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Dragon Justice
Laura Anne Gilman


We knew the job was impossible when we took it…In my time with PUPI, formally known as Private, Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations, I’ve seen a lot. Learned a lot. And not all of it’s been good. But what we do – making people accountable for crimes committed with magic – is important work. Still. Even I need to take a break every now and again. Or so I’ve just been told (ordered).So hey, vacation. Maybe I’ll finally figure out what’s going on with the “special bond” between me and the bossman, Benjamin Venec. Venec seems to like that idea – he’s invited me down to join him on a jaunt to Philly. But no sooner do I arrive in the City of Brotherly Love than we’re called in to look at a dead body. And that’s when life gets really complicated…."Layers of mystery, science, politics, romance, and old-fashioned investigative work mixed with high-tech spellcraft." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Pack of Lies







WE KNEW THE JOB WAS IMPOSSIBLE WHEN WE TOOK IT...

In my time with PUPI, formally known as Private, Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations, I’ve seen a lot. Learned a lot. And not all of it’s been good. But what we do—make people accountable for crimes committed with magic—is important work.

Still. Even I need to take a break every now and again. Or so I’ve just been told (ordered).

So hey, vacation. Maybe I’ll finally figure out what’s going on with the “special bond” between me and the boss man, Benjamin Venec. Venec seems to like that idea—he’s invited me down to join him on a jaunt to Philly. But no sooner do I arrive in the City of Brotherly Love than we’re called in to look at a dead body.

And that’s when life gets really complicated....


Praise for






PARANORMAL SCENE INVESTIGATIONS

Hard Magic

“Readers will love the Mythbusters-style fun of smart, sassy people solving mysteries through experimentation, failure and blowing stuff up.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The mystery is solid, the characterization strong, the plot fast-paced and the final product solid. This is a great start to a new series.”

—Green Man Review

Pack of Lies

“Bonnie’s intelligence and perceptiveness really make this book go, and readers will root for her and the team to solve their investigation.”

—RT Book Reviews, Top Pick

“Pack of Lies is not to be missed by urban fantasy fans looking for a great mystery.”

—Reading with Tequila

Tricks of the Trade

“Innovative world building coupled with rich characterization continues to improve as we enter the third book of this series.”

—Smexy Books Romance Reviews

“I want the next book now! I was not ready to leave this world when I finished Tricks of the Trade.”

—Reading Reality


Dragon Justice

Laura Anne Gilman




www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)


To all the readers who have, over the years, joined the Cosa Nostradamus. None of this would have happened without you.


Contents

Prologue (#u36e681e8-37af-5aed-ad4e-bf1944fdc14d)

Chapter 1 (#uecced06e-e289-5d93-8023-551599e1d73a)

Chapter 2 (#uc613350e-3c84-56dd-a8e4-6df13f1b0525)

Chapter 3 (#ud069dc71-9ad1-5fcd-9269-1519854fac95)

Chapter 4 (#uf8774967-891e-5917-ab72-e90b83ec743f)

Chapter 5 (#ue3582daa-9849-59a1-9a1e-9e6f9c5e5a4d)

Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)


Prologue

Yesterday was, unofficially, the second anniversary of PUPI. Two years ago, we were hired, me and Nick, Nifty, Pietr, and Sharon.

Nobody brought cupcakes. Nobody said a word. But we all knew.

You can spend your entire life wondering if you’ve made a difference. We know. Two years. A lot accomplished. A long way to go.

There’s no sign on our building; it’s just another mixed-use brickwork like hundreds of others in Manhattan. Too far uptown to be fashionable, too well kept to be fashionably seedy, seven stories and a clean but boring lobby with a row of nameplates and buzzers. Ours simply read P.U.P.I.

The plaque outside our door, on the seventh—top—floor repeated the terseness etched in bronze. If you came this far, you knew who we were and what we did.

My name is Bonnie Torres. A long time ago not so long ago, I was a newly minted college grad with a degree and enthusiasm—and not a clue where to go with it. Now I’m lead investigator with PUPI, the Private, Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigators of the Cosa Nostradamus. I spend my days looking underneath the rocks of the magical community, finding the things my fellow Talent want to keep hidden. We use magic to fight magic, to find the evidence the cops can’t, to prove the crimes the rest of the world can’t see.

Sounds pretty glam, right?

So far, in those two years, I’ve been shot at, verbally abused, nailed with a psi-bomb, physically threatened, seen people—human and otherwise—die and been unable to prevent it, and had most of my illusions about the inherent fairness of life yanked out from under me. Some days, it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning.

And then I think about what we’ve done, and I haul myself out and get my ass to the office. Because this, PUPI, what we do? It matters.

The boss likes to give a lecture about how we’re not crusaders or superheroes. The world’s too big a place for us to save all of it. He lectures us, and he knows that we’re listening, but we don’t believe him. Hell, he doesn’t even believe himself, not really, otherwise he wouldn’t be here with the rest of us, training us, teaching us enough to stay alive and get our job done.

If he—and Ian Stosser, our founder—didn’t believe that we could save someone, maybe not the world, but someone who might otherwise fall, there wouldn’t be a PUPI at all.


Chapter 1

We hit the scene, and I started delegating. “All right, I want you to get a perimeter reading—”

“Oh, god. Again?”

I stopped and looked at my companion, puzzled. “What do you mean, again?”

“Again. This.” Farshad made a helpless little gesture, indicating the room we’d just walked into.

I put my kit down on the floor and tried to see whatever it was he was reacting to. It was a nice room. It was a nice house, from what I’d seen on the walk through it. The room in front of us had just the right amount of furniture, less than fifty years old but well crafted, not Ikea specials or en suite acquisitions from a “fine furnishings” catalog. Paintings on the wall were original, if not spectacular, the rugs underfoot quality but not hand-woven. It seemed pretty straightforward and ordinary. For a crime scene, anyway.

“What?” I asked again, aware, even if Farshad wasn’t, that the client was waiting in the hallway outside the room, impatient for us to get on with it. I’d gotten to the office that morning and been handed a job ticket and a trainee. I hadn’t even had time to grab a cup of coffee before we were off to the scene, and my patience might not have been all that patient.

My trainee shook his head, clearly resigned to the fact that I just wasn’t getting it. “Don’t you ever get tired of all this? Perimeter readings, scan-and-pan, collect evidence, sort and discard? You don’t find it boring?” Far swept his hand over the scene, an expression of almost comical resignation on his face. I looked again, then looked back at him.

“Not really, no.”

Farshad was one of our new hires; he’d only been on the job for three months. If he was bored with the routine already, he wouldn’t last to his half-year evaluation.

He opened his mouth to say something, and I held up a hand to stop him. “Just go into fugue and see what you can find, okay?”

Far nodded, sinking onto his haunches and resting his hands on his knees. I counted silently with him as he slipped into the fugue state that made concentrating current easier, and then followed down after him. Once, when I’d been a new-made pup, I’d had to count back, too. Now it was a matter of breathing deep, once, and sliding into my core.

This was Far’s third site. I’d lost count around twenty-five. We’d gotten busy over the past year. That was why we’d hired new staff—and why I was stuck training them.

All right, not entirely fair; everyone was doing newbie-training. But I seemed to be the only one who hated it. Griping, though, did not close the case, and the client was waiting.

An exhale, and I opened my eyes to examine the site again. Seen in mage-sight, the rug and sofa were splattered with a dark stain. Not blood or ichor; that would have shown up with normal eyesight. It didn’t carry any of the neon-sharp trace of current, either, so it wasn’t magical. Something new? Part of me groaned—an open-and-shut investigation would have been nice, considering the paperwork waiting for me back at the office. On the other hand…something new?

Every sense I had perked up at the thought.

* * *

We made it back to the office before lunch, despite the usual Monday transit snafus. At least it hadn’t been raining; it had rained every day for the past week. Summer would be starting soon—maybe the sun would show up eventually.

Venec had set up shop today in the smallest conference room, spreading his gear over the table. When we came in, he leaned back in the single chair at the table, an interesting contrast to his usual hold-up-the-wall stance.

“Report.”

I’d written my own evaluation of the site while we were there, taking samples both magical and physical, but I let Farshad make his initial report unassisted. Far quavered a little under Venec’s sharp bark, but then stood tall and delivered. Good pup.

The job was open-and-shut after all—the client’s son had tried to exorcise a family ghost who was annoying him and ended up attracting a succubus. The ghost escaped; the boy did not. We had the succubus’s trace now, though, so the client could negotiate for her idiot offspring’s return—or not, as she still had two other kids who looked to be smarter than their brother. Whatever happened, it wasn’t our concern any longer. PUPI investigated and handed over our findings; we were not judge, jury, or negotiator.

In slightly longer words, Far was telling Venec exactly that. Minus the comment about possibly not ransoming the teenager: it was a common office opinion that three-year-olds had more tact than I did.

*he’s doing well*

The thought came to me, not in the push of emotions or sensations the way pinging—current-to-current communication—usually did, but a soft voice in my ear, clear and defined. It was unnatural as hell, but after a year of it, I didn’t even flinch.

*he’s not going to make it* I sent back, with the added implication of a money bet.

There was a sense of snorting amusement and acceptance of my bet. You took your amusement where you could some days.

The source of that mental snort was now leaning forward in his chair, listening to Far’s report, not a twitch indicating that he wasn’t giving the boy one hundred percent attention. Benjamin Venec. One of the two founding partners of PUPI—Private, Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations. Tall, dark, and cranky. Sexy as hell, if you liked the type. My boss. And, much to our combined and considerable dismay, my “destined merge,” according to every magical source and Talent we could consult.

That had been, putting it mildly, an unpleasant, unwanted surprise. To both of us.

The Merge was—according to legend, because there were no modern references—what happened when two matched Talent encountered each other, when our cores blended or swirled or something equally annoying and sparkly.

The best hypothesis we could put together was that the Merge was some kind of coded breeding program to make sure there were little baby magic users for the next generation. Talent wasn’t purely genetic, but it did seem to bud in family trees more often than not.

The idea of magic having an ulterior goal was bad enough; being its means was worse. I was twenty-four and in no mood to become a broodmare, even if Venec had been so inclined. More to the point, neither of us took very well to anyone telling us what—or who—our destiny was, especially since it would totally screw with the dynamics of a job we both put first, second, and occasionally third in our lives.

In true rational, adult fashion, we’d therefore both spent the first few months ignoring it. That had been pretty much a failure; when you literally spark around someone, you notice. And so does everyone else. So then we tried managing it, maintaining our distance and shutting down everything except essential contact. That hadn’t worked so well either, especially after Ben was attacked by a hellhound about seven-eight months ago, and I caught the pain-rebound through our connection.

The cat had been out of the bag then; we’d had to tell the others. Awkward didn’t even begin to cover it. But the team dealt with it, mostly. Truthfully, being able to communicate so easily, share information along the thinnest line of current other Talent wouldn’t even sense, made the job much easier. Only problem was, using it bound us together even more, until it became impossible to shut the other out entirely. The Merge was as stubborn as we were, it seemed.

I kept my walls all the way up off-hours, though, and Venec did the same. We stayed out of each other’s personal lives.

Mostly.

Right now, it was all work. Venec now had his gaze fixed on Far in a way that generally made even us old-timers nervous, wondering what we’d missed that the Big Dog was about to point out.

Venec finally relented on the stare and asked, “If you were to approach the scene again, fresh, what would you do differently?”

The right answer to that was “nothing.” You approached every scene the same way: with no expectations or assumptions. Far fumbled it the way all the newbies did, trying to determine what he’d missed that the Big Dog was going to slap him down for. I tuned it out and let a tendril of current skim out into the office. My coworkers’ individual current brushed against me in absent greeting, the magical equivalent of a raised hand or nod, giving me a sense of the office moving: people coming in and out, talking, working out evidence, or just refilling their brains with caffeine and protein.

Lunchtime was serious business in this office. Current burned calories, and a PUP used more current on a daily basis than most Talent did in a month.

The sense of movement was comforting, like mental white noise. All was right with the world, or at least our small corner of it, and I’d learned enough to cherish the moment.

Far stumbled to a halt in his report and risked looking at me. I kept my face still, not sure if I should be frowning or giving an approving nod.

“All right. Good job, you two.” Venec nodded his own approval, making Far sag a little in relief. “Farshad, write up the report and file it. Lou will invoice and close the file. And then go get some lunch. You look paler than normal.”

Far grinned at that, accepting the usual joke—he was about as pale as a thundercloud—and beat a hasty retreat.

“You’re wrong,” Venec said out loud. “He’ll make it.”

Big Dog was still a better judge of people than I could ever hope to be, so I didn’t argue. But the truth was, we’d gone through seven new-hired PUPs in the past nine months, hire-to-fire. One of them, rather spectacularly, had only made it a week before giving notice. Venec had hired all of them; occasionally, even he was wrong.

