Читать книгу Dragon Justice - Laura Anne Gilman - Страница 7

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.