1

My back hurt, my horns itched, and I was pretty sure that burrito for lunch had been a mistake.

“You’re bluffing,” I said.

“Danny, oh Danny.” The miserable fucker had the balls to smile at me. “You know I never bluff.”

It was summer. Some places in the city, summer’s nice. You get out by the water, maybe Orchard Beach or Coney Island, or even the Seaport if it’s not too crowded, and the salt air and breeze touches your skin and you’re seventeen again. And the Green, what humans called Central Park, was a blessed respite, even on the worst days.

But inside the city itself, locked within the henge of buildings that reflected heat and cast it back to the pavement which in turn shoved it up into living tissue, summer was miserable. I wanted to be somewhere with clean air, cold water, and a colder beer. Instead, I was stuck on a park bench in midtown Manhattan, watching tourists pile on and off those damn tourist buses.

The last round had been a mistake, last night. So had the first round. I’m not much for drinking – my years on the force showed me how badly that could go wrong, and my father’s genetic inheritance makes me prone to…overindulgence. But an old friend was getting married next week, and the least I could do was go along with the bridal shower, make sure nobody got in trouble.

Everyone, of course, had. And now I was paying for it. At least the sweat was soaking the toxins out of my system, right?

Anderlik, next to me, smiled again. His teeth were perfectly capped, his skin naturally tanned, and his eyes flat and ugly as the pavement. His hands rested on his lap, and I noted that the creases of his pants were perfectly pressed, even in this heat. Bastard.

“So, if you’re willing to negotiate, he went on, “I think we can come to an amicable position that leaves everyone satisfied.”

One of the double-decker buses I’d been watching pulled up and disgorged its passengers, overwhelmed families tumbling off onto the sidewalks, fanning themselves with cheap folding fans, hats, and folded brochures, their faces red with sweat and bright with excitement. Mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, young lovers and wait for it, a pack of teenaged boys, out on a lark, not minding the heat. Sixteen, tops. They came off the bus last, already looking for their next big thrill, their body language practically screaming ‘fresh meat.’

“Danny? Can we talk terms?”

I saw him then, oozing his way through the crowds like a proper snake, eyes beady and tongue practically scenting his prey in the air. Another two-three minutes, and he’d be on them, dropping lures and seeing what he could catch.

Not this time, I thought, standing up.

“Danny!”

My fist was almost an afterthought, hitting Anderlik a solid three-quarter blow on his perfect nose.

“The photos haves already gone to the PUPs,” I told him. “You’re going to have to negotiate with Venec. Have fun with that.”

I walked off, my gaze focused on my prey, Romeo already forgotten. I moved through the crowds, aware that I was getting looks as I went. Tourists always looked; the Department of Tourism should send me a check every month. I had an actor’s face, a friend once told me, and I’d be cast as Every New Yorker Ever; sardonic, weary and just a hint of amusement left in my eyes. The bastard love child of Jimmy Stewart and Woody Allen.

Slime had found his prey: he was leaning against the hip-high white barricades the DoT had put in to keep cars on the road and pedestrians on the sidewalks, his body language oozing smarter, cooler older guy. Two of the boys were buying it, the other three not so much. I’d have to wait: if they walked away, I’d have nothing, no proof. Part of me wanted them to be smart and walk away. The rest of me wanted nothing more than to get this slimy skin-seller out of business.

Something – someone – was pacing me. Tall, taller than me, dark, and female. Clearly pacing me too, with a mind to intercept, rather than just moving in the same direction I happened to be moving.

“Excuse me?”

She was talking to me, yeah. My momma raised me to be polite, most especially to women. I kept an eye on the knot of potential boy-toys ahead of me, and turned just enough to see who was trying to get my attention.

She was tall, dark, and strong-boned, with black curls pinned away from equally dark eyes and a nose like Cleopatra might’ve had. Not a beauty, but New York’s values aren’t LA’s, and I’ve always been a sucker for an interesting face.

All right, I’ve always been a sucker, period.

“Danny Hendrickson, right?”
Ahead of me, Slime was leaning in, trying to close the sale. Next to me, a dark-eyed woman was calling my name.

“Honey, it’s gotta wait,” I said, and stepped forward. She followed.

I was a long pace away from the boys when two oversized individuals in regrettable matching outfits passed in front of me. I dodged, came around, and saw that the majority vote had won: the boys were backing away, several of them looking somewhat nervous. Good, and damn it. I stopped, and something tipped Slime off, because he looked up and saw me standing there.

He had no clue who I was, but his slimy instincts told him what, as much as if I’d still carried a badge. And that was enough to make him disappear like a Salamander on a frosty morning.

“Mister Hendrickson?”

I exhaled, let the irritation go, and turned to see what the hell was tapping me on the shoulder.

“Mister Hendrickson.”

“Danny.”

She nodded, gravely. Looking at her straight on, I could see her skin had an ashy tint to it, and she was sweating. Okay, we were all sweating, but I didn’t think the heat was what had her shaking.

“My name is Ellen. Bonnie…Bonnie told me how to find you.”

New York City was a big town. Bonnie knew a lot of people. But there was only one Ellen I knew about, who Bonnie Torres might have sent my way.

I’d heard about Ellen. Heard enough to be damn cautious.

She licked her lips, and raised those scared eyes to mine, and said the words that were always my damned downfall.

“I need your help.”

One of these days, those words were going to get me killed. Might even be today.

oOo

We decamped to the nearest coffeehouse that wasn’t Starbucks, which in this case was the venerable Café Cafee. It’s been around since 1952, and looks it. Even the repeated clean-ups and gussy-ups of Times Square couldn’t touch CC’s.

She wrapped her hands around her coffee mug like it was the last source of warmth in a stone-cold winter. She had long fingers, broad palms, the kind of hands that looked capable, like they could saw a body apart or sew it back together, whichever she had a mind to.

She looked, in fact, like a sturdy, well-built girl, the kind who took up wall climbing or hiking, something physical, was maybe too chunky as a teenager, and has been turning it to muscle ever since.

She didn’t look dangerous.

I’d heard enough to know better.

Ellen. No last name, no known background that anyone had heard of, suddenly appearing thirteen-fourteen months ago on the scene in the company of Bonnie Torres and her crew.

The so-called CSI of the magical community excelled at digging out details – and keeping those details to themselves. So I didn’t ask. None of my business, no matter how curious I’d been.

And then a few weeks later, The Wren, one of the most powerful Talent currently alive on the East Coast, had taken this unknown girl to mentor. Gossip had flared immediately, of course. But when young Ellen didn’t seem to be moving in her mentor’s larcenous footsteps, nor in fact, doing much of note at all, the talk turned to more interesting, immediate things.

I hadn’t pried, but I hadn’t forgotten, either. Sudden changes and unexplained actions were relevant to my interests. Lines of mentorship were incredibly important to the Talent community, more so than blood. Why had the Wren – Genevieve Valere – taken an unknown Talent to mentor, seemingly out of the blue? Something hadn’t quite added up, knowing both Bonnie and Wren the way I did. The two of them taking an interest in this girl meant something.

What a little careful poking around turned up was that Miss Ellen No Last Name had no training, hadn’t even known she as a Talent until recently, and that fact made the PUPs, Bonnie included, nervous as hell. That, to a trained investigator like, say, myself, meant that Miss Ellen also had power. Power that The Wren had been asked to shape – or control.

And now powerful Miss Ellen had come looking for me.

I suddenly wished for a shot of something stronger than caffeine to pour into my coffee.

If I was nervous, Miss Ellen was clearly terrified, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her.

“Bonnie said…she said you help people.”

She was too young to get the pop culture reference that went through my head, so I kept my mouth shut, nodded, and waited.

“There… someone needs your help. I just don’t know who.”

All right: that was a different song than I usually got. I leaned back, stretched my legs out in front of me, and studied my damsel in distress. I’d gotten pretty good at judging human ages: she was twenty-three, tops. Maybe only twenty-one. Legal, by the Null world’s standards. But to the Cosa Nostradamus, she was a Talent in mentorship, and that made her, in all the ways that counted, a minor.

“You know they need help, but not who it is that needs my help.” Being a PI wasn’t all that different from my years as a beat cop: sometimes you had to walk people through it before they’d get to the point and tell you what they wanted you to know. Small words and long silences worked better than trying to ask questions before they were ready.

“You know who I am.”

It wasn’t a question. She’d been in this world long enough to know that the Cosa gossiped like a granny on meth.

“You don’t know what I am.”

“Talent.” A human with the ability to manipulate current, also known as magic. That was a no-brainer: human Nulls weren’t part of the Cosa Nostradamus. Most of them didn’t even know we existed.

My mother had been a sensitive Null, aware but not part of. My father… we don’t talk about, much. Ever.

“I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know anything about any of it. Genevieve’s been trying to teach me, but…” Genevieve, huh? Most days I forgot that was Wren’s legal name. She swallowed, gathering courage, and I could feel something cold touch the base of my spine. Here it came, whatever it was.

“I see dead people.”

Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t that.

“You mean like Bruce Willis?” The words just slipped out; my mouth is like that sometimes.

Ellen had a touch of steel to her little-girl-lost routine; the glare she gave me over that proud nose would have made my momma proud.

“I see people who are going to die,” she clarified. “In the current. I don’t ask for it, it just… comes.”

“And you saw someone.”

She nodded.

“Someone you know?”

She shook her head, and then hesitated, nodded.

I took a deep breath, let it out. “You saw me.”

She nodded again.

“Just me?” I doubted it, and I was right

“No. There were others. But that doesn’t mean… I don’t know how to read what I see yet. Bonnie uses scrying crystals, but she says my visions aren’t like hers. They’re… more. She says I’m a-”

That sound you heard, the crystalline ping of a penny dropping? Yeah. “You’re a storm seer.”

She nodded, looking miserable. I didn’t blame her.

No wonder they’d been keeping her quiet. The only reason I knew about storm seers was because my mother, once she figured out about my old man, got her hands on everything she could find about the Cosa Nostradamus, which included a lot of junk but also some of the real histories, all the way back to Founder Ben’s time. Ben Franklin had codified the laws of current, helped shift it from some random hobledygook of superstition and woo-woo into a practical system that could be studied and ordered. For humans, anyway. The fatae – the non-humans – didn’t use magic, they were magic. So it was different for them.

I was half-human, half-fatae. Didn’t happen too often. Most of the time, a woman found herself with a fatae child, she drowned it, if she couldn’t take care of the problem beforehand. My mother had made a different choice. I didn’t think she regretted it, but I never asked, and she never told me.

If she’d asked me, I might have chosen differently, but, well.

This wasn’t about me, it was about the woman sitting in front of me.

Storm seers, according to what I’d read, were a legend.

See, magic exists, but it’s cranky. It doesn’t like being touched, and most humans try to manipulate it, it’ll fry them up like bacon. But some humans, they’ve got the gift. Talent. That’s what they have and that’s what they’re called, and they’re the rest of the Cosa Nostradamus, along with the non-humans of the world. I’d grown up with Talent, counted most of my friends among them, but they were a mystery to me, in a lot of ways.

A storm seer was that mystery wrapped around dynamite. A storm seer, according to legends, could take wild current, the magic that hums throughout the world, emerging from the core of the earth or coming down from the sky in lightning, and see what was coming. Cassandra-style seeing, not just a touch of kenning or precog.

And apparently, what my girl saw, was death.

Specifically and relevant to my interests, my death.

oOo

Ellen had thought he would be…scarier. Or larger. Or not seem so…human. In her vision, her kenning, Bonnie called it, his face had been more drawn, his cheekbones more pronounced, and his chin – clean-shaven now – covered with stubble. And his horns…

You couldn’t see his horns, now. His brown hair was a tousled mess, curly but not in any kind of styled way, more like he washed it and dried it and then forgot he had it, and you had to look carefully to see the tiny curved points peeking out.

About the size of her thumb, she figured. Maybe smaller: she had large hands. But very real.

Faun. Half-faun, Bonnie had said. Fatae – not human. That still blew her mind; she’d only just learned that the things she kept seeing out of the corner of her eyes were real, that the things she saw and felt and could do were real. After twenty years of being told she was imagining things, and then being told that she was crazy, reality didn’t quite feel real to her.

She knew enough not to reach out and touch those half-hidden horns, though. She wanted to. Badly. Badly enough that her immediate suspicion was that it wasn’t her wanting, exactly.

“Danny’s a heartbreaker,” Bonnie had said that morning, casually, like it wasn’t anything important. “It’s the whole faun thing. He can’t help it.”

Ellen licked her lips, and tried to focus on the vision that had sent her here. But that didn’t help any, either. Her visions scared the fuck out of her, more and worse than anything else. Especially now that she knew they weren’t just bad dreams or hallucinations, that she wasn’t crazy, and it was all real. Everyone she saw dead, died.

“Not all.”

“What?” He looked at her, and she realized suddenly that she’s said it out loud. She swallowed, and it felt like something sharp was stuck inside her throat.

“Not everyone I see, the ones who call to me, dies. I’m fifty-fifty, so far.”

“Well. That’s reassuring.” He didn’t sound reassured. But he also wasn’t trying to pretend he was reassured, the way everyone else did. Genevieve and Sergei, even Bonnie and the others, they all tiptoed around her, careful and cautious, and she knew why. It was because she came late to this, to knowing she was a Talent, and she was supposed to have learned all that before, when she was a kid, and she didn’t and that was bad.

“I saw you.” She had to get it out before she was too scared to talk. “Last night. You were wet, like…like you’d gotten caught in the rain. And you looked really tired. And there were these …” she fumbled, trying to remember the details of the vision from nearly twenty four hours before. “Kids? Teenagers. Three of them. Behind you. They were all wet too, and they looked weird, but I can’t tell you how. And you were all dead.”

There was something in his expression when she started to describe the other people she’d seen. Like he didn’t much care about himself being dead, but other people bothered him.

She understood that.

“First, relax,” he said, leaning forward a little. “You’re not going to be able to remember anything important if you’re tensed up and stressing about remembering the important things.”

He had a nice voice. Not too deep, but broad and warm, like… like… she didn’t know what it was like, but the voice more than the words helped her muscles loosen, her stomach unclench, and she leaned back into the booth, resting her hands on the table, even though her fingers remained clasped together maybe a little too tight.

“Tell me about where you were, before.”

“Before?”

“Before you saw me. Where were you?”

She had been in Wren’s living room. They were supposed to be having a class – she thought it was a class, anyway. Mostly, it was Wren telling stories, stuff that happened to her, or to her mentor. Sometimes older stories, about things that happened hundreds of years ago. The sky had been clear that morning, a sharp blue, with only a hint of clouds when she walked from her little studio apartment uptown to where her mentor lived. The air had felt…strange, sort of tingly, but there was so much that was new to her, she hadn’t thought anything of it.

“Wren was telling me about how she learned about being a Retriever. About how her no-see-me was part of her, and since she couldn’t turn it off, she had to learn to use it.”

That story, at least, had been obvious. She might be new to this, and kind of clueless about magic, but she wasn’t dumb. Being a storm-seer was part of who she was, and she couldn’t shut it off, either. So she had to live with it, or…

“And then… I felt weird. Like I had too much to drink, or like the building was moving under me, moving and spinning. And thunder cracked, right overhead, even though it hadn’t been raining, and I heard Wren swear, and then everything went black, like it does when a movie’s about to start, and I saw…” she remembered what Bonnie had told her that first time, about stepping back from what she saw. “I saw a figure, a man, stepping forward. Ordinary clothes, jeans and a T-shirt, a red T-shirt. And soaking wet. The way you get when you’re caught in a storm, and your umbrella gets trashed by the wind. Tired. He looked tired, and worried, and there was a streak of something on his face, something… blood.”

She hadn’t remembered that before, but now it was clear as that first vision, a streak of muddy brown from ear to chin. Not a scratch, more like he’d tried to wipe his face and smeared it off his hands.

“And horns. I remember the horns. Your hair was matted, and they showed through, and I said something to you about it and you were annoyed and then the others appeared.”

She hadn’t remembered that at first, either. Had it happened in her original vision, that sense of being there, of knowing him, or speaking to him? Or was it coming up now because she knew him, had spoken to him? She didn’t know.

Too much she didn’t know, and only one thing she did for sure.

“Three teenagers. Two girls and a boy. All wet, and tired, and…. I don’t know. I can’t see them as clearly, they’re already fading. There’s something about them, something strange. It’s like something’s taking bites out of them? Something hungry, nibbling.” Her voice faded for a moment, then came back, stronger. “Mouths of steel biting at them, a bite at a time. But that might be a metaphor. I still don’t know how this works, exactly. At all. But they’re angry, not scared. Really angry.”

“Who are they angry at?”

Ellen shivered. “I don’t know.”

She tried to hold onto the vision, try to wring something more out of it, prove she could be good at this, but it was fading, the split-second of clarity gone.

“That’s all. I had the vision, and then the rain came down like crazy, and it was gone.”

Lightning triggered it. Not lightning itself, but the energy within the lightning, the current – magic – that ran through every bit of electricity in the world, her brain reacting to it somehow. That was what they told her. That’s why they called her a storm-seer.