* * *

I was amazed, sometimes, when I came into the office in the morning and there were so many people here. We’d started out with five PUPs. We had nine in the field right now, plus our office manager, Lou, and her cousin’s daughter Nisa, who helped out in the back office part-time while she went to school. And Venec and Stosser, of course. Thirteen people. Crazy, right?

“If he’s doing so well, you’ll take me off babysitting duty?” I asked, hopeful but not really expecting a positive response. “Seriously, Venec, I’m better in the lab than I am riding herd. Pietr is way better, and so is Sharon.”

“Objection noted,” he said calmly. “Again.”

“Ben…” I wasn’t whining. I wasn’t begging, either. The fact that I was using his first name, though, was a warning sign to both of us. Usually I didn’t slip in the office. I tested my walls: half-up, so anyone could reach me, but enough that I shouldn’t be leaking anything through the Merge. Just like the rest of the magic we worked with, we’d gotten it down to a science. Everything was totally under control—except the sparks that flared through both our cores when we touched, that is. We just made damn sure not to touch anymore.

Which, by the way, sucked. He was nice to touch, toned and muscular, with just enough flesh under the skin to feel good. Months after my hand last touched him, the feel remained.

From the flicker in his gaze, he remembered, too. “You go where you’re needed, and right now we need you riding herd as well as being brilliant. Now put some food in your stomach, too. I can hear it growling from here.”

Benjamin Venec could be a right proper and deeply irritating bastard when he wanted to be. He was also the boss. And he was right, damn it.

I saluted sloppily and turned on my three-inch boot heel, a flounce of which I was justifiably proud. I did not slam the door shut behind me. That would have been rude.

By the time I’d stalked down the hallway to the break room, the soothing green-and-cream decor had done its job, and my brain had stopped fizzing at me. Calmer now, I was able to see his point: it wasn’t about teaching the newbies but working with them. The things we did on a regular basis required everyone to be comfortable with each other, on a level most people aren’t ready for—lonejack or Council, we’re trained one-on-one, not classroom-style, and group-work takes some getting used to.

So, by putting me in the training rotation, the newbies got used to me being in their personal space, both physical and magical. And vice versa—I might be used to working in a group, but I still needed to learn each individual’s signature.

The fact that I hated teaching, would much rather have been in the office working up a new cantrip or spell, didn’t matter. Venec was pushing me, making me get out of my comfort zone, and making sure I stayed a viable member of the team.

Making sure I did the best job possible by challenging me in the area of my least competence.

Knowing that you’re being manipulated isn’t always a bad thing: you can either fight it or let it do its job. Since its job was to ensure that I could do my job, I let it go.

The smell of something warm and meat-filled came through the doorway, drawing me into the break room, my stomach even louder now. The need for more coffee was officially secondary to the need for food.

I noted there was someone else in the break room even as that person greeted me with a wave and “heya, dandelion.” I returned the wave, going straight for the fridge.

“Hey, yourself,” I said, grabbing a packet of chocolate pudding and an anonymous wrapped sandwich, then turning to face my coworker. “You close your ticket?”

Nicky shook his head mournfully. “Held over by popular demand. Seems our client wasn’t quite forthcoming on all that was stolen.”

I snorted in a way that would have made my mentor shake his head in genteel dismay. “Surprise. Not.”

After the ki-rin disaster we’d somehow gotten a few more jobs, but then came the Tricks case, that damned prankster, and the horse-trading Venec had indulged in to satisfy his sense of fair play. In the aftermath, there had been a month of utter silence when we’d figured it was all over, nobody would trust us to find a missing gerbil. I’d even started browsing the want ads, not that there was anything there I was qualified for, much less interested in.

Then, all of a sudden, it was like the floodgates opened. Okay, a steady trickle through the gates. The Eastern Council hadn’t given us their gold seal of approval yet, but the rank-and-file Council were bringing us their troubles.

The problem was, most of them held the “above the rules” attitude that had made Ian Stosser decide there was a need for us in the Cosa Nostradamus to begin with. It’s tough to solve a supernatural crime. It’s almost impossible when the client doesn’t give over all the gory details at the start.

Nicky had gotten one of those.

I’d gotten pretty good at holding back exasperated sighs. “At some point, they’re going to have to realize that we’re not going to judge them. Right?”

Nick snorted in response, and I flopped down on the sofa next to him, swinging my feet up into his lap and unwrapping the sandwich. “Okay, maybe not.”

Nick shoved my feet back onto the ground and went back to marking something in his notebook. Since current messed with electronics something fierce, most Talent couldn’t use recorders or cameras, so we all carried notebooks around like twentieth-century beat cops. I’d added a sketchbook to my kit, but Nick couldn’t draw a straight line if you gave him a ruler. I know, I’d tried.

“Just be glad you weren’t here when the smoke detector went off again,” he said.

I groaned. “What’s that, the third time this month?”

“Yeah. Scared the crap out of Nisa.”

“Poor kid. She so doesn’t deserve to be stuck here with us.”

Nicky just snickered.

“I didn’t see anything on the board—I wonder if I could get tomorrow off,” I said, biting into my lunch. Ham and cheese. Not bad. Time off would be nice. I’d gotten an invite to go sailing from a woman I’d met the week before, and I wanted to take her up on it before she decided I wasn’t interested. Despite the Merge, I was trying to keep some semblance of a normal social life, even if very few of my hookups ended up with an actual hookup these days.

“Doubtful,” Nick said, not looking up. “Stosser took a new client into the back office about ten minutes ago. Got your name all over it.”

“Oh, gods above and below.” I took another bite, that news suggesting that lunch might be abbreviated. “Can’t someone else handle it?”

“Fatae.”

That one short word made me put down my sandwich, thoughts of my new acquaintance and a lazy afternoon on the water not quite forgotten but shoved aside. “Seriously?”

Nick finally looked up from his notebook. “Serious as a heart attack. No idea the breed. They were cloaked like it was midwinter. Human-tall, human-wide, no visible tails or fur.”

That didn’t rule much out—most of the fatae in New York City were human-shaped, enough to get by on a casual glance, anyway. There were a few horned and hooved types, and a few clearly not-human breeds living in the parks or underground, but they were the minority. And when they had a problem, most of them dealt with it internally. In fact, most of the breeds dealt with their own shit. For one of them to come to us…

It could be good, or it could be seriously bad. The last time we’d gotten tangled in fatae business, we’d had to drag a ki-rin into disgrace. Never mind that the Ancient had brought it on itself; we were still the ones who had exposed it. The fact that the honored one had chosen suicide rather than live with the knowledge of what it had done…

Technically, and what passed for legally among the fatae, what happened wasn’t our fault, nor our responsibility. But I still felt sick about it and suspected the others did, too. I didn’t want to deal with a fatae case.

“Still.” I was running through excuses and justifications in my head, if only for the practice. “Someone else could handle it. What about Sharon? She’s good with delicate situations.”

“You’re the fatae specialist,” Nick pointed out with damnable reasonableness. “Stosser will put you on it, if there’s anything to be put on.”

Right on cue, there was a touch of current against my awareness. *torres*

The feel of that ping was unmistakable. I sighed and got to my feet. “I hate it when you’re right,” I grumbled, shoved my lunch back into the fridge, and headed into the office to face my fate.

We had started two years ago with one suite, taking up a quarter of the seventh floor. About a year back the guys acquired the second suite of offices on our side of the building and combined the space, repurposing the original layout into a warren of rooms that gave the illusion of privacy without sacrificing an inch of workspace. Nice, except when you were doing the Tread of Dread, as Nifty had dubbed the walk from the break room to Stosser’s office at the very end of the long hall.

I knocked once, and the door opened.

“Sir?”

Usually I’d have started with “you rang, oh great and mighty?” but what worked with humans could backfire spectacularly with fatae. The fact that I knew that—the result of years more experience interacting with the nonhuman members of the Cosa than anyone else in the office except possibly Venec—was why I’d been called here. Nick had it in one.

“Torres. Come in.”

I came in, closing the door behind me, uncertain of where to go after that. The office was large enough to hold five people comfortably, seven if we all squeezed. Right then, there were only four—me, Stosser, and two figures, cloaked, with their backs to me—but it felt crowded as hell.

Then they turned around, and all the air left my lungs in a surprised, if hopefully discreet, whoosh.

* * *

Benjamin Venec took good care of his investigators. If they were stressed, he gave them something to snarl at. If they were worried, he could provide a sounding board. If they were pissed off, he was willing to fight with them. But he couldn’t force them to relax; even if that had been his style, his pups were stubborn. They’d decide when they went down, not someone else, opponent or boss.

So he could have told Torres to go home and get some sleep. She might even have gone—or at least started to. But he knew her: something shiny would catch her attention, either a case or a person, and she’d be off again. That was just…Torres.

The fact that he had given up any right to be jealous of either things or people she deemed shiny didn’t seem to help the slight burning sensation to the left of his gut when he felt her sudden rush of surprise, followed by a shimmer of glee and anticipation that was uniquely Bonita Torres.

Her signature was like coconut liquor, spicy and warm, and he let himself enjoy the taste—offsetting the burning sensation, or enhancing it, he wasn’t sure.

The pleasure was balanced by a sense of moral discomfort, though. They’d agreed to stay out of each other’s headspace unless invited. Bonnie had been scrupulous about maintaining that agreement. He hadn’t. And claiming that it was part of his job, as her boss and teacher, nothing more than he did for the others, only went so far in justifying what his mentor would have called a blatant misuse of Talent.

Ben didn’t even try to justify it, not to himself. He might be a bastard, but he was an honest one. He simply couldn’t avoid the overlap: even with his walls up, he was hyperaware of every strong emotion that passed through Torres, and the girl never felt anything halfway. It should have been annoying to his more cynical, jaded self, the way she threw herself wholeheartedly into every step of her life and dragged him along, via the Merge, without even realizing it. Instead, the experience amused, exasperated, frustrated, and invigorated him, sometimes all at once.

He let it ride. The first rule of dealing with the Merge, they had discovered, was not dealing with the Merge, and so far, he had been able to ignore the other, totally unprofessional urges. Mostly.

The fact that Bonnie took other lovers had been established—by her—early on. Also established: it was none of his damn business. She kept her private life private, but the Merge… If she knew how much leaked, even when she thought her walls were up, she’d be horrified. And mortified. Thankfully, she was as particular as she was omnivorous, and they had been few and far between lately. He always knew, though.

He waited a minute, just letting the Merge-connection wash over him, and the sense of surprise and excitement faded, her thoughts settling into the focused hum that meant that whatever was making her quiver was work-related.

Work was within his purview. Ben tapped his pencil against the desk, resisting temptation for all of ten heartbeats.

*new job?* he queried his partner.

*interesting problem* Ian sent back, not so much words as a perception of something sharp and dark, versus Bonnie’s sense of shiny.

Ben tapped the pencil harder.

*too much* he suggested, with just the sense of scales tilting too far to one side. The past few months they’d been getting a steady stream of work, from piddling jobs like the one they’d tested Farshad on to the more complicated blackmail-and-possible-murder case he’d given Sharon, Pietr, and Jenna.

There was silence from Ian, which could mean anything from disagreement to his being attacked at knifepoint by the supposed client.

No, if that were the case, even if Ian were his usual cool self, Torres would have reacted. So: he was being ignored.

In its own way, that was reassuring. Torres and Stosser both had the kind of focus that didn’t miss much. Whatever was going on there, he could safely ignore it for now in favor of…

Ben paused his pencil-tapping. Actually, there was nothing pending on his desk. Lou, their office manager, had the day-to-day things running smoothly, and with the exception of Ian’s new project, whatever it was, nothing new had come in needing his attention.

Ben exhaled, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nothing did. Everyone was either out on a job or finishing up their paperwork. Nothing new needed to be evaluated and assigned. That meant he was free to pick up the job that had come across his desk this morning. Not a PUPI investigation; something from his previous line of work. He’d given up his sidelines while they got PUPI running, but not gotten out of the game entirely.

This project would only take a day or three, and it would be good to get out of Big Dog mode, use his other skills before they got rusty…and, he admitted, get himself out of Bonnie’s immediate vicinity, give the connection between them time to cool off a bit. She’d been single for a couple-three months now, but every time she did hook up with someone, he could feel himself hovering between an all-out confrontation or sliding the knife in deep, in places only he knew about. He was capable of both, he knew. Both would end badly.

Yeah, time away would be a good thing.

*taking a few days off* he told his partner and got a distracted mmm-hmm back. Not that he needed permission, but with Ian it was better to clear the decks anyway, in case he had something tucked up his sleeve that Ben would be needed for.

Looking at the packet of papers on his desk again, he picked up the landline—an old-fashioned rotary, thrice-warded against random current-spikes—and dialed the number in the letterhead. He let it rotate through the phone-tree options until an actual operator came to see what the problem was.

“Extension 319, please.”

He waited while he was clicked through, and a familiar voice picked up at the other end.

“Allen? It’s Ben. Usual plus expenses, and I can be there this afternoon.”


