Unquiet Dreams (31 page)

“Murdock saw her.”

She pulled her lower lip in. “Connor, no one’s seen a drys in decades. Murdock is not credible on fey and, frankly, with your conspiracy theory habits, neither are you. The Guild is convinced the Consortium is behind this.”

“The Guild or Nigel?”

“Both.” She looked down at her desk, shifted her eyes to the computer monitor and back to me. I could practically feel her running scenarios in her head, trying to figure what she needed to do to get the job done while figuring out how to present herself in the best light. I’ve seen it before. It’s how she works. “We have security at the funeral. Gerin’s shielding Forest Hills Cemetery for the ceremony. Nigel’s coordinating with Manus and the diplomatic envoys. I’m not worried about the funeral. I’m worried about the Weird. I’m trying to seal it down so no one can move in or out without my knowing about it.”

“I did.”

She glared at me. “Connor, bring me your proof, and maybe then I will contradict Gerin Cuthbern and Nigel Martin. Until then, I run things my way.”

I decided it was time to shake Keeva’s cage a little. “You haven’t made any progress in your Kruge investigation.”

She looked honestly startled. Looks aren’t everything. “What the hell are you talking about? I’ve been looking for Croda. You know trolls are difficult to trace.”

“Dennis had distinctive new running shoes on. Easy to trace. Your credit card bought a pair.”

She leaned over her desk toward me. “What are you talking about?”

I stared her down. “Ryan macGoren has known where Croda is from the night of the murder. You bought Dennis’s running shoes. I don’t think it’s me and Murdock with the credibility problem.”

She jumped to her feet and pointed at the door. “Out.”

I’d definitely struck a nerve, but it was time to go. I stood, but before I left, I gave her a last warning. “If the Guild is using Kruge’s murder to provoke a confrontation with the Consortium, I’ll expose you.”

She was angry enough now that a little fey light glowed in her eyes. She pointed at the door. “I said ‘out.’”

I moved to the hallway. “Keeva, if you don’t increase security, you won’t have to worry about finding a troll. One’s going to find you.”

The Guild had replaced my apartment door. The security agent remained posted outside at the end of the hall, though. While they had done a great job on the door, even fixing an old squeak, unfortunately they hadn’t brought a housekeeper with them. My place looked like a gang of elves and fairies had run amok. Which, of course, was exactly what had happened.

I pulled two bottles of Guinness out of the fridge, popped one, and left the other on the counter to warm. The bottled stuff is nowhere near as good as tap, but it’s better than the can. Or nothing.

I slunk into my desk chair and called Meryl. She picked up on the first ring, and I smiled. Someone was worried. “I saw you buried by a pile a rubble.” The genuine concern in her voice felt oddly pleasurable.

“Believe it or not, Moke saved me. Are you okay?”

“Tired, but fine. What happened?”

I took a swig of beer and booted up the laptop. “Long story. I have to be at the funeral. Want to be my date?”

“Ooooo, a funeral. Sounds fun,” she said.

“The service starts at sunset. Can you drive?”

She sighed. “Fine.”

“Oh, and wear green. It’s the elven color for mourning.”

“Gee, thanks, I didn’t know that,” she said sarcastically. “Oh, and Grey?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not a date.” And she hung up.

Joe busied himself with cookies while I changed. I had very little to work with but stumbled on a dark green shirt I’d forgotten I owned. Even given the formality of an elven funeral, I wasn’t about to wear green pants. As I pulled on my boots, I could hear Joe laughing in my study.

“Now I get it,” he said, his voice oddly hollow.

“Get what?” I called back.

The Guild security helmet I had retrieved from Croda’s murder scene came floating into the room. Two bare feet dangled out of it. “How the Guild is keeping flits out lately. They’re letting in only essence they expect, not blocking what they don’t want.”

I stopped myself from commenting. That’s an old druid trick, a modification of the shield on a grove. Gerin and Nigel must have adapted it for the Guildhouse. As much as I’d trusted Joe, he had a tendency to talk before he thought, and who knows who would hear him. “Tricky,” I said.

He circled around the living room, landed on the coffee table, and rolled the helmet off. “Not really. I can think of ten ways to get through now.”

