Dragon Justice (5 page)

*?*

*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.”

Valid point. The fact that they liked to gossip did not mean
that they got the facts straight, or wouldn’t embellish or pare down to make the
story more interesting.

“Enough?” the da-esh asked, and I nodded. He lifted his hand,
and Og popped up like a cork, glaring at me like it was all my fault his rounded
scalp had gotten polished.

My mentor had spent his entire adult life walking various halls
of power, putting a word in one ear, a hand on another shoulder, coaxing and
pulling events and people into patterns he approved and could use. I was
starting to see—on a far more crude and after-the-fact fashion—why it was so
appealing.

“My thanks,” I said, and my hand moved off the table, leaving a
suitable donation to the da-esh’s bar tab. Before Og could grab at it, I had
turned and left.

Out on the street, I got out of the pedestrian flow, leaned my
back against a building, and called the team.

*hey* A tight ping, but broad enough to reach the original
Five—Pietr, Sharon, Nifty, Nick, and myself. Nobody else needed in on this—they
hadn’t time yet to build up useful contacts.

Sharon and Nifty came back right away, clear question marks
forming in my awareness, with Nick’s query half a second later. Nothing from
Pietr. He must be busy.

*anyone hear any chatter along the rat-line the past week or
so?* The actual ping was less actual words than a query and a feel for what I
wanted. Group-pings were hard enough to maintain without wasting the extra
energy trying to shape words, too.

*piskies?* Nifty was dubious.

*nothing here* Sharon came back, and Nick echoed that.

*what’s up?* That came from all three of them, in varying
degrees.

*job for Stosser. tell ya later*

Their awareness faded from mine, and I was alone in my head.
Pings weren’t really communication, the way you would talk to someone, and it
wasn’t telepathy, either: there was, so far as anyone could tell, no such thing
as real telepathy, although the incredibly tight, almost verbal pings Venec and
I could manage might come close. That said, pings were damned convenient, and I
could not understand my mentor’s reluctance to use them more—it was very
definitely a generational divide. I had long suspected that J would probably
still be using a wand if he thought it wouldn’t get him laughed out of the
bar.

I started walking again, not really having a direction, but I
thought better when I could pace. So. Piskies. I had been casting a wide net,
hoping to pull in something that would give me a specific direction. Now that I
had it…I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Investigate immediately? Gather more
information and see if there was backup for what was—admittedly—a vague mention
by an unreliable source? Go back to the office and report on my morning’s work,
and ask Stosser for further instructions?

That third choice wasn’t even an option. Ian was a brilliant
people-shmoozer and politician, and the driving force behind PSI, absolutely. As
an investigator, though? Not so much. In point of fact, he sucked at tight-focus
detail work. I could ask Venec, but he’d sounded occupied with his own shit,
whatever it was, and anyway, even if he was here he’d just give me one of those
Looks. And he’d be right to do so. I was dithering, and that was so unlike me I
had to stop in the middle of the sidewalk—earning dirty looks from the people
who had to swerve around me—and wonder what the hell was going on.

“Y’know, I really don’t like this job.”

I took a step, frowning. The words had come out of me, driven
by kenning-chill I could still feel shivering in my bones. Maybe it was time to
stop and explore that a bit. Talk it out, Torres. Ignore the nice people
carefully not-staring at me, and talk it out. Pretend you’ve got an ear-thingy
on and there’s someone on the other end of the line…

Venec. His eyes half-closed, leaning against a wall like his
shoulder bones grew out of it, listening to everything I said and everything I
wasn’t saying.

“This job… We have so many other things going on, everyone’s
working flat-out, and I’m doing pro bono work for the Fey, trying to clear up
their problem so Stosser can maybe yank their leash later…”

So I felt put-upon. That wasn’t enough to explain the shivery
unhappy-feeling in my bones. A little girl, seven years old, was missing. And
maybe others, too, if Danny’s girls were related somehow. Even if they had just
run away to join a bunch of would-be park-dwellers, my job was to find out and
bring at least one of them safely home.