Dragon Justice

“NISMART numbers say slightly more males than females, out of about a million-plus reported every year. Most are runaways, teenagers, or known-adult abductions. Only a small but ugly percentage are nonfamily kidnappings.” Of course Danny would know. “Most are white. Yours?”

“No. Mom’s Asian, dad’s Caucasian.”

Danny frowned. “Mine are mixed, too. Statistically that’s odd, although within range for New York.”

I thought about that and let it go. “Even if we had a full-scale kid-snatch going on, which I doubt, I can’t think of any fatae breed who would be looking for the full range of age and—”

Something ticked in my brain, and I pulled out the file again, flipping through. “Seven. Fourteen. Twenty-one…”

“What?” Danny was watching me intently now, his skin still tired-looking but his eyes alert and focused, his usual energy back.

“Magic.” I said it like a curse word. It fit, damn it. It all fit....

“What?”

I forgot sometimes that Danny was fatae, not Talent. They looked at—and reacted to—things differently than we did. Also, they got told different stories as kids. “Old magic, pre-current.” Before the modern age, before Founder Ben: when things were messy and magic was as much hope and prayer as science. “Seven was a magic number, really strong, potent. Even today, some people like to run things in sets of seven, hedge their bets. And here we’ve got my girl, seven. Yours, if fourteen, twice seven, and twenty-one, thrice seven. Three’s a strong number, too. All gone missing in the same city, the same time, and you think there was Cosa involvement in your cases, too, otherwise you wouldn’t have mentioned the fatae.” Danny handled Null cases, too, but he wouldn’t immediately have associated something I was working on with one of those.

By the time I’d finished, the words spilling out of my mouth, he was already reaching across his desk, pulling a pile of folders toward him. Being fatae, Danny could use computers, but he tended to do that stuff away from where Talent might drop by. He ran a shoestring operation, and we were hard on electronics, especially when we got emotional.

“Melinda, fourteen. Went missing two weeks ago. I’ve been on the case for three days, after the NYPD dumped her in with the runaways. Haven’t turned up a whisper of anything. Started with the street kids, got nothing. Was starting to wonder if she’d skipped town or hooked with a dead-end john when Gail’s parents called me. She’s been missing almost a month, and all the stats are the same—smart, pretty, but not overwhelmingly brilliant or beautiful, everything to stay home for, suddenly up and gone between midnight and dawn.”

He put his hand palm-down on the file, like he was trying to hold them safe, and turned his head to look sideways at me.

I stared at his hand. They were blunt-tipped, his fingers, strong and scattered with coarse brown hairs. Venec’s hands were strong, too, but more tapered and smooth. I shook my head, dismissing the thought. “My girl’s too young to be really slotted—but she’s definitely cute. Smart… Unless they’re genius level, how do you tell at that age?”

Danny snorted. “Don’t ask me.” He was an only child, and despite his breed’s proclivities—or maybe because of them—he wasn’t the type to sleep around. I’d sussed early on that Danny was looking for One True Love, god help him. “Talent family?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“So how did they come to you?”

I hesitated, then went for broke. “They didn’t.”

That got me a closer look, squinty-eyed, like they must teach in the academy, the kind of look that makes you talk too much when a cop asks to see your ID. “Spill, Torres.”

Stosser was going to kill me. But, damn it, Danny might have the info that broke the case. And he took discreet into artistic levels. And the Big Dogs had taught us to trust our gut instincts. “The Fey Folk asked us to look into it. Rumor is that they were responsible for my girl’s disappearance. They say no. They don’t want people claiming they’ve broken Treaty.”

“An’ if PSI says they’re clean, most folk will stand by that.” Danny nodded. “Sounds like Stosser’s long-term plan to own the Cosa is working.” He shook his head then, dismissing the boss’s plans as unimportant, which, to him, they were. “Damn it, Bonnie, I think we’re onto something. My girls are Null. Yours?”

One of the first things I’d checked. Talent kids tend to wander down slightly different rabbit holes, when they go missing. “Yeah.”

