Promises to Keep

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Most of investigation work, Ellen had quickly learned, was incredibly boring. On the other hand, it could be worse; at least she got out of the office. Danny took all the on-line research, because he was less likely to short out their entire office with one misplaced burst of frustration. Bad enough they were going to have to buy a new coffee maker: if they had to buy a new printer and laptop, the budget would be fried, too.

  Doing legwork wasn’t exactly glamorous, though.

  “So, what’s this guy’s name again?”

  “Alfred McConnell,” she said, trying not to lean away. Chadwick was a good guy, as things went. Human, Talent, and generally happy to help out, he was her first stop not because she thought he’d know anything pertinent, but because talking to him wasn’t particularly stressful, and she needed all the confidence-building she could get.

  She just wished he’d stop trying to look down the neck of her sweater.

  “Huh. Nope. He’s local work?”

  “Westchester.”

  She might as well have said Mars; Chadwick shook his head and pushed the photo back to her. “Sorry, Ellen. You know me, I don’t work much above 96th Street.”

  “Yeah, I figured, but you’re the first stop on the list, as always.”

  He took that as a compliment to his knowledge, and preened a little. Ellen kept her expression professional-tough, but inside she felt a giggle shake free. The first time she and Danny had come to see Chadwick , she had been terrified; other Talent were still a mystery to her, and men - especially older men - way out of her league. But then Danny had introduced her as Wren Valere’s mentee, and the other man had practically bugged his eyes out, and said ‘”ma’am,” until she’d rolled her eyes and told him to call her Ellen.

  She knew Genevieve was powerful, and well-respected - and with reason. She also knew that Ellen herself was, by the standards of the Cosa Nostradamus, and as Talents judged things, almost as powerful. But she didn’t feel powerful. And Ellen’s real power, the reason other people were cautious around her, and treated her with respect, wasn’t anything she could control, or consciously use. Her StormSeer sense was external rather than internal, some intense need reaching out to her through the natural strands of current, a ley line, or thunderstorm.

  This case had none of that; she had intentionally walked through Central Park, over a known ley line, to make sure. Not even an itch of foreboding, not a single vision.

  Ellen knew that she should be thankful: her visions tended to end badly. And yet… she felt somehow useless, like not seeing their client in imminent mortal danger meant she’d let Danny down somehow.

  Sergei, Genevieve’s partner, said she suffered from a Surfeit of Insecurity Syndrome. He had smiled when he said it, but he hadn’t been joking, not really.

  “The person you should talk to,” Chadwick said, thoughtfully, almost unwillingly, “is Madame Haddad.”

  Haddad. Ellen sat back in her chair and considered the other Talent. She knew of her by reputation, but had never met the other woman. She was a power-broker, a matcher. Genevieve had never worked with her, because she had Sergei, but her mentor had said she was good at what she did, matching people, Talent, up with clients who needed their particular skills.

  “You think-” she started to ask, when Chadwick spoke over her.

  “I’m just saying that she’s got a finger on the pulse of everything that goes down. If this was anything more than a guy taking a flying leap into nowhere, she’d have the skinny.”

  oOo

  “Ellen Bint al-Genevieve”

  Getting an appointment to see the woman had been as simple as showing up and asking the receptionist if Madame Haddad was in. She hadn’t even given her name; she hadn’t thought it necessary. She’d been right.

  Mahiba Haddad was tall, elegant, and very old. Her suit was perfectly tailored, her headdress a delicate length of silk that covered her hair and draped loosely around her shoulders. Her eyes were the same dark brown as Ellen’s own, but her skin was paler, olive-toned.

  “Madame Haddad.” There was an awkward pause, and then Ellen sat down in the chair opposite the desk, folded her hands on her knee, and waited. Ellen didn’t know the phrase the other woman had used, but in connection with her mentor’s name, she assumed it was some variant of “daughter of.” Genevieve was only about a decade older than Ellen, and not exactly mother material, but from what Ellen had learned, the mentor/mentee relationship trumped everything else, with Talent.