“I didn’t sense the storm coming,” she said to herself. “I wasn’t ready. I need to learn how to be ready.”

She felt her hands covered by something warmer, and opened her eyes to see his hands on hers, the skin several shades lighter, but the flesh so much warmer. She was cold all over, all the way down to her bones.

“It takes time,” he said. “You did great. Thank you.”

Then, as though he’d just realized he was touching her, his hands were gone, his arms crossed over his chest, and he was looking away, calling the waitress over for more coffee that she didn’t want, but took anyway, because that made the mug warm enough to hold, warm enough to rewarm her.

“I don’t know where, or when, though,” she said. “Or who. Last time…”

Last time, she had seen her mentor, whom she knew now, but not then. And the man who had died, Bonnie’s boss, whom she had never met, but they had known, the minute she described him. She’d told them he was going to die, and then he did.

“You’ve known about what you are for, what, a year? Less? And this is your second storm vision?” He sounded like he was making notes, even though he didn’t write anything down.

“My third.” The second one had been induced, her mentor calling down lightning – the most terrifying experience she’d ever had, including visions, had been standing on the rooftop watching that happen – and she’d seen half a dozen people, but none of them had called out to her. None of them had forced her to find someone, and tell what she had seen.

Genevieve had said that maybe those were natural deaths, or older deaths that had already happened, or a dozen things that were supposed to make her feel better, that maybe not every vision she’d have would involve terrible things.

But those people were still dead, or going to die. And she couldn’t do anything about it.

“Third. And you’re handling them – upright, sane, and still verbal. I’d say you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”

When Sergei, Genevieve‘s partner, said things like that, she knew he was trying to make her feel better. When her mentor said it, she was trying to build up her confidence, make her willing to try another test, learn another thing, listen to another story. And both those things were…nice. No, more than nice. After a lifetime of people -her own family- thinking she was lying, or crazy, the reassurances were a lifeline, and Ellen was smart enough to grab on with both hands.

But this man… he said it casually, almost off-handedly. Like of course she was managing it. Ellen wasn’t sure how to deal with that.

“They’re still dead,” she said. “I was only able to save one of them.”

That got his attention. He looked at her – straight at her, those hazel eyes looking more green than brown, and sharp as flint – and smiled. It wasn’t a particularly happy smile, though.

“That’s why you came to me.”

2

I’d given her my best shot, reassured her of my competence, and not quoted her a fee – this one was going to be on the house, and Bonnie had known that when she sent Valere’s pet Seer to me. I’d expected the girl to gasp out some thanks, grab her bag, and flee.

Instead, she sat there, staring at me like she expected me to get up and dance, or turn into a goat, or something.

I resisted the urge to check my hair, to make sure my horns weren’t showing, and waited.

“I need to see this through,” she said, her voice small and uncertain. Then her jaw moved again, like she was chewing something over, and she said it again, this time stronger. “I need to see this through.”

Oh. Ah, hell. I worked alone. All right, sometimes I worked with the PUPs, when they called me, or if our cases collided, the way they’d done once or twice, but on my own, my own time, I wasn’t a team player. My duty sergeant had made that point clear, several times during my tenure with the NYPD. My partner had been a patient man, but when he retired… yeah. Not a team player.

It wasn’t just about having to hide what I was, either. Since leaving the force I’d been more or less out – not that I’d been all that “in” back then, either. I liked my space, mental and physical.

I could probably say Boo! and she’d run. She had that edge-of-skin look to her, like she was terrified but holding on through sheer grit.

Damn it. I respected grit. I thought it was dumber’n hell, but I respected it.

And if she was seeing that scene play out behind her eyes…

I knew something about that, too.

“You need me,” she said, her voice desperate and a little too fast. “I know what they look like. I know…”

“It’s all right, girl,” I said, not even pretending to be happy about it. “You don’t have to convince me. If I say no you’re just going to get into mischief on your own, probably, and then I’m going to have The Wren breathing down my neck, and no thank you.”

Bonnie I could sweet talk and explain. Wren Valere…

Valere scared me, just a little. I had no shame in admitting that. Valere was a little crazy herself, where it mattered.

“I won’t be any trouble,” she promised. I gave that the once-over it deserved, and she blushed, her cheeks darkening like she knew it was a promise she was bound to break.

“I need you to agree to three things, though.” I pulled my cop voice out from the box I’d shoved it in, fixing her with the “don’t make me tell your parents” look that my old partner had perfected after two decades on the street. “One, that no matter what I say, no matter how it sounds, if I tell you to do something, you do it.”

A single wisecrack or hesitation, and I’d hog tie her and deliver her to Wren’s front door, if I had to.

She nodded.

“Two, if I decide, for any reason, that I’m doing something alone, you accept that, without back talk.”

She nodded again, although with a faint hesitation. I wasn’t sure I’d have believed her, if she’d agreed without hesitation. I love women, individually and as a gender, but there wasn’t a one of them that accepted anything without argument. Most days, I counted that a plus, but not on the job.

“Three. You don’t use current unless you clear it with me. I know you Talent, you do it like breathing, but the people we’re talking to, they’re not always comfortable with it, and I can’t have you spooking them, or pissing them off.”

I didn’t expect her laugh, and didn’t expect it to sound so…sweet.

“That, I can promise,” she said.

Right. She was new to all this. Current probably still freaked her out worse than it did a half-headblind Null.

“Good,” I said, dropping the bad cop routine. “Let’s go.”

I threw enough cash on the table to cover the coffee, and stood up. She took longer to unfold herself – she was taller than me, if only by an inch or so, but it was mostly leg, like watching a giraffe find its balance, except that made her sound ungainly and she wasn’t. Just… unsure.

Useless in a fight, I decided. Hopefully, it wasn’t going to come to that. She’d seen me dead, not herself.

Me, and three teenagers.

If Bonnie were here, she’d point out, logically, that I might not be in danger at all if I walked away. Yeah. It wasn’t a choice: I’d do whatever it took to find out who those kids were, where they were, and how to get them out of whatever danger they were in.

Bonnie knew that. Anyone who knew me, knew that.

Outside the coffee shop, I held up a hand, and then pointed with two fingers. “Go stand over there.”

She looked puzzled, but did as I said, just like she’d promised. Once she was a safe distance away, I pulled out my cell phone, and turned it on. Hanging around Talent as often as I did, you learned to power down your electronics when you weren’t using them, just in case. Current might run with electricity, but they didn’t like sharing the same track, and current usually won

I hit number three on my contact list, and waited until the other man picked up.

“Didier. It’s Hendrickson.” Not that Sergei Didier answered his phone without knowing full well who was on the other side, but my momma had drilled manners into me. “Just wanted to let you and your bird know that I’ve got possession of your fledgling.”

“Good.” Didier was his usual urbane self, but I’d known the human long enough to be able to detect relief in that smooth voice. “I assume she has told you what is bothering her?”

“Oh yes. I’ve decided to take the case.”

“I thought that you might.” There was a pause, almost imperceptible. “And I should tell Genevieve that her student will be available for lessons, or is she otherwise engaged?”

That got a laugh out of me. “She’s determined to play hooky.” I slid a glance at her. She was still waiting, patient the way people who’ve spent a lot of their life waiting get. Her hands were at her sides, not fiddling with anything, her eyes were soft and her face almost relaxed. She looked almost passive, but I could feel the tension in her body. It was just coiled down deep, and under an almost scary level of control. Whatever I might have to worry about her current, leak wasn’t going to be part of it.

“Danny.” And there was Wren on the other end of the line: even if I hadn’t known, the static filling the spaces between words a dead giveaway. A Talent, agitated, near electronics. I hoped Didier had a spare phone handy.

“Valere.”

“She shouldn’t be out and about.”

If half of what I’d heard and suspected was true, Valere was right about that. “She’s invested in this. I send her back with a pat on her head, tell her not to worry about it…. How well would you have taken to that?”

There was a long, dire silence; even the static went dead. Then: “You take care of her, Danny. Keep her safe.”

I closed my eyes, feeling an impossible weariness wrap itself around me, all the way down to my bones. It was a too-familiar feeling, these days. I didn’t need a shrink to tell me I was on the edge of burnout. For every kid I found and brought home, five more went missing. I was starting to wonder if any one person could really make a difference. But making a difference was the only sanity I had.

“Understood, Valere.”

I ended the call, turned off the phone, and put it back in my pocket. I turned and studied my new temporary companion. She looked back at me, still waiting. Tall, yeah, and not lean, and not graceful exactly, but there was power coiled under there, like the lacrosse players I’d see out in the Green, sometimes, or the field hockey girls. Potential, that was the word I’d been looking for.

“What do you see?” she asked, finally. Her voice carried without stress across the sidewalk, despite the usual ceaseless noise of traffic and sirens and the construction they were still doing up on 53^rd.

“Trouble,” I said honestly.

For some reason, that seemed to please her.

oOo

Ellen knew it was rude to stare – and in this world she’d fallen into probably dangerous – but she couldn’t stop herself from looking at him, even if she had to turn away every time he looked back, like some dumb, giggling teenager. His words – she shouldn’t feel flattered by them. She’d worked so hard, all her life, not to be trouble, to stay out of trouble, not give anyone – her parents, her teachers, the few friends she could keep – cause to turn away, that his words should have hurt.

But he wasn’t like her parents, or her teachers. He wasn’t even like the other Talent, not the woman who had lured her away with promises of being “special” and then abandoned her, not even like Bonnie and Genevieve and the others, the ones who were showing her how to use current, teaching her how to control it. And he wasn’t normal, wasn’t…what did Genevieve call them? Wasn’t a Null, thinking that she was crazy because she saw things, felt things, they didn’t.

He wasn’t human. Like the…the other things, the things she saw out of the corner of her eye, the ones Wren said were called fatae. They were real, she wasn’t crazy. But most of them were…. Too weird. He looked human, if you didn’t see the horns, or look too closely at his face, the way his ears weren’t quite rounded, and his cheekbones were too high.

But his eyes were kind, and his voice was soft, even when he was obviously annoyed, and there was something about him that made her feel like for once, she didn’t have to be careful, that she wasn’t going to break something, ruin everything.

That he wouldn’t turn away, no matter how badly she fucked up.

Ellen didn’t trust that feeling. But when he called her trouble, it felt like…like something that didn’t hurt.

And maybe, she didn’t quite dare to think, if she could help him, if her vision saved those lives, saved his life….

She couldn’t think that far, what that might mean

oOo

The home base of Sylvan Investigations wasn’t all that, but it was in a good enough part of Manhattan to reassure clients, and a boring enough part of town that I could afford the rent without dipping into my pitiful excuse for a pension. Mostly.

My shadow looked around the front room without a comment. I tried to see it through her eyes: windowless, painted an allegedly-soothing shade of cream that wasn’t aging well, two broad-leafed plants in the corner that needed repotting already. There was a wooden secretary’s desk dead center, three-quarters of the way back, with a scattering of papers and a hand-sized intercom system set-up, even though I’d never hired a secretary in my entire career. The look, overall, was bare bones, but that was okay: the people who hired me weren’t looking for pretty. They wanted competence.

Shadow finished sizing the place up, and if she had an opinion, she didn’t show it. “What now?” she asked.

“Now, we go to work. Or rather, I do. You’re going to be useless right now.” I meant it jokingly, but the expression on her face reminded me that this wasn’t Bonnie I was talking to –I had to watch myself, watch my words.

“You know about current, and electricity?”

She bit her lip, and was obviously thinking carefully about what to say. Good. Caution wasn’t a bad trick. “Current and electricity run together, come from the same sources, have a lot of the same properties. We - Talent - can channel both of them, they won’t harm us, but current’s the one we can shape and use. It’s the stuff they used to call magic in the old days.”

“Yeah. Which means that you people are pretty much shit out of luck when it comes to things like computers, because that ability to channel also means you’re walking talking lightning rods. But I find them, computers, damned useful in my job.”

“So what do I do?”

I nodded at the secretary’s desk. “There’s a pad of paper, and pencils, maybe even a pen with ink. Sit down and write out everything, and I mean everything you can remember from your visions. Visuals, feelings, hell, even what you were tasting in your mouth at the time.”

“You think that’s important?”

“I don’t know that it’s not.”

She considered that, letting it settle in her brain before nodding. I was starting to like the girl, she had a solid brain between her ears. With Valere’s mentoring and Bonnie’s guidance, she just might make it.

“You want coffee?” I asked. “The machine’s old, but it does decent enough work.”

“I don’t drink coffee,” she said, and my opinion dropped a little. I also wondered how the hell she was surviving, living with Valere. Maybe she teamed up with Didier and drank tea?

“I like my caffeine carbonated,” she said, almost apologetically.

“Oh, right. There’s some soda in the fridge but I don’t know how old it is. Does that stuff go bad?”

“Not that my taste buds ever noticed.” She went to the little fridge tucked under the far counter, and pulled out a can, frowning at it. “Yeah, that’ll do.”

My obligations dealt with, I opened the door to the back office, and went in. I left the door open, just in case.

I’d upgraded to a sweet little laptop a few months ago, which was one of the reasons I was leery of letting a Talent – especially an untrained one – anywhere near it. The older desktops were easier to ground. Nick, one of Bonnie’s teammates, said that netbooks were actually safer around Talent – he used one, when he did his Talent-hacking thing – but my hands never fit on the keyboards.

“All right, Chinjy, give me what you’ve got.”

The Child in Jeopardy site was a relatively recent thing, compiling every Amber alert, every state’s child welfare filing, every missing person’s report filed on a minor, swept and sorted into a database that could be broken down by gender, location, description, and type of abduction, and multiples of same. You had to be licensed and accredited to get access, hoops upon hoops set in place to prevent abuse and satisfy the privacy rights advocates. But the retrieval rate for missing minors had gone up seven percent since we - private investigators and other non-government interests - were able to use it, and that made all the hoops, and the yearly fee, worth it to me.

The sheer number of names in the database always made me want to drink. I’d learned to do a tunnel vision sort of thing, only look at the ones who fell within the parameters of my case, and never, ever for fucking ever look when I wasn’t on a case. I focused on the girls, narrowed down the parameters, and still got over thirty kickbacks just in the past six months. I needed more.

“Hey-” and for a second I couldn’t remember her name, only “Shadow” and I didn’t think that would go over well. But before I could remember, she was in the doorway, hesitant, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed in.

Computer. Right. I’d warned her off.

“How you coming with those notes?” I asked.

She held up the pad, and I could see that it had been filled with writing and a not-bad pencil sketch of three faces. “The moment I started, it all kind of fell out.”

“Talk to me. What’s most significant, most memorable about them?”

She hesitated, and I realized that her body language wasn’t just about proximity to the computer, or me. Something else was going on. Then something clicked for her, you could see it in her face. “What?”

It took a second for her to put the thought into words. “The kids. The ones I saw. They… their skin color was off, and it threw me. I’d thought there was a scrim between us, or they were blue from the cold, but the more I tried to remember, the more I… their skin was weird. And they had gills. On their necks.” She raised her hand and placed it on the side of her own neck, like you would if something bit you.

Well, hell. I closed the laptop and stood up, palming the taser stashed in the desk drawer. “Right. Time to do a different kind of research.”

3

I felt bad, dragging Shadow everywhere, but I didn’t even suggest her staying back in the office. First, I was under orders to keep her safe, and while I didn’t think anything was going to go down in my office – I’d been working there for six years now and the most excitement we’d ever had was when a rabid squirrel decided to take up residence in the bathroom down the hall – I couldn’t say for sure trouble wasn’t going to suddenly show up.

And anyway, she wasn’t going to stay put, not when we might have a lead on the missing kids. I knew that already. She might be a mouse, but if you poked her, she roared.

We took the 5 line downtown. It was the start of rush hour, so we didn’t catch seats, but there was room to railhang without getting squashed up against other people. I’m a New Yorker through and through but I hate the subway, especially when it’s crowded. People tend to cluster toward me, not even realizing it, and I’ve got a touch of clausto to begin with. My mom might’ve spent most of her career before me on a ship, but my fatae genetics were geared more to open hillsides and relative solitude. I never did understand why I stayed in New York, except I couldn’t quite wrap my horns around leaving.

Shadow swayed a bit, swinging toward me, then catching herself. She had that slightly dreamy look on her face, one I recognized from long exposure: she was jamming with the current that ran through the underground tracks, looping around the electricity that powered the trains, the lights, streaming through stone-carved tunnels, winding in around itself and just waiting for a Talent to come siphon it off, just a little bit, a hit to sooth the stress of a long day.

Or so I’d been told. All I could feel was the rackety-clack of the rail under us, the occasional hitching scream of the brakes, and random cold bursts of the train’s straining air conditioning. But it was nice to watch her face, see the tiny stress lines around her mouth ease. She had a nice mouth, wide, and full, but not pouty or posed. You could describe it in crude terms, yeah, but my mother did her best to raise me to not be a dick. Anyway, all I could think was that she probably had an awesome smile. If she ever smiled.

