rationalize them.”
Meryl arrived with her own Guinness and dropped into the seat next to Murdock. “That was fun.”
“Making a little extra money for the holidays?” Murdock asked.
She grinned. “Just flexing some old muscles.” She dropped her eyes to his clothes. “I didn’t know Brooks Brothers sold jeans.”
He feigned insulted disbelief. “Hey! They’re Levi’s!”
She wiggled her shoulders. “Oooo, trendy! Was your Members Only jacket in the wash?”
Murdock tilted his brow toward me. “Some help here would be nice.”
I laughed. “Not me. I get in enough trouble with her.”
Meryl nudged him with an elbow. “You should let me trick you out with some clothes, Murdock. Shake up your image a little.”
He sipped his seltzer. “I have enough image problems at the moment.”
“Your father again?” I asked. We had Police Commissioner Scott Murdock to thank for the aggressive curfews in the Weird. He pushed for them, and the mayor jumped.
Murdock slipped the napkin back under his glass. “He wants me to transfer to Back Bay.”
Meryl pursed her lips. “Not a lot of murder in Back Bay.”
“Exactly. He wants me out of the Weird. It’s undermining his image,” Murdock said.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
I let it drop. Talking about his father was a touchy subject at the best of times. Murdock had caught the backlash of a spell a few months ago and somehow ended up with the fey ability to produce a body shield. It wasn’t something he’d shared with his father, as the commissioner hated the fey. The way things went between them, I guessed he wouldn’t tell him for a long, long time.
“Is your friend coming?” I asked Meryl. Meryl knew more people in town than anyone. How she juggled her impressively busy social life with work was a mystery to me. After telling her earlier about the sending I had received at the headworks, she offered to connect me with a contact in the solitary community.
She sipped her beer. “Oh, he’s here. He’s being careful. Yggy’s makes for strange bedfellows, but people still speculate about who talks to whom in here.” She leaned out of the booth, then back. “He’s coming.”
My essence-sensing ability did the looking. Essence sensing worked as a field around the body, so fey folk that have it literally can see behind themselves. Through the clutter of signatures, I recognized one moving toward the booth. A moment later, a solitary named Zev sat next to me. He was a friend—or maybe just an acquaintance—of Meryl’s, another in a series of mysterious connections she had the habit of making with unlikely people.
Zev could never hide his place as a solitary in the fey world. His ochre skin had ripples and seams like tree bark, and black spiny growths dangled from his head like thick dreadlocks. White irises gave him an unnerving stare that I’m sure he used to great effect. Truth be told, he wasn’t the oddest solitary in the Weird, even with those eyes.
He cracked a smile at Meryl, stained yellow teeth that almost matched his skin tone. “Hey, M, good to see you behind a bar again.”
“Yeah, those were the days, huh? You remember Murdock and Grey?” she asked.
He tilted a bottle of Bud to his lips. “Yeah. Last time I was in a bar with them, the place exploded.”
“That was Meryl’s dancing,” Murdock said.
“I seem to remember some hip-shaking from your direction,” I shot back.
Zev shifted his eerie white eyes between us. “We here to joke or talk about what’s going on?”
I leaned farther into the corner of the booth. “Okay. A corpse was found at the headworks. When I was there, someone threw me a sending that said he wasn’t the first victim. Since so many solitaries work there, we were hoping you might know someone willing to talk.”
Zev shrugged. “I think an anonymous sending answers that question.”
I glanced at Meryl. “So, why are we here?”
Zev