“Where is he? Where is the moron?”
“Baby, I don’t know.”
I stopped, turned, and looked back at her. Claire’s baby blue eyes were rimmed with red, and her long red hair–Pippi Longstocking hair, I called it–was done up in a single messy plait, not her usual Medusa’s crown of cornrows.
I’m not what you’d call a dispassionate person. In fact, J says I throw my heart over the hedgerow, whatever the hell a hedgerow is, more often than any steeplechaser he’s ever met. Whatever a steeplechaser is. But when something goes hinky in my world, I don’t freak. Just the opposite.
Remember what I said earlier about magic? It’s not something everyone gets. Just some of us: Talents. Humans, who have the little extra kick of whatsis, lets us do… Stuff. It’s called current these days, not magic, and according to the lectures J. sat me through, it’s directly related to but not exactly like moral electricity. You feel it, inside you, in your gut, like a personal power generator.
J says, and so does every other Talent I’ve talked to about it, which isn’t admittedly, many, that they feel current like this whirling, swirling mess of energy inside them, and the more agitated they get, the harder it is to control.
Not me. I get upset, I get agitated, or I get worried, and my current goes cold and calm. Instead of panic, I get planning.
“All right. When did you last see him?”
“Tuesday.”
It was Friday, now.
“The fourteenth.”
The Tuesday before last. The idiot had been missing for over a week. And Claire hadn’t been worried?”
Scratch that. Obviously, she had been.
“He had been fine up until then. Happy, even. He had been whistling. You know how he does that.”
God, did I. Zaki the wonder whistler. Off-key and under his breath. Maybe someone with good hearing and perfect pitch had killed him.
“No worries, then?”
She shrugged, a flailing of arms that looked more Italian than Irish. “When did your father ever worry about anything?”
When he did, it was too late, anyway.
“Tell me everything you know.” I tried to keep the request polite. She didn’t seem to mind the edge in my words, thankfully.
“You’ll find him?”
She didn’t even ask how I knew that he was gone. Either she had mailed the letter I got, which implied that she knew what was in it, or she believed more of my dad’s stories about being able to use magic than she’d ever let on.
I steered her toward the sofa, and pushed her on the shoulder until she sat down on the nubby brown upholstery. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll see what I can do.”
oOo
Three hours and a plate of crappy bakery cookies later, I escaped with a pretty good idea that Claire didn’t know shit. Feeling restless and annoyed, and trying to put my brain onto what little I had been able to learn, I reached inside and started braiding lines of current: blue for thought, red for inspiration, green for energy. Not that the colors actually meant anything, but it helped me focus. And focus was what it was all about, in the end.
The subway took me out of Brooklyn where Claire lived, and dumped me into midtown Manhattan, about ten blocks from where we were staying.
I could have gone back to the hotel, but the weather was nice, and I had missed being in the city, so I decided to take a walk, instead.
I loved going to school in Massachusetts, loved the slower pace and the whole academic immersion thing, but for a Talent, a big city was like a candy store–all that electricity zipping around, making an easy road for current to travel alongside. Current came naturally–lightning storms and ley lines–and it came artificially–neon signs and electrical wires. It didn’t care, and artificial forms were easy to piggy-back on, so hey presto, a ready-made pool of current every time you turned on a power switch.
There was a downside to it, though.
“Hey, what the hell?”
I had been so busy braiding current I hadn’t realized how thick the string had gotten. It crackled and sizzled under my mental touch, and one of those crackles jumped outside of me, touching the overhead marquees and shorting them out, one after another after another, all the way down 46th Street.
Ooops.
That was the payoff, for magic. Not that it didn’t like technology, but that it loved it. So much that it always wanted to go where it was, and make like best buddies with it. Hang with it.
But like two cats in a single household, electricity wanted not so much to do with current. It could tag along so long as it didn’t interfere, but the moment electricity got annoyed–bam. Sparks and ugliness, and you had to go out and buy a new computer. Or cell phone. Or anything else that got caught in the crossfire.
Talents didn’t make great electricians, generally, although we knew theory inside and out.
Bonnie?
The familiar mental ping was like mashed potatoes: comfort food.
On my way back to the hotel. J. had been good, staying out of my space, but I knew that he was worried, too.
oOo
“He was working,” I told him twenty minutes later. We were sitting in the lounge of the hotel, which was pretty decent without being overpriced, and they didn’t ask for ID when I ordered a vodka martini. I had ID of course, but it was always easier to just project “legal drinking age” at them and not worry about an ex-cop behind the bar. J had settled in with a beer. He might have been Council, which was sort of the equivalent of being the country-club set of the Cosa Nostradamus, but he never did seem like it.
“Claire said that it was a job with a construction guy, over on Staten Island. He was doing some detail work.”
That was one thing Zaki was good at, no question Give him a chunk of wood and his tools, and he’d hand over a banister or a mantel or some other bit of house that you could point to decades later and say “yeah, we had this handmade, and it was worth every penny.”
He made a decent living at it, too, if he could keep his mind on the job. Only he kept insisting he knew how to play poker, too. As a gambler? Zaki made a damned good carpenter.