“What are we – where are we going?” she asked, not opening her eyes.

“What, you’re not going to just trail after me like a good shadow, trusting my decision-making?” The moment the words fell out of my mouth I wished I could recall them, remembering how badly she’d reacted before. Her eyes opened then, and she stared at me, judging something.

I guess I passed, because she shook her head, and closed her eyes again, letting her body sway as we slid around a curve in the tunnel. “I don’t trust anybody anymore,” she said. “But I’m good at following.”

There was something in that, some depth in her words that lost me. I’m usually pretty good at sounding the depths, too. I decided to focus on the hunt, and worry about my shadow later.

“Yeah, you proved that earlier,” I admitted. “We’re going to talk to some people, best you stay quiet and just pay attention. If you see anything, or you remember anything, tuck it into your brain and tell me when we’re alone.”

She clearly remembered her earlier promise, because she just nodded once, and followed me up out of the station at our stop, down John Street and into the chaos of the South Street Seaport. Home to some of the most comprehensive kitsch in all Manhattan, outdoing even Times Square on summer afternoons when half the world and three-quarters of Wall Street were there for the view, the booze, and the mingling. I’d spent more than a few hours here himself, killing time and a few beers, watching the tall ships and the tourist boats.

This time, I bypassed the flurry of the Seaport itself, dodging buskers, tour-hawkers, and tourists, Ellen at my heel. Under the overhang, and down past the old fish market, where the East River greenway began.

This had been easier when it was still run down and dingy; nobody questioned a guy sitting on the bench, talking to himself. But then, I wasn’t by myself, now.

That would make it easier, and possibly harder.

“Sit.”

She sat, legs stretched out in front of her, and damn the girl had some legs. She leaned back against the bench, her elbows braced, and lifted her face to the sun, then looked at me when I sat next to her.

“Whatever happens, just pretend I’m talking to you.”

“Whatever,” and she lazily waved a hand. It wasn’t a perfect act, but it was pretty good. I turned so that it seemed as though I was facing her, and watched the walkway over her shoulder.

“I’m here looking for information. You know that I pay fair for whatever I get.”

She shook her head, and smiled. Two men came along the path, talking to each other; one of them noticed her legs, the other kept yakking, and then they were gone. To my right, something in the sparse shrubbery between the walkway and the street made a rustling noise. It could have been the wind, or a squirrel, or a rat.

“Come on, don’t waste my time.” I played irritated, annoyed, no time to waste. Truth was, I’d be willing to sit here all night if that’s what it took. I’d done it before.

“More children gone walkabye?”

My shadow jumped a little; the voice was right by her elbow, way too close, and way too loud for a whisper. I might have jumped too, if I hadn’t been expecting it.

If someone weren’t paying attention, they’d think that a bush had overgrown the verge, greenstick branches reaching over the bench, buds of leaves too small for full-summer and the faintest hint of fading yellow flowers. Then they’d realize that the branches were too thick, the leaves and flowers moving with a slow, steady pulse, and then, if they were paying attention, they’d see the eyes, heavy black orbs, and the small, sucker-shaped mouth.

“You know me,” I said, keeping it casual. The trick to dealing with fatae was to never let them think that you needed them. Humans liked to be needed, got off on it, could be flattered into giving it away. Fatae saw it as a chance to build obligation, accumulate debt they could turn around and use for themselves.

Of course, they want to be needed, too. The desire to show off how much smarter you were is universal to every species that could communicate.

“We know you,” it agreed. “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“Fish,” I said.

“Ah.”

One branchlet touched Ellen’s shoulder, and she managed not to jump or shudder. Her expression wasn’t too happy, though.

“Talent,” it said. “Shiny-sharp.”

“Valere’s,” I said, and the branchlet paused, squeezed once, and fell away. Her eyes were wide, but she didn’t react. Someday – soon, I was betting – she’d be able to singe grabby hands on her own. But for now, a mentor’s protection was…well, part of why Talent had mentors.

“You have anything?” I didn’t want to waste time.

“Wrong time, right place. Fish go missing, weeks ago. Think first it was prank or school-joke, but they not come back. School scared, swim back north. Think shark got ‘em.”

Close enough, if not the kind of sharks the school had been thinking.

“You’re a pal,” I said, and passed something flat-palmed over Ellen’s shoulder, where it disappeared into the leaflets.

oOo

Ellen focused on breathing. If she kept breathing, she’d be all right, even when that…thing touched her, sticky-sharp pressure on her shoulder, on her neck, and she wouldn’t turn around to look, didn’t want to see anything more than what she’d already glimpsed out of the side of her eyes. She focused instead on Danny, on his face, his hands moving as he talked. He had nice hands, strong ones. They looked like they’d be capable of doing a lot more than hailing a cab or typing. She moved her gaze up to his face, the rough lines of his jaw, the curls plastered now in the summer heat against his forehead. He had cute ears. She noticed that in passing, not letting herself smile at the thought. His attention was on whatever was touching her, talking to it, listening to the hot whisper that she didn’t dare listen to, or she would turn to look at it, and she knew if she did it would be over, she would freak, she would break her promise to Danny, and right now that promise – that she would follow, and she would tell him everything, and he’d find a way out of the nightmare of her vision, was all that was keeping her intact.

“Feel your core,” Genevieve had told her. “Reach in, down into where you feel the most centered, the most real and shove your hands into that, feel what’s there.”

Ellen’d spent so many years being told she was crazy, just looking for attention, imagining things…. When the Central Park cult leader had told her she was special, that she had something, and then cast her out, Ellen had decided that they were all right, that everything she felt, everything she saw, thought she’d seen, just meant she was crazy, broken.

She still wasn’t sure she wasn’t. But when she breathed deep and reached, the way Genevieve had taught her, the static prickle of warmth and comfort that greeted her, stinging up her arms and spine, down her legs, connecting her to every inch of her body and the static waiting beyond….

It made her feel like broken was another word for amazing.

And then the thing touched her again, and her eyes went wide, instinctively falling into her core the rest of the world fading to a blur of grey sounds, wrapping herself in the static, the current that rested inside her, and suddenly she could see the three teens again, the blue tinge of their skin, the dampness of their clothing, the faded, haunted expression in their eyes, not hurt or angry but lost, so lost, and she needed to find them, she needed to wipe that look away and if she just reached, she knew that she could find them, could-

“Ellen.”

She opened her eyes, not remembering having closed them, and Danny’s hands were on hers, his face inches away, his eyes intent enough on her to be scary. The thing behind her was gone, she knew that without looking.

“It wasn’t going to hurt you. It was just curious. You’re strong, we can all feel that. Some of them get a little grabby, but… ”

She almost couldn’t remember what he was talking about. “I saw them again.”

He pulled back, his expression changing from concern to something sharper, more hungry. “Another vision?”

“Not a new vision, it was… I saw it again, only closer, clearer. More details, things I missed last time.”

“Is that normal?”

She almost cried at the absurdity of the question, and his face changed again as though realizing that yeah, she had no idea. It was subtle, something around his eyes and mouth, the way they tensed and relaxed, but she could read them like signposts, and somehow that let her breathe more easily.

“You’ll remember it now, though?” he asked.

“I…yes.” Before, the visions had been like nightmares, fading wisps that couldn’t be clutched at, disappearing almost the moment she became aware of them. This time it was different.

Different worried her, but she thought maybe it was the way Genevieve had said, that the more control she got, the better she’d be at this, more able to control it. Control was the name of the game.

Danny stood up, slipping sunglasses back on, pushing them up the bridge of his nose and looking away, over across the water. “My snitch confirmed that several merfolk disappeared from here, so we’re on the right track.”

“Mer…mermaids?”

“Don’t ever call ‘em that if you want to step into the ocean without fear, ever again. Merfolk, or mers.”

She nodded, storing that information away with everything else she’d been learning. “They disappeared from here?”

“Under this very dock, it says.”

It being the ..thing that had been behind her, that had touched her. She resisted another shudder, and instead got up off the bench - noting as she did so that what she’d thought was a bush was now gone, as though it had gotten up on its roots and tip-toed away - and walked across to the railing overlooking the water. Not really the ocean, here, if she remembered the maps right. The end of the East River and the start of the bay, waters mixing and mingling with the tides. She tried to imagine beings swimming underneath, living in those waters, and was surprised to find that it was easy enough. She’d already been introduced to a woman who lived in, no, belonged to a tree, after all. Why not mers?

oOo

“Danny?”

It was the first time she’d used my name. That was my first thought, even as I got up to join her where she stood along the railing. The slightly briny air made me even more aware of the sweat on my scalp and back, while her skin practically shimmered in the sunlight, bringing out dark copper highlights along her cheekbone. Amerindian blood in there, maybe. Or just that I don’t know enough about human races to catch the clues; they were all so much alike, compared to the fatae, I found it difficult to take the divisions seriously.

“Did you remember something else?” I asked, resting my hands on the wooden railing, and looking not at her, but the ocean spread out in front of us. If I narrowed my gaze enough, I could block out the boats and the buildings, and almost imagine the city didn’t exist around us, just for an instant.

“No. I….” She kept looking out across the water too, her head turning slightly, scanning from left to right, with the longest hesitation toward the right. “I can feel them.”

“What?” Okay, that wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I didn’t know seers could do that. “When you say feel, you mean…?”

“I don’t know. You, ah, you feel different. You, the…the thing that touched me, PB – all the fatae I’ve met so far, you all feel different, but when you’re near me I can feel you, recognize you. I can feel them here, too. Or, something, anyway. Something that feels like what I saw in the vision.” Her forehead crinkled again, trying to get the right words. “Mers, I guess, but specific. Familiar feels.”

Talent, I’d been told, could pick up signatures, the feeling current got after it’s been wrapped around another Talent, or something. But it took training, and a level of skill there was no way Shadow had, not yet. Still, she’d already had them in her head, their current, and their fate, zapped into her brain. That could be enough of a connection. Maybe.

Magic. I might be part of it, but that didn’t mean I understood it. Not really. I didn’t let that stop me, though.

“Can you follow it? The feeling?”

“I… yes. Maybe. Yes.” Her breath hitched, and she nodded. Yeah, she could do that.

From what I’d already figured about Shadow, she didn’t have a hell of a lot of self-confidence, and doubly so when it came to what she could do, what she was. So ‘maybe-yes’ was enough for me. “But we need to get out on the water. I can’t follow it from here.”

Oh, I so really hadn’t wanted to hear that.

4

Once I’d accepted the fact that we were going to have to get our toes wet, metaphorically if hopefully not literally, we had to find a way to get out there. I considered and then discarded the idea of renting one of the two-person kayaks that people took out on the Hudson - with my luck we’d capsize and drown, and no thanks. There were half a dozen charters and ferries that worked the rivers, but they all kept to a regular route, and I wasn’t going to rely on Shadow’s scent trail, such as it was, sticking to regular routes. If our missing kids had been taken, odds were low it had been on a registered passenger ferry. So I went an alternative route. Or tried to, anyway.

“So, you want to hire me, but you don’t know for how long, or where you want to go?” The guy leaned against the wooden sign advertising his fishing boat, and shook his head. “Sorry, no.”

“It’s nothing illegal. Or even immoral.” I’d already showed him my PI license, but that hadn’t impressed him much. To be fair, it didn’t impress many people. I might look like the quintessential ideal of a New Yorker, as filtered through Hollywood, but I didn’t look much like a hard-bitten PI, I guess. Maybe I should switch out the baseball cap for a fedora, or something.

“Ffffft.” The captain made his opinion of illegality or immorality clear. “S’not the laws it’s the cost. Fuel’s too expensive to be doing that. You want to wander, you want a smaller boat. Or a sailboat.”

Those were actually two things I really didn’t want. But he had a point.

“Got someone in mind?” I asked. Recommendations were always useful, even if I didn’t take them.

“Talk to Tal Berthiaume, captain a’ the Mercy Me. They’ve got a slip up at the Basin. Mercy Me doesn’t do charters, but you’re interesting enough a request, Tal might bite.”

oOo

I’d never actually been to the Boat Basin – it was out of my usual range, as far on the Upper West Side as you could get without actually hitting New Jersey. It had the usual blend of rundown and very expensive that you get at working marinas, but the view up and down the Hudson was definitely millionaire’s row. I could see why people lived here, year round.

Shadow, and I needed to stop thinking of her as that before it stuck, was, well, shadowing my heels without a word, but her gaze was taking everything in. Clearly, she’d never been here before, either. “Can you imagine living on a boat?” she asked, her voice sounding younger and more gleefully innocent than it had been before.

“No.” I could, actually, but it wasn’t a pleasant thought. Give me a nice apartment in a nice building, where the bathroom has room to turn around, and you don’t get seagulls crapping in your morning coffee.

“That’s the Mercy Me,” she said, pointing down one of the wooden extensions, clearly a lower-rent section of the Basin.

She was a sailboat. Maybe there was a technical term for the size or how many sails or whatever, but “sailboat” summed it up for me: sails the color of, well, canvas run up on masts, the ship itself trimly built, painted a dark blue, with pale yellow trim. The railings were varnished wood, and you could see the care that maintained them, even from here.

“Anyone home?” I called, as we reached its berth.

“Hang on,” a voice called, and then someone appeared from below the floor – the deck.

Legs. Long legs, but not skinny, curving under shorts that came a respectable way down the thigh, connected to a torso clad in a white T-shirt, arms just as long and curved, and my gaze connected with the face that went with that body, and it was looking at me with bemused patience.

Next to me, Shadow let out an unkind snicker.

“I was told you might be agreeable to a day-hire,” I said. If they thought getting caught staring was going to discomfit me, they were in for a surprise. I might not give in to the more basic urges of my faun genetics, but lack of shame was one of the things I’d found useful.

“Today? Local charter, out and back again by sunset?” When I nodded, the ship’s master went on, “Cash, in advance. Five hundred. There’s an ATM at the dock, if you need it.”

“You don’t want to know-“

“Nope. You’re hiring me to take your lady on a romantic cruise around the island, that’s your business. I got rent to make. The money gets you on-board, soda and water included, but if you want food you gotta bring your own. No glass, no drugs, no booze. If the cops board us and you’re not clean, I’ll hand you over to them without a second thought.”

“Got it.” I turned to Ellen, meaning to give her my ATM card and send her to get the cash out while I discussed any further terms with our captain, then realized that handing my ATM card to a Talent – a powerful and mostly untrained Talent – was one of my less thought-out ideas, unless I wanted to have to stop by the bank and get a new card after her current had demagnetized the damn thing.

“I’ll be right back.”

oOo

By the time I got back – after having a slight panic about leaving enough money in my account to cover the bills that would be paid in the next day or so – Ellen and our Captain had settled in, Shadow curled up on a wooden locker that was doubling as a bench, and the Captain doing competent-looking things with ropes.

I hesitated, then gave myself a hard shove, and climbed, rather inelegantly, onto the ship itself. The moment my feet hit the deck, my entire body swayed once, a slow rolling movement I felt from the soles of my feet all the way up my spine and into the back of my head, and it took every bit of stubborn I had not to turn around and get the hell off that boat.

My mother might have been a sailor, but water and I did not get along.

“Captain Tal says all I have to do is stand in the front of the ship and point, and she can get us there,” Ellen said.

Tal – I was guessing it was short for Talia, or something – shrugged. “You’re paying, you get to choose. If we start to get somewhere we shouldn’t be, I’ll tell you.”

“I could always use some help with that,” I said, not even meaning to turn on the charm, but Tal’s face melted a little, the way people always did.

If I’d been full-blood, she might have offered me more than a smile. If I’d been full-blood, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.

oOo

Tal Berthiaume – Tal was short for Thea Anna-Louise, Ellen had learned while I was gone and no, the good captain apparently hadn’t forgiven her parents yet – was a good sailor, and the Mercy Me seemed to be a good ship. I spent the first hour trying not to throw up, and the second hour wondering why I hadn’t let myself throw up more often.

“You’re really crap on boats, aren’t you?” Ellen seemed surprised, and not inclined to tease, although I suspected it was less having to do with kindness and more not being sure how I’d react. Someone had told her to sit down and shut up a load too often, but I didn’t have the energy to do any reassuring just then.

“Yeah well, I’m built for ground.” I took a sip of the ginger ale Tal had provided, trying to ignore the rise and dip of the boat as we cut through the water. We couldn’t go exactly the direction Ellen pointed at, but the winds seemed to be behaving, far as I could tell, taking us sideways in the direction we wanted.

If all else failed, we’d been told, there was an engine that would get us there.

“Landlubber?” Tal had used that phrase first, less kindly than Ellen did.

“I’m half-faun.” She knew I wasn’t human, but she was still learning the Cosa Nostradamus, and even Talent had trouble with all the various breeds. Hell, I wasn’t sure I could name them all, and it was my job to know ‘em. “Named for the god Faunus, although we could just as easily have taken Pan’s name. Woodland revels are more our thing, not seaborne hijinks.”

Woodland revels, meaning indulgences of all sorts, especially sex. The few cousins I’d met over the years took the “life is a party” philosophy to heart and groin, and they were charming enough to make humans – and a lot of other fatae – go along with them. Unfortunately, they matched charm with an utter and absolute inability to think about consequences, long or short term.

