Meryl smiled as she sipped her wine. “No changing the subject.”
He shrugged. “All I’m saying is there’s a lot of scuffed boots at this table, and they’re not mine.”
Briallen’s brow went down slightly as she parsed his meaning. The on-again, off-again, on-again thing Meryl and I had going was not something I discussed with her. “Hey, isn’t this snow crazy?” I said to change the subject.
Briallen nodded as she brought stew to the table. “That was cailleacha work if I ever saw it. They stayed away from here, though.”
“Maybe they haven’t decided whose side they’re on yet,” I said.
“The solitaries,” said Meryl, around a mouthful of salad.
“Oh?” I asked.
She nodded. “They caused the storm. Zev got word that the Dead were going to attack, so he asked the callies to provide some resistance.”
“I guess it didn’t work,” I said.
“It could have been worse,” Meryl said quietly.
We avoided looking at Murdock.
“Jark’s been released,” he said.
I didn’t expect that. “How? I thought you said you could hold him?”
Murdock poured himself more wine. “Someone put the word out to let him go. The Dead’s legal status is messed up, and the city’s afraid of lawsuits.”
Briallen shook her head in exasperation. “That whole situation down in the Weird is getting out of hand. It’s neglect.”
I dropped my fork and clutched my chest melodramatically. “Finally, Briallen ab Gwyll agrees with me.”
She wrinkled her nose at me. “It’s not your issue to agree or disagree with, Connor. I never said the Guild deals with the Weird appropriately. I said you let it annoy you too much. I’ve lived a long, long time. There’s always a Weird of some kind, and neglect is always the reason it exists.”
“So you just accept its existence?” Murdock asked.
She gave a noncommittal shrug. “Not per se. It’s a problem to be managed. Acknowledging that it can’t be eliminated isn’t the same thing as allowing it to flourish or degrade.”
“So how would you manage it, Briallen?” Meryl asked.
Their eyes met for a fraction of a second. I knew Meryl well enough to know her flat tone was about disagreement and challenge, like I knew that Briallen’s habit of making eye contact then breaking it was a sign of disagreement and dismissal. “By getting people talking to each other,” Briallen said.
“In other words, let other people fix it,” Meryl said.
Murdock and I threw wary glances at each other. The firmness of their responses was feeling a lot like a prelude to an argument. My idea for us all to have dinner with Briallen was on the brink of spinning out of control. As I tried to think of a way to redirect the conversation, Briallen surprised me by laughing. “You’re right, Meryl. It’s never been my nature to step in and solve problems. Maybe I’m a bit selfish that way. No one ever tries to solve mine.”
Meryl’s lips twitched into a smile, and she nodded in acquiescence. “Been there, baby.”
“Hey! I think I’ve helped both of you a few times.” They turned their heads and stared at me, that stare that women have like the calm before a storm. “What?”
Meryl leaned over and placed her hand on mine. “Grey? When you make a mess and someone else starts to clean it up and you show up at the eleventh hour to help? You’re not really solving someone else’s problem.”
Murdock hooted. Like an owl, hooted. I glowered at him. “I’m taking that as betrayal of the unwritten male code of brotherhood.”
He held his hands up. “Hey, there’s an escape clause that says I can get out of the way when a guy pisses off two women at the same time.”
I tossed my napkin on the table and crossed my arms. “I hate everybody.”
Briallen grinned as she stood and placed both hands on Murdock’s shoulders. Meryl narrowed her eyes, then looked at me suspiciously.
“Leonard, why don’t you take poor, misunderstood Connor upstairs, and he can make us all drinks?” Briallen asked.
“My pleasure,” he said.
We left them in the kitchen and went up to the second-floor parlor. Briallen used the room as a study. When I was a kid, I used to find her sitting by the blue fire that always burned in the fireplace, reading books in languages I didn’t know or standing at the window thinking. Next to the window, a small table held glasses and liquor bottles, mostly ports and liqueurs. I flipped some glasses up and sorted through the bottles while Murdock dropped in a chair.
“I’m beat,” he said.
I found the always reliable Jameson’s and poured a glass. “How’d things go at the station house?”
He shrugged. “It was fine. No one knew I had lost my gun, so I didn’t have to deal with that. I told Ruiz I had a headache in the morning, but it was better.”
Ruiz was captain of Area B, which covered the Weird. I didn’t envy the man having the police commissioner’s son on his team, more than one of them, actually. “You lied? That’s not like you.”
Another shrug. “No one knew what really happened. It would have been a lot of red tape if I gave a full report. It’s over. No harm, no foul.”
“I told Keeva you went missing,” I said.
“Yeah, the old man told me she called. I told him you and I got separated in the storm is all,” he said.
I turned back to the table to cover my frown. Murdock was by-the-book. Pragmatic, but he bent rules more than he broke them. “What do you want to drink?” I asked.
“Do you think Briallen has any Guinness?”
“I was thinking maybe we should run down Jark later, see if he has anything new to say,” I said.
“And?”
Surprised again, I looked at him. “I thought you didn’t like to drink if you were going to be working?”
He smiled. “It’s one beer, Connor. That dinner deserves a nice finish.”
Briallen was a good cook. “I’ll see what she has.”
I slowly descended the stairs, trying to decide if I should be worried about his behavior. Murdock was calm, steady. Honest. The irony that I was worried he was acting more like me wasn’t lost on me. Voices from the kitchen caught my ear. I paused on the last step.
“I said maybe you’re spending too much time with him, not to avoid him,” Briallen said.
“I know what I’m doing,” Meryl said.
“I’m concerned,” Briallen said.
“And I’m not. It’s different this time.”
“Do you remember something?” Briallen asked.
“Do you?” Meryl responded.
A long pause followed. The longer it lasted, the more likely one of them would sense me, so I entered the kitchen. “Remember what?”
Meryl shifted on her stool. “What?”
“I thought I heard Briallen ask you if you remembered something,” I said.
She waved her hand and picked up her wineglass. “Oh, it’s nothing. Briallen and I refuse to tell each other how much we remember of Faerie.”
I covered my curiosity by opening the fridge. “I thought you didn’t remember any of it.”
The fey—the Old Ones—who lived in Faerie before Convergence over a hundred years ago remembered a world far different than the modern one. People like Maeve and Donor wanted to get back to it at all costs. The here-born like me, born after Convergence and never knew the place, were sometimes ambivalent about it. I wasn’t, though. I didn’t care at all.
Meryl chuckled. “Nice try, Grey.”
I faced her with two Guinnesses. “Can’t blame me for trying.”
Meryl won’t tell me if she’s an Old One or not. When the fey came through to this reality, their memories were damaged. Some didn’t remember who they were. Others didn’t remember anyone else. No one remembered what caused Convergence. If Meryl was an Old One, I was having sex with a centenarian. When I thought about it, I waffled between whether that was cool or creepy.
“And Briallen keeps trying, too,” Meryl said. “Until she tells me what she knows, I ain’t tellin’ what I know—if I know.”