“The job was set to go on for another couple of weeks. Sometimes he’d stay out there, stay in a hotel room overnight rather than lug back to Brooklyn. She had a couple of trips—”Claire was a flight attendant for Air Cheapo. “—so she didn’t think anything of it when he wasn’t home when she got back. But then she went to pay the rent—” The apartment was hers, not his, which was the smartest thing both of them had ever done. “–and the money he was supposed to have left for her was gone. She got suspicious, because she does know Zaki, and went to look–and her stash was gone, too.”
“How much?”
“Twenty thousand. And no, I don’t know why she kept that much in the apartment. I guess dragons aren’t the only ones who like to be able to fondle their hoards. Anyway, that’s when she went looking for him. Only the guy who hired him said that he hadn’t been there all week, had asked for time off to, and I quote, ‘deal with some family shit.’”
I was the only family he had, far as anyone knew. Zaki would be the type to rush off and embrace a new alleged offspring, but he’d be busting to tell someone–me—about it first.
I actually would have liked a kid brother or sister. Claire had never seemed interested in producing, though, and they’d been together for almost ten years, so…
“Bonita, you are not focusing.”
J’s reprimand got me back on track.
I pulled the letter out of my backpack. It was a little rumpled from being shoved into my psych textbook, but it wasn’t like I’d ever gotten points for neatness. “’I’m going to take care of this,’” I read, “’and then I swear, never again. And I won’t ever trust a dragon to hold my marker again, even if it swears up and down I can have a full decade to repay.’” I folded the letter and stared at J, thinking hard.
“You still know people who know people?” J had worked for the state befor
e he retired early at fifty-eight, about the same time he took me on. And yes, the two events were probably connected.
“I might. What do you want me to do?”
“Get them to pull his records. Credit reports, stuff like that. Maybe we jumped to the wrong conclusions for all the right reasons. See if he took out any loans, or had been bouncing checks, stuff like that.”
“Not a problem.” J had friends who had friends all the way down, I sometimes suspected. He was the kind of guy who collected people. And it was something he could do sitting in a bar, sipping his beer, which was where I wanted him. He might still be rough and tough mentally, but he was pushing seventy even if he didn’t want to admit it, and I worried like any dutiful mentee.
“And in the meantime, you will be doing what?” he asked, waving the waitress over for a refill.
“His tools and stuff are still on the job site. I think I need to go sniff at them.”
Ask anyone in the Tristate area what that smell is, and more than half the time you’ll get back the wiseass response of “Staten Island.” Unless the speaker is from Manhattan, in which case it’s a toss-up between Staten Island and New Jersey. But the truth is that the little borough gets very little respect. And with good reason; it’s the kind of place you grow up in and get the hell out of, as soon as possible. Why? Because it’s boring.
The ferry over was kind of fun, though. I liked the feel of the wind on my face, and the fact that it was off-hour meant there weren’t many people crowding the bright orange deck–the old ladies and older men with their shopping bags and snot-nosed grandchildren were inside, glomming the molded plastic seats.
The job site was a reasonably ordinary-looking house. I don’t know much about architecture–I grew up in a series of apartments, until I got to college and dorm housing–but it seemed pretty nice without standing out. In other words, classic suburbia.
Inside, though, I could see why they’d hired Zaki. Wood everywhere. And not just wood, but WOOD. The kind that has texture, and almost glows from within. Wood like current, actually, the more I looked at it.
Zaki must have loved this job. He wouldn’t have just walked out on it.
“Can I help you?”
Guy. Big guy. Foreman, my brain whispered to me.
“Hi. I’m Bonnie Torres. Zaki’s daughter? I called, about his kit?”
Foreman guy melted. He must be a dad, too. You can always tell. “Right, right. Damndest thing. I hope everything’s okay?”
“Me too,” I said.
The guy showed me where Zaki stashed his stuff, and looked like he was going to hover. I plucked a thread of current like a harp string and listened to it resonate. Go. Deal with something important. This isn’t important. I’m trustworthy.
“Okay, I gotta deal with some stuff–you’ll be okay?”
“Oh yeah, sure.” I gave him my very best virtuous daughter look. “I’m good. Don’t let me distract you.” Really. Don’t let me distract you.
He left, and I turned my attention to the tools Zaki had left behind. A metal locker, which my occasionally not-so-useless dad had lined with a cushion of foam padding. Even when you weren’t using current, you tended to leak, and using tools with metal–good conductors–meant you ran the risk of transferring it. Metal to metal, with current? Could be bad.
That was the stuff you learned form your mentor. My dad never told me anything about his mentor, so I guess I’d figured he didn’t know much.
Live and learn. Revise impressions. If Zaki was still with us I was going to have to apologize. After I kicked his ass for putting us through hell.
I looked, first. Two hammers, each a different size. A plastic case that, when opened, revealed a series of chisels, each of a different size. One of them had a fleck of something on it that looked like rust.
Zaki would never let rust get on his tools.
A chamois cloth wrapped around a larger chisel that had some kind of carving in the wooden handle.
