Dragon Justice (8 page)

I let a slow smile grow on my face. It wasn’t a nice smile,
either; I knew because I’d copied it from Stosser at his most evil-minded.

“I am.”

I raised my left hand, and the sword flew back into my hand,
just heavy enough for me to grip it, nowhere near as heavy as an actual blade of
that size might be. There was a shock of contact; I had been right, there was
something other than me animating it, although the form was made from my
current. Weird, unnerving, and not the point right now. I lowered the blade
again to her throat.

“Stop it!”

The voice was strong and female, and I tilted my head, half
expecting to see the Mysterious Leader come to rally her troops. But Steph
reacted not with respect or fear, but disdain.

“Why are you even still here?” she asked the girl who had
shouted, as though I didn’t have a cold steel blade to her neck. “You didn’t
make the cut, and you’re too old.”

The newcomer scrambled down over the rocks, wincing a little as
she slipped; she was not graceful, that was for certain. Older than the others,
although I couldn’t tell by how much—three years? Five? Tall, almost bulky, and
awkward with it, she still had a presence to her, although the overall
impression was of diffidence, not strength. “Please don’t kill her.”

She was talking to me, not them.

The force in the blade wanted to address this new challenger: I
told it to stand down, at least for a moment. The game had changed.

“Please. I can’t bear… Not anymore.”

I had no idea what this girl was talking about, but there was
no way I was going to add to the pain in her voice. The sword lowered, slowly,
and Steph fell backward, still glaring at me but not quite daring to attack
again—or run away.

“Molly,” I said. “Bring her to me, and I can forget I ever saw
you.” I would, but I had the distinct impression that the spirit who had come
along for the ride wouldn’t. I saw no need to tell them that, though.

Steph nodded once, realizing that was the best deal she was
going to get, and all the girls fled, leaving me with a current-sword in my
hands and the newcomer, who sagged down onto the grass as though arriving had
taken all the strength she had.

The hilt of the blade shimmied once in my hands, to get my
attention, and then faded back into loose current, disappearing on the breeze.
The newcomer’s gaze watched it disappear, her expression caught between fear and
wonder.

Talent. Not just current-aware Null, like those girls, but an
actual Talent. I could feel the difference, like skim milk to cream.

“You came for the Mollywog?” she asked me.

“Yeah.”

“Good. She doesn’t deserve to be out here.”

Okay, something was weird. This girl… She was maybe my age, if
the other girls said she was too old, and she’d been part of their group
but…failed? Hadn’t passed the initiation? But she was an actual Talent!

“What’s your name?”

She glared at me, then sighed, like it was all too heavy to
hold in anymore. “Ellen.”

Not Danny’s missing girl, but someone else. Somebody else’s
missing daughter.

“There was another girl, a little younger than you,
maybe…?”

“Zette. You’re looking for her, too?” Ellen shook her head.
“Forget it. You might get Mollywog back, but they’re keeping Zette. She’s part
of the Plan.”

Anything that had a capital-
P
plan,
involving current, yeah, we needed to know about that. But it could be Stosser’s
headache. Right now, I was more interested in the girl in front of me. “And
you’re not part of the Plan?”

Ellen shivered, and I realized suddenly that for all that she
was solidly built—a few inches taller than me, but twice the bulk, which
admittedly wasn’t difficult—she still managed to look too skinny. Healthy on her
would be another ten pounds, and a layer of muscle. Her hair was a crop of
curls, like mine, but black as sin, and her eyes were large and round and just
as dark, over a nose that managed to be both hawklike and cute at the same time,
matching cheekbones that could probably slice cheese. Not pretty, but fierce,
that face. The expression on it, of fear and hesitation, didn’t fit, at all.

Every single one of my instincts said that this girl had been
hurt somehow. Not physically, but emotionally. Psychologically, and by more than
her current situation.

And yet, she had leaped into the fight, rather than hiding.

The sensation I had, of another force in the Park with me,
returned. Softly this time, almost curious. Ellen’s expression twitched, like
someone had touched the tip of her nose.

As gently as I could, I pulled a strand of current from my
core, imbued it with as much of my signature as I could, consciously, and wafted
it toward her, just to see what she could do.

