Unperfect Souls (24 page)

She took her bottle back, and we followed her into the kitchen. Meryl hopped on a stool and said hello. Briallen, I noticed, barely acknowledged her. The two of them disagreed about things I wasn’t privy to. Sometimes I thought it was druidic politics. Sometimes it seemed something more.

Murdock handed Briallen the bottle of wine. She placed it on the counter next to Meryl’s. “You look well, Leonard.”

“Thank you, Ms. Gwyll. You like French wines, if I remember.”

She smiled and brushed her hand down his arm. “Charmer.”

She handed off the bottle to me. “If you could do the honors.”

Murdock and Meryl teased each other about their parking skills while I hunted down the corkscrew. Briallen laid out the salad bowls, and we took seats around the kitchen island. I poured the wine. I may like my Guinness, but a glass of wine in Briallen’s kitchen brought back pleasant memories from my younger days.

Murdock made a curious face as he chewed. “What’s this dressing?”

“Vinaigrette, mostly, with a few special things thrown in,” Briallen said.

“Don’t ask the definition of ‘special things,’” I said. Briallen poked my hand with her fork.

Murdock chuckled. “I never know what I’m eating around you people.”

Meryl poured herself another glass of wine and leaned on her elbows. “So, Murdock, I heard you’re knockin’ boots with someone.”

Murdock choked in surprise. “Why is everyone so interested in my love life?”

Meryl’s eyebrows went up. “Ohhhh! Love life? No one said anything about love.”

He twisted his lips in a smirk. “Are we talking about you, now?”

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.”

Briallen leaned back against the sink and shook her head. “I know more than she wants to believe.”

Meryl smirked. “Back at ya, Bree. For instance, what’s the little game you’re playing with Murdock?”

Briallen looked at me. “I told you that you shouldn’t have invited her.”

I shrugged. “He would have been suspicious otherwise.”

Meryl waved her hands above her head. “Okay, I’m still here and still want to know what’s going on. You weren’t very subtle about it, Briallen. That last bit with the hands on his shoulders lit him up like a candle.”

“He won’t go to AvMem or New England Medical, so I asked Briallen to check him out,” I said.

Meryl arched an eyebrow. “And?”

Briallen smiled. “He’s in perfect health. Extraordinary health for a human.”

I put my arm around Meryl. “I’ll be your best friend if you keep this to yourself.”

She slipped out from under my arm. “Oh, happy me. Just so you know, Grey, I have my own gynecologist, so don’t go doing me any favors.”

She walked out, shaking her head.

Briallen pursed her lips. “Are you going to tell him?”

“Not tonight. Eventually.”

“And what about you? When was the last time you went to see Gillen?”

“He can’t do anything, Briallen. If he had any new ideas, he would have called. He hasn’t,” I said.

She stared at her foot as she scuffed at the floor. “Within the Wheel are many paths, but only you can find the one you need.”

I wanted to tell her about the
leanansidhe
, but she wouldn’t approve. Whatever the dark mass was in my head, it was beyond Briallen’s knowledge and skill. She’d be concerned if I told her about using the
leanansidhe
to figure it out. Actually, she’d be afraid. I certainly was. But the normal path wasn’t helping me, and where I needed to go was not a place Briallen would approve. “And if I don’t find my path, it will find me. That’s how you taught me the Wheel works.”

She caressed my cheek. “It’s nice to know you listened occasionally.”

I kissed her on the forehead. “Don’t worry so much. Things work out eventually. Let’s get upstairs before Meryl convinces Murdock to plant whoopee cushions for us.”

 

 

 

 

After-dinner drinks wound into the early- morning hours. For a brief time—too brief—the events of the world outside Briallen’s second-floor parlor faded behind the softly falling snow. The four of us sat before the blue-flamed fire, laughing and at ease with each other as we talked into the night. Beer and wine and liqueurs flowed, loosening tongues and relaxing muscles. To be trite, it was nice. Nice in the way nostalgia colored our memories or the way a day felt hung in suspension when all the chores and errands were done and there was nothing left to do but curl up and do nothing of consequence. It had been a long time since I’d had the feeling, had it and appreciated it.

But all such times end, time and energy taking its toll, nudging us back to activity and to life. We made our good-byes with smiles and reluctance and ventured into the night. Meryl drove off alone, determined to get some sleep before an early morning at the Guildhouse. Murdock and I, though, decided to make a short pit stop before he dropped me off. A good meal, good drink, and good conversations were great ways to spend an evening, but after a while, memories of murder and unanswered, lingering questions crept back into our minds. It was a good time to visit the Dead.

Murdock pulled up near the old Helmet. The side street off Old Northern was far enough out from the Tangle that the nasty stew of essence down there didn’t muck with my head. Panels of cheap plywood painted black hid the original facade of the building, and hundreds of silver or rusted staples littered the surface, the remains of long- gone posters. Weathered advertisements for band dates, club contests, and local services lingered long past their relevant dates. The pitted metal sign above the door bore the ghost image of the last three letters someone had removed from the old bar’s name.

We attracted significant looks and stares when we entered. In TirNaNog, if one of the Dead killed a living person, they absorbed the living body essence—the basic life spark—and escaped back into the world. A sort of Get Out of Jail Free card for the afterlife. On this side of the veil, the rules had changed. When the Dead killed someone living here, they didn’t return to life. Their essence didn’t change. The victim, though, ended up very much dead.