidewalk, and barked once. I frowned. “If you’re only good for stopping muggings, go back to bed, you stupid mutt. It’s ten degrees, and the only things out here are me and you.”
He faded. Insulting mysterious beings from the Land of the Dead was a defense I never knew worked. It didn’t work with Jark, but I guessed it did with dogs.
I cut through an alley. Petty street crime goes down in the winter, and the Weird was no different on that score. The damned cold bothered murderers and thieves like anyone else, so I wasn’t too worried. Besides, I wasn’t joking with the dog. I wasn’t stupid. I had my sensing ability ticking away. No one was out, especially not by a section of abandoned warehouses where they weren’t likely to find anyone to mug.
I slowed to a stop. In the gray and white of the street, a bright orange sticker stood out like a flare. The crime-scene warning on the warehouse door. The one I slit open. I looked up and down the street for anyone. Empty. Uno flashed into view at my side but disappeared before I fully looked at him.
Did he herd me there? Could he hear my thoughts? Did he know I was thinking about the leanansidhe or sense that I was about to? The possible connection between my dark mass and Eagan’s haze had simmered in the back of my mind all night. Could Uno know that? Or did I lead myself to the door, my subconscious pushing me there because of what I was thinking, the sensual pleasure I got from using the dark mass’s abilities bubbling up in some mental center of desire.
I didn’t care. I was there, and the creature in the tunnel held a key to possibly saving the Guildmaster’s life. I hadn’t heard from Keeva. I didn’t think I would now, not after what Moira said. There was no way Ryan macGoren wasn’t involved in her game, and Keeva wasn’t likely to do me any favors over her boyfriend’s objections. The leanansidhe was going to be down there. I pushed aside the thought that I was rationalizing going inside. No law said I couldn’t learn something that might help Eagan and get off on the feeling at the same time.
The door popped open easily. Between the cold and the walk, the edge of my drunk was blunted by the time I reached the walled-off basement. Uno took care of the rest. He appeared near the back wall, suddenly there in the dark, and let out a howl that shook the walls. Adrenaline surged through me at the sound, burning off the rest of the alcohol in my system. When I reached the hidden opening in the wall, the dog was gone.
I hesitated. Maybe the dog was trying to warn me off. Maybe I wasn’t as secure against the leanansidhe because of the thing in my head as I thought I was. I pushed the thought aside. The dog was messed up, a lost Dead animal with no more purpose, twisted like any other Dead fey. How could it portend my journey to TirNaNog if there was no TirNaNog anymore? It should have shown up at Eagan’s when I apparently died and was reborn, but it didn’t. I walked into the tunnel.
The dark mass pulsed in my head, a throb of pressure against the back of my eyes. I flushed with warmth despite the cold in the tunnel. The air rubbed against my skin, an itchy pleasure of temperature difference. My peripheral vision narrowed as the dark mass moved, and I navigated the tunnel by instinct and memory.
The leanansidhe’s room was a shambles. Books scattered across the floor where they had fallen from overturned tables. Burn marks seared the fabric of the armchair Druse used, and her reading lamp lay shattered next to it. I sensed nothing, no essence, the dull, sterile aftermath of the leanansidhe’s ability. At the back of the room, a white-and-silver essence glow drew me to the fissure in the wall.