I didn’t spend a lot of time with my cousins.

The Mercy Me hit another swell, and I had to interrupt my explanation with another bolt for the bucket.

“Nice impression you’re getting of me,” I said wearily. I’d done worse, in front of more people – the first dead body we found on my first month on the job, in mid-summer, was high up there – but this wasn’t so good for my ego, either.

“Actually, it is kind of nice,” Ellen said. “Everyone I’ve met in the city so far is so… competent. It’s unnerving.” She swallowed, her throat working visibly, and looked away, like she thought she’d said too much and didn’t know how to take it back.

I just laughed. “Yeah. Seeing as who you’ve been hanging with, I can imagine the competence level has been nauseatingly high.” Maybe I should have used another word… but no, my stomach stayed quiet for the moment. “If it helps any, Valere unnerves everyone.”

“She didn’t want to take me. I know that. I don’t know why –” She broke off what she was saying, coming to point like a rescue dog catching scent of a live one.

“There.”

I followed where she was looking, and sighed. “South Jersey. Well, could have been worse, could have been Staten Island.” I don’t usually indulge in the time-honored borough-bashing so beloved of my fellow citizens, but I’d a grudge about Staten Island that wasn’t going away any time soon.

oOo

Danny had Captain Tal cruise along the coastline, just outside the markers that showed where they shouldn’t go, until Ellen could say for certain where the trail led, and he marked it on a map he’d pulled out of his jacket pocket. Then Danny nodded at Tal, and the Mercy Me headed back to the Basin, where the captain saw them off with an invitation to hire her any time again. Apparently, having someone spend most of the day throwing up in a bucket wasn’t enough to put her off, so long as they paid in cash.

The investigator still looked a little green, and he was staggering rather than swaggering as they walked down the pier, but Ellen wasn’t going to point out any of that. The sway of the boat had actually felt a lot like current, the outsides finally matching the way she felt inside during a thunderstorm, or when Genevieve had her try to draw down current from a man-made source and then reshape it to her own needs.

She wasn’t going to say any of that, either. But she held the knowledge to herself, that this was a thing she could do. It was a small thing, probably a stupid thing, but it was hers.

“So what now?” The more she focused on the connection, the more the need to find those three teenagers chewed at her. Now that they had an idea where to go, she wanted to go now.

“The fact that you were able to pinpoint them probably means that they’re still alive,” Danny said. “And the fact that they’re still alive means that whoever has them intends to keep them around for a while longer.”

Ellen listened to what he was saying, and thought that she heard something else, underneath.

“But what do they want them for?” she asked. “And…” And what is being done to them? She didn’t ask that, either. She knew enough to know that it probably wasn’t good.

Danny sighed, and shook his head, removing the baseball cap and wiping his arm across his forehead, to clear away the sweat. His curls were sea- and sweat-damp, the fine lines around his eyes more visible now than they’d been under direct sunlight. If you could ignore the horns more visible through his damp curls, he looked a hundred percent human, and really tired.

“I want to look at a better map, see if I can pinpoint exactly where you were targeting, and also figure out the best way to get there. I don’t suppose you drive?”

Ellen blinked. “Of course I do.”

That got a laugh out of him. “Right. Suburban girl, right?”

“City boy” making it sound like an insult. The words slipped out of her mouth, and she almost didn’t realize they’d come from her. She knew – she knew – he wasn’t going to yell at her for sass, or get pissed off, but her breath still hitched for a second, her body bracing itself.

“I can drive,” he said, mildly. “Only last time I did, it was a patrol car, and my instincts are not what you want out among civilians.”

She was diverted, trying to imagine him in a uniform. “Did you ever do a high speed chase?”

“Never once. But I do occasionally forget to stop for red lights. Or stop signs. It’s safer just to not let me behind the wheel.”

“I don’t have a job, to rent a car, though.” Ellen felt she should make a clean breast of everything. “I don’t even have a bank account, or a cable bill, or anything. They ask you for all that, when you rent.” She’d come to New York with a friend, who had rented their car, and she remembered the excess of paperwork that had been required.

“So I rent, and we put you down as a driver. You’re staying with Valere?”

”No.” She had slept on the couch for the first month, until Genevieve got her office cleared out. Now she had her own place, an off-the-books sublease, but it was so tiny, and she spent so little time there, she’d never gotten around to acquiring Stuff. Not that she had much; she’d left home with just her backpack, and living in the Park the way she’d done, you didn’t keep much in the way of belongings. Even if you tried, they’d disappear pretty soon.

“Hrm.” He made a noise she didn’t understand, but then they were on the street and he was raising his hand to hail a cab, and she didn’t want to ask any more questions, while they were in public, even if it was only one cabbie listening in.

“How urgent does it feel?” he asked, out of the silence. Ellen was taken aback suddenly – she’d slipped easily into follow-the-lead, and wasn’t expecting to be put on the spot again.

“Urgent,” she said. She didn’t know what not-urgent felt like; the people she Saw were about to get dead, so urgent was the only way she knew to feel. Then she thought about it a little more. When she’d Seen Genevieve and the guy who had died, Stosser, it had felt urgent, too. But nothing had happened for a couple of days after, and Genevieve hadn’t died at all, because… because something had changed. Because she had changed something, by telling them.

So. Urgent, yes. Death was always urgent. But maybe they had time.

“They’re not dead yet.” She was pretty sure about that, especially after what Danny had said. Pretty sure, but not absolutely. She licked her lips, trying not to think about the cabbie who might or might not be eavesdropping. She tried not to think about her mother, who had told her all these things she said she saw meant that she was crazy, or lying. She tried not to think about anything, except the sense of three figures, ghostly but real, lingering in her brain.

No, not her brain. Genevieve had explained that. Her core. The place where current coiled inside, the magic everyone had access to, but only Talent could handle, channel, and manipulate. Only Talent, like her, could hold inside.

She was a Storm-Seer. She Saw things in the current that even other Talent couldn’t. She saw Death, and the dying. She wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t lying, and Danny needed her in order to find them.

Had Genevieve felt different, after the other one, Stosser, had died? Yes. A subtle, slight difference, like feeling silk under your hand instead of silky cotton, but there. Maybe. If that’s what the difference was.

She needed more visions to learn what they meant, but she never wanted to have another vision, ever.

“Can you feel anything more than that?” He was pushing, but he wasn’t pushing her, he was pushing for them. That made it okay.

“Hurt. Weak. Angry. Afraid. Angry most of all.” That was what had reached her, their anger and fear; they did not want to die.

“At risk?”

She thought, reaching mental hands down the way Genevieve had taught her, stroking the waves of current in her core, letting the ripples run over invisible fingers until the knowledge reached her brain.

“Yes.”

“Do you need to get anything from your apartment?”

He was taking her with him. He’d promised, and yet the confirmation was equal parts relief and fear. Relief, because she needed to do this, needed to see it through, to know that yes, she had helped, that it wasn’t just chance, that there was a reason that she Saw all this. And fear because… well, she might be crazy but she wasn’t stupid.

“No.” She’d spent days in the same clothes, before. She could buy a toothbrush and a comb, if needed, and they weren’t about to go hungry. Everything else was just details.

“Right. I need to get a few things from the office, and,” he checked his watch, “yeah, there’s enough time to swing by and rent a car.”

Ellen decided not to tell him that the Mission: Impossible theme just started playing in her head.

oOo

When we got back to the office, I sent Ellen off to pick up some road trip essentials – water, soda, sandwiches, and a stack of whatever daily newspapers were still on the stands. We could have picked all that up once we were out of the city, but there was something I needed to do that required her being out of earshot.

But the voice that picked up on the other end of the line was male, not female.

“Exactly how fucked up is she?”

To give Didier credit, he didn’t hesitate, or ask what I was talking about, or who.

“We don’t know. Bad, but not broken.”

“If I’d thought she was broken I wouldn’t have let her stick around,” I said impatiently. Jesus, did they think I was an idiot, or that masochistic?

“A purely clinical assessment?” Sergei went on. “She’s got some serious self-worth issues, probably inevitable from second-guessing her sanity for the past ten years, once her Talent kicked in and nobody told her what was happening. She then fell in with a group that first told her she was special and then rejected her, and was then informed that she was not only not-crazy, but she had a skillset that was going to direct her life for, well, the rest of her life. Within those parameters, she’s not fucked up at all.”

“Within those parameters.” Like saying a cobra wasn’t dangerous, within the parameters of it being able to kill you with one shot if you disturbed it, and oh guess what, you won’t see it until you step on it.

“Is there a problem?”

“No.” I was used to working with high-res Talent, and poking at temperamental fatae, and going toe-to-toe with the least-appealing of humanity. Relatively speaking, this was a piece of cake. “I just wanted to know where the stress lines were.”

“So we shouldn’t expect her home tonight?”

And damned if Didier didn’t have the Big Bad Daddy voice down perfect. I almost felt guilty.

“I need her to keep me on track, to find these kids.” I could do it myself, but it would take longer. And, I’d promised her.

“If she can help you, it will help her.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell her to ping Wren if anything, and I mean anything goes to hell.”

I blinked, and cursed myself for an idiot. Just because I couldn’t use the ping, and neither could a human like Didier, that was no reason to ignore a damned useful tool.

“I’ll do that.”

The external door to the office opened, and I reached across my desk for the box I’d pulled out of the lower drawer, before Didier had answered the phone. “Gotta go. Give the little woman my best,” I said, and hung up before Didier finished laughing.

“Danny?”

She came into the inner sanctum’s doorway, but didn’t pass the threshold. She wasn’t carrying anything, so I assumed that she’d put the bags down already.

“Checking in with another client,” I said, lying smoothly. If her self-esteem issues were as serious as it seemed, then the idea that I was checking in with her mentor – okay, her mentor’s significant other – wouldn’t help any, no matter how normal a thing it was.

Normal if she were a normal teenaged Talent, I reminded myself. She wasn’t normal, and she wasn’t a teenager. I was painfully aware of both facts just then, as she leaned against the doorframe, for once not over-conscious of herself, and watched me.

She was a long drink of water, strong-shouldered and nicely tapered, and when she stopped worrying about other people noticing her, she had a regal sort of grace that matched her face. She was young, yeah, but in no way shape or form a child.

Fortunately, I was older and had learned how to put a lockdown on my libido before she was even born. No matter her age, she was damaged; the usual flirt-work pattern I had with Bonnie was not the way to go here.

“Car’s reserved. There’s a toiletries kit in the bathroom, under the sink. Grab it and let’s go.” I opened the box in my hand, and took out the extra case of bullets. I hadn’t needed to shoot at anything other than a target in years, but I never assumed that was going to be the situation going forward.

oOo

“She’s doing what?” Wren Valere put down the set of locks she had been playing with, and looked incredulously at her partner. “She was supposed to tell him what she Saw, and then come home, not run off playing Private Eye.”

Sergei didn’t disagree with her, but Hendrickson had been telling him what was going down, not asking permission. “Danny said that she was helping him track down the missing teens, something about her vision maintaining a thread?”

“Huh.” Wren considered that. “A variant on a signature, maybe?” She wasn’t all that interested in the hows of current, just so long as she could make it work. “Okay, I can see that, and why he’d take full advantage. No dummy, our Danny. But–” She bit down on what she was going to say. “No, I’m overreacting. Danny’s a perfectly responsible adult, most of the time, and he won’t let her get into trouble. And it’s good that she get a first-hand look at the fatae community, right?”

“Right.”

Sergei didn’t quite trust her calm. His partner, normally unflappable, had been decidedly flapped ever since she accepted the mentorship of a half-grown, totally untrained Talent, and this should have sent her into a small panic, not calmed her down.

“And he’ll be able to take care of her. Unless they run into another Talent. If they do, she’s helpless. She barely knows how to maintain her own core, she’s barely at first-level cantrips, and if she gets hit with another vision? She’s a sitting target when that happens.”

Wren Valere took a shallow breath, and leaned back against the sofa, staring out at the brilliant view out her apartment windows. Sergei waited.

“I’m doing that thing where you roll your eyes and tell me every mentor in the entire history of mentoring has had the exact same doubts and panics.”

“You are.”

“And Ellen’s smart, and reasonably savvy, and oh by the way not an idiot teenager amuck with hormones and the need to show off.”

“Exactly.”

“And the best way for her to stop being afraid of her visions is to see, first-hand, that they can be used in a proactive way, too. That she’s not helpless, she’s actually incredibly powerful.”

She knew that already: Ellen had been part of the circle that caught a serial killer team. Admittedly, Bonnie and the other PUPs had been in control but it was Ellen’s storm-seer sense that had allowed them to harness the storm.

“And if she really needs help, she will ping for it.” Wren frowned. “She will, won’t she? She won’t go all stubborn and independent and decide she can handle it herself?”

“What, you mean like you would?” Sergei’s lips twitched as she glared at him. “No, I don’t think so. Even if she hadn’t seen how well Bonnie and her crew work together, Danny won’t let her.”

But inwardly, shoved far below even the levels his partner could read, Sergei wasn’t so sure. Ellen had something she needed to prove, even if she wasn’t vocalizing that need yet. And, he knew all too well, a Talent with something to prove…sometimes took stupid risks.

5

Once Ellen had identified our probable destination, I’d started working on a plan. Like most plans, it depended on a dollop of luck, a smidge of skill, and the smile of the gods. But then, that was pretty much the MO of the boardwalk, any given night.

My shadow, apparently, had never been down the Shore.

“Wow.” Ellen had a strange look on her face, like she wanted to grin, but was afraid it would be impolite. “It really is…. It really is.”

I looked around, trying to see it through her eyes. “Yeah, it really is.” The boardwalk was transitioning between day and night, some sunbathers still sprawled out on the sand even as the workers in the game booths began their calls, to win a prize and impress your girl. I could remember coming here as a teenager, and it had seemed exactly the same, back then. Even the people seemed the same: the teenagers in packs, the families with a small child wide-eyed and babbling with excitement, the occasional senior citizens walking slowly, and every now and again the bright “beep beep beep” of an electric cart bringing people from one end of the boardwalk to the other, almost but never quite running someone over. The booths were garish and overly-bright, the darkness hanging over the ocean somehow comforting and threatening all at once, the sound of the cold Atlantic surf a scarce murmur under the many voices.

I’d worked one of those booths as a teenager, lived in a house off the beach with seven other guys, worked all night, slept most of the day, not worried about anything except saving enough of my paycheck that my mother didn’t kill me at the end of the summer. Hadn’t been back, since.

This wasn’t a vacation. The clock was ticking, a metronome in the back of my head, driving me on. Lives at risk, and I was the only one looking.

“How are we going to find anyone, or anything here?” Ellen asked. “It’s a zoo.”

“Ask a zookeeper,” I said.

Ellen had to show I.D. at the bar, which was a difference from when I’d been down here, but the inside of Doblosky’s was what I’d been expecting: bare wood walls and benches, a long bar that would be three-deep by midnight, and bartenders who already looked tired. We moved up to the bar, and I leaned against it, removing the baseball cap and ruffling the sweat-damp hair so that my horns didn’t show through. Ellen leaned in at my side, not too close but clearly with me.

The bartender took a professional look, the kind that didn’t see anything but remembered everything in case it was needed later. “What can I get you folks?”

“Yuengling, draft.”

“Two,” Ellen said. I was pretty sure she wasn’t a drinker, but Yuengling was a good basic lager: decent enough to not get you sneered at, common enough that nobody would think you were trying too hard. And if she left it half-drunk it wasn’t going to break the budget.

The bartender nodded once. “PI?”

I spread my hands, fair-caught. “After a while, it starts to show.” Actually, it didn’t, not on my face. The bartender was good, and experienced – he might even have been here twenty years ago when I did my time. “I bet you get a lot of that down here.”

The guy shrugged. He had hands like baseball gloves, and a torso to match, but his face was more like a college professor’s: narrow, with dark hair slicked back, and thoughtful eyes.

“Missing kids, mostly. Sometimes a missing spouse.”

“Kids. Late teens. Two girls and a boy.”

“Runaways?”

“Maybe. Probably not.”

The bartender finished pulling our beers and set them down in front of us, hearing what I wasn’t saying. “This ain’t back when. Not much like that going down here.”

“Not much isn’t none.”

Ellen stirred next to me, but only reached out to pick up her beer, and take a sip. I wondered what she’d been about to say, and why she’d stopped herself.

The bartender went down the line, dealing with other customers, and Ellen let out a little sigh.

“What?”

“How do you know what to say? How do you know if something’s too much to tell them?”

“Experience.” That probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but it was all I had.

“If it was just boys, I might have something for you,” the bartender said, coming back like the conversation’d never been interrupted. “House downtown is the place for that, lost boys end up there. But girls aren’t their thing and the cops are watching too close for anything else to go on right now.”

I looked sideways at Ellen, who was staring down into her beer like answers to a test she hadn’t studied for were written in the foam. Anyone would have thought the faint shake of her head was her reaction to the taste. I wasn’t anyone.

