“Really? Curiouser and curiouser.”
He nodded. “My father asked me to pick him up at a restaurant. They came out together.”
“How the hell do they know each other?” I asked.
Murdock shrugged. “He said she was Guild business.”
I pursed my lips. Eagan said she was a spy. Despite her claims otherwise, Moira Cashel was up to something more than ministering to a sick Danann. “I know it isn’t like me to worry about your father, but I would tell him to be careful around her.”
He smirked. “Will do, concerned citizen.”
“Interesting coincidence,” I said.
“Small world,” he said.
“Yeah, with small people in it.”
12
The Office of the City Medical Examiner was a long name for a sad place. At night, it was even sadder, a brick building perpetually clothed in gray twilight on a desolate stretch of road. It was open twenty-fours a day, seven days a week. Death made its own appointments, and the city morgue waited like a patient suitor for a date.
In the cool basement, steam rose from Murdock’s coffee. He leaned against a counter, not looking like he’d been up all night. The accident that boosted his essence had boosted his energy levels, too. Not that he needed it. Murdock’s stamina was legendary. As a police officer, he had spent more than enough time on dull surveillance, which came in handy for him since he’d been watching Janey Likesmith and me work through the night. Occasionally, we needed an extra pair of hands, but for the most part he watched.
The OCME handled all the deaths in the city and transferred major fey cases to the Guild only at the Guild’s request. As the lone fey staff member at OCME, Janey worked the rest. All of them. She had to pick and choose which ones to give more attention to than others. Who the decedent was or who they knew or how much money they had in life didn’t matter to her. Producing the best examination results did.
Janey was a dark elf, a member of the Dokkheim clan. The dark elves acknowledged the Elven King, but most of them went their own way in the post-Convergence world. They had never been strong enough to challenge the Teutonic court, but they were skilled enough to have influence over it.
We met on a case together not too long ago. She impressed me with her skills and even temper. The politics of Convergence held no interest for her. Like a child of immigrants, her parents’ stories of the old country—in her case, Elven Faerie—were stories, nothing more. She understood where she came from, but she also understood that Boston was where she was. She had no desire to re-create the past or find a way back to it. She focused her energy on the here and now, trying to help the fey and humans live together.
We worked on opposite sides of an examining table. Janey’s deep brown hands moved with careful skill as she realigned her side of the glass case. On each side of the table, narrow strips of quartz supported glass panels around the decapitated body from the sewer. The body itself lay on one long pane.
We had spent most of the night tuning the stones—turning them into wards—so that they could receive an infusion of essence. The process was one part skill and one part luck. Getting one stone to work in conjunction with another was easy. Getting several to do it depended on understanding the natural contours and densities of the stones so that essence would flow like a smooth current through all of them. It was like aligning a series of magnets of various strengths so that they would all stand up but not reject each other’s shifting polarities.
“I think if you tighten the brace on your side, we’re done,” I said.
She twisted the wing nuts in front of her. The glass plates shifted into place along the side of the table. Janey flicked a strand of her nutmeg-colored hair around the delicate point of her ear. “Perfect.”
“We can put the head in now,” I said.
Murdock stepped aside as Janey opened a cooling locker. She didn’t pull out the drawer but reached in and lifted the head out. It had seen better days. Bloated skin indicated time spent in the water, and missing pieces of flesh evidenced the natural process of sloughing and banging around in sewer pipes. Without a trace of revulsion, Janey carried it to the table and placed it gently inside the box. “How close to the body should it be?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think it matters that much.”
She shifted it closer to the neck stump and stepped back, peeling off her gloves. “Okay, now the lid.”
Murdock put his coffee down. He grabbed one end of the second large glass pane we had, and I took the other. We lifted, and Janey guided it over the table as we lowered it onto the standing walls.
Essentially, we had created a huge glass ward box around the body. Where metal bent essence and sent it in unanticipated directions, glass absorbed and dissipated it into the ambient air. I loved the irony that something so fragile could defeat something so powerful. Janey smiled in satisfaction. “This is amazing. I will have to call Ms. Dian later and thank her.”
“Well, this wouldn’t have been possible if you hadn’t put the body in a ward box in the first place,” I said.
When the Dead regenerated, the body vanished and reanimated somewhere else the next day. Meryl had lots of theories about why—everything from appearing where they died, to where they felt safe, to more complex theories about essence sinkholes or concentrated focal points. Since we worried that we might regenerate the body but not know where it went, Meryl came up with the idea of a barrier spell on a large ward box as a way to prevent the Dead guy’s essence from going anywhere.
Janey discarded her gloves in a hazard bin. “I preserve body essence for evidence as part of my routine. I wasn’t sure it was going to work with a Dead person.”
“The leanansidhe must have done something similar. There’s still significant essence in the head,” I said.
Janey checked her watch. “We have some time until dawn. I’d like to show you something from my examination of the body.”
We followed her up the hall to her lab room. The layout looked the same as the last time I had visited, but the instruments on the two tables were more sophisticated. The city budget didn’t allow for much in the way of fey-related diagnostic tools. A little enforced guilt toward Ryan macGoren and the Guild helped buy a few things. Janey handed me a small glass box—a miniversion of the one we had built in the morgue. Inside the box, a wafer of quartz glowed with essence. “I made an imprint of the Dead victim’s essence for the files. Notice anything?” she asked.
The essence glowed with the vibration of the Dead body in the next room, the dull ochre signature of a Teutonic berserker clan. Splotches of a vibrant green with black mottling mingled in his essence. “The Taint.”
Janey retrieved the box and examined it under an essence magnifier. “It’s bonded to his essence.”
“And if it affects the Dead the same way as the living . . .” I said.
“It reinforces their baser instincts. When the Dead die, they’re coming back as killing machines,” she finished. She slid the boxed wafer inside a marked envelope and placed it in an evidence drawer in a large wall cabinet.
We returned to the examining room and spread around the table, Murdock and I on opposite sides. Janey stood at the foot of the ward box and placed her hands on the corner quartz strips. She looked at me. “Ready?”
“As we’re ever going to be,” I said.
In the guttural dialect of her clan, she chanted the soft words of a rejuvenation spell. Normally, such a spell worked to boost someone’s energy. Janey had made a few tweaks to it to encourage the essence to mimic whatever it came in contact with, which would be crucial in a situation where the residual essence in the dead body was nearly gone. Pale green essence flowed from her fingers, seeping into the stone strips. It flowed along the edges until the box’s entire frame glowed. As the essence penetrated the stones, they flashed once with the charge, and Janey ended the spell.