Over two years the dark mass had been in my head, blocking my abilities. Over two years of mistaken diagnoses and dead-end treatments. My healer Gillen Yor was at a complete loss. My friend Briallen’s eyes showed more fear every time she examined me. No amount of ibuprofen stopped my chronic pain.
And it was getting worse.
The thing inside me was escaping, for lack of a better word. Whatever it was, it was attracted and repulsed by essence. If essence threatened me, it reacted to protect me, and when it did, it devoured the essence. When a group of the Dead recently attacked me on Samhain, the dark mass absorbed them. I hadn’t really understood that at the time, but it was the only explanation under the circumstances. The only person who seemed to know what it was, was one of the most reviled beings known to human and fey.
Brother. She’d called me brother.
Inside the warehouse, my breath steamed in the shaft of light from my flashlight. Despite the many doors and hallways, the basement door was easy to find. The building had been empty so long that dust on the floor was evolving into dirt. I followed the recently disturbed path that the crime-scene investigators had made. The trail ended at a large door with rusted and dented sheet metal nailed over it. It opened with the whine of metal on metal and exposed stairs going down. The corrugated metal steps rang dully beneath my boots as I descended.
I swept my flashlight beam across the sealed-off basement. The categorized piles had been removed, then tagged and bagged in evidence lockers at police headquarters. All the clothing, the hats, the shoes—everything the leanansidhe had picked off her victims—were being sorted and scanned, compared to missing persons reports, maybe analyzed for DNA. Phone calls would go out to doctors and dentists. If anything matched a file description, a police officer would have to make that long, slow walk to the door of the next of kin. With the volume of material I saw, it was going to be a long while before the police processed everything. A lot of cold cases were going to be closed. This being the Weird, a lot of unanswered questions were going to result, too. Not all the missing are missed.
The crime-scene team had enlarged the hole the leanansidhe had escaped through. A bone-chilling draft wafted over me from between the jagged bricks. Silence filled the utter darkness beyond. Why the section had been sealed off wasn’t obvious. The columned space inside was devoid of the usual abandoned equipment or stock supplies left by long-gone businesses.
Body signatures from the investigative team lit up in my sensing ability, two fey signatures mixed in with about a dozen human. Keeva macNeve must have sent someone from the Guild. Probably to cover her ass. If the leanansidhe went after humans, she’d have a hard time explaining she knew it existed and did nothing.
The team had scoured the basement. Individual trails branched and overlapped throughout the room. The far wall was another bricked-over section. Other than the leanansidhe ’s bolt-hole, I found no other openings. Leanansidhes weren’t stupid. It was no coincidence Joe had found her lying on the floor near an escape route, and she wouldn’t let herself become trapped if someone followed her. An exit had to be in the basement somewhere.
I turned off the flashlight and allowed my sensing ability free rein. The investigative team’s residual signatures brightened. Down the center of the room, directly from the bolt-hole if I judged the angle right, their signatures masked a thin layer of violet essence, the faint trace of the leanansidhe’s body signature. At the far end of the basement, a thin purple haze splashed up against the solid brick wall. I turned on the flashlight.
The wall showed no breaks. The leanansidhe’s essence danced on my fingers like static when I touched the surface. She had hidden her exit with a strong-yet-subtle masking ward. Frustrated, I slapped my hand against the wall. The dark mass in my head clenched, and my hand slipped beneath the surface of the bricks. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Masking wards were keyed to specific essences for access, usually the spellcaster and whoever else the ’caster allowed. The leanansidhe wouldn’t have keyed the wall for me, never mind known my essence well enough to do it without me.
I pressed at the bricks. The dark mass in my head danced in short pulses of pain as my hands sank below the surface. A pit of anxiety formed in my stomach. The leanansidhe must have set the ward to something she thought unique to herself. The dark mass was the key. I felt open space on the other side of the wall. I stepped forward, a pounding in my mind as I passed through the ward. I stumbled into the other side and took deep breaths as the pain settled.
A narrow section of basement mirrored the one that Murdock and I had found. A sense of pain permeated the air in this one, the echoes of long-past deaths. Tragedy lingered in spaces, the emotion of the moment seeping into the surroundings like a memory stain. It was the leanansidhe ’s dining room. People died there, drained of their essence to feed another’s hunger.
Ignoring the emotions vying for attention, I searched the area. Another staircase led to the warehouse above, but an avalanche of dirt and trash blocked access. No one had used it for a long, long time. At the other end, a door was shaped in the stone wall, more handiwork of the troll who had made the sewer tunnel. The leanansidhe must have taken over the space after the troll left or died. More likely, she had used the troll to create the tunnels and killed it when the work was completed.
I hesitated. No one knew where I was. I had no abilities to defend myself, and I was about to seek out a monster. I found assurance in the fact that the leanansidhe had tried to absorb my essence and failed—an irony that the one fey with no abilities to defend himself was the one fey she apparently couldn’t feed on. I crossed the threshold.
The smooth earthen tunnel led down, the leanansidhe’s signature strong enough to be evident even to a normal sensing ability. The path twisted and turned, branched and widened. I walked through at least a quarter mile of turnings before I found a series of chambers. I hung back from the entrance to a furnished room.
Warmth radiated against my face. That was it as far as welcome went. The chamber was a living room of sorts, if a room buried three floors beneath the ground could be considered living. A generation’s worth of furniture filled the space, old sofas and bookcases, tables and chairs. A many-joined extension cord trailed from the ceiling, providing electricity for a glass-shade lamp by a reading chair. A book lay open on the table next to it.
Welcome, brother. Enter and be at peace.
I pressed flat against the wall, my dagger out of its sheath and in my hand without a conscious thought. Sendings don’t have directional indications like sound. The leanansidhe had to have me in her line of sight to know I was in the room. “Where are you?”
A fluctuation in the air passed over me. Definitely someone moving in the room. Some fey can cloak themselves, but I didn’t know it was an ability the leanansidhe had. Come, brother. Make peace. There is no blade at your throat.
I flinched from the brief icy touch of steel against my neck. A soft chuckle came from the middle of the room. The air rippled, and the leanansidhe appeared, crouched on an old Persian rug. In her outstretched hand, she held a dagger. She grinned through matted tangles of hair and opened the hand wide to let the dagger fall. “You see, brother? No harm from me for such as we.”