Laura Anne Gilman - Tales of the Cosa Nostradamus

by Laura Anne Gilman

  I touched it with current, as lightly as I could. Something warned me that a gentle touch would reveal more than demanding ever would.

  “The killer’s actions, I beg you wood, reveal.”

  J’s influence: treat current the way you would a horse; control it through its natural instincts. Current, like electricity, illuminated.

  A dent in the floor, sanded down and covered up. The point of a chisel stained with blood? No. The harder end, sticking out of a body as it landed, falling backward…

  Oh, Zaki, you idiot was all I could find inside myself, following the arc of the body. For a woman? For another man’s woman when you had Claire at home?

  And then I saw it, the shadow figure of the killer, indistinct even in his own mind–shading himself. That meant the killer was a Talent, if of even less skill than Zaki. Had that been a factor? The man–the foreman, I knew now–jealous not only of the carpenter’s attraction to his wife, but of his skill to display it, driven to murder?

  The chisel was removed, wiped down, and…

  The blood alone flared bright in the pictorial, a shine of wet rubies in the shadows as the foreman dipped the chisel into a cloth still damp with the blood, laying the trace for me to find, a week later.

  The picture faded, rubies and shadows into full, rainy dark. I might be able to regain it if I used more current, but with two men on the crew Talented, others might be as well. I dared not linger.

  oOo

  So that’s it, I guess.” A long ferry ride, and I couldn’t face the bus ride back to Boston that night. I was tired, and cold, and I had a class in the morning I hadn’t done any of the reading for. I supposed the death of one’s father was reason enough to skip a chapter, but it didn’t feel right to me, somehow.

  So I ended up at Claire’s apartment, wrapped in a gold-and-brown afghan she had knitted, telling her–and J, who had Translocated down for the night when I said I was too tired to come home–what I knew.

  “He knew Zaki, had hired him. So he knew about the gambling, figured we’d believe a story about debts, and assume he’d screw yup the repayment enough to get himself killed. Masqueraded as Zaki and went and offered his–Zaki’s–marker to the dragon, stole the blood from a scratch, planted it…”

  “And the letter,” Claire asked.

  “When was the last time you saw Zaki’s handwriting, Claire?”

  She had to think about that for a while, which was answer enough.

  “Yeah,” I figured as much. “Me? I got to see a signature on a check every now and then. Genghis Khan could have forged that letter, and I’d have no way to know.”

  Zaki hadn’t been a deadbeat dad, financially. Not even emotionally. He just hadn’t been the dad I needed. To be fair, I hadn’t exactly been the kid he was looking for, either, me and my Talent and my brains and my desire to actually get out there and do something.

  “What now?”

  J asked a reasonable question. I had no idea. I could establish cause, means, and motive, but who would listen? Who would care?

  “A good daughter would take revenge,” I said. Part of me liked that idea. A could prove I loved him that way, right?

  “Zaki would be horrified by the thought,” J said.

  “Let it go, honey.”

  I looked at Claire. “How can you say that? You loved him, and he was dicking around on you.”

  Claire had a wistful smile on her face, like she’d said her good-byes already. “He came home to me. He always came home to me. His dick wandered, but his heart never did. Zaki was a gentle man, baby. Hopeless, but gentle. The last thing he would ever want would be for you to have blood on your hands. Even for him. Especially for him.”

  She’d known my father. She had known him right.

  oOo

  J forced the issue and Translocated me back to college. It’s a decent way to travel, if you’ve got the skills and the current. Sure as hell beat the Chinatown bus. So I got to curl up in my own bed that night, listening to my roommate’s barely-there snore, and the ticking of the alarm clock that was usually a surefire soporific. I should have been fast asleep, or so wracked with loss that I couldn’t close my eyes. Instead, all I felt was too tired to sleep.

  It’s normal, the voice said After a case.

  “What case?” Across the room, Nancy stirred, but didn’t wake.

  An investigation. You did well.

  “Who the hell are you?” A reasonable question, I thought. Talent, obviously. Strong–very damn strong, to ping me like this. I should have been nervous, if not outright scared. I wasn’t.