She saw it, or felt it, there was no doubt about that—and no
doubt, to my mind, that she didn’t have a clue what it was.

Talent. Untrained. Utterly, absolutely untrained. It unraveled
in front of me without her having to say a word: born into a Null family,
probably, had no Talent around, no experience, no nothing, and so no mentor to
guide her when she needed training. No idea that what she felt, what she did,
was totally normal, for
Cosa Nostradamus
standards
of normal.

These girls, gathered by their mysterious leader… I’d eat my
boots if they weren’t all of them sensitive Nulls, playing at magic, feeding
their leader’s fantasies with their own desires to be different, special. This
girl Ellen… She was the real thing. And they had rejected her. I would have
laughed if I didn’t know she would take it the wrong way.

Also, if it hadn’t been scary-serious. Ellen needed training,
and she needed it fast. And not just from anyone, either. Matching a teen with a
mentor was tough enough, but an adult starting from scratch? An adult without
the first clue, who had no reason, I could tell already, to trust anyone worth a
damn?

My first instinct was to take her to Stosser.

First instinct gave way to basic fact: Stosser, while, yeah,
strong enough, would be one of the world’s crappiest mentors. Too brilliant, too
sharp, already overworked and no patience whatsoever.

J? No. I loved my mentor, but he had done his time twice, and
he was in his late seventies now. I couldn’t ask him to do that, not again, not
with someone with absolutely no idea what she was. J, much as I love him, lives
entirely in the world of the
Cosa.
This girl needed
someone who understood both worlds, who lived in them, and wasn’t the sort of
get-in-your-face…

And then it hit me.

“Hold here a second,” I said, taking a chance and putting a
hand on her bare arm. Her skin was chilled, but she didn’t flinch away from me.
Good. I tried to exude a little of Stosser’s sense of
everything-is-under-control, even as I was reaching out to find my pack.

*nicky*

*wazzup?*

*need you here*

I didn’t give him any more information, just a picture of where
we were and a sense that he should arrive out of sight, not showboat. All I
needed was someone Translocating in three inches from Ellen’s nose. She might
hurt him. Or pass out.

“This…crew,” I said to her, as gently as I could. “You didn’t
fit in.” It wasn’t a question. “Why didn’t you go home?”

“Home?” The word, in her mouth, broke my heart. “My mother
said…” Ellen shrugged, a helpless, broken-winged gesture. “She said to go, and
be damned. They already thought I was crazy, all the…” She stopped and looked at
me, like I was about to pass judgment, too.

“All the things you saw? The things you felt? The crackle under
your skin sometimes and the way your blood tingled during a thunderstorm?” If
she’d been giving off current the way we tend to when we’re pre-mentorship, then
her family must have been freaked out of their minds and not known why. Wasn’t
the Council supposed to be alert to this kind of shit? Hadn’t there been a
single lonejack within a mile, when all this was happening?

“The things I saw…” She was whispering now, talking to herself,
not me. “They said I was crazy. They were going to put me away, somewhere I
couldn’t hurt myself or anyone else. But those things were real. I know that
now. They’re everywhere, here in the Park…”

Fatae.

“Yes.” I put as much reassurance as I could into my voice.
“They’re…” Saying they were harmless was a lie, but… “They’re just like us. Some
good, some bad, mostly they’ll just leave you alone if you don’t bother
them.”

“Fairies.”

“Some. We call them fatae, as a whole. It’s from the Latin. It
means, well, fairies.” I cracked a grin, and she almost reluctantly mirrored it.
Fatae
actually refers to the Fates, or a greater
supernatural whole, but no need to freak her out with that particular bit.

“You’re a Talent,” I said. “Like me.”

“Like…” And one of her square-tipped fingers waved almost
helplessly, trying to describe something she wasn’t supposed to talk about.

“Like your leader?” I guessed. “I don’t know. Maybe. But not
like those other girls. They don’t have it. You do.”

That made her eyes go even wider. “They said…”

“They were wrong.”