Chapter 2

Holy mother of meatloaf, the atmosphere in Stosser’s office didn’t just hum—it fricking crackled.

The boss did the introductions. “This is Bonita Torres.”

“The Torres is known to us.”

It took me a second, then my manners flooded back and I made as graceful a salutation as I could. A properly elegant curtsy requires yards of skirts and a fitted corset, but I didn’t think the Lord would be offended, so long as the proper respect was shown. How the hell was my name known to him? That wasn’t good. Or it was very good. I wasn’t sure.

The other unknown figure in the room laughed at my response, a low noise that sent a different kind of shiver down my neck. Oh, fuck. Stosser, damn him, looked utterly unaffected.

“She will be acceptable,” the other, still-hooded figure said. Her voice was low, a smoky contralto, but not even remotely masculine. It was the voice that could lure otherwise sane men to their doom with a smile on their lips and a sparkle in their eye.

A thought passed through my head that it wasn’t really a surprise Stosser was unaffected: he had already trooped merrily along to his doom, that being us, here, this.

I wanted very badly to know what the hell was going on, but also knew damn well to keep my mouth shut unless spoken to.

“Our guests have come to us about a child who has gone missing.”

I turned my head slightly, to indicate that I was listening to the Big Dog, but I kept my gaze on the Lord. Not that I distrusted him, exactly, but I wanted to keep him in my sight at all times. The Lady didn’t worry me—I might like guys and girls, but the Fey Folk kept it pure vanilla when they deigned to mess with mortals. At worst, she’d try to make me a lapdog, and my kinks didn’t bend that way.

“A Fey child?” Even as I asked I knew that wasn’t it. Not just because Fey children were rare and protected, but because the Fey would not involve mortals in their own business. While not nearly as arrogant as the angeli, the Fey were still about as insular as a breed could get, in the modern world. Which, in my opinion, was good for all concerned.

Every fairy tale you ever heard? The truth was worse.

“A mortal child.” Stosser clarified the case. The Lord did not move away from my gaze, allowing me to watch him, and I knew damn well he was allowing me to do so. His cowl lay against his shoulders, and his face was clearly visible, a Rackham sketch come to life, but twice as vibrant and three times as dangerous, if he desired. “A seven-year-old girl, abducted from her bed during the dark of the moon.”

Which had been last week. “Not quite seven, I bet.” It wasn’t a guess; a child past that birthday would be safe from the Fey; I didn’t know if Catholicism set seven as the age of reason because the Fey stopped being interested in human children around then, implying that God had claimed them, or if the Fey stopped being interested because the child actually had developed a moral backbone. It didn’t matter which came first so long as you could keep your offspring safe until then.

Someone hadn’t.

“And you came to us because…you didn’t take her? And her parents think you did?” That made no sense; they wouldn’t care what mortals thought. Especially if nothing could be pinned to them.

“Our Troop abides under the Palisades Treaty,” the Lord said. I was starting to get—not used to his gaze, but able to ignore it. Sort of.

“But you think someone slipped up, maybe couldn’t resist?” Stosser asked.

No. Not that. It didn’t feel right.

“Or another Troop is poaching?” he continued.

Poaching in their territory and letting them take the blame. Yes.

“That,” the Lady said, and her voice was the growl of a sweet-tuned sports car, clearly annoyed that Stosser seemed oblivious, “is what you must discover.”

“We must?” The words slipped out, even though I’d have sworn my mouth was shut. Oh, not smart, Bonita, not smart questioning one of the Fey. I didn’t think they would do anything here—hell, I knew they wouldn’t do anything here, not within our walls. That would be rude. But once I was out on the street, once I left the protection of human habitations… Being well over the age of reason didn’t protect you from anything save abduction. There were far worse things the Fey could—and did—do to humans who crossed them. And they could make you like it.

The Lord seemed to be in command of these negotiations, from the way he stepped in. Or maybe he just wanted to keep the Lady from saying anything more. “If the human child was taken within our Troop, we will deal with it. If she was taken by another, infringing on our lands and agreements…then we will deal with it.” I did not like the sound of that, and from the way Stosser went even more still, neither did he. But neither of us said anything. “If she was taken by another, one not-Fey, and a trail was left to indicate that a Troop had done it, breaking the Treaty…”

The Lord looked me direct in the eye then, his gaze unshadowed, and the tawny-gold of his irises was exactly like an owl’s, just like legend claimed. “It was not so many turns of the moon past that this city was at shattering point, mortal and breed, Cosa and Null.”

Understatement, that. The battle of Burning Bridge last winter had been a high point in human-fatae cooperation, but the before and after… I knew I didn’t know how close to the brink the city had come and was pretty sure that I didn’t want to know.

“We have no wish for that point to return.”

No. Nobody did, not even the most rabid antihuman fatae. We’d scared ourselves sober, for once.

If someone was trying to set up the Fey, we needed to be on it, to prevent any more damage from being done. A PUP’s word that the Fey were not guilty would be trusted; we’d earned that, at least.

“You have the best contacts within the fatae community,” Stosser said to me. “If anyone knows anything, they’ll tell you.”

The boss knew better than to use his usual glamour of competence with not one but two Fey in the room, but he practically glowed with such utter confidence in my abilities, I almost believed it, too. Sure, not a problem, boss.

“It is done, then,” the Lady said, her voice still disturbing but not so obviously fishing for bait. We weren’t interesting enough for her to keep playing with, I guess. The Lord lifted his hood back over his head, making them a matched set, and they swept out of the room like the arrogant bastards they were. I was pretty sure I never saw either one of them touch the door; it opened for them like it was eager to do their bidding.

Or maybe just to be rid of them. I know I breathed a little easier once I sensed they had left the office entirely.

Only then did I turn to Stosser. “Who’s on—”

“Just you.”

“What?” We did not go out alone. That was the first rule, hammered into us from day one, by Venec. Pups worked in pairs, to make sure someone always had your back.

“I don’t want this looking like an investigation. Not yet. Ideally not ever.”

I tended toward the blunt—tactless, Venec said, often—but my mentor had been a politician to match Stosser, once upon a time, and I knew when a game was on. “You want me to solve it quietly, have them owe us without anyone knowing they owe us, and have them know that we kept them out of it, but without ever being tacky enough to say so.” Shit. “We’re doing this pro bono?”

Stosser’s expression didn’t change, which meant absolutely nothing. “For a fee to be determined later.”

“Uh-huh. They’re really worried, if they’re agreeing to that.” The Fey were the ones who gave the fatae some of the worst reps—even more than redcaps or angeli. Not because they were violent, but because they were sneaky to a level that would make a corporate lawyer jealous. Agreeing to a deal without having all the terms nailed down hard-and-fast and in their favor? That was the kind of mistake they anticipated mortals doing, not one they made themselves. I was immediately, worryingly suspicious.

“Um, boss?”

“Let me worry about that, Torres. You just do your job.” There was a sudden sparkle in his eyes that I distrusted. “Manage this without getting anyone killed, and we’ll make a Council schmoozer out of you yet.”

On that threat, I turned and ran. Slowly, decorously even, but I ran.

The doors off the hallway at this end were all closed, but I could still feel the steady hum of activity throughout the office as I made my way back, pausing in the half-open doorway of the main conference room at the other end. There was a single pup in residence, working at the long, polished wood table.

“Kill me now, please.”

Pietr made a gunlike shape with his right hand and mimed shooting me, even as he kept writing with his left.

My fellow investigator and sometimes lover had just finished a three-week-long investigation into a missing sculpture, an alleged magical Artifact that turned out to have been a spell-cast but otherwise ordinary figurine pawned by the owner’s stepdaughter. I wasn’t sure why the boring jobs generated the most paperwork, but it always seemed to be the case.

I stood in the doorway and watched him awhile longer. Pietr was the quiet one, among all of us. He thought first, and then thought again, and then when he did something he did it well and thoroughly. And yes, that included sex. He also had the interesting and occasionally useful, more often annoying, tendency to fade from sight, literally, when under stress. That little quirk made it problematic, at times, to work in the field with him. He was sharp and clear today, though.

He looked up at me, just then, as though suddenly realizing I was watching him. “New assignment? Need help? I’m just about done here.”

Pietr would have been useful as backup, but Stosser’s orders were, well, orders. I shook my head. “No. I’m good. Just some Q&A among the fatae the Big Dog wants done. One-person gig.”

“Lucky you.” He knew that was against standing procedure but didn’t push.

“Yeah. Lucky me. We still on for dinner next week?”

“Assuming no last-minute disasters, yeah. Wear your dancing shoes.”

I nodded and went the rest of the way to the break room, where there was no sign of Nicky. I eyed the coffeemaker on the kitchenette counter to my right, then decided that more caffeine wasn’t what I needed. Sleep, now, that would have been nice. And I needed to re-source my current; I’d been too busy to dig deep recently, and I could feel a hollowness inside that had nothing to do with hunger.

Calories weren’t the only thing we had to replenish after working. A Talent’s core stored their current, and the longer it stayed there the more it conformed to that individual’s signature, making it easier to use.

It also made it easier for us to track down the Talent who had used it, like matching fingerprints to fingers. So far, we’d kept that bit of info to ourselves. Trade secrets—no reason to give up what slight advantage we had over our criminally minded peers.

I thought about making a second try at lunch, but my appetite had fled. The Fey suspected someone was interfering with the Treaty and had given us the chance to stop it. If we couldn’t…

Yeah. Suddenly, a sandwich wasn’t so appetizing.

If I wasn’t going to eat, and I wasn’t going to tell Stosser where he could stick this job, it was time to get my ass out of the office. I’d always hated the “soonest begun, soonest ended” crap, but it had the nasty flavor of truth.

I went over to the small board that hung on the wall next to the main door and marked myself “out, on job.” Lou had set the system up after one too many confusions about who was where, when, and god help the pup who forgot to check in or out. I left my work-kit in the closet; I wouldn’t need the external tools of my trade for this—just my brain.

I hoped.

The external hallway was empty, as usual. There were two other offices on our floor, but it was rare that we saw anyone go in or out save the UPS guy. I paused a moment at the elevator and then told myself taking the stairs was exercise, nothing whatsoever to do with the lingering memory of the boy who had died there when the power failed, now almost two years ago. Nothing at all, nope.

The six flights down were easy, but the moment I hit the outside air, I felt sweat break out on my skin. It wasn’t that hot outside yet, but the air still had the feel of an oven. I plucked at the fabric of my T-shirt and scowled. It was barely June. This was going to be a bitch of a summer, you could tell already. Great. Still, maybe a lot of people would take the summer off, go cool down somewhere else, which would mean fewer people rubbing raw nerves against each other, making life easier for the rest of us in the city.

Yeah, and cave dragons were suddenly going to start giving interest-free loans.

So. Scouting the fatae. Where, and how to begin? It’s not like this gig came with a bunch of guidelines or clues…

Try acting like a trained professional, an acerbic voice in my head suggested. My own voice, this time.

Right. First things first. I dipped a mental hand into my core, the pool of current all Talent carry within us as a matter of course, and tested my levels. Blue-and-green threads brushed against me like slender little snakes, sparking and snapping as they moved, crackling when they touched each other. Low, definitely low. Discretion would probably be the better part of valor, then. There was a power generator on the West Side I could dip into without inconveniencing anyone, while I made my plans.

Current—magic—liked to run alongside electricity. In the wild state, that meant ley lines, electrical storms, that sort of thing. For the modern Talent, though, the best, most reliable source of power was, well, a power plant. The trick was learning how to take enough to satisfy your needs, without draining so much you blew the source.

I grabbed the 1 train downtown, got off at 66th, and checked into the nearest ’bux for my latte. The place was doing the usual midafternoon traffic, so I grabbed the first empty chair I saw and sat back like I was just another poser killing time before a date.

Once I was sure nobody was going to approach me, I let myself relax a little, the outer awareness alert and upright while my core opened up and went in search of all the tasty current it could sense shimmering outside.

Compared to the faint hum of the wiring and overhead lights, the generator a few blocks away was like a sauna, warm and inviting. The temptation was there to slide into it and soak up all that was on offer, but that would have been bad manners, not only to any other Talent looking to use it, but for the folk whose rents paid for the power. “Take only what you need, and not all from one source, Bonita,” I could hear J saying, like I was a wide-eyed eight-year-old again.

The current swirling inside the generator was a dark, clean blue, its lines sharp and delineated. Ask any five Talent what the colors meant, and you’d get six different answers, but a sharp-edge meant it was fresh, that there was no one else’s signature already on it, softening the feel. I’d never been able to sense that, before becoming a PUP.

Lots of things I couldn’t do, before. We all were the type to really look at things, not just accept what was on the surface; that was why Stosser hired us in the first place, because we didn’t accept the first impression as truth. But two years of doing this day in and out had put us on another skill level entirely. The more you used, the more you could do. The thought of what we might be able to do five years from now…

“Bonita?”

