Читать книгу Dragon Justice - Laura Anne Gilman - Страница 11

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.