Chapter 7

Icarus flinched when the coroner flicked back the sheet to reveal the mutilated corpse of the older woman. He fumbled in his pockets for his rosary and took a few deep breaths before making himself look. This part never got easier. 

Maren leaned over the body and inspected the jagged, torn flesh at her throat. She sighed, directed at him, “You split a bodach’s hand in half.”

He grimaced, “It’s different when it’s… us.”

She made an affirmative sound and continued her inspection. He noted the coroner taking an additional step back at the mention of a fae. A sour taste bubbled in his mouth. He rolled up his sleeves and touched the head gently, shifting it from one side to the next. It moved easily, too much give in the absence of tendon and flesh. 

“Stop,” Maren lifted a hand and he obeyed. She used a thin silver stylus to prod at the slackened, graying skin. For a moment, he could not see what gave her pause. Then, almost as if it materialized in front of him, he saw it. 

Puncture marks. 

Four. Needle-thin. Almost missable in the bend of the woman’s neck--Colleen Callahan, Eilonwy had told them. Maren lifted her eyes to his, mouth curved in a faint frown. 

“Mangling’s for show then,” he sighed and tried to set Colleen back to neutral. It took a few tries and started a battle in his stomach for its contents to stay where they were. 

“It clawed out her throat, everything is ripped but not in tatters. This was calculation, not rage.” Maren handed the stylus back to the coroner who used it as an excuse to disappear into the washroom. 

He leaned back and folded his arms, “There was so much fucking blood in that room, Mare. I can’t figure out why there were signs from both. Fae and demons collaborating is unheard of, they try to tear each other apart when they cross paths.”

“This is one wound. One creature,” she eyed the rest of Colleen’s body with clinical detachment, “one thing that’s part demonic and part fae.”

He laughed involuntarily, “Please. If something like that existed, we’d have heard of it by now. It’d be tearing through the streets.”

“Who’s to say it isn’t?” Before he could respond, she flagged the coroner, “How many cases have you had recently with marks like that?”

The man, flustered, kept a distance when he followed the line of her finger. He shook his head, “Three or four, but they can’t be related. They don’t come in looking a mess, like. Just with those little marks and missing half their weight in blood.”

“And nobody’s reported this to the Church?” Icarus snapped his eyes to the man. Behind their muted grey-blue, a storm brewed.

The older man shrugged helplessly, “We did, but they said not to worry. They’ve all been urchins or whor- ah… women of ill-repute, no family to follow up. It’s just me, like. I don’t have the manpower to stay atop all the cases that come through.”

Icarus’s fingers dug into his forearms, “So no urgency because they were just parentless children and women working to survive.”

“I didn’t mean-”

“I know what you didn’t mean,” he flared, “and you’d do better to speak of all the Pale God’s children with respect. His son lived among the harlots and lepers, fed the starving, restored sight to the blind. As a man of faith, I’d expect you to want to walk the same path as the Pale Son.”

He jerked his chin to the cross at the coroner’s throat: straight line slashed perpendicular a third from the top with two slanted lines. He hurried to tuck it behind his shirt, a flush in his cheeks, but offered no apology. Icarus hated one thing more than the Church--hypocrisy. Not up for a sermon, he waved his dismissal and cleared the room in several long strides. He snatched his coat from the hook when he passed.

The midwinter air was brutal, despite the heavy wool. He lit a cigarette while he waited for Maren to do whatever her salt magic let her do with a body that dead. Smoke filled his lungs--sharp and punishing. He closed his eyes and let his head tip back until it met cold brick. None of it made sense. The sky whirled gray and patient above him, waiting with him in the midday light of the alley. He took another drag and the door opened. Maren glanced at the lit paper and back to him in mild disapproval. 

“What? Not like it’s going to kill me,” he smirked, dropping the spent butt and grinding it under his heel. “Something’s wrong with this case, Mare. I don’t like it.”