Downstairs, Meryl sent, and I startled. When most people do a sending, a subtle warning happens in your head that one’s coming. The person you’re sending may be anywhere, so the sending itself tends to travel in a thin envelope of essence. The envelope is part of the searching and touches your mind moments before the actual message. Not Meryl’s. Her sendings are incredibly focused to the point where they find you and arrive instantaneously. It’s like someone jumping out of a closet and saying “boo!”

“Are you coming?” I asked Joe.

He swung his legs back and forth from the edge of the coffee table. “Maybe later. I’ve got some business.”

I smiled. “Be careful.” I’m sure Joe’s business entailed testing his new ideas at the Guildhouse. If there’s one thing a flit despises, it is being told to keep out.

I passed three security agents on my way out. I jumped in the immaculate passenger seat of Meryl’s Mini Cooper, reveling in the refreshing change of pace from Murdock’s car.

“We look like catalog models for the goth professional,” she said.

She wore a body-hugging leather jumpsuit and knee-high leather combat boots with lots of heel and buckles. Not a bit of it was green. In fact, the only green about her was her hair. She slipped on a pair of fingerless calfskin gloves and put the car in gear.

“My hair’s not dyed,” I said.

She flipped her hand through her hair. “Do you like it? I have it on good authority it was Alvud Kruge’s favorite shade.”

“It’s perfect. For you.” I smiled to keep it amusing.

She zipped around the block and coasted over the Old Northern Avenue bridge. “We’ve got a tail. Want me to lose them?”

I peered up through the structural beams of the bridge. Two security agents followed. “Nah. They’d be stupid not to know where we’re going. Can we make a pit stop?”

“Sure, I’ll keep the meter running,” she said.

“I need to go to Avalon Memorial.”

She looked askance at me. “Anything wrong?”

“No. Just need to visit a sick friend,” I said.

Rather than deal with the street restrictions in place downtown, Meryl scooted up on the highway to loop around to Storrow Drive along the river. “You know you have troll essence all over you?”

I nodded. “It’s a residual effect from Moke pulling me through stone. He said it has to clear through my system. Look at this.” I held up my left hand, letting the light pick up a tracery of faint patterns across the back. “That’s stone. I keep picking up ambient dust, and it bonds with my skin.”

Meryl glanced back and forth from the road to my hand. “Does it hurt?”

I shook my head. “No. It uses my body as an anchor, pulling stuff to me like a body shield. Can’t even feel it unless I focus on it. Now watch this.” I mentally visualized the essence coursing over my body, sensed the difference between my own essence and the ambient troll essence, felt for the bonded stone, and pushed. It separated from my skin and slid off my hand like fine dust.

“You’re getting my car dirty,” Meryl said.

I wiped my hand on my pants. “Sorry.”

She pulled up in front of Avalon Memorial. Guild security guards hovered in the air, with more brownie security on the street. They must have recognized Meryl because they let her park without a word.

“I shouldn’t be long,” I said.

“Don’t be. I only have one CD in the car,” she said.

I found macGoren lying on his side in his room surrounding by ward stone amplifiers. Two bowls of infusions sat at the end of the bed. My nose twitched on the betony and a hint of basil. MacGoren’s left wing fluttered with a rippled texture and a few jagged holes. Danann wings didn’t have the physical property of skin. They didn’t have true nerves for that matter, so pain registered very differently. Regardless, the damage looked painful. The ward stones generated a field that amplified macGoren’s own essence as well as the simply pure air essence that Danann fairies had a natural affinity to. The herbals soothed the spirit with a protective spell working against infection.

MacGoren overall looked hardly worse for wear. He languished on the bed in his blue silk pajamas reading a magazine. When he saw me, he tossed aside the magazine and stretched onto his stomach. “Ah, good. Company. Gillen Yor says I can’t have my cell phone because it will disrupt the wards. I think he’s just saying that to irritate me.”

“You look like you’re recovering well,” I said.

He smirked with amusement. “I’m just here because I’ll heal faster. I assume this isn’t a social call.”

“And why’s that?”

He grinned. “No flowers. No candy.”

“Why were you fighting a troll in the Tangle the night of Kruge’s murder?”

He gave me a long measured look. “You found the helmet.”

I nodded. “I found the helmet.”

MacGoren shrugged. “You know I wanted a piece of land Kruge owned. He didn’t want to sell. I thought I’d get on his good side by helping with the drug problem down there. A nightclub was the epicenter. It burned down last night as a matter of fact.”

