Miles to Go

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.