She nodded and pulled her gloves over small hands. They walked towards the tramway, both lost in calculations and webs of detail neither of them were quite ready to share. He ran back through Eilonwy and how she had spoken about her brother. Maren pointed out her reluctance to give his name after she left, Icarus had not noticed. He shared his observation about the strange sing-song way the woman spoke. They had agreed something was amiss, but decided to handle her case anyway. Whatever secrets the woman may have held, there was a creature in the night murdering people to deal with.

His thoughts drifted back to his father and the box of dead ends that made up the Church investigation. He could not lie to himself anymore, not after staring into the mutilated throat of a dead woman. There was no magical arrangement of evidence he could concoct that would let him see whatever the investigator-priests had missed. That box was worthless and he was right back to where he started. 

Only worse. At least before the bodach he had made some form of peace with the loss of his father. Now, he had to sift through all the complicated emotions about it again. It always nagged at him--a truth he put considerable time, effort, and whiskey into ignoring. 

He would not know peace until he knew what happened to Daedalus Ulrich. 

Maren made a disagreeable sound at the ticket counter and corrected the clerk, “Trinity College Station.”

“College Sta-?”

“The library.”

Of course. The library. Leave it to Maren to find an excuse to disappear into research. He could not blame her, she was good at it. Research had been her only anchor keeping her sanity on the ground after everything that happened to her. They had met when that anchor had started slipping away. Destiny, Icarus used to joke. Over the years, he secretly wondered how much of a joke that really was. 

The library doors stood open, too ridiculously large and loud to keep them closed considering the foot traffic this brilliant building directed. It was something of a legend, the Trinity College Library. Three floors, plus more basement vaults and archives, covered floor to ceiling in thousands and thousands of books. Romantics spent time writing stories about it, academics spent time whispering curses at the romantics for taking up so much table space, and the occasional cast-out duo of priests spent time rifling through obscure books nobody paid a mind to in the dustiest corners of the room. 

He could not say he loved it, not like Maren. It was a place that felt like time took a breath, though, and he could appreciate that. The air was thick with the hushed movement of students and researchers and would-be authors, each of them leveraging the silence to express their frustration with each other in that passive way academics always manage. Dust motes drifted through the slices of silver early-afternoon light cutting through the floor-to-ceiling windows into the wide open space below--they danced on the heels of every passerby, kissed the cheeks of bookworms who came too close. There was a strange man-made magic in this place that even he could not ignore. 

Maren set him to work immediately. She dropped him off at an empty corner table and lit the reading lamps. When she came back, she dropped a cracked leather book in front of him with a thud. He lifted his arms in aggravation, she fired a look that humbled him back into his uncomfortable wooden chair. They collapsed into a focused silence scanning through all manner of terrible beasts and monsters. When one book yielded no answers, Maren disappeared to grab another. After a while, a library assistant had picked up the pattern and began quietly building a stack for them at the edge of their table. 

Icarus rubbed his eyes, every handwritten page blurring together and refusing to stick in his mind any longer. He was in the process of sighing to get Maren’s attention when her hand shot out and stopped him. She turned the book in front of her and shoved it towards him. 

He stared at the woodblock image. A man. Spindly, tall, long hair wiry and sparse. His teeth gleamed in a broken-mouthed smile--two stepped canines on either side of his jaw. The eyes felt wrong, but Icarus could not say precisely why. One clawed hand raised in a gesture, long index finger drawing his attention to the bedraggled corpse lying at his feet. Blood pooled around the throat of his victim. Along its neck--four puncture marks. 

Icarus’s blurred vision sharpened. The scrawling text was half faded, but legible enough.

Abhartach

He lifted his cool eyes to Maren’s and she pulled the book back to her. She closed it and stood, he followed her lead while she went through the painstaking process of convincing the librarian to let her take it out of the building. 

While she negotiated for her hostage, Icarus paced along the facade. He unscrewed the lid of his flask and let the liquid fire burn away his mind-fatigue. Abhartach. He could not recall this creature, not from any of his training. The name, though, felt familiar. He rolled the word around in his mouth, trying to place it. Another long swig slowed his thoughts enough to pull it apart. Still, its familiarity evaded him. 