It might not mean anything, all these facts. Sometimes, even the most suspicious of circumstances turned out to be flutterby, unrelated and unconnected. But there was a thick, heavy feeling in my core and a tingling of my kenning, the sense that sometimes, often unpredictably, hinted at the future, that told me otherwise. A full eighty percent of this job was listening to the facts and sorting the evidence, and then fitting them together. Sometimes it took logic; sometimes it took a wild leap. More often, it took both.

“If it’s not the usual suspects, but the gossip points there…” I didn’t want to say the word, but I had to. “You think it’s the Silence, come back?”

For years, an organization called, ironically, the Silence had been spreading enough lies and rumors around the city, enough to nearly destroy the Cosa Nostradamus. We’d taken to the streets to fight them, one snowy night last year, and they’d finally disappeared from the scene a few months ago, their office building still sitting vacant. Wren Valere had been elbows-deep in what was going on, then. If they’d come back, Wren would have known. She would have told me, us. Right?

“If they were back, the Dynamic Duo would have let us know,” Danny said, echoing my thoughts. “Right?”

“Right.”

I sounded convinced, but there was a low note of doubt in my stomach to go with everything else. Wren Valere was my friend. A genuine hero, although she’d scoff at the thought. She was also a Retriever, and like Danny, she took discretion to an art form when needed. Discretion that, to me, could translate as withholding evidence. How far could we trust her to share information? Yeah, hero, friend, etc., but…

I couldn’t afford to be distracted by a maybewhatif. Useless dithering, Torres. Focus on the facts. “I’ll have Venec put a few feelers out, just in case.” Ben had friends in seriously low places, even for the Cosa, and if the Silence were back, those friends would be scurrying for their lives. “But for now, we focus on the girls and work our way out to their captors, not the other way around.”

“Right. Here.” He pulled a handful of sheets from the folders and shuffled them together. “Copies of all the known facts on my girls. Okay to copy yours?”

“Yeah, go ahead.” We’d hired Danny for side work before; Stosser and Venec trusted him. Besides, I’d already spilled the part I wasn’t supposed to say; wasn’t like his having hardcopy would change anything.

The copier machine was a tiny little thing, off in the corner of the room. Danny fed the sheets in, one at a time, while I grabbed one of the client chairs and draped myself into it.

Better to fess up now than get caught out later. But indirectly…

*boss?*

There was a slight lag in his response. Nothing that would have been noticeable with anyone else, but I’d become accustomed to Venec being just next to my thoughts at all times. Distance was a factor in pings; maybe it mattered here, too? If so, he wasn’t in the city anymore. Huh.

*what?*

*twist in the job Stosser gave me. taking Danny on. he has a case that might match it*

A sense of acknowledgment, acceptance, and being busy somewhere else. Ben was leaving the city. Yeah, moving… I concentrated a little. Southward.

*?*

*do your job, torres*

And then he was gone. Okay, fine. There was absolutely no reason for me to feel like I’d been punched in the stomach, right? He was the boss, and I was the pup, and we’d agreed that was where we were and he had no obligation to tell me where he was going, any more than I checked in with him, off-hours.

I’d never been jealous before in my entire life. Not even when J, my mentor, went out to visit his first student, now a lawyer out in California, and didn’t invite me to come along. I’d understood I shared J, and was okay with that. Not when lovers had moved on, or when a potential lover had chosen someone else. It just… I had never understood how you could resent someone spending time somewhere else, like only you had a claim on their life.

But I did now. And I didn’t like how tightly I hugged that feeling, as though it should give me comfort instead of pain.

“Okay, here.” Danny came back and handed over the originals. “You want to work this together or split up?”

Having something concrete to work on would keep Venec and his mysterious errand out of my mind. “Split up.” Plausible deniability was key: Danny could be pretty bullheaded, and Stosser had told me to go gentle. “We can work more contacts that way. If you find something…” I paused. Danny couldn’t ping me, and I didn’t carry a cell phone, for obvious reasons. I’d gotten really spoiled, working only with Talent.

Luckily, Danny was used to it. “If I find anything, I’ll call the office and they can ping you.”

“Yeah.” I paused, looking over the paperwork. My throat tightened at the black-and-white reproductions of those faces. Three girls, one of them only a few years younger than me, one of them still a baby. Missing for weeks now. “Danny.”

