two of us had a complicated and unexpected history. Through some residual arrogance from my Guild days, I had gotten his boyfriend killed during a murder investigation. Shay had almost died a couple of times since then because he had gotten sucked up in my wake.
No matter how hard I tried to leave him alone, something conspired to bring us together, and not in a good way for Shay. He had saved my life, but committed murder to do it. He hid the stone bowl for me, and I had almost killed him in his own apartment. I knew his boyfriend, Robin, was hiding in the city, one of the many Dead, but kept the information from him. He didn’t deserve what I had done, and I didn’t deserve his friendship.
He flipped his long hair over his shoulder. “That was faster than I thought it would be.”
“Are you insane coming into the Tangle dressed like that?” I asked.
Shay held his hands out dramatically from the waist. “Exactly, Connor. Anyone who shows up in the Tangle looking like this is either too crazy to deal with or too powerful to screw over. I made more people nervous than the other way around.”
“How did you know how to find me?” I asked.
He leaned the package against the chair. Essence radiated off it—the paper was insufficient to block it. I didn’t look directly at it. It shifted and swirled and made my head hurt. “Process of elimination. Your apartment’s being watched. I didn’t think you’d abandon the bowl, so I figured you were still somewhere in the Weird. The end of Oh No is too close to the police and stuff, and you don’t strike me as the type to hide out in a burned-out building. The Tangle was the only thing left.”
Shay was too smart for his own good sometimes. “What’s in the package?”
Shay ripped the brown paper to reveal a painting canvas. “It’s your friend Meryl’s painting.”
He flipped it around to show me the plain white surface, but plain only in the visible sense. “That doesn’t look like much of a painting to me, Shay.”
He pursed his lips in appraisal. “Color blocking is a bit passé, although she did use some interesting fingerwork.”
Essence swirled and danced across the surface. Multicolored shapes bent and twisted, dancing like clouds on the wind. They reacted as I approached, and the dark mass in my head threw little pain spikes down my neck. “It’s infused with Meryl’s essence.”
Shay stepped back, still staring as if he could see what I was talking about. Shay was human, though, with no fey abilities. Sometimes he seemed to exhibit a fey sensitivity, but it appeared more intuition than talent. “I thought something was up. It won’t take paint. Every time I painted on it, the paint ran off onto the floor. Uno wouldn’t stay in the same room with it. It’s been taking up room in the studio, and I figured you would want it.”
Uno was a dog, of sorts, a big black dog whose eyes glowed red in the dark. He was the Cu Sith, the hunter of souls, demon dog of TirNaNog. After he died, Robin sent the dog to protect Shay, but Uno spent an uncomfortable amount of time watching me. In history and legends, the Cu Sith was a harbinger of death. For Shay and me, he was an overgrown puppy that drooled a lot and occasionally protected us from getting killed. At least the drool vanished on its own by the next day.
“I need to get Meryl to take a look at this. I keep hearing no one can scry, but I’m getting a scrying buzz off it,” I said.
Shay turned his attention to me with the same appraising eye he had trained on the painting. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks.”
“Seriously. Are you all right? Your eyes look funny.”
“It happened at the Guildhouse,” I said. My irises were crystallized like stained glass. With the faith stone emanating its energies in my head, I had the look of an Old One out of Faerie. It made me feel ancient.
Shay licked his lips and turned away. “I knew some people who died. Not a lot.”
“One’s enough, isn’t it?” I asked.
He played with the sequins on his sleeve. Shay wasn’t one to dwell on sadness or misery. “Well, you could use some sun anyway.”
I walked him to the door. “Will do. You keeping out of trouble?”
He slipped a strand of hair around his ear and smiled. “Actually, yes. My life is quite boring at the moment. I could use a little excitement,” he said.
The essence barrier faded open to reveal a bustling alley camp outside. “Well, please don’t find it here. I’m trying to keep a low profile.”
He paused at the door. “If you keep leaving important stuff at my apartment”—he leaned in and tapped his finger on my lips for the next words—“people will talk.”
I tweaked him on the nose. Shay had flirted with me since the moment we met. It flattered and amused me, but it was all good-natured. “Get going. Don’t stop until you’re well into the Weird. I don’t want to hear that you caused a riot.”
He laughed and walked into the alley. Uno faded into view, his dark form slipping in behind Shay. People pulled away, uncertain. Not everyone could see Uno, but they could feel him. It wasn’t a good feeling. Shay and I didn’t have the same reaction to him as everyone else. It always made me worry. About the both of us.
12
After Shay left, I had the painting brought up to Ceridwen’s rooms. I didn’t know what to make of it, but leaving it around unattended was not an option. Ceridwen was subdued as she stared at the whirling essence but didn’t say why. She agreed to put dampening wards on the canvas so that whatever scrying was operating wouldn’t split my head open with pain.
Afterward, I decided to pretend my life was normal. The Tangle was living in a stew of essence. People who remembered claimed the atmosphere reminded them of Faerie, but with urban buildings and no positive relief. After weeks in the neighborhood, I understood what they meant. Essence saturated everything in the World but intensified in the Tangle. Part of that was the high concentration of fey, but it also was what those fey did.
Essence in the Tangle was activated in all its forms—spells, wards, incantations, shields, glamours, barriers. To my mind, the difference between the Tangle and Faerie was in kind. The Tangle was about warped uses of defense and offense, of catering to baser impulses and exploiting the weak or unsuspecting. I didn’t doubt that Faerie had all those things, but they wouldn’t define it so narrowly. It had been a place where people lived, good people and bad, but not a place that was inherently exhausting. Wearing a body shield all day in the Tangle was not unusual. Wearing one in Faerie to plow a field was probably unnecessary.
As a here-born, someone who had never lived in Faerie, I had the added difference of being attuned to the modern world. I had lived in places where essence was ambient, not a regular tool for the locals. I had friends who were not fey, who didn’t resonate with body signatures after standing in the sun too long. I noticed the difference between life in the city and life in the Weird. I liked the relief of the city sometimes.
I went for a nice long run in a stocking cap and sunglasses in the cool evening air, unnoticed and unrecognized. For a half hour, I was a guy in running shoes, not a suspected murderer. I did my favorite route down the waterside of the Weird, hopping over gaps between docks and balancing up and down old planking. I left the Weird and made for the loop down at Castle Island, feeling the harbor wind on my face.
During the day, Castle Island was a favorite public park for nearby Southie. It was devoid of people at night, not a safe place for anyone. It wasn’t crime-ridden, per se, but sometimes an opportunistic mugger took advantage of the abandonment.
I slowed as I approached the parking lot. The land sloped up to an old fort from the 1800s, when the park was an actual island not connected to the mainland by fill.
A thin haze floated over the fort like a mist, not unusual since it was on the harbor, but the mist seemed only above the fort. My sensing ability picked up ambient essence stronger than usual, too.
Castle Island was where things first fell apart last year, where Shay and Keeva had almost died, and Murdock’s family history started to crack open. A madman under Vize’s control had almost destroyed a dimensional barrier and released a race of beings called Fomorians, or what might politely be called monsters. The impact of those events lingered—much as nasty things lingered in the Weird and the Tangle—and took a long time to