“Special consignment, I’ve been allowed three days,” Maren stuffed the ancient tome in her bag and walked past him. 

He followed and cupped his hand around an unlit cigarette until the paper caught, “I don’t know it.”

“Neither do I," she sighed and wafted the smoke away from her face, “which exacerbates concern.”

Night folded in around them, blanketing their path back to the tram. When they stepped off, it had fully embraced the sky above. Buildings went quiet, most windows dark and lightless. Pubs teemed with patrons, oil lamps swung idly when caught off guard by an evening breeze. Maren touched his arm and motioned with her head. Her street was lit, which felt important to Icarus for a distant reason he could not name. 

“I’ll glean what I can and get back to you in the morning. Slán, ” she offered a light squeeze before disappearing. He waited and watched until she rounded the corner that led to her door. 

Hands shoved into his pockets against the burgeoning chill, he carried on down the road in the dark. His thoughts drifted everywhere. Abhartach, Colleen’s body, Eilonwy’s avoidance, the bodach’s words about his father. There was a thread connecting them just out of reach, lost to some angle of light he could not catch. He felt it in his bones, deep in the marrow. Whether the evidence was plain or not, it was there. Waiting for him to find it and pull. 

Rocks skittered in the dark alley to his side. Something raised the hairs on the back of Icarus’s neck. He froze. The familiar electricity of the unnatural moved like static in the air. His attention focused on the road to his flat he had turned down without thinking. 

Darkness. Not complete, but looming. More gaslamps were out than normal, casting the cobblestones in unfamiliar shadows. He inventoried them and caught the telltale signs of deliberate sabotage in a handful. His mind attempted to rationalize it. He did not exactly live in Dublin’s most lavish neighborhood, but it was not the boarding house slums either. Despite the attempt to label the low lighting just another act of mischief, the serpent of wrongness slithered through his thoughts.

Another sound came from the alley. He turned his head--slow and casual. Any moment, a drunk or a dog would come stumbling out. That was all. He was acutely aware of the pulse in his veins. All of his senses sharpened. The air smelled of coal and spilled beer and something old. Something that should not be here. Every laugh, a shift of fabric, a scrape of boots carried on the breeze for his inspection and were all found wanting. Whatever he was listening for would not carry on the wind. Instinct told him that. 

The alley was engulfed in shadows. Blacker than the night had any right to be. A dark so total it made his skin ripple with gooseflesh. Everything about that impenetrable tenebrous wall was flawed. Incorrect. Out of place.

From deep within it, two lights shone faintly--close together, pinpricks of silver against the void of darkness beyond. Dim, far away. Animal instinct corrected the miscalculation. Not dim. Small. Close. Lingering just at the threshold of shadows. 

His muscles coiled, something older than time surged to the forefront. It took hold like the hand of a lost Old God attempting to move his body without his consent. His heart stampeded wildly. His mind screamed. run. Run. RUN. RUN!

He could not move. He had to know--to see, to be sure. Time dilated. Everything slowed. He stopped breathing.

It blinked. 

A flash of silver and blood spilled from his arm. Hands flexed. Azure flames burst from his fingertips. He slashed his hand towards the darkness. Faefire rained down on the shadows, sending them scattering. It hit the stone in furious droplets and dissolved with an impertinent hiss.

Nothing. 

The darkness inhaled sharply, sucked away from the light of his fire as if it had never been. Icarus stared down the alley, the only sound now the slow drip of his blood onto the street. He knew without a shadow of a doubt. 

Someone was being hunted. 

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This week's pick comes from our Administrator Michelle;

Thomas Dent Mütter, an eccentric and brilliant doctor who paved the way for modern surgery techniques, is a fascinating man. He added the umlaut to his last name, just because he could. I could not read about him fast enough. This book is also full of diagrams and medical drawings, and even a photo of a huge impacted colon. But it is not solely worth reading for the sensational photos. Apotwicz uses Dr. Mütter as a window to society at the turn of the century. You can see not only the journey of one strange doctor, but the evolution of medical thought to a (slightly) more compassionate form.