Free Unperfect Souls by Mark Del Franco Page B

crack in the tunnel, Joe?”
    Joe’s eyes went wide. He turned around again, lowered his loincloth, and bent over. My laugh drew confused and annoyed stares from the MWRA workers. “Murdock, please don’t ask him what three-day-old lasagna smells like. I’ve had enough bad odors today,” I said.
    Laughing wildly, Joe shot into the tunnel behind us.
    Murdock reddened from laughing. “I can’t believe I fell for that. Twice.”
    “Never accept glow bees from strange flits, my friend,” I said.
    “So, you guys want to see what I found or not?” Joe called out.
    He hovered next to the pipe, his wings lighting the space with a pink glow. Murdock cocked an eyebrow with me. “I’ve learned my lesson. You go first.”
    I sidestepped along the pipe a few feet and looked where Joe pointed. Behind the pipe, bricks were knocked out from floor to ceiling, leaving a dark gap. I shined my light in but saw little beyond the opening. “He’s not joking, Murdock.”
    Murdock slid next to me. We leaned on the cold cast-iron pipe and aimed our flashlights. The gap led to another tunnel, more rough-hewn, but clearly not natural. The Weird was built on landfill, so if a tunnel existed, someone had dug it. Faint hints of essence trails ran into it, the ambient remainders of body signatures. More than one person used the gap.
    “He wasn’t lying about the smell,” said Murdock.
    We both recognized it. Once you knew what it was, no one forgets the rancid smell of body decomposition. If we hadn’t been in the sewer, it would have been overpowering. Something was dead and rotting in there. “We’ve got another crime scene, Detective Murdock.”
    Murdock glanced at me from under his brow. “Is that your way of saying I’m going first again?”
    I stepped aside, then followed as Murdock ducked under the pipe and squeezed through the gap. The passageway was molded from the surrounding earth with supports made from random material—car bumpers, scaffolding, old timber, granite blocks—holding the opening stable. My body signature tingled against my skin. A few months earlier, troll essence had bonded to me, and it had never gone completely away. I’ve had a sensitivity to troll work ever since. “The earth and stone were shaped by a troll using essence, Murdock.”
    Murdock’s flashlight beam was lost in the distance. “We didn’t fare so well last time we encountered a troll. Maybe we should call the Guild.”
    I rubbed my hand along the wall, dirt and stone particles clinging to my body essence as the troll residue attracted it. “It’s old work. I think the troll who made it is long gone. The only fresh body signatures I’m getting are dwarves and solitaries.”
    He leaned his chin into his shoulder and called it in on the radio. “Let’s check it out,” he said.
    “Now?”
    His face was shadowed when he looked over his shoulder. “I’ve got a gun and a body shield.”
    Murdock’s body shield existed in my mind as a curiosity and a failure. On an earlier case we worked together, he had become caught in the backlash from a major spell. When he recovered, he could create a body shield stronger than most fey body shields. No other abilities had manifested, though, and he remained human to my senses. The shield’s existence fascinated me because I had never seen something like that happen to a human. It also made me feel that my own lack of ability had prevented me from protecting him, and I wondered what the change in him boded for the future. “This is the part of the movie where I think, ‘Why the hell are they going in there?’ ” I said.
    He walked up the tunnel. “And this is the part where I say, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ ”
    Joe flew between us. “And this is the part where I wonder if there will be cookies and whiskey when we’re done.”
    Where the sewer had the chill of winter, the air in the tunnel had the tang of steam heat, the faint odor of wet metal and rust. The temperature shifted,