Stories of the Cosa Nostradamus

Inferno

Overrush

Palimpsest

Illumination

Dusted

Bonus Features

© 2010 Laura Anne Gilman

published by Book View Press

Other titles available in digital format by Laura Anne Gilman

STAYING DEAD

CURSE THE DARK

BRING IT ON

BURNING BRIDGES

FREE FALL

BLOOD FROM STONE

HARD MAGIC

PACK OF LIES (February 2011)

FLESH AND FIRE: BOOK I OF THE VINEART WAR

WEIGHT OF STONE: BOOK II OF THE VINEART WAR (October 2010)

http://www.lauraannegilman.net

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“Inferno” was written expressly for BookView Café, as part of the backstory for BLOOD FROM STONE, and has not appeared anywhere else. This story takes place several months before the events of STAYING DEAD.

Inferno

"Breathe. Breathe, damn you!"

The pile of fur on the wooden table lay still, inanimate.

"Damn." A world of frustration in that one word, frustration, and anger directed both outward, and in. The temptation was too great for the third figure in the room.

"This would be a bad time to say I told you so?"

"Yes."

"I shall refrain, then."

There might have been a faint smile on his face. Or perhaps not. "You are a pestilence and a plague."

"As you say, master."

The man shook his head, reaching down and drawing a sheet over the motionless form.

"We'll try again tomorrow. Ensure that the blood is fresh, this time."

The other speaker looked down at the dark splatters on the leather apron wrapped around his squat body. "Yes, master."

oOo

P.B. had woken that afternoon in a foul mood, the sheet tangled around his legs and his thick white fur damp with sweat. Restless dreams he didn’t want to remember mixed with the sound of jackhammers hard at work on the sidewalk outside his one-room basement apartment. The whites of his eyes were scratchy from exhaustion, and his claws ached from a lack of calcium in his diet. Only the fact that he had two jobs pending and no payment due on either one until he was done got him to consider moving at all. Life in the big city cost big bucks, even living in a dive like this one. Time to get up and at ‘em.

The demon dragged himself out of bed and went to rummage in the pantry for something still edible. Nothing appealed. A note tacked to the empty, non-working fridge reminded him that he had a third job that evening.

“And the excitement just never ends, does it?” His voice was harsh, raspy, and self-disgusted.

He poured a cup of cold coffee out of the coffee maker, and washed it down with a pumpernickel bagel, tearing chunks out of it with determined bites. A little dry, but not bad. He really needed to go food shopping at some point. Or stop by Valere’s and mooch off her. But for now, the work. Or what he would be able to accomplish, seeing as how one client had been avoiding him, and the other didn’t seem to know his elbow from his teakettle when it came to binding contracts...

Humans. Bah.

Grabbing his grey trench coat and snappy-brimmed hat from the coat tree by the door, P.B. slipped his sunglasses out of the pocket, adjusted the arms so that they would stay up on his decidedly not-designed-for-sunglasses nose, and went out the door into the afternoon sunlight to see a man about a package.

oOo

Despite his lack of optimism, the afternoon had been surprisingly productive, closing out a week of frustration on a much better note. Having a check for the remainder of one job in the pocket of his trench helped, too. P.B. supposed that was what was making him so uncharacteristically mellow when he arrived to take on his third and last job of the day.

"Tell us a story!"

The demon settled himself more comfortably against the tree he was leaning against, overcoat folded underneath him to make a rough sort of padded seat, and snorted, his flat black nose perfectly designed to make that noise. "Why should I?"

"Because if you don't, we won't settle down and go to bed. And mom'll be pissed if we're still awake when she gets back." The speaker had a squeaky, self-confident voice, too confident for something that weighed about as much as one of his toes.

"Jailhouse lawyer." P.B. grumbled with no discernable affection, and the speaker giggled, despite not knowing exactly what the term meant. He shifted a little further, allowing the seven piskie pups he was minding to rearrange themselves comfortably around him, their tiny wings catching in his fur and tugging free, more durable than they looked. "All right. "What do you little monsters want to hear this time?"

The eldest, who had been acting as speaker for her siblings, rested her fuzzy red head against his arm. "Tell us about the first demons. Tell us about your people."

There were low lights around the lab, illuminating glass beakers and tubing, strange metal objects. Ivory-white long bones hung from wooden beams. Acid-washed lumps of cartilage and stoppered jars of gray marrow rested on shelves along the wall.

A figure moved out of the shadows and stood by the table. Its length matched the height of his shoulder, the wood dark and polished by years of use. Years of blood and flesh soaked into its grain. "I'm sorry, little brother. I told him it was a bad idea, but he's not one for listening on a good day."

"Hurts.” A whisper, vocal chords relearning their use in this new, uncomfortable form.

"I know." One hand reached down to touch the prone form, black, hooked claws fully extended, like a dog’s. "It will all be over soon." One way or another. They either lived, and went off where master sent them... or they found release in death.

"Didn't want this." Its claws were sheathed under thick skinned pads, attached to over-muscled arms now resting limply on the table, held down by wide leather straps and buckles. Like, and unalike, the method of birth was still the same.

"Nobody ever asks us, little brother.” Irony, there. He had many brothers. And no brotherhood at all. “We don’t have a choice."

oOo

"They're asleep?"

Unlike the pups, momma piskie had no charms, winsome or otherwise. Wraith-thin, famine-thin, with pointed ears and a mane of dry red hair running down to her tissue-leather wings, her triangle-shaped face reminded P.B. of a documentary he'd seen once on cobras, and the lidless stare of her sky-blue eyes merely reinforced that. But what she lacked in physical appeal she more than made up for in sheer stubborn doggedness—one of the reasons why piskies had not only survived in the big bad city, but thrived enough to qualify as one of the major communities living in the greenspace of Central Park.

“After four stories, a pint of ice cream–you owe me seven-forty–and at least one threat of demonic violence on their still-tender bodies, yeah. Sleeping like the innocents they aren’t.”

Einnie laughed, the sound like wind on cold water, and settled on the park bench next to him. “Thank you again for taking them on such short notice. Nobody else will watch them, any more.”

“I can’t imagine why.” His tenor growl was dry. Of all the members of the cosa nostradamus, the supernatural world, piskies were the worst: annoying, unaesthetic pranksters with no sense of personal boundaries and no concept of loyalty to anything other than their pups, and even then only until they were out of the nest. That said, they could take a prank as well as play one. That covered a multitude of sins, in his personal ledger. And they seemed to like him, with the same sort of casual affection he could give them. It was a fair balance.

“They’re handfuls, all right,” Einnie said in acknowledgement. Understatement of the year. “But they adore you. Gods only know why.”

“You don’t think I’m adorable?”

Einnie gave him a thorough up-and-down, the morning sunlight making them both squint. Piskies were nocturnal by nature, P.B. a night owl by choice and circumstance. “I think you need to take yourself home and give yourself a thorough brushing-out.” She reached over and snagged three tiny pine cones from a rough matting of hair. “You look like hell, P.B.”

“Always the charmer. Go sleep with your offspring, you miserable creature, you.”

Einnie dug her thin claws into the matting, holding him in place when he would have moved away, and combed it out with surprising gentleness.

“You’re a good friend. Thank you.”

oOo

"What are we?"

"We are nothing.” His own voice, flat and factual. “Always remember that."

oOo

Two days later, the memory of her words still puzzled him. He could count on his four-fingered paw the number of times someone had called him friend, much less a good friend. It wasn’t deserved–if there was one thing he had perfected over the years, it was a merciless self-evaluation–but he supposed that her standards weren’t all that high to begin with, being a piskie.

“Hey, short stuff, move it!”

He barely had time to sidestep before the cyclist was past him, blithely ignoring the bike lane set aside for him in order to put his Lycra-clad body in the way of innocent pedestrians and baby-carriage-pushing nannies. It was only April, but the winter had been a long one, and just the hint of warmth in the sunlight caused humans to flock to the greenspace, spreading blankets and baring occasionally unfortunate amounts of skin.

P.B. took one look at the sea of bodies and skirted around them, not wanting to deal with any more people today than he had to in order to finish off the job. He knew some humans on a social basis, but they were Talents, magic-users. They could see beyond white fur, black claws, eyes that were cat-slitted and the color of dried blood. He had no such faith in these human Nulls to do other than scream and point. Or point weapons. Idiot humans.

Not that the Talents were any better, overall. Humans were all annoying creatures.

“Morning, master fatae.”

P.B. barely had time to nod in response to the greeting before the teenager was past him, dodging around him and speeding down the track on bright yellow rollerblades, the magic-energy humans called current snapping around him with the energy only the very young have. In his wake, people smiled and raised their faces again to the sunlight, infected with his joyous celebration

All right, he admitted, letting the Talent’s energy reach him as well, he was being particularly cranky this morning. Babysitting the piskie pups while Einnie was out hunting had left him uneasy, somehow, in a way he’d not been able to shake. No reason for it–but being a demon meant that you learned to listen to your instincts. It was how you survived.

So why this unease? Don’t be a moron, old man. Think it through. When did the unease begin? Not just this morning–you just finally had enough food in your stomach to think about it today, is all. When did the need for babysitting begin?

The short, plush fur on his face wrinkled like a shar-pei’s as he thought. Six, no ten months ago. He had just finished a job for Valere, the one where her partner almost spit blood on the cop and that storefront window got shattered, but before he did the courier gig from Chicago to Miami for the Council.

Why? And why him? All right, that was easy enough to answer–the piskies wanted someone not a piskie, someone who would be enough of a sucker to put up with their impossible offspring. In a word, him. Not that he had any objection to doing a favor now and again–favors were as valuable as currency, in the Cosa Nostradamus—but that fact itself weighed against so many favors being given out. Imbalance bothered him. Owing bothered him. Being owed bothered him more.

And why did they need to go outside their own community? Would another piskie even be willing to watch the pups? Piskie males were flighty things, even with their own offspring. Piskie mommas needed to hunt for their own broods. Unmated piskies... P.B. realized that he didn’t know any unmated piskies. Had never thought of it before.

So why were the mommas so worried about their nests being unprotected at night while they hunted? What had happened ten months ago, to cause that worry? While someone with a grudge over a prank might go after an adult, pups were considered off-limits in just about every case. There weren’t enough fatae that they could afford to let their children become pawns in any kind of fatal arguments.

The only thing that would really be a danger to a pup would be a feral dog, or some other four-legged predator, and even a newling piskie pup could outwit an animal. No need to bring him into it.

P.B. shrugged the question–and his unease–off. Not his problem. Reaching into his overcoat pocket to make sure the cash was still there–his kind of job didn’t take personal checks or credit cards–he calculated how much time he had to finish this gig and still get to the bank. He had meant to make the deposit yesterday, but then things got busy, and he preferred to use the ATM when nobody else was around. It wasn’t the risk of being seen–he walked through Times Square on Wednesday matinee afternoons and nobody even blinked–but too many of the damn machines were above his head, so he had to climb up on the machine in order to use it. Humiliating.

In the meanwhile, there was a handoff to be made. And he’d earned a treat, for jobs well-done.

“Double scoop of pistachio, please,” he said to the clerk behind the ice cream cart.

The human blinked at him, but whether it was from the sight of a four-foot tall figure wearing a trench coat and slouch hat, or the fact of someone asking for ice cream this early in the morning, or if it was the white-furred paw that handed him the money, P.B. didn’t know.

He used to be self-conscious about going out among humans. That wore off long ago.

“Thanks.”

”No problem, man. Enjoy.”

He was, to paraphrase Lord of the Rings, no man. But the ice cream still tasted good. So did the fact that he had been able to move the envelope from his other hand into the side panel of the ice cream cart without the human noticing.

Moving away with a casual slow walk, a shadow caught the corner of his gaze and he made as though to adjust his hat, keeping his gaze carefully averted. He did not want to know who was making the pickup. That wasn’t his concern: he was just the courier.

Maybe his unease had nothing at all to do with the piskies themselves, and more to do with the stories they asked for. He had no shortage of stories: the Cosa Nostradamus had more than its share of characters, from the snoots-in-the-air angels to the sea creatures no land-dwelling piskie would ever encounter except second-hand. If nothing else, he could tell the wee bits about humans, the non-fatae strangers they saw only as shadowy figures passing beyond their nest. But for some reason the eldest had become fascinated by him, by his kind. He was the only demon in Manhattan right now; as far as he knew, perhaps the only one on the East Coast. They were few and far between, and not prone to socializing with each other. Too many memories, and none of them good.

Taking his ice cream, he followed his whim and wandered off the main path, weaving his way around the youngsters playing some sort of game with chalk and sticks.

Of all the things in the world he never understood, it was the concept of play. No matter how often someone tried to explain it to him, they might as well have been speaking in a foreign tongue. But others seemed to enjoy it; need it, even.

Fun, he understood that. He could and did have fun. But sheer physical release for no purpose other than to laugh...

Valere tried to explain it once. Lots of chemistry and biology and brain stem stimulation. He’d nodded, and listened, and kept his thoughts to himself.

He wasn’t human. He wasn’t truly fatae. He was demon.

And none of his earlier thoughts explained why he had woken up every morning this past month with nightmares echoing in his head.

oOo

“Good morning, demon.”

P.B. looked up and grinned without humor, showing an array of sharp-edged teeth. He had molars better suited for grinding and crunching, but they were set back, away from the tearing and rending tools. An intentional design, for fearsome first impressions. The small, gray-tailed creature sitting on the tree limb above him didn’t seem at all fazed by it.

“Good morning, you mindless little meatball.”

The creature merely grinned back at him, nonplussed by the insult. Even if P.B. had been in the mood to chase up a tree for such a small mouthful, it would outrun him faster than thought. Easier to order a pizza. Safer, too. You tried not to eat a fellow Cosa member. Terribly bad manners.

“You’ve not been to a Gather recently,” it accused him.

“Been busy.” Pizza cost money, unless you were willing to mug the delivery guy. P.B. was law-abiding, within reason. So if he wanted to eat, he had to work. He was, as he had just so deftly proved, a damn good courier–objects or information, carried safely from one place to another. A lot of demon did that, the ones who didn’t go in for bodyguard stints. He wasn’t much for violence, so that career path was out, but he was no slouch, either. He also had excellent vision and a better memory, so the person who robbed him did so at their peril.

His memory was his real asset, though, even more than claws or muscle. Couriering paid well, but not so well as his secondary career–gossip. He made a habit to learn who and how and where and why, for as wide a range of questions possible. It might not seem important at the time, but you never knew what someone might be interested in. So the past few weeks he’d been spending with his ear to the ground in and around some of the less reputable places where gossip hung out, hearing what there was to hear. But, from the way the creature was still grinning down at him, he might have missed a bigger story. Something someone might be willing to pay real greenbacks for.

“All right, pleasantries out of the way. Spill.”

“Spill what?”

Innocent eyelash fluttering worked better when you didn’t look like the misbegotten offspring of a squirrel and a squid. And had actual eyelashes to flutter.

“Okay, if you don’t have anything of interest, I’ll be on my way, then.”

The fatae leapt from one branch to another with annoying grace, keeping pace with the demon as he walked along the shaded path. It took all of seven paces–P.B. was counting–before it let out a heavy sigh.

“You’re no fun any more. Spending too much time with humans.”

“They’re where the money is. Spill.”

“You’ll share?”

“Have I ever not?”

“Anchovies, this time. I like anchovies.”

P.B. kept from shuddering, merely nodding gravely and making a complicated gesture with the claws of his left hand. “With anchovies, just for you.”

“There’s something hunting piskies.”

P.B. stumbled on a non-existent tree root, catching himself awkwardly before he fell. His form, which a human had once not-unkindly described as an ape crossed with a polar bear, was not made for graceful.

“Einnie didn’t say anything to me about it.” Like the thought had never occurred to him, like he’d not been judiciously contemplating exactly that possibility. Like he hadn’t thought about breaking protocol and asking Einnie, flat-out, if something–someone–was bothering her. He would never have done it... but he had thought about it.

The creature shrugged, tossing an acorn in the air and catching it in its impossible wide-opening mouth with a loud crunch. “Maybes they don’t know? Maybes they know and don’t tell demon.”

That was possible. Being known as a seller of information meant that you had to ferret it out; people didn’t just hand stuff over if they didn’t want it on the market. Although P.B. would think that having something hunting you would be something you’d want known, so others could keep an eye out…

“Why are you telling me, then?” If the piskies didn’t want to share, who was he to insist? Protocol was there for a reason. Nobody wanted another species up in their business, Cosa or no.

The creature pointed one tiny clawed finger at him. “Piskies are being foolish. Clannish. What hunts them, it may not stop there. You walk all worlds. You talk, listen, hear. Are listened to, on occasion. If this is more than piskie-hunting, you will know.”

“And do what?”

“Stop it.”

“Yeah, right. Look, I don’t –“

P.B. stopped mid-scoff. The branch above him was empty.

“Well. Damn.”

oOo

There was a way to gather gossip, and a way to do research. They might look the same, to casual observers, but one was much harder than the other. Gossip, everyone wanted to share. Information? Not so much. It took P.B. three days–three days he should have been scouting out real work, paying work–to discover that there wasn’t anything to discover.

He wasn’t even sure why he was bothering. Cosa was Cosa, sure. In theory, all fatae were united. Practical application had always been a lot shakier. And there wasn’t anything in this for him, far as he could see.

“You sure you don’t know anything?”

The angel gave him the most supercilious eyeballing imaginable, one delicate brow climbing all the way back into its slicked-back blonde hair. Wasn’t an angeli existing that didn’t think its sweat didn’t stink...and that all that stink had washed down into demonkind. “I know many things. None of which I would share with you.”

Right. Like that was a surprise.

A real detective, now, would slip a reluctant snitch a twenty, or do something to ensure future info would be sweet. He wasn’t a real detective. He wasn’t even a faux one. And he knew no matter how many twenties he folded into anyone’s palm, that was all they were going to give him: nothing.

It was time to go back to basics.

oOo

“A piskie? I should care about them, why?” Andolf made a rude noise, particularly spluttery through his sucker-like mouth, and P.B. thought about just stomping the shizida–a narrow, snake-like creature from the deserts of the Middle East–flat under his foot. It wouldn’t even take much effort, because the thing was as dry and fragile-looking as the ecosystem it came from.

And the thought was as good as the deed, his clawed foot lashing out and knocking the foot-long fatae onto its back, three black claws almost but not quite puncturing the unpleasantly oily skin of its stomach.

“Hey, ow!” The shizida was a new immigrant to the city; P.B. didn’t think much of its survival chances if it caved this quick under a little physical coercion. “Why me? Do I have sign, stomp on me like worm?”

“Only because you look like one.” P.B. could produce the elocution of an Oxford don when he chose to, but the inflection of a Brooklyn slugger always seemed to produce better results. “Come on, Andolf, ya wuss. I’d say show a little backbone, but you don’t got one, do you? If I step a little harder on you, you’ll just go squoosh, won’t you?”

“Bite me, demon.”

P.B. hated that, the way other fatae made his breed into some kind of title, and not one of respect, either. He’d been hearing too much of it lately. Time to make it pay for him. Widening his eyes and opening his mouth slightly, the demon allowed the streetlamp overhead to catch the glint of his sharpened teeth and blood-red eyes. “You wouldn’t even make me an after dinner mint.”

“Ow! Look, demon. If I knew anything I’d tell you. Just get offa my neck!”

Stretched out on its back, Andolf's seven tiny arms waved madly, the seventh, in the middle of its thorax, pausing long enough to make a rude gesture, while the seven legs kicked helplessly. The main defense of the shizida was a noxious fume that was reputed to strip the gloss off chrome. P.B.’s leathery black nose wrinkled in anticipation, but the assault didn’t come.

Interesting. It didn’t want to piss him off. Which meant ...something. Or nothing. Damn it, he couriered information, he didn’t interpret it. All he knew was that the fatae was lying to him. About something.

But one thing the demon did know was that when everyone was singing the same song–don’t know a thing, can’t tell you a thing–the lie usually hid a truth, somewhere. P.B. didn’t believe in conspiracies. Too few people, fatae or otherwise, were capable of holding a secret that long.

“Talk to me,” he suggested, trying for a more reasonable tone, letting his lips cover his teeth again. “Or I might–oops, y’know, do that squoosh. Just ‘cause I don’t know my own weight.” He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to put any more weight on the thing’s belly. Pretty sure. Not positive. And if he didn’t know, himself...

