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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.”