“I have to believe they’re alive,” he said, somehow knowing what I didn’t want to ask. “I couldn’t do this job otherwise. You do the same, Bonnie. Believe.”

I carried that with me, the belief in his voice, all the way back down to the street and the next stop along the gossip network. It didn’t help shake the feeling of an onrushing train that had started prickling up and down my arms the moment I picked up all three files, though.

Kenning. It wasn’t quite foresight or even precognition, nothing that precise or useful. But the weird shimmer of current let me know there was something building. Something that involved me. And it was rarely good.

* * *

On the train heading toward Philadelphia, Ben Venec felt a twinge of unease. Bonnie, he identified, and then frowned. No, not Bonnie. She was worried. The Merge and his own abilities told him that through their brief contact, but she was focused on the chase, whatever Ian had set her on earlier. It was something else prickling at him.

He touched the briefcase on the seat next to him, his unease making him need to confirm, physically, that it was there and safe. He didn’t have even a touch of precog, or Bonnie’s kenning, but his instincts were good, and something felt wrong, off. He just couldn’t figure out what.

He ran down the mental list of possibilities. Ian? No, he was accounted for. It wasn’t the pups themselves; when he’d left, the office was humming along at a mad but steady pace, and if anything had gone wrong, he would have heard the yelps. The job he was heading for? Unlikely. It was bog-standard, more a distraction than a challenge.

“All right. Apprehension noted and filed,” he said out loud, as though that would make whatever it was shut up. Much to his surprise, it did, a palpable sense of the unease backing off, like a cat settling back on its haunches to watch, rather than leap.

Interesting. Possibly it was his own nerves, reacting to…something. There were a limited number of things—and beings—that could cause that reaction. He considered the idea of another trickster imp in town, and dismissed it. This was more personal, more…direct.

“Aden, what are you up to?”

Ian’s little sister, Aden, had made it her personal mandate to shut PUPI down, to keep her precious Council from being held accountable for their actions. She had been banned from approaching them directly, after her earliest attempt got an innocent Null killed, but she hadn’t given up. Not by a long shot.

Not too long ago they—he and Ian—had been the focus of a Push, a current-driven emotion, intended to doubt themselves into making mistakes. With a touch of the Push himself, Ben had recognized it easily enough, but not before it had done some damage they couldn’t afford. Aden had been behind that, and while Ian said he had dealt with her…

“There’s nothing more stubborn than a Stosser on a crusade. The only question is what level of crazy will she bring, and from what direction?”

Since this twinge seemed intent on being a helpful warning rather than a distraction, Ben was willing to let it sit there and wait. He would be alert—but he would have been on alert, anyway. That was his job.

Popping open the brown leather briefcase, he extracted the file marked Ravenwood in thick black lettering, took out a folded blueprint, and smoothed it open, settling himself in to study the outlines of the museum. He hadn’t taken on a side job in almost two years, burdened with getting his pups trained and ready, and he was looking forward to the work. Allen’s employers—a small private museum in downtown Philadelphia—wanted a security system that couldn’t be beat? Ben felt a sliver of challenge rise up within him as he considered the specs. Old building, with all the newest tech added to bring it to modern-day standards. Adding current to that wasn’t going to be an easy job…which was why Allen had recommended him.

Time to prove that he could still do more than herd pups.

* * *

“Please. Don’t.”

The voice was tired, flattened in the way that human voices should never be. The cave’s walls were high, but there was no echo, no sound at all, his words swallowed by the vast presence around him.

The dragon hovered over him, eyes burning in the darkness, drawing all the light into their glittering gold depths. “Give me your treasure.”

Again and again, that demand. You could not refuse a dragon, could not resist. But he had none, no more to spare. No gold, no cash, no worldly possessions: he had offered them all, hours ago, and the dragon would not be sated. Even his core had been drained, the current sucked away so swiftly he had gone from full to empty in a heartbeat. Who knew dragons could do such a thing? Who knew they would?

Another slash of its claws, agony burning through his abdomen, and he was too tired to scream again. There was nothing left. No hope of rescue, no hope of survival. No hope of explanations: Why me? What did I do?

Please, his lips formed, but no sound emerged.