“Come on, you little fishhook bait. Talk to me.”

“Don’t. Know. Nuthin’.” But Andolf’s voice shook in fear far in excess of maybe getting his innards rearranged, and something an occasional employer had said to P.B. once resurfaced in his memory: it’s not when they’re telling you something dire that you should be nervous. It’s when they won’t tell you anything.

o0o

The Park at night was a scary place, even for a demon. Cop cars made random patrols, their headlights cutting through underbrush, sweeping the tree line, but never penetrating very far. Not even drug dealers came this far into the park, not this late at night. They weren’t scared; merely cautious. Things happened to people who wandered alone in this part of Central Park. Things that never made the evening news.

“Hoogaboo—”

P.B. pivoted and snarled at the goblin, who turned an interesting shade of puce and fled back into the underbrush.

“Yep, I still got it,” he said in satisfaction, mock-polishing his claws against his fur and walking deeper into the brush. His white fur glimmered even in the moonless dark, faintly luminescent at the tips of each strand. The overcoat had been left at home tonight, as had the hat.

Overhead, he could hear the faint chitter of the occasional squad of bats, or a solitary piskie, hunting in their wake. Underfoot, the soft whisper of grass, or the crunchier snap of twigs. And that was it. Contrary to popular belief, most of the fatae were daytime-dwellers, going about their 9-5, shoving for a seat on the subway, and standing in line at the coffee place, bitching about whoever was mayor at that particular moment. Every law-abiding fatae, and most of the ones that weren’t, were in whatever passed for their bed right now.

Or, if they were sanitation workers, getting up and going on their rounds. He’d been told once that their union was almost 60% fatae, but nobody had ever paid him to verify it.

Why he wasn’t in bed as well was something he’d given up trying to understand.

“Screw this for a rotten lark,” he said, finally, after an hour of patrolling the underbrush had netted him nothing beyond a lot of twigs in his fur. P.B. could see quite well in the darkness, but he had been up and working for almost 24 hours now, and supernatural creature or no, his feet were beginning to get tired. So were his knees, his shoulders, his back, his...

“Right. Fine.” He spotted a rock set into a small hillock that could double as a seat for a large child–or a demon of average height. And it glimmered like dirty marble, so he would blend into it, to the casual observer.

As good a place as any to watch the area from, he figured. And try to figure out why he was doing this in the first damned place.

oOo

“Why?” They all asked that. Once. Maybe twice. Never a third time.

“Because he is curious. Because he can.” The only answer there was to give.

“You call him master.” Accusing. Hurt. Disbelieving.

“He made us. We owe him our breath.”

“We owe him nothing!”

oOo

“Hrmmm?” P.B. opened his eyes even as he was questioning what had woken him, coming to awareness the way his kind always woke; quickly, silently, and assuming the worst.

It was almost dawn, the faintest grey-pink touching the sky overhead. Something moved, off to his left. And behind, no, over him, on top of the rock he had fallen asleep on. His muscles tensed, but other than a faint flexing of his paw-claws, he didn’t move.

“Cheeeechachachcha...”

A piskie, finishing up her night’s hunting. And pleased about it. That was in the coming-closer distance. Overhead...

“You take the left quarter, Dobson’s on rear. Set?”

“Yeah. No worries, this winged bitch won’t get past us.”

P.B.’s nose twitched, taking in the flavor of the air wafting downwind from them. Humans. Not Cosa–they didn’t have that extra tang, like buttermilk, that marked a magic-user from a Null.

“Stinking animals. Disgusting things.”

“We’ll take care of them. First this one, then its nest. A good night’s work.”

Nulls, talking like they knew about piskies. Were planning to harm piskies. Was this what had been hunting them? Humans? Nulls?

Unlike most of the fatae, P.B. had never discounted Nulls simply because they had no magic. Lack of Talent did not make a human harmless.

Hate-mongers. Vigilantes. Oh, he knew about those: from his earliest days, he knew about those who hate. But piskies? Annoying but hardly offensive, unless you’ve annoyed them, and even then you mostly have to look out for the rude practical joke. They can’t afford to be aggressive; their claws are too soft, their wings too weak, their bodies–

Too easy to damage.

Easy targets. Not human, no magic, no real defenses other than their wits. Exactly the kind of target cowards like the humans over him would look for. Something to make them feel like tough hunters, mighty monster-killers, Big Bigots on Campus.

And P.B. had a sudden flash of understanding.

It wasn’t that none of the fatae he questioned didn’t know. It was that nobody wanted to know.

The Cosa Nostradamus thought that by looking away, it wouldn’t happen to them. As though these hatemongers–fataephobics–weren’t just getting warmed up.

The fatae in this city were shit out of luck. And any human Talent who stopped to help them, likewise.

P.B. has been there before. Holland, the land of his birthing. Transvaal. Armenia. Germany. He was older than he looked, and his memories carried the weight of all those years, the past decades in America doing little to lighten them. All he had done was shove them down, under the skin and into the bone.

His bones ached, now.

Master, why your kind must destroy as well as create...

What he should do is go back to his apartment, throw whatever he couldn’t live without into a bag, and head for the city limits. And then keep going. Somewhere there weren’t many fatae. Weren’t any fatae.

He owed them nothing. They cared nothing for him, had never done anything for him.

He owned no-one anything.

Blood. So much blood. Who would have thought the old man – stop Don’t think. Don’t hear echoes of anything any more. This is not a place of civilization. This is Hell

Hide. Down. Cover. Branches over his head. Mud on his fur.

“Hier! Ze hier zijn!”

Feet, pounding. The weight of humans, carrying guns, the blades once sharp and glinting fixed at the ends.

“Master! Master we must go!”

“We go nowhere. This is my home. My work. Stand at the door, and let no one pass.”

“Master! I will not die for you!”

Silence.

Blood. Blood everywhere. His fur, his eyes.

Blood on his claws

And the soldiers go past him, hunting other prey.

oOo

This thing, this hatred. It always starts with the weakest.

The demon’s eyes glittered red in the pre-dawn light. This was nothing to do with him, nothing he could do anything about. He was a courier, a go-between. A neutral party.

But, unlike some, his claws were hardened, and his teeth were sharp.

And he was, he decided, so very tired of sitting out the fight.

This story first appeared MURDER BY MAGIC, edited by Rosemary Edgehill (Aspect Books, 10/04). It features Wren Valere and her partner, Sergei Didier, as they are caught up in the fallout of a series of terrible deaths among the Talent of New York City — and discover an even more terrible secret….

Overrush

Wren Valere looked at the body sprawled in the alleyway in front of her and wanted to throw up.

Okay, she thought, dead body. Not your problem. All you have to do is go on past him, hand the painting over to the client, and the damn job's done. It was twenty feet, tops. All she had to do was keep walking down the alley, slide past the dark green dumpster, and go home. Nothing to it. Piece of cake.

Once she stepped over the body face-down and blocking the alley.

"Bodies were not in the contract," she muttered, wiping the sweat off her forehead with the back of one latex-gloved hand. She thought about taking a deep breath, then looked around her surroundings and thought better of it. "Right. I can do this."

Not that there was any other option. The Wren never left a job unfinished. That was the reputation her partner sold to nervous, twitchy clients. He talked the talk, and now she had to walk the walk…

Stepping over the body was every bit as bad as she expected it to be–the paranoid fantasy of the corpse reaching up, grabbing her foot, pulling her down—but once she managed that, it was even worse. Every move she made was shadowed, like his ghost had decided to latch onto her like some phantasmic kitten.

Wren didn't believe in ghosts. Mostly. Placing her feet firmly against the cracked sidewalk at the end of the alley, she exhaled once, slowly, letting all the remaining tension flow from her neck, through her shoulder muscles, down her arms and legs until she could practically feel it oozing out of her feet and fingers like toxic sludge. And with it, the buzz of unused current-magic still running her in her system, drawn back into the greater pull of the earth below her.

When she opened her eyes again, the word seemed a little more drab somehow, her body heavier, less responsive. Current was worse than a drug; it was like being addicted to your own blood, impossible to avoid. All the myths and legends about magic, and that was the only thing they ever really got right: you paid the price with bits of yourself.

She reached almost instinctively, touching the small pool of current generated by her own body. It sparked at her touch, like a cat woken suddenly, then settled back down. But she felt better, until she looked up and saw the body still there. And the ghostly presence weighted on the back of her neck again.

What? She asked it silently. What?

Wren bit the inside of her lip. Scratched the side of her chin. Then she sighed.

It didn’t matter if you believed in ghosts or not, if they believed in you.

oOo

"You did what?"

"Shut up, Sergei," Wren snarled, slamming the door behind her. He was glad they had gotten a mage-tech in last year to reinforce the office with current: she was practically emitting sparks of frustration. "I couldn't just leave him there."

"Why the hell not?"

Sergei knew that he had a great voice for yelling. The same person who had told him that, a woman, had also told him that when he got really pissed, his lips flattened into a whiplash line, and his square-tipped fingers went so still you just knew he wanted to wrap them around someone's neck. Wren’s, tonight.

"I said, shut up."

Sergei opened his mouth, shut it, stared at her. It shouldn't have been a contest–he had ten years, a hand-tailored suit, and the weight of being the senior partner behind him. She glared right back. He blinked first.

"All right. Suppose you tell me why you felt the need to risk a well-executed job in order to remove this…gentleman from his last stand and bring him back to my office?"

Sergei leaned back into the leather chair, steepling his fingers and watching over them as she paced. His office was a luxury in dark brown leather and burnished chrome. The clients who came in here to write obscenely large checks for obscenely overpriced works of art were reassured that this was a man who knew Good Taste and Quality. Wren normally perched on the edge of his desk instead of sitting on the leather sofa. But tonight, she was clearly too wired to sit. "I don't know. I just had this feeling that it wouldn't be good to leave him there alone."

"He's dead, Genevieve. Being alone probably wasn't going to bother him." He waited, then, when she didn’t say anything more, he finally did sigh, running one hand through his expensively styled hair, leaving it tousled, hanging down over his eyes. "I'm going to assume you didn't incriminate the scene in any way? Leave an untidy fingerprint as you were hauling him off?" The glare she shot him answered that. "No, I didn't think so. All right. What do you want to do?"

"I think...I need to know how he died."

Which would mean actually examining the body. Her partner grimaced. “Better you than me.”

“Mulder hung around when Scully did autopsies.”

“Mulder didn’t have anything better to do. I do.”

As though on cue, the phone lit up, and he made a shooing motion in her direction as he picked up the receiver, automatically making the sea change from retrieval agent of dubious legality to legitimate art dealer. Wren stuck her tongue out at him, and left.

oOo

They had stored the body in one of the rooms in the basement, where Sergei kept the materials needed to stage the gallery’s ever-changing exhibits: pedestals, backdrops, folding chairs. She opened the door, and turned on the light, half expecting the corpse to be sitting up and looking around.

But the body lay where she had left it, on its back, on the cold cement floor. “Hi,” she said, still standing in the doorway. That sense of a presence was gone, as though in bringing it here she had managed to appease its ghost. But it seemed rude, somehow, to poke and pry without at least some small talk beforehand.

“I don’t suppose you can tell me what happened to you?” She closed the door behind her, and locked it. Sergei’s gallery assistants were gone for the night, but better overcautious than having to explain a dead body.

Wren swallowed, and put the book she was carrying down on the nearest clear surface. No point trying to recall anything from her high school biology courses–that, as her mentor used to say, was what we had books for. “Rigor mortis,” she said, and flicked two of her fingers its direction. The book opened, pages riffling until the section she needed lay open. Taking a small tape recorder out of her pocket, she pressed “record” and put it next to the book.

“The body is that of an older male, maybe…a really rough fifties. He’s wearing jeans, sneakers, and a long-sleeved button down shirt. Homeless, probably–his skin looks like he hasn’t washed in a while.” She walked around the body, trying to look at it objectively. “Hair, graying brown. Long–seriously long. This guy hadn’t been to the barber in a long time.”

She stopped, stared at the corpse, trying to decide what it was that struck her as being wrong. “There are no signs of visible trauma. In fact, there’s no sign of anything. Unless he died from an overdose of dirt.” It might have been a heart attack, or something internal, she reminded herself. The only way to tell would be to cut him open… “Ew,” she said out loud. “Riger mortis. Tell me about it.”

There was a faint hum, like that of a generator somewhere starting up, and a voice recited: “The stiffening and then relaxing of muscles after death, as caused by the change in the body’s chemical composition from alkaline to acid. Process typically begins in the face, and spreads down the body, beginning approximately two hours after death and lasting twelve to forty-eight hours. A body in full rigor will break rather than relax its contraction.”

Wren flicked her fingers again, and the voice stopped. “The body was stiff, but not rigid when I picked it up,” she said thoughtfully. “And it stretched out okay when we got it in here–nothing broke off or went snap.” She grimaced, then bent down to touch the skin, at first gently, then jabbing harder. “The skin is plastic, not hard. So I guess it’s safe to say rigor’s pretty much wearing off. So he’s been dead at least half a day, maybe more. Not too much more, though–he doesn’t smell anywhere near that bad.” At least, not for a body that had been lying in a filthy alley.

Sitting back on her heels, she looked at the book. “Next paragraph,” she told it. The voice continued: “Also to be considered is liver mortis, or post-mortem lividity. When a person dies, the red blood cells will settle at the lowest portion of the body. This can be identified by significant marking of the skin. Markings higher on the body would indicate the victim was moved after death.”

Wren made a face, then she sighed, gave herself a quick, silent pep talk, and reached down to take off his shirt.

“There better not be anything disgusting hiding in there,” she warned him. “Or I’m so going to throw up on you…"

Her fingers touched the skin at the base of his neck, and the jolt that went through her knocked her backwards on her rear and halfway across the room.

"The hell?"

oOo

"What am I looking for?"

Wren shook her head. "If I tell you, you–just touch him."

Sergei shot her a look, but knelt to do as she asked. He was still wearing a tie, but his shirt sleeves were rolled to his elbows. Long, manicured fingers touched the corpse's hair, then the side of his cold cheek, flinching slightly away from the feel of dead flesh. You never got used to it, he thought.

"Go on. His torso."

Sergei placed the palm of his hand flat over the corpse's chest, where Wren had left the shirt half undone. He waited. Then frowned. "What the hell…?"

"You feel it?"

Sergei nodded, astonished. He was reasonably sensitive to the natural flow of magic—that was how they’d first met–but this was different somehow. "I feel …something. What is it?"

"Overrush."

Sergei pulled his hand away, wiping it on his slacks as though that would rid of the taint of death. "Which is…?"

"Current. Only, more than that. There’s current residue in him that’s impossibly high. This guy's…God, I don't know how to explain it. I don't even know what it is! But it feels right. That's what you're feeling. It's the only thing that could explain –"

"Genevieve!"

He hated shouting at her, but it seemed to do the trick; she grabbed onto it, pulling herself together. "Right. It looks like he got caught up in current, major mondo current, pulled it in–and got ungrounded. Which is impossible. I mean, any lonejack worth their skin knows how to ground. You don't make it past puberty if you can’t."

"So this fellow should have been able to ground, and dispel any current he couldn't use."

"Unless," Wren said, even slower than before, "unless somehow, he was stopped."

Sergei stared at the body. "How? By whom?"

Wren shrugged, hugging herself. "Damned if I know. I didn't think it was possible. Grounding’s as much mental as physical–like breathing. Which he’s not doing either, any more."

Sergei sat down heavily on a dark green velvet-covered stool and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "You couldn't have just left him in the alley?"

She didn’t even bother glaring at him, looking at her watch instead. “Almost seven,” she told him. “You’d better get upstairs and meet our new client. I’ll see about finding the old boy a more final resting place.”

Sergei caught her arm, nor harsh, but firm. New client be damned. "Be careful," he told her. "I don't like this."

She put her hand over his. "That makes two of us, partner."

oOo

Sergei never asked what she’d done with the body. She never offered to tell him. He told her, instead, about the new client. “It’s something a little different,” he said. Different was good. Different required planning, plotting. That was what they did best, the different ones. The difficult ones. That was why they were the best Retrievers in the business, on either side of the law.

And different distracted her from the memory of a man torn apart from the inside by too much of the stuff she depending on to exist.

Lonejackers were all current junkies. The mages’ council might try to rein their people in, keep them under strict control, but the jones was the same. It got in your blood, your bones. If you could jack, you did. End of story. And if you jacked too much…

Her mentor had gone crazy from current. She had always thought that was the worst thing that could happen. Maybe it wasn’t.

Sergei's hand touched her waist, his breath warm in her ear. “Stop thinking. That’s my job.”

Wren nodded once, making her mind go blank. It wasn’t the usual run for Sergei to be with her on a job, but you had to mix it up every now and again. If they start expecting one, give them two. If they expect two, don’t hit them at all that night, that week, that place. And when they expect stealth, walk in the front door.

“Mr. Didier, a pleasure, a pleasure indeed…” Wren tuned out the host’s nervous bubbling. If ‘jackers were bad about hanging around each other, gallery owners were worse. At least a ‘jacker would let you see the knife before it went into your back.

She detached herself from Sergei’s side and began to wander around the gallery. It was larger than Sergei’s, and more eclectic. There were a series of oddly-twisted wire shapes that she thought she might like. Then she saw them from a different angle, and shuddered. Maybe not. Snagging a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter, she took a ladylike swig, licked her lips, slanted her gaze around the space as though looking for someone to share her shallowest thoughts with.

A heartbeat, and she had effectively disappeared from the awareness of everyone else in the room. There wasn’t any real magic to it–herd mentality clothing, a perfectly ordinary body and face, and a strong desire to not be noticed, sewn together by the faintest of mental suggestions wafted along the man-made current that hummed in the lights strung along the room, illuminated the exhibits.

Walking slowly, seemingly at random, she made a half-circuit of the main floor, then moved up the short, straight staircase against the back of the wall. Nobody saw her lift the velvet rope barricading the steps, nobody saw her move up into the private areas of the gallery. If she hadn't been so intensely focused, she might have felt pride in her skill.

She barely paused at the primary security system at the top of the stairs. Her no-see-me cantrip was passive, neither defensive nor aggressive, and she passed through the barrier of current without a hitch.

Reaching into her fashionably useless purse, Wren pulled out a silver compact, from which she took a folded index card. The sketchy lines were a poor substitute for the schematics Sergei had downloaded to his PDA, but that was off-limits on gigs like this one. Anything protected by current the way this gallery was could be set off by electricity as well–even cell-powered. You stayed out of trouble by assuming the worst.

Once satisfied she knew where she was going, she cast one look back down the stairs, picking Sergei out of the crowd with ease. He was leaning in to hear what an older woman was saying, his shoulders relaxed, his right hand holding a glass, his left gesturing as he replied, making the older woman laugh. Charming the marks. If you didn't know what to look for, you'd never recognize the break in the line of his coat as a holster. The one time Wren had picked the compact, heavy handgun up, she'd spent the next hour dry-heaving over the toilet. Psychometry wasn't one of her stronger skills, but she could feel the lives that gun had taken.

But hating something didn't mean it wasn't a good idea to bring it along.

Moving down the hallway, Wren counted doorways silently, stopping when she came to the seventh. A touch of the doorknob confirmed that there were elementals locking it. Trying to use magic to force them out would bring smarter guards down to investigate, exactly what she didn't want to risk.

Going back to the stairs, she leaned against the wall, just below the protective barrier, and took a deep breath. As she exhaled, slowly, she touched the current, sending a wave of disturbance racing down the stairs.

The twinkling lights in the gallery window went out with a satisfying pop, followed in quick succession by the lights over the exhibits. As the crowd milled about in confusion, Wren raced back down the hallway and slipped inside the seventh room, trusting the chaos downstairs would hide her own intrusion.

Inside, the room was dimly lit, three paintings stacked against the wall like so much trash. Each one cost more than her mother's house. Sergei would have had conniptions, if he'd seen them treated like that. But Wren wasn't interested in their artistic value. A razor taped to the sole of her shoe let her slice the bottom painting out of its frame and remove the piece of pink-hued bone that had been pressed between two layers of canvas. The relic went into a small, rubber-lined case that fit in her pocket, and the painting was placed back into the frame. A finger run along the serrated edges, and a tiny draw-down of power, and the two layers sealed themselves together again. Done, and prettily, too, if she did say so herself.

"Sssst!"

