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or if the darkness took advantage of my mental state somehow.
    I closed my eyes, touched the dark spot in my mind with a mental nudge from the essence in my body signature. The dark mass didn’t move or respond in any way. I opened my eyes. “Not now. I might have then. I don’t know how.”
    He grunted, pulling his hair on one side as he stalked off. “Stay out of my files, Grey.”
    Back in Meryl’s room, the nurse had gone. Meryl was in the chair by the window again, staring at the glass. The smiley face had been wiped away.
    I nudged Meryl legs closer to the chair and pulled at her hand. She rose on unsteady feet. I led her out of the room and to the elevator. She responded to touch, to pushes and pulls. Gillen suggested that I take her for walks and give her exercise she wouldn’t get lying in a hospital bed. The walks made me feel like she was okay. Whatever was wrong, she was still in there, remembering how to walk and how to eat and how to breathe. To my layman’s mind, that was more than reptilian brain.
    Meryl was lost, but not gone. The woman I knew—and loved—was inside this silent shell. If I had faith in anything, it was in her will to survive. I was going to be there for her.

4
    I wandered through the deep end of the Weird later that night, testing the air for essence. For weeks, the strange cloud of blue light had been sweeping the neighborhood, a rush of essence that surged into being as if out of nowhere. In its wake, people disappeared. Eorla had expressed concern because a number of Teutonic fey were among the missing. She worried that it might be overzealous supporters of her cause against the Consortium and the Seelie Court.
    At first, I considered it might be a new form of the Taint, the virulent corruption of essence that had driven the fey mad. Eorla had been powerful enough to dominate and contain it. I saw no sign that she had been affected by it or that it had become loose again. The Taint was gone. Whatever this new problem was, it was its own thing.
    My main challenge was finding it. I had seen it in the distance a number of times, but by the time I reached each location, it had vanished. It followed no decipherable pattern, and while many of its victims were dwarves and druids, plenty of other fey went missing, too. It was hard to get a handle on how many. People in the Weird received little attention from the police when they reported someone missing. Over time, a culture of acceptance evolved, unexplained disappearances another part of what it meant to live in the neighborhood.
    Tonight, I had seen it once a few blocks away, a flash of bright blue roaring across a small intersection. There was no trace of it by the time I reached the corner. The intersection was in an out-of-the-way corner of the neighborhood, off the main streets, where few people lived and fewer businesses operated. The four buildings that sat on the corners of the intersection were boarded up, dark and empty observers over an abandoned street.
    Druids have a talent for total recall. If I found an essence signature, I could file it away in my memory and recognize it if I ran into it again. Whatever this blue thing was, it was a kind of essence that left no trace behind. I had nothing to tag and had never seen anything like it.
    The air had a sharp tang to it, like the aftermath of someone’s firing concentrated essence as a weapon. Essence itself was absent, much like it had been at the murder scene last night. As I moved along the sidewalk, I picked up faded essence from the Dead, which resonated differently from the living.
    Essence dissipated in open air. The one consistent thing I had been finding at the sites of the blue essence was old Dead signatures, the faded remnants of their passage. Recognizing a specific essence, I could estimate how long ago the person had passed through. The degradation in the essence intensity gave me a time frame much like Janey Likesmith could estimate how long a body had been