  “Call me Mahiba, please,” the older woman said now. “I had not thought to see you here, in my office. Certainly not for many years yet.”

  “I am not here for myself,” Ellen said carefully, wary of accidentally making any agreements. “Merely as proxy for another.” If there was going to be any cost to this, financial or otherwise, Danny could cover it. That’s what the boss was for. “A man named Alfred McConnell has gone missing.”

  “And you are searching for him. What makes you think that I might know of this man?”

  Both Danny and Sergei said: listen more for what someone doesn’t say that what someone does. Mahiba hadn’t said no, or she didn’t know, or that she couldn’t help. “Mr. McConnell went missing while searching for another. But he was not the sort to dig into dark corners on his own.”

  Ellen heard herself falling into a more formal voice, echoing the other woman’s speech patterns. Sergei had taught her that, and Danny encouraged it. Echoing showed respect, attention.

  That was the theory, anyway. Ellen was always afraid that it would come across as mockery.

  Mahiba did not seem to feel mocked. She nodded gravely, and reached across her desk to pull a great leather binder toward her. Ellen immediately felt a surge of envy: Danny had his computer, but she had been working in cheap spiral notebooks and lined pads.

  “McConnell. Talent, yes. Male, white, searching for someone who had been lost to him. I gave him three names. Hartman, Louis and Hendrickson.”

  Ellen started and Mahiba smiled grimly. “No, he did not choose your partner.”

  “It would have simplified things considerably if he had. He also might’ve found who he was looking for.”

  “Why do you assume he did not?”

  She smiled at Ellen’s expression, then picked up a pen and wrote a series of lines, gently pulling the sheet out of the book and passing it to her.

  Ellen took it carefully. The ink glinted wetly on the page, drying as she read it. And then read it again, and said, under her breath, “Oh hell.”

  oOo

  This was important enough to take straight to Danny, and not wait on their scheduled check-in. The problem was, going back to the office would be half an hour at least on the subway, and he might not even be there when she arrived. So she stood on the street, new information in her pocket, and frustration building in her. Stupid, stupid not to have planned for this.

  She chewed on a nail, and tried to think of a solution.

  Once upon a time, she’d been told, there were working public phones on the streets in New York City. Now, the booths were mostly dismantled shells, and everyone had cell phones. Everyone except Talent, anyway, because current - specifically, the current held within her core - would short out every bit of a cell phone carried anywhere near a Talent, over time. And “time” could be anything from a year to five minutes, depending on the Talent. “Stay calm, Ellen.” That had been Genevieve’s first lesson. Stay calm, and make sure you’re in control of your core, where the magic rested. A Talent who couldn’t control her core was a danger to everyone. Bad enough if she shorted out a city block, or set something on fire - but now, to do so would shame Genevieve, too. The idea that people thought she was worth training, worth hiring, was still so new that she’d rather lose an arm than embarrass any of them, most especially her mentor.

  As soon as she thought that, she had her solution. *genevieve?”*

  It wasn’t a word, exactly, or even a thought. It was more, if she had to describe it, like the sen
se of her mentor, the visual remembrance and the sound of her voice and the taste of her current crackling in the air, shaped into a dart that she launched into the faint eddies of current that swirled around them, all the time. It was called “pinging,” and it was the closest thing Talent had to instant messages.

  Some people were better at it than others. Some could send a ping that seemed as though it were typed on a page, clear and crisp. Most people, though, it was more muted, more generalized, an emotional push of “are you okay?” or “meet me here.” Ellen didn’t have enough control or experience yet to manage anything more than a vague sense of her message, and only to people she knew well enough to “find.”

  *what’s up?* came back immediately. Genevieve was alert, but not worried, a sense of ready-to-act rather than in-motion-already.

  *danny* Ellen sent back, focusing on the need to talk to him, rather than there being a problem. Most of what they did was confidential. She couldn’t share what she’d learned, *can’t call.*

  A sense of comprehension hit her in return, and the knowledge that Genevieve was passing the buck to Sergei. Her partner was a Null, and could - and did - carry a cell phone.

