Unquiet Dreams (26 page)

I opened the back and pushed some trash across the seat. It wasn’t that bad. I’d seen it worse. Joe found it interesting enough to rummage around in it.

“Gerin turned the Bosnemeton into a boys’ club, and someone’s not happy,” I told Murdock.

He looked at Meryl. “Don’t you ladies have your own island somewhere?”

Meryl smirked. “Yeah, right. It’s where we run around in star-spangled swimsuits.”

I think the biggest mistake I had made in my social life recently was introducing Meryl and Murdock. They took to each other like sarcasm and snark. At first I was their main target, but they finally moved on to the rest of the world.

We wound our way through Southie while Meryl explained druid gender politics to Murdock. She made several good points. Convergence had not been kind to the old order. Gerin liked to cling to the notion that women didn’t want to be involved in politics. Of course, he tends to forget that not a few druidessess have had more influence in Faerie than he apparently ever did.

We entered the Tangle. A blue haze crept along the streets, ghostly translucent in the dim streetlights. Small neon signs flickered here and there, subdued signposts for bars that didn’t want to draw attention but didn’t want to be overlooked either. No one moves quickly down here, especially at night, unless they’re running. The quick step is the fear step and draws the curiously malicious. No loud talking, and especially not laughter. It’s a place of hard coolness, the strut of confidence and threat.

Meryl made Murdock park on an empty side street. Pulling up near the club would attract minimal attention, but more than we wanted.

“Ditch the coat,” she said to Murdock. He looked down at the camel-hair, one of his favorites. He took it off, folding it neatly on the driver’s seat. Underneath it, he had worn black pants and a white button-down shirt. “Egads, Murdock, this is the Tangle, not Newbury Street.” She turned to me. “Give him your sweater.”

I shrugged out of the turtleneck without debate, happy that I had decided to wear the black T-shirt. Murdock took off his shirt with a bemused smile and pulled the sweater on. He’s broader in the chest than I am, so it fit snugly, very sixties British spy movie. Meryl opened her robe and threw it in the car. Murdock and I stared. I’m not sure if our jaws dropped, but they should’ve. Meryl wore her red Doc Martens with white ankle socks, a red and white midthigh skirt in candy-cane stripes, and a strapless top in redfreakin’-vinyl that molded her curves from cleavage to waist. She flipped her magenta bangs and smiled. “Let’s go, boys.”

Murdock and I exchanged glances. “My dates never wear vinyl,” he said.

“Not a date!” Meryl called back. We caught up with her at the corner and came out into one of Boston’s amusing intersections called squares. Eight streets converged into a tight formation, buildings wedging in like slices of cake. No one in their right mind would try and drive through it without praying to whatever gods they held dear. As it was, a half dozen cars clung to the curbs, burnt-out husks of metal that had been there long enough to rust. One of them had a parking boot clamped to its tire, whether in tribute to the traffic department’s efficiency or indifference was unknowable.

A cluster of people waited on a sidewalk on the far side of the square, some in outfits that made Meryl’s look demure. And the women were even more scantily clad.

“Don’t talk,” Meryl said as we stepped up to the club. No sign over the door, but down in the Tangle, if you didn’t know where you were going, you shouldn’t be there. Following Meryl, we skirted around the waiting queue.

On one side of the entrance, a dwarf worked the line, while on the other, a tall, lanky fey surveyed the crowd. He was one of the solitary fairies who didn’t have any prominent clan affiliation. Not with his yellow-barked skin and damaged, spiny growths like hair on his head. No high fairy clan would ever claim him as their own. He might even be Unseelie, one of the unwanted who banded together to protect themselves from the pretty fey with the nasty essence bolts. He turned unsettlingly white eyes toward Meryl, and his face cracked open in what passed for a smile. “Long time no see, M. What brings you down to party town?”

Meryl gave him a cool nod. “Hey, Zev. Just playing with some friends. Can you let us in?”

His white eyes glittered over us, lingering a moment on Murdock. “New policy. Fey only.”

She smiled coyly and stroked the bent thing in the middle of his face that I hoped was his nose. “I don’t see any humes, do you, Zev? You know me.”