When the next blow came, he fell into it, the only escape he had. The last thing he heard, echoing down into oblivion, was the dragon’s howl of rage.

Chapter 4

“Ow! Damn it, I just wanted to talk to you!”

The brownie didn’t let go of my wrist, its blunt teeth digging in more firmly. The little bastard was about the size of a French bulldog and just as solid, so this was really beginning to hurt, not to mention being annoying as hell. If I tried to shake him off, I’d probably snap my wrist.

“Og, let the lady go.”

Og rolled his eyes up at me, the whites yellowed and sick-looking, and I hoped to hell I wasn’t going to need a tetanus shot after all this. Or rabies.

“You heard the man, Og,” I said, sugar-sweet. “Lemme go. Or I will zap you with enough current to make your whiskers curl around your ears.”

Brownies don’t actually have ears, just little pinholes like dolphins, but the threat sounded scary enough that he unhinged his jaw and let go. I refused to step back or check the skin to see if it was broken, but stared down at the little bastard until it cast that yellowed gaze to the wooden floor, sulky but cowed.

Most fatae breeds I treat with cautious respect. Brownies were the exception: I hated them, and they seemed to return the favor. Long story, going back to me, age five, and a stray kitten. Brownies love cats, too—but not quite the same way.

I’d never been able to look at Girl Scouts without shuddering, after that.

“Did he hurt you?”

“Only my feelings.”

The fatae who had ordered Og to loose the teeth was a da-esh, a close-related breed. They tended to pal around together. Same basic shape and coloring—imagine if the stereotypical alien silhouette had put on twenty pounds and filed its head to a smooth, round shape—but about a foot taller and with better social skills.

“You’ll survive,” he diagnosed. “What did you come down here to ask about?”

“Down here” was more figurative than literal: we were in a tiny café on the Upper West Side, dimly lit, with an old TV muted in the corner and a waitress who looked like she’d escaped from a high school for the permanently don’t-give-a-damn doing her nails at the only other occupied table. I’d only just sat at their table when Og decided I’d make a good appetizer.

“You know we make good on useful data,” I said, not quite answering. It paid to remind informants about that: PSI appreciated free info, especially when solving the case benefited everyone, but we didn’t expect our informants to put themselves on the line without some kind of compensation. It was also a reminder to my companions that I wasn’t a private citizen, as it were: if they screwed with me, it wouldn’t be just me pissed off with them. Stosser and Venec had reputations both independently and together that would make anyone seriously reconsider trying to scam their people.

“I can’t tell you shit until you ask a question, puppy.” The da-esh looked me up and down, while Og climbed back into his chair and glared at me from across the table, brave again now that its pack leader had taken control. “You’re Torres, right?”

“Right.” There were enough of us in the office now that it could get confusing to fatae, I supposed. Not like when we started, and there were only five of us, and nobody ever mistook me for Sharon, more’s the pity.

“Huh.”

I had absolutely no idea how to decode that, so I just waited.

It took three sips of whatever the da-esh was drinking for him to decide. “You pups have done fair by us so far. If I know anything useful, and it don’t get me killed to tell, I’ll share.”

That was a better offer than most I got. I nodded agreement of the terms. Unlike the others I’d spoken to today, he only got the driest of details. “Missing-persons case. Three persons. Child, teenager, and a young adult—all female, all missing from the city in the past month. Null, or at least non-declared.” Sometimes Talent popped up out of nowhere, and the two youngest were young enough to be uncertain. “I’m looking for trace of any of them.” I reached—carefully, with an eye on Og—into my bag and pulled out three photographs. Spread out on the table in the dim light, I could barely see the details, but brownies and their kin make up for their lack of external ears by having rather spectacular night vision.

“Human. Two overtly Caucasian, one with a definite Asian parent. No similarity in coloring or in face shape. They are all coddled little brats, but no meanness in them.”

My jaw might have dropped open just a little bit, because Og chuckled, a nasty little sound.

“We are not, how do they call it, apex predators,” my informant said, ignoring his companion. “Survival often involves being able to read information quickly, off limited data. That is why you came to me, isn’t it?”

It was. I just hadn’t expected it to be quite so detailed.