  Ellen sent back a ping of relief, and gratitude, then *going to grab coffee at the dog,” a coffee shop in the area. She’d wait until she heard back from Genevieve, or Danny found her.

  3

  When I took Ellen on as my assistant-slash-student, I’d also added Sergei Didier’s phone numbers- both his private one and the gallery’s main line - into my cell phone. It wasn’t any kind of premonition, just common sense. Having it appear on the display for the first time today, after sending Shadow off on her own, had nearly given me a heart attack, though. Considering his first words were “nobody’s dead,” he’d known what my reaction would be.

  “We need a better set-up.” I said as I slid into the booth opposite Ellen.

  Ellen looked up from the laminated menu she’d been studying, and gave me a Look. “What, carrier pigeons?”

  The girl who’d first approached me, months ago, nearly shaking from the weight of the vision she’d seen, ready to shrink away from anyone or anything that looked at her harshly, wouldn’t have snarked like that. Or rather, she would have, but it would have been a defensive move, a deflection, a way of showing armor and warning away would-be predators.

  Now, she was just snarking because she could. Despite my exhaustion, I smiled. Long way to go, still. But progress.

  “It couldn’t be any less awkward than having to relay everything through those two,” I said, but I didn’t have any brilliant plan to offer, either. “You could have borrowed someone’s landline, you know. Go into a store and ask if they’ve got one. But buy something, first.”

  Even as I made the suggestion I knew it wasn’t going to fly. Ellen could snark at me, but she knew me. Walking into a strange place, and asking for what was, in effect, a favor? She’d grown up in a house where she was considered odd, if not outright crazy, and everything she said or saw was doubted and ridiculed. Talking to strangers - people who might judge her - was still a trigger, even now that she knew that magic was real, the fatae were real, and she wasn’t crazy at all. Or at least, no more so than the rest of us.

  I wasn’t her therapist or her mentor, anyway. Just her boss. “So what have you learned?”

  “I have a lead. On the person our missing person was looking for, anyway.”

  I waited. There had to be more to it than that, some kicker that had made her haul me out here, rather than waiting. She shook her head, and pushed a sheet of paper across the table toward me. I took it, unfolded it, read it.

  You learn to roll with the punches, the jobs I’ve had. Never show what you’re thinking, much less what you’re feeling. Even when they know they’ve gut-punched you. Maybe especially then.

  “So,” I said, when I could finally trust my voice again. I lifted my hand, summoning the waitress over. “Coffee, black, and a plate of rye toast,” I ordered. It might be iced coffee season for everyone else, but I’m an old-fashioned boy.

  “So,” Ellen echoed, waiting on me.

  “Our missing woman was fatae,” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “So our missing man has a cross-breed daughter.”

  “Looks like.”

  Cross-breeds are rare. Trust me on this, I know.

  My coffee came, and I wrapped my hands around the mug. The toast my stomach had been grumbling for minutes earlier didn’t seem quite so appealing, but I knew better than to put more coffee on an empty stomach, so I lifted a piece, and took a bite. I should have stopped for lunch three hours ago, especially since I hadn’t been getting much in the way of results.

  “It’s all there, everything Mahiba knew,” Ellen went on, her voice soft, like she thought I was going to tell her to shut up at any moment. “She gave birth at St. Luke’s, before they shut it down. She checked out without the baby.”

  Not unusual. St Luke’s used to handle a lot of the fatae in town. The unusual thing was that the fatae had gone through with it at all. No, what was unusual was that she had caught, and then that she had gone through with it. Maybe she hadn’t realized the baby had a human father? Who knew. Sometimes, fatae could be such careless sluts.

  I didn’t realize I’d said that out loud until I heard Ellen’s indrawn breath of reaction.

  “We are,” I said, ruefully, and took another bite of the toast. It was pretty good, with just enough butter to soften the crunch. “God knows, my father…. Well, fauns are fauns. Probably not the best example. Do we know what breed she was?”