Oh, hell. I brought myself back to the Starbucks, keeping the connection to the generator open, if narrowed, and looked to see who had approached me, who knew me well enough to use my name, but not so well to use the shorter version.

“Andrea. I didn’t know you slummed in public coffeehouses.”

The words were joking, the tone probably softer than I’d intended, because Andrea took it for an invite, sitting on the windowsill next to my table in lieu of an available chair.

Five foot ten, short blond hair, eyes the color of the Aegean Sea, and teeth as white and straight as money could make them. Andrea was Eastern Council, running at the same levels as my mentor used to.

Because of that, I was cautious about why she’d approached me. I doubted she was just happy to see a familiar face; we’d flirted a bit back when I was still living with J up in Boston, but she was in her thirties, and I’d been twenty, and nothing more than a few innuendos had been exchanged.

And now…now I was a PUP and had to think about things like why someone wanted to get to know me, rather than just enjoying their company. Even the Council people who supported Stosser’s Great Experiment still saw us as tools for them to use rather than the impartial clearinghouse we were trying to become. So there was that.

“I heard that you were living in the city now, but I didn’t think I’d run into you. I should have, of course. That’s how it works—you think this is a huge place, but it’s really such a small town.” She leaned forward, her blue silk blouse open just enough at the collar that I could see the swell of her breasts and the gold chain that dropped between them, and part of my brain kicked into a different gear. Apparently, being out of college meant I was fair game now.

Huh. Andy was gorgeous, smart, ambitious, and potentially very useful to me, long-term, if I were going to think the way she did. And I was—modesty aside—smart, good-looking, and potentially very useful to her, both short- and long-term, if she had any ambitions in the Council, which I knew damn well she did. We would be, as the pundits like to say, a dream power couple.

And the sex would probably be a lot of fun.

There was just one damn problem. The Merge. Other than Pietr, who knew what the deal was and where he stood, all of my sexual relations for the past year had lasted two weeks, tops. Not that my sex drive had suddenly gone away—far from it. It had just… I need to be emotionally engaged with the person I’m sleeping with. Not love, but like-a-lot. And respect. And…

And every time I touched someone else, I knew that it wasn’t enough. I wanted Venec. I wanted the spark-and-thump I got just touching him. Wanted to know if his eyes were as intense when he hit orgasm as they were when he was decoding an evidence tangle. Wanted…

I wanted him out of my head, out of my groin, and the last lingering scent of him out of my core, because it was just the damn Merge, and I did not like being directed by anything, least of all some obscure, magical hand-of-fate.

But I knew, by now, that he wasn’t going anywhere. And neither was I. It just… I wasn’t ready yet.

Andy touched my hand, her fingers soft and firm and smelling like very expensive sin. “I have to get to a meeting—I’m already running late—but can I ping you later, maybe have dinner?”

I didn’t want to encourage her if there was nothing happening—I’m a flirt, not a tease—but Andy could be useful. And it wasn’t like I wasn’t glad to have someone to exchange friendly innuendo with who knew the rules and wasn’t interested in a lifetime of devotion. And having a Council friend was never a bad thing, despite what my lonejack-raised coworkers believed.

I tested my conscience and came back with a quick response. “Sure. Ping me.”

I watched her leave, enjoying the view her knee-length pencil skirt gave me, then brought myself back to the business at hand. My core hadn’t quite topped off, but it was good enough. Time to get moving. Stosser would expect me to have something to report, come morning.

Not an answer: even the Big Dog wasn’t that unreasonable. But a little girl was missing, and finding out who took her was my job. No fucking pressure, right.

I had a number of contacts among the fatae, both through my mentor and my own social circles. Bobo, the Meshaden who acted as my occasional bodyguard and gossip-bringer. Danny, the half-faun P.I. who did side work for us occasionally and had connections into just about every shadowed corner of the city. Madame, the Ancient dragon who lived in a penthouse cave high above the cityscape and had her talon on the pulse of everything scandalous in the society world, human and otherwise. But even as I ticked off names in my head, I knew that if I wanted the most up-to-date details that other people wouldn’t want known, if time was of the essence and cost not really an object, there was one place to go and two people to talk to.

For various interpretations of “people,” anyway.

* * *

I didn’t have the patience to deal with the stop-and-start motion of a cross-town bus, so I hailed a cab. Stosser would damn well approve the expense, even if we were doing this pro bono.

Once upon a time, meeting up with The Wren had been a thing of awe—after all, she was The Retriever, at least in the States—the most talented (and Talented) of current-thieves. Then we’d become building-mates, and friends, and I almost stopped thinking of her in a professional manner.

Almost. Not quite.

The past year or so, we’d lived in the same building—she’d gotten me my apartment, in fact. But about a month ago, when the planned condo conversion of our building fell through, she’d moved uptown. I didn’t blame her—our building was cozy and had a sense of living energy in the actual construction that made Talent feel comfortable, but it was also kinda cramped and rundown, and her sweetie lived uptown anyway, so…

It wasn’t like we saw each other every day, anyway.

I gave the cabbie Wren’s new address and leaned against the seat as the car jolted forward, moving into traffic. Pulling the file Stosser had given me out of my bag, I opened the folder and studied the report in more detail, putting aside what the Lord said and concentrating only on the established facts. Kids sometimes went missing with no supernatural elements involved, and I’d learned the hard way about not checking every-damn-possibility. Especially if anything contradicted what the client gave us. But the notes didn’t give me anything new, or even problematic. Parents still married, so not a custody battle. No other relatives who might be problems. Family decently middle-class, not the sort to be targeted for ransom. Both parents worked in academia, teachers, so it’s not like there was the high probability of coercion or blackmail, either, unless PTA meetings had gotten a hell of a lot tougher since I was in school.

The cab dumped me out on the corner rather than fight the delivery van double-parked and blocking traffic, and I walked the half block to “The Westerly.” I had laughed when I saw the name on the formal, cream-colored change-of-address card delivered in the mail a few weeks before. Seeing it, though— J’s building was called Branderford. I wanted to live in a building that had a name. And a doorman. And…

And, pointless. I couldn’t afford an apartment in a building with a name and a doorman. Not yet, anyway.

Doormen in New York City are more than guys—or women—who open doors and accept deliveries. They’re the first line of security for the residents. So I was prepared to do the usual who-I’m-here-to-see routine—I was assuming Wren, being Talent, would not have bought into one of those places with the full electronic security systems. To my surprise, though, the doorman riding the simple but splashy marble counter merely looked up, nodded, and pressed a button, summoning the elevator. I let a slender tendril rise, and it was met by a similar one from the doorman.

Huh. Not so much a surprise that the doorman was a Talent—we tended to non-office jobs as a whole: less chance to current-spike the tech—but that Wren had apparently put me on an all-clear list. I guess she was hoping I’d still show up with lasagna every now and then.

The elevator was clean and well maintained, with pretty architectural touches that said the building was a prewar renovation. My estimate of how much she paid for the place went up, considerably. Ouch. But she could afford it: you didn’t hire The Wren for cut-rate work.

The apartment was on the top floor—Wren liked not having anyone thumping above her, considering the odd hours she slept. Twenty-four J was at the end of the hallway, the fifth down, which meant she had a corner apartment. My estimate of the cost went up, again. Damn.

The door opened even before I got there, and the moment I saw two expectant faces, one brown-eyed and human, one red-eyed and ursine, staring at me, I apologized. “No food this time, sorry. Will you take a rain check?”

It wasn’t as though I was such an amazing cook—they were just that bad at it. I wasn’t sure Wren knew how to use her stove to do more than reheat pizza, and the demon…

PB had agile paws, but his short, black-padded fingers ended in sharp white nails that probably didn’t make it too easy to cook. Certainly I’d never gotten any indication that he even had a kitchen, wherever he lived.

The first time I had seen the demon, it had been in an all-night diner, during the ki-rin job. He had been the first demon I’d ever encountered—maybe the only, since I still wasn’t sure if the angular shadow that had passed me late one night had been a demon, despite the glimpse of pale red eyes under its slouch hat. There were a lot of strange and dangerous things in the Cosa Nostradamus, and a lot of them didn’t care to be identified by humans.

My hosts let me in despite the lack of lasagna. I took a minute to case the joint, noting that, as expected, Wren hadn’t done damn-all to decorate and that she needed curtains for that wall of windows, no matter how nice the view.

“Whatever it is, I didn’t do it,” Wren said, then added, “probably.”

It was an old joke, or a year-old, anyway, which was as long as I’d known the thief well enough to have jokes. Wren Valere was not only a Retriever; to a lot of folk she was The Retriever. Like Pietr, she had the ability to disappear from sight, slide through barriers, and sneak into anywhere she wasn’t supposed to be, only unlike Pietr she’d gone for a life of… I couldn’t exactly call it crime, since a lot of the jobs I knew she’d taken involved reclaiming objects for their rightful owners. But she moved in a gray area I tried not to look too deeply in. We were friends, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Also, Wren and her partner, Sergei, and PB, had been responsible for keeping the city from going down in flames earlier this year. Everyone knew, even if nobody talked about it. Whatever forces had set us up to war, she had taken them on and won.

No matter what side of the law you were on, you did not want Wren Valere pissed at you. Thankfully, from the moment I’d met her, sent over by Stosser to check into things when her apartment had been bugged by forces unknown, we’d hit it off. Totally nonsexual—I have a useful sense for who’s off the market, and Valere and her partner, Sergei, were like peanut and butter.

“Come on in,” Wren said, even though I had already gone well past the door frame. She might have been ironic; it was tough to tell sometimes with her. “Sit down. I think there’s furniture somewhere under all the boxes. You want coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

I found a space on the dark green sofa, which was definitely new. Wren’s old place had a sort of bedraggled assortment of furniture, like she’d never quite thought about the fact that guests would need a place to sit. This… I sensed PB’s paw in this.

PB found a footstool under a garbage bag that looked like it was filled with pillows, and perched himself on top, tossing the bag onto the polished hardwood floor. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me, his rounded, white-furred ears twitching ever so slightly, like a radarscope listening for something human ears would miss.

I looked back. If I’d ever been uneasy under that weirdly red gaze, it had faded a long time ago. Angeli were bastards, but demon, far as my experience went, were loyal and honest, if occasionally short-tempered. Trust the Cosa to screw up their naming conventions.

“It’s a fatae thing,” I said, to head off any concerns Valere might have had about my showing up unannounced.

“Of course it is,” PB muttered. Wren handed me a plain white mug filled with caffeinated nirvana, and I took a deep sip. She might not be able to cook, but Valere could magic up a serious pot of coffee.

“And it’s delicate,” I added.

“Of course it is,” the Retriever said.

I thought about how much to tell them, zipped through the best- and worst-case scenarios, and shrugged mentally. Delicate, and no-footprint, but Stosser had set me to this scent, and I’d follow it best I could, and that meant using my sources as best I could. And for these two, that meant telling them the truth.

Just not all the truth.

“A girl’s gone missing. Baby girl. Seven years old.”

They went the same place I did, hearing her age: just the right age for a Fey-snatch, if someone were willing to break the Treaty.

“The Fey say they don’t have her.” Let them think I already checked that avenue, rather than taking it on faith from a client. I thought again of the Lord’s expression, and restrained a shudder. No, clients lied, and the Fey lied even more, but not in this specific instance. They wanted to know who had her, enough to give Stosser a blank IOU in return.

PB humphed. “No chance she went willingly?”

That was the other way a breed could acquire humans: glamour them into coming of their own accord. We called it fairy-dusting, and it wasn’t covered under any treaties.

“She’s seven, PB. Doesn’t matter what she wanted. She’s still a baby. Babies can’t go willingly.” Wren sat on the hassock opposite me, looking thoughtful. “You’ve checked into the usual gossip spots, I assume, otherwise you wouldn’t be going to me.”

“Not yet.”

That took them both aback, PB’s ears going flat in surprise.

“The usual spots take time, and greasing. I need to know, hot and fast, if there’s any gossip in the fatae community, about newcomers, maybe someone out to prove a point, or score a grudge.” I hesitated, then unreeled a little more truth to hook them with. “It feels like a setup. Someone’s trying to make it look like the Treaty’s been broken.”

These two knew better than anyone how bad a broken treaty could get—especially one between humans and fatae. If that was what was going on, it had to be stopped and fixed, before word got out.

Wren thought about it for a minute, and I watched. Looking at Wren was difficult; even when you stared right at her, she seemed to slip away from your eye. But Pietr and I had been lovers on and off for months, and I’d almost gotten the trick of looking-not-looking. Average height, average looks, average coloring—brown hair, brown eyes, a face that could have come from almost any genetic stew. Even without magic, Wren Valere didn’t appear on your mental radar.

That—and a natural talent for larceny—was what made her a Retriever.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s been quiet since… It’s been quiet.”

Since she’d taken out the organization that had been fucking with the Cosa and Nulls alike, she meant. Another thing nobody talked about but everyone knew.

“PB?” She turned to the demon, her head tilted. “You hang in lower sewers than I do. You hear anything?”