Zev looked down at Murdock, then at the dwarf. When he was sure the dwarf wasn’t looking, he slipped a small stone in Murdock’s hand. It was a ward stone, and I felt Zev’s essence on it as Murdock put it in his pocket with a nonchalant move yet puzzled face. No one would mistake Murdock for an Unseelie with it, but it interacted with his essence enough to keep suspicion down that he was just a human normal. My senses were still hyped-up from the Bosnemeton, and I could see little flashes of purple light cascading around him.

Without a word, Zev gave us his back, unhooking the velvet rope as he did so. We walked through and entered the club. Inside, the hallway closed in tight with bodies, the walls glistening with some kind of phosphorescent life. The floor vibrated beneath our feet. We came around a corner to a blast of heavy bass, filktronica crushing out any chance of conversation.

The cavernous space of Carnage unfolded before us, four wide floors above ripped open to make more height. Crumbled concrete and jagged rebar hung over the main floor, where hundreds of fey danced in a pandemonium of light and sound. Old metal elevator cages enclosing a live band lined the edge of the second floor, five people with drums and electric lutes and harps. The singer groaned into a microphone, her voice adding a sensual growl to the rhythm of sound.

Meryl’s arms shot into the air, and she sashayed into the mix. I made a mental note to kill her for this later. I don’t like dancing. Murdock dove right in, though, taking right to the music. Learn something new about people every day. Of course, all the drugs in the air probably helped. I could smell plenty of weed and a couple of fey concoctions. I did my usual simple shimmy-in-place and looked around.

Carnage was the current place for hot music and the seen scene. I recognized more than a few faces from the arts and leisure pages of the Boston Globe. The place was simply one in a long string of gathering places that placed a premium on edgy and illicit. I had been in more than a few despite Meryl’s belief. They burst into existence with regularity, only to fade when the mainstream found them or the cops did. A new one would spring up before the lights went up on the last one.

All the menace was in the posturing. The most uncool thing to happen to you in the hottest club in town was to get thrown out of it. So, a strange mélange of people bumped and ground against each other who would never give each other the time of day otherwise. The Carnage crowd had a distinct Teutonic bent, with dwarves and elves from more clans than I had seen in a while. Not a few fairies swooped overhead, their eyes glazed with a feverish high. Squirreled away here and there were more solitaries, strange denizens who lingered in the shadows even here. You didn’t see many of them in Boston. They kept to themselves, feared for their lives, and made do with the lot life had given them. Copper-skinned men with overly long arms showed sharp teeth as they teased a skeletal woman, naked and pale, or an amphibious fey of indeterminate sex.

No flits, though. I realized Joe wasn’t with us, nor were any of his brethren anywhere that I could see. I thought he’d wanted to come. Knowing him, though, he had found something fascinating under Murdock’s car seats.

We spent the better part of an hour moving around the floor. What I couldn’t see in the darkness, I could sense. Fey essence everywhere, some minor spells working, mostly on glamours to make the hot look hotter. A lot of action seemed to be going on in alcoves around the upper levels but nothing that shocked me. I left Murdock and Meryl on the floor to get some water. With everything else going on in the room giving me a headache, I didn’t want to increase the head pain with alcohol.

I didn’t want to think about the structural integrity of the building, but hoped the extra warding I was seeing and feeling was enough to hold it all together. Ripping the floors out to create the open space had weakened the structure, but someone who knew how to work stone materials, probably a dwarf or maybe C-Note himself, had used essence to strengthen what remained. Essence could be used to create tough barriers in and of itself. Bonding it to existing brick and mortar made it even stronger.

I leaned against the bar and caught sight of Callin. He stood across from me, a section of gyrating dancers between us. He talked with a motley crew of fey who looked like trouble. I was going to have a conversation with my brother sometime in the near future. It would end in anger, I’m sure, but I at least had to try to understand why he chose to put himself on the wrong side of things so often. He finally caught sight of me but didn’t come over, making it clear he didn’t want us seen together. After a few minutes, he caught my eye again and with an imperceptible nod indicated a wide set of closed doors visible on the third floor above.

C-Note is up there. Don’t do anything stupid, he sent. The man was hanging out with drug dealers and gangs and was telling me not to do anything stupid. I couldn’t complain too much at the moment, though. He had let me know that C-Note would be here tonight when I asked him to find out.

