“This place has valet service now?” I asked.

Meryl looked at me like I was insane. “No.”

She didn’t elaborate, leaving me to conclude she had a private arrangement with the guy. No surprise. At almost every bar and pub I’d been to with Meryl, she knew either a bouncer or a bartender.

The after-work crowd had thinned, so we landed a table easily. Within moments, the waitress delivered two pints of Guinness. The Craic House, then, was one of those places where she knew the bouncer and the bartender. Meryl could put it away with the best of them, but she never got drunk that I could see.

“We haven’t gone out for a drink in weeks.”

Meryl sipped her beer. “Ceridwen’s pulled me into the hearing four times.”

I smiled down at the table. “It’s not like you don’t enjoy irritating her.”

She made a funny snarl face. “I hate it. I come in to work every day not knowing whether I’m going to be filing or defending myself.”

“That’s a lie. I’ve seen your office. You never file.”

“You sound like Nigel,” she said.

Meryl and Nigel Martin had recently become friends, or at least friendly. I found the situation a little suspicious on both sides. For all her denials about playing Guild politics, she was good at wiggling into the power structure without looking like she was up to anything. Nigel, on the other hand, had motives for everything he did. His sudden interest in Meryl could have been coincidence. It could also be about the fact that he and I were not on the best terms and that Meryl was an available resource for an old mentor to keep tabs on his wayward protégé.

“He must be loving all this court intrigue,” I said.

She snickered. “Gods, yes. Ceridwen’s spear is like catnip for him. He calls me constantly.”

I gulped some beer. “Any clues why it likes me?”

“The spear?” She shrugged. “It’s a pretty powerful artifact. From what I can tell, its original purpose was that of a silver branch.”

“A key to the Magic Kingdom?”

She nodded. “Yeah, you can use it to get into Faerie. Well, maybe once upon a time you could. Since Convergence, there hasn’t been any opportunity to use a true silver branch, so the Seelie Court has been using it for its other capabilities.

“It has properties independent of the holder-like the truth detection. Ceridwen made me touch it when she was interrogating me. When I told the truth, the spear was reacting, not Ceridwen. She just watches for the reaction signs. Nigel’s worried about its being in the hands of the Seelie Court.”

“Are you saying it has a mind of its own?” I asked.

She pinched her lips. “I wouldn’t go that far, no. But it reacts to things on a level I don’t think we’re capable of understanding. Whoever made it was either a genius or a madman, and whoever tinkered with it was just plain stupid.”

“Tinkered?”

She nodded. “Nigel’s been very intrigued, so he asked me to research it. The spearhead was either changed or added later. The silver filigree was bonded even later, and it also has silver-branch properties on its own. It fades in and out of history. You wouldn’t believe where it’s been. It was probably with the elves in Alfheim at one point. The elven armies do love their spears. I think they were the ones who changed the spearhead.”

I leaned back, impressed. “How do you find this stuff?”

She flipped her hands up at the wrists and batted her eyelashes. “I’m just a girl with a computer.”

“Yeah, right. With more stealthware than the Pentagon.”

She checked to see if anyone around us could listen in. “I almost got caught in Austria. I hacked a museum server, and the next thing I knew, I was chased across the Web. It was cool. They were good.”

I knew that wasn’t the end of the story. “But not good enough.”

She shook her head, clearly proud. “Nope. Before I lost the connection, I was able to confirm the filigree was done in Britain after the spear disappeared from Germany. The spear has its own silver-branch properties, but someone decided to enhance them with the silver filigree. If I had to guess, it was for a spell that allows multiuser interface functionality with a primary dimensional portal via a single active administrator.”

I laughed out loud. “You so just overgeeked yourself.”

She made this cute I’m-so-embarrassed face. “Um… I meant to say that there was probably a spell that allowed whoever used the spear for a silver branch to take as many people as they wanted across a veil between the realms.”

“Much better, thank you.”

She scrunched up her nose. “So, how’s your case going, Mr. Smart Guy?”

I swirled the dregs of my beer. “Strange. Unlike you, the most exciting thing that’s happened in my search is bumping into a crabby fairy in a bookstore. I have a rune spell I can’t figure out. I was wondering if you could look into it for me. It might distract you from Ceridwen.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, golly, Mr. Grey, really? I’d love to do your consulting work for you. When can I start?”

I pouted playfully. “Hey, I’m paying for the beer, aren’t I?”

She pursed her lips. “It’ll take more than a round to convince me.”

I doodled the rune spell on a bar napkin, breaking the runes across two lines to keep them from accidentally activating something. Like Meryl said, even though I didn’t have my abilities anymore, sometimes tools simply react to their environment. “Two dead bodies with the same ogham runes. They read like ‘grave denied’ or ‘the way to death denied.’ Considering the dead bodies, I don’t get what they’re supposed to accomplish.”

Meryl circled three runes. “You’re probably being too literal, which is how the modern mind works. You’re translating those runes as ‘death-home,’ which logically means grave or graveyard. But the word used here for death is not a definite form-it’s more like ‘not mortal living,’ which could be an invocation to a god or goddess.”

I turned the napkin toward me. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

Meryl nudged her glass. “Ask me about kennings.”

I signaled the waitress for another round. “I know what kennings are.”

Meryl hummed and bobbed her head as if she were listening to music. When the waitress delivered the Guinness, she stopped humming and leaned forward. “And we’re back from our commercial break. Every dru-kid knows kennings are poetic metaphors, but that’s different from figuring out whether you’re looking at a kenning and what it could mean. There’s intuition and cultural context to take into account. This is the part where you say, ‘That’s bloody brilliant, Meryl. You should have some hot, spicy chicken tenders.’ ”

To prove I’m not dense, I waved the waitress back. “That’s bloody brilliant, Meryl. You should have some hot, spicy chicken tenders. In fact, let me order and pay for them.”

She winked and lifted her glass. “Excellent. I don’t usually like ad-libbing, but that’s good. Anyway, given what I know of the cultural context of the Old Irish, and this ogham spell looks Old Irish in form, I’d say death-place is a kenning for Mag Mell.”

She downed the remainder of her beer as the waitress arrived. “Another round, please, and I believe the gentleman is adding onion rings to his order.”

I added onion rings to my order. “Why Mag Mell?”

She shrugged. “It’s a place-name kenning from the text position, and given that you found it at a painful murder scene, the type of otherworld would be the opposite of pain. Mag Mell-the plain of joy-where the dead living is easy. Plus, it’s Samhain. Murderers aren’t very creative about their timing.”

Impressed, I shook my head and smiled. “You really are brilliant.”

She stood. “Yes, well, now I have to pee. When I come back, remind me to tell you about the time I killed Liddell Viten.”

She walked off into the crowd. My entire body felt like it was sinking into the chair. I couldn’t speak when the waitress served our order, but stared at the food and wondered what to say when Meryl came back.