The B Street Headworks was one of those places I passed, maybe paused to admire the Richardson Romanesque architecture, but otherwise without giving much thought to it. I had no idea what I had been missing. A wall of glass met me inside, large panes stretching floor to ceiling and the length of the building. Essence didn’t travel well through glass, so the wall served as a protective barrier against what happened on the other side. And on the other side was an infernal wonder. Huge iron pipes snaked and twisted through a wide-open space filled with enormous stone cylinders. Conveyor belts rose and fell through a maze of smaller pipes. Steam rose from vats and release valves, hazing the lighting to misty gray and sallow yellow. Catwalks serviced the three-story height. Solitary fey in all their strange and beautiful-scaled and feathered and oddly colored skin glory lounged against the railings.
Solitary fey didn’t fall neatly into any of the major species categories. The Celtic and Teutonic fey each had their own varieties, and the Weird was home to most of them. Scorned and feared for their appearances and odd abilities, it didn’t surprise me that so many worked one of the most thankless jobs in the city. They peered down at a group of police officers clustered near one of the large conveyor belts on the main level.
The stench hit me as I let myself through a glass door. My body shields activated, patches of near-invisible hardened essence that protected me from essence attacks and reduced the effect of physical ones. They had covered my entire body once, and I could turn them on and off at will. Now they were fragmented, the result of an essence fight that had destroyed most of my abilities and left a black mass in my brain that hurt like hell whenever I tried to use what remained. I could still activate the shields, but doing it on demand was painful. Perversely, they reacted on their own now, which didn’t hurt as much but ratcheted up my anxiety until I could figure out why they had gone on.
As I walked to where Murdock stood with the other officers, my essence-sensing ability kicked in. My vision filled with streams and clouds of light, the machinery and pipes glowing in multicolored hues of essence. The B Street Headworks acted as a giant filter, pulling essence out of the water and sewage before it reached the more mundane headworks that sifted garbage out of the system. The way some of the essence resonated with indigo and violet indicated a nasty brew that was probably what had triggered my body shields in the first place.
Murdock wore a B.P.D. parka instead of his usual camel-wool long coat. To the amusement of several workers, the police officers had face masks on. Murdock glanced up from a trough that ran the length of the room. The top of the trough was covered with a glass lid that had quartz wards embedded in it to control the essence inside.
“Hope you haven’t had lunch,” Murdock said. A putrid stew filled the trough, murky gray water covered with an oily slick. Things floated in it, some of it unrecognizable, but way too much perfectly identifiable. Strands and eddies of essence flickered, more than the natural ambient essence all organic things had. Things intentionally infused with essence pooled in the water, precisely what the B Street Headworks was designed to filter. Unfortunately, one of those things was a male body. He bobbed on the surface, his brawny, naked torso slicked with black grime. His suede trousers had snagged on a seam in the trough, and he pivoted lazily against the side. To up the horror quotient, his head was missing.
“This has to be one of the most revolting things I’ve ever seen,” I said.
Murdock raised an eyebrow. “One of? I don’t think I want to ask.”
A flash of pink in the dim atmosphere caught my attention. Stinkwort walked along the tiny edge of another trough fifteen feet up, peering into its contents. For a diminutive fairy who topped out at twelve inches tall, a one-inch-wide path was not a problem. Stinkwort preferred to go by the name Joe, for obvious reasons. I’ve known him since before I could walk and talk, so I tended to think of him by his real name. “Where the hell did he come from?”
Murdock followed my gaze to Joe. “He likes odd smells.”
I nodded. “It’s why he likes your car.”
“And your apartment,” Murdock said.
“Touché, my friend. A lie, but touché.”
Murdock gestured at the body. “We haven’t found the head. The plant manager says this is an essence trough for outflow from the gross-material filter. The body shouldn’t have come through unless it had some kind of essence charge on it. That’s why I called you.”
I leaned forward. Druids had receptors in the nose and eyes that sensed essence in ways no one understood. My essence-sensing ability had become heightened in the past few months, far beyond the ability I’d had before the accident. My vision sensing was more acute, too. I didn’t have to be near something now to sense essence—I could see it. The essence coming off the body explained why it had ended up in the trough. The corpse radiated differently than normal essence. The filters must have had a fail-safe to kick out anything they didn’t know how to categorize. “He’s Dead, Murdock.”
Murdock pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “Excellent deduction, Connor. I wasn’t sure what to make of the missing head.”
I laughed at the dry tone in his voice. “Seriously. He’s Dead, as in TirNaNog Dead. You’ve got a dead Dead guy.”
A few weeks earlier, the veil between the world of the living and the dead opened on Samhain, the holiday that the non-fey world called Halloween. Under any other circumstances, that would have been cause for celebration, since none of the veils between here and Faerie had opened in over a century. But things went wrong—seriously wrong—and the veil slammed shut. When that happened, the Dead from TirNaNog who happened to be on the living side of the veil became trapped here. They were supposed to vanish at daybreak. They didn’t.
Murdock’s face went flat. The Dead were not his favorite topic. He was raised in a Roman Catholic home. Mass on Sunday was not a chore for him, but a duty and desire. Fitting the Dead into his worldview was becoming more and more difficult for him. “Why would someone kill a Dead guy?” he asked.
I shrugged. “For all the same reasons someone would kill the living. When you’ve got an axe to grind against someone who died, I imagine the temptation to kill him is pretty high when you catch him walking around again. Especially since you can do it over and over. The Dead regenerate the next day. Which brings me to this guy. Whoever did this wanted him to never come back. That’s why the head is missing. Since the head is where the fey believe the soul abides, if you remove the head, you acquire the power of the soul, and the Dead guy can’t regenerate. I’d get as much info off the body before dawn as you can. Without the head, it’s going to discorporate into its elemental essence and vanish forever.”
Murdock looked even less pleased. Resurrection outside his Church was not something he liked to discuss either. “How am I supposed to find a motive for killing a Dead guy who might not have even died this century?” he muttered, more to himself than to me.
Joe fluttered down and landed on the trough. He peered through the glass at the body, twitching his nose and shaking his head. “I think he died two and a half hours ago.”
“You can sense that by looking at him?” Murdock asked.
With a sage expression, Joe pointed. “Of course. See? His watch stopped. It’s probably not waterproof.” A murmur of chuckles rippled through the nearby officers. Murdock cracked a smile. Joe was fascinated by clocks and watches, mostly because he didn’t see their point.