The Taint avoided me. Something about the dark mass in my head made it recoil. Like the cloud that curled around me near the end of Congress Street. In my sensing ability, the green essence with black splotches looked like a dirty wave. It didn’t touch me.
The Weird comes alive at night. It’s when most of the neighborhood plies its trade, either legal or not. I’ve never been a morning person, so it suits me. After I got back from Eagan’s place, I put the word out that I was interested in the dead body at the headworks. That meetings often get set up in bars suits me fine as well, so when Meryl Dian came through with a connection, Murdock and I made plans to meet her at one of my regular haunts.
Congress ended at a small side street with no name that leads to a soot-stained door with a “Y” painted in the middle of it. Yggy’s started out life as a tavern long before Convergence. Some claimed the place had a certain air of otherness even before the fey arrived. Whatever the truth of it, the bar had been in continuous operation for over a century and appealed to a rough-and-tumble crowd that occasionally wanted a drink without worrying about a knife in the gut. I nodded to the coat-check girls who guarded an empty cloakroom. People used the coat check to ogle the girls and not much else. If you crossed someone at Yggy’s, the last thing you had time for was picking up your coat as you ran out the door.
By midnight, patrons filled the seats at the large square bar, and only cramped standing space remained. The crowd spilled onto the unused dance floor while a cluster of regulars worked the pool tables. The place smelled of old cigarette smoke and beer, wet clothing and a singed-fabric odor that was the essence-fire equivalent of gunshot residue.
My essence-sensing ability made it easy to find a human signature at Yggy’s, but I didn’t see Murdock. Humans were welcome—everyone was—as long as they weren’t tourists, gawking tourists, or gawking tourists with cameras. The clientele consisted mostly of fey folk. That was one of the attractions of the bar—the one place in the Weird, if not the entire city, where the fey could gather on neutral territory.
Behind the bar, Meryl Dian flipped glasses and poured shots. Apparently, in addition to her talents as archivist extraordinaire, formidable druidess, and scathing intellect, she knew how to sling booze. Even if she weren’t on center stage, it would have been hard to miss her in a black leather bustier and black jeans. Plus, she had let her hair grow to her shoulders. Red. This week. A bright red, a hue short of fire truck.
A gust of cold wind rolled in as the door opened and closed, and I sensed Murdock before I saw him. His dark eyes swept the bar, assessing the layout and the patrons. “Meryl need to moonlight?” he asked.
“You never know with Meryl,” I said.
I didn’t know which was stranger. Finding Meryl bartending at Yggy’s or Murdock wearing a Red Sox hoodie and jeans. He downright looked like an average Southie guy. Last time I brought him to Yggy’s, he wore clothes that screamed police officer. Our friendship started out as a way for him to understand the people who lived where he worked. While the fey tended to accept people despite appearances, they also reacted accordingly. Cops were not their best friends down there. Murdock was starting to get it.
A tall wood-ash fairy from one of the minor Irish clans paused in front of us with two glasses on a tray. She handed me a Guinness and a glass of seltzer with lime to Murdock. Meryl caught my eye as she rang up a sale and nodded toward the back of the room. Murdock and I threaded our way through the crowd and found an empty booth near the pool table. He took the corner because he liked to face the room whenever he was in a bar.
I plucked the stir straw from his nonalcoholic drink and tossed it at him. “You’re not on duty.”
He pulled the napkin from under his glass and wiped up a few spots of moisture on the table. “Technically, no. But it’s not a bad habit.”
I sipped my beer. Perfect temperature, not too cold or warm. “I like my bad habits.”
Murdock shook his head. “You do not. You rationalize them.”
Meryl arrived with her own Guinness and dropped into the seat next to Murdock. “That was fun.”
“Making a little extra money for the holidays?” Murdock asked.
She grinned. “Just flexing some old muscles.” She dropped her eyes to his clothes. “I didn’t know Brooks Brothers sold jeans.”
He feigned insulted disbelief. “Hey! They’re Levi’s!”
She wiggled her shoulders. “Oooo, trendy! Was your Members Only jacket in the wash?”
Murdock tilted his brow toward me. “Some help here would be nice.”
I laughed. “Not me. I get in enough trouble with her.”
Meryl nudged him with an elbow. “You should let me trick you out with some clothes, Murdock. Shake up your image a little.”
He sipped his seltzer. “I have enough image problems at the moment.”
“Your father again?” I asked. We had Police Commissioner Scott Murdock to thank for the aggressive curfews in the Weird. He pushed for them, and the mayor jumped.
Murdock slipped the napkin back under his glass. “He wants me to transfer to Back Bay.”
Meryl pursed her lips. “Not a lot of murder in Back Bay.”
“Exactly. He wants me out of the Weird. It’s undermining his image,” Murdock said.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
I let it drop. Talking about his father was a touchy subject at the best of times. Murdock had caught the backlash of a spell a few months ago and somehow ended up with the fey ability to produce a body shield. It wasn’t something he’d shared with his father, as the commissioner hated the fey. The way things went between them, I guessed he wouldn’t tell him for a long, long time.
“Is your friend coming?” I asked Meryl. Meryl knew more people in town than anyone. How she juggled her impressively busy social life with work was a mystery to me. After telling her earlier about the sending I had received at the headworks, she offered to connect me with a contact in the solitary community.
She sipped her beer. “Oh, he’s here. He’s being careful. Yggy’s makes for strange bedfellows, but people still speculate about who talks to whom in here.” She leaned out of the booth, then back. “He’s coming.”
My essence-sensing ability did the looking. Essence sensing worked as a field around the body, so fey folk that have it literally can see behind themselves. Through the clutter of signatures, I recognized one moving toward the booth. A moment later, a solitary named Zev sat next to me. He was a friend—or maybe just an acquaintance—of Meryl’s, another in a series of mysterious connections she had the habit of making with unlikely people.
Zev could never hide his place as a solitary in the fey world. His ochre skin had ripples and seams like tree bark, and black spiny growths dangled from his head like thick dreadlocks. White irises gave him an unnerving stare that I’m sure he used to great effect. Truth be told, he wasn’t the oddest solitary in the Weird, even with those eyes.
He cracked a smile at Meryl, stained yellow teeth that almost matched his skin tone. “Hey, M, good to see you behind a bar again.”
“Yeah, those were the days, huh? You remember Murdock and Grey?” she asked.
He tilted a bottle of Bud to his lips. “Yeah. Last time I was in a bar with them, the place exploded.”
“That was Meryl’s dancing,” Murdock said.
“I seem to remember some hip-shaking from your direction,” I shot back.
Zev shifted his eerie white eyes between us. “We here to joke or talk about what’s going on?”