She managed not to freak by the skin of her teeth, turning to glare at Sergei standing behind her.

"They're frisking everyone downstairs," he told her, heading off any questions. "We need another exit."

"Chyort," she swore, using one of his personal favorites. "Right. This way."

"This way" ended up being a long hallway without a single door off it until they came to a T intersection. Sergei looked decidedly unhappy, his gun now out and ready in his hand. Wren barely spared it a glance, too busy listening to the hum of current throughout the building. It was alert now, singing in activity, but very little of it was directed at them. The building was locking down, tucking itself up tight. "No, down here," she said suddenly, grabbing his free hand and tugging him to the left, concentrating on the patterns.

Four steps down, Sergei stopped so suddenly she was pulled backwards by his weight. She recovered, looked up into something big, ugly, and smelling of wet fur. The wide metal collar around its dog-like neck shimmered with controlling current-marks. It pulled back, its mouth opening to show huge, silvery-white teeth in double rows like a shark's. Behind it, Wren could hear the faint noises of the rest of its pack. They were screwed, now.

"Shoot it! Shoot it!" she yelled, but Sergei was already moving, pushing her behind himself.

Wren flattened herself against the wall as he sighted, steadied, and slowly squeezed the trigger. The sharp crack of the .38 echoed down the hallway past them like a miniaturized sonic boom. The creature checked it pace as the bullet hit it square in the chest. It shook its head, as though annoyed by horseflies, and snorted, a wet, sticky sound.

Sergei cursed. "Now what?"

Wren didn't bother replying, sliding forward against the plaster wall, feeling for the wiring hidden underneath, pulling whatever energy she could find into herself. It was going to hurt, but not as much as getting eaten. Then she sprang at the creature, grabbing at the collar. Sparks flew as current met current, and Wren yelped but didn't let go. The beast staggered, fell back, died. Wren unclenched her fingers, staggering a little in pain and dizziness.

"Let's go!" Sergei said, holstering his gun and grabbing her by the scruff of the neck.

Wren yelped again, but ran with him. Down the hall, through a heavy fire door, a pause on the landing to determine–up or down?–then up to another fire door and into a hallway that was the exact replica of the one they'd left behind.

"What did you do to that thing, anyway?" he asked, breathing hard.

"Short circuit," she said. He grimaced, as though he should have known better than to ask. They took a corner at a full out run, and stopped.

"Oh hell."

Wren stared at the blank wall. She could hear the hounds still on their trail, despite the fire doors, could smell the sweat on her skin, Sergei's. She could feel the thrum of blood racing in her veins. Panic bubbled just below the surface. But Sergei's voice, next to her, was calm.

"Get us out of here."

She knew what he was asking.

I can't!

We're dead either way. Or worse…

She reached, grabbing every available strand of current, draining every power source in the building, siphoning off Sergei until he staggered. Filled and overflowing, practically sparking and glowing from within, she grabbed her partner in a bear hug and threw—

There was no transition. Her chin to the ground, palms abraded by macadam, vomit pouring from her mouth as everything she'd ever eaten came back in double-time. Her body ached and quivered and she was drenched in cold, sticky sweat.

When the torrent finally released her, she fell to her side, panic filling her brain.

"Serg?"

"Da."

Utter relief filled her at the sound of his voice, faint and worn-out, somewhere behind her. "I told you I was no good at this," she offered, wiping her face with her filthy sleeve. There was a scrape of flesh against pavement, then a slow stream of curses in Russian.

"You 'k?"

She managed to find the energy to roll over, and watched as Sergei fussed with his cell phone. Throwing it down in disgust, he reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out his PDA. He glared at it, then her, then threw the equally useless device next to the cell phone.

"Oops?" she offered.

He closed his eyes, picked up the gun from where it had fallen when they translocated. It seemed to click and spin in all the right places, and some of the lines on his face eased as well. He replaced it in the holster, then leaned forward and took her hand, pulling her up with him as he stood.

They leaned against each other for a few moments, listening to the sound of their still-beating hearts. In the near distance, a car hit the breaks too hard, squealed away. Further away, the hum of engines, horns, sirens wailing–all the normal sounds of the city at night.

""You got it?"

She nodded, touching her pocket. "Got it."

"Then let's get the hell home." He paused. "You have any idea where we are?"

Wren tried to laugh, couldn't find the energy. "Not a clue"

"Great," Sergei muttered, moving forward at a slow shuffle. "And what are the odds any self-respecting cabbie will stop for us?"

They came to the end of the alley, and paused to get their bearings. "Wow. I managed to toss us further than I thought."

"In the wrong direction."

"Bitch, bitch, bitch." She paused, her head coming up like a dog catching a scent. "Sergei?"

A strangled scream answered her, and they whirled: bodies, exhausted or not, tensing for a fight. A figure staggered towards them, its skin crackling with fire like St. Vitus' dance, blue and green sparks popping and dancing along his skin. He jittered like a marionette, hinking first to the left, then right, forward and back, moaning and tearing at himself all the while.

"Oh god…" Wren went to her knees, her already depleted body unable to withstand the barrage of current coming off the man in front of her. "Oh god, Sergei…”

The burning figure lurched forward again, and Sergei reacted instinctively. A sudden loud crack cut across the buzzing of the current in Wren's ears. The figure jerked backwards, his eyes meeting Sergei's in an instant before he pitched forward and fell to the ground.

The lights disappeared, and Wren heard a faint whoosh, as though all the current were suddenly sucked back inside his skin

Sergei went to the body before she could warn him not to, flipping it onto its back. Long fingers tipped the man's head back, and then Sergei nodded once, grimly, and released him, getting back to his feet and putting the pistol away.

"What?" Wren looked at what her partner had been looking at; a pale blue tattoo under the dead man’s chin.

"A mage."

"That the same thing that killed the other stiff?"

Wren touched the rapidly-cooling skin just to make sure, but it was a meaningless gesture. "Yeah," she said with certainty.

"You think this is a Council thing? Was the other guy a mage, too? Maybe some kind of punishment?"

Wren shook her head, stepping away from the body as though afraid that it was contagious. "No. Never. If they had a problem with a mage, they'd kill him or her, but never like that. That's bad for morale."

"Right. We're out of here." He put one large palm between her shoulder blades and steered her towards the sounds of traffic, and cabs. Neither of them looked back.

oOo

Wren was still nursing her first cup of coffee when Sergei arrived at their usual meeting place the next morning, sliding into the booth across the table from her. The waitress brought over a carafe of hot water, tea bags, and a mug without being asked, and Sergei smiled his thanks at her. Wren watched him as he went through the ritual of testing the water, then stirring in the right amount of milk. She couldn't stand the stuff, herself, but she liked watching him make it.

Finally, he took a sip, then looked up at her.

"His name was Raymond Pietro," she told him. "Twelve years with the Council. Specialized in research, which is the Council's way of saying he was an interrogator. Truth-scrying, that sort of thing. Only the past tense isn't just because he's dead. Rumor has it he went over the edge last month."

Over the edge was a gentler way of saying he had wizzed. That the chaotic surges of current had warped his brain so much that he couldn't hold on to reality any longer. But that didn't explain his death. Wizzing made you crazy, dangerous, but your ability to handle current actually got better, the more you gave yourself over to it. That was why wizzarts were dangerous. That, and the raving psycho loony part.

"They dumped him?" It might have seemed like a logical explanation to Sergei, but Wren shook her head.

"I told you, Council takes care of its own. They have a house; really well-warded, totally low-tech, so he wouldn't be distracted by electricity. Not exactly the Savoy, but better conditions than lonejackers get. He disappeared from the house two days ago. Council was freaking–the guy I talked to actually thanked me for bringing news, even though it was bad.

"They also said Pietro wasn't the first of their wizzarts to go missing. They never found the others."

Her partner's face, not exactly readable at the best of times, shut down even more. She finished her coffee, putting the mug down firmly on the table in front of her. "People that good, good enough to be mages, don't just 'forget' how to ground. And one might have been an accident, or a particularly crude suicide, but not half a dozen. Someone's killing wizzarts, Serg. Whatever it was that killed them, someone did that to them–Pietro, our stiff, the others. Who knows how many others? It's easy–nobody cares about them. You can't, not really. They're as good as not there anymore. So they're easy victims."

She was really rather proud of how steady her voice was, until she made the mistake of meeting her partner's eyes. The quiet sympathy she saw there destroyed any idea she might have had of remaining calm.

Oh, Neezer…

John Ebeneezer. Two short years her mentor. Five years now, since he started to wiz. Since he walked out of her life rather than risk endangering her with his madness.

Are you out there, Neezer? Are you still alive?

"And if he–she, that–are?" His voice matched his face; stone. "From everything you've told me, what I've seen, wizzarts are wild cards, dangerous, to themselves and others. And quality of life isn't exactly an issue."

Wren bit back on her immediate reply. He wasn't trying to goad her; it was, to his mind, a valid question. And she had to give him the respect of an equally valid answer. "Because that could be me, some day. Wizzarts are powerful. Sergei. Undisciplined, but strong. If someone's found a way to get at them… Council might poke around, but they don't care about lonejackers. If they discover anything, they might not even do anything, so long as they can cut a deal to protect their own." She hated asking him for anything, but they had to take this job. She would do it alone–but their partnership had been founded on the knowledge that their skills complemented each other; she didn't want to handicap herself by working solo if she didn't have to.

A long moment passed, and her skin began to sweat. Finally, Sergei sighed. "It's not as though the Council will ever admit they owe us anything, least of all payment," he groused, signaling to the waitress for a refill of Wren's coffee. She would have grinned in relief, if her mind weren't already working on the next problem.

"First things first–is there any way to keep track of wizzarts in the area?"

"Already ahead of you," she said, her memory search turning up what they needed. "It's not pretty, but once I have them in sight, I can tag them; monitor their internal current pool. If anything–anyone–tries to mess with them, I'll know.

Sergei looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth. "How much risk is there to you, in this?"

"Negligible," she said, lying through her teeth.

oOo

Sergei tapped a finger on the space bar, studying the screen in front of him, skimming the descriptions of John Does brought into the local hospitals for unexplained expirations. Of the seven names listed, two of them had cause of death listed as lightning strikes. One more had internal damage consistent with lightning, but the cause of death was liver failure–apparently he had been a long-term alcoholic.

None of the men matched the description of John Ebenezer. His lips thinned as he entered another search, widening the area to include Connecticut and New Jersey. Genevieve had grown up across the river, and it seemed likely that, if Neezer were still in the area, he would have remained close to his home. Assuming he stuck around. Sergei wouldn't put any of his money on that.

Behind him, Wren made a sound of disgust, changing the channel with a flick of the remote. They had spent two days driving through the city, walking into homeless shelters and into run-down apartment buildings until she could "see" the wizzarts scattered there, siphoning the faintest trace off their auras until she could weave a leash from them to her. She had found seven, but had only managed to create three leashes before collapsing from exhaustion. Just the memory of her shaking, sweating body made him angry all over again.

"Drink more of the juice," he told her, not looking over his shoulder to make sure she obeyed him.

The screen displayed a new list of names. Nothing.

"Serg?"

He was at her side before he consciously realized he'd heard her voice. The juice lay splattered on the carpet, the glass rolling off to one side, thankfully unbroken. He determined that there was no physical danger, and cupped her face in his hands all in the space of heartbeats.

"I'm here, Zhenechka," he told her. The pulse at her neck was thready, and her eyes were glazed, pain lines forming around them. He waited, cursing whatever idiotic impulse had ever led him to agree to this, as she struggled to maintain the connection.

"Got him! "

They had lost the first one that morning, the leash snapping before Wren could do more than be aware of the attack. She had cried then, silent tears that left her eyes red-rimmed and her nose runny. She had never been able to cry gracefully. His fingers tightened on her chin. "Easy, Wren. Hold him. Hold him…"

It was dangerous, touching her. The overrush of current she was going to try and channel could easily jump to him, and he'd have no protection from it, no way to ground himself. But he couldn't abandon her to do it alone. They were partners, damn it.

Sweat was rising from her skin now, dampening her hair against her face and neck. But she felt cool, almost clammy, tiny jumps of electricity coursing off the dampness, sparking in the air. He spared a thought for his computer, and then forgot about it.

"Ah – yes, that's it, come on, lean on me….lean on me, dammit!" She was chanting instructions to the wizzart at the other end of her line, trying to reach through their connection into his current-crazed mind. Trust wasn't high on a wizzart's list, though, especially for voices they heard inside their own heads.

A bolt rumbled through her, almost knocking them to the side. Sergei planted himself more firmly, his grip keeping her upright. She'd have bruises on her face when they were done. He'd have them too, on the inside; lighting burns, internal scarring. Pain ached through his nerve endings. This was insane. For some literal burnouts they'd never have anything to do with…

For Ebenezer, he reminded himself. For Genevieve.

The air got heavy, and he could almost smell the singing of hair and flesh, of carpet fibers cracking underneath his knees, the fusing of the wiring in the walls, the phone, his computer. A lightbulb popped, but all he could focus on was her labored breathing, the voice crooning encouragement to someone miles away.

Her eyes, which had been squinted half-shut, opened wide, and she stared into his eyes endlessly. He felt as though he were falling, tumbling straight into an electric maw with nothing to stop his fall. He was her, was him, was the current flowing between them. He Saw through her eyes the wizzart let go, felt the current being pounded into him, flowing into her, and being grounded. He understood, finally, for that endless second the elegant simplicity of grounding, and reveled in the surge of power filling the matter of his existence.

The wizzart slumped, fell unconscious in a puddle of his own urine. Get him, Sergei urged into her open mind. Find whoever did this…

He felt her stretch back into the wizzart's self, backtracking the current that had been pumped into him, striking out like the lightning it rode in. A shudder of anger, hatred, disgust slamming into hard walls, confusion, and time stretched and snapped back, knocking him clear across the room and headfirst into the wall.

When he came to, the room was dark. He didn't bother to turn on the lights–they'd blown, each and every one of them. Crawling forward, he reached out, finding the top of Wren's head. She was curled into a ball, silently shaking.

”Zhenechka?"

"I screwed up," she said. "I couldn't get them. It was too far away, I couldn't reach the bastards…"

He sat there, in the dark, and rocked his partner back and forth while she cried.

oOo

"It was a good control group," Sergei said around a mouthful of toast. "Small enough population to monitor, and nobody to care if a few bodies went missing. Who knows how long they'd been perfecting this?" He shook his head, less astonished at the ways of mankind than impressed at the planning it had taken. Planning, and resources, and a certain bloody-mindedness.

"You're a bastard, Sergei." He had dragged her out to have breakfast, but she wasn't eating. Scrambled eggs congealed on the plate in front of her. Sunglasses perched on the edge of her nose even though the diner itself was shaded and cool.

He put his fork down. "What do you want me to say? It's over, Wren. We got too close...we scared them, at least. They knew someone was trying to reach them, whoever they are. That will make them pull back, be cautious."

"So they'll just move shop to another town? Sergei, I can't..." She stopped. "I couldn't do anything last night. I didn't have enough juice, wasn't good enough. We can't stop them. We don't even know who "they" are."

He ran a hand through his hair, wincing a little as he touched the bandage on his forehead. Practical acceptance was an essential in their business. But it wasn't all downside. "We know the how, what they're doing, the kind of people they're looking for. A few well-placed words, a few well-placed comments in the right newsgroup, and people will be looking, and paying attention. They'll be able to protect each other."

"It's not enough." He could see the tears building again, and watched her force them away. Damn you, John Ebeneezer…

"It's all we can do." He didn’t have anything more to offer her. Sometimes, all you could do was make sure your own neighborhood was clean. Sometimes, that just had to be enough.

Wren didn’t look convinced. But she picked up her fork, shoveled a mouthful, and chewed, swallowed.

That was enough.

This story first appeared in Powers of Detection, edited by Dana Stabenow (Ace Books, 10/04). A true caper story, it features Wren Valere and her business partner Sergei Didier, as they race to complete two different jobs that get tangled in a complicated sort of double-cross that only magic can undo…

Palimpsest

"That had better be coffee."

"Hazelnut. Double."

"You'll live." Wren's arm reached out from under the blanket and snagged the cup out of her partner's hand. Without spilling a drop, she raised herself on her elbows and took a sip.

"God. I may be human after all." She peered out from under a tangle of dark brown hair at the man standing in the dim light of her bedroom. He looked broad-shouldered and solid and reassuringly familiar. "What time is it?"

"Nine. A.M.," he clarified. "Rough night?" Sergei sat down on the edge of her bed, forcing her to scoot over slightly to make room.

"No more so than usual. The Council came down hard on the piskies who were dragging people under the lake, so there've been some minor temper tantrums in protest, but other than that everything's quiet. Well, quiet for them, anyway."

There had been the equivalent of a gang war in Central Park earlier that Spring between water and earth sprites. Fed up, the city's independent Talents—lonejacks—and the Mage Council had declared truce long enough to make sure things didn't get out of hand again. Wren, like all lonejacks, distrusted the Council on principle, and the Council and their affiliates thought lonejacks all were troublemaking fools, so it was an uneasy truce to say the least.

Wren took another sip of the coffee, and decided that there was enough caffeine in her bloodstream to move without breaking apart. She got out of bed, cup still in hand, and staggered to the dresser to pull out a clean t-shirt.

"You know if the Cosa ever got itself organized…"

"Perish the thought." She ran one hand through her hair and peered at herself in the mirror. "Oh, I look like hell. Thank god I don't have another stint of babysitting for a couple of days. I could sleep for a week…"

Suddenly his presence there clicked, and she turned to glare at him, the effect in no way diminished by the fact that she was naked save for a pair of pink panties.

"Sorry, Zhenechka. We've got a job."

Wren closed her eyes tightly, seeking balance, then kicked back the rest of the coffee with a grimace, and handed the cup to him. "Shower first. Then details."

She stopped halfway to the door. "Is it at least going to be fun?"

"Would I sign you up for anything boring?"

"The last time you said something like that, we spent two nights in a Saskatchewan jail. And if you say 'wasn't boring' so help me I'll fry your innards."

The sound of the shower started up, and Sergei allowed himself a faint smile. "Wasn't boring."

oOo

Under the pounding of steaming hot water, Wren swore she could feel the particles of her body coming back into focus. She ducked her head under the stream of water, then reached for the shampoo, massaging it into her scalp with a sigh of pleasure as the deep herbal scent wafted through the air. She could rough it with the best of them but after a night wrassling with earth spirits peevy at everything that moved, a little luxury was nice. And if the coffee's any indication, this may be the last luxury I get for a while. He only buys the Dog's coffee when he wants to soften me up.

Rinsed, dried, and dressed, she walked out of the bathroom drawing a comb through her hair, wincing at the tangles. Her partner leaned against the counter in her tiny kitchen, drinking a mug of tea and reading the newspaper. "All right, you know you're dying to tell me. So spill."

"Seven grand down." He gestured to the counter where the coffee machine was working already, just starting to send out scented steam. "Another ten when you retrieve their package."

"We're working cut-rate this week, I see." They had three price scales. High-end was the stuff that was snore-worthy: divorce settlements, insurance reclamations. Situations that required thinking and ingenuity were slightly cheaper. Sergei knew, by now, what would pique her interest, and was willing to dicker a little less sharp for them. And third…

Don't think about the third. If you think it, they'll call.

Third was working on retainer for the organization known as the Silence. Wren had been with them for a little under a year now, Sergei for far longer than that. Human, non-magical, and utterly without mercy or compassion, the Silence were nonetheless one of the Good Guys. She thought. She hoped.

"So, what's the deal?"

"Stow-and-show. Special interest group, wants 9/10ths of a particular display." Translation: Several someones, acting in concert, wanted her to steal something—possession being 9/10th of the law—from a museum, the 'stow-and-show.'

"You have got to stop watching those godawful heist movies. Life's not a caper, Sergi." The coffee machine finished perking, and she grabbed a mug from the sink and filled it. She breathed the fumes in then drank it black. "Paperwork?"

He jerked his chin at her kitchen table, and she noticed the sheaf of papers awaiting her perusal.

"They're organized, I'll give them that."

"Organized, and chatty. Guy wanted to tell me every detail of his life, this job, and the weather in Timbuktu."

Coffee in hand, Wren sat down at the table and drew the blueprints toward her. "And how is the weather there, anyway? Oh Christ on a crutch, the Meadows." She had hit them twice in four years—by now she and the alarm system were old friends. "And still people loan them exhibits. I just don't get the world, I really don't. What's the grab?"