Every demon, Venec had told me once, looked different. Rumor had it they were artificial, created like Frankenstein’s monster, their only shared characteristic those red eyes and a snarly disposition. PB looked like a pint-size polar bear, all thick white fur and powerful limbs, and a snout that was supremely made for frowning, which is what he was doing right now.

“Danny had some trouble a couple-three months ago, but that was a teenager. Nothing about a wee one. That screams of trooping fairies.”

Despite myself, I cracked a grin. Only a demon would call them that, especially out loud. Fey folk was the preferred polite term, if you didn’t want a Lady’s gaze turned on you, which I desperately didn’t. Demon, though—demon didn’t care. There wasn’t a Fey glamour in the universe that could hold a demon against his will. Some said it was because they had no soul. Me, I think they were just too stubborn.

“The Fey Lord says they did not. Swears it, in fact.” Breaking a sworn statement had penalties I didn’t think the Lord wanted to pay, not unless he was playing some deeper game than even Stosser could guess. And this…didn’t feel like a game.

“And the Fey Lady?” Having PB’s direct red gaze on you was disconcerting as hell, even when you considered him a friend, like I did. It was a fair guess on his part: they came in pairs, like mittens.

“Noncommittal, but seemed very certain it was from outside her Troop.”

We’d lost Wren from the conversation; she had gotten up and left the room without me even noticing. Retrievers were like that. PB shifted on the footstool, his toe-claws tapping quietly on the hardwood floor.

“So you want to know if there’s news of a schism within the city’s Troop, or if anyone outside’s trying to poke holes into it. No. And trust me, that I would have heard about. Troop wars aren’t as ugly as some things we’ve faced, but they’re bad enough.”

I wasn’t surprised. “That was about what I’d figured, yeah.” If it were that simple, the Fey would have figured it out for themselves and dealt with it already. We only got the tricky things.

“What does it feel like?”

Normally I didn’t talk about this—job details—outside the pack. But PB was unarguably loyal to Wren, and Wren…

Was, technically, on the other side. Not all Retrievers were criminals—they worked for legitimate owners as often as not—but it was better not to think about how they did their job. That said, Wren could be trusted. Within reason.

“It feels like a mess,” I admitted. “And maybe a wild-goose chase, with the Fey holding the feathers. But that’s me, lead goose-chaser.”

The phone rang in the kitchen, once, and Wren picked it up. I tried not to listen in, but even with her voice lowered, I could still pick up most of the words. From the way PB had gone all distracted, he could hear even more: demon senses were a hell of a lot better than puny human ones.

“Sergei,” he said, neither of us pretending we weren’t eavesdropping. “He has a new job for her. And not a minute too soon—she was about to start stealing things out of boredom.”

I shushed him, and her voice, slightly raised, carried into the living room.

“On a scale of one to ten?”

“Private or corporate?”

A groan: she hadn’t liked the answer. “A shove-and-grab?”

A long pause: he was explaining something. PB’s ears twitched: he was picking up more than me, but not sharing now. Just as well: I really didn’t want to know the details.

“I should scoot,” I said, getting up. “Tell Wren I said thanks, and I’ll try to bring by a housewarming lasagna or something this weekend, okay?” I hadn’t had much time to cook lately, which might have been half my problem: I de-stressed by feeding people. Taking an hour or two to myself would be a very good idea and keep the wheels here properly greased.

“You’re not going to hang around and help me bully Valere into ordering curtains?” He held up one of the shelter magazines, with Post-it notes stuck all over the pages.

“Oh, hell, no. You’re on your own for that one. If you hear anything…”

“Yeah, you got it. Go, before I start asking your opinion on carpets.”

I laughed and left.


Chapter 3

I’d walked out of Wren’s apartment with no useful information but, thanks to PB’s comments, with the beginnings of a plan: hit up Danny for details on what the smaller Cosa-fry were doing. It made sense that PB and Wren had come up dry, in retrospect: PB’s main gig was as a courier who asked no questions and spilled no secrets. When he looked, he looked big picture, citywide. But a little girl might fall between the cracks, especially if there wasn’t something Dire involved. A private eye who worked for whatever cases came along would be able to see the smaller details.

And I already knew that Danny, a former NYPD patrolman, had a weakness for kids in distress. He’d drop anything not-urgent, and maybe even a few things that were, to help me out.

I didn’t feel good about using his soft spot that way, but I was going to do it, anyway. It helped to know that he’d do exactly the same thing if the situation were reversed.

The afternoon sun hit me a few steps down the street, like it was trying to coax me into taking the rest of the day off to sprawl on the Great Lawn and read the newspaper front to back. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually had time to do something like that.

And today wasn’t going to be that day, either. I ignored the siren call, intent on my destination, weaving around the slower-moving clumps with the agility of practice. Not that I was looking forward to going back down into the subway: three seasons of the year they were fine, but once we got into summer… Ugh. Manhattan was a relatively small city; why the hell couldn’t everyone I needed to talk to be within a ten-block radius?

The 6 subway downtown to Danny’s office wasn’t bad, though; relatively uncrowded, and the air was flowing properly. And it took less time than a cab.

I leaned back against the plastic subway seat and tried to even out my breathing—and my thinking. Sometimes, kids get lost. The fact that I didn’t want to think about it, that it made my gut hurt, didn’t change that. If someone hadn’t implied fatae involvement, this little girl would just be a poster on a cop-shop board somewhere, another Amber Alert on the wires. And if there wasn’t anything to do with the Cosa Nostradamus…

PUPI’s mission statement did not encompass the Null world, to quote directly from one of Stosser’s usual “we are here to help you” speeches. Didn’t matter. Even once the Fey were cleared, I knew already I wasn’t going to let this case go. A dozen years ago I could have gotten lost, too. My dad had been loving but kinda loose about parenting, and if I hadn’t found J, if he hadn’t found me, been willing to mentor me…

Being Talent didn’t mean you got a pass on the rest of the crap life could hand out. Mentorship was supposed to be a safety net and a lifeline, but it didn’t always work out that way. And Null kids… They didn’t even have that.

I got off at my stop, giving a hairy eyeball to the guy who tried to use the in/out crush at the door as an excuse to grab my ass, and made my way to Sylvan Investigations.

I didn’t bother knocking, and the door, as usual, wasn’t locked. Danny’s office still looked like it was straight out of Dashiell Hammett, with a front room staged with a secretary’s desk, padded guest chairs, and some anemic-looking potted plants, waiting for some bright but world-wise dame to answer the phone, while the detective slept off a bender in the back room.

Danny didn’t have a receptionist, and he usually slept off his hangovers at home.

A weary voice called out, “What do you want?”

Or, maybe not.

I took myself all the way into the back room and shut the door behind me. “You look like hell.” Danny was a good-looking guy, the product of an attractive woman—I’d seen pictures of his mom, stern but lovely in Navy blues—and an unknown, unlamented faun who, like all of his breed, had the strong, stocky body that Danny had inherited, along with the short, curved horns that were only barely hidden by his thick brown hair. Right now, though, Danny was slumped in the chair behind his desk, cowboy boots up on the aforementioned desk. His eyes were closed, and his face was lined and gray, like he hadn’t slept in a week.

He might not have, for all I knew. We hadn’t had a chance to schmooze lately, with the workload Stosser kept handing the pack. I felt a flare of bad-friend guilt.

“Are you okay?” I had no idea what a fever would feel like on a mixed-breed, but moved forward to touch his forehead, anyway. He batted my hand away and opened one eye enough to glare.

“I’m fine, Torres. It’s just been a crappy week. What do you want?”

I didn’t want to lay anything more on him, but there wasn’t any point in walking away without at least asking.

“I have a case I was hoping you could help with. It’s about a missing kid.”

Danny’s boots hit the floor so fast and hard I didn’t even see him move. “What kid? When? How old?”

Whoa, hadn’t been expecting that. A bit of an overreaction, even for Danny’s known soft spot. I stumbled my reply, then recovered. “Seven years old. Missing a week now.”

“Oh.” He settled back a bit then, his shoulders not exactly relaxing, but no longer looking like he was about to leap out the door at a full run. “Not mine, then.”

Oh, fuck. The pain in my stomach got worse. “You have another missing kid?”

“Two, actually. Probably dusted.”

That was slang for being lured by one of the more seductive fatae breeds—like Danny’s.

“One almost fifteen, the other a legal adult, just turned twenty-one, but parents still worried.”

The difference—and that they were older—made me feel slightly better, and I relaxed, too, pulling one of the client chairs around the desk so I could sit next to Danny, not be separated by the expanse of wooden desk. “Nope, mine’s seven, like I said.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl. Yours?”

“Girls, too.”

That still didn’t mean any connection. “Do boy-children or girl-children go missing more often?” I’d never wondered that before.

“NISMART numbers say slightly more males than females, out of about a million-plus reported every year. Most are runaways, teenagers, or known-adult abductions. Only a small but ugly percentage are nonfamily kidnappings.” Of course Danny would know. “Most are white. Yours?”

“No. Mom’s Asian, dad’s Caucasian.”

Danny frowned. “Mine are mixed, too. Statistically that’s odd, although within range for New York.”

I thought about that and let it go. “Even if we had a full-scale kid-snatch going on, which I doubt, I can’t think of any fatae breed who would be looking for the full range of age and—”

Something ticked in my brain, and I pulled out the file again, flipping through. “Seven. Fourteen. Twenty-one…”

“What?” Danny was watching me intently now, his skin still tired-looking but his eyes alert and focused, his usual energy back.

“Magic.” I said it like a curse word. It fit, damn it. It all fit....

“What?”

I forgot sometimes that Danny was fatae, not Talent. They looked at—and reacted to—things differently than we did. Also, they got told different stories as kids. “Old magic, pre-current.” Before the modern age, before Founder Ben: when things were messy and magic was as much hope and prayer as science. “Seven was a magic number, really strong, potent. Even today, some people like to run things in sets of seven, hedge their bets. And here we’ve got my girl, seven. Yours, if fourteen, twice seven, and twenty-one, thrice seven. Three’s a strong number, too. All gone missing in the same city, the same time, and you think there was Cosa involvement in your cases, too, otherwise you wouldn’t have mentioned the fatae.” Danny handled Null cases, too, but he wouldn’t immediately have associated something I was working on with one of those.

By the time I’d finished, the words spilling out of my mouth, he was already reaching across his desk, pulling a pile of folders toward him. Being fatae, Danny could use computers, but he tended to do that stuff away from where Talent might drop by. He ran a shoestring operation, and we were hard on electronics, especially when we got emotional.

“Melinda, fourteen. Went missing two weeks ago. I’ve been on the case for three days, after the NYPD dumped her in with the runaways. Haven’t turned up a whisper of anything. Started with the street kids, got nothing. Was starting to wonder if she’d skipped town or hooked with a dead-end john when Gail’s parents called me. She’s been missing almost a month, and all the stats are the same—smart, pretty, but not overwhelmingly brilliant or beautiful, everything to stay home for, suddenly up and gone between midnight and dawn.”

He put his hand palm-down on the file, like he was trying to hold them safe, and turned his head to look sideways at me.

I stared at his hand. They were blunt-tipped, his fingers, strong and scattered with coarse brown hairs. Venec’s hands were strong, too, but more tapered and smooth. I shook my head, dismissing the thought. “My girl’s too young to be really slotted—but she’s definitely cute. Smart… Unless they’re genius level, how do you tell at that age?”

Danny snorted. “Don’t ask me.” He was an only child, and despite his breed’s proclivities—or maybe because of them—he wasn’t the type to sleep around. I’d sussed early on that Danny was looking for One True Love, god help him. “Talent family?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“So how did they come to you?”

I hesitated, then went for broke. “They didn’t.”

That got me a closer look, squinty-eyed, like they must teach in the academy, the kind of look that makes you talk too much when a cop asks to see your ID. “Spill, Torres.”

Stosser was going to kill me. But, damn it, Danny might have the info that broke the case. And he took discreet into artistic levels. And the Big Dogs had taught us to trust our gut instincts. “The Fey Folk asked us to look into it. Rumor is that they were responsible for my girl’s disappearance. They say no. They don’t want people claiming they’ve broken Treaty.”

“An’ if PSI says they’re clean, most folk will stand by that.” Danny nodded. “Sounds like Stosser’s long-term plan to own the Cosa is working.” He shook his head then, dismissing the boss’s plans as unimportant, which, to him, they were. “Damn it, Bonnie, I think we’re onto something. My girls are Null. Yours?”

One of the first things I’d checked. Talent kids tend to wander down slightly different rabbit holes, when they go missing. “Yeah.”

It might not mean anything, all these facts. Sometimes, even the most suspicious of circumstances turned out to be flutterby, unrelated and unconnected. But there was a thick, heavy feeling in my core and a tingling of my kenning, the sense that sometimes, often unpredictably, hinted at the future, that told me otherwise. A full eighty percent of this job was listening to the facts and sorting the evidence, and then fitting them together. Sometimes it took logic; sometimes it took a wild leap. More often, it took both.

