Читать книгу Dragon Justice - Laura Anne Gilman - Страница 10

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.