"Painting. Smallish, should be easy enough to stow in the tube. In and out, seventeen minutes, tops."

"I can do it in eleven, if it's in the main gallery." It wasn't ego if you really were that good. And she was. Possibly—probably—the best Retriever of her generation.

He waited a beat, then dropped the other shoe. "And we got a Call."

She heard the capital letter in his voice, and her head lowered to rest on her crossed arms on the table. "Of course we did. Because my life just wasn't full to the brim with joy already."

"Beats unemployment."

"Easy for you to say, Mister Stay At Home and Cash the Check."

Which wasn't fair, she knew. Sergei had warned her about working for the Silence. They wanted first call on her time, always and ever. But it had seemed a worthwhile tradeoff at the time.

And their checks always, but always cleared.

oOo

"You going to need to charge up?"

"Now you ask?" They were sitting in the car—a yellow sedan, mocked up like a cab, the quintessentially invisible car in Manhattan—outside the Meadows. Although she knew the answer, Wren reached deep into her core, touching the roil of current that always rested within her, the sign of a Talent. A gentle stroke, and it uncoiled inside, sparkling like glitter in her veins. "No, I'm fine. Soaked up a bit when the last batch of storms rolled through, in case things got ugly in the Park."

She had loved storms since she was old enough to lurch against the windowsill. "You're a current-user, kid. You're always going to crave the storm." Her mentor's voice, years and lifetimes gone. You could recharge current off man-made sources, and there were lonejacks who preferred that. Safer, more readily accessible, and no hangover if you pulled down too much. But Wren went to the wild source every chance she got.

She didn't have much chance to rebel, these days.

"If you draw down too much, remember that there's a secondary generator over here." His index finger stabbed the blueprint on the seat between them.

"Yeah, saw that." They'd been over the plans half a dozen times already. But it made Sergei feel better if they rehashed everything just before she went in. Normally he wouldn't be anywhere near the scene on a simple grab like this, but the transit workers had gone on strike, and she couldn't risk hailing a real cab to get home. So he would drop her off, go drive around for a while, and come back for her.

"Try not to pick up any long distance fares while I'm gone."

"Not even if they offer to tip like a madman," he promised.

She laughed, touched his check for luck, and slipped out into the darkness.

In some ways, the strike was a nice bit of luck. In her dark grey tracksuit and black sneakers, if stopped by anyone she could claim to be heading home from a late night at the office. A knapsack slung over her shoulder held a lightweight dress and strappy heels to back up the story, plus a thin, strong nylon rope coiled in an inside pocket, her lockpick set, and a wallet with realistic looking identification and enough cash to get home for real should something go wrong.

Pausing just beyond the reach of the closed circuit cameras, Wren took a deep breath, let it out. Ground. That was the key. Focus. Center. Ground.

As though she had grown from the earth, Wren felt the weight of its comfort rise up through her, from bedrock into flesh and bone. Soothing the serpent of energy and coaxing it up her spine, into her arms, down her legs. It was like an orgasm, a muted one; pleasure sparking every nerve ending until she was completely aware of everything around her, but not so much that she was overwhelmed by it. Balance. Balance…There was a thin line you had to ride, when you directed current. It wasn't enough to be able to sense it, or to be able to direct it. You had to convince it to do what you wanted, when you wanted.

Taking the faintest hint of current, she lifted her hand, drawing the camera's attention. It was like finger-painting, or weaving without a loom. Flickers left her fingertips as she concentrated on the circuits and wires of the camera system. Too much, and you burned it out, setting off alarms. Too little, and a sharp-eyed watchman might spot her. Just a hint of static, something that could be brushed off, so long as it didn't go on for too long. Just long enough for her to move, crouched low and flowing across the grounds like the low-flying bird she was named for, until she reached the relative safety of the decorative overhang. God bless old buildings. The Meadows had started life as a mansion, and still boasted any number of odd architectural details that created enough shadows for Wren to wrap herself in.

Letting her heart rate slow down to normal, Wren pictured the assignment in her mind. It was a small thing, barely 12x12, set in a severe silver frame. Part of a traveling exhibit of paintings that were as of yet unattributed but considered by a number of experts to be 'rediscovered' works by various Impressionist masters. The art world was wild over the find; Sergei had been to see the exhibit twice even before they got this gig. If she knew her partner, he'd want to hold onto the painting for a few days until they handed it back, just to have one of the so-called "Fabulous Finds" in his possession.

Actually, if she'd been prone to liking artwork, she thought she might want to own something like this, too. The colors were almost alive, creating a wash of light on the landscape that reminded her of the photograph Sergei had in his own office, by the black and white nature photographer, the guy who took all those pictures of national parks.

Art critique later, she told herself. Clock's tick tick ticking...

The thing about museums was, they weren't stupid. They knew that technology was fallible, and humans were fallible. But most of them also had serious budget restrictions. The Meadows had a top-of-the-line electrical alarm system. It would probably have stopped any casual intruder, or at least alerted the police to the incursion. But the Board of the Meadows had one serious disadvantage. They had never heard of current, the magical kind, or the Cosa.

Magic wasn't the fairy dust and wild imaginations science liked to claim. It was real, and tangible...if you were part of the small percentage of the human population able to sense it. An even smaller percentage of those humans, like Wren, were able to direct the current into anything useful.

And Talents like Wren, who honed her skills for the specific purpose of larceny, were called Retrievers.

A light touch to the door, and she felt the tingle that meant elementals were around, drawn to the current that was bound into electricity, no matter what form. A quick push of current bridged the gap in the alarm system long enough for her to open the door and slip inside. She started to move in the slow-slide fashion she had perfected for not creating footfalls, when she stopped and returned to the lock. Placing her hand on the alarm pad, she waited. Elementals had the reasoning ability of inbred hamsters, but you could use them, if you knew how. She did.

Come on, you know you're bored with that stale, man-made electricity...come taste some of mine...

They came to her tentatively at first, then swarming in their eagerness. Natural current 'tasted' better to them. She let them feed for a few seconds, nibbling around the edges of the current curling up from her belly, twining around her spine. All right. Earn your keep. She visualized clearly what she wanted them to do. A faint hesitation, and the swarm was off, splitting into a dozen different directions as they moved along the museum's state-of-the-art wiring.

A pity they couldn't call back to warn her if someone else was in the hallways, but if a person didn't have current, elementals didn't know they existed.

The painting was in a little alcove off gallery #11, in a space that had probably once been a servant's room. Or a closet. What did she know, Wren thought, listening with part of her Talent to the sounds of the elementals causing chaos in other parts of the building. She grew up in a double-wide trailer, for Pete's sake. They didn't even have any mansions in Redwater.

Palms held over the frame, and the current surged, creating the illusion again that the alarm hadn't been breached. Moving quickly, she fit a small ceramic knife into the frame and slit the painting carefully along four sides, sliding it out and rolling it up. Tucked into an aluminum tube, the tube stowed in her backpack. And then it was time to go. She checked the digital readout on her knapsack, far enough away from her body that the current didn't futz it too badly. Fourteen minutes. Damn. Getting old, Valere. You're getting old.

oOo

By the time she made it out to the edge of the museum's property, it was almost 12:30. She perched in the vee of a large oak and contemplated the street. The empty street.

"Damn it, Didier…." She'd had to duck and wait while a guard went by her; too close, that one. They were getting smarter. She'd have to put a no-go on any jobs here for at least two years. Maybe three.

Not for the first time she wished for a cell phone. But even if they hadn't been too risky—too easy for someone to check the last few numbers dialed—she still couldn't carry one. No cell phone, no PDA…even the old watch was prone to odd fluctuations under current, and when she pulled down a surge, all bets were off.

Another fifteen minutes, and she had to accept the fact that Sergei had probably been forced to call it a night. The glitches she had the elementals set off might have caused a patrol car to take a swing by, even though it none of it had been enough to trigger an actual alarm.

"Good thing you wore the comfy sneakers," she told herself, swinging herself down from the tree and landing with lazy grace on the grass. It was going to be a long walk back.

oOo

It might have been the night air. Or the current still running high in her system. Or, as Sergei claimed, just a natural born stupidity. But at the time, the idea to kill two jobs with one evening seemed just a matter of common sense and practicality. She had to walk by the site anyway, so why not?

"Why not," Sergei said over his tenth mug of high-test tea, the first five of which had cooled while he was waiting for her, "is because a) you were carrying a Retrieved object. And b) because you hadn't done anything more than a cursory glance at the job write-up."

She knew he was mad, then, when he called it a job instead of a situation.

"And c) because you got caught!"

Wren winced, fighting the urge to duck under the diner table. "Not so much caught," she protested meekly. "More like… "

oOo

"Who's there?"

Wren swore, wrapping herself in current and fading into the shadows. The store was a hodgepodge of clichés, down to the moth-eaten thing stuffed and mounted on the counter, its crystal eyes reflecting light back at her. At least, she hoped it was just crystal reflecting light…

"I said, who's there?" An old man to match the shop stomped downstairs, a mega-powered X-Files quality flashlight in one hand. Wren closed her eyes so she wouldn't reflect the light. The beam flashed across her face, passed on…then came back.

"I know what you're here for," the old man cackled. "But you can't have it. Can't, can't can't!"

Nobody said anything about the guy being a Talent she thought with irritation, then common sense reasserted itself. He wasn't a Talent, or a seer, or anything that would have allowed him to sense what she was or what she intended. He was just old-fashioned bugfuck. Crazy had a way of messing with the brain in ways even current couldn't work around.

"Yeah, old man?" Her voice was low, dangerous. She'd copied it from Blue Angel, practicing until she had it down just right. If anyone reported her to the cops, they'd get laughed out of the station for claiming they'd been robbed by Marlene Dietrich.

"Yeah. It's mine. Mine I tell you. I bought it, I got it, and I'm going to keep it."

Any moment now Wren expected him to break into a round of "mine, my precioussss." If he did, she was out of there, and the Silence could keep their damn retainer that month.

"My staff, mine. Going to make me a wizard. Going to teach me how to talk to the birds."

"I think you're halfway there, old man," Wren said, relieved that he was nattering about something other than her goal. And if the staff that he was talking about actually was an Artifact—an item used like a battery to store current—the Silence would just have to hire her to come back and get it. Sergei's cat would have better luck working a manual can opener than the man in front of her actually accessing current.

"What's that? You, stop there. Who are you? How did you get in here?" The hand not holding the flashlight came up, the dark shape unmistakable even to someone as gun-shy as Wren. A sawed-off shotgun.

Think quick, Valere!

"I'm a djinn, come to gift you with a treasure," she said, punting madly. Maybe, in her dark clothing, the shimmer of current still wrapped around her, visible or no, she'd be able to pull this off. "A painting, though which magic you might transport yourself instantly."

A combination of Bugs Bunny cartoons and Star Trek reruns, but he leaned closer, the rifle not focused quite so threateningly as a minute ago.

Moving carefully, she withdrew the tube from her knapsack, having to tug it free when it snagged on the dress's folds.

"All shall be yours…for one simple gift in return."

The old man checked himself, glaring at her suspiciously. The shotgun began to rise towards her face. "What's that?"

"A trifle, a trinket. One of no use to mortals but great significance to djinn." She was dancing as fast as she could, the sweat crawling under her scalp and running down the side of her face and back of her neck. "A bell, a silver bell with a golden clapper, a bell that does not ring. You have such a thing, I am told. Give it to me, and the magic painting shall be yours".

oOo

"You traded one job for the other." Sergei was trying, really trying, to be his usual hard-assed self. Wren reached across the diner table and snagged the pseudo-cream in its little tin pitcher; poured it into her coffee until it went from mud to diluted mud. "Hey, no problem. I'll just go steal it back."

She drank her coffee, pretending not to hear the muffled, pained noises coming from her partner.

oOo

"Oh...hell." Disgust dripped from every word as she stared down at the body of the pawnshop owner. Someone had staved in the back of his head with his own staff. There was a moral in there somewhere, but the smell of stale blood and feces was rising off the body and she didn't want to waste time thinking when she could be working. Wren wrinkled her nose, wiping her palms on her jeans as though there was something sticking to them. "If I'd wanted to see dead bodies I'd have gone to work for the morgue, damn it."

Ten minutes since she'd walked in the door. Daylight retrievals usually weren't her thing, but it wasn't as though the guy was in any shape to report her.

She risked another look down. Even less shape, now.

Normally working current just required an internal adjustment and some finely focused concentration. But there were times that shortcuts were useful, and words were the surest way to focus current fast, if a little dirty.

"Picture gone missing

hands not meant, not deserving

Retriever reclaims."

It wasn't great verse, but it didn't have to be. It just had to be meaningful, in form and function. Her mother loved haiku, so using that form made her think of her mother, which made the form meaningful. And she needed to get that picture back. Which made the content meaningful. And…there it was. Her hands itched as the current she had generated reached like a magnet to lodestone, forcing her forward, stepping over the old man's body, to where the painting was tacked up with thumb pins—Sergei's going to shi —on the wall behind the counter.

"Looks like the old boy was trying to make a getaway... pity he didn't make it." She took the painting down, the tingling fading once she made contact with the spelled item. She looked around for the tube, but didn't see it. Refusing to muck around any longer looking for it, she pulled the scrunchie out from her hair, letting the ponytail fall loose, and wrapped it around the re-rolled painting. Ready to get the hell out of there, something made her look back over her shoulder to the body lying on the floor.

"Ah... hell." She sighed, tucking the roll under one arm and retracing her steps. Stooping low, she put her hand out, palm down and flat. A hesitation, a centering, and then she touched the corpse. Spirits fled in the moment of death, unless there was a damn good reason—or a very strong spell—holding them in place. But while the animus might be gone, the body still had current caught in the biofield every living being generated, the natural electricity that made Kirlian photography possible.

"What? No! No, mine, mine, mustn't take, mustn't...” a fast-moving figure in front of him, angry, full of rage. "Where is it? She didn't have it on here when she left, which means you have it, now where? Where. Is. It?"

Whimpering, then another heavy blow. The old man spins under the force, falls to the ground. "Useless old fool.."”

The sound of something whistling down a shock of red-flaring pain, and...

Nothing

Wren came out of the connection like a dog shaking off water, breathing heavy. "Damn damn damn Damn!" He'd been killed for the painting. Killed…and she might have been… No time to think about it, she'd already stayed too long. Not that she was worried about cops showing up to investigate: poor bastard had been dead a day at least.

Her eyes narrowed at the thought. "Ah…hell." Nobody deserved to rot like that. Slipping out the front door, she wiped the handle clean, then uncoiled a narrow rope of current from her inner pool and reached out with it, brushing the surface of the burglar alarm.

The loud wail of the alarm covered the sound of her boot heels on pavement, moving in the general direction of away.

oOo

The painting remained untouched on the coffee table where Wren had tossed it when she came in the door to Sergei's apartment. Wren was curled up on the sofa, while Sergei paced back and forth in front of her.

"Who the hell are we working for, Sergei? Because I get the feeling there's something they didn't tell us. Something that almost got me killed. And did get that poor bastard —"

"Bob Goveiss."

"Bob, killed. So give."

"Yes. That's what doesn't make sense."

"What?"

"The violence." He shook his head. "Those paintings were on loan from the French government. The same government that's about to splinter apart from the inside, which could have awkward repercussions on the current political scene."

"So sayeth CNN, amen," Wren said, but she was listening. "And…?"

"And, the organization that hired us was planning on holding that painting hostage, to force the various factions to come back to the table."

Wren stared at her partner. "Okay, huh?"

He paced back and forth, gesturing with his hands as he spoke. "It's rare, but there have been a number of cases where an item is taken to force two sides to cooperate or risk being shown in public as the destroyer of a priceless work of art. Most recently in the theft of a Chagall painting: a ransom note was sent demanding peace in the Middle East before the painting would be returned. A useless demand, really, but it made a splash in the news."

Wren considered that, a small smile appearing on her face. "I like that," she said finally.

"Yeah. It does have appeal. But it doesn't always work. Anyway, it still doesn't make sense. Why would anyone who know about the heist want to —"

"Play a round of Kill the Retriever?"

"Yes."

"Dunno. That's your job to find out. I'm going to home before I forget what it looks like, catch some sleep before my next turn playing peacemaker. Call me when you find out anything." She got up, stretched, looked at her partner. "But do me a favor? Lock the doors when I leave. And don't be careless."

Sergei shook his head, his squared-off face softening as he smiled. "I'm always careful, Zhenechka."

Wren thought briefly of the nasty little gun he carried on some jobs, and shuddered. "Right. Better them than us and all that jazz." She kissed him goodbye, rubbing her cheek against his five o'clock stubble, and let herself out.

oOo

The next evening he caught up with her on Park duty. A piskie had decided to pick on her, spluttering insults on her paternity, her maternity and the general state of her underwear. Since piskies were, on average, twenty inches high and five pounds soaking wet, Wren's reaction was closer to embarrassed annoyance than anything else. She kept trying to kick it, but it would dance out of the way and come back a few moments later, still talking.

"Goid, you're annoying," she said to it.

"And you could use a drag into the lake. Wanna try?"

"Remember what happened last time you tried dunking a lonejack?"

Clearly it did, dancing back again until it was just out of reach. "Annoying human. Spoil all our fun."

"Be glad that's all I'm spoiling, you annoying little wart."

"Want me to shoot him?" Sergei asked, falling into step beside her.

"You got a bullet small enough?"

"I hear tell that's all he's got," Goid crowed, then bit his tongue with an audible yelp when Sergei turned to glare at it. It was no secret in the Cosa that The Wren's partner had little love for the fatae, the purely supernatural creatures of the Cosa Nostradamus.

"Scoot," he said to it. Goid scooted.

"Damn. Next time the Cosa calls, you can answer, okay? What's up?"

"Nothing." His voice was sharp, and she could practically feel the irritation rising off him, now that the distraction of the fatae was gone. "As in, not a god-damned thing. As in, my contact seems to have disappeared."

"The rest of the payment got deposited?"

One or two of the lines in Sergei's forehead eased out. "The rest was deposited this afternoon, soon as they got their hands on the painting."

"Well then." Wren let out a little sigh. "What's a possible attempt on my life, so long as we're paid."

He cast a sideways look at her. "You mean that?"

They walked a few more paces along a tree-shrouded path, ignoring the faint giggles and rustling branches following them. "No," she said finally, on a sigh. "No, I don't. Not after…I felt him. And I felt him die. I can't walk away from that."

"Right. Lowell did a rundown on this organization for me. They check out clean, he says—but he was very surprised that they had the money to pay us. Not a dime in their collective kitty, and no fundraisers going on in their name."

"Breaks my heart, it does." She didn't like Sergei's assistant, to say the least, but the twit did know how to do his research. "So they hocked the furniture to pay us?" The giggles got louder as they reached a particularly large tree, and Wren put a hand on Sergei's arm to stop him. "Hang on."

She slipped out of her sneakers and planted her bare feet in the grass by the side of the road. Safely grounded, she opened herself to the current of the world around her. Colors swirled, electrons danced, and she sorted through the information tugging at her senses until she was able to discern the slightly off pattern twined around the tree. A tendril snaked out, stroking the ends of the pattern, then retracting in a flash as the pattern snapped out, attempting to snare her within its own tendrils.

She came back to herself with a blink, after confirming that the trap had been sprung. A chorus of disappointed "Awwwws…" trailed after them as she slipped her shoes back on and they walked on.

"Okay. So: no money. And yet they manage to scrape together 17 thou to pay us. So what's the deal? They borrow the money from someone to pay for the retrieval, and then that someone decides they'd rather have the painting than the promise of money?"

He shot her a sideways glance. "Maybe. Or it was never actually the organization who wanted it, at all. We might have been set up."

"But then why make the final payment? I mean, we're tough, but we're not that tough. Are we?"

"More to the point, do they think we are? If so, not a bad thing."

"Also besides the point, your ego aside," and she squeezed his hand to soften the words. "Ignore who hired us for a minute. Who went after me? Did that same person kill poor old Bob? What do we have? An organization, poor as proverbial church mice, who still manages to retain us to retrieve an object that they claim they're going to use to force political unity.

"Okay, here's a question for you."

Sergei nodded, indicating he was listening.

"Why did they bother to tell you what they'd be using it for?"