“Have you heard anything about missing females, human, or anyone who might have an interest in them?” I was choosing my words carefully, something you had to do when dealing even with the most friendly of fatae. “Interest either in having them, having them harmed, or having harm come to them.” The last two weren’t the same thing, and you could hide a lot of malice in the space between.

“You mean other than the usual steal, molest, eat, and otherwise do evil with?”

I sighed. “Yeah, other than that.”

The da-esh showed his teeth in a grin, and I really wished he hadn’t. Their kind were carrion-eaters, when they couldn’t get fresh cat, and not much on hygiene. “There was a case a while back, of gnomes dusting teenage girls. I guess they couldn’t get dates for the prom. But nothing else. Mostly when someone’s little girl goes missing, she does it of her own free will. My pretty unicorn or elf-prince of something.” The scorn practically dropped off his words. I really couldn’t blame him.

“Now, if it were boys gone missing, that would be unusual. Unless an elf-wench’s gone hunting, they tend to be safe.”

Elf-wench. That was even worse than “trooping fairies.” I was so never going to use that in a Lady’s hearing. In fact, I was never even going to think it.

“And nobody’s been talking trash about humans again?”

The da-esh paused, then looked over at Og. I guessed he would be more likely to hear—and maybe partake of—any such trash-talking.

Og looked sulky, his mouth drawn in a tight little frown. “Nobody dare trash-talk,” he said, and his tone was that of a ten-year-old grounded for the first time. “Not since The Wren do what she did.”

What had The Wren done? Was this tied into… No, didn’t know, didn’t want to know, didn’t want to have to take any notice, official or otherwise. If Wren had won us goodwill among the fatae—or at least put the fear of Talent into them—then I’d use it and be glad.

“But,” Og went on, and it was like the words were getting pulled with pliers from his throat, “there is a thing.”

“A thing?” I was prepared to bribe, if needed—we had a slush fund for that, not all of it in cash—but the da-esh beat me to it, placing one large hand square on the top of Og’s head and pushing down with obvious threat. “Talk, or I eat your brains for breakfast,” he said.

I was pretty sure that wasn’t an idle threat. From the way Og’s eyes rolled up into his head, he was, too.

“Whispers. Not even whispers. Loud thinking, maybe.” He squirmed a little under the weight of the hand, then shrugged, all pretense of resistance going out of him. “I hear talk in the Greening Space. The piskies talk. Humans, too many humans, pissing off fatae already there. All hours, sleeping and eating and shitting there.”

“A full campsite?” I was suspecting they didn’t have official permits, but Central Park was large, and a few people could probably disappear for a while, especially in warmer weather. A settled camp, though, would be harder to hide.

It’s tough to shrug when you’re being squished from above, but Og did his best. “Whispers. They hide, but they are not good enough to hide from piskies.”

Piskies were the Cosa Nostradamus’s official gossips—tiny, inquisitive, borderline-rude pranksters who didn’t understand the meaning of the word privacy and wouldn’t have cared if they did. They looked a bit like one of those old-style Kewpie dolls crossed with a squirrel, or maybe a mouse lemur—big eyes, grasping claws, fluffy tail, and a topknot of hair that came in colors that should not be seen in nature. Most of the Cosa Nostradamus despised them, but people I respected—namely Wren Valere and Ian Stosser—listened very carefully if a piskie spoke to them.

“A campsite of humans in Central Park,” I repeated, to make sure that I wasn’t misunderstanding.

“Children-humans,” Og corrected me. “That was why the piskies whispered. Young humans. They thought they might play with them but they threw pinecones and rocks and drove them away, instead.”

The pronoun abuse in that sentence nearly gave me a headache, but I was able to follow it. “The children drove the piskies away. They didn’t want to be found.”

That meant that there had to be at least one Talent in the group, or someone familiar enough with the fatae to know that either the piskies weren’t a hallucination—a common enough belief—or that if you were trying to keep a low profile, you did not invite piskies to hang around.

“Human-children…” In fatae-terms, that meant teens, not little kids. “And no adults?”

Og rolled his yellowing eyes up at me again. “How should I know? I only know what piskies whisper and they’re piskies.”