One pair of work gloves, dirty, and another pair, clean. A small bottle of hand lotion–unscented, half-empty.
My brain felt like it was going at half-speed, taking in the details, but at the same time really really revved up, like everything was flooding in all at once, giving me all these impressions and ideas, most of which didn’t seem to make any sense.
Slow down. Let them come. Don’t push.
J?
The voice-impression went away when I pinged at it. It hadn’t felt like J, but who else would be hovering around my brain?
Dad?
No response.
Right, then. I looked at the tools, and didn’t touch anything, letting my impressions filter in without distraction.
“Tell me something, guys,” I said, then lifted my hand and placed it inside the locker, palm down, about six inches over the tools.
“Tell me something.”
Love
That was first. The absolute love that only comes from joy, and the joy that builds out of love.
If I hadn’t already known that Zaki totally followed his bliss, his tools would have told me. In that instant, I think I probably forgave him almost every horrible un-dadlike thin he’d ever done to me. Not that he deserved forgiving, but because I understood that he couldn’t help it. He loved me, but he was always going to be dragged in another direction, too.
I wondered if Claire knew that, too. She probably did.
Never love an artist.
I moved my hand slightly, so that it was over the chisels. The current-him intensified
Exasperation.
Huh. That was different. I cast my memory back over the site, what little I had seen of it. The banister had looked like it was almost done–they had installed it and were doing some kind of treatment on it; it had smelled of varnish or something. The mantel over the fireplace had looked done, too. Was it prefab? Probably not, in that house. But that didn’t seem right.
Think, Bonnie, think. What else? There had been wooden doors leading into the room with the fireplace, hadn’t there? Sliding doors, with some kind of pattern carved into them. I let my finger dip down just enough to touch the plastic case, and thought about the quick glimpse of the doors I had gotten
Zaki’s current-memory reacted to my memory, an irritable growl rising from the tools.
It wasn’t anything that would stand up to even the most sympathetic Talent’s questioning, but I was convinced. Zaki had been working on those doors when he disappeared, and there had been something about them that had bothered him.
“Where are you, Dad?”
I dipped my finger again, and touched the chisel with the rust stain on it.
Wings. Teeth. Thick, leathery skin and heat and brimstone. Red, red eye in the darkness, and a snarl that would and did scare the piss out of a cougar, and make a bear back up and apologize.
I clenched my finger and pulled my hand out of the locker, sweating slightly.
Dragon blood. There was dragon blood on my dad’s work chisel.
I pulled on the clean gloves and bundled everything in the foam padding, and shoved it into my backpack. It made it heavier than hell, but I didn’t want to leave anything behind.
Look at the door
That voice again, tapping at my brain. I grabbed at it, trying to get a taste of who was trying to instruct me, but it danced away and disappeared.
Good advice, though.
The site was busy, but everyone had seen me with the foreman, so they assumed I had the right to be there, so long as I didn’t bother anyone. Maybe he had told them I was Zaki’s daughter, but if so they declined to stop work long enough to say hi or ask after my old man. That worked for me.
The door was absolutely Zaki’s work, and equally as obvious unfinished. The pattern at first looked like some kind of leaves falling, but when you looked at it carefully, you saw there was a face in the leaves. At first I thought Zaki had gone all Celtic and done the Green Man, but no, it was a woman’s face, delicate and fey.
I checked: no pointed ears, no antenna, and no wings. Not any of the fatae species I knew, anyway. Zaki was just feckless enough to have used one of the nonhuman breeds as a model, thinking that nobody would ever notice.
Was the owner of the house a Talent? The Cosa Nostradamus wasn’t all poor, far from it, and they would know about Zaki’s skills…
But no. From what I’d seen of the wiring going into the walls, this place was going to be high-tech. Not a Cosa household, then.
Zaki! I didn’t expect a different response than I’d gotten before, but I was just frustrated enough to try. Zaki you stupid son of a bitch, where are you?
No answer.
oOo
“You sure about this?”
“Hell no.”
I was sitting in the passenger seat of a tough little SUV, staring at a thirty-foot-high wall of stone. Becky, my roommate, could probably have told me exactly what the stone was, and how old it was, and what kind of critters roamed the earth when it got folded and shoved up from the crust, but all I was thinking about was what waited above it.
“Here.” Steve was in his forties, maybe. A good guy, if a little skeevy, and one of the people whom J knew. He had met me at the Albany airport and loaded me into the SUV, checked my gear, and given me the bag he was shoving into my arms.
“You know what to do?”
“Yeah.” No.
“Just be polite. But not unctuous. Act like you would with a grandfather you really liked.”
“That was helpful. Not.
“Right. Let me get this done.”
I got out of the car, the bag slung over my shoulder. I was wearing jeans and work boots, a heavy sweatshirt and a hoodie over that. It might be Spring, but it was damned cold up here in the Adirondacks, colder even than it had been in Boston. Trust Zaki to find a cave dragon in the northern boonies.
Laura Anne Gilman - Tales of the Cosa Nostradamus Page 7