He let out a huff of breath. They walked in silence through the park, past human joggers running in pairs, and the occasional biker in bright spandex zipping through at high speeds. If any of the fatae were still watching them, they were being quieter about it now.

"I've been wondering about that too. At first I thought the guy was just a talker. But then I started to wonder if maybe his verbal diarrhea had a purpose. The assignment was the kind of thing you can't help talk about, because it's so different from the usual. But we don't talk about clients outside the office…"

"You would have if I'd turned up dead. Especially if they'd done it in such a way to suggest that, rather than waiting to be handed the painting, they'd stolen it from us."

Sergei stopped like he'd walked into a wall. "Chyort! Stolen it back and then used it to make peace. With your blood. Damn straight I would have talked. I would have blackened their reputation until they couldn't stand under the weight of it."

"And the talks would be undermined by doubt, maybe just enough to break them."

Sergei started swearing again, alternating between Russian and English, until Wren was certain that she could see blue current sparking and shimmering in front of his mouth.

"We're going to have to do something about them using us like that," she said thoughtfully, almost to herself. "Bad for business, otherwise…"

oOo

Sergei had called the dinner-date, his voice on the answering machine filled with such glee she could only imagine the retainer he'd managed to con out of someone. She wasn't in the mood to party, her brain still filled with the annoyance of having been tricked into getting involved in politics, not to mention the attempt on her life, but dinner was dinner was dinner, especially if Sergei was buying. She threw herself into the shower, grabbed the first summer-weight dress she could find that wasn't wrinkled, and threw it on. Things had changed enough in their relationship over the past year that she slicked on lipstick and mascara, and tied her hair up in a looked-more-complicated-than-it-was knot before heading out the door. Not that any of that was going to turn her into a raving beauty, but Sergei appreciated the effort. And she appreciated his appreciation.

They were regulars at Marinana's, to the point where Callie, the waitress, didn't even bother getting up to show her to their table. Of course, it wasn't that large a place, either. She could see Sergei sitting in the back the moment she walked in. And he was grinning like he was about to choke on wee yellow feathers.

"You're scaring me. What?"

"I had a little chat with an old friend of mine who was shocked, shocked to hear that criminals had their hands on any part of the "Fabulous Finds." A few hours later, this job came in. Since we are, after all, the only team who could pull something like this off…"

He slid a piece of paper across the table to her. She picked it up, noting first the weight of the paper, then the fact that it was letterhead stationery, and then her mind took in the words and she started to laugh as Sergei called Callie over to open the wine.

"The Meadows Museum board would like to make use of your services to Retrieve a painting which went missing from our premises on the night of July 14th…"

Getting paid to take back what they took in the first place, and undercut any attempt the organization might make to go ahead with their plan anyway.

"I love this job," Wren said, raising her glass.

"To karma," Sergei agreed. "To karma, and the joy of being the boot that gives it a kick in the ass. Zdorov'ye!"

The PUPIs – private, unaffiliated, paranormal investigators–first appeared in BRING IT ON, but the full story of their founding will be told in HARD MAGIC (May 2010

This story first appeared in the anthology UNUSUAL SUSPECTS, edited by Dana Stabenow (Ace 2008), and gave readers the 'origin story' of Bonnie Torres, paranormal investigator.

Illumination

The boat was long and lean, and so was the guy pulling the oar. I leaned out so far over the bridge, I probably would have fallen if Joseph hadn’t grabbed the back of my belt.

“Darling, the water level is high enough. No need to add your drool to it.”

“But…pretty!”

Joseph has known me since I was eight. He was there when my hormones kicked in, there when I went through the “boys or girls” agita. He was there for all of my not-too-stellar high school career and he was there when I settled into semi-responsible adulthood. I don’t think he’s blinked once.

Well, maybe when I got into Amherst. I think he blinked then. He wouldn’t admit to crying.

“Your mind on the crisis at hand, please?” he said without too much hope.

The crisis was my dad. As usual.

J.. held the letter in his hand. It had come a few days before, but I hadn’t gotten around to opening it until the previous night. I’d read halfway through and pinged J.. In every way that counted, he was my real father. Zaki Torres was just my genetic donor and occasional pain in the posterior.

“I think he’s dead this time,” I told J.. I wasn’t sure, but it felt probable.

“Is that gut instinct, or something else?”

I had to think about that for a minute. “I don’t know. Maybe both.”

Gut instinct was the normal everyday “I got a bad feeling about this” sort of thing. Something else was, well, something else. And it had a lot less to do with feeling that knowing. Or, as J. put it, with kenning.

Magic worked like that, sometimes.

I cast a longing look after the sculler, by then halfway up the river, and sighed. J.. hadn’t brought me there for the scenery, more’s the pity. There’d be time for that later, if I was lucky. If not, well, there were always new boys all over the place.

“Bonnie…”

“Right.” I leaned against the stonework of the bridge and tried to soak up the cool spring sunlight into my skin. I’m pale like skim milk, with the annoyingly white-blonde hair to match, but I keep hoping that some melanin will sneak into my epidermis, somehow.

“Let’s review the facts. My father, also known as Zaki the King of the Shiftless Losers..”

J made an inarticulate sound of protest, but it was mainly a formality. He’s known my dad since I was eight, too. Zaki’s Talent was slight enough to make him almost a Null, so he’d known he had to get someone else to mentor me. Thank God for great favors. Unfortunately, Zaki’s idea of an acceptable mentor for his rather–modesty aside–strongly Talented eight-year-old daughter would probably make a slumlord blush. J had been walking by on the street below the apartment when Zaki tried to make the introductions, and I had been a pretty good judge of character even then. Desperate to find an alternative–any alternative–I had let out what J later described as a mental all-points-bulletin, asking for a mentor who didn’t suck. My exact wording, apparently.

J had been upstairs and talking to my dad before either of them knew what was happening. Which was how a backstreet lonejack kid got a hoity-toity Council mentor, and don’t think that didn’t raise a few eyebrows and almost as many hackles on both sides.

But it worked. For us, anyway.

“He is, J. No use candy-coating it. He has, according to this letter, managed to get himself once again in debt to not only a loan shark, but a loan shark that would think nothing of roasting him over the coals for a human BBQ. What the hell possessed him to borrow from a cave dragon, anyway?”

“Because cave dragons always have money, and they take a long view. Usually.”

“Yeah. Usually.” North American cave dragons, from what J had gotten around to telling me, weren’t all that much like their older cousins in Europe and Asia. They were small–only around ten feet long–and sort of dingy-looking, and generally didn’t hold with the eating of maidens, razing of homestead, or wholesale stealing of livestock.

They did like their pretties, though, and stuffed their mattresses with cash, just like all misers. And they liked a nice return on their investments.

Only an idiot did a runner on a debt owed to them.

An idiot, apparently, like my genetic donor.

oOo

A dutiful daughter probably would have rushed out into the mountains and demanded an answer–or at least the personal effects and whatever was left of the body. But it was spring, an the mountains were damned cold and muddy just then. And J didn’t raise a dummy.

I went to the source, instead.”

“Bonnie! Baby!”

I dodged the attempted embrace, and sidestepped my way into the apartment. Claire, my dad’s girlfriend, wasn’t bad as they went–she was clean, sober, and actually cared about him. She was also intent on turning me into the daughter she’d never gotten around to raising, and at nineteen I wasn’t interested in suddenly having a mommy.

“Where is he? Where is the moron?”

“Baby, I don’t know.”

I stopped, turned, and looked back at her. Claire’s baby blue eyes were rimmed with red, and her long red hair–Pippi Longstocking hair, I called it–was done up in a single messy plait, not her usual Medusa’s crown of cornrows.

I’m not what you’d call a dispassionate person. In fact, J says I throw my heart over the hedgerow, whatever the hell a hedgerow is, more often than any steeplechaser he’s ever met. Whatever a steeplechaser is. But when something goes hinky in my world, I don’t freak. Just the opposite.

Remember what I said earlier about magic? It’s not something everyone gets. Just some of us: Talents. Humans, who have the little extra kick of whatsis, lets us do… Stuff. It’s called current these days, not magic, and according to the lectures J. sat me through, it’s directly related to but not exactly like moral electricity. You feel it, inside you, in your gut, like a personal power generator.

J says, and so does every other Talent I’ve talked to about it, which isn’t admittedly, many, that they feel current like this whirling, swirling mess of energy inside them, and the more agitated they get, the harder it is to control.

Not me. I get upset, I get agitated, or I get worried, and my current goes cold and calm. Instead of panic, I get planning.

“All right. When did you last see him?”

“Tuesday.”

It was Friday, now.

“The fourteenth.”

The Tuesday before last. The idiot had been missing for over a week. And Claire hadn’t been worried?”

Scratch that. Obviously, she had been.

“He had been fine up until then. Happy, even. He had been whistling. You know how he does that.”

God, did I. Zaki the wonder whistler. Off-key and under his breath. Maybe someone with good hearing and perfect pitch had killed him.

“No worries, then?”

She shrugged, a flailing of arms that looked more Italian than Irish. “When did your father ever worry about anything?”

When he did, it was too late, anyway.

“Tell me everything you know.” I tried to keep the request polite. She didn’t seem to mind the edge in my words, thankfully.

“You’ll find him?”

She didn’t even ask how I knew that he was gone. Either she had mailed the letter I got, which implied that she knew what was in it, or she believed more of my dad’s stories about being able to use magic than she’d ever let on.

I steered her toward the sofa, and pushed her on the shoulder until she sat down on the nubby brown upholstery. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll see what I can do.”

oOo

Three hours and a plate of crappy bakery cookies later, I escaped with a pretty good idea that Claire didn’t know shit. Feeling restless and annoyed, and trying to put my brain onto what little I had been able to learn, I reached inside and started braiding lines of current: blue for thought, red for inspiration, green for energy. Not that the colors actually meant anything, but it helped me focus. And focus was what it was all about, in the end.

The subway took me out of Brooklyn where Claire lived, and dumped me into midtown Manhattan, about ten blocks from where we were staying.

I could have gone back to the hotel, but the weather was nice, and I had missed being in the city, so I decided to take a walk, instead.

I loved going to school in Massachusetts, loved the slower pace and the whole academic immersion thing, but for a Talent, a big city was like a candy store–all that electricity zipping around, making an easy road for current to travel alongside. Current came naturally–lightning storms and ley lines–and it came artificially–neon signs and electrical wires. It didn’t care, and artificial forms were easy to piggy-back on, so hey presto, a ready-made pool of current every time you turned on a power switch.

There was a downside to it, though.

“Hey, what the hell?”

I had been so busy braiding current I hadn’t realized how thick the string had gotten. It crackled and sizzled under my mental touch, and one of those crackles jumped outside of me, touching the overhead marquees and shorting them out, one after another after another, all the way down 46th Street.

Ooops.

That was the payoff, for magic. Not that it didn’t like technology, but that it loved it. So much that it always wanted to go where it was, and make like best buddies with it. Hang with it.

But like two cats in a single household, electricity wanted not so much to do with current. It could tag along so long as it didn’t interfere, but the moment electricity got annoyed–bam. Sparks and ugliness, and you had to go out and buy a new computer. Or cell phone. Or anything else that got caught in the crossfire.

Talents didn’t make great electricians, generally, although we knew theory inside and out.

Bonnie?

The familiar mental ping was like mashed potatoes: comfort food.

On my way back to the hotel. J. had been good, staying out of my space, but I knew that he was worried, too.

oOo

“He was working,” I told him twenty minutes later. We were sitting in the lounge of the hotel, which was pretty decent without being overpriced, and they didn’t ask for ID when I ordered a vodka martini. I had ID of course, but it was always easier to just project “legal drinking age” at them and not worry about an ex-cop behind the bar. J had settled in with a beer. He might have been Council, which was sort of the equivalent of being the country-club set of the Cosa Nostradamus, but he never did seem like it.

“Claire said that it was a job with a construction guy, over on Staten Island. He was doing some detail work.”

That was one thing Zaki was good at, no question Give him a chunk of wood and his tools, and he’d hand over a banister or a mantel or some other bit of house that you could point to decades later and say “yeah, we had this handmade, and it was worth every penny.”

He made a decent living at it, too, if he could keep his mind on the job. Only he kept insisting he knew how to play poker, too. As a gambler? Zaki made a damned good carpenter.

“The job was set to go on for another couple of weeks. Sometimes he’d stay out there, stay in a hotel room overnight rather than lug back to Brooklyn. She had a couple of trips—”Claire was a flight attendant for Air Cheapo. “—so she didn’t think anything of it when he wasn’t home when she got back. But then she went to pay the rent—” The apartment was hers, not his, which was the smartest thing both of them had ever done. “–and the money he was supposed to have left for her was gone. She got suspicious, because she does know Zaki, and went to look–and her stash was gone, too.”

“How much?”

“Twenty thousand. And no, I don’t know why she kept that much in the apartment. I guess dragons aren’t the only ones who like to be able to fondle their hoards. Anyway, that’s when she went looking for him. Only the guy who hired him said that he hadn’t been there all week, had asked for time off to, and I quote, ‘deal with some family shit.’”

I was the only family he had, far as anyone knew. Zaki would be the type to rush off and embrace a new alleged offspring, but he’d be busting to tell someone–me—about it first.

I actually would have liked a kid brother or sister. Claire had never seemed interested in producing, though, and they’d been together for almost ten years, so…

“Bonita, you are not focusing.”

J’s reprimand got me back on track.

I pulled the letter out of my backpack. It was a little rumpled from being shoved into my psych textbook, but it wasn’t like I’d ever gotten points for neatness. “’I’m going to take care of this,’” I read, “’and then I swear, never again. And I won’t ever trust a dragon to hold my marker again, even if it swears up and down I can have a full decade to repay.’” I folded the letter and stared at J, thinking hard.

“You still know people who know people?” J had worked for the state before he retired early at fifty-eight, about the same time he took me on. And yes, the two events were probably connected.

“I might. What do you want me to do?”

“Get them to pull his records. Credit reports, stuff like that. Maybe we jumped to the wrong conclusions for all the right reasons. See if he took out any loans, or had been bouncing checks, stuff like that.”

“Not a problem.” J had friends who had friends all the way down, I sometimes suspected. He was the kind of guy who collected people. And it was something he could do sitting in a bar, sipping his beer, which was where I wanted him. He might still be rough and tough mentally, but he was pushing seventy even if he didn’t want to admit it, and I worried like any dutiful mentee.

“And in the meantime, you will be doing what?” he asked, waving the waitress over for a refill.

“His tools and stuff are still on the job site. I think I need to go sniff at them.”

Ask anyone in the Tristate area what that smell is, and more than half the time you’ll get back the wiseass response of “Staten Island.” Unless the speaker is from Manhattan, in which case it’s a toss-up between Staten Island and New Jersey. But the truth is that the little borough gets very little respect. And with good reason; it’s the kind of place you grow up in and get the hell out of, as soon as possible. Why? Because it’s boring.

The ferry over was kind of fun, though. I liked the feel of the wind on my face, and the fact that it was off-hour meant there weren’t many people crowding the bright orange deck–the old ladies and older men with their shopping bags and snot-nosed grandchildren were inside, glomming the molded plastic seats.

The job site was a reasonably ordinary-looking house. I don’t know much about architecture–I grew up in a series of apartments, until I got to college and dorm housing–but it seemed pretty nice without standing out. In other words, classic suburbia.

Inside, though, I could see why they’d hired Zaki. Wood everywhere. And not just wood, but WOOD. The kind that has texture, and almost glows from within. Wood like current, actually, the more I looked at it.

Zaki must have loved this job. He wouldn’t have just walked out on it.

“Can I help you?”

Guy. Big guy. Foreman, my brain whispered to me.

“Hi. I’m Bonnie Torres. Zaki’s daughter? I called, about his kit?”

Foreman guy melted. He must be a dad, too. You can always tell. “Right, right. Damndest thing. I hope everything’s okay?”

“Me too,” I said.

The guy showed me where Zaki stashed his stuff, and looked like he was going to hover. I plucked a thread of current like a harp string and listened to it resonate. Go. Deal with something important. This isn’t important. I’m trustworthy.

“Okay, I gotta deal with some stuff–you’ll be okay?”

“Oh yeah, sure.” I gave him my very best virtuous daughter look. “I’m good. Don’t let me distract you.” Really. Don’t let me distract you.

He left, and I turned my attention to the tools Zaki had left behind. A metal locker, which my occasionally not-so-useless dad had lined with a cushion of foam padding. Even when you weren’t using current, you tended to leak, and using tools with metal–good conductors–meant you ran the risk of transferring it. Metal to metal, with current? Could be bad.

That was the stuff you learned form your mentor. My dad never told me anything about his mentor, so I guess I’d figured he didn’t know much.

Live and learn. Revise impressions. If Zaki was still with us I was going to have to apologize. After I kicked his ass for putting us through hell.

I looked, first. Two hammers, each a different size. A plastic case that, when opened, revealed a series of chisels, each of a different size. One of them had a fleck of something on it that looked like rust.

Zaki would never let rust get on his tools.

A chamois cloth wrapped around a larger chisel that had some kind of carving in the wooden handle.

One pair of work gloves, dirty, and another pair, clean. A small bottle of hand lotion–unscented, half-empty.

My brain felt like it was going at half-speed, taking in the details, but at the same time really really revved up, like everything was flooding in all at once, giving me all these impressions and ideas, most of which didn’t seem to make any sense.

Slow down. Let them come. Don’t push.

J?

The voice-impression went away when I pinged at it. It hadn’t felt like J, but who else would be hovering around my brain?

Dad?

No response.

Right, then. I looked at the tools, and didn’t touch anything, letting my impressions filter in without distraction.

“Tell me something, guys,” I said, then lifted my hand and placed it inside the locker, palm down, about six inches over the tools.

“Tell me something.”

Love

That was first. The absolute love that only comes from joy, and the joy that builds out of love.

If I hadn’t already known that Zaki totally followed his bliss, his tools would have told me. In that instant, I think I probably forgave him almost every horrible un-dadlike thin he’d ever done to me. Not that he deserved forgiving, but because I understood that he couldn’t help it. He loved me, but he was always going to be dragged in another direction, too.

I wondered if Claire knew that, too. She probably did.

Never love an artist.

I moved my hand slightly, so that it was over the chisels. The current-him intensified

Exasperation.

Huh. That was different. I cast my memory back over the site, what little I had seen of it. The banister had looked like it was almost done–they had installed it and were doing some kind of treatment on it; it had smelled of varnish or something. The mantel over the fireplace had looked done, too. Was it prefab? Probably not, in that house. But that didn’t seem right.

Think, Bonnie, think. What else? There had been wooden doors leading into the room with the fireplace, hadn’t there? Sliding doors, with some kind of pattern carved into them. I let my finger dip down just enough to touch the plastic case, and thought about the quick glimpse of the doors I had gotten

Zaki’s current-memory reacted to my memory, an irritable growl rising from the tools.

It wasn’t anything that would stand up to even the most sympathetic Talent’s questioning, but I was convinced. Zaki had been working on those doors when he disappeared, and there had been something about them that had bothered him.

“Where are you, Dad?”

I dipped my finger again, and touched the chisel with the rust stain on it.

Wings. Teeth. Thick, leathery skin and heat and brimstone. Red, red eye in the darkness, and a snarl that would and did scare the piss out of a cougar, and make a bear back up and apologize.

I clenched my finger and pulled my hand out of the locker, sweating slightly.

Dragon blood. There was dragon blood on my dad’s work chisel.

I pulled on the clean gloves and bundled everything in the foam padding, and shoved it into my backpack. It made it heavier than hell, but I didn’t want to leave anything behind.

Look at the door

That voice again, tapping at my brain. I grabbed at it, trying to get a taste of who was trying to instruct me, but it danced away and disappeared.

Good advice, though.

The site was busy, but everyone had seen me with the foreman, so they assumed I had the right to be there, so long as I didn’t bother anyone. Maybe he had told them I was Zaki’s daughter, but if so they declined to stop work long enough to say hi or ask after my old man. That worked for me.

The door was absolutely Zaki’s work, and equally as obvious unfinished. The pattern at first looked like some kind of leaves falling, but when you looked at it carefully, you saw there was a face in the leaves. At first I thought Zaki had gone all Celtic and done the Green Man, but no, it was a woman’s face, delicate and fey.

