UNFALLEN DEAD

Connor Grey Series, Book 3

Mark Del Franco

CHAPTER 1

When I find myself walking through dark, unlit hallways in an abandoned warehouse in the middle of the night, it means one of two things: I am on my way to an after-hours party — or to a death. Since Detective Lieutenant Leonard Murdock wasn’t prone to inviting me to parties, I knew the only music I’d be hearing shortly was the squawk of police radios.

When Murdock called me out of a nice, quiet dive down on Stillings Street because he had something interesting for me, I didn’t think it meant feeling like a rat in a maze. The warehouse had been easy enough to find because of the police and ambulance out front. Once inside, though, I made a wrong turn and found myself wandering a series of corridors that led back onto themselves.

I put my cell phone to my ear. “Which way, Murdock?”

“I have no idea, Connor. Get to a window and tell me what you see,” he said.

Amusement colored his voice. I knew what he was thinking. Connor Grey, the great druid and former investigator for the Fey Guild, had gotten himself lost. In a building. Surrounded by police officers. With cell phones and radios. I may no longer have the ability to manipulate essence on a grand scale, but I didn’t think I’d lost my sense of direction, too.

Using the silvery blue glow from the cell phone as a flashlight, I managed to find a window with frosted chicken-wire glass. I pushed at the frame, but years of paint refused to budge. I swore under my breath and put the phone down. Breaking the glass wouldn’t help because of the safety mesh. It’s moments like this that I find particularly frustrating.

I used to have the power to do things humans could only dream of. Essence made it possible, the essence in everything, including myself. The superstitious call it magic. I’ve had some mystical moments, especially lately, but in general I don’t tend toward that kind of thinking. I like things to make sense, to be able to quantify them and apply rules. Essence is no exception.

Back in the day, I manipulated essence and caused it to flow out of my hands, my body — even my eyes — and it did things I intended it to do. Good things and bad things, but powerful things either way. Not anymore. Since the accident that caused the loss of most of my abilities, a dark mass in my brain blocks me from doing what I used to be able to do. Painfully so.

“Are you there?” Murdock’s voice sounded tinny in the small phone’s speaker.

“Yeah.” I had probably been stuck on the same floor for twenty minutes. I decided enough was enough and didn’t want the further humiliation of asking Murdock to send someone to find me.

Everyone has body essence to a different degree depending on their species. I can still access my own to an extent, but the thing in my head kicked up a storm of pain when I did. I avoided it most times. I put my hand on the window frame and shot a quick burst of body essence into it. Several things happened simultaneously. The window cracked; the frame cracked; and I’m pretty sure my head cracked. I clutched my temples as a searing pain shot behind my eyes.

“Connor?” Murdock’s voice was now flat with police concern.

I picked up the phone. “I’m good.” I pushed the window up, fighting its years of inertia, and stuck my head out. “I’m on the third floor, looking at an air shaft.”

“Hold on.”

The full moon sent a faint light into the shaft, illuminating it enough for me to see another window ten feet across the way. I craned my head up and saw more windows. The silhouette of a head leaned out above me.

Murdock’s voice echoed from behind me on the phone and above me in the shaft. “I see you. You need to come up two floors. There’s a stairwell about fifty feet to the right as you face the air shaft.”

I startled at a cold touch on the back of my neck. Jumping back from the window, I dropped the phone. The blue screen winked out. Complete darkness surrounded me. I crouched and picked up the phone, feeling cracks on the screen. It didn’t light up at my touch. I’d managed to disconnect Murdock, too.

Something moved in the dark, soft and silent. I sensed more than heard it. I slid to the side of the open window so that my head wouldn’t be a nice handy target against the dim moonlight behind me. When you’re in a dark building with a dead body, you think of these things. I stilled my breath, listening. Nothing moved, at least nothing that I could hear. An afterimage of light from the air shaft cluttered my vision, but I couldn’t see anything in the darkness anyway. I opened my essence-sensing ability, trying to perceive whether anyone was in the room with me. As a druid, I was naturally good at sensing essence. I was better at it than most. It was one of the few remaining abilities I had.

Faint white light coalesced in my inner vision, faint hints of ambient essence creating the shape of the hallway. Here and there along the edges of the floor, pinpricks of light showed evidence of insects, probably roaches. I made out the pathway. I stepped to the left toward the stubbornly hidden stairwell. Two doors opened to the right, dark and empty. As I passed the second one, cool air fluttered over me.

I froze. Just inside the door, essence shimmered in the shape of a man. His indistinct face looked stricken, strange creases crisscrossing his forehead like deep worry lines. He lifted a hand toward me, an innocuous gesture that, under the circumstances, made me recoil.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Confused, he peered at his hand. Blinking slowly, he tilted his head and stretched his hand toward me again. He took a step, then evaporated like pale smoke in the dark. Gone. Even his essence was gone. He wasn’t there, but he had to be. It’s nearly impossible to mask your essence completely, especially from me. I focused my sensing ability tighter, like turning up a dial, but still couldn’t register him. I held my hands out to ward him off if he came at me. Flattening myself against the wall, I slid away from the empty doorway, glancing quickly to the left to be sure I was going the right way, waiting for him to jump me. At the end of the hall, I realized why I kept missing the stairwell. An odd jog in the wall made the hall seem like it was a dead end. I stepped around the partition, pressing myself against the opposite side. I took shallow breaths, straining to hear if I was being followed.

A bright light shone in my eyes, and I startled. The light found me again, and someone said, “Connor Grey?”

Embarrassed, I held my hand up against the beam. “Yeah?”

The flashlight swept down, and a puzzled young police officer observed me in the backwash of the light. “Detective Murdock sent me down to get you.”

Murdock was not going to let me hear the end of this. I pointed into the darkness of the hall. “There’s someone down here.”

The kid’s training kicked in, and he went for his gun. In that coordinated way police have, he held the flashlight focused into the hallway and used the same hand to call for backup on the radio on his shoulder. I stepped behind him out of the way. I may be able to hold my own in a fight, but I had no idea what the mystery man had with him. Being cautious wasn’t the same thing as being afraid.

“Stairwell’s right behind us,” the officer said in a low voice. I backed into it and heard the clatter of running feet on the stairs above me. Another officer joined us, gun drawn.

I leaned away from the door to let him pass. “He’s all yours, guys. First door on the left is where I saw him.”

I mounted the stairs. Police officers get flashlights with their uniforms. I forget that not every building is going to have electricity. One long flight up, white light spilled into the stairwell. In my rush up the stairs, I had turned off a couple of floors too soon.