“If it’s not the usual suspects, but the gossip points there…” I didn’t want to say the word, but I had to. “You think it’s the Silence, come back?”

For years, an organization called, ironically, the Silence had been spreading enough lies and rumors around the city, enough to nearly destroy the Cosa Nostradamus. We’d taken to the streets to fight them, one snowy night last year, and they’d finally disappeared from the scene a few months ago, their office building still sitting vacant. Wren Valere had been elbows-deep in what was going on, then. If they’d come back, Wren would have known. She would have told me, us. Right?

“If they were back, the Dynamic Duo would have let us know,” Danny said, echoing my thoughts. “Right?”

“Right.”

I sounded convinced, but there was a low note of doubt in my stomach to go with everything else. Wren Valere was my friend. A genuine hero, although she’d scoff at the thought. She was also a Retriever, and like Danny, she took discretion to an art form when needed. Discretion that, to me, could translate as withholding evidence. How far could we trust her to share information? Yeah, hero, friend, etc., but…

I couldn’t afford to be distracted by a maybewhatif. Useless dithering, Torres. Focus on the facts. “I’ll have Venec put a few feelers out, just in case.” Ben had friends in seriously low places, even for the Cosa, and if the Silence were back, those friends would be scurrying for their lives. “But for now, we focus on the girls and work our way out to their captors, not the other way around.”

“Right. Here.” He pulled a handful of sheets from the folders and shuffled them together. “Copies of all the known facts on my girls. Okay to copy yours?”

“Yeah, go ahead.” We’d hired Danny for side work before; Stosser and Venec trusted him. Besides, I’d already spilled the part I wasn’t supposed to say; wasn’t like his having hardcopy would change anything.

The copier machine was a tiny little thing, off in the corner of the room. Danny fed the sheets in, one at a time, while I grabbed one of the client chairs and draped myself into it.

Better to fess up now than get caught out later. But indirectly…

*boss?*

There was a slight lag in his response. Nothing that would have been noticeable with anyone else, but I’d become accustomed to Venec being just next to my thoughts at all times. Distance was a factor in pings; maybe it mattered here, too? If so, he wasn’t in the city anymore. Huh.

*what?*

*twist in the job Stosser gave me. taking Danny on. he has a case that might match it*

A sense of acknowledgment, acceptance, and being busy somewhere else. Ben was leaving the city. Yeah, moving… I concentrated a little. Southward.

*?*

*do your job, torres*

And then he was gone. Okay, fine. There was absolutely no reason for me to feel like I’d been punched in the stomach, right? He was the boss, and I was the pup, and we’d agreed that was where we were and he had no obligation to tell me where he was going, any more than I checked in with him, off-hours.

I’d never been jealous before in my entire life. Not even when J, my mentor, went out to visit his first student, now a lawyer out in California, and didn’t invite me to come along. I’d understood I shared J, and was okay with that. Not when lovers had moved on, or when a potential lover had chosen someone else. It just… I had never understood how you could resent someone spending time somewhere else, like only you had a claim on their life.

But I did now. And I didn’t like how tightly I hugged that feeling, as though it should give me comfort instead of pain.

“Okay, here.” Danny came back and handed over the originals. “You want to work this together or split up?”

Having something concrete to work on would keep Venec and his mysterious errand out of my mind. “Split up.” Plausible deniability was key: Danny could be pretty bullheaded, and Stosser had told me to go gentle. “We can work more contacts that way. If you find something…” I paused. Danny couldn’t ping me, and I didn’t carry a cell phone, for obvious reasons. I’d gotten really spoiled, working only with Talent.

Luckily, Danny was used to it. “If I find anything, I’ll call the office and they can ping you.”

“Yeah.” I paused, looking over the paperwork. My throat tightened at the black-and-white reproductions of those faces. Three girls, one of them only a few years younger than me, one of them still a baby. Missing for weeks now. “Danny.”

“I have to believe they’re alive,” he said, somehow knowing what I didn’t want to ask. “I couldn’t do this job otherwise. You do the same, Bonnie. Believe.”

I carried that with me, the belief in his voice, all the way back down to the street and the next stop along the gossip network. It didn’t help shake the feeling of an onrushing train that had started prickling up and down my arms the moment I picked up all three files, though.

Kenning. It wasn’t quite foresight or even precognition, nothing that precise or useful. But the weird shimmer of current let me know there was something building. Something that involved me. And it was rarely good.

* * *

On the train heading toward Philadelphia, Ben Venec felt a twinge of unease. Bonnie, he identified, and then frowned. No, not Bonnie. She was worried. The Merge and his own abilities told him that through their brief contact, but she was focused on the chase, whatever Ian had set her on earlier. It was something else prickling at him.

He touched the briefcase on the seat next to him, his unease making him need to confirm, physically, that it was there and safe. He didn’t have even a touch of precog, or Bonnie’s kenning, but his instincts were good, and something felt wrong, off. He just couldn’t figure out what.

He ran down the mental list of possibilities. Ian? No, he was accounted for. It wasn’t the pups themselves; when he’d left, the office was humming along at a mad but steady pace, and if anything had gone wrong, he would have heard the yelps. The job he was heading for? Unlikely. It was bog-standard, more a distraction than a challenge.

“All right. Apprehension noted and filed,” he said out loud, as though that would make whatever it was shut up. Much to his surprise, it did, a palpable sense of the unease backing off, like a cat settling back on its haunches to watch, rather than leap.

Interesting. Possibly it was his own nerves, reacting to…something. There were a limited number of things—and beings—that could cause that reaction. He considered the idea of another trickster imp in town, and dismissed it. This was more personal, more…direct.

“Aden, what are you up to?”

Ian’s little sister, Aden, had made it her personal mandate to shut PUPI down, to keep her precious Council from being held accountable for their actions. She had been banned from approaching them directly, after her earliest attempt got an innocent Null killed, but she hadn’t given up. Not by a long shot.

Not too long ago they—he and Ian—had been the focus of a Push, a current-driven emotion, intended to doubt themselves into making mistakes. With a touch of the Push himself, Ben had recognized it easily enough, but not before it had done some damage they couldn’t afford. Aden had been behind that, and while Ian said he had dealt with her…

“There’s nothing more stubborn than a Stosser on a crusade. The only question is what level of crazy will she bring, and from what direction?”

Since this twinge seemed intent on being a helpful warning rather than a distraction, Ben was willing to let it sit there and wait. He would be alert—but he would have been on alert, anyway. That was his job.

Popping open the brown leather briefcase, he extracted the file marked Ravenwood in thick black lettering, took out a folded blueprint, and smoothed it open, settling himself in to study the outlines of the museum. He hadn’t taken on a side job in almost two years, burdened with getting his pups trained and ready, and he was looking forward to the work. Allen’s employers—a small private museum in downtown Philadelphia—wanted a security system that couldn’t be beat? Ben felt a sliver of challenge rise up within him as he considered the specs. Old building, with all the newest tech added to bring it to modern-day standards. Adding current to that wasn’t going to be an easy job…which was why Allen had recommended him.

Time to prove that he could still do more than herd pups.

* * *

“Please. Don’t.”

The voice was tired, flattened in the way that human voices should never be. The cave’s walls were high, but there was no echo, no sound at all, his words swallowed by the vast presence around him.

The dragon hovered over him, eyes burning in the darkness, drawing all the light into their glittering gold depths. “Give me your treasure.”

Again and again, that demand. You could not refuse a dragon, could not resist. But he had none, no more to spare. No gold, no cash, no worldly possessions: he had offered them all, hours ago, and the dragon would not be sated. Even his core had been drained, the current sucked away so swiftly he had gone from full to empty in a heartbeat. Who knew dragons could do such a thing? Who knew they would?

Another slash of its claws, agony burning through his abdomen, and he was too tired to scream again. There was nothing left. No hope of rescue, no hope of survival. No hope of explanations: Why me? What did I do?

Please, his lips formed, but no sound emerged.

When the next blow came, he fell into it, the only escape he had. The last thing he heard, echoing down into oblivion, was the dragon’s howl of rage.


Chapter 4

“Ow! Damn it, I just wanted to talk to you!”

The brownie didn’t let go of my wrist, its blunt teeth digging in more firmly. The little bastard was about the size of a French bulldog and just as solid, so this was really beginning to hurt, not to mention being annoying as hell. If I tried to shake him off, I’d probably snap my wrist.

“Og, let the lady go.”

Og rolled his eyes up at me, the whites yellowed and sick-looking, and I hoped to hell I wasn’t going to need a tetanus shot after all this. Or rabies.

“You heard the man, Og,” I said, sugar-sweet. “Lemme go. Or I will zap you with enough current to make your whiskers curl around your ears.”

Brownies don’t actually have ears, just little pinholes like dolphins, but the threat sounded scary enough that he unhinged his jaw and let go. I refused to step back or check the skin to see if it was broken, but stared down at the little bastard until it cast that yellowed gaze to the wooden floor, sulky but cowed.

Most fatae breeds I treat with cautious respect. Brownies were the exception: I hated them, and they seemed to return the favor. Long story, going back to me, age five, and a stray kitten. Brownies love cats, too—but not quite the same way.

I’d never been able to look at Girl Scouts without shuddering, after that.

“Did he hurt you?”

“Only my feelings.”

The fatae who had ordered Og to loose the teeth was a da-esh, a close-related breed. They tended to pal around together. Same basic shape and coloring—imagine if the stereotypical alien silhouette had put on twenty pounds and filed its head to a smooth, round shape—but about a foot taller and with better social skills.

“You’ll survive,” he diagnosed. “What did you come down here to ask about?”

“Down here” was more figurative than literal: we were in a tiny café on the Upper West Side, dimly lit, with an old TV muted in the corner and a waitress who looked like she’d escaped from a high school for the permanently don’t-give-a-damn doing her nails at the only other occupied table. I’d only just sat at their table when Og decided I’d make a good appetizer.

“You know we make good on useful data,” I said, not quite answering. It paid to remind informants about that: PSI appreciated free info, especially when solving the case benefited everyone, but we didn’t expect our informants to put themselves on the line without some kind of compensation. It was also a reminder to my companions that I wasn’t a private citizen, as it were: if they screwed with me, it wouldn’t be just me pissed off with them. Stosser and Venec had reputations both independently and together that would make anyone seriously reconsider trying to scam their people.

“I can’t tell you shit until you ask a question, puppy.” The da-esh looked me up and down, while Og climbed back into his chair and glared at me from across the table, brave again now that its pack leader had taken control. “You’re Torres, right?”

“Right.” There were enough of us in the office now that it could get confusing to fatae, I supposed. Not like when we started, and there were only five of us, and nobody ever mistook me for Sharon, more’s the pity.

“Huh.”

I had absolutely no idea how to decode that, so I just waited.

It took three sips of whatever the da-esh was drinking for him to decide. “You pups have done fair by us so far. If I know anything useful, and it don’t get me killed to tell, I’ll share.”

That was a better offer than most I got. I nodded agreement of the terms. Unlike the others I’d spoken to today, he only got the driest of details. “Missing-persons case. Three persons. Child, teenager, and a young adult—all female, all missing from the city in the past month. Null, or at least non-declared.” Sometimes Talent popped up out of nowhere, and the two youngest were young enough to be uncertain. “I’m looking for trace of any of them.” I reached—carefully, with an eye on Og—into my bag and pulled out three photographs. Spread out on the table in the dim light, I could barely see the details, but brownies and their kin make up for their lack of external ears by having rather spectacular night vision.

“Human. Two overtly Caucasian, one with a definite Asian parent. No similarity in coloring or in face shape. They are all coddled little brats, but no meanness in them.”

My jaw might have dropped open just a little bit, because Og chuckled, a nasty little sound.

“We are not, how do they call it, apex predators,” my informant said, ignoring his companion. “Survival often involves being able to read information quickly, off limited data. That is why you came to me, isn’t it?”

It was. I just hadn’t expected it to be quite so detailed.

“Have you heard anything about missing females, human, or anyone who might have an interest in them?” I was choosing my words carefully, something you had to do when dealing even with the most friendly of fatae. “Interest either in having them, having them harmed, or having harm come to them.” The last two weren’t the same thing, and you could hide a lot of malice in the space between.

“You mean other than the usual steal, molest, eat, and otherwise do evil with?”

I sighed. “Yeah, other than that.”

The da-esh showed his teeth in a grin, and I really wished he hadn’t. Their kind were carrion-eaters, when they couldn’t get fresh cat, and not much on hygiene. “There was a case a while back, of gnomes dusting teenage girls. I guess they couldn’t get dates for the prom. But nothing else. Mostly when someone’s little girl goes missing, she does it of her own free will. My pretty unicorn or elf-prince of something.” The scorn practically dropped off his words. I really couldn’t blame him.

“Now, if it were boys gone missing, that would be unusual. Unless an elf-wench’s gone hunting, they tend to be safe.”