  “Not in the notes.”

  “She was human-shaped, at least, or even St. Luke’s might have noted something was up when she walked, and called in the Cosa, which would have put this on my radar.” Like I said, cross-breeds were rare. Someone would have made sure the only other cross-breed in the city would have known, right? Although what they’d have expected me to do with that knowledge, I don’t know.

  “Right. So, what do we know? Only that our client’s missing husband disappeared off the roof, after, how long ago?”

  “Eight months,” Ellen supplied.

  “Eight months after he went looking for what we now know to be a cross-breed infant, presumably his, because why the hell else would he care?” My issues were showing.

  “Presumably his.” Ellen still had that scrunchy look going between her eyes. “Is this going to be a problem, boss?”

  “No.” It wasn’t. “If anything, I mean, the guy’s actually looking…yeah, he’s late, but at least he’s making an effort now.” The older I got, the more I understood that sometimes you just…couldn’t do anything right away. It never got easier to accept, but you understood.

  She played with the spoon in her hands, thinking. I let her be. Part of learning is figuring stuff out by yourself. When she had a question, she would ask. I finished my toast, and then ate what was left of her share. I was the boss, I was picking up the tab, I could eat all the toast if I wanted to.

  “Do you think he knew? I mean, that she wasn’t human?”

  “Yeah. You can pass” - I did all the time, just pull on a baseball cap and turn my head so my features seemed softer, more human, that sort of thing “- but once you’re that up close and personal, it’s pretty much impossible to hide.”

  “Do you think it’s connected? I mean, the woman, the baby, and him going AWOL off a roof? There’s almost a year between the two things.”

  I wiped my fingers, and crumpled the napkin and dropped it on my plate. “Second law of disappearances: if something unusual happened in the missing person’s life in the year previous, odds are high it’s connected.”

  She nodded, taking that in. “And a cross-breed offspring is unusual.”

  My usual response would have been sarcasm, but I couldn’t bring myself to it. “Considerably higher on the weird-o-meter than disappearing off a roof without any sign of climbing down.” The first law of disappearances was that the
nearest and dearest almost always had the motive with the mostest. Although that was the first rule of pretty much everything.

  “Boss, what are we getting into? I mean, is this a two-person-missing case, or…”

  Or what, was the question. Or what seemed to always be the question. I should have listened to my mother and gone into the Navy. At least there you knew the shape, color, and requisition form for whatever shit you were handed.

  “Damned if I know, kid.” This was why I never promised the clients anything except my best effort; because every job inevitably went pear-shaped, in its own way. Focus on what we know, and what we were hired to do. Find our guy. He was chasing the baby, so where did the baby go?” I watched as she hauled out her spiral-bound notebook and flipped to a fresh page, ready to take notes - or, as I’d learned was more probable with Ellen, to sketch a flow chart. She thought in weird ways, even for Talent.

  “If the mother walked out without the baby, she didn’t want it,” she said. “So it’s unlikely that she went back for it later. We can probably rule her out, either as a problem or an answer.”

  She started with a box connected to a triangle by a dotted line, then a line from each to a circle. Mother and Father and Baby make Three. Then a line away from Baby Circle, with a question mark. “The baby wasn’t adopted - would it have been an obvious fatae? Is there a fatae adoption board, or something?”

  “No. A fatae baby’s always taken in by its family - extended or otherwise. Or, it…”

  There was a very uncomfortable silence.

  “Or it’s left out to die?” she asked softly.

  I’d promised not to coddle her. “Mostly, yeah. Although not often, I’d think. Population shrinkage means most babies are wanted, even with human blood.”

  Most, not all. And a cross-breed? If the fatae parent didn’t want it, the human parent had some hard decisions to make. For one: how did you deal with it if Junior or Princess didn’t look human enough to pass?

  Ellen was either reading my mind, or thinking along painfully similar lines. “Your mom…”