way up the street between boarded-up buildings. The next alley was tauntingly far off.
I threw a glance over my shoulder. The Dead charged up the street, running and jumping through the snow with wild abandon. Dark shapes filled the air, Dead fairies and other things, wheeling in the darkness on ragged wings.
We weren’t going to make it. The alley was too far away. I pulled Shay against my side as Murdock’s body shield blazed red in the swirling snow ahead of us. Murdock turned, pulling his gun out. For a brief moment, I saw surprise on his face as he lifted his weapon. Then something slammed into my back. Shay and I fell in a tangle, the great black shape of Uno, impossibly huge, pinning us to the ground with paws that threw an emberlike heat. I twisted beneath him, blindly reaching out to ward off his massive jaws. A torrent of snow washed over us. The Taint bent above the dog, and the rampaging Dead swirled to either side of us.
I craned my neck to see Murdock backing away. He turned to run, but a dim shadow on dark wings dove at him and swept him into the sky. The Taint passed on, rolling up the street, leaving the lane between the buildings empty. The pressure of weight from the dog vanished, and I scrambled to my feet.
“Murdock!” I yelled. Retreating screams and howls answered me.
“Leo!” Still no answer. I looked down the alley, but he wasn’t there.
“Leo, answer me, dammit!”
No answer. There was no one left but Shay and the black dog.
Murdock was gone.
19
Blood stained the snow in front of the meeting warehouse. Bodies lay crumpled in the gutter. All solitaries. All dead. At the end of the street, police officers huddled in their cars. Motorcycles lay scattered in the snow, some with their lights flashing. No one was outside.
Shay and I stumbled into the warehouse. Pistols and rifles swung in our direction, and Shay grabbed me by the waist from behind. I held my hands in the air to confused shouts of “get out” and “get on the floor.”
“Is Detective Lieutenant Leonard Murdock here?” I shouted.
An officer grabbed my arm and shoved me against the wall. “Get your arms out now,” he shouted.
I assumed the position. Shay turned a panicked face toward me as an officer pressed him hard against the wall while another fumbled with his oversize coat. “I’m with the Guild,” I shouted.
The officer patting me down shouted in pain as a flash of heat burned against my ankle. “He’s armed! He’s armed!” he shouted as he fell back with his gun out.
I kept my hands against the wall. “I’ve got two daggers in my boots. That’s it. One of them’s spelled. I need Lieutenant Murdock.”
“He’s not here,” someone said.
“Just throw them out with the others,” someone else yelled.
I had no idea what was going on. These guys sounded angry and scared. “Call the Guild, dammit! Tell Keeva macNeve that you have Connor Grey!”
An officer pressed the muzzle of his gun against the back of my neck. I closed my eyes. “Let the kid go,” I said.
No one answered. I didn’t dare move my head to check on Shay.
After several agonizing minutes, someone called over. “He’s clear.”
The pressure of the gun disappeared. I dropped my hands. Shay huddled against me again. “This is no way to treat a lady,” he whispered.
“Are you okay?” I asked. He nodded against my shoulder.
I called Keeva. She spoke before I had a chance to say anything. “Stay with the police, Connor. We’re handling this. Don’t tell anyone else you’re there.”
“What the hell is going on?”
Rustling sounds came through as Keeva moved her phone. Muffled voices argued in the background. “It doesn’t matter. Listen, don’t talk to anyone. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“What the hell is going on?”
She dropped her voice. “I can’t talk. We’ve got missing police officers. Just do what I say. You’re better off in Guild custody.”
“Custody?” I said.
She disconnected. I stared at my phone. Bastian’s words came back to me. I glanced around the room. No one seemed to be watching me. Given a choice between the police and the Guild, I liked neither. I looked out the window. The storm was raging, blinding white snow obliterating the view to the street. I called Meryl.
“I’m at 264 Summer Street. Can you get me out of here?” I asked.
“It’s a blizzard out there, Grey,” she said.
“Murdock’s missing,” I said.
“Missing? Like missing missing or not returning your phone calls because he has something better to do missing?”
I told her what happened. “And now I’m surrounded by cops who apparently don’t know they’re supposed to arrest me,” I said.
She sighed. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Officers watched the storm through the grate-covered windows. The heightened apprehension faded as time went by, but the tension never completely left the room. No one but uniformed officers came inside. Whatever solitaries had been out in the street when the Dead came through were either hiding elsewhere or dead.
“I’m going to need a distraction,” I said to Shay.
“I’ve got a pretty good singing voice,” he said.