I checked: no pointed ears, no antenna, and no wings. Not any of the fatae species I knew, anyway. Zaki was just feckless enough to have used one of the nonhuman breeds as a model, thinking that nobody would ever notice.

Was the owner of the house a Talent? The Cosa Nostradamus wasn’t all poor, far from it, and they would know about Zaki’s skills…

But no. From what I’d seen of the wiring going into the walls, this place was going to be high-tech. Not a Cosa household, then.

Zaki! I didn’t expect a different response than I’d gotten before, but I was just frustrated enough to try. Zaki you stupid son of a bitch, where are you?

No answer.

oOo

“You sure about this?”

“Hell no.”

I was sitting in the passenger seat of a tough little SUV, staring at a thirty-foot-high wall of stone. Becky, my roommate, could probably have told me exactly what the stone was, and how old it was, and what kind of critters roamed the earth when it got folded and shoved up from the crust, but all I was thinking about was what waited above it.

“Here.” Steve was in his forties, maybe. A good guy, if a little skeevy, and one of the people whom J knew. He had met me at the Albany airport and loaded me into the SUV, checked my gear, and given me the bag he was shoving into my arms.

“You know what to do?”

“Yeah.” No.

“Just be polite. But not unctuous. Act like you would with a grandfather you really liked.”

“That was helpful. Not.

“Right. Let me get this done.”

I got out of the car, the bag slung over my shoulder. I was wearing jeans and work boots, a heavy sweatshirt and a hoodie over that. It might be Spring, but it was damned cold up here in the Adirondacks, colder even than it had been in Boston. Trust Zaki to find a cave dragon in the northern boonies.

I stepped and squelched. Cold, and muddy. “Nice,” I said in disgust, and Steve, still behind the steering wheel, laughed. “A little wet dirt won’t hurt you,” he said.

No. Mud wouldn’t hurt. Not like screwing this up might.

“Stay here. I’ll be back.”

oOo

There was a path, if you could call anything that narrow a path. In drier weather the stones would have been a footing hazard, but the mud kept them in place, and all I had to worry about was not stepping off the trail and falling off the side of the cliff.

“Zaki actually dragged himself up here?” My dad was a lazy SOB, and his love of woods was restricted to dead and polished ones, not things with bark and leaves. I made sure my footing was secure and tested the current in the air.

“Oh yeah.” The swirls and swoops in the air ahead matched the signature I’d gotten off the blood on the chisel. The dragon that had bled lived there.

Probably, from that letter, the same dragon who had given him the loan he needed to get out of the trouble that he was in, whatever that was.

Which meant that, not knowing who he had been in trouble with, the dragon was probably the last to see Zaki before he disappeared. And, therefore, was the most likely suspect for causing that disappearance. Especially considering the blood.

“The things I do for you, Zaki, you don’t know…”

Some part of me still hoped that he was alive. That I’d track down the pieces and rush in just in time to save him. But dragon’s blood didn’t suggest anything good.

“Were you moron enough to attack a dragon?”

I’d know, soon enough.

The cave was nice, as caves went. Maybe ten feet wide, and six feet high, dry and well cleared. The inside was smooth, like someone had sanded it for a long time… or hit it consistently with really hot breath.

“You’re psyching yourself out. Stop it. Cave dragons don’t eat people.”

Usually.

“Think of something else. Like, who’s been pinging you with suggestions, and where are they now when you could use the helpfulness?”

There. That was a nicely unanswerable question to annoy myself with while I walked.

I adjusted the bag over my shoulder, turned on the flashlight, and walked into the cave.

Ten paces in, and it made a sharp left turn. Wind baffle. Smart. The ground underneath had been smoothed the same way the walls were, and was slightly rounded, like something had dragged itself back and forth across it for a very long time.

The bean from the flashlight reflected off the walls, catching bits of stuff in the stone.

“Pretty.”

“I’m so glad you approve.”

I am not ashamed to admit that I yelp like a girl. There’s a biologic reason for that.

Fucking dragon was behind me!

“What did you do, hold your breath?” There hadn’t been any warning, not even the faintest whiff of heat or brimstone.

The voice was deep, sweet, and not at all what I had expected.

“Yep.”

It was also almost sinfully proud of itself. I was in love.

I turned, trying hard not to move in any way that might be considered even remotely aggressive. Or disrespectful. Or sniveling.

Cave dragons weren’t big. But ‘not big’ when you’re talking about dragons? Trust me, that’s not like saying ‘not big’ when talking about cats.

The body blocked out the entire cave behind us, his belly low to the ground like a cat skulking through the grass. The wings were furled close to the body. Thick legs tapered into clawed pads the size of hubcaps. But the body was totally secondary to the head, which looked barely a foot away from my face.

It looked like the head of a snake, with wide nostrils at the pointed end rising to two wide red eyes that stared without blinking. If you could imagine an arrowhead two feet across and three feet long. And the neck…only a few feet, and not sinewy like I’d expected, but thick and muscular, like a python’s body. Wasn’t that a lovely thought, being crushed to death by a dragon’s neck. It might, I suppose, be better than being eaten. Or town apart by those claws. Or burning to death in its breath…

“And I really need to stop thinking about those things,” I said out loud, somewhat desperately.

“What do you want, cosa-cousin?”

“An exchange.”

Dragons, even cave dragons, didn’t have eyebrows. But if they did, this one would have raised them. “Please.” The head moved slightly, as though to invite me to continue. “Let us take this into my office.”

I swear to God, I don’t know why that invitation made me feel better. But it did.

oOo

I walked forward, the dragon directly behind me. Once I knew what to listen for, I could hear his breathing, like the sound of the ocean, or rain. Which was weird, a creature that breathed fire sounding like water, but there it was.

“What is your name?”

“Bonita.” I hated my full name, butt Steve’s words came back to me, and I figured formality was better. “Bonita Berg Torres.”

“And you came here to see me, Bonita Berg Torres. To make an exchange. For what you carry in that sack?”

“Don’t all the best fairy tales begin that way?”

A snort of laughter, the sulfur smell hit the back of my neck, and every single atavistic impulse I had rose and screamed at me to Get. The. Hell. Out. Of. There.

The cave opened in front of us, and we were in his–I couldn’t call it an office. His lair. Because there, in the middle of the space, was a pile of greenbacks. Literally. Old cash, crumpled and dirty, the dark green of old-style bills. The pile was at least four feet high and about ten feet in diameter, and had a depression in the middle that looked exactly like the shape my head left in my pillow every morning.

“So. What is it you want from me?”

“Don’t you want to see what I have to offer?”

“You’re a smart human. You will have done your homework.”

God, I hoped so. “A man came to see you. A human. A cosa-cousin.”

“Many do.” The dragon passed me, crawling into the pile and curling up, exactly like a cat. Its eyes stared at me. I had no desire whatsoever to pet it.

“This one…” What the hell did I say now? I didn’t know what Zaki might have said, or asked, or anything. “You loaned him money. Or something of value. His name is Zaki Torres. My father. You took his marker, and told him he could have a decade to repay.”

The dragon rose, the wings that had been furled until then spreading like the shadow of doom. I stumbled back, landing hard on my ass.

The stone might have been smoothed, but it sure as hell wasn’t soft.

“He stole from me!”

“What?” That was not Zaki. Clueless and useless, yeah, but never a thief.

“He stole from me!” the dragon insisted, its full fifteen-foot length rising in the air over me but not–thank God–doing anything more threatening than looming.

I straightened my spine and stared up into red eyes.

“Back. Off.” I waited, then repeated myself, really really proud that my voice sounded so uber-bitchy. “Back off, cousin. Or theft will be the least of your worries.”

I strummed the threads of current, building it up into a crescendo, letting it fill my body. God, I hadn’t thought to recharge before I came out, because I was an idiot, but there hadn’t been much call for it at college, so it was relatively easy to pull current out of my own body without too much stress. I’d feel it the next day, though. Assuming I felt anything.

“This man?”

An image, of Zaki the last time I had seen him. His head back, teeth showing as he laughed, his shaggy brown hair a little too long on the back of his neck, his black eyes filled with mischief, his face totally without any remorse, contrivance, or treachery.

“No.” The dragon backed down, settled down. “Not that human. But that was the name he gave me.” His eyes were red and angry, but somehow less unnerving. “Why did this human lie to me, cosa-cousin?”

It was a shame that the fatae, as a rule, couldn’t use current, or he could show me what the human who had used my father’s name had looked like. I couldn’t go in and take it out of his head, either. Someone else, maybe, but I didn’t have the juice or the training. Especially not a dragon’s head. He might talk, and react in a way so he could communicate, but he was a dragon. Humans who went into dragon brains didn’t come out the same, if they came out at all.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “But I will find out.” I remembered my manners then, and held out the sack. “Here.”

One huge paw took the bag and opened it with a surprisingly delicate claw. Bright, brand-new pennies fell out, a copper waterfall.

“Lovely. Truly lovely.” He sounded enchanted I was, too, for a moment–they were so bright and pretty, and the sound they made wasn’t.

He scooped his paw through them, creating the waterfall effect again. “But I did not give you the information you came here for.”

“You gave me information that contradicted what was established. That makes it better than what I came for. But the price remains the same.”

Did cave dragons laugh? This one did. “You are a wise kit, cousin. And brave.”

No; just desperate, I thought.

oOo

Steve took one look at me and didn’t say a word all the way back to the airport. I don’t remember much of the flight home. I could feel the thoughts running like salmon upstream in my head, but nothing went anywhere.

Except, if I was going to run with that metaphor, there was a bear waiting to chow down on my thoughts.

“I really need to stop thinking.”

The woman sitting next to me looked pointedly out the window, shifting her body so that there was no risk of my actually touching her.

Hey, great: more space for me.

The flight was too short to allow them more than drinks service. I grabbed Diet Coke and watched the ice melt. The temptation to reach out with current was almost overwhelming, like the need to hug a teddy bear or stuff your face with chocolate. Tossing current in the middle of a plane held up entirely by electronics and faith, though? Next to the word “suicidal” in the damned dictionary.

What the hell happened, Zaki? What the hell happened?

The cab from Logan was where it hit me. He was dead. My father was dead. I knew that, somehow, now. No way to hope; only to discover what happened. I needed to know what happened.

Traffic was mercifully light, and I had the right amount of cash on hand. I paid the cabbie off and slogged through the lobby, barely falling in through the apartment door when J was in my face. “Steve called. He said you were a disaster. What the hell happened?”

“I’ve got no idea,” I said, too tired to take offense at his lack of personal space. He was worried. At least he hadn’t pinged me; I might have broken, then. “But I need to look at the tools again.”

J pulled back and was cool. He nodded, and I went into the study/my old bedroom, and pulled out the knapsack with Zaki’s tools. I took them into the living room where J was seated in his chair, a huge leather monstrosity with a hassock that had seen better decades. His English sheepdog, Rupe, was sprawled by the chair. Rupe lifted his head when I came out, let his tongue loll in his own form of greeting, then went back to contemplating his paws.

Rupe had known me since I was eight, too. He wasn’t much impressed, although I think he liked me okay.

There was a bottle of white wine open on the low glass table and two glasses poured. I ignored it for the moment and unrolled the tools out on the table.

“This.” I put my hand over the chisel with the blood. “Dragon’s blood.”

J nodded; he knew that already.

“But Zaki never went to see the dragon.”

“His letter…”

“Yeah. I’m getting to that.”

I wasn’t going to get distracted. Anyway, having been nose to nose with that snout, picking up his echoes in the blood wasn’t quite as overwhelming.

It was still pretty damn impressive, though.

“I’ve never seen a cave dragon in person,” J said thoughtfully.

“I’ll introduce you sometime,” I said. “In about a decade or so. I can read this better now. He’s annoyed but not hurt. Not really.”

“Annoyed?”

“Not like someone stabbed him with a chisel. More like…”

“A scratch?”

“Stealing enough blood to drip the point of a chisel in. Enough to leave a current residue that would trigger the memory of an angry dragon on it if anyone were to look. A dragon who had been stolen from.” Pieces, coming together.

“A Talent?”

“Or someone who knew about Talent. And knew enough to go to a dragon, and what would be a likely reason Zaki would have gone to a dragon.”

My head hurt.

Motive and means.

There was that voice again! Annoying, intrusive bastard. I didn’t even bother chasing it down, because it was right. I knew the how–whoever had done whatever they had done to Zaki set the scene to lead anyone investigating to assume that a dragon had killed him. Case closed.

“But then how would the tools have gotten back to the locker?” The answer came to me even as I asked the question. “Who would have wondered? Seriously, who would even have gone this far, and once they saw the dragon…” Most people would give up then. Dragons were dragons.

“Whoever did this was smart, but not clever,” J said.

“Yeah. And even if someone did, who would they call to go to? Not like we have a police force you can call, or anything.” The Cosa tended to settle things one-on-one. You didn’t need proof but you’d damn well better be certain. And you had to be sure you were willing to bear the cost of making enemies who might be more powerful–or have friend who were more powerful–than you.

Zaki hadn’t had anyone.

So. Means. Someone who had access to Zaki. To his tools, which meant the job site. And someone who had access to the dragon, and knew that Zaki would have debts, and knew that Zaki had a daughter who would get the letter and be smart enough to connect the dots.

But they hadn’t counted on my being clever.

“Motive. Who has means, and motive?”

J shook his head and reached for the wine glass. “To murder, and to murder someone you know, that is a strong crime. It requires strong emotion. Who would Zaki inspire that sort of strong emotion in?”

Zaki had been a good guy. Not a great person, but a good guy. Seeing him as a man, not my father, was easy enough for me. And the answer to who he could piss off that much came pretty fast, but I wasn’t sure. Not yet.

I needed to be sure.

oOo

Another long trip down to New York City on the Chinatown bus, me and twenty four of my closest friends and all their worldly belongings. But it was cheap and it was fast and it didn’t take any current-use. The ferry over wasn’t much fun: it was raining, and I stayed inside, huddled in my molded plastic seat, ignoring the masses of commuters all trying to stay dry and just make it home.

The site was deserted; I snuck through the fence and into the house. Lucky for me none of the alarms had been turned on yet.

The door called to me. I could feel it, practically singing in the rain-filled dusk. My flashlight skittered cross the floor, allowing me to pick my way around piles of trash and debris. No tools left out; the carpenter’s daughter approved.

“Hello, beauty,” I said to the door. Or maybe to the woman in the door: in the darkness, in the beam of light, she was nakedly apparent now, a sweet-eyed woman who gazed out into the bare bones of the room with approval and fondness.

“Who are you, then? That’s the key to all this. Who are you?”

The door, not too surprisingly, didn’t answer. But I knew how to make it talk.

Or I thought I did, anyway.

It was all instinct, but J had always told me that instinct was the way most new things were discovered–instinct and panic.

I held my hand over the door the way I had with the tools, carefully not touching it, and touched just the lightest levels of current, like alto bells sounding in the distance.

The woman’s hair stirred in a breeze, and her face seemed softer, rounder, then she disappeared behind the leaves again.

Zaki really had been an artist, the bastard. I could feel him in the work. But I didn’t know, yet, what he had been feeling.

‘Evidence doesn’t lie.’

Shut up, I told the voice. I’m working.

I touched a deeper level of current, bringing it out with a firm hand and splaying it gently across the door so that it landed easily, smoothly.

Oh how I love her, such a bad woman, such a wrong woman, and I cannot have her, but I will show her my love…

Zaki, melancholy and impassioned, his hand steady on the chisel, his eyes on the wood, sensing even through his distraction how to chip here, cut there, to make the most of the grain. He was concentrating, thinking of his object of affection, the muse who inspired him. So focused, the way all Talent learned to be, that he never saw the man coming up behind him, the man who had already seen the work in progress, and recognized, the way a man might, the face growing out of the wood.

The blow was sudden and sharp, and the vision faded.

No, I told my current. More.

It surged, searched, and found…nothing. No emotions from the killer. No residue of his actions.

“Damn it.” My flashlight’s beam dropped off the door; I was unwilling to look at the face of the woman who had cost my father his life.

There is always evidence.

The voice was back. And probably right. I let the beam play on the floor, unsure what I was looking for. Scan, step, scan. I repeated the process all the way up to the door, then turned around and looked the way I had come.

“There.”

On the floor, about two feet away. A spot where the hardwood floor shone differently. That meant that it had been refinished more recently than the rest of the floor, or been treated somehow…. Zaki would have known. All I knew was that it was a clue.

I touched it with current, as lightly as I could. Something warned me that a gentle touch would reveal more than demanding ever would.

“The killer’s actions, I beg you wood, reveal.”

J’s influence: treat current the way you would a horse; control it through its natural instincts. Current, like electricity, illuminated.

A dent in the floor, sanded down and covered up. The point of a chisel stained with blood? No. The harder end, sticking out of a body as it landed, falling backward…

Oh, Zaki, you idiot was all I could find inside myself, following the arc of the body. For a woman? For another man’s woman when you had Claire at home?

And then I saw it, the shadow figure of the killer, indistinct even in his own mind–shading himself. That meant the killer was a Talent, if of even less skill than Zaki. Had that been a factor? The man–the foreman, I knew now–jealous not only of the carpenter’s attraction to his wife, but of his skill to display it, driven to murder?

The chisel was removed, wiped down, and…

The blood alone flared bright in the pictorial, a shine of wet rubies in the shadows as the foreman dipped the chisel into a cloth still damp with the blood, laying the trace for me to find, a week later.

The picture faded, rubies and shadows into full, rainy dark. I might be able to regain it if I used more current, but with two men on the crew Talented, others might be as well. I dared not linger.

oOo

So that’s it, I guess.” A long ferry ride, and I couldn’t face the bus ride back to Boston that night. I was tired, and cold, and I had a class in the morning I hadn’t done any of the reading for. I supposed the death of one’s father was reason enough to skip a chapter, but it didn’t feel right to me, somehow.

So I ended up at Claire’s apartment, wrapped in a gold-and-brown afghan she had knitted, telling her–and J, who had Translocated down for the night when I said I was too tired to come home–what I knew.

“He knew Zaki, had hired him. So he knew about the gambling, figured we’d believe a story about debts, and assume he’d screw yup the repayment enough to get himself killed. Masqueraded as Zaki and went and offered his–Zaki’s–marker to the dragon, stole the blood from a scratch, planted it…”

“And the letter,” Claire asked.

“When was the last time you saw Zaki’s handwriting, Claire?”

She had to think about that for a while, which was answer enough.

“Yeah,” I figured as much. “Me? I got to see a signature on a check every now and then. Genghis Khan could have forged that letter, and I’d have no way to know.”

Zaki hadn’t been a deadbeat dad, financially. Not even emotionally. He just hadn’t been the dad I needed. To be fair, I hadn’t exactly been the kid he was looking for, either, me and my Talent and my brains and my desire to actually get out there and do something.

“What now?”

J asked a reasonable question. I had no idea. I could establish cause, means, and motive, but who would listen? Who would care?

“A good daughter would take revenge,” I said. Part of me liked that idea. A could prove I loved him that way, right?

“Zaki would be horrified by the thought,” J said.

“Let it go, honey.”

I looked at Claire. “How can you say that? You loved him, and he was dicking around on you.”

Claire had a wistful smile on her face, like she’d said her good-byes already. “He came home to me. He always came home to me. His dick wandered, but his heart never did. Zaki was a gentle man, baby. Hopeless, but gentle. The last thing he would ever want would be for you to have blood on your hands. Even for him. Especially for him.”

She’d known my father. She had known him right.

oOo

J forced the issue and Translocated me back to college. It’s a decent way to travel, if you’ve got the skills and the current. Sure as hell beat the Chinatown bus. So I got to curl up in my own bed that night, listening to my roommate’s barely-there snore, and the ticking of the alarm clock that was usually a surefire soporific. I should have been fast asleep, or so wracked with loss that I couldn’t close my eyes. Instead, all I felt was too tired to sleep.

It’s normal, the voice said After a case.

“What case?” Across the room, Nancy stirred, but didn’t wake.

An investigation. You did well.

“Who the hell are you?” A reasonable question, I thought. Talent, obviously. Strong–very damn strong, to ping me like this. I should have been nervous, if not outright scared. I wasn’t.

Nobody you need to know yet. Finish your degree. Stay out of trouble. We’ll talk soon.

And then the voice was gone.

I stared at the ceiling, mulling over the words. Male. Older. The voice of someone who knew how to mentor.

But I already had a mentor.

But from the sound of it, maybe I had–would have–a boss, too.