“Yeah, I heard about it,” I said dryly.

MacGoren nodded. “This drug Float was the problem. I analyzed it and found druid essence. I brought it to Kruge.”

“For which he was extremely grateful,” I said.

MacGoren shrugged again. “Actually, he didn’t believe me. But he was worried if that were true, then Gerin Cuthbern would try to cover it up to protect the Grove. Then he was afraid if he told Manus ap Eagan, Eagan would think he was maneuvering against Cuthbern and use it against him politically. So, he asked me to help, figuring since both the Guildmaster and I are Danann, Manus naturally wouldn’t think anything suspicious of my motives.”

It was my turn to smirk. “Naturally.”

MacGoren ignored the dig. “Anyway, Kruge came up with the idea of recording the drug analysis and sending a sample to Manus via courier. I was supposed to meet the courier on Summer Street and take the evidence to the Guildhouse.”

A piece of the puzzle fell into place. Fairies, in general, were good weather workers. Some Dananns specialized in it. “He was supposed to meet you up on Summer Street. You pulled the weather trick to drive away any witnesses and give Dennis Farnsworth safe passage through three gang territories.”

MacGoren nodded. “Correct. When the courier didn’t show up, and Kruge didn’t answer my sendings, I went looking. I found Kruge. I don’t know how the troll found out, but that wasn’t part of the plan that I knew.”

I could see what Keeva found attractive about him. She liked a good schemer. MacGoren paused, and the superior tone finally left his voice. “Then I saw something incredible, Grey. I saw a troll, in broad daylight, flying. Scared the living hell out of me. He had the courier, so I went after him.”

“That was brave.”

The idea clearly surprised him. “Yes, I guess you could look at it that way. I didn’t find the ward stone at Kruge’s, so I figured the kid had it. I took the troll by surprise. I lost the helmet in the tussle but managed to get the kid. The troll chased me almost to Summer Street. I felt a compulsion to drop the boy. It was like I had no choice.”

“Why didn’t you tell someone?”

He shrugged again. “With Kruge dead, I didn’t have the evidence. If that troll could kill Alvud Kruge, he could kill me. I thought if I kept quiet, he would leave me alone. I didn’t see any percentage in coming forward. Didn’t seem to help in the end, though.”

I shook my head. “People died, and you didn’t see a percentage in coming forward?”

MacGoren frowned with a condescending look. “Please, Grey. Don’t be naïve. If it wasn’t this, it would have been something else.”

“Naïve? You helped start a gang war. Maybe worse now.”

He sighed as if bored. “It’s all the same, Grey. They’re all gangs. Xeno and elf thugs. The fey and humans. Seelie Court and the Consortium. They look for any excuse to play their games. I didn’t cause anything they wouldn’t have found a way to cause themselves.”

“And you make a buck in the process,” I said.

He nodded. “I always look for the percentage.”

I didn’t say anything. Despite what macGoren thought, I wasn’t naïve. I knew there were people like him, people who single-mindedly pursue a goal and damn the consequences. I knew them. I knew myself. In another life, I was well on the way down that road. I don’t know if I would have gone as far as macGoren. The fact that I didn’t know, couldn’t emphatically deny it, gave me a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Keeva’s been looking for the troll that died. Why didn’t you tell her where she was?”

“Because I would have had a lot of things to explain that I wasn’t interested in explaining. Keeva’s good at what she does. She’ll find the troll.”

“I know she will,” I said.

“So, am I being charged with something?” he asked.

“I’ll have to think about it. I know you’re only talking because you know I’ll have a hard time finding something to stick. For now, I’ll keep thinking about it.”

A shrewd look came over him. “Hold it over my head, eh? A Guild director for less than a week, and already you’re playing games.”

I didn’t show how much he hit the target with that. “You could say that, macGoren. Remember one thing, though: I don’t play by anyone else’s rules.”

I strode out of the room before he had a chance to respond. As I walked out of the hospital, I felt a dull depression settle over me. Everything that had happened in the past few days could have been avoided if macGoren had just opened his mouth. But he hadn’t. Why bother when the only people hurt were the outcast and the shunned? Why bother when it would just make more headlines supporting his development project? Turf, land, territory. The hood. Whatever you called, Eorla Kruge was right. It was all about who had what piece of it and how they used it. It was always about control and power and greed.