Unperfect Souls

(The fourth book in the Connor Grey series)

Mark Del Franco

1

The water cut off in the middle of my shower. Irritation settled over me as I suspected the mayor and the police had taken another drastic step to isolate the neighborhood from the rest of the city. When you lived surrounded by barricades and security patrols, a little paranoia happened to the most optimistic person—and I wasn’t that person. As I toweled off soap and shampoo, reason crept back in. Even if the mayor of Boston blamed the local population for the recent catastrophes plaguing the city, shutting off basic utilities would be a recipe for disaster. I chalked up the situation to either a building-management problem or a water-main break. That was the point at which Murdock’s number lit up the caller ID on my cell. Murdock rarely called during the day unless I was helping him on a case. When he convinced his bosses to consult Connor Grey, it wasn’t likely to be a pretty situation.

In the Weird, the bad stuff went down at night. People fought. They screwed up. They died—sometimes by accident, sometimes by their own hands. And murder happened, too, more frequently in this end of town than any other. That’s why the neighborhood had the reputation it did. One of the reasons anyway. As a detective lieutenant with the Boston P.D., Murdock tried to contain the worst of it.

When the problems spilled into fey territory, Murdock called me for advice. I didn’t mind. I needed the money. Despite having limited abilities these days, I was still a druid. I knew the foibles of most kinds of fey—understood their abilities, their politics, and their perspectives. Even after a hundred years of coexistence, humans had trouble understanding what motivated even fairies or elves to do the things they did, let alone all of the vast subspecies of fey. There was no denying that manipulating essence caused all kinds of trouble. But, it wasn’t “magic” like the non-fey thought. It was a system. It had rules. It could be understood. And Murdock wanted to understand it.

I flipped open the phone. “I’m guessing this isn’t a social call.”

Murdock’s low chuckle prickled in my ear. “Oh, I don’t know. We can always go for a beer after and guess where the missing head is. You’ll probably want to shower first, though.”

“I just had half a shower, and now there’s no water,” I said.

“I’ve got plenty of water for you. Summer and B Street. Can you make it?”

“Be there in a minute.” I closed the phone. The intersection was a brisk walk from my apartment. By “brisk,” I meant “frigid wind that would be in my face no matter which direction I faced.” The neighborhood of the Weird was bounded by water—the harbor to the east, Fort Point Channel to the north, and the Reserve Channel to the south. Several long avenues stretched from one end to the other and acted like wind tunnels. Winter was the worst for it, making December my least favorite month, even if it did have Yule.

I put on a gray hoodie and a knit cap, then my leather jacket—the streamlined, padded one, not the old biker. I had lost the biker jacket in TirNaNog a few weeks earlier. Since I might have accidentally destroyed the Land of the Dead in the process of escaping it, I couldn’t complain too much about the jacket. TirNaNog was weighing on my mind a lot lately. Briallen, one of my former mentors, tells me I brood too much and blame myself needlessly. Easy for her to say. She didn’t apparently destroy another entire dimension that finally opened after being blocked for over a century.

A blast of cold air greeted me on the street. Of course. I bunched my hands in my jacket pockets, hunching forward as I walked. Clouds covered the sky, a flat white expanse that threatened snow but refused to deliver. When tourist brochures called Boston a walking city, they never mentioned winter.

I cut the corner to Old Northern Avenue into more wind. To the north, the financial district’s skyscrapers clustered along the edge of the harbor, hard exteriors of glass and brownstone and steel that stared down on the Weird as if they didn’t quite approve of the jumble of warehouses and failed office buildings that sat across the channel.

The Weird was a neighborhood of the lost and forgotten as much as a place where people escaped whatever passed for their lives elsewhere. Sometimes that was a good thing, a fresh start in a place that challenged them to get their acts together. Sometimes it was a bad thing, a sad end for people ground down by circumstances beyond their control. It was where I lived and hoped and dreamed, like so many others did.

Anyone with a dream of leaving the Weird would be sorely disappointed these days. A series of fey-related disasters had led the city to clamp down on the neighborhood, declaring travel curfews for those who lived there—but not, of course, for those who visited—and instituting road-blocks to keep people inside—but not, of course, anyone who lived elsewhere. Never mind that the local population had little to do with the essence-related meltdowns that had nearly destroyed the city of Boston. As far as humans were concerned, essence manipulation was magic, magic came from the Weird, and magic was destroying their comfortable way of life.

Anyone with a passing experience of the local scene would have noticed how things had changed. Morning—even late morning—had never been the busiest time of day along Old Northern Avenue. Except for a few diner-type storefronts that served breakfast, the shops didn’t even open their doors until nearly noon. Yet police cars were stationed every few blocks along the street, and the bridge had a roadblock. Overhead, black-clad Danann fairy agents from the Guildhouse flew sweeps from rooftop to rooftop, the morning sun glittering off their chrome helmets. Security was even tighter at night, at least along the main drag. Martial law was on everyone’s lips, and not in an admiring way unless one was on the other side of the channel.

I expected to find Murdock on the corner of Summer and B, and with all the police cars, I almost gave a pass to the B Street Headworks. The yellow police tape across the front door drew my attention back. The building had started out life as a machine-shop warehouse long before the mysterious Convergence that brought the fey folk from Faerie into modern reality. By the early twentieth century, the warehouse had been abandoned. It remained shuttered as the neighborhood began to attract elves and fairies and every other species of fey that couldn’t find a home elsewhere. That was when the trouble started.

There’s a reason sewers smell the way they do. Down in the Weird, there were even more. Things get flushed, dumped, drained, dissolved, and discorporated, and end up in a noxious stew percolating and meandering its way under the street to the treatment plant across the harbor. The Fey Guild helped the city of Boston install ward baffling in the main lines all over the city to capture potions and spells made with essence that found their way into the sewer system. The old building found new life as a headworks to collect anything charged with essence before it ended up in the harbor.

It wasn’t a perfect solution. Every once in a while, someone’s porcelain went flying and landed on the news. Of course, everyone blamed the Weird because that was where the headworks was, but the fey lived all over the city. Just because they looked and smelled nicer on Beacon Hill didn’t mean they didn’t use the services of the water department.

I flashed my newly minted Boston P.D. identification pass. If anyone looked closely, they’d see that, one, I wasn’t a Boston police officer, two, it was a tarted-up travel pass to and from the Weird and, three, my hair was not at its best the day they took my picture for it. Murdock pulled a string or two to get it for me. Being the son of the Boston police commissioner helped that way. Of course, if Commissioner Scott Murdock knew I had the ID, he’d blow a gasket. He’s never liked me much, and since I’ve inadvertently been involved in every recent catastrophe, I was even lower on his list than usual.