Unshapely Things (18 page)

"I think I pushed myself to the limit."

"Go sit in the study. Now."

I took another tissue and did as I was told. Now that my adrenaline rush was over, I felt tired down to my bones, not to mention the pounding headache that threatened to split my forehead open. The usual fire glowed on the hearth, comfortable even though summer heat sweltered outside the windows. I fell exhausted into an armchair.

Briallen came in and wordlessly handed me a cup. I drank it without question, an earthy concoction with the smoothness of honey that permeated my chest with a soothing warmth. Closing her eyes, Briallen held her hands just over my face. They became pale, glowing phosphorescently. I felt the soft force of her essence begin to emanate from her fingers. It molded itself to the contours of my face. I closed my own eyes as the feeling intensified, a sweetly painful sensation that vibrated through my head down to my groin. After a few moments, the feeling vanished, like a warm compress had been taken away.

I opened my eyes. Briallen stood over me, her arms crossed, a pale white light flickering behind her eyes. "Are you trying to kill yourself?"

"I was trying to stop a murder."

"And almost got yourself killed. You don't even have a weapon on you, do you?"

"I have a knife," I said weakly. The pain in my head was receding to a dull thudding at the base of my skull.

She snorted and took a seat. "Fat lot of good that would have done you. What exactly happened tonight?"

I gave her the rundown, starting with Keeva at the Flitterbug so she could understand how the whole disaster happened. "I just don't get what I missed. We were obviously in a seven-day cycle. Why tonight instead of last night?"

Briallen leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. "I've been scouring books for days. Now that..." She jumped up and let out a strangled cry of anger. "What a fool! What an idiot! It's a lunar cycle, Connor."

"Are you sure?"

She frowned at me. "I'm dead sure. The calendar is just a feeble tracking mechanism for the moon, not the other way around. The first murder occurred during the new moon, three weeks ago yesterday, the second followed a week later on the quarter moon, the third a week after that on the full, and now tonight, eight days later on the last quarter."

My mind raced as I tried to reconcile the dates in my head. "Are you sure?"

"Why do you keep saying that?" she snapped. "Trust me, boy. I'm a woman and a druidess. I think I know the cycles of the moon. It never occurred to me that I was doing invocations in the garden every night a murder's occurred. I'm out there so much, I never made the connection."

We both started at the sound of something falling out in the hall. In the tense moment that followed, a loud moan broke the silence. Briallen was out of the room and halfway down the stairs before I even reached the landing. Down in the vestibule, a flit lay on the floor groaning. I'd recognize the pink wings anywhere.

"Stinkwort!" I leaped down the stairs after Briallen.

As she crouched on the floor next to him, he pulled himself into a sitting position. He held his left arm close to his waist. "Call me Joe, dammit." His voice was weak. His eyes flickered to Briallen. "Sorry, m'lady."

"Don't mention it, Joe," Briallen muttered as she reached out her hand. Amazingly, he sidled onto her palm, something he'd normally considered beneath his dignity. Without dropping his arm, he rolled it slightly away from his body to display a wound. A deep gash ran the length of his forearm to the base of his palm. Thick blood welled up, and he clenched the arm against himself again.

"This night is cursed," Briallen muttered again.

Cradling Stinkwort in her palms, she rose, and I trailed after her up the stairs into the study. She placed him carefully on the table and began searching in boxes beneath it.

"He got another one," said Stinkwort through clenched teeth. "I followed him to a warehouse but got there too late. Chased the bastard all the way to Charlestown before he turned to fight. I almost had him, too. He used some kind of incantation I've never encountered before. It slowed me down, and he stuck me. The damned freak stuck me."

Briallen poured something foul-smelling onto a cloth and held it close to Stinkwort's arm. "This will sting." It always stings, I thought. She pulled his arm and swiftly draped the cloth over the wound before it could ooze again. He yelped, but she held on. Light welled up from her hands, a white nimbus that fluttered like a candle in the fog. A pink aura sprang up around Stinkwort. It twined within the white light, pulling it into his arm in an incandescent swirl. He growled in pain.

Briallen clutched my arm with her free hand. "Sorry, Connor, I need some of that back."