Ellen didn’t look convinced. I guess, in her place, I would be
skeptical, too. I didn’t know what she’d been through, although I could make a
guess, but having me tell her—skinny, scrawny, close-to-her-own-age
Bonnie—wasn’t going to do the trick. And she hadn’t really seen what I’d done
with the others, only their reactions. Even the sword had faded away
quietly.

“Hey, Bonnie, what’s the emergency?”

Nicky walked out from the tree line like he’d just strolled in
from Fifth Avenue and gave Ellen an almost involuntary onceover. Not
offensively, just “okay, new girl, must look” sort of thing. Ellen blushed but
didn’t startle.

That was why I’d called Nicky, instead of one of the others.
Sharon was too sharp, too quick to judge. Nifty was just too damn intimidating,
on first sight. Pietr might have done the job, but he was too good-looking, in
his quiet way. Lou… We called her
“mami,”
but I had
no idea how she’d react to this. And Stosser was Right Out, despite the thought
of it giving me a wicked amusement. Nicky slipped in under your guard, and you
could go your entire life never knowing how dangerous he could be.

“I need you to do me a favor,” I said and gave him a very brief
rundown of my assignment, pinging him underneath with the need to keep it all
very low-key. “So the girls have promised to bring her back here. I need you to
wait and take possession.”

“Of a baby?” Nick’s obvious distress was pretty funny,
actually.

“She’s seven,” Ellen said. “Not a baby.”

“And she’ll go with me? I’m a stranger.”

“You tell her you’re taking her home to her parents,” I said.
“That should do it.” I couldn’t imagine being seven and stuck among strangers
was all that much fun, despite what a fourteen-year-old might enjoy.

“And where are you going?”

“I need Ellen to meet someone,” I said.

Nicky still didn’t look happy, but he settled down on a rock
and pulled a book out, prepared to wait for as long as it took.

“If they don’t show up,” I said, hazarding a look at the sky to
gauge time, “in an hour, then let me know.” I had a feeling they’d show up,
though. I’d looked into Steph’s eyes: she didn’t want me coming after her. The
kid didn’t mean enough to her to deal with that. So long as they avoided their
leader, still the unknown in all this…

“And take the kid to Stosser?”

“Right.”

“On the bus or…?”

“Take a cab. It’s billable time.” I had heard of
people—Nulls—being Translocated without damage, but I’d never met anyone who did
it, and the thought of what could happen… Oh, hell, no. Current acted like
electricity in a lot of ways, and one of those is what it could do to untrained,
ungrounded Null flesh.

As I led Ellen out of the Park, putting up my hand to hail one
of the cabs that cruised down Fifth Avenue, I remembered how we had pinched
every penny the first year. The subway was still transport of choice, but cabs
weren’t verboten any longer.

What I was about to do wasn’t on company billing-time,
technically, but I didn’t care. There was no way I was taking this girl—and
never mind that she was maybe a year younger than me, she was a kid—on a
convoluted bus trip across town, when a cab would cost twice as much but take
half the time.

“Where are we going?”

It took her almost three blocks into the trip to ask.

“There’s a lot that you need to learn,” I said, watching the
meter tick off each increase. “Mostly, usually, we learn it when we’re
teenagers, when we’re first starting to…see and feel all that. Someone should
have trained you but they didn’t, and now we’re going to fix that.”

A mentor was more than a teacher. They were a guide to the ins
and outs of current, and the
Cosa Nostradamus
as a
whole, and generally just how to survive without losing your shit. It was
one-on-one, no set guidelines or textbooks. You learned what your mentor thought
that you should learn, how she had learned it, and all the side notes that came
with; lines of mentorship were damned important to Talent interactions and
politics, even if some folk insisted they weren’t.

Ellen was going to need not only good training, but someone who
understood how Nulls thought. More, she was going to need a mentor who, when
named, elicited respect, to get Ellen through the inevitable missteps she was
going to make.

All that had gone through my head when I first realized how
helpless Ellen was, and led us to this place.

I just hoped that PB wasn’t there. That might be too much,
right away.

* * *

“Bonnie.” Wren didn’t look unhappy to see me twice in a
day, which was nice, although her gaze did drop down to my hands first, looking
for her lasagna. Nice to know she loved me for a reason.