“They’re together, last we heard,” I said. “So yeah, probably not our scene.” I made note of it, though. Prostitution was, my way of thinking, a valid lifestyle choice – hell, I sold my physical skill and a breed of comfort too, if you wanted brass tacks – but only if the people involved were of legal age and consent. A few unofficial pokes into the house’s business would determine if official notice should be taken. I’d been a city cop, not Jersey, and I’d never worked Vice, but I still knew who to call.

“Nothing else floating under the surface?” I paid for our drinks, an additional two twenties folded into the tab.

“The usual graft and corruption, but it’s been under control for a couple-three years by now. Bad business to let anything else in. You know how it is.”

Yeah, I knew. The casinos had taught everyone else how to keep their backyards clean, the better to rake money in through the front door. If you kept under their radar you could survive, but pop up once….

“Thanks.”

“Good luck,” the bartender said, and one of my twenties came back to me, along with a handful of dimes in change. “I got teenagers, myself.”

I nodded, and drank my beer.

“So what now?” Ellen had gotten halfway through hers, and then pushed it away, reaching instead for the bowl of bar-mix. “Got more bartenders to hit up, or are we going to pile back into the car and drive around randomly until we find them?”

My shadow had claws. Tiny milk-claws, but claws. That was good to know.

“We could do a survey of all the bars,” I said. If the missing kids had been human, that’s what I would have done. But what she’d Seen changed that plan. “But no to both of your questions.” I’d stopped here to eliminate possibilities. Now it was time to open them up again.

Unfortunately, I’d have to wait until full dark for that. Some of the fatae could wander the beaches and boardwalks without being noticed – all right, some of us in bathing suits would probably make people do a doubletake or three – but the one in particular I needed to question raised a massive fuss every time, and I was in no mood for fuss. So there was some time to kill.

We stopped outside the bar to pick up dinner – a hot dog for Ellen, two slices of cheese pizza for me – and an extra pastrami sandwich, hold the slaw and mustard. The guy gave me a doubting look, but made the sandwich anyway.

“For later?” Ellen asked, as we walked away, heading not down the boardwalk but toward the nearest ladder down to the beach itself.

“For bribes.”

The sand was almost too soft to walk on, courtesy of all the sunbathers, but we took off our shoes and slogged toward the water, a dark glint in the distance. I could see the city’s lights, and something that was probably Staten Island, plus a couple of larger ships out beyond the markers. And, off to the side, the movement of something sliding through the water, then disappearing again.

I decided not to mention the shark to Ellen. It wasn’t like we were going to go in all that deep. Just enough to be polite.

I took the sandwich out of the waxed paper bag, and peeled off the bread, shoving it back in the bag – no use wasting good rye, after all.

“What are you doing, going fishing?” She wasn’t being snarky: she really had no idea. Valere had been slacking on this side of her education.

“Not exactly. But kind of. Stay here.”

I left her ankle-deep in the surf, and moved forward, holding the meat in my left hand. With my luck I’d end up either getting nibbled at by a shark, or hit on by an inquisitive fendha. Neither of those would be useful, right now. Or, actually, ever.

“I’m looking for information,” I said, trusting the night air and ebbing tide to carry my words. “No tricks, no traps. Looking for information on a trace carried in these waters, from Manhattan to here. Three traces, unhappy or angry or scared.”

No answer. I didn’t want to influence the witnesses – you never gave them any info they could build off, so nobody could say you led them – but a little glide for the ride could be overlooked. I shook the meat gently, letting the smell of it carry on the night air. “I’m offering dinner, to seal the trade.”

There was no response, although I could hear something slapping the surface a few meters out. Unlike in the city, when I could play on my rep, I had to be more cautious here. This wasn’t my turf, and the politics of who answered to whom could tangle me up badly, if I wasn’t careful.

Still. Not as bad as the time I had to go to Denver.

“Nobody out there knows anything? I guess the Shore’s reputation is oversold, then.”

When in doubt, insult the fatae. It’s not advice I’d give to humans, but I’ve found it remarkably effective over the years.

A louder slap on the water, and then something moved under the dark waves, a too-large mass coming too fast at me.

I held my ground. Sand. Whatever.

The mass stopped just shy of ramming into me, and a darker, more solid shape rose from the waves. The head was the size of a football, and shaped about the same, with a neck that managed to be both muscular and sinewy at the same time. The shadow underneath suggested that a more massive body was attached to that neck, but I wasn’t going to poke it to find out.

“Yes.” The voice was high, but masculine. As far as you could make assumptions about that sort of thing, anyway.

“Yes, what? Yes you have information, or yes, nobody knows anything?”

“We know.”

I had no idea what breed this kid was, but it was clearly a groupthink type. Or maybe kid here was a split personality. So long as one of them had the info to share, I didn’t give a fuck.

We stared at each other for a bit – or I stared, and it waited. If it had eyes, they weren’t immediately obvious, just long whiskers dripping from either side of the football, the entire thing covered in gleaming black scales. Even its mouth was a narrow slit, the jaw dropping when it talked, but no teeth visible.

That didn’t mean this thing wasn’t dangerous, though.

“You want?” I held up the meat carefully, trying not to give any invitation for it to snap it out of my hand – and maybe take my hand along with it.

The head lowered slightly, and it took the meat from me like a cat tasting treats, soft and steady. One second the chunk of corned beef was in its mouth, hanging over the side, and the next it was gone, swallowed whole like…well, like a snake would snork down a mouse. I guess the analogy made sense, all structural resemblance considered.

It wavered back and forth in front of me like a damned sea-cobra, either digesting or getting ready to strike, and then it said, “Five night ago. We heard them screaming.”

I tensed: screaming was never good. But “heard” was open to interpretation, especially coming from a breed that didn’t seem to have ears. “A little more detail than that, please?”

“We were feeding. Over us, a ship. Not-large, not a barge, but larger than the usual ones that come here.”

This was a public beach; anything larger than a two-person sailboat would probably get waved off by the lifeguards, assuming they didn’t get grounded on a sandbar. But if this was late at night, there would be no lifeguards, and if they came in at high tide…

“And you heard screaming.”

The serpent stared at me.

“Were those screaming on the deck, or-?”

“From inside. We heard them, as they passed over”

Vibrations. Of course. I’d save feeling dumb for later.

“The water shivered with their fear. We followed, as far as we dared, but there were too many humans. Too much light and noise, when they come to shore.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I am sorry the meal was so small.”

The serpent stilled, like I’d insulted it, or it had no idea what the hell I’d said, and then it slid back into the water, barely a ripple marking its passing, and the dark shadow writhed and roiled back into the depths.

That hadn’t been its body, I realized: that had been its entire school. I’d been surrounded. Jesus fucking Christ.

I turned around and sloshed back to shore, picking up Ellen along the way.

“Was that…another fatae?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind?”

“I have no idea. The sea-going breeds are kinda standoffish. Swimoffish. Finoffish? They don’t come hang out with landfolk often.”

“But it had something useful?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t know how much to tell her. I wasn’t used to working with a partner – the times I’d done work for PUPI, I still worked it on my own, and reported back, mostly, and NYPD protocol was laughably useless here.

“Five nights ago, a boat came in, unloaded bodies that might or might not be our kids. I’m guessing they are, since there’s no reason fatae would be interested in ordinary humans being hauled out.”

“And?”

She was looking at me so expectantly, the lights from the boardwalk catching the turn of her head, the cant of her body, that I felt like not being able to say “So here’s what we’re going to do,” was an utter and absolute failure of myself as a human being.

Since I’m not entirely human, this didn’t bother me as much as it should have.

But it still bothered me.

“And…I don’t know,” I admitted. “‘A boat’ is too vague, and it’s not like there are eyes on the beach we can hack. I’d been hoping they knew something more specific. Right now, the trail ends here. Unless we pick up something new, or you suddenly get a flash of something…”

The clock ticks on every missing kid case. These were older teenagers, and there were three of them, together, so the clock would slow down a little, but every day that went by, the damage risks went up until the difference between retrieval and failure was not much difference at all.

I didn’t say any of that out loud, but I’d figured that Shadow was pretty good at reading the silence.

“They’re going to die. I only see people if they’re going to die.”

“Valere didn’t die.” I put my hand on her arm, not curling my fingers around, just resting them on her skin. If she wanted to move away, she could, no resistance. “Wren Valere is alive, and well. You see a possible future. Yeah, it’s the most possible, the most probable. But nothing’s set in stone. Nothing’s foreordained. You know Bonnie, I’m sure she’s talked to you about kenning.”

“Yeah.” She didn’t pull away, didn’t move. She didn’t sound convinced, either.

“Bonnie sees the highest likelihood of events coming together. But even one push can bring it all down, or send it in a different direction. Bonnie’s like…like a shove. You’re a battering ram. Just your Seeing has the potential to change things.”

I sounded smooth, persuasive, convincing. Fact was, I didn’t have fucking clue how much impact she had, although what I’d said about Bonnie was truth, far as Bonnie had explained it to me. But what mattered was that Shadow bought it.

“You’re full of shit.”

I probably shouldn’t have laughed, but I couldn’t help it. She wasn’t mad, she wasn’t offended, she was just so matter of fact, it was funny.

“I am. But I really do believe that the fact that you started people looking, started me looking, that we’re asking questions, has the potential to change things.”

“Change it enough?”

I sighed, and let my hand drop from her arm as we started walking again toward the lights and noise of the Boardwalk. “That, yeah. That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“So…we keep looking,” she said.

Yeah. We kept looking.

6

Danny was used to working alone. Ellen had known that, figured that she’d be a tagalong, useful for… well, she didn’t know what she would be useful for, actually. But she wasn’t going to be left behind, to sit and stress and not know what was going on. Not this time.

And, unlike Genevieve, and even Bonnie and the other Pups, Danny Hendrickson didn’t seem to think that she needed to be sheltered and protected, or act like she was some kind of bomb that was going to go off if someone spoke too loudly, or said the wrong thing. She’d made a Hulk joke, once, and only Sergei got it, which was just sad.

If being a Talent meant giving up pop culture, Ellen wasn’t sure she wanted any part of it. Except she didn’t have a choice, apparently. This was the road she’d been put on, and she had no real choice but to walk it. So she would.

While she was shaking sand off her feet, Danny had cornered a bunch of teenagers by one of the hundred and seven pizza places that lined the boardwalk, and was asking them questions, showing them the sketch she had done of the three faces. The teenagers were shaking their heads: another dead end. Ellen considered them, and then considered how little the hot dog had done to fill her stomach, and let instinct and hunger lead her to a nearby pizza stand, a long counter facing the boardwalk, with tables and plastic chairs arranged in the back. It wasn’t busy, so she leaned her elbows on the counter the way she’d seen Danny do in the bar and waited for someone to notice her.

The guy behind the counter was old, maybe in his forties, and looked like he should have been cast in a mob movie. But his eyes were tired, and kind.

“A slice and a Diet Coke, please.”

“Pepsi okay?”

Ellen made a face, and the guy laughed. “How about a root beer?”

“That’s good yeah, thanks.” She pulled out her wallet, and counted the bills, then handed them to the guy as he shouted her order to the younger guy by the ovens, and handed her a drink. It was pre-made, and the ice was melting already, but the salty air and the walking and the beer almost two hours ago had left her thirsty enough to not care.

She turned to watch Danny, who had let the kids go, folding the sketch back into the inside pocket of his jacket.

“You work here long?” She turned back and asked the guy, as he slid her pizza across the counter, the grease already seeping through the two white paper plates underneath.

“Twenty-seven years this summer,” he said proudly. “Family business, still.”

“Nice. I bet you get a lot of regulars.”

“Some. But there’s always turnover. Kids, you know?” He said it like she wasn’t barely five years older than some of the kids he was talking about – and some of them might even be older than she was. She felt older, though. A lot older.

“Three of my friends were down here, last week.” She had no idea what she was doing, but she’d been watching Danny, and listening, and maybe it was time to be more than just a tagalong. “We were supposed to meet them, but… ” She shrugged, tried to make it seem both important and no big deal. She’d been blown off before, dumped by people she thought were friends, who would have her back. She scooped up some of that bitterness, held it in her stomach, and let it blend with the worry she had for the three faces she had Seen in her vision. “If they took off and didn’t tell me, I’m going to kill them.”

The guy laughed, and leaned on the counter, mimicking her pose. “It’s summer, it’s the Shore. Stuff happens. You can’t reach ‘em on your cell?”

“It goes straight to voicemail. All three of them.” She let a little more worry creep in. “You don’t think anything bad happened to them, do you?”

“Bad things can happen,” the guy said. “But no, I suspect you’re right, they just flaked, and you can kick their asses all the rest of the year for it. But hey, hang on. Justin!”

The kid by the ovens turned, and she saw that he was younger than she’d thought, maybe sixteen at most. “Yeah?”

“C’mere,” the guy said, and swung his arm. “This is my son, Justin. He notices faces better than I do, especially at that age. Maybe he saw ‘em.”

Ellen started, her mind suddenly going blank. “I—”

“Here,” and Danny was next to her, his hand sliding the sketch across the counter. “Visuals help better – El’s been known to forget what color her own eyes are, much less someone else’s.”

“Hey,” she protested, and felt his arm reach around her waist, pulling her close. It should have felt awkward, but it didn’t: she was reassured, and warmed in a way that had nothing to do with the air temperature, or the sweat already on her skin.

“You know it’s true,” Danny was saying. “Anyway, nobody’s seen them, so if this is a dead end too, I think we’re going to have to admit defeat.”

The pizza guy had looked up at Danny, then back at her, and he looked like he was going to say something, and then shrugged. Ellen could guess – Danny wasn’t that much older than her, maybe a decade? – but it was enough to raise a few eyebrows, the way Danny was playing it. Definitely not “older brother” style, or tagalong not-quite-partner.

“Nah,” the kid, Justin, said. “I didn’t see ‘em. Sorry.”

Out in the distance, over the water, there was a flash of heat-lightning, zigging from one cloud to the other, less a threat of rain than a reminder that it was still summer, that changeable forces still loomed overhead. Ellen didn’t see the flash behind her; she didn’t have to. She felt it, knew exactly where it was, how far away, how powerful, although she had no science training or instruments to measure it. She knew because the vision hit her like an icepick, bypassing her walls and digging right into the softest part of her brain.

Genevieve had taught her how to make it easier, how to let the visions in rather than having them knock her barriers over. It helped, a little: like diving into a tornado instead of being swept off your feet, she supposed, and then there wasn’t any time to think, her mind sorting through what she Saw, trying to put it into some kind of order.

She felt Danny grab her arm, leading her away from the noise and bustle of the booths. Her body followed automatically, but the rest of her was inside a room filled with shadows. Her visions didn’t have smell, and rarely sound – when they called it Sight they weren’t kidding. So she looked, and the shadows became distinct shapes: boxes, and tables, mostly. She was in a storeroom of some kind.

Then one of the shadows moved, coming toward her, and there was a hand reaching out to her, pale and slender, palm turned up. There was webbing between the fingers, and something glittered faintly on the skin, even in the dim light.

Then the scene changed, wrenching Ellen along with it, and she was in the middle of a street, dark and abandoned. Rows of neat little houses sat along either side, with cars parked at the curb. She looked up, all the way down the street, her sight telescoping in a way that made her want to throw up, and she saw the beach, and the ocean. Too far away. Too far away to be safe.

“Safe from what, Ellen? Safe from what?”

She tried to walk toward it, but something had her by the ankles, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t step forward, only back, the weights pulling her back into the shadowed room, and she knew if she went back there she would never escape.

“Ellen?”

She made an irritable noise, and tried to flap her hand at him, to tell him to shut up. He must have taken the hint because he didn’t say anything more, although he still had a hand on her arm, somewhere outside the vision.

The street was nice, the houses in decent repair, what she could see in the night. Was it tonight? She looked up, and checked the moon, hanging high in the black. Tonight, or close enough. Tonight or tomorrow. But where?

She needed more. Needed to see more.

Unable to move from where the vision had dropped her, she couldn’t turn to see the cross-street, but it was narrow, almost like an alley, and had more houses on it, smaller ones, almost like cottages. Carlyle, she read off the nearest street sign, squinting to read the letters.

Not enough.

You’re a storm-seer. Genevieve had explained it to her, the two of them sitting on a bench in Central Park. The sky had been bright blue, the air clear and cool. Genevieve had said it was safer to talk about it then. We all pull power from current, the magic that run along electricity, but you have an extra gift. Current carries things with it. Memories. Images. You can see them. You can pull them from the current, before they even happen.

More current. She reached for the power she could feel racing overhead, riding along those lightning flashes out at sea. All those years of denying she saw anything, trying to fit in, it seemed almost wrong how easy it was to find the current, bring it in toward her…

Too much, too many conflicting sparks. She fell to her knees, the current prickling painfully up and down her spine, unable to settle, and the vision was lost.

“Ellen. Ellen, come on. Come with me. No, it’s okay,” and he was talking to someone else now, his voice pitched away from her, “She’s ok, I think that last beer did her in.”

