Promises to Keep

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Boss. Did you sleep here?”

  I hit Podzilla’s start button, listening to its hiss of steam with a possibly erotic shiver of anticipation, and ignored the question as being beneath notice.

  “Boss.”

  She’d been taking lessons in that voice from someone else. Either that, or she was developing a strong streak of Mom, too.

  “No, I didn’t,” I reassured her. But I hadn’t slept well, either. I finally gave up around four in the morning, and spent the rest of the night wandering the streets. It was weirdly soothing; half my genetics might crave green hills and free-running water, but everything else was a child of concrete and steel in general, and New York City in particular. There was an energy to the pre-dawn hours that had nothing whatsoever to do with magic and everything to do with magic, if that made any sense at all. Even the darkest streets still felt the quiver of neon in the air, solitary traffic speeding and slowing to the lights, echoes of late-closing bars and early morning hustle, punctuated by trucks rattling in for pre-dawn deliveries and running through it all the constant awareness of life. New York wasn’t the city that never slept so much as it was the city of overlapping shifts, where one person’s bedtime was another person’s wake-up call.

  I’d given up and headed toward the office as the clouds were starting to lighten to pink. Ellen was here early, too, but a quick glance confirmed that she was neither bright-eyed nor bushy-tailed. She didn’t drink coffee: I wasn’t sure how she was still standing. I said as much.

  “I’m young and resilient,” she said. “But you will forgive me because I brought breakfast.” She held up a bag, but my nose had already told me.

  “Give. And talk.” I fished out a brioche and put it on the counter next to the coffee maker, then put the bag down and waited.

  “So yeah,” and I could hear her taking off her coat and dropping it on the wooden coatrack, then sitting at her desk, the chair squealing slightly as she swiveled around. “I went to see Rashada, like you said. And then spent the next five hours going through her files, which are not, just so you know, digital. I have paper cuts on my paper cuts. But I can tell you that no newborn died that week coming from that hospital, and no non-human infant was brought into the morgue in the past nine months.” She paused. ” Rashada said she’d know if the baby wasn’t human. Even half. Yes?”

  “Maybe.” The coffee machine let me know it was ready, and I pulled a double shot into my cup, and slammed it back. “Lilin can pass for human unless you’re looking close.” Like me. “I don’t know what their insides look like, and never wanted to ask. But yeah - they’re not human, so there’ll be some differences that would ping for someone like Rashada.” She’d cut into every fatae db in the past five years, no matter when they hit the slab. The local Talent Council had made sure of that. They wanted to know what was happening when, why and to whom. The fatae mostly weren’t thrilled with the Council’s nose poking into our business, but we’d learned the hard way we couldn’t prevent it. Not entirely.

  “That doesn’t mean the baby’s alive, through,” Ellen said. “Whoever took her, they might have just dumped her.”

  I turned fast at that, a hot comeback on my tongue until I saw how miserable she looked at even mentioning it, and how she flinched a little, when I moved. Easy, boy. This is Shