and not landed comfortably laid out on his bed.”
Murdock squatted at the opposite side of the bed to bring his line of sight level with the victim’s chest. He lifted the body on one side, then let it fall back. “Arrow goes through into the mattress. He must have been sleeping. He was stabbed, not shot. “
I pointed at the area around the entry wound. “There’s another telltale right here. Elf-shot forms with a bowfront of essence around the arrowhead. When it lands, the essence hits first and makes a circular burn mark before the arrow pierces the target. This guy’s got some burning, but it’s too small. The victim was likely sleeping, stabbed, then hit with a burst of essence down the arrow shaft to make sure he was dead. Janey should be able to confirm with a pathway analysis.”
Janey Likesmith was the fey specialist down at the Office of the City Medical Examiner. She was good at her job—great, in fact—though underappreciated. She was the lone fey forensics staff member in an agency that did not hold the fey in the highest esteem. The human staff resented taking care of jobs that the Guild or the Consortium should take, so they perceived fey cases as a drain on limited resources. Janey had helped solve more cases than most examiners, so they grudgingly gave her the space she needed.
“I’ll make a note to see her later,” Murdock said.
I checked under the bed. “Are you working a lot of cases together?”
He compressed his lips. “Yeah. Mostly routine.”
When Murdock stood, I noticed that the windows behind him shimmered with security wards. Wards could be made in all shapes, sizes, and materials to perform pretty much any function. Pump something up with essence, add a little directional spell work, and you had a ward. Glass was a strong essence retardant, but it could still break. The fey—at least those with reason enough to be paranoid—created wards around property entry points. They reflected sight and sound, and even enhanced the properties of glass to prevent essence-fire.
I walked around the bed and examined the window casements. The wood was much newer than the rest of the framing, recently installed. It had been charged with essence to create a barrier shield. “I think our victim was a professional.”
“Undercover?” Murdock asked.
I wandered back to the bedroom door. The living-room windows had wards, too. “The apartment’s nondescript, not many personal effects, and the security wards on these windows are pretty sophisticated for someone who lives in the Weird.”
“Consortium?” Murdock asked.
I pushed my lower lip out as I considered it. “It’s a reasonable guess. The Consortium has as many spies down here as the Guild does. The guy could’ve been freelance, but it won’t hurt to ask around.”
I stared out the window. A few blocks away, another warehouse rose above its surroundings. A tall tower of wood-and-steel scaffolding stood on the roof, a nest of aged red air-raid sirens clustered together at the top. Murdock and I had found someone hanging from it not long ago. The victim had been someone who had played on too many sides of the game. In the end, no one was on his side.
Whoever the dead elf was, he thought he was doing the right thing for the right reason, even if it might have been for the money. That was the seduction of a life like his. People gave up much in the hope that they would contribute to something so much more. It didn’t matter which side of the law they were doing it for, at least not at the end. In the end, they either gave up and walked away, or someone made the decision for them.
A squad car pulled up in the street below. Gerry Murdock got out of the driver’s side. No love existed between me and Murdock’s brother. He blamed me for the death of their father. I didn’t kill the man, but through no intention of my own, the entire Murdock family had gotten messed up.
“Gerry’s here. I’m not in the mood for him today. You mind if I skip out the back?” I asked.
Murdock’s gaze swept the room. “Yeah, you might as well. The higher-ups are not going to be cutting any consulting checks to you anytime soon. Thanks for the favor.”
I knew my consulting days were over. Ever since I lost my abilities, I had been surviving on disability checks from the Guild and the occasional consulting fee from the Boston P.D. The Guild had stopped paying me a few months earlier, and I didn’t have the resources to force them to pay me. I figured it was just a matter of time before the police department dumped me, too. It was no surprise.
“Actually, I could use a favor myself. I’m meeting some people at the airport tomorrow and could use a ride,” I said.
“Sure.” He didn’t look up. His tone wasn’t enthusiastic. Murdock was having a hard time with my involvement in his life, too. The difference between him and his brothers was that he didn’t routinely threaten to beat me up. As much as I would have loved to normalize things with him, dinner would have been asking too much.
A time existed not too long ago when I thought my life was getting back on track. I had given up trying to solve the problem of having no abilities. I had shed my desire to return to the Guild as a top investigator. I even had let go of the anger over the downward turn my life had taken. Yet, here I was again, without many friends or any means of support, with no clear path out of the situation.
“Do you ever feel like your life is going in circles, Leo?” I asked.
He chuckled. “All the time.”
“I don’t think I have many circles of hell left to go through,” I said.
Murdock tilted his head. “You know what people forget about all those circles of hell? They’re followed by the spheres of heaven.”
I snorted. “And purgatory’s in the middle. Heaven’s a long way off.”
Murdock shrugged. “Patience is a virtue, Connor. It all makes sense in the end.”
2
Later that afternoon, I sat amid piles of books and dust deep underground in an old section of the Guildhouse subbasements. I had lost myself in an old book. Its thick, cracked-leather covers showed evidence of poor rebinding, and some of the ink had faded to indecipherable. The pages rubbed dry against my fingertips, as if pulling the oils from them. It might have been. Grimoires were not casual reading. They told histories and parables, but their true value was in the lessons. Manipulating essence was inherent to the fey, different species being proficient in different areas. Becoming a true practitioner required study and practice. Grimoires were the textbooks to the art and science of being fey.
The Boston Guildhouse was gone, destroyed in a terrorist attack by the Elven King. The surviving Guild staff were struggling to get back to business from buildings scattered across the city. They weren’t keen about taking on new investigations at the moment.
Several stories above me, the ruins of the Guildhouse pressed down, a shattered heap of stone. Donor Elfenkonig, the Elven King, had destroyed the building by using a talisman known as the faith stone. He broke the bonds that held the building together with essence. I tried to stop him, tried to prevent the disaster, but failed. Donor was one of the most powerful fey in the world. I didn’t have much of a chance against him and survived by fate or dumb luck. The building came down anyway. I had killed the Elven King in the process, though I’m not sure if I meant to.
The faith stone survived. The problem was that it was inside my head. A chunk of blue crystal the size of my fist had passed through my skull and embedded itself in my brain. How I survived and why it could happen had brought me to a tiny storeroom of old books that most people had forgotten existed.
It wasn’t the first room like it I had been in. The worn, wooden table on thick, rounded legs teetered a fraction of an inch, enough to irritate me every time I leaned forward or shifted a pile of books. Stacks of bound parchment surrounded me in a narrow, vaulted alcove no larger than a monk’s cell. Most of the stuff was crap, apocryphal writings on subjects people wished they knew about. Here and there, though, true writings were buried like diamonds in the rough. Or a faith stone in a thick head.
A door slammed off in the distance, followed by the sound of glass breaking, then louder swearing. I hurried into the hall. “Meryl?”
Something heavy slid against a gritty floor. “I’m fine . . . ish.”
The hallway curved and dipped, one of the original tunnels beneath the Guildhouse that conformed to earthen