She wanted to protest, but her knees felt like rubber and her head was burning and all she really wanted to do was lie down somewhere until the fireworks scrambling inside her settled down and behaved.

“You did something with current, didn’t you? And it burned you. It’s okay, you’re going to be okay.”

Yes. She knew that. She was the Talent here, not him, and she opened her mouth to say that, but all that came out was a harsh gasp.

“Come on, sit down.” And she was being lowered onto a bench, and Danny was sitting next to her, his arm around her shoulders.

“I Saw,” she said, barely a whisper. “I saw…her. One of the girls. She’s alive, she’ll be alive, but I don’t know about the others.” The last time she had seen someone twice, it had been Genevieve…and the one missing from that second vision had already died, although she hadn’t known it at the time.

“And I saw… outside. Outside where she is.” Although she didn’t know for certain the cellar was on that street, why else would she be seeing it? “A street. Hamlin? No, Carlyle. Carlyle Court.”

She felt him shift, reaching for something, and then he swore under his breath. “You scorched my cell.” There was no condemnation in his voice, just resignation. “No way to get a new one before morning. But the street, it’s near here?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Not here, the town’s not like this one.” The town they’d driven through had cottages the same size, but they were clearly rentals, more run-down, nowhere near as carefully tended. “I could see the beach from there, sort of. Down the end of the road. A private beach? Not like this.”

“Beach town, nicer, Carlyle Court. Okay.” His arm left her, and she opened her eyes to see him watching her intently, his face in shadows from the streetlamp hanging over them. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” The current had settled, finally, and she no longer thought she was going to throw up. She didn’t want to try standing up just yet, though.

“All right. Hang tight for a minute.”

She wasn’t sure what that meant, to hang tight, but she was all right with sitting there while he went off, approaching an older couple walking past them. They spoke for couple of minutes, and then Danny held up his phone as though showing it to them. The woman laughed, and the man nodded, and took out his own phone, entering something on the keyboard. They spoke a little more, and then Danny was coming back, his body language saying he had something, a direction, a scent to follow.

Oh yay. She forced herself to sit up straight, pretending that she was ready to go, not a burden at all.

oOo

Shadow looked even more like a shadow, like someone had taken an eraser to her sharp edges. If I had an inch of compassion and any sense whatsoever, I’d throw her into the car and go back to the city, leave her there and come back tomorrow, alone.

I was pretty sure that her reaction to that wouldn’t be pretty. And she’d be right. She was wrecked, but she’d been the one to see the missing kids, and she had a right to be in on it. If she wanted.

“Light Bay,” I said.

She lifted her gaze enough to look at me. “What?”

“The only town around here that has a Hamlin Court, according to the Internet, is the town of Light Bay. It’s about fifteen minutes north of here. You game?”

“Yeah. I… Yeah.”

She wasn’t. But she wasn’t going to admit it, either.

“C’mon, tiger,” I said, reaching out a hand. “Get to the car and you can sleep the rest of the way there.”

I ended up half-carrying her the rest of the way. She’d gone silent and loose, like a little kid sullen with exhaustion, and only pride was keeping her upright. I didn’t remember if this was normal for Talent – the ones I hung with tended to be, well, tougher than this.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” It was more of an exhale than an actual word, but she was buckling herself in, and her eyes were open. “Genevieve says that pulling wild current is harder than man-made, and the storm was pretty far away. I don’t think I should have done it.”

“So why did you?”

She shrugged, and looked out the passenger side window. “I don’t… it’s not like it is for everyone else. I don’t always have a choice.”

I started up the car and pulled out of the parking spot, careful to avoid the gaggle of drunk teenagers trying to cross the street in front of me. “The visions?”

“They come when they come. All I can do is…” and she waved a hand lazily in the air, “ride it.”

She seemed to be waiting for me to say something. “That sucks.”

Her laughter was bright, unforced, and an unexpected surprise, even if it didn’t come with a smile. “Everyone else says I’m rare, or special. I spent my whole life wanting to be special. But yeah. It sucks.”

7

Shadow fell asleep in the car. She slept like a little kid, her head lolling forward, snoring faintly. I kept the radio off, and drove through the night. I took route 35 up, rather than getting onto the Parkway, and had to focus on where I was going. Even so, my mind wouldn‘t let go of the case, and the echoes that every case invariably, inevitably, stirred.

Every case I take, when kids are involved, I hope to hell that they’re runaways. Runaways, there’s a reason they left. You can deal with reasons, whether it’s getting them help, or getting them out of that situation and into a healthier one. You don’t always get a happy-ever-after, but you get a better-for-now.

And most of my cases are runaways. Just not all of them.

This one could have been – three teenagers ditching a bad situation or boring relatives for something they hope will be better, in the relative wilds of the summer shore. Fatae teens were dumb as human ones. Even with Ellen seeing people in death’s way, it could have been accident, or random chance…but it didn’t feel like it.

These kids had been taken.

There were three reason why teenagers are abducted, as opposed to the myriad of reasons little kids are abducted. None of them were good. Some of them were worse. The fact that these kids were fatae didn’t change any of that. In fact, an “exotic” would probably bring twice the money, for the discerning predator.

One, they were taken for the sex trade. Horrible as that sounded, it was almost the best option, because I could find them, then. And, assuming they didn’t put up too much of a fight, they wouldn’t be permanently damaged. Physically, anyway.

I had to unclench my fingers from the steering wheel when they started to hurt. Calling that the best option was only relative to the others. Option Two was that they’d been taken as slaves. The slave trade could be sexual or non-sexual, but there was less value, more turnover there… the moment a slave became trouble, they’d be killed. Three….

I’d never run into the third, but I knew about it. There was a small but very profitable market for victims. Disposable flesh, designed only to be hurt. When I was a cop, I’d seen the end result, fished out of basements, and buried in a closed casket.

Ellen had only seen one of the three in her most recent vision. The other two might have been asleep, or taken elsewhere. But they could also already be dead.

“There.”

Ellen’s voice was sleepy, but she was alert enough to catch the signpost I almost missed. Three quarters of a mile later, we were taking the exit for Light Bay.

“I don’t suppose you have any sense of where to go?”

“It doesn’t work that way. But it was residential, and near the beach. So away from downtown.”

Such as downtown was, a single street of storefronts, all closed and dark for the night already. This wasn’t a hotspot. In fact, it was barely a warm spot on the map. I could imagine, in the daylight, it was cozy and quaint, the ideal place to take your pre-teens for a week down the shore, eat ice cream every afternoon and everyone’s in bed by 10pm. The year-round locals were probably blue-collar, solidly working class of all races – probably a fair sprinkling of fatae, too. Two or three generations in one place, and the ones who leave probably come back, eventually, because once you’ve seen the rest of the world, this starts to look pretty good.

“This looks right,” Ellen said, after I’d gone a few blocks east, driving slow enough to see but not so slow a late-patrolling cop would think to stop me. The local boys might be useful, but more likely we’d waste time and energy on territorial markings. “The houses look right.”

They were seaside cottages, probably two bedrooms and a front parlor that could hold a pull-out bed, maybe another bedroom shoved into the attic. But they were all well kept-up, even in the moon and lamplight, the yards tended and the streets recently repaved. We drove along, and her attention scanned back and forth, not so much with her eyes but that weird blind look Talent got sometimes, the one that could seriously weird you out if you didn’t know what they were doing.

I didn’t plan it, but my right hand left the wheel, and reached out to touch her leg. Just a touch, my fingertips barely resting on the cloth, but it was enough to catch her attention. She looked down, smiled, just a corner of her mouth and a rise of her cheek, and then she went back to scanning.

“Anything?”

“It’s not like a whatchamacallit, a GPS.”

“You use a GPS?” The higher res a Talent, the less they were able to use tech. I’d thought that Shadow would be high res enough to warrant a strict low-tech ruling – and her lack of training would make the situation even worse.

“My dad. At least now I know why it never worked properly when I was in the car.” Her smile was gone, now. “He was right to blame me.”

I’d already gotten the picture of her life before Bonnie and her crew dragged her in, but confirmation was always a kick in the gut. Bonnie said I had a white knight syndrome thing going, always wanting to rescue the helpless. She was only half right. I wanted to rescue everyone.

“Yeah, you guys are hell on electronics.” There wasn’t any point in candy-coating it: her parents hadn’t been winners on the support front, but expecting them to know, or understand, what was happening…might as well ask a dog to do your taxes.

“They’re gone.”

“What?” I might have overreacted a little, because Ellen’s hand covered mine suddenly, pressing down in reassurance. “Not gone-gone. Not here, gone. The feel of them’s faded.”

“Do you know where?”

She frowned, her eyes narrowing. “This would be easier if they were Talent,” she said. “I think I’ve touched them enough, I’d be able to follow their signature.”

I’d only ever heard the PUPs talk about signature, the feel of an individual’s personal current. She’d learned that from Bonnie, not Wren.

“But you can’t do that for fatae?”

“No, like I said, you feel …different. And this isn’t signature, what I feel through the vision. It’s… deeper, and softer, and…signature’s something you follow. This is, it’s leading me.”

I wasn’t Talent, I didn’t give a damn about the technical aspects of current. From the look on Ellen’s face, though, I suspected she was going to be cornering the PUPs, the Cosa’s technicians, when she had a chance. “So they are fatae?” I was pretty damn sure, just based on her sketches, and the fact that the serpents had bothered to hear them, but…

“They feel… human but not. And the gills? So, yeah. Close enough to pass…”

“Like me?” We were still cruising the streets, although with less direction now. I came to the end of one road, facing the low seawall that kept the shore from the city, and pulled the car over to the curb. “What do I feel like, to you?”

It was a stupid question. I didn’t even know why I was asking, or what she was going to say.

“Wood and wine, and a warm dirt road.”

Okay, I absolutely hadn’t expected that. From the look on her face, neither had she. I rolled the words around in my thoughts, and laughed. “Yeah, close enough. My genetic donor was a faun, so that makes sense. I-“

She wasn’t listening. She’d gone glassy-eyed again, her fingers convulsing around my hand, her body bending over tense as a bowstring. Even I could feel the current crackling over her, even as I heard the book of heat-thunder in the distance out over the ocean.

“Ellen?” I didn’t know what to do, if I should hold onto her, or pull away, or talk to her… my instinct was to protect her, to shield her from whatever was slamming into her so hard, and I couldn’t, all I could do was sit there and watch.

I’m not good with being helpless. Never have been, that’s why I ended up a cop in the first place.

“Danny. Danny, no.”

She wasn’t talking to me. Or, she wasn’t talking to the me who was in the car. I unhooked my seatbelt and turned sideways, ignoring all doubt to yank her into my arms, holding her the way you would someone just yanked off a ledge, arms curved around her, keeping her steady without actually holding her down. One of the few things we learned in the academy that was actually useful on the street. That, and learning how to duck, mainly.

Slowly, her breath came back to normal, and she pushed away, a gentle request to back the hell off. I let go, but stayed alert.

“I saw you. Alone this time. At a…carnival? There were lights, booth lights, like the Boardwalk but it was…grubbier, and daylight. And banners flying and.. a gun.”

“The other three?” I kept my voice soft and low, like I used to coax kids out of hiding places. Me and a gun, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

“I didn’t see them. Only you.”

“So we have no reason to believe that anything has changed. They’re still alive,” I said, although truthfully this could be taken either way. But hope keeps us moving, and she looked like she needed to move. “Let’s go.”

8

In the end, finding a carnival somewhere near Light Bay was easy. Danny pulled into a diner, they slid into a booth, and he asked the waitress. Between the menu being handed over, and Danny’s second cup of coffee, they had not only directions, but gossip about how long the carnival had been coming around, who they probably had to pay off to keep those rides going, and how many times the local church had tried, and failed, to get them shut down for moral offenses, etcetera.

“Seriously?” Ellen’s eyes were wide in a combination of awe and too-much-information as the waitress, finally, left them to their coffee in peace.

Danny nodded. “Seriously. People, mostly, want to tell you things. If someone doesn’t want to talk, they’re scared. Take the toughest, most morose bastard on the face of the earth, and give him a platform, and he’ll talk for hours. They might not answer your questions, but they’ll let enough slip that you can draw conclusions.”

Despite the hour, the seriousness of everything, and her utter exhaustion, Ellen felt for the first time like they had a chance.

“Drink your coffee,” he said, letting his lips curl in just the hint of a smile, suggesting that he felt the same way. “We have our destination.”

oOo

At night, the fairgrounds were near-magical to little kids and love-struck couples. During the day, before the lights came up, it was probably borderline seedy, worn and workmanlike. This early in the morning, with dew glittering on the grass and canvas tents, the sun just barely lighting the sky, dark purple streaks fading away to pale blue, it had an unexpected, calm beauty.

“I used to love county fairs when I was a little kid,” Ellen said. “We’d go once a year, morning to midnight, and we got to run wild. Ate such disgusting things…”

“I’ll buy you a deep fried something,” Danny said.

“Yeah, thanks anyway.” She couldn’t quite work up a real smile, not with the vision of him, and the gun, and the sensation of death still creeping around in her head, but she did appreciate the effort. “I suppose we…what? Go knock on the door?”

“You already did.”

She yelped a little, jumping back as two men appeared in front of them. One of them was lean and long, the other low and square, like they’d been designed to be a salt and pepper set. The lean one was covered in a soft grey fur, like a pelt, and had a feline face. The squat one was softer, like a beanbag chair with feet.

“So you’re here, and you have our attention. What do you want?” The human was silent in their question, but the way they were looking at them said it, pretty loud.

“My name’s Daniel Hendrickson,” Danny said, taking off his baseball cap and running his hand though his hair. It could have been the mark of nerves, if you weren’t paying attention. Or, if you were, it would highlight the horns showing through the curls, shutting down the accusation of human in their tone.

Ellen tried to shrink in on herself, calling on years of staying invisible, unseen, unnoticed. She wasn’t a Retriever, though; it only worked when people wanted to discount and ignore her.

“Yeah, so?”

“I’m a private investigator,” Danny went on, lifting his right hand to indicate he wasn’t making a threat, while he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a little fold-over wallet, opening it one-handed to show the laminated card tucked inside.

“Yeah, so?” the fatae repeated, unimpressed without even looking.

“So you can either help a cousin out, quietly, or I can walk away and come back with a lot of official paperwork that will make your life more difficult than it has to be,” Danny said, matching him tone for bored tone. He wasn’t threatening, exactly, Ellen thought. He was…promising. Not bravado: a fact, backed by confidence. She wanted that, she wanted to learn how to do that so badly it made her teeth hurt.

Danny tilted his head a little to the left, and almost-smiled at the two figures blocking them. “And we both know that even a hint of red tape is going to screw your day a lot worse than answering a few uncomfortable questions.”

“We’ll take that chance,” the second fatae said, finally speaking up. “Town and us have an understanding.”

In other words, they’d paid off enough people that they weren’t worried. Ellen might not be a trained PI but she knew enough to understand that. Danny could try to force the issue, but even if they could get backing from the cops, it would be at least a day and she didn’t know what would happen to the kids then; the tension she’d felt during each vision, the knowledge that death was sliding its fingers around them, just waiting for the right moment to yank them into its domain.

The thought shivered in her core, and there was an odd echo of that shiver on the soles of her feet. Frowning, Ellen glanced down. They were standing on ordinary dirt, hard-packed and worn from a summer of foot traffic. Using the sense Genevieve had taught her, Ellen clicked over into mage-sight and tried to look again.

Ordinary dirt…but deep below, there was something that pulsed, a thick shimmering rope twisting like a slow heartbeat, running under her feet and off into the distance.

A ley line. Current ran with electricity, both man-made and natural. Most Talent looked in the air, but it was under their feet, too.

She pulled a strand of current from her core, letting the dark blue thread curl around her mental finger, and then sent it down the way she’d learned, letting the leading end touch the ley line.

It was a different energy than what she felt when a storm touched her: thicker, less a jolt than a shove. It felt… like Danny, she realized suddenly. Solid, steady, and weirdly calm for something that was inherently unstable. Storm-current was harsh, unpredictable, as likely to burn your core as fill it, if you weren’t careful. This… ley lines were easy enough to find, but harder to draw on, Genevieve had said; harder, and less powerful, diluted through the earth the way they were. That was why most Talent didn’t bother using them. The power flowed through it, Ellen could feel it. Only, rather than forcing power into her the way air-current did, the flow enticed her in, surrounded her, soaking down into her core like rain.

Her visions, unlike most other usage, didn’t drain her core because they came in from outside, an external force. Still, the sensation of topping off the tank was like an endorphin kick, making her feel competent and capable, too… or at least able to bullshit others into thinking that she was.

Five seconds, that had taken her. But in five seconds, things had gone from casual to tense.

“So why don’t you both get back into your car, and drive back somewhere safer?” the squat fatae said, and it didn’t sound like a suggestion. “This is our space, and we don’t want you in it. Cousin.” He smiled, showing teeth like a shark’s, and the lean fatae next to him took a step forward, bring a knife up out of nowhere. He held it casually, but Ellen had no doubt that it could become a threat as easily as it had appeared.