  Nobody you need to know yet. Finish your degree. Stay out of trouble. We’ll talk soon.

  And then the voice was gone.

  I stared at the ceiling, mulling over the words. Male. Older. The voice of someone who knew how to mentor.

  But I already had a mentor.

  But from the sound of it, maybe I had–would have–a boss, too.

  Investigation. A lifetime of finding answers, figuring out the why of things. Bringing people to justice. Yeah.

  I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

  This story will appear in THOSE WHO FIGHT MONSTERS, edited by Justin Gustainis (Hades Publications, 2011). It is the first story featuring perpetual supporting character Danny Hendrickson, the human/faun ex-cop first introduced to readers in the Retrievers and PSI novels. Here, when a young girl goes missing, we get a closer look at the uneasy line Danny walks, between cop and PI, human and fatae… and why it all makes him dangerously good at his game.

  Dusted

  “Sylvan Investigations. Daniel Hendrickson speaking.”

  People tend to be surprised when they hear the name of my agency. I guess it’s not what they expect from a big city PI. They don’t expect the investigator to pick up the phone, either. In all the movies the PI has a cute secretary/gal Friday answering his phones and trying to block the bad guys from rushing into his office.

  I handle the cute myself, and I answer my own damn phone. Overhead’s bad enough without having to pay someone else’s salary, too, and I prefer to work alone.

  The caller didn’t care about my dimple or my boyish grin. He wanted to sell me a subscription to the Post.

  “Not if you paid me,” I told him, and hung up. Some day they’d invent call discarding. Like call forwarding, only it would hang up preemptively on telemarketers.

  I really needed a job. Not for the money —my pension from the NYPD took care of the basics, and I lived a pretty simple life. But I was bored. Bored was bad. Bored was boring.

  “Mr. Hendrickson?”

  I looked up to see a man standing in my doorway. Fifty-ish, solidly build, with graying brown hair and worried eyes..

  “I was told you…you find missing people?”

  I pushed back my chair and considered him. “That I do.”

  Parent, I pegged him. Runway. Boy? Maybe. Maybe girl. And where’s…ah.

  Behind him, the mother: petite without being tiny, with brown curls and doe eyes that were red-rimmed, now. Daughter. Definitely daughter.

  “Come in, please.” I stood up and gestured to them, indicating the chairs by my desk. They came in, looking around. I let them take time to size up the place. Whatever brought them here, it wasn’t easy, and they needed to be reassured. It also gave me the chance to size them up.

  I had the basic two-room suite set-up, but I kept all the action up front. The furniture was basic brown wood, the chairs comfortable but not elegant, and the sofa was leather, but scruffed just enough that people felt comfortable sitting on it. The wall behind my desk was covered with photos and citations from my PD career and a few since then, for show. The letters from clients went on the wall to my right, so I could see them, on bad days. I’m not much for modesty–if you’re selling your skills, put ‘em front and center.

  His name was Jack, and she was Ellen, and their absent daughter, age fourteen, was Susan. All-American family: mom and pop and loving daughter, like a picture book, ex
cept someone had ripped Miss Susan out of the picture.

  Or she had cut herself out, neatly and quietly, leaving behind two very worried, self-blaming parents.

  I actually preferred it when they blamed themselves. It was easier to get information out of them.

  The first thing I knew was that they were Null. Talent–the humans who can use magic–always enter my office like they’re about to apologize. At least until they see that I don’t have any electronics in sight for them to fry, either accidentally or on purpose. Talent feed off current, the hip term for magic, and current, like its name, runs cheek and jowl with electricity. Imagine the fun when they tangle. Yeah. There’s a reason I keep the computer in the back room.

  No, this couple were Null, and they didn’t know about the Cosa Nostradamus, either. You can always tell if they do. For one thing, they notice things about me.