Elf-wench. That was even worse than “trooping fairies.” I was so never going to use that in a Lady’s hearing. In fact, I was never even going to think it.

“And nobody’s been talking trash about humans again?”

The da-esh paused, then looked over at Og. I guessed he would be more likely to hear—and maybe partake of—any such trash-talking.

Og looked sulky, his mouth drawn in a tight little frown. “Nobody dare trash-talk,” he said, and his tone was that of a ten-year-old grounded for the first time. “Not since The Wren do what she did.”

What had The Wren done? Was this tied into… No, didn’t know, didn’t want to know, didn’t want to have to take any notice, official or otherwise. If Wren had won us goodwill among the fatae—or at least put the fear of Talent into them—then I’d use it and be glad.

“But,” Og went on, and it was like the words were getting pulled with pliers from his throat, “there is a thing.”

“A thing?” I was prepared to bribe, if needed—we had a slush fund for that, not all of it in cash—but the da-esh beat me to it, placing one large hand square on the top of Og’s head and pushing down with obvious threat. “Talk, or I eat your brains for breakfast,” he said.

I was pretty sure that wasn’t an idle threat. From the way Og’s eyes rolled up into his head, he was, too.

“Whispers. Not even whispers. Loud thinking, maybe.” He squirmed a little under the weight of the hand, then shrugged, all pretense of resistance going out of him. “I hear talk in the Greening Space. The piskies talk. Humans, too many humans, pissing off fatae already there. All hours, sleeping and eating and shitting there.”

“A full campsite?” I was suspecting they didn’t have official permits, but Central Park was large, and a few people could probably disappear for a while, especially in warmer weather. A settled camp, though, would be harder to hide.

It’s tough to shrug when you’re being squished from above, but Og did his best. “Whispers. They hide, but they are not good enough to hide from piskies.”

Piskies were the Cosa Nostradamus’s official gossips—tiny, inquisitive, borderline-rude pranksters who didn’t understand the meaning of the word privacy and wouldn’t have cared if they did. They looked a bit like one of those old-style Kewpie dolls crossed with a squirrel, or maybe a mouse lemur—big eyes, grasping claws, fluffy tail, and a topknot of hair that came in colors that should not be seen in nature. Most of the Cosa Nostradamus despised them, but people I respected—namely Wren Valere and Ian Stosser—listened very carefully if a piskie spoke to them.

“A campsite of humans in Central Park,” I repeated, to make sure that I wasn’t misunderstanding.

“Children-humans,” Og corrected me. “That was why the piskies whispered. Young humans. They thought they might play with them but they threw pinecones and rocks and drove them away, instead.”

The pronoun abuse in that sentence nearly gave me a headache, but I was able to follow it. “The children drove the piskies away. They didn’t want to be found.”

That meant that there had to be at least one Talent in the group, or someone familiar enough with the fatae to know that either the piskies weren’t a hallucination—a common enough belief—or that if you were trying to keep a low profile, you did not invite piskies to hang around.

“Human-children…” In fatae-terms, that meant teens, not little kids. “And no adults?”

Og rolled his yellowing eyes up at me again. “How should I know? I only know what piskies whisper and they’re piskies.”

Valid point. The fact that they liked to gossip did not mean that they got the facts straight, or wouldn’t embellish or pare down to make the story more interesting.

“Enough?” the da-esh asked, and I nodded. He lifted his hand, and Og popped up like a cork, glaring at me like it was all my fault his rounded scalp had gotten polished.

My mentor had spent his entire adult life walking various halls of power, putting a word in one ear, a hand on another shoulder, coaxing and pulling events and people into patterns he approved and could use. I was starting to see—on a far more crude and after-the-fact fashion—why it was so appealing.

“My thanks,” I said, and my hand moved off the table, leaving a suitable donation to the da-esh’s bar tab. Before Og could grab at it, I had turned and left.

Out on the street, I got out of the pedestrian flow, leaned my back against a building, and called the team.

*hey* A tight ping, but broad enough to reach the original Five—Pietr, Sharon, Nifty, Nick, and myself. Nobody else needed in on this—they hadn’t time yet to build up useful contacts.

Sharon and Nifty came back right away, clear question marks forming in my awareness, with Nick’s query half a second later. Nothing from Pietr. He must be busy.

*anyone hear any chatter along the rat-line the past week or so?* The actual ping was less actual words than a query and a feel for what I wanted. Group-pings were hard enough to maintain without wasting the extra energy trying to shape words, too.

*piskies?* Nifty was dubious.

*nothing here* Sharon came back, and Nick echoed that.

*what’s up?* That came from all three of them, in varying degrees.

*job for Stosser. tell ya later*

Their awareness faded from mine, and I was alone in my head. Pings weren’t really communication, the way you would talk to someone, and it wasn’t telepathy, either: there was, so far as anyone could tell, no such thing as real telepathy, although the incredibly tight, almost verbal pings Venec and I could manage might come close. That said, pings were damned convenient, and I could not understand my mentor’s reluctance to use them more—it was very definitely a generational divide. I had long suspected that J would probably still be using a wand if he thought it wouldn’t get him laughed out of the bar.

I started walking again, not really having a direction, but I thought better when I could pace. So. Piskies. I had been casting a wide net, hoping to pull in something that would give me a specific direction. Now that I had it…I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Investigate immediately? Gather more information and see if there was backup for what was—admittedly—a vague mention by an unreliable source? Go back to the office and report on my morning’s work, and ask Stosser for further instructions?

That third choice wasn’t even an option. Ian was a brilliant people-shmoozer and politician, and the driving force behind PSI, absolutely. As an investigator, though? Not so much. In point of fact, he sucked at tight-focus detail work. I could ask Venec, but he’d sounded occupied with his own shit, whatever it was, and anyway, even if he was here he’d just give me one of those Looks. And he’d be right to do so. I was dithering, and that was so unlike me I had to stop in the middle of the sidewalk—earning dirty looks from the people who had to swerve around me—and wonder what the hell was going on.

“Y’know, I really don’t like this job.”

I took a step, frowning. The words had come out of me, driven by kenning-chill I could still feel shivering in my bones. Maybe it was time to stop and explore that a bit. Talk it out, Torres. Ignore the nice people carefully not-staring at me, and talk it out. Pretend you’ve got an ear-thingy on and there’s someone on the other end of the line…

Venec. His eyes half-closed, leaning against a wall like his shoulder bones grew out of it, listening to everything I said and everything I wasn’t saying.

“This job… We have so many other things going on, everyone’s working flat-out, and I’m doing pro bono work for the Fey, trying to clear up their problem so Stosser can maybe yank their leash later…”

So I felt put-upon. That wasn’t enough to explain the shivery unhappy-feeling in my bones. A little girl, seven years old, was missing. And maybe others, too, if Danny’s girls were related somehow. Even if they had just run away to join a bunch of would-be park-dwellers, my job was to find out and bring at least one of them safely home.

I started walking again, briskly, as though to leave the unease behind simply by outpacing it. “Torres, get your head out of your ass, your self-pity back in its box, and get to work.”

The kenning was never wrong—but it was always vague. The unease might be related to this case. It might not. I had no way of telling, without more info, and even if the kenning was related, it would hardly be the first time one of our cases ran us into trouble. So. I would check up on the lead, reconnoiter a bit, and see if there was anything actually going down in the Park. If not, well, checking on leads was part of the game. If yes…then I could go on from there.

The one thing I couldn’t do was let my feeling of being shunted off into a low-importance case interfere with my ability to kick ass.

* * *

Central Park is large. If you don’t live in New York City, you may not realize that, or think that the small portion that you see is all there is, just a breath of greenery in the middle of the concrete jungle.

The truth is, Central Park is more than eight hundred acres of lawns, woods, lakes, playgrounds, fields, and rambling paths that never actually go in a straight line. There are bridges and underpasses, tunnels and suddenly-appearing gazebos, restaurants and castles, and god knows what else tucked into the utterly artificial and incredibly lovely grounds. Something like thirty thousand trees, according to the stats, and rumors of coyotes to go with the birds and rabbits and squirrels and occasional seriously confused deer.

And there are fatae. Exactly how many Cosa-cousins live in the Park is unknown—even if we tried to run a census, they’d either refuse to answer or lie. Piskies, flocks of them nestling in the trees and building, their nests tangled in the roots. Dryads, not as many as we might wish, but enough to help keep the rooted trees healthy and well. Some of Danny’s full-blooded faun cousins, and at least one centaur. I didn’t think the lakes were deep enough to support any of the aquatic fatae, but I’ve been wrong a lot before, enough that I’d be very careful leaning too far over a watery surface. City fatae tended to abide by the Treaty…but water-sprites were changeable and moody and saw most humans as annoyances at best. Venec and Stosser would be peeved if they had to ransom me from the bottom of a lake.

The moment I entered the Park at West 77th Street, I knew that I was being watched. Fatae don’t use magic the way we do, but they’re part of it, and they know it when it walks by. I could pretend I wasn’t aware of the surveillance, make like I was just out for a nice afternoon stroll, or I could stop and deal with it now.

I stopped.

The closest person to me was a woman pushing a stroller a few yards ahead of me. Other than that, the walkway I was on appeared deserted. I waited until she was out of earshot, then cocked my hip and addressed the air around me.

“If you’ve got something to say, say it. I’m listening.”

Silence. Not even a rustle or a giggle, which meant that it probably wasn’t piskies. When no pinecones or other shot hit the back of my neck, I decided it definitely wasn’t piskies.

“Come on, this is boring. You have a question? Ask. Got a warning? Go ahead. But don’t just skulk silently. It’s creepy as hell.”

The sense of being watched didn’t go away, and I was starting to get annoyed. “You know who I am.” It wasn’t a question this time; last I’d gone hunting in the Park I’d almost managed to set off an interspecies incident, riling a Schiera to the point that it spat poison at me. That was the kind of thing that got retold. And I wasn’t exactly subdued in my appearance—I didn’t dye my hair the extreme colors I used to, after being told in no uncertain terms it wasn’t a good look for an investigator, but the naturally white-blond puff of curls, matched to my normal urban goth-gear, was easily identifiable. Lot of Talent in the city, but the combo of Talent, appearance, and showing up to poke my nose directly into things that other folk looked away from? Savvy fatae knew who I was, and unsavvy or ignorant fatae wouldn’t have lingered once I called them out.

“Come on. Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

My heart went into my throat and my eyes probably bugged out, and I resisted—barely—the urge to drop to my knees and apologize for every thoughtless, stupid, or mean thing I’d ever done. The woman standing in front of me tilted her long, solemn face to one side and lifted one long, gnarled hand to my hair, touching it as gently as sun touches a leaf.

“I startled you. That was not my intent.”

“M’lady—” And unlike with the Lady this morning, the title came easily to my mouth, without resentment. “You do not startle but amaze.”

Rorani. Not merely a dryad but The Dryad. It was rumored that her tree predated the Park itself, making her well over three hundred years old. Nobody had ever seen her tree, at least not and spoken about it, but Rorani was always there, moving through the Park the closest thing to a guardian spirit it had. If the fatae in New York had any leader at all, or one soul they would listen to without hesitation, it was Rorani. Her willowy green-and-brown presence could stop a bar fight in progress, halt a bellow midsound, and make edged weapons disappear as though they’d been magicked into fog.

“You are here about the children.”

“What, everyone knows about this except us?” I sighed and dragged a hand across my face as though to erase the words. “I am sorry. I just…”

“I have been watching them,” she said, accepting my apology without acknowledging either it or my rudeness. “I worry. But I did not know who to speak to, or even if I should. Humans…are difficult sometimes.”

“As opposed to the logical, tractable, and obedient fatae?”

At that, she smiled, a small, almost-shy grin that could break your heart. “Even so.”

That grin didn’t mask her concern, or soothe my unease, but it put paid to my thinking this job wasn’t worth my skills. Even if this had nothing to do with my case, I was glad I’d come. Anything that worried the Lady of The Greening, Stosser would want to know about.

“These children. Show me?”

I was surprised when the dryad hailed a pedicab. I don’t know why—even dryads must get tired of walking, eventually. I always felt guilty using a pedicab—I was in better shape than a lot of the drivers—but Rorani stepped as gracefully into the carriage as a queen into her coach, me the awkward lackey trailing at her heels.

“To the Meer, please,” Rorani said, and the pedicab headed northeast.

My first thought was to be thankful that I had encountered Rorani the moment I entered the Park, saving me probably hours of searching… and that thought led me to the suspicion that it hadn’t entirely been coincidental. Accusing a dryad of collusion with a da-esh, though, took cojones I did not have. And it changed nothing, save that the fatae of the city were helping in an investigation without being prodded, coerced, or paid, and that was…new.

I had no expectation that we were all going to join hands and sing “Kumbaya” anytime soon; we might have stepped back from the edge regarding human-fatae relations, but there were still generations of tension built into every encounter. If Rorani had given word that we were to be helped… that was a very good sign.

