She glanced at me with a slim smile. “You don’t have to, but it presents an interesting opportunity. Bastian adores secrecy. If I were you, I would suggest a public meeting. It will irritate Bastian and drive Ryan macGoren to distraction when he receives word that you met.”
Impressed, I nodded. “Tell him it’s a date, then.”
“He will be pleased with me that I persuaded you,” she said.
When I first met Eorla, she said she used her skills best in the political arena. She wasn’t kidding.
The car turned onto Harbor Street. Plywood covered the windows of the building in the middle of a row. A smaller piece of wood had been fitted over the glass door. In a few short months, graffiti had found a home on it, much of it lamenting the closing of the place. The sign across the front, faint beneath a rime of frost, read UNITY. Eorla’s husband, Alvud Kruge, founded the place as a drop-in center to help area kids get off the streets. It was where he was murdered, his body hacked to pieces. Eorla stared out the window.
“Why are we here?” I asked.
Eorla didn’t turn. “You don’t seem to know much of elven history. Do you know much of our religion?”
“Not particularly. Most of what I know is related to how elves manipulate essence.”
She leaned closer to the window to peer up at the building. “Yes, the outward manifestation of power always impresses. I am talking about matters of the soul, Mr. Grey. When at last we leave our bodies, we leave a sign of ourselves behind for a time, a bit of the soul, if you will. That is what my people believe. That is what I believed.
“But when I last saw Alvud’s body, there was nothing there, no last thought or emotion. It saddened me that my husband did not leave a final remembrance, and saddened me further that my faith was misplaced. I have had a difficult time these last months with no husband and no faith.”
I clasped Eorla’s gloved hand. She returned the pressure lightly. It was not the first time she shared her grief with me. I don’t know why she did, but Bastian Frye and Brokke didn’t strike me as sources for heartfelt sympathy.
She turned from the window. “You likely know of these decapitation murders in the Weird, yes?”
Change of subject, then. “I’ve been helping the Boston police with them.”
“I overheard a chance remark among my security staff recently. I was not made aware of the full details of my husband’s murder.”
Not a change of subject, then. Because of his high profile, the Guild investigated Alvud Kruge’s murder. I never read the final report. Murdock and I found his body at the murder scene. Kruge’s body was savaged, blown apart by essence. The force of the attack decapitated him. We found his head embedded in a wall.
“I’m sorry you had to hear that, Eorla,” I said.
She withdrew and folded her hands in her lap. “I understand the impulse to protect my feelings, but I wish I had known.”
“I’m still confused by why we are here,” I said.
Beneath her outer calm, I felt her emotions rising. “You were the only one who saw what was behind my husband’s murder. I think it is fitting for you to see the final resolution of his death.”
With the prompting of a soft sending, the driver trotted to Eorla’s side of the car. Even though I overlooked Eorla’s royal privileges, on an embarrassing level, I enjoyed watching Teutonic Consortium agents being used as footmen. They tended to be pushy and arrogant types, so watching them taken down a peg or two was entertaining. Plenty of people felt the same way about me. I joined Eorla on the doorstep of the store as she withdrew a key from her pocket.
“Please wait outside, Rand,” Eorla said. He hesitated but withdrew after sendings flew between them.
The place had not changed since the murder months earlier. Cast-off furniture filled the front of the large, dim room, a Ping-Pong table and old metal desks in the rear. After Kruge’s murder, it was a crime scene. It didn’t look like anyone had been inside since the police released it. “Is UNITY closed down?”
Eorla reflectively observed the room. “I appointed a manager and moved its offices. I haven’t decided what to do with this property.”
“You’ll sell it?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to deal with Ryan macGoren asking to buy it. He would be inconsiderate enough to try.”
MacGoren’s desire to turn the Weird into an urban renewal project was one of the reasons Alvud Kruge had ended up dead. MacGoren withheld information from the police, but there wasn’t significant evidence that he could have prevented what happened. Being a callous dirtbag wasn’t against the law. “I’d like to check the office before you see it.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. Kruge’s office was through a large archway. Unlike the front, the room had changed from my last visit. Kruge’s body, of course, was gone. When we found him, blood bathed the office in horrific red. Now, somber brown stains marked the walls and floors in the muted remainders of the murder. To the right, a few feet above my head, darker stains smeared the cavity in the wall where Kruge’s head had been. His attacker had killed a young man, too, a teenager who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I looked over my shoulder at Eorla. “There are dried bloodstains, but otherwise nothing.”
She wet her lips. “I have seen the carnage wrought on battlefields, Connor, but thank you.”
Despite her boast, I heard a faint intake of breath beside me. It was one thing to see blood and gore. It was another to know it belonged to someone you knew—loved—no matter how old it was. Her eyes went to the cavity in the wall. “That’s where his . . . where he was?”
“Yes,” I said.
She muttered an incantation. In a smooth glide, she rose from the floor until she was eye level with the hole. Levitating your own body was difficult, but Eorla didn’t appear to need much effort to raise herself. She stared at the opening and chanted.
From the darkness of the wall cavity, warm green essence eased into my sensing ability. It peaked and gathered, slowly revolving. Eorla removed a glove and reached in. The essence flowed over her hand and vanished. She stayed with her hand outstretched, as if waiting for more, a subtle look of surprise on her face. She closed the hand into a loose fist as tears sprang to her eyes. Closing her eyes, she brought her hand to her lips and held it with her other hand. A single tear escaped and rolled down her cheek as she descended.
I gently turned her from the wall. She leaned her head against my shoulder. I wrapped my arms around her and swayed in place to comfort her. She let me, lost in her husband’s last memories, which had bonded to the blood in the wall.
“His final thoughts were for the human child, then he said my name,” she murmured into my chest.
“He was a good man, and he loved you. You didn’t need to do this to know that,” I said.
She placed her hand on my coat over my heart. Warmth touched me. The dark mass in my head flexed at the sensation but didn’t do anything else.
Eorla took an audible breath. “Thank you.”
She adjusted her hat and took my arm. I escorted her back to the car.
16
Bastian Frye wasted no time arranging lunch the next day. I walked into the Ritz-Carlton Hotel late, half on purpose, half that’s-the-way-it-is. Taking a cue from Eorla and the Teutonic penchant for order and timeliness, irritating Bastian Frye wasn’t a bad way to start.
The restaurant at the Ritz had a storied history. The Boston Brahmins made it the home of the power lunch for decades, a stuffy, pretentious room of white tablecloths and blue glassware. As the city’s power structure expanded into the upstart Irish and Italian immigrant populations, the luster of the place diminished until the dining room was a nostalgia trip for granddames and their granddaughters. No restaurant survived on tea and crumpets. Eventually, the hotel owner gave up and leased the space to an elven group, which rebranded the place Feudal, and the power lunch returned, only this time for the Teutonic fey set.