I smiled down at him. “I’m sure you do. When I tell you to, go to the back of the room and do something to draw attention.”
He nodded. “Then what do I do?”
“Stay here. You’ll be safe.”
His eyebrows went up. “Really? With the guys with the guns that were pointed at me?”
“You’ll be fine. This seems to be about the fey,” I said.
He pouted as he looked around the room. “Maybe I’ll get that guy who groped me to buy me a drink.”
I grinned. “See? I’m giving you a dating opportunity.”
A deep, low rumble sounded outside. Everyone moved away from the door and windows except me and Shay. A smudge of light appeared, white and yellow. As the noise grew, the lights brightened and separated into flashing roof lights. A snowplow stopped outside, a massive hulk of yellow steel belching steam out its overhead exhaust.
A cool spot formed in my mind and a sending came through.
“Showtime, Shay,” I said.
He pulled his hood up and wandered toward the back of the room. I sidled toward the door. When Shay reached the table in back, he stooped and picked up the fallen microphone. For a moment, I thought he really was going to sing, but then he let loose with a loud, high-pitched scream. Every head in the room whipped in his direction. I slipped outside.
Snow swirled around me in thick curtains. In the few feet from the door to the truck, I was covered from head to foot. I hopped on the running board of the plow, then jumped inside the cab. Bundled in a thick black cloak, Meryl waited behind the wheel.
“Where the hell did you get this?” I asked.
She put the truck in gear. “Geez, Grey, doesn’t anyone owe you favors?”
“I got you out in a blizzard, didn’t I?”
“This is you owing me another favor, not you calling one in.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To meet Zev. He agreed to have his people look for Murdock.”
The truck rumbled along Summer Street in its own bubble of light. The warehouses to either side were barely discernible through the storm, less so as we drove deeper into the Weird, and the streetlamps became fewer. We drove through a trail of essence. The storm degraded what lingered, but I got hits on elves, fairies, and all kinds of solitaries and large animals. “This is the direction the Dead came from,” I said.
The dashboard lights threw a pale yellow glow against Meryl’s face. “I’ve been sensing their trail since the financial district. There were a few live ones, but not Murdock’s.”
“This is my fault. The Dead wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me,” I said.
Meryl took a wide turn onto Drydock Avenue in the deep end of the Weird. “No, I’d blame Bergin Vize for that one.”
“He led them here, but I trapped them,” I said.
She turned onto Harbor Street and dropped the plow. The snow drifted nearly two feet in front of us. “Eh, that’s debatable and beside the point. They’re here. The point right now is to find Murdock.”
“Are we going where I think we’re going?” I asked.
“If you guessed the Tangle, you get to go to the bonus round,” she said, as we crossed Old Northern.
The Tangle is where the worst of the Weird meets the worst of everything. The original layout of the streets was buried under shifting lanes and buildings that created a maze with no beginning and no end. Bad things happened in the Tangle, from knife-throwing target practice on the unwary to full-blown essence battles. Blood and sadness soaked the streets, the memories of rage and waste. Human law enforcement gave up on it long ago. It had to. If the fey had to be on guard in the Tangle, a person with only a gun and a badge had no hope of surviving.
Tiny streaks of white lightning danced over the truck as it passed through a warding barrier. The engine coughed, and Meryl muttered a shield spell as she downshifted. The deeper we drove into the area, the more spells pinged against the shield, bursts of essence in green and white across the hood of the truck, streaks of yellow and brilliant hazes of blue and white. The engine whined higher, and Meryl hit the brake. “We need to get out here. The engine can’t take any more hits. I don’t want to lose it and have to walk home in this mess.”
My head started aching. The dark mass in my mind hated whenever someone tried to read the future, and the Tangle was a hotbed for scrying. As I trudged through the snow behind Meryl, I fought off the nausea that welled up. My vision blurred as the pain increased. “I don’t know if I can do this, Meryl. There’s too much scrying, and I’m getting hit with sensor spells.”
She reached out a gloved hand. Her body shield shimmered around her, a faint yellow glow in the thick snow. The essence flowed off her fingers and up my arm. The dark mass flared, sharp little spikes of darkness reacting to the body shield’s intrusion. The mass in my head resisted, intent on blocking outside essence. Including me in her body shield wasn’t a true interaction of the kind the dark mass resisted—Meryl’s shield wrapped around me more like a blanket than a merging of our body signatures. Meryl jerked her head up at me, surprised at the resistance the mass pressed back with. When her shield blocked the emanations from the scryings, the dark mass settled down and didn’t attempt to reject her help.