Investigation. A lifetime of finding answers, figuring out the why of things. Bringing people to justice. Yeah.

I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

This story will appear in THOSE WHO FIGHT MONSTERS, edited by Justin Gustainis (Hades Publications, 2011). It is the first story featuring perpetual supporting character Danny Hendrickson, the human/faun ex-cop first introduced to readers in the Retrievers and PSI novels. Here, when a young girl goes missing, we get a closer look at the uneasy line Danny walks, between cop and PI, human and fatae… and why it all makes him dangerously good at his game.

Dusted

“Sylvan Investigations. Daniel Hendrickson speaking.”

People tend to be surprised when they hear the name of my agency. I guess it’s not what they expect from a big city PI. They don’t expect the investigator to pick up the phone, either. In all the movies the PI has a cute secretary/gal Friday answering his phones and trying to block the bad guys from rushing into his office.

I handle the cute myself, and I answer my own damn phone. Overhead’s bad enough without having to pay someone else’s salary, too, and I prefer to work alone.

The caller didn’t care about my dimple or my boyish grin. He wanted to sell me a subscription to the Post.

“Not if you paid me,” I told him, and hung up. Some day they’d invent call discarding. Like call forwarding, only it would hang up preemptively on telemarketers.

I really needed a job. Not for the money —my pension from the NYPD took care of the basics, and I lived a pretty simple life. But I was bored. Bored was bad. Bored was boring.

“Mr. Hendrickson?”

I looked up to see a man standing in my doorway. Fifty-ish, solidly build, with graying brown hair and worried eyes..

“I was told you…you find missing people?”

I pushed back my chair and considered him. “That I do.”

Parent, I pegged him. Runway. Boy? Maybe. Maybe girl. And where’s…ah.

Behind him, the mother: petite without being tiny, with brown curls and doe eyes that were red-rimmed, now. Daughter. Definitely daughter.

“Come in, please.” I stood up and gestured to them, indicating the chairs by my desk. They came in, looking around. I let them take time to size up the place. Whatever brought them here, it wasn’t easy, and they needed to be reassured. It also gave me the chance to size them up.

I had the basic two-room suite set-up, but I kept all the action up front. The furniture was basic brown wood, the chairs comfortable but not elegant, and the sofa was leather, but scruffed just enough that people felt comfortable sitting on it. The wall behind my desk was covered with photos and citations from my PD career and a few since then, for show. The letters from clients went on the wall to my right, so I could see them, on bad days. I’m not much for modesty–if you’re selling your skills, put ‘em front and center.

His name was Jack, and she was Ellen, and their absent daughter, age fourteen, was Susan. All-American family: mom and pop and loving daughter, like a picture book, except someone had ripped Miss Susan out of the picture.

Or she had cut herself out, neatly and quietly, leaving behind two very worried, self-blaming parents.

I actually preferred it when they blamed themselves. It was easier to get information out of them.

The first thing I knew was that they were Null. Talent–the humans who can use magic–always enter my office like they’re about to apologize. At least until they see that I don’t have any electronics in sight for them to fry, either accidentally or on purpose. Talent feed off current, the hip term for magic, and current, like its name, runs cheek and jowl with electricity. Imagine the fun when they tangle. Yeah. There’s a reason I keep the computer in the back room.

No, this couple were Null, and they didn’t know about the Cosa Nostradamus, either. You can always tell if they do. For one thing, they notice things about me.

Like the fact that I‘m not entirely human.

oOo

A missing kid could go anywhere. It all depended on who she was, and what she wanted. I started with her last sighting: the lobby of her high school, up on East 74th. She’d been there on Tuesday afternoon, hanging with her homegirls, or whatever the slang was around the 14-year-old set these days, and then, an hour later…she wasn’t. The police had already questioned her friends and boyfriend, and I had–through my ex-partner–gotten copies of those reports. They were all unsurprisingly unhelpful. Normal day, normal traumas, normal schedule. The kids broke to go their separate ways, and nobody knew anything until Susan’s parents started calling and texting her peer group that night, looking for their wayward daughter.

Talking to the friends didn’t get me much further, either. They seemed like good kids, all worried about Miss Susan. Nothing they said sounded suspicious or questionable, and none of them were suspects. Just…normal kids, as much as that sort of thing was possible.

So Miss Susan became an official Missing Person. My former compadres in the NYPD did their usual sweep of the obvious places; the bus station creepers and ladies’ room Lotharios who like to sweet-talk young girls into unsavory arrangements. No luck. They were still looking, but if you knew how many kids go missing every year, you’d know why they weren’t busting their humps over a girl who might or might not have gone under her own power.

But now I was on the job. The fact that I’d been a cop wasn’t in my favor among the dirtirati, but the fact that I was part of the Cosa Nostradamus won some of those points back. One outcast recognized another. If there had been gossip around about Miss Susan, I would have gotten wind of it.

No such luck. Human or fatae, nobody was talking. To all intents and purposes. Susan had walked out of her high school, and disappeared.

To a human, that might mean anything. To me, it suggested something entirely different.

I walked out into the street, blinking a little at the sunlight, since the baseball cap I’d jammed over my curls didn’t do quite enough to shield my eyes. My father’s species wasn’t much for sunlight, except maybe to nap in while recovering from their hangovers, and I’m willing to admit I’d inherited significant night-owl tendencies. That, and the pair of thumb-sized horns that my thick curls didn’t quite cover, were about all I’d gotten from him, thankfully.

All right, that and a way with the ladies. The fact that my father had been a charmer was supported by the fact that my human mother, on discovering that her weekend of passion with a faun during Fleet Week had resulted in a pregnancy, decided to keep the result of said pregnancy: me.

I wondered sometimes if she’d made the right decision.

“Hey.”

The piercing whisper was all too familiar. I looked up, squinting and cursing again at the sunlight, to see a small creature perched in the overhang of the building to my left, like some kind of furry gargoyle. A piskie. I stepped back, leaning against the wall as though contemplating the midday traffic passing by on Broadway.

“Hey Boo. You got something I should listen to?”

“Your skidoodle.”

“I’m listening.” Boo had brought me scoops before. If there was something useful, I’d reward the little pisher, and he knew it. If it was useless I’d kick his ass to Pretoria for wasting my time. He knew that, too.

“She got dusted,” Boo told me.

I dragged the toe of my boot against the cement. “Aw, fuck.”

I’d been afraid of that. Dusted, from a fatae, doesn’t mean what it does in human slang. It’s worse. It’s what happens when a Null teenage –usually a girl, but not always–discovers that the fatae are real. They want nothing more than to traipse off with their newfound discovery, to go play with the fairies. Unfortunately, most of my fatae cousins are just as tricky and unreliable, if pretty, as human fairy takes suggest, and the playing…rarely ends well.

If my Miss Susan had taken up with Manhattan’s answer to Trooping Fairies, I might as well hand her parents back their check and call it a night. The fatae rarely give back what they take, especially not if they thought someone else wanted it.

“Who with?” I asked my informant, who shrugged his furry shoulders, and scampered off.

Great. Well, that was why there was an “I” in “Investigator–I was the one who actually had to work.

oOo

The thing about the Cosa Nostradamus is that it’s pretty polarized. You have the human Talent on one side, and the non-human fatae on the other, and they don’t often mingle. Not socially, anyway. Lucky for me, horns and hooves made me fatae enough to be able to ask the questions that would get a human hurt. That didn’t mean I could go in like an Appalachian cave dragon on a bender, though. You had to know the players. That was what had made me useful on the force, and was a lot of what made me successful now: I could work both sides of that street. And I knew that there was one fatae breed that not only gossiped like a knitting circle, but was amenable to some gentle bribery.

“For me?”

The salamander looked longingly at the glowstick, but didn’t take it out of my hand. We were on the West side of the Park, just below the Rambles, at dawn. I’d hauled my ass out here to make sure I caught one of the firebrands before they were really up and moving. Sure enough, one of them had been having breakfast along the stone wall, catching the early morning rays and hotfooting the occasional jogger for laughs.

“A gift for you,” I agreed, placing it on the top of the stone wall.

The salamander considered it without touching it, then looked up at me, its lidless eyes surprisingly expressive. It wanted it, oh so very badly, but it wasn’t sure why I was just handing it over. It assumed I wanted something.

It was right.

“I’m looking for someone who has gone missing. A young girl. Her parents miss her.”

It picked up the glowstick in its front leg, the tiny claws snapping it so that the chemicals started to glow. “Pretty,” it said. They could burn without scorching, but the concept of a cool light fascinated them. I guess you always want what you can’t have–or do.

It cocked its slender head at me, the foot-long body still stretched out along the wall, managing to be both relaxed, and ready to scamper at the slightest threat. “How young the girl?”

“Fifteen. Rumor says she’s been dusted.”

“Blond or redhead?”

“Blondish.”

That’s where the ‘smart one’ myth comes from, by the way. Brunettes? Less likely to get dusted. Other trouble, yeah, but not by following the pretty little man into the greenways. Don’t ask me why, it just is.

“How long?”

“Five days.” Five. Four days too long for a girl to be dusted. Once it takes, it’s tough to ever get out of your system. Seven days, seven years–seven is the magical number. I had a very real deadline.

The salamander nodded. “Maybe. Maybe. We hear talk. You need to go low down to talk to someone. Down into the metal caves.”

Gnomes. Wonderful. This case just kept getting better and better.

Fortunately, I knew where to go for help.

oOo

The door was opened by one of the least attractive women I’ve ever met.

“Heya doll,” I said, swooping in to steal a kiss. She let me, rolling her eyes and taking my hat.

“What trouble are you bringing this time, Danny-boy?”

Unlike her face, her voice was lovely, a gentle alto that would have put any of my full-blooded cousins into unstoppable heat. I admitted to myself that I wasn’t totally immune.

“No trouble, doll, I swear. Not for you, anyway.”

“And for my husband, who doesn’t know how to say no?”

“I just want to ask his advice. He won’t even leave his studio.” I hoped.

Lee was a Talent who had an unbelievable gift that wasn’t magical at all, at least not as Talent went. He was a sculptor, working with metal to create figures that totally baffled me, but sold for large amounts of money. His studio, on the top floor of their narrow townhouse, had huge windows, and a floor half-covered in an electrostatic carpet.

Lee used current to meld his metal, not fire. One bad day, if he forgot to discharge after working, he could take out his entire grid. The fact that he never had told you a lot about the man.

He was working on something when I came in, so I took one of the cushioned chairs at the far end of the room and waited. About ten minutes later the sparks stopped flying, and he stepped over to a thick black mat to ground himself.

“What’s up, Danny?”

“I need your advice on how to approach gnomes.”

Lee stopped short, clearly not sure if I was joking or not.

“They’re metal. You work metal. I figured you’d know something that could help me out, some spell or something that would make them, I don’t know, malleable?”

Lee shook his head sorrowfully. “Your ignorance of magic is terrifying.”

Tough to argue with that, especially since I do it intentionally. My kind—fatae in general—don’t use magic, as such; we are magic. As a human, I’m basic Null—can see magic, sort of, but can’t use it at all. Some Nulls can’t even see it, can’t even see the fatae strap-hanging beside ‘em on the subway. It’s a sliding scale.

“Seriously, Lee. I have go down and deal with the gnomes. They have something I need back.”

“And you think that I have an answer. Man, they‘re fatae — you should have a better grasp of them than I ever could.”

I shrugged, craning my neck to look up at him. I’m not short, but Lee was one damn long drink of water. “They don’t much like the flesh-folk.”

He winced. “They’re not really made of metal. You know that, right?”

“We know that. I’m not sure they do.”

“Yeah.” He leaned against the wall and thought. I let him.

“All right. There’s one tribe, I’ve done some trading with them.”

“Hah!” I crowed, making a subtle fist-pump gesture. “I knew it.”

“Shut up. I’ve done some trading with them, I said. Not enough to figure out how their brains work and I’d sure as hell never use current on them; it would be bad manners, and I’d never get supplies from them again, anyway.”

“So you can tell me who to talk to?”

“No. But I can talk to them for you.”

Oh hell. “Your wife is going to kill me.”

Lee just laughed. I think he’s used to that reaction.

oOo

The metal tunnels were actually long, large metal pipes that had been fitted in shafts decades ago, for some MTA project or another, and then abandoned. No wonder we always ran a deficit, the way they lost materials. You went in through the waterways, everyone knew that, if they knew about gnomes at all, but that’s where things got hazy. For me, anyway. Lee sloshed along in his galoshes like he was going to market. I guess for him, he was.

“Who is that?” The voice came out of the gloom without warning, cranky and suspicious

“Who the hell do you think it is?” Lee held up a hand, and sparks flickered at his fingertips, illuminating the small circle in front of him. A gnome sat on a metal shelf that had been grafted into the tunnel, blinking in the current-light. “Who else has to bend over double in these damn tunnels, and sounds like a fucking moose slogging through this damned sewage?”

It took a minute and then my brain kicked back in. Lee, calm-tempered, soft-spoken Lee, was in trading mode. Was that how gnomes spoke to each other, or how they expected humans to speak, overall?

“Ah. You. Wasn’t expecting you.” The gnome was about knee-high to me, which meant that Lee could have stepped on him and barely noticed.

“Well, I’m here. You have any redweight?”

“You want redweight, you gotta call ahead. Not grow on trees down here.” The gnome giggled like it had said something unbearably witty.

My eyes had adjusted enough to take in details: I’d known that gnomes were small, but I hadn’t realized how much they looked like Beaux Arts fairies. Pretty little bastards. No wonder they were able to enrapt stupid Null children into following them underground into the sewers.

“How about black ash?” Lee asked.

“Maaaaaaaaybe. What you got in trade?”

Lee reached into his pocket and pulled something out. I craned my neck to see what gnomes considered fair trade for their handiwork, but his hand was tilted so I couldn’t see into his palm. Secret of the trade, I guess. Talent were just as secretive in their way as the fatae.

“Too much,” the gnome said in alarm. “Too much for black ash.”

“Hrm. So it is.” Lee started to put whatever it was back in his pocket, and then stopped. “But maybe we could deal, anyway. You answer a question, a small question, and I call it fair trade.”

“Hrmmmm. Small question? And black ash?”

“I call it fair.”

“Then not small question.”

“Small question, important answer. If not truth, then all deals end.”

Oh, the gnome did not like that, not at all. It hopped from one foot to the other, tilting its head as though it was listening to something far away. Maybe it was: I bet these tunnels carried sound unspeakably well, and I doubted there was only one guard along this stretch of sewer.

“Ask,” the gnome said, finally.

“Did you dust a young human girl, near-grown, a blonde, in the past sevenday? Is she here?”

“That two question.” But it considered again, and this time I was damn sure I heard the high-pitched echo of other voices, up and down the metal tunnel.

“Blond girl come freely,” it said finally, and with finality. “Honored guest.”

I snorted at that. For honored guest read ‘slave.’ The fatae liked to have someone else to do the housework. I didn’t think they’d hurt her, but there were other things living in the underground city, and gnomes were notoriously careless of their guests. Metals, they protected. Humans—disposable.

“Give. We bring you black ash. Now go.”

Lee made the exchange, and they shook hands on it, the gnome’s hand absurdly lost in his.

“Come on. Let’s go,” Lee said to me.

Waitaminute. “I need to—”

“We need to go. Now. “ Lee looked over his shoulder, clearly worried.

I’d asked him for help because he knew the underground kingdom. We went.

oOo

“You can’t go back there.”

“I have to.”

“Danny. Daniel.”

Nobody calls me Daniel, not even my Mom. Only my old lieutenant ever called me that, and only when he was about to ream me out something spectacular, so I’d know to loosen up my sphincter.

“I have to go back,” I told him, against his disapproving look. “The girl is down there.”

Lee sighed. “Of her own free will. Mostly.”

Yeah. The “mostly” was the kicker. She had chosen to leave home and go live in the underground kingdom; gnomes didn’t have glamour, not really, just a lot of exotic allure and pretty skin. On the “however” side, she was a legal minor, and no human should spend any length of time down there, not unless they were fixing to come down with asthma and Vitamin D deficiency. And her parents had paid me to get her back.

Humans didn’t belong down there.

Lee paced back and forth in his studio, five paces in either direction, turn-and-glare. “You’re going back down there no matter what I say, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. But you’re not going back with me,” I told him. “It could get ugly and that’s not your thing.”

Lee looked mulish, but didn’t argue. He was much more of a ‘make art not war’ sort, and he was okay with that. No heroics in that boy.

“If caught, I’ll swear I tortured you to hand over the map.”

He scowled at me. “Very funny. They won’t torture you, anyway, they’ll just eat you. Goat’s a rarity down there, and you’ve put on a nice layer of fat since you left the force.”

“The hell I have.” I’d noted the surprisingly sharp teeth on that gnome, but not thought to wonder about it. “And they don’t eat people.” I’d never heard that they did, anyway…

Lee gave up trying to scare me. “If they did, they’d have been burned out of there by now. No. Just rats and stray pets. Look…if you insist on this, there’s not a damn thing I can do against them. My magic doesn’t work that way. But I might be able to help you find the girl, once you‘re down there...”

oOo

Twenty-four hours later I was back in the tunnel, carrying a small metal sphere in the cup of my left hand and a rubber-tipped metal wand in the other. I felt like a proper idiot, and was prepared at any second to drop the damn wand in order to grab for my gun. Some kinds of cold steel made me feel more secure than others.

The wand carried a current-charge that would stun anything that came out at me, although I wasn‘t sure if it would be a fatal shock or a jump-back-Jack. Lee’d handed it to me without comment, and I‘d taken it instinctively, the cool metal fitting perfectly into my grip. “I thought you said you didn’t have anything that would work against gnomes?”

“This isn’t for gnomes. It’s for the ROUS.”

It took me a minute, then I got the joke. “Very funny.”

“Danny, I’ve been down there more than you have. I’m not kidding. Bullets won’t do the job. If you see anything with a tail, shock it and apologize later.”

Comforting. So I was moving through the tunnel, my gun holstered and my wand at the ready, keeping one eye on the shadows shifting against the walls and the other on the globe in my palm. That was the important bit of magic: it would lead me in the direction of my girl. Or a girl, anyway. A human. Lee had spelled it to seek out an upright bipedal without the metallic-gritty blood of a gnome. So, assuming they didn’t have half a dozen captive or pet humans down here….

Something moved, off to my left. I stopped, my heart racing a little more than I enjoyed, and waited. A skittering noise, and the swish of what might have been a long tail attached to a giant rat-ass. Or it could have been my over-pumped imagination. I took a better hold on the wand, and started forward again.

The quality of light was starting to increase, which means I was entering the gnomes’ domain. Joy. On the plus side, whatever had been skittering in my shadow decided to stay back. I guess the gnomes had rat-proofed or something. Or it didn’t like the taste of their flesh. Either way, it was a good thing. But I kept the wand out, anyway. I really didn’t want to have to shoot anyone. Even down here, there would be paperwork.

“You. Lost?”

I swear, the gnome hadn‘t been there half a second ago. But it was now, a foot high and all of it filled with the finest street corner ‘tude you could muster. Dress it in colors and it’d pass for a gangbanger.

“Nope. Visiting. Here to see a shut-in friend”

I can’t blame my genetic donor for my smart mouth—that came down straight from the maternal line.

The gnome didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. But he didn’t call for backup, either. Just stared at me with those oversized eyes, the ones that you just know can find you in the middle of the night in a pitch-black room, and nodded, then let me pass by.

That creeped me out, way more than anything else had. Why wasn’t he worried? What where the little metal-skins planning?

“Huuuuman.” A taunting whisper, a mocking call, the tingle of fairy-dust on my skin, like a shiver in the middle of the night, coming from ahead of me.

“Huuuuuman.”

That one came from somewhere off to my left. The shiver became an itch, the urge to follow, to find the treasure such a creature undoubtedly hid here, below ground, in its mines.

“I don’t think so, boys.” I was a little old and jaded to be dusted that easily. I had no desire to be found, seven years from now, starved to death in a metal hole.

“And don’t bother with the rats, either,” I said, more loudly. “I’ll just turn them into stew.”

Bravado–if they actually did have rodents of unusual size down here, there’s no way I’d be able to hold off more than one, two max. But the whispering faded away, and they let me continue on unmolested.