  Like the fact that I‘m not entirely human.

  oOo

  A missing kid could go anywhere. It all depended on who she was, and what she wanted. I started with her last sighting: the lobby of her high school, up on East 74th. She’d been there on Tuesday afternoon, hanging with her homegirls, or whatever the slang was around the 14-year-old set these days, and then, an hour later…she wasn’t. The police had already questioned her friends and boyfriend, and I had–through my ex-partner–gotten copies of those reports. They were all unsurprisingly unhelpful. Normal day, normal traumas, normal schedule. The kids broke to go their separate ways, and nobody knew anything until Susan’s parents started calling and texting her peer group that night, looking for their wayward daughter.

  Talking to the friends didn’t get me much further, either. They seemed like good kids, all worried about Miss Susan. Nothing they said sounded suspicious or questionable, and none of them were suspects. Just…normal kids, as much as that sort of thing was possible.

  So Miss Susan became an official Missing Person. My former compadres in the NYPD did their usual sweep of the obvious places; the bus station creepers and ladies’ room Lotharios who like to sweet-talk young girls into unsavory arrangements. No luck. They were still looking, but if you knew how many kids go missing every year, you’d know why they weren’t busting their humps over a girl who might or might not have gone under her own power.

  But now I was on the job. The fact that I’d been a cop wasn’t in my favor among the dirtirati, but the fact that I was part of the Cosa Nostradamus won some of those points back. One outcast recognized another. If there had been gossip around about Miss Susan, I would have gotten wind of it.

  No such luck. Human or fatae, nobody was talking. To all intents and purposes. Susan had walked out of her high school, and disappeared.

  To a human, that might mean anything. To me, it suggested something entirely different.

  I walked out into the street, blinking a little at the sunlight, since the baseball cap I’d jammed over my curls didn’t do quite enough to shield my eyes. My father’s species wasn’t much for sunlight, except maybe to nap in while recovering from their hangovers, and I’m willing to admit I’d inherited significant night-owl tendencies. That, and the pair of thumb-sized horns that my thick curls didn’t quite cover, were about all I’d gotten from him, thankfully.

  All right, that and a way with the ladies. The fact that my father had been a charmer was supported by the fact that my human mother, on discovering that her weekend of passion with a faun during Fleet Week had resulted in a pregnancy, decided to keep the result of said pregnancy: me.

  I wondered sometimes if she’d made the right decision.

  “Hey.”

  The piercing whisper was all too familiar. I looked up, squinting and cursing again at the sunlight, to see a small creature perched in the overhang of the building to my left, like some kind of furry gargoyle. A piskie. I stepped back, leaning against the wall as though contemplating the midday traffic passing by on Broadway.

  “Hey Boo. You got something I should listen to?”

  “Your skidoodle.”

  “I’m listening.” Boo had brought me scoops before. If there was something useful, I’d reward the little pisher, and he knew it. If it was useless I’d kick his ass to Pretoria for wasting my time. He knew that, too.

  “She got dusted,” Boo told me.

  I dragged the toe of my boot against the cement. “Aw, fuck.”

  I’d been afraid of that. Dusted, from a fatae, doesn’t mean what it does in human slang. It’s worse. It’s what happens when a Null teenage –usually a girl, but not always–discovers that the fatae are real. They want nothing more than to traipse off with their newfound discovery, to go play with the fairies. Unfortunately, most of my fatae cousins are just as tricky and unreliable, if pretty, as human fairy takes suggest, and the playing…rarely ends well.

  If my Miss Susan had taken up with Manhattan’s answer to Trooping Fairies, I might as well hand her parents back their check and call it a night. The fatae rarely give back what they take, especially not if they thought someone else wanted it.

  “Who with?” I asked my informant, who shrugged his furry shoulders, and scampered off.

  Great. Well, that was why there was an “I” in “Investigator–I was the one who actually had to work.

  oOo

  The thing about the Cosa Nostradamus is that it’s pretty polarized. You have the human Talent on one side, and the non-human fatae on the other, and they don’t often mingle. Not socially, anyway. Lucky for me, horns and hooves made me fatae enough to be able to ask the questions that would get a human hurt. That didn’t mean I could go in like an Appalachian cave dragon on a bender, though. You had to know the players. That was what had made me useful on the force, and was a lot of what made me successful now: I could work both sides of that street. And I knew that there was one fatae breed that not only gossiped like a knitting circle, but was amenable to some gentle bribery.