I could feel a tug in my chest, and my mind went fuzzy. It seemed a long moment later that she released me. I swayed on my feet, shaking the dizziness from my head. Stinkwort had his eyes squeezed shut as the brightness of Briallen's essence sheathed his entire arm. All at once, the light went out as though a switch had been thrown. Stinkwort sat breathing heavily, his arm draped across his lap. A thick ugly crevasse of scar tissue ran the length of where the wound had been.

My joints felt like they were held together with string. I stumbled out of the room, back to the parlor, and collapsed in a chair. Briallen came in a few moments later and sat down, too. She was very pale as she stared into the fire.

"Is he all right?" I asked.

She stirred up from her reverie. "He'll live now. He almost died. He lost a lot of blood, and his essence was severely weakened trying to compensate. That's why I had to tap you."

The soberness with which she said it took me off guard. "Well, that's one less person on my conscience tonight."

"You didn't kill anyone, Connor."

"Didn't I? I turned an arrogant little boy and a simple country flit into bait with a glamour stone I gave them."

"Stop being so self-centered. This is not about you. Shit happens."

"I don't see how you can be so indifferent," I said, trying to quell my anger.

"I'm not. I'm just not taking it personally. There's wisdom in knowing the difference between your sensibilities being challenged and your heart being threatened. I'm just telling you not to lose perspective."

I slouched farther into my chair. "How do you manage to make me want to apologize when you piss me off?"

She smiled. "By being right all the time. How are you feeling? Are you up for a short walk?"

"I'm exhausted, but I'll go if you want me to."

She stood. "The invitation is equal parts honor and obligation."

She took my hand and let me pull myself up. I felt lightheaded for a moment, but it passed quickly. She led me out of the house into the street.

"Where are we going?"

"To pay our respects."

We walked up the street in the cool predawn air. Very little noise disturbed this end of town at that time of night. The sky began lightening in the east as we came out on Beacon Street. We crossed over to the Common through an old iron gate and proceeded down a brick lane. At the bottom, a small empty concrete pond basin shone a dull cream color in the light of the streetlamps. Small stones and broken glass crunched under our feet as we crossed that to a hill on the other side. Briallen took my hand, and we climbed the shoulder of the hill. At the top, a circle of trees enclosed an empty grassy space, and we stopped at the verge.

The sound of singing broke the early-morning silence. Its low cadence rose and fell in a mournful chant that grew subtly louder. A group of six or seven flits came out of the underbrush nearby, their wings dimmed of light as they walked. I realized one of them was Stinkwort. They wore simple red caps on their heads and held sprigs of myrtle leaves in one hand. With the other hand, they carried a bier of grass and twigs, on which the dark form of Tansy lay facing the sky. Her face was gracefully calm in repose, her wings already curving around her body like a brittle gray shroud.

The procession moved solemnly to the very top of the hill and lowered Tansy to the ground. The flits slowly circled the body, dropping the leaves around her until she was wreathed in myrtle. One by one they winked out until only Stinkwort remained. He produced a small tea rose from the sleeve of his tunic and reverently placed it on Tansy's chest. Then he, too, disappeared.

Without speaking, Briallen touched my arm, and we descended the hill. Neither of us spoke the entire way back. I couldn't help feeling responsible for the scene I had witnessed no matter what Briallen said. We reached the front door of the house when Stinkwort suddenly appeared in front of us.

"Thank you for attending," he said, with a small bow.

Briallen returned the bow. "The honor was ours."

"I'm sorry, Joe. I know what she meant to you," I said.

He shrugged listlessly. "I honor her life and her spirit and mourn a passing that was not meant to be, nothing more. The People don't die often, and they certainly don't die of senseless murder. A line has been crossed."

I had never seen Stinkwort so solemn and formal. He was unlike the capricious joker I'd come to know over the years, and it made me uncomfortable. I shifted my feet in place, almost embarrassed to form my question at the moment. "Did you get a good look at him?" I asked quietly.

His face remained unexpressive as he spoke. "He fits the description you have. He's also very strong."

"Come back inside, Joe. You need to rest," said Briallen.