I shimmied my way back onto the dance floor to Meryl and her dancing fool partner. They couldn’t hear me, but I got them to follow me through the flailing arms and legs and wings to the steel staircases that twisted up to the second and third levels. Once above the band, the sound diminished. People milled about what was left of a floor that had become a balcony overlooking the dance floor.

“What’s up here?” Meryl asked.

I nodded behind me toward the sheet-metal door. “That.”

By the way Meryl’s nostrils flared, I could tell she was sensing what I was. “Haven’t you boys had enough of trolls lately?”

“I wish. Care to join us?”

She held up her hands in refusal. “I’m not a field agent.”

I couldn’t blame her. I was about to nail the connection between my murder case and Keeva’s. Guild politics being what there were, Keeva would find ways to make Meryl miserable if she caught wind of her involvement.

Murdock took up a flanking position on my right as we walked to the door. In the short time we’d been working together, Murdock and I had fallen into comfortable patterns. All my other partnerships had an element of competition in them. Not Murdock and me. We worked well together because we had our own areas of expertise. In fey situations, he had no problem letting me take the lead. In human normal, I let him take it.

An elf shifted in front of the door, a TruKnight by the black and red jacket. He didn’t say a word, just stared. Several others lurked nearby, pretending not to notice us.

“Tell C-Note I want to talk to him about Dennis Farnsworth,” I said.

He didn’t move. Murdock stepped in closer. I had an uncomfortable moment as I felt his essence charging up, but he looked calm. He didn’t make any move for his gun, but from his stance I knew he’d have it in his hand before the elf knew it. “Open the door because you don’t want to make me mad.”

The elf smirked. Any fey would. Most elves are pretty good at sensing essence since they like to manipulate external sources rather than their own. Despite Zev’s ward stone muddying Murdock’s essence so it didn’t feel human, the TruKnight clearly thought whatever Murdock was, he was no match for an elf. After seeing Murdock in action at Yggy’s, I almost wanted to watch him wipe the smirk off the guy’s face. I felt a soft flutter in the air around us, which meant the elf was sending. Sure enough, he nodded a moment later and opened the door.

After we entered, he closed the door behind us, muffling the blasting music to a pulsing bass vibration. The room stretched long and cramped. The air was thick with smoke and incense that my head problem hated. Fey lounged on couches along the walls, elves and dwarves mostly, but with a few drugged-up fairies and brownies. The ones that bothered to notice us gave condescending smiles. The rest were either deeply involved with each other or stoned on something. At the far end sat a table, and behind the table sat C-Note.

As trolls go, he had been hit with the ugly stick more than most. His wide, pockmarked face was cut by a long, sinuous nose with nostrils a man could fit his fist in. He watched us with tight, round eyes nestled deeply at the bridge of that nose, long tendrils of eyebrows twisting up into a thick mane of greasy brown hair. Even seated, both Murdock and I had to tilt our heads up to look at him. By the expanse of his chest, I’d guess he hailed from the mountains. Most of the Teutonic trolls from there seem built from the raw bedrock.

C-Note rubbed a dull gem on a leather cord around his neck. As we approached, I could see a long, black staff of wood clenched like a royal scepter in his large, taloned hand. A leash wrapped around the other hand and trailed to a collar worn by a naked woman. She crouched on the floor beside him, silvery white skin laced with healing wounds and bruises. Her coarse hair hung to the floor, charcoal gray and matted. She looked at us with no emotion, eyes a deep brilliant green yet empty. Just the hint of saliva glistened at the corner of her parted lips.

“What can I do for you, Connor Grey?” C-Note asked. I recognized the growling sound from the ward stone Croda had.

“You know me. Good. This is Detective Murdock,” I said.

He showed rows of sharp little teeth. “I know him, too. He’s been hassling some of my friends.”

“Your friends are thugs,” Murdock said. Good for him, I thought. It paid not to show intimidation. Not that I had any doubts about Murdock.

“Who’s your date?” I asked.

He looked down at the woman and jerked the chain. She shuffled closer but didn’t change her expression. “Just a pet.”