“At least they were stories that fit your religion,” I said.
She nodded. “I guess. It’s funny. Despite my job, I don’t think about death much on a personal level. My people die by accident or murder. I don’t have—I don’t know, a connection to it in the same way humans do. Maybe that’s why they fear us, Connor. Even death isn’t an end for the fey.”
I nodded at Jark. “I don’t think that’s what the fey expect when they do die.”
“It’s probably why the solitaries are fighting so hard. They used to have an idea of what came after death. Now it’s a mystery,” she said.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. She was right. With TirNaNog closed to the Dead, no one knew what happened to the fey when they died. It hadn’t hit me because I wasn’t a target. For all my fears about a shortened life span because of the dark thing in my head, I hadn’t been confronted with the visceral realization that death might be an end and an end only.
“Thanks for this, Janey. Our friend here might have given us something solid to follow up,” I said.
She crossed her arms. “No, thank you. This has to be one of the more fascinating things I’ve seen here. I’m not used to my cases sitting up and talking to me.”
I smiled slightly. “With any luck, this will be the only one.”
Jark’s anger had subsided to confusion. He was only . . . animated . . . because we intervened. He had no idea how close he had come to an eternal nothingness. If the leanansidhe had drained the remains of the essence in his head, if we hadn’t brought his head and body together, he wouldn’t be sitting in bindings, wearing nothing but a towel, and wondering what the hell we were talking about.
“Maybe this is what Convergence brought the fey here for, Janey—to experience an end to all things they knew and give them the humans to help them cope.”
“I hope that’s not true, Connor. I hope it’s the opposite—that humans can learn the value of thinking beyond their finite lives. The Wheel of the World keeps turning no matter what. It doesn’t stop when we die. If there’s one thing the fey and humans have in common, it’s that neither of us knows why things happen they way they do.”
“Amen to that,” I said.
She laughed.
Murdock waited outside with the car running. How he had managed to get newspaper all over the passenger seat in the short time he’d waited there was beyond me. I tossed it all in back.
“You okay?” I asked, as he drove down Albany Street under the highway.
“Yeah. I needed some air.”
“I wonder if we can count this Jark as an eyewitness to his own murder,” I said.
“Does it matter anymore? He’s not dead, and she is,” he said.
The fey certainly managed to produce entertaining legal puzzles. “Well, we still have Sekka’s murder to deal with.”
He nodded. “At least we have a lead without having to do another resurrection.”
“The animosity between the solitaries and the Dead is going to become a problem with the Taint involved.”
He drove over the Broadway bridge into Southie. “I’ve been warning my father things are spiraling. Some community activist pressured the mayor’s office about it, so they agreed to the neighborhood meeting. My dad doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble.”
“Then what is he doing to reduce the tension?”
Murdock shrugged. “Leaving it to the Guild, I guess. You know how my father is, Connor. The more the fey screw up—especially down in the Weird—the happier he is. He’d like nothing more than for the entire neighborhood to disappear.”
A sinking, guilty feeling hit me. Murdock and I talked about his father all the time because of the political issues he was involved in. After what Manus ap Eagan asked me to do, suddenly the discussion felt like information pumping. It was, in a way, but not for Eagan. I had been meaning to tell Murdock about my conversation with Eagan. I knew Murdock well enough that the longer I held off, the more annoyed he would be with me. “Eagan tells me you’re dating someone.”
Murdock chuckled in surprise. “The Guildmaster talks about my social life?”
I shook my head. “Actually, no. He thought if he told me you were sleeping with someone, and I didn’t know, I would resent it and would wheedle information out of you about planned police actions against the fey and funnel the information to him.”
Murdock’s jaw dropped in a half smile. “What?”
We cruised down to Old Northern Avenue. Out of habit, we both scanned the sidewalks to check out the action. “No lie. Eagan’s worried your father’s playing him for a fool.”
Murdock flicked an eyebrow up and down. “He probably is. Nothing my father likes more than putting one over on the Guild.”
I laughed. “Yeah, that’s about the only thing your father and I have in common. But Eagan might have a point. This thing brewing between the solitaries and the Dead is bound to make someone look bad. It’s too much of a legal tangle not to.”
Murdock pulled up in front of my building. “Are we surprised? The jurisdictional issues are so messed up that nothing’s being handled. Just to spice things up, with all the gang deaths in the last couple of months, there’s a power vacuum on the streets. You know it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
I slumped against the door. “You know what I really want to know?”
Murdock frowned with curiosity. “What?”
“Who you’re sleeping with.”
He laughed. “No comment.”
I didn’t care who he was dating. Curious, sure, but at the end of the day, Murdock told me what he wanted to tell me, and that was okay. I respected him enough to accept what he decided. He’s done a lot for me in the two years that I’ve known him, not least of which was save my life. If anyone deserved some slack from me, it was him.
I punched him playfully in the arm. “Jerk.”
13
I spent the day catnapping and reading, my curiosity about the leanansidhe prompting more reading and Internet surfing. Everything I knew about the leanansidhe filled one small volume on my bookshelf. Internet searches picked up no reliable primary references. Few leanansidhe existed, and those that did spent their lives hidden and alone. By nature, they were not forthcoming, never mind social. Their reputation was too well-known for them to live openly. By all accounts, they absorbed the essence of the living. As with most legends, the whole truth lay beneath hyperbole and falsehoods. If the only essence the leanansidhe survived on was living essence, their presence would be determined quickly. Just look for the dead, essenceless bodies.
Yet they managed to survive. I was willing to bet that the leanansidhe sought other essence resources. Those who survived encounters with them were probably unique situations. As Joe likes to say “kings and queens” about things like that, meaning “yeah, that’s one version, but the reality smelled worse and was usually boring.”
It wasn’t enough. Failure to learn more drove me out into the night. The chronic lack of progress in understanding what had happened to my abilities frustrated me—and created situations that put lives at risk. Janey and Murdock could have been seriously injured by Jark—or worse. I hadn’t thought through resurrecting a Dead man with Taint in his body essence. I failed to protect them because I had no abilities to use against him. No matter what people said about using the abilities you had instead of wishing for ones you didn’t, the berserker couldn’t have been stopped without essence abilities. Abilities I didn’t have anymore.
The leanansidhe knew something about the dark mass. I had seen it, and the thing inside me had reacted to it. It was in her, too, at least something very much like it. For the first time since my accident, I had something that looked like a clue as to what was wrong with me. I had to know if it meant anything. I had to know if the leanansidhe knew something.