For an instant, she thought about using some of the cantrips that Genevieve had taught her, maybe to call fire, or levitate something. But she couldn’t think she had enough control to do more than piss the two fatae off, and maybe making things worse. But she needed to do something: the thought that the missing kids might be here, and they were going to be turned away, was too much for her to bear.

Something inside her core clicked and turned, the ley-current sliding into place and her eyes glazed over even as she stepped forward, in front of Danny, and placed her left hand, palm out, on the chest of the first fatae.

It took a lifetime to sort through the possibilities rushing at her, instinctively not looking too closely at anything but waiting until that right moment in time came to her.

“Cancer,” she said. “It’s already in you, moving through your body. Nasty.”

Before he had time to react, she turned to the other. He tried to evade her, and her hand closed on his shoulder, instead. “Car wreck. Drunk. You won’t die immediately though.”

She let go, not wanting to keep the vision any longer than needed, and stepped back, blinking at them. They both looked like frogs, mouths open and eyes blinking.

“You want to know what else she can find out about you?” Danny asked, and that soft voice didn’t disguise any of the menace underneath, this time. “No, I don’t think so. Why don’t you just let us in, walk around, ask a few questions…and nothing has to get ugly.”

Ellen breathed in and out, letting the current surge through her. Ordinary humans – Nulls – couldn’t actually see current, but even though the fatae didn’t use, it they could still sense it. That was what she’d been told, anyway, and from the way Tall and Squat were backing up, she was willing to believe it.

Nobody had ever been scared of her before, not even when they thought she was crazy. It didn’t feel as good as she’d thought it would.

“Anyone complains about you, out you go,” Squat said, like he was trying to regain ground.

“We will be as polite as your granny,” Danny said. “Thank you, gentlemen. Have a lovely day.”

The thugs backed off to what seemed like a safe distance, and they walked through the gates, and onto the carnival grounds proper. Ellen felt the ley line fade as they moved away, and pushed the last lingering bits of current back into her core. The tingling in her skin faded, and she made an involuntary but heartfelt noise that sounded a lot like “ugh.”

“I don’t know what the hell you did back there, but you did good,” he said.

“I don’t know what I did back there either,” she admitted. “Can I not have to do it again?”

Danny wasn’t a Talent. He couldn’t understand – it wasn’t just that the visions were painful, or that she was tired of death aiming for her like cupid with his bow – she was a Storm-Seer, according to everyone, and it was like being an epileptic or color blind or something, just a thing you dealt with and adapted for and she got that she really did, but-

“I don’t want to know that much about other people. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen to them. It’s too much.” She could still see it in her head, even though she’d tried not to look, tried not to notice anything, but it was all there. Death called the most strongly, limned itself with fire and frost, but every end result of every act and inaction was still there, hanging in the current around everyone.

And then Danny’s hand was on her arm, curved around the crook of her elbow, and the fire dampened, the frost melted, and all Ellen felt was tired.

“Come on, Shadow,” he said. “Time to be eye candy while I do some work.”

That was just ridiculous enough to make her laugh.

oOo

My quip had covered up hell of a lot of uncertainty. I wasn’t quite sure what the hell had happened back there at the gate: everything I’d ever heard of Storm-Seers, which admittedly wasn’t a hell of a lot except what Bonnie had told me after Ellen showed up on the scene, said that they were only able to read the future randomly, when the current spikes were strong enough, and never in a particularly directed manner, the way she just had, by touching them.

I had a passing thought that maybe she’d made it up – I mean, who the hell would know – but I knew the signs of current-exhaustion well enough. Whatever had gone on, it had drained her significantly. And she looked unhappy enough for it to be real. There were folk who could fake me out, but Shadow wasn’t anywhere in their league.

The sun had finally gotten up high enough that the overnight lights were flicking off, and people were up and moving. The livestock areas were bustling – horses and bears and whatever else they had there didn’t like to wait until a decent hour for their breakfast, I supposed. But while their handlers might be the most awake, I didn’t think that was the best place to start, since they’d also be the most distracted, and probably armed.

Sometimes, distraction was good, it got you information they didn’t want to give, either verbally or through body language. But trying to wrangle a large-ish animal meant that any distraction could get someone hurt. I didn’t want to risk that, when we had other options.

The midway, with its games of chance, was still shut down; it wouldn’t come to life until mid-afternoon, when the gates opened to the public. And I wasn’t quite ready to go barging into the living areas…not yet, anyway. Not unless we had cause to.

“Are you picking up anything else?”

“No. Just… we’re in the right place. This is what I saw. But I don’t, I can’t See anything else.”

“All right.” I was getting soft, relying on her visions, anyway. Time to prove I deserved my license.

“Hey!” I raised my voice, and called out to a figure up ahead, carrying a long pole with what looked like a lash at the end. “C’mere a minute.”

The boy turned and looked at us, and then with a shrug that clearly said whatthehell, walked toward us. He was in his late teens, sullen-faced and muscled in a way that suggested he didn’t spend most of his day in front of the television – or a book, for that matter.

“You cops?”

Oh, the suspicious mind of a migrant worker. “If we were cops, we wouldn’t have gotten this far.”

The boy grunted, and gave Ellen a once-over. Her chin went up and she stared him back. His gaze dropped first. Whatever issues Shadow had, giving the other gender shit for sexism clearly wasn’t on the list.

“We’re supposed to find someone, figured you might know where they are.”

“Maybe.” Sullen didn’t sound hopeful. “What’s their name?”

“Don’t know,” I admitted cheerfully. “Don’t know where they’ve been assigned, either. But they’re mer.” As I spoke I pulled my cap off and ran my hand through my hair.

It was a risk – this kid was human, not even Talent, and he might be a pure Null for all I could tell. But the fact that two fatae had been assigned gatekeepers meant the probability that this was an integrated crew was high.

“Mer?”

Bingo. The boy was playing dumb but his body language gave him away: he was ready to sprint in the opposite direction if I made one wrong move.

I spent most of my days passing – cross-breeds were rare enough that the fact that I’d lived as human my entire life trumped the obvious fatae aspects of my appearance. But I knew how to switch that out, at-need. I’d never look wholly faun, but there was no doubt that I was fatae.

Especially to a teenaged kid who – despite his sullen act – was no fool. His gaze flicked from my eyes to my horns, and then did a quick once-over, skimming along my body as though he were trying to adjust his initial perception. Then his gaze came back to my face, and I smiled. It wasn’t, I admit, a pretty smile. In fact, I’d spent a lot of time practicing it to display just the right amount of arrogant shit.

“Mer,” I said again. Two girls and a boy, teenagers.”

There was a flicker, an awareness, and then something fell behind his eyes, and he took a step back. “I’m sorry. I don’t know anyone like that here. Not too many of your folk around here, and none of ‘em my age.”

“Never said they were your age,” I said softly. “Just teenaged. Wide range, there.” I could have been wrong, it could just have been the normal teen ego assuming everything revolved around them. But I didn’t think so.

“Mister I swear, I don’t know anything. There’s nobody like that working here now.”

“But there was, before?” I could feel Ellen tense beside me, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the kid to check on her. Some of the fatae, they could wring the truth out of you, like it or not. That wasn’t my skillset. My glamour was hail-fellow-well-met, and it wasn’t effective once they’d gotten skittish.

“Lots of kids come through. They think it’s a glee, an easy gig for the summer. That they can drink all night and sleep all day and make money and then go home again when the summer’s done. Most of ‘em don’t last a week. Mer wouldn’t last a day, unless they were working the dunktank.”

He wasn’t wrong. But we also weren’t looking for someone who was working here. Not willingly, anyway.

“Who does the hiring and firing?”

Passing the buck, Sullen could do. “Perkins. His office is back of the back, the one with the flags flying, that means he’s in. I can go now? I gotta get to work.”

“Yeah, go,” I said, and he was halfway across the lot before I’d gotten the second word out of my mouth.

Ellen had seen me dead, too. And maybe dead here, or at least in danger, here, with a gun.

“How much control do you have?” It was way too goddamned late for me to be asking that.

She licked her lips, and rubbed the bridge of her nose, like it itched. “More than I did six months ago.”

Not much of an answer.

“The first thing Genevieve did was teach me defensive spells. She said there were enough people eyeballing her and Sergei, I had to be ready to duck and cover without her worrying about me, just in case.”

That was a better answer. I reached around under my jacket, and pulled out my Glock. I hadn’t needed to use it even for show in almost a year, and I didn’t think I’d need it here… but the moment you weren’t ready was the second you’d need it. And if she was seeing a gun, I’d rather it be mine than someone else’s.

The grip was warm and familiar in my palm, my fingers curling around it as easy as clicking a mouse. I’d had the damn thing since I was in the academy, same as the boots on my feet. The boots had seen more use.

I checked the chamber, then reholstered the pistol. “Can you Translocate?”

She shook her head.

“Damn. Would have been useful. All right. Stay low and quiet.”

I should send her back to the car, but that probably would be worse – I didn’t trust the goons out back not to be stupid again, if they saw her alone.

oOo

The trailer was as advertised – four flags hanging limp over the roof: one American flag, one MIA, and two I didn’t recognize. The door was open, a concrete brick holding it ajar. I knocked anyway.

“Yo, in.”

The thing you learn, after a few years, is that most stereotypes and clichés become stereotypes and clichés for a reason. Perkins might’ve singlehandledly created the cliché of the stogie-smoking, scowl-faced carnie owner. I hadn’t expected him to be Korean, but that was a minor dissonance in the cluttered, dingy office that also looked like the cliché of every carnie office, right down to the three generations out-of-date computer and the pile of fast food wrappers.

Perkins had a thing for Arby’s.

“What can I do for ya?” He looked me up and down professionally, and I returned the favor. “Cop? Not local. Who’re you looking for? I don’t hire runaways, they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”

I believed him. That didn’t mean I trusted him.

“Not a cop. Private citizen.” If he asked, I’d show him my I.D. but not unless he asked. He didn’t. “Looking for three teenagers, traveling together. They came through here, we know that already so don’t waste my time denying it. I want to know where they went.”

There was a sound behind me, and Ellen stepped forward, not quite stepping in front of me, but fully visible. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her hands moving, a palms-up gesture that would have looked like a peace offering if you didn’t know she was Talent. If you did, it looked an awful lot like she was gathering current. Perkin‘s gaze went to her hands, then to her face, and he let out a curse in a language I didn’t know. Then, without warning, he broke.

“Bad crowd. Damned bad crowd. But the locals, they like their cut, and they’re going to get it somehow, and a man’s got to make ends meet, so I lease them space, every year.” He scowled at me like it was all my fault, and a few things suddenly made sense.

“Cost of doing business,” was all I said, though. Whatever deals he’d made with the locals, cops or criminals, human or otherwise, wasn’t my business except if and as it led me to my targets.

“Yeah.” His expression was sour, but his voice was as matter-of-fact as mine. Cost of doing business. When both cops and criminals require payoffs, what’s a businessman to do?

“I threw them out, mid-season. Got to be too much, no matter how much money it brought in.” He was sulky, not apologetic. I suspected they’d tried to undercut him, or something had gotten too expensive to pay off to cover up.

“So, my kids were with these people you didn’t want hanging around your show. What were they doing?” The list of things a legit carny owner would spit at was pretty short, and matched with my expectation of where this case was going, but I wanted to put him on the burn, just a little

“I don’t know. I didn’t go into their tent. I didn’t want to know.” His body language flashed from annoyed to distinctly uncomfortable, and back to annoyed again.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell?” Ellen said, not really a question. “You knew something bad was happening, and you looked away.”

There was something dark in her voice that hadn’t been there before, not even when the current was flooding her system, speaking through her. My skin prickled, and I felt the urge to step away.

“El…” I said. Not a warning, not a question, just a reminder. We were in an enclosed space, a metal enclosed space, and she’d admitted that she didn’t have all that much control yet.

“I saw them. I Saw them. And he looked away.” She took a step forward, now ahead of me, standing between me and Perkins, and things had suddenly gone from in control to not in control.

“Where did they go?” I willed the idiot to answer me, and in detail. As much as I didn’t want to cause a fuss here, I wasn’t sure I’d be willing to get between a pissed-off Talent and her target, either, especially since she had a damned good point. If I thought it would do any good at all, I’d take him outside for a little come-to-Jesus myself.

“I don’t know.” His eyes shifted to the left, and I coughed. “I swear. But they’ve got winter quarters outside town. An old warehouse. I’ve never been there, ever wanted to go there, but it’s all I got.”

“Thanks ever so much for your help.” The darkness was still in her voice, but it was tinged now with a note of snark that was pure Sergei Didier. Wren might be Ellen’s mentor, but her partner was leaving his mark, too.

That was both reassuring, and unnerving as hell.

9

Whatever I’d been expecting to find at the warehouse, this hadn’t been on the list.

“A sideshow?”

“A freak show.” I considered the neon sign, leaning against the car and crossing my arms against my chest, aware that – in my boots and baseball cap and leather jacket – I probably looked as disreputable as the building I was studying. Ellen was next to me, trying to mimic my pose and failing. It looked easy, but took years of practice.

“You think they have them there….” She looked puzzled. “Maybe… a front for prostitution? Or drug-running?”

“Maybe.” I’d be surprised as hell if there wasn’t some of both of that going on here. “But they’ve got an interesting cover. Freak shows are better suited to carnivals, not somewhere like this, where you don’t get a lot of casual traffic. Even if they wanted to set themselves up for off-season customers, why not somewhere closer to a tourist area, where you get casual traffic? God knows, I doubt zoning laws would get in their way, if they’re able to throw money around.”

Ellen tilted her head, and made a face, understanding that this was a test. “Because there’s something about this location that’s important. Or they want to stay under the radar, here.”

“And how do we find out?”

“We go in.”

She didn’t sound thrilled. I understood: when you’re a freak yourself – and we both were, to the rest of the world – you were cautious about gawking at other freaks. Never mind that this was probably no different than any other Barnum-inspired funhouse with Fiji mermaids and mummified monkeys, and maybe a down on their luck fatae flashing a little wing or tail for the Nullbies.

“Seventeen bucks. There had better at least be an egress,” I muttered. Ellen have me a confused look, but the woman taking our cash almost-smiled. I do appreciate a woman who knows the classics.

The first few rooms were the basics, the expected mummified monkeys, and what I was pretty sure was a piskie skeleton mislabeled as a tooth fairy. The thought of one of those kewpie-troll-doll menaces acting as tooth fairy was almost worth the $17 right there.

“Is that…” Ellen poked one finger at a glass case leaning over it to see better. “Is that a serpent’s skin, like the one we talked to?”

“Yeah. They shed on a regular basis, when they’re young. Might have washed up on the beach, or even been traded for something. Pretty, isn’t it?”

“Prettier than when it’s on it,” Ellen said. She wasn’t wrong: in the artificial light, the old skin glinted with a definite iridescent shimmer that the sea water had muted.

There was a scattering of other people walking through the rooms, one group of teenagers gathering around one case, giggling nervously, a father and daughter pair, dad making sure to keep her smaller hand in his, no matter how she tugged to rush ahead, and an older couple, moving slowly, with evident pleasure, through the exhibits. And a woman, leaning against the far wall, near a sign that did, indeed, say “This way to the egress.”

The employee saw me looking, and smiled. It was a carny smile. I sighed, and put on my best dumb mark expression.

“You like our exhibit?” she asked as I wandered over in her direction. Her nametag said she was Kerry, and she was good, mixing her professional shiller mode with an undercurrent of bored-with-this-job and a hint of actual physical interest. Just the thing to hook a male mark who needed his ego stroked by a little casual flirtation.

“It’s okay.” Casual, playing it cool, too cool to give in but definitely interested, even though I was there with someone. She wasn’t human. She thought I was, though. “None of it’s real, though, obviously.”
“Yeah?”

“Please.” I invested the word with male dismissive behavior, guaranteed to irk any female with a brain.

Ellen wandered up slowly, hanging back like she wasn’t sure that she was welcome to join. I had a bad feeling that she wasn’t playing – that she really was that unsure of her place, even now – but it worked too well for me to wave her closer yet. I’d apologize and explain later.

“You want to see something that’ll really blow your world away?” Kerry said, her tone a come-on and a challenge, paired with one raised eyebrow.

I narrowed my eyes at her and cocked my head, playing the overly-confident rube. “And how much is it gonna cost me?”

She laughed, leaning in like she was going to tell me a secret. “High-rollers pay thousands, because they’re suckers. For you?” She gave me another once-over, not even trying to be subtle. “For you, ten bucks more, that’s all. Another ten dollars for the stuff tourists don’t get to see.”

It wasn’t the best hook I’d ever heard, but I’d have bit no matter what. I pulled out my wallet, and counted out twenty dollars, handing it to her. She took the cash, and leaned back to press open a door that had been hidden in the wall behind her. “Go on in,” she said. “Enjoy.”