  “For me?”

  The salamander looked longingly at the glowstick, but didn’t take it out of my hand. We were on the West side of the Park, just below the Rambles, at dawn. I’d hauled my ass out here to make sure I caught one of the firebrands before they were really up and moving. Sure enough, one of them had been having breakfast along the stone wall, catching the early morning rays and hotfooting the occasional jogger for laughs.

  “A gift for you,” I agreed, placing it on the top of the stone wall.

  The salamander considered it without touching it, then looked up at me, its lidless eyes surprisingly expressive. It wanted it, oh so very badly, but it wasn’t sure why I was just handing it over. It assumed I wanted something.

  It was right.

  “I’m looking for someone who has gone missing. A young girl. Her parents miss her.”

  It picked up the glowstick in its front leg, the tiny claws snapping it so that the chemicals started to glow. “Pretty,” it said. They could burn without scorching, but the concept of a cool light fascinated them. I guess you always want what you can’t have–or do.

  It cocked its slender head at me, the foot-long body still stretched out along the wall, managing to be both relaxed, and ready to scamper at the slightest threat. “How young the girl?”

  “Fifteen. Rumor says she’s been dusted.”

  “Blond or redhead?”

  “Blondish.”

  That’s where the ‘smart one’ myth comes from, by the way. Brunettes? Less likely to get dusted. Other trouble, yeah, but not by following the pretty little man into the greenways. Don’t ask me why, it just is.

  “How long?”

  “Five days.” Five. Four days too long for a girl to be dusted. Once it takes, it’s tough to ever get out of your system. Seven days, seven years–seven is the magical number. I had a very real deadline.

  The salamander nodded. “Maybe. Maybe. We hear talk. You need to go low down to talk to someone. Down into the metal caves.”

  Gnomes. Wonderful. This case just kept getting better and better.

  Fortunately,
I knew where to go for help.

  oOo

  The door was opened by one of the least attractive women I’ve ever met.

  “Heya doll,” I said, swooping in to steal a kiss. She let me, rolling her eyes and taking my hat.

  “What trouble are you bringing this time, Danny-boy?”

  Unlike her face, her voice was lovely, a gentle alto that would have put any of my full-blooded cousins into unstoppable heat. I admitted to myself that I wasn’t totally immune.

  “No trouble, doll, I swear. Not for you, anyway.”

  “And for my husband, who doesn’t know how to say no?”

  “I just want to ask his advice. He won’t even leave his studio.” I hoped.

  Lee was a Talent who had an unbelievable gift that wasn’t magical at all, at least not as Talent went. He was a sculptor, working with metal to create figures that totally baffled me, but sold for large amounts of money. His studio, on the top floor of their narrow townhouse, had huge windows, and a floor half-covered in an electrostatic carpet.

  Lee used current to meld his metal, not fire. One bad day, if he forgot to discharge after working, he could take out his entire grid. The fact that he never had told you a lot about the man.

  He was working on something when I came in, so I took one of the cushioned chairs at the far end of the room and waited. About ten minutes later the sparks stopped flying, and he stepped over to a thick black mat to ground himself.

  “What’s up, Danny?”

  “I need your advice on how to approach gnomes.”

  Lee stopped short, clearly not sure if I was joking or not.

  “They’re metal. You work metal. I figured you’d know something that could help me out, some spell or something that would make them, I don’t know, malleable?”

  Lee shook his head sorrowfully. “Your ignorance of magic is terrifying.”

  Tough to argue with that, especially since I do it intentionally. My kind—fatae in general—don’t use magic, as such; we are magic. As a human, I’m basic Null—can see magic, sort of, but can’t use it at all. Some Nulls can’t even see it, can’t even see the fatae strap-hanging beside ‘em on the subway. It’s a sliding scale.