We skirted the Reservoir and got off a little while after 102nd street, vaguely on the east side of the Park. Rorani waited, and I belatedly dug into my bag for cash to pay the cabbie. He sneered at my request for a receipt.

“This way,” she said, as he pedaled away. We walked past the Lasker Pool and off the roadway, down a worn path, and into surprisingly deep woods.

This part of the Park had been designed to mimic a natural forest, and once within it, you could not see—or hear—any hint of the city around us, not even the tallest skyscrapers. I was pretty sure that a slender beech winked at me as we passed, but I didn’t have time to stop and say hello—and I might have imagined it, anyway.

We walked down the deer path, single file, until Rorani stopped, waiting for me to see whatever it was she wanted me to see.

There was a decline, sloping gradually into a little flat-bottomed valley, with another higher, rocky rise on the other side. The floor was covered in grass and ground cover, the trees midheight and leafy, and—then the scene shifted, the way some paintings do when you stare at them too long.

I saw the bedrolls first. They were tucked under a clump of thick-trunked trees, concealed under tarps painted to mimic the ground, but the shapes were wrong, jumping out at me like they were splashed with bright orange paint. The storage container was harder to find; they’d found one the same gray as the rocks and cluttered it up so that the lines resembled a small boulder. I was impressed.

Once I saw that, the bodies came into focus. Three skinny forms in dark hoodies and jeans, curled up against each other like kittens, and another higher up on a rock, his or her legs hanging over the side, reading a book. It was a quiet, peaceful scene, and I couldn’t see a thing about it that would have worried Rorani, other than the fact that all four were young enough to be living at home, not out here on their own. But that was a human concern, not a fatae one.

The campsite, now that I was aware of it, looked well established. Without using magic to hide it, I was amazed they’d been able to keep it from being discovered even a week, much less a month or more. I guess if nobody’s looking, it’s easier to hide.

Had anyone been looking for these girls, before us? The cops had…but in a city this size, kids go missing at such a rate it must be impossible to keep up, even on a purely Null basis. Add in the fatae, and the risk of being dusted or—well, nobody had been eaten in years. That we knew about, anyway.

“How many are there?” I spoke softly, although I was pretty sure that they couldn’t hear us from up here.

“I’m not sure,” she said, equally as quiet. “They come and go, and I cannot stay to watch them as I might. I have seen as many as a dozen gathered. A dozen, and their leader.” She paused, and her hand touched my shoulder, the fingers folding around my skin. “Their leader. She…worries me.”

Ah. I had thought Rorani would not mind teenagers gathering peacefully among her trees; there was something else going on. “An adult?”

“Yes. A Null. And yet there is magic there. She holds them in sway. A glamour, save she has none. She speaks, and they gather around. She points, and they scatter.”

I chewed on my lower lip, listening. What Rorani was describing was a charismatic, like Stosser. Take a charismatic, Talent or Null, add a bunch of under-twenty-somethings, and put them out here, with no other distractions? You have a cult.

Most cult leaders were male, from what I’d ever read, but most doesn’t ever mean all. A females-only cult? If they were religious, I’d lay money on Dianic—or Artemic—or any of the other mythological interpretations. No stag to hunt here, though.

“What do you—” I started to ask, when something caught Rorani’s attention. “Oh, dear,” she said, in a tone of voice that put every nerve I had on edge. There was “oh, dear, that’s too bad,” and then there’s “oh, dear, this is very bad,” and hers was the latter.

We weren’t alone. Out of the stillness, a dozen creatures flowed over the hill behind the campsite. They were long and lean and shimmered a pale silver like sunlight on water, and I had no idea what the hell I was looking at except I was pretty sure they weren’t bringing milk and cookies. As we watched, the first one started picking a careful, silent route down the hill.

The kids below had no idea they were about to have company.

“Landvættir,” Rorani said. Her fingers moved restlessly, her lovely face grave, but she remained still by my side, merely watching. “They claimed this area before the humans came. I tried to warn them, but they did not hear me.”

I wasn’t sure if she had tried to warn the humans or the breed, but it didn’t matter. Dryads were negotiators, not fighters; she wasn’t about to get involved in what was about to happen. I’m not much of a fighter, either. Every time I’m near a fight—any kind, even a scuffle—my heart starts to pound and my stomach hurts. But I couldn’t stand by and watch someone get hurt, either.

Any faint hope that the fatae meant no harm was dashed when—the moment they hit ground—they attacked. The humans were caught off guard, but rallied in a way that suggested they’d been taught at least some fighting moves: they rolled away from the first attackers, then went back-to-back in pairs, grabbing whatever was nearest to hand as weapons.

My move into the clearing was more hasty than graceful, but a few bruises and dirt on my clothes were the least of my worries. The fatae had sharp claws and blunted snouts that still looked like they could do some harm, and the four humans had what looked like pocket knives, a baseball bat, and a large rock. That wasn’t going to do it, even if they had the first idea where the fatae were vulnerable.

I had no idea, either—I’d never encountered these lan-whatevers before. But I had a trick these Nulls didn’t; one that any fatae would recognize and respect.

I hoped.

Reaching up with my current-sense—the thing that makes your hairs stand on end and your skin vibrate when there’s an electrical storm overhead—I grabbed the first bit of wild current I could find and dragged it down into my core. I’m normally not much for wild-sourcing, but in this place and this instance, it seemed the right thing to do.

The new current sizzled hot and fierce, and I didn’t give it time to settle into my core before I was pulling it up and out again. Thin, sharp blue lines sparked along my skin, like electric veins, and crackled and popped in the air around my hands.

Most of what we did these days was careful, regulated, and always, always thought out in advance. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do right then, except it involved keeping anyone—human or fatae—from getting killed.

One of the girls saw me, and I could tell from her body language that she wasn’t sure if I was friend or foe. Trying to reassure her, without catching the fataes’ attention, I nearly fell over one of the camouflaged lumps and kicked aside something small and shiny. A metal tent peg. I grabbed it instinctively, and the moment the cool metal hit my palm, I had a plan.

I ignored the individual scuffles, dodged around a fatae who tried to grab at me, and made it to the center of the scrum. Holding the spike up over my head, I gathered all of that wild current and sent it into the metal, wrapping it tight with hot blue threads of my own core-current, forcing it to my will.

“Sit down,” I yelled and put all my annoyance, my frustration, my worry, and my sheer irritation at wasting time with this crap into those two words.

The magic echoed like a thunderclap under the tree branches, and I swear I heard some of the granite behind me calve off and splinter in response. The effect on the fatae was gratifying. They weren’t built to actually sit down, but they dropped to the ground anyway, bellies low and clawed hands down. The humans went down like someone had cut their strings, in at least one instance falling over her erstwhile opponent.

“Stay down,” I said, still annoyed, when one of the humans tried to get back up, and she subsided. A fierce looking chica, maybe midteens, with dirty blond hair in a braid and a pair of brown eyes that were currently trying to glare me in half. She was pissed and wanted to get back into the fight. Despite myself, I started to grin and had to force it back. Now was not the time to admire her scruff.

The magic, amplified through the metal spike, had hit the ground hard, hard enough that there were still sparks in the dirt, moving like miniature whirlwinds. When one of the fatae shifted, it sparked him—her, it?—hard enough that it uttered a clear yelp and turned to glare at me with the pained expression of its human counterpart.

Apparently, I had ruined their party.

“Life sucks, kids,” I said to both of them.

There was a scuffling noise behind me, somehow managing to sound graceful, and I knew even before the fatae all looked in that direction that Rorani had decided to join us.

“This will not do,” she said. “This is not acceptable.”

The human children—and this close I could see that they were in fact all children, none of them past fourteen, probably—went wide-eyed in astonishment and fear. The fatae were just very attentive. I’d never seen—hell, I’d never even heard of a dryad losing her temper, but that was very much what was happening next to me. It took every bit of control I had not to step away.

Rorani wasn’t sparking, or yelling, or waving her arms. She had, in fact, gone very still and very tall, and the impression was not of a delicate, willowy lady but an ancient tree, deep-rooted and stern, standing beside me.

“Sweet Dog of Mercy,” I whispered, barely audible even to myself. Rorani was an American Chestnut.

To survive the blight, to live so long after her tree-kin had died out and been replaced by lesser trees… There was a lot about the Lady of the Greening, and the way the fatae reacted to her, that made more sense now.

“The Greening is large. Treaties exist. Even if these humans did not know, you did.” She was talking to the fatae then. “You knew, and were warned to behave, and yet…this? This attack?”

The pissy-looking fatae shifted its gaze, and the others all looked down at the ground. In that moment I realized something: these fatae were teenagers, too. Or whatever passed for it, in their lifecycle.

We’d interrupted the equivalent of a teenage gang turf war.

“You.” I pivoted slowly and took on the brown-eyed human. “Where are the rest of your folk?”

She glared at me, utterly defiant. She’d get up in an instant and start the fight again, not cowed by the magic show I’d just put on or the fact that her opponents looked like something from a high-budget sci-fi flick. She might be Null, but magic didn’t impress her much. If I were a high-res user, or could make with the mojo, I’d change that, fast, but I’d always been brutally honest about my capabilities. I was smarter, faster, and able to outthink most other Talent, thanks to J’s and Venec’s training, but I would get blown off the curb in a real power-off. And pulling all that wild current, without warning, had given me the start of a serious stomachache.

“I’m not the enemy here,” I said impatiently. “In fact, I just saved your asses. You might have won this fight, but you might not have, and even if you did, you’re outnumbered here. You know that, right?”

“We’re protected.”

That was from another of the girls, the one who had been reading up on the rock. She was about the same age, still skinny, still looking like someone needed to tuck her into bed, not toss her into the street.

“Protected?” Rorani had said that their leader was a Null. Was Rorani wrong? Or was another person, a Talent, protecting them? If so, why? I held up a hand, the current still sparking under my skin, making it look like it was wreathed in bright blue smoke, and showed it to her. “Like this?”

She glanced at my hand, swallowed, and looked away. Not scared, but…disturbed? They definitely knew magic, same as they knew fatae; enough to deal with it, but not anywhere enough to be comfortable. Or, probably, understand exactly what they were dealing with.

Their leader had taught them, but not well. That probably meant they weren’t as protected as they thought, either.

I looked at Rorani, whose lovely face was still set in stern lines that would have made me quake if it was directed at me. The fatae certainly knew they were in deep shit, the way they were still flat on their bellies.

“You,” she said now. “Take your fellows and be gone. This place is now mine.”

The lead fatae actually had the cojones to try and protest. “We…”

“I have spoken.”

And that was that. It and its fellows got up, moving slow and careful, and slid back out the way they came.

“Will they cause trouble later?” I asked her, watching them go.

“They will not. Their elders…possibly. It will depend.” She looked over the remaining humans and sighed, the sound of wind through leaves. “These are your people. You will be able to manage it?”

To most fatae, humans were all one breed: Talent or Null, lonejack or Council. I’d expected more of Rorani, but it wasn’t as though I could hand these idiots over to her. And I still had my own case to follow up on, something I’d nearly forgotten in the current-rush and the confusion of the fight.

My stomachache got worse. The thought of my girl being somewhere among these would-be toughs meant there might be others stolen away, too. Maybe all of them.

Even if babygirl wasn’t here, I couldn’t walk away from this, not without knowing who was teaching them and who was—allegedly—protecting them.

“Yeah, I’ve got it,” I told Rorani.

“Then I shall leave you to your work, and I shall manage mine.” She offered me her hand, and I took it. The flesh was hard but soft at the same time, like velvet over bone, and I had the moment’s thought that I should bow over it, not shake it.

Then the moment passed. Rorani turned away, blending into the landscape the same way she’d appeared, and I was left with four uncowed, unbiddable teenage girls who clearly saw no reason to answer any of my questions.


Chapter 5

“You say you’re protected.” I had settled with my butt on an outcrop of rock, giving me the double advantage of covering my back and making it look like I was just lounging, totally in control of the situation. The first rule of interrogation, as per Benjamin Venec, was to proceed as though you were utterly certain that you would be given all the answers you wanted, in time. Let the perp worry about how you planned to get those answers.

“You can’t make us talk,” the third girl said, all spitfire defiance. Oh, darling, I just did. But I only smiled and nodded my head. “You’re right, I can’t. Well, I could, but that would be messy and you’d probably lie, anyway. At first.”

I let that sink in for half a breath.

“Seriously,” I continued, girl-to-girl. “You’re not dumb. You know what I am—you weren’t surprised by the magic—so you know I can do stuff you can’t.”

There was a twitch at that, just the slightest twitch, but I caught it. Rorani had said these girls were all Nulls, hadn’t she? I tried to remember. The missing girls were all Nulls, mine and Danny’s. Did they think they could do magic, too? Had their protector gathered them here to be some kind of modern hedge-witch coven? Well, stranger things than that had happened in the Park before, the past few hundred years, but…




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