No idea how much longer I walked, waiting any moment for giant teeth to dig into my arm or leg, getting more and more unnerved each moment, when I came to a four-pronged branch in the tunnels. One way was the correct choice, the others would leave me stranded somewhere I didn’t want to be. Maybe with rats. That’s why the little bastard wasn’t worried; it knew odds were good I’d end up lost.

“All right, Lee, now’d be a good time for your toy to work.”

As though it were listening, the globe in my hand flashed red when I moved it past the leftmost option, so I turned that way.

In the distance now I could hear noises, the rumble of machinery and voices blending into grey noise. A while in, and doorways broke the smooth walls, the sheet-steel doors boasting tiny latches just perfect for gnome hands. There weren’t any markings on the doors that I could see, but remembering the bush-baby peepers on that gnome, I didn’t assume that meant there wasn’t huge signs everywhere my crap day-timer sight was missing.

Another multi-pronged split in the hallway, and I waved the globe back and forth slowly, letting it tell me where to go. If I hadn’t had the globe, I’d have been lost ten ways from Monday. Hopefully it would work on the way out, too, or my bones would wash out into the East river’s low tide seven days from now, gnawed bare.

“Stop freaking yourself out, Hendrickson.”

This time the globe suggested the right side, and about five doors down that hallway, it flared so bright I almost dropped it.

“Here, then?”

The sphere declined to answer. Either it was worn out, or it didn’t feel my stupid-ass question deserved an answer.

I tried the door handle but, as expected, couldn’t quite get my hand to work the latch properly. Thinking quick, I took the wand and bent the non-grounded end slightly. The metal was soft enough to do it without much effort, although I hated to ruin the thing. Not just because I didn’t know what effect it might have on it as a weapon but because it was a beautiful piece. Lee couldn’t make anything simply utilitarian. It wasn’t his nature.

The bend slid under the handle, and I could apply the right pressure to make the lock click open. Go me! I pushed gently, and the door swung open. Alert to anything from screams to gunshots to a vase coming down on my head, I stepped inside.

The room was about as far from the bleak exterior hallway as you could get. The walls were gray rock, framed at ceiling and floor with a dark, patinaed metal, and the floor was mostly covered in a thick fleecy rug, white and soft to the touch. There wasn’t any art on the wall, but the bed had a bright blue coverlet, and there were pillows that looked comfortable. A white wood vanity with a mirror above it, and enough gewgaws scattered around to make any 14-year-old girl happy, I guessed.

No photos of her loving parents, I noted. No photos at all. No artwork, nothing representational. The fatae loved beauty, but mostly their own. Not so much about looking at pretties someone else made. That seemed to be a human thing…something Miss Susan was already losing.

“Who are you?”

I had been so busy looking around, I hadn’t secured all the entrances. I turned slowly to face the girl who’d come in through a side door, cursing myself upside and down. Thankfully, she was carrying a towel, not something that could be thrown or otherwise used as a weapon, and seemed disinclined to scream.

“Hello, Susan. I’m Danny. Your folks asked me to stop by and check on you. They’ve been worried, you know.”

Susan didn’t even blink, although she did shrug. Draping the towel across her neck, she walked into the room and sat down at the vanity, peering into the mirror as though checking for wrinkles. Her posture and pose was that of a mature woman, but her body was still skinny-gawky teenager, and her pose was just that —a pose.

“You should at least have left them a note, told them that you were all right.”

“They’ll forget about me, get a new kid,” she said, oh so casually. “That’s how it works, right?”

Oh we were going to play that game, were we?

“Sometimes. But mostly, no. Mostly the parents worry and stress and hire people to go looking, and sometimes they even risk their own lives—their souls—to bring back their loved one.”

I wasn’t getting through; I’d known I wouldn’t the moment I saw her. She was completely dusted. To her, this wasn’t a dreary hole in a dreary tunnel: it was fairyland, and she was the shiny new queen. Why did nobody read Thomas the Rhymer any more?

“You’re here to try and talk me back into going Above. I’m not interested. Tell my parents I’m fine.”

“You really think they’re going to believe that? Come tell them yourself.”

“No. If I leave, I’ll never find my way back. Ageo told me so. I’m not going to risk all this just to reassure them.”

Well, she had the Snow Queen cold down already. I very much did not like Miss Susan at all.

“Look.” She stopped and looked at me. She had her father’s eyes, and her mother’s mouth. Nowhere near as pretty as she wanted to be, but not bad, overall. Give her another ten years and she might even break a few hearts. But not if she stayed down here.

“You have no right to tell me what to do.”

“True. I don’t.” And telling her anything would be useless, even if she hadn’t been dusted—she was a teenager. Short of dragging her out of there by her hair, there wasn’t much I could do.

The hair thing was tempting. But I had one card I hadn’t played. I hadn’t even thought to, honest, but seeing her sitting there trying so desperately to be what she thought was adult and sophisticated and … fatae-acceptable…. .

She had been missing for six days now. One day left, before she was lost to the above world forever.

I made my decision before I let myself think about it. If I thought about it, we’d lose her.

Miss Susan thought I was human. Most people do. I think human, I live human, I pass for human even among people who are looking for non-human; at least until the NYPD decided to change unofficial policy and I had to get out or be asked some uncomfortable questions at my next physical.

But I’m not human. Not entirely.

I ran my hands through my hair, intentionally flattening the brown curls so that my horns showed through, impossible even for a Null to overlook. They’re not elegant or impressive or even any use as a weapon, but they’re there, if I choose to shown them: short, curved nubs rising out of my scalp like…okay, like a baby goat’s, yeah. I could have taken my boots off to show the hoof-like growth that protects my toes, but it was too damn much effort to pull off cowboy boots, and I didn’t need it anyway. The horns would catch her attention, and then my genetics—and her brain chemistry—would handle the rest.

“Susan.”

She had gone back to the mirror, painting up her eyes to look wider, more helpless…more gnome-like. What a waste. Although I suppose she should be thankful the angeli didn’t catch her eye. Those sadistic bastards would encourage her to do body mods, just for their own entertainment.

“Susan.”

I moved across the room and stood behind her. My reflection in her mirror was from hip to shoulder, and I paused a moment to consider how that would look to her. I’m in damn good shape, in the prime of my life, and if you don’t mind some pelt I’m told I’m pretty damn cute. Didn’t matter. This wasn’t about sex or even physical attraction, but seduction. The gnomes lured her down; I had to lure her back.

My dusting had to be stronger than theirs.

I placed a hand on her shoulder, lightly enough to be a caress, firmly enough to be thrilling to a young girl who didn’t know the first thing about men but was old enough to be intrigued. Carefully, carefully. I relaxed the tight hold I normally kept on my instincts, leaned forward so that my face came into view in the mirror, close to her ear, and whispered again, “Susan.”

Susan’s gaze flicked up, instinctively, against her will, and met my gaze in the mirror. My narrow face seemed leaner, my cheekbones more prominent, my eyes more gold than brown, and the horns almost shimmered white in the silvered mirror.

There was no way I could have passed for human, not in any crowd.

Susan’s pink-painted mouth fell open a little, showing teeth that had been a gift from the orthodontist, and her gaze lifted and zeroed right in on my horns. Typical.

“You think that you know what’s fantastic in this world?” I asked her, still keeping my voice low, my touch gentle. “You think it’s down here, in these caves and stone and steel?”

She swallowed hard, but didn’t move, the eye pencil still in her hand.

“Up above, my sweet. Up above, in the green grass and the flowering trees. The sun warms our bones and we dance until we are exhausted and then we sprawl in the shade and feast until we sleep, and then we rise and do it again.”

Her breathing sped up, just a bit, and I moved my hand down from her shoulder to her upper arm. “We eat fresh fruit and cheese, and wash it down with wine, and shout into the winds…. We are free. None of this enclosed space, this lack of fresh air or blue sky. Gnomes look down, they see only the dirt. Nothing grows here. Come with me, sweet Susan. Come see the world in all its glory. See the magic that surrounds us, every day.”

Everything I was telling her was true. Full-blooded fauns were hedonistic, careless, loving sorts. Useless in any practical manner, but a lot of fun to hang out with, and they simply adored every tingle of magic they could get their hooves on.

Pity they were also callous bastards.

“I am promised here…” she managed. Her eyes were very wide now, like she’d ingested a full dose of belladona, and she hadn’t blinked once while I was talking, then her lids fluttered three, four, six times in a row, trying to recover.

“Promises are made to be broken,” I told her. “Otherwise there wouldn‘t be half as much art or music in the world.”

That went over her head a bit—ah, the teen years, when you think everything’s forever, and their hearts will never be broken.

I was about to educate her.

I knelt down and rested my chin lightly on her shoulder, still keeping my touch gentle. Spooking her now would be catastrophic. “You’ve only seen one side of fairyland,” I told her. My voice was brown sugar and warm breezes, soft grass and the smell of apple blossoms and honey. “Come see more of it. Griffins and dryads are in Central Park, my sweet, and dragons live in the hills of Pennsylvania. Piskies flitter in the Botanical Gardens, and kelpies swim off the Seaport‘s piers….”

All true. Of course, the dryads didn’t mingle much, and the dragons didn’t mingle at all, kelpies were nasty-tempered, smelly beasts…and the less said about piskies the better.

“So much to see…so many creatures to dance with. How can you let yourself waste away here, living in this single room like a drudge when you should be a princess….”

Her eyes sparkled at that, and I almost had her. My hand rose up her arm again, stroking her hair. “Sunlight suits you, my sweet,” I said, leaning in for the kill. “Come with me, and I will show you the true wonders of the fairy world.”

I sounded like a B-grade Hollywood movie extra, but it was working. Her eyes started to glaze over, and her mouth curved up in a dreamy smile, even as I threaded my fingers in her hair, and tugged her head back just a little, as though to deliver a first kiss.

Her head lolled to the side, her body utterly relaxed as my dusting took effect, and I scooped her into my arms without hesitation.

It was a crap way to rescue a princess, but I wasn’t exactly prince charming.

oOo

By the time Miss Susan recovered from the hormonal overload enough to protest, she was back in her parents’ care, and I was on my way back to the office. They had been all sorts of overjoyed not only to see her, but to have assurances that she was unmolested. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that she wasn’t entirely untouched. All I did was remove her from the scene—and I’d dusted her myself to do it

Yeah, I had good intentions and good results, but she had the taste now sexual, the rush magic could bring, and odds were pretty damn good that she’d disappear again, chasing after another hit. They’d lost her already; they just didn’t know it yet.

All I could hope was that the images I’d used in my dusting would keep her aboveground this time. There were other humans who associated with those breeds… they’d be able to keep an eye out for her, teach her the ropes. Keep her out of too much trouble. And maybe by then, she’d have grown up enough to handle it.

The fatae weren’t bad company, as it went. It was just better to accept what you were, before you went chasing something else.

That thought kept me company as I walked up the steps to my office, and let myself in the door, looking around the space with a sense of relief. Home. Wood furniture, plants, light…they were all a steady, solid reminder. I was human.

But my little stunt reminded me that I was also faun. My father’s son, the product of my magical genes. A real charming sonofabitch when it came to women.

I didn’t like it, I didn’t let it out very often…but it was me, as much as current—and art—was Lee. Me, who I am. What I am.

I sat down in my chair, and reached for the bottle in my desk. Not to forget; I never drank to forget. I drank to remember. I drank so that the pleasant warmth of the booze, the heady shot of inebriation, would remind me that I wasn’t entirely fatae. My human half was stronger. I wasn’t my father.

Some days, I needed the reminder.

BONUS FEATURES

Excerpts from A Handbook for Working with Talents, a handbook

(Didier, Sergei. d.y.m.k. press, 1st edition, 2014)

"Benjamin Franklin: Genius, Talent and Troublemaker"

In history class we learn about Ben Franklin. Bon vivant, man of letters and science, inquiring mind.

They don't tell you that he was also one of the most influential Talents of his time. Or that he is credited — blamed, by some — for the formation of the first Mages' Council in America.1 Knowing this, one looks at the experiments he performed with weather, including the creation of a lightning rod to draw down electricity in order to experiment on it, and the now legendary kite-and-key story, with a slightly different eye.2

Before his work (and similar experiments being done in France and elsewhere during the same time period), any understanding of what lightning was—and any possible connection to electricity—was minimal, at best. The long-held religious interpretations were that lightning was the wrath of (a) god coming down upon the sinning or unworthy. In fact, science, that rational study, was uncertain about the origins and structure of electricity itself: although a fascination with it dates back to the ancient Greeks, any kind of detailed observation had of necessity been confined to the results rather than a quantifiable, scientific breakdown of its origin or cause.

In 1746, that changes drastically, when an object known as a Leyden Jar (so named for the University of Leyden, where its creator, Pieter van Musschenbroek, studied) became all the craze in Europe, for its ability to collect static electricity in a glass jar, and use it to create shocks in those who touched it. The connection between this lightning in a bottle and the lightning which appeared in the sky with similar but much more impressive results was obvious. But how to test any theories on such a powerful force of nature?

One of the popular scientific theories at the time was that electricity formed out of two opposing forces—that those forces "fought," and out of that fighting created energy. Franklin's experiment proved—to the public world—that electricity instead was comprised of a "common element." However, in private notes taken by his son and student, who was also present during the experiments, Franklin comments on the "second electricised element" encountered during correct atmospheric conditions, and which could be felt only within his body, and not register in any of the apparatus he had set up for measurement.

That element, the son's notes continued, sent such a surge of Power through his body "as was to make him feel rejoiced with the Power as was our gift and our joy, and Empowered to do as he might wish, without thought of the cost." His work thus confirmed what some magic-users had long-suspected: that the ability within them was woken not by spells or sacrifices, but through the infusion of a positive charge into receptive cells within their body that transform current into power.
More, his work confirmed the nature of that charge, and how one might intentionally channel it.

However, because of the secretive and close-mouthed nature of Talents, arising from the waves of persecution they had endured over the generations, this information was at first not widely disseminated. Instead, it was passed, as was much of their knowledge, from mentor to student, one transference at a time.

Fortunately, Franklin's indoctrination as a Talent was not enough to hold back his admiration for the democratic ideal, and—after a rather strident argument with his son and several other Talents in the community—he decided to offer his knowledge to the Talented community as a whole, leading to a radical change in how magic—now called current—was viewed and used.

(from from A Handbook for Working with Talents, 1st edition, by Sergei Didier. dymk press, 2012)

1 (The work-journal of John Ebeneezer, from the private collection of Wren Valere. Note in margin of bell lightning lecture from March 1994. Seconded in discussion with Council members, unverified.)

2. (The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Edited by Leonard W. Labaree. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962. Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson dated September 1753.)

Mentorships and Journeyman Practices in the Cosa

Magic, as a force by or through which events or actions are influenced, has been around for as long as humanity, and doubtless before[1]. As a force, or energy, or however it is defined by both users and observers, there is no doubt that the energy which enables magic is a part of the primal universe.

Much has been made in the literary media of how magicians are trained, from the ‘coven’ theories of traditional witchcraft, to the master-apprentice system, and the ‘wizarding school’ stories popularized most recently by LeGuin, Wynne-Jones, Bradley and Rowling. And, of course, the historical precedence of the druids and other religious and semi-religious orders, which seemed magical as much as mystical in their knowledge to outsiders.

It is not known precisely when the first realization of magic–so-called ‘Talent’– as a manageable, trainable skillset came into being; in the days before the formal creation of the Cosa Nostradamus, in what is referred to alternately as the “Old Time,” or the “Time Before,” a person with talent often had no idea who or what they were, and stumbled up on their abilities purely by happenstance. This led to a number of what were referred to, dismissively, as ‘hedge-witches’ and ‘gutter-mages’–individuals who often did as much harm as help with their magics. They did not understand what they did, or how to harness it.

It did not help that, at that time, magic was considered a supernatural phenomena, often influenced by gods or devils, demons or other creatures we now know to be part of the fatae or magical community, but not otherwise related to magic (exception: demon, e.g.). As such, practitioners were viewed alternately with fear or suspicion, and only rarely, when tied to the local religious beliefs, were they held to any esteem. In many cases, those who showed any ability at all were immediately co-opted into the local religious structures either as priests or handmaidens, but just as often as suitable sacrifices for a jealous or hungry God–said God possibly being another, pre-established magic user. This is specifically hypothesized in the writings of Professor Archibald Leonard, Chair of Antiquities at the H. Jones Museum of Artifacts and Research, specifically referring to the pre-Incan civilizations of Peru near the Pachacamac temple complex outside of Lima.

By the time the Cosa was first mentioned in print[2], it was with reference to the secretive nature of their selection and training, with specific mention of the one-on-one nature of that training: “And so did one take on another, with no recourse to the child’s parents, and so did that child disappear from the world of God’s works and become a familiar of the dire practices hidden behind such curtains as to be invisible to God Almighty and the very gift of Redemption.”

By that we may assume that the mentorship practices of the Cosa were established early on in its history, with the associated ‘family lines’ being drawn in the same way. A Talent would not formally identify his or herself as being “Jane Doe, daughter of Susan and Michael Doe from Montana” but “Jane, student of John, student of Joseph, student of Julia, of the line of Jacob from Montreal...”

The Cosa Nostradamus FAQ

What is the Cosa Nostradamus?

It's the name given to the entire magical community–Human Talent and non-human 'fatae.' Also the all-encompassing name for the books set in the world of the Cosa Nostradamus.

What are fatae?

The fatae are any creatures of supernatural origins, specifically those who are made of or utilize magic in some way. Most people assume it simply refers to the Fates, but the term "Fairies" (fate or fata) comes from the Latin fatae—which in the wider use of the word simply meant supernatural creatures with nature-associations. The Fates (in English) were merely one aspect of that supernatural world (and they were actually "Moiare" in Greek, and "Parcae" in Roman mythology, I think). The Italian tradition of the fairy tale is one of the oldest, and had the added advantage (to me) of not being Celtic. I wanted to stay away from the Anglo interpretations of mythology, since the point of the Cosa Nostradamus is that it is worldwide, and ancient.

How many books are in the Cosa Nostradamus universe, and do you need to read them in order?

There are currently six books IN THE “Retrievers” series (STAYING DEAD, CURSE THE DARK, BRING IT ON, BURNING BRIDGES, FREE FALL and BLOOD FROM STONE), all featuring Wren Valere, the Retriever, and her cohorts Sergei Didier and the demon P.B.

The PSI novels , featuring paranormal investigator Bonnie Torres, will begin in May 2010 with HARD MAGIC, and continue through PACK OF LIES and TRICKS OF THE TRADE.

It's not necessary to read the books in order, but I generally suggest that you do, in order to get a real sense for the growth of the characters. Also, I do refer back to events in previous books. You can start with either series, once they're out; they are independent of each other. The short stories can be read in any order.

Short stories?

What you have in your hot little e-reading hands, right now. And yes, there probably will be more.

Are there any vampires in the Cosa Nostradamus?

No. I reserve the right to have something exist on blood, but there are no vampires as such. Why? Because there aren't. There are lycanthropes, though.

How do you feel about fanfiction?

I think that fanfiction is a wonderful thing, an expression of affection on the part of the fan-writer. I also think that anyone writing Cosa fan fiction should never show it to me, or tell me about it, for various technical and legal reasons. Also? Being demon, PB doesn't have a sex drive. Sorry, folks.

Is there ever going to be a plush version of P.B.?

As soon as I find someone who can make me a reasonable prototype, you betcha!

Questions for the FAQ? Email me at LAG@lauraannegilman.net

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About the Author:

Laura Anne Gilman is the author of the Cosa Nostradamus books for Luna (the “Retrievers” and “Paranormal Scene Investigations” urban fantasy series), and critically-acclaimed The Vineart War trilogy from Pocket ( the first book, FLESH AND FIRE, was short-listed as a “Best Book of 2009” from Library Journal and nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novel). She is also a member of the on-line writers’ consortium BookVew Café, and continues to write and sell short fiction. She also writes paranormal romances as Anna Leonard.

Connect Online:

Official website: http://www.lauraannegilman.net

Twitter: @LAGilman

Livejournal: http://suricattus.livejournal.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/lauraanne.gilman

1 The work-journal of John Ebeneezer, from the private collection of Wren Valere; pp 34-35, section 7a, “historical antecedents of magic and the Older Beings of Power.”

2 (Of Magic and Magic-Users”, from the Wilibrod Collection in Utrecht. Vatican Library, Private Collection (Restricted), date and author unknown but probably ca. 500 A.D.