The door led into a landing, and then a short flight of stairs leading down. The stairwell was barren but well-lit, and the steps were clean and in good repair. I tensed up anyway, and reached back to take Ellen’s hand, squeezing it once in warning before letting go. The door closed behind us, and I had the Glock in my hand, dipped down but ready. I didn’t think this was a trap, but I didn’t know what it was. Prepared was better.

oOo

At the bottom of the stairs there was no ambush, no guards, and no goons of any species waiting to get shot. There were, however, cases. Large cases and small ones, a dozen or so, each lit with professional quality lighting.

Gun still in-hand, I stepped forward and looked into the first case. A face looked back. My breath caught, even as part of my brain was categorizing what I saw, the way I used to scan a crime scene. Ridged forehead, pearlescent skin yellowed with age, eyes wide and milky-white, and a jaw that, dropped open, showed a double row of sharp, shark-like teeth.

A Nagini. Just the head, and a chunk of her neck: the muscled serpent’s body missing, maybe lost, maybe cut off for easier display.

My throat tight, I moved on to the next case.

“Danny?” Ellen’s voice was too small, too quiet, and I abandoned the display of what looked like a centaur’s forearm to see what she had found. She was standing in front of one of the full-sized cases, at the back, and her hands were palm-flat on the glass, as though trying to reach inside.

The case was set up like a diorama, with a painted backdrop of leaves, green and vibrant, while a three-dimensional tree trunk filled the center of the case, and in front of that…

No, not in front of. Nailed to the tree was the body of a woman, her skin smooth and brown, her arms twined above her head, her hair falling over one shoulder, down to her hips, her face…

God, her face.

Most people – Nulls, maybe even some Talent – would assume this was more of what was upstairs, frauds expertly done. I knew better.

“A dryad,” Ellen choked out. “They did this to a dryad.”

And another fatae had sent us down here, knowing what we’d see. Not that we had any great claim to the moral high ground compared to humans, overall, but… I’d trained myself to hold back emotion, to never let the anger interfere with the job. This took a hard shove, but it stayed down.

“Come on.” I used my free hand to gather Ellen in closer, and we moved away from the ghoulish display, moving toward the back of the room, where a short hallway led us to another room, both of us bracing to find our missing trio, even as I prayed that I was wrong, that this wasn’t what it was.

There were four exhibits in this room, each in a full, floor to ceiling case. And they were moving.

My first instinct was to break the cases, to free the beings inside, but Ellen’s hand on my arm held me back. I looked back, and her face was strained, stressed, her eyes too wide and intently focused.

“Current,” she said, looking at the half-dozen piskies fluttering around inside their case. “They’re not alive, not really. Just…moving.”

Magic. A Talent did this. Not that I had any particular love for the squirrel-sized tricksters of the fatae, but not even piskies deserved this.

And the other cases….

Ellen let out a harsh cry, and fell to her knees, a howl rising out of her throat that made me want to kill something, anything, just to feed the bloodthirst I could feel in that sound. The rage that escaped my control, finally, was cool and hard, implacable, and in need of something to hit.

In the other case, the largest one, were three mer, one perched on a rock, combing out her long green hair, the other two half-submerged, their tails flicking underwater, as though they were telling each other stories, or competing for her attention.

Ellen keened, and I dropped to my knees beside her, trying to keep my gun out and ready while still trying to offer some useless support, some reminder that she wasn’t alone, my arm over her shoulders, holding her to me the way I would any injured, frightened child.

Too late. Far too late to save them; whatever Ellen had seen must have been echoes of their road to this place, this end. “Are they aware?” I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to ask, but I needed to.

“I don’t…” She choked back a sob, the sound thick with phlegm and sorrow. “I don’t know. There’s…” She stared at the case as though trying to memorize it. “There’s current there, but it’s wrapped around them so tightly, I can’t tell if anything’s beneath any more.”

Current was kin to electricity. Life ran on electricity, too, the pump of hearts, the tingle in our brains. The thought that they might be aware, turned into conscious waxwork displays to horrify and titillate… it was worse than any horror movie I’d ever seen, because it was real.

“Why?” So much pain in that voice, so much anger. “Why do I see things I can’t change? What’s the point?”

Everything she’d hoped to do, tagging along with me, had shattered. I wanted to comfort her, but there was no comfort in this room.

“We know what happened to them,” I said. “There’s no more uncertainty for their families. Sometimes, that’s the best we can do.”

It sounds weak, but being able to give a family closure can be enough. When you know it’s not going to end well, having it end with even a small kindness…you take the gifts you get.

“Not enough. They change out the exhibits, the sign on the door out front said, new ones every six weeks.” Ellen’s voice was raw but clear. “This is new… they had others before. They’ll have others again.”

She looked up at the mer display, and something in her face changed, like the ocean had washed under her skin. “This is wrong.”

On so many levels. But this misuse of magic, and fatae involved with the actual freak show, from the security to the door guard… it was going to get messy.

“We can sic the PUPs on them, but for now we need to keep moving.” I could feel the time ticking down again – not for the teens, but for us. At some point, someone was going to start talking, and this place was not exactly the kind of place that liked official notice. If we wanted to bring them down, we had to make sure they didn’t spook.

And I hadn’t forgotten that she’d seen me dead, too.

“All right.” Ellen got to her feet, wobbling a little, but her back straightened and her chin went up, and I didn’t know how far it would carry her, but it was enough for now.

We made it as far as the exit – and this one had an actual exit sign on it, not egress – when someone came in through the out door.

“Not so fast,” the person said. Perkins. And he had a gun, too.

“Oh, fuck me,” I said.

oOo

Ellen had gone through too many emotional switches already. She’d been scared, and sad, and horrified and too many other things she wasn’t quite able to grasp. When the carny owner confronted them, she reacted without thinking following not instinct – to hide – but the way Genevieve had been training her, to grab hold of her current and let it flow through her, opening herself up to it, so that she was ready to defend herself.

And when she did that, something pushed at her. Something large, not powerful in and of itself, but large enough to make itself known. It didn’t feel like current, but it didn’t not exactly, either. She tried to ignore it, keeping her gaze on the man in front of them, trying to see what Danny was doing, in case they had to make a sudden run for it, or if she was supposed to drop or-

That something pushed at her again, enough to slide through, a tendril, no, a gnat, biting at her, shoving something into her awareness, finding a tiny hole and forcing its way through.

“You bastard.” She knew, suddenly, as though the mers had told her, their last whispers in her ear. “You sold them. You told them they’d have jobs, lured them here, and then you sold them!” Once she opened herself to it, the whisper grew into a wave, swamping her, explaining everything without having to say anything at all. The other fatae in the cases were too weak, their awareness too faint to start, or gone too long. But the mers were fresh, the magic animating them keeping electrical impulses running in their brain, too, enough that she had Seen them, Seen their despair, their sense of betrayal, the way they’d been moved from place to place…

They had called her here. Nobody else could hear them. Nobody else could do this.

Current hummed inside her, making her feel queasy, like she was going to throw up, but at the same time like she could do anything, explode into violence like the ninja whatevers in the old movies her mother loved. Genevieve had warned her about that, about how dangerous is was to let current take control, that she could do more damage than she meant to.

She wanted to do a lot of damage. But Danny was next to her, and there were people upstairs, and she didn’t know how to hurt only the right people.

“Just you?” Danny was saying, and she was confused at first, distracted by the current-hum, unable to focus well on the two armed men in front of her.

“Son, I don’t want to be here,” Perkins said, lifting his weapon until it was pointed directly at Danny’s chest. “All you had to do was walk away, and nobody needed to be here, nobody needed to get hurt,” he continued, like they were having a friendly little chat. “I told you the truth – I didn’t want this anywhere near my show.”

“But not out of any moral bias,” Danny said, and his voice was dry, dry as paper, dry as winter air. “Just because things were getting too hot. Maybe the local inspectors got complaints? Comments that couldn’t be ignored? There’s always a small percentage of suckers who get too disturbed, who start to think, instead of reacting, and maybe some of them knew about the fatae, knew that your ‘side show’ was too real to not be real?”

“All it takes is one weak willy,” Perkins said, “and the bribes cost more than what you’re taking in. But I didn’t like it, not once I knew about,” and the tip of the gun moved slightly, taking in the entire basement, “this. Doesn’t matter, didn’t matter. Once you’re in the game, you don’t get to walk out again.”

Ellen could see it all now, not the moment of death but just before, in that basement in the house by the Shore, the moment of realization when the girl cried out, desperate for something, for someone to know what had happened to her, to them, and the current had carried that call, dropping it into her brain, her core. It had all come from that, everything that brought them here.

There was no meaning to it, there was no hidden purpose. It was all chance, all random, who she heard, who she saw, flickers in the current-line, roads taken or not-taken.

Danny had moved in front of her, a subtle but clear protection, for all the good it would do, and was still talking. “So you’re here to kill us, is that it?”

“Of course not,” the man said. “Killing a human? That’s illegal. Oh, wait. You’re not human, are you?”

Fatae had no protection, because they didn’t exist, legally. He thought she was fatae, too. But he had felt her pull current…

Ellen realized, suddenly, that Perskins didn’t know about Talent. He knew about fatae, but not magic. He thought they were all the same, and his business partners had never told him anything else.

They were going to die. Die, and Danny would end up in one of these displays, and -

*genevieve* She didn’t know if she could ping loud enough, over this far away, but she didn’t know what else to do. *bonnie!*

The current sizzled and snapped around her, demanding that she do something. Something now, not waiting for someone else, hoping someone else will fix everything.

Random chance. But random chance that ended with her, here.

“Don’t be a fool,” Danny said, his voice tight and angry, but not scared, he wasn’t scared, and he stepped forward and the gun went off, too loud in the basement room. Ellen dropped instinctively even before Danny’s body hit hers, taking her to the ground, and then there was another gunshot, or maybe the echo of the first, and terror ripped through her, loosing the current in her core without any control whatsoever.

The glass cases shattered, and all she heard was screaming.

Some of it might have been her own.

oOo

I hate getting shot. Never happened while I was on the force, but since then? Three times: twice in the leg, once in the shoulder. This made a third time in the leg, and it never hurt any less. The fact that I was pretty sure he’d been aiming for my chest wasn’t much consolation.

The noise seemed to have died down, so I lifted my head and risked looking around. Underneath me, Ellen made a noise, and tried to get up, too.

“No. Stay down.” I put my hand on her head, and kept her from looking. She didn’t need to see this.

I couldn’t use magic, but I could feel it. I was pretty sure head-blind Nulls a mile away would have felt this.

The glass cases were all shattered, the lights overhead likewise. The room was lit by a handful of emergency lights, the red glow adding to the surreal hellishness.

Perkins lay in front of us, face up. Or what was left of his face, anyway. Something had gouged at him, torn him apart, and left him in a puddle of… watered down blood.

I was pretty sure, without bothering to test it, that it was seawater. Poor bastard. He’d gotten too deep in bad things, but as much as I despised him, he wasn’t the one who’d done this.

He’d been the one they could reach, though. Maybe. They? Maybe my Shadow had done this on her own. I didn’t think so, though.

I’d leave figuring it out to the PUPs. My responsibility was to the living.

“Come on,” I said, sliding my hand down to Ellen’s shoulder. “Close your eyes, and come on. Trust me, and don’t look.”

She got to her feet, still shaking, and slid her hand into my other one, twisting her fingers with mine. I tried to project as much reassurance as I could into my voice and touch, and slowly her skin warmed, her shaking eased.

“Your leg…”

“Hurts like hell, needs to be looked at, yeah. But not here. Let’s go.”

I’m not sure who was supporting whom, but we walked out of the exit and up into the lobby of the building. A few people stared, but nobody stopped us, as we walked out into the sunlight, and the car.

10

Most of my cases, I get to see the wrap-up. I’m the one who delivers a missing kid home, or tells the client good news about whatever they’d feared… or brings them the news they’re never prepared to hear. Sometimes it’s the best moment in the world, sometimes it’s the worst, but there’s always a sense of closure, that the agreement I’d entered into had been fulfilled.

I didn’t have that, here. We’d gotten back to the city without incident, dropping the car off at the rental place and cabbing it, not back to my office, or the emergency room, but directly to the PUPI offices uptown. Bonnie’d been waiting, as had Valere and her partner, hovering with a mix of fear and anger. Valere had been almost maternal, swooping down on Ellen and wanting to know what had happened, if she was okay. The girl put up with it for a few minutes, stoic as an oak, and then broke down, wrapping her arms around her knees and putting her head down in a clear do-not-ask warning sign.

I didn’t blame her a damn bit. I was tempted to myself. But Bonnie and Venec were waiting, and I needed to give them my report, so they could go do whatever it was they could do, to make sure this mess didn’t get swept under anyone’s’ rug.

That’s what PUPI was there for, to make sure magical crimes didn’t get excused, explained, or otherwise forgotten. And if that meant that I didn’t get to be in on the final moments… I was all right with that, for once. There wasn’t anyone to tell: I knew that the sideshow’d already moved on, and finding them would be damned near impossible. Word would go out, because the Cosa Nostradamus would know, once PUPI was done. People – our people – would be alert, now.

Only what happened before I could say anything was that their office manager/medic took one look at me, and had me flat on my back and pantsless in under three minutes, possibly a world record. Only after she’d pronounced me bullet free and luckier than I deserved, and stitched me up, was Venec was allowed to take over. He was the thorough bastard I’d expected, wringing the last detail out of me until I almost wished the bullet had done more damage.

By the time I was turned loose, Ellen had been swept away by her mentor. I stood in the office lobby, my leg aching like a bitch, and feeling weirdly bereft. She had only shown up, what, 36 hours ago? If that? How had I gotten used to having a shadow, so quickly?

I hoped that Valere was able to help her deal with what she’d seen what she’d done, and headed home to a date with my case notes for the job Ellen’s arrival had interrupted, a stool to put my leg up on, and a bottle of gin.

oOo

I don’t drink often, but when I do, it’s with the intensity and fierceness of my faun kin. And twice in one week added up, even for me. Which meant that when someone slammed on the door of my apartment at WTF early the next morning, I wanted to tell them to fuck off and die. Instead, I made sure I was wearing shorts - I was - and staggered to the front door. I didn’t get hungover as easily as humans did, but there was some definite dehydration-exhaustion happening in my cells.

“Open the door, Danny.”

I opened the door. My shadow stood there, looking about as good as I felt. But she was fully dressed, and carrying a box of what smelled like pain au chocolat.

“Come in,” I said, but she was already in, handing me the box and stalking into the apartment like she owned it. I closed the door behind her, and leaned against it, holding the pastry box. Definitely pain au chocolat. My mouth watered, even as my brain demanded coffee. And my body wanted painkillers.

“Genevieve says twenty-four hours with you did more good for my control than a month of training,” she said without any kind of hello or how are you. Although the latter was probably pretty obvious. “She says you’re Earth to my Air, whatever the hell that means.”

“Current and grounding.” I knew that much about Talent, anyway. Air was current, earth was…well, earth. I looked down at the pastries in my hand, and saw not Valere‘s hand in this, but Sergei’s. I didn’t think well in the morning, but even I knew something was up. “Why are you here?”

Ellen turned and stared at me from across the entry foyer of my apartment. She seemed to suddenly notice that I was considerably underdressed, let her gaze drop to my feet, flushed slightly, and then kept her gaze trained on my face.

“It’s all random,” she said. “What I see, what I hear, it’s not God sending a message, or people picking me because I’m me. There’s no point to it except whatever meaning I can give it.”

If she’d figured that out, she was well ahead of most of the world.

“So, I see the dead. No.” She collected herself, started again. “I see those who’re going to die, violently. I can’t stop that, for whatever reason. And Genevieve…she can’t help me, not with that. It freaks her out a little. It freaks everyone out. Except you.” She swallowed hard. “I don’t know why you’re not scared of me, but you’re not.”

Maybe because I didn’t understand it, all the potential she carried inside her, the way other Talent could. Maybe I was an idiot. But she was right: I wasn’t scared of her, or what she did, or what she could do.

I should have been. If I’d any sense…

No, that wasn’t right. I had plenty of sense. Maybe even too much of it. And Valere – and Didier – knew that. Fuck.

“I’m no mentor,” I said.

“I have a mentor.” She stared at me, not arguing, just waiting for me to figure it out on my own.

This was a really bad idea, on so many levels. I worked alone, she had no training, no license. No idea what she was asking for.

“This job hurts,” I said. “Rip-your-guts-out hurt, sometimes.”

“I know. God, I know. I don’t want this. I never wanted this any of this. But I can’t just,” and she waved a hand in the air, unable to articulate whatever it was she couldn’t do. “I can’t not.”

We stared at each other, while I tried to find a comeback to that, and failed.

“Only one way to screw up this game, rookie.” My partner’s voice, my first day on the street. “And that’s thinking whatever you do don’t matter. Because everything we do, matters.”

“Fuck.”

I may have said that out loud, because Ellen almost cracked a smile. I remembered the pastry box in my hand, and handed it to her. “Kitchen’s over there. Go put these on plates and pour me some coffee while I put some damn clothes on.”

Looked like my shadow was going to stick around.

 

 

 

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