A surge of energy seemed to run through him, his eyes glinting with a fey white light. His wings beat in agitation as he hovered back from us and drew his sword. He held the weapon at the ready, his face set with determination. "No, m'lady. There'll be no resting. This ska bastard is mine."

He vanished.

Hot anger lanced through me. "Call him back, Briallen. Call him back now."

For a moment, as she stared off into the lightening sky, I thought she was calling him. Then she calmly took my arm and firmly escorted me inside. "Let it go, Connor. There's been enough high emotion for one night."

I pulled away from her. "He pulled a sword on your threshold!"

She looked directly at me. The fine lines around her eyes were etched deeper than usual. "Connor, I'm in no mood to quibble about old guest rules. He's hurt. He's angry. And above all, he's appalled at a strike against a fellow flit. It will do no good to embarrass him right now."

"Embarrass? He knows the insult he's given. He violated your hospitality by pulling a weapon on your threshold."

She pursed her lips. "First, he wasn't on my threshold, he was in front of it; secondly, he did not accept my invitation to enter before he did it; and besides, I was not inside the house when it happened, so technically there was no hospitality to violate. Let. It. Go."

"You're stretching to let him off."

She shook her head and walked past me. "Connor, I didn't exhaust myself saving him and healing you tonight so you could annoy me to death. You need sleep more than he does, I think. I've more important things to deal with than a violation of etiquette rules."

I folded my arms triumphantly. "Ha! You just said a violation!"

I felt like an idiot as soon as I said it. Briallen compounded the feeling by chuckling exasperatedly at me. "Come out back before the dawn is gone."

I sheepishly followed her through the kitchen and into the backyard. Even in the dim light of predawn, Briallen's garden was an amazing place. Not far from the kitchen door stood a gnarled oak tree that had embedded itself into the brick wall that separated her yard from the garden next door. A small gravel path wound around the tree and meandered through clusters of flowers and plants that all seemed to be shades of gray in the dimness. On the far side of the garden was a small crescent of grass surrounding a shallow pond that bordered the back of the property.

Briallen led me to the grass and took up a position to one side of the fountain, gesturing for me to take my place on the other side. "I don't get the direct sunrise here, but enough light makes it through for the invocation to be worthwhile." She raised her arms in the starting position, and I did the same. I could feel the sun coming, its nourishing light sweeping toward us. The start of the invocation was almost upon us when Briallen said, "Don't worry, I don't drop trou' for sun rituals." I smothered a laugh as we began chanting.

When we were finished, the garden had come alive with color. Purple foxgloves jutted up among lavenders and heathers. The stone bedding borders overflowed with clover and cowslip. White climbing roses draped the northern wall in a curtain. It smelled exquisite. I felt better—physically and emotionally. My body still ached, but the high-pitched bell in my head was almost gone. Not to mention my anger. I would have a word with Stinkwort when I found him, even if Briallen wouldn't. But I probably wouldn't slap him silly.

Returning to the kitchen, Briallen filled a kettle and placed it on the stove. She leaned against the counter. "You should sleep."

"I know. I'm exhausted."

We did not speak as the kettle groaned with heat expansion. In moments, it whistled. Briallen poured the water into mugs and handed me one. Tentatively, I sipped the hot liquid. It tasted minty and earthy, with just a touch of what actually might have been some kind of tea. Briallen preferred decocting her own blends to dipping a bag. I felt a sudden sense of euphoria that settled quickly into a nice warm feeling. I wondered how the FDA would feel about some of the things she served guests.

"Do you have something like a plastic sandwich bag?" I asked.

"Something like that," she said sarcastically as she opened a drawer and pulled out a box. "Here. I use these strange plastic things when all my burlap wraps are in the wash."

"Very funny. I just need one. It's for the stone."

I set down the mug and went back up to Briallen's workroom. Even though I thought it a little irrelevant at that point, I used the bag like a glove to gather the stone without touching it and pulled the bag closed around it. The strange essence had dissipated, leaving a faint echo behind. A few grains of debris settled in the bottom of the bag, and I remembered the odd grittiness in the victim's chest. I held the bag up to the morning light. It looked like sand. The first victim had had debris in his chest wall if I remembered correctly. I hadn't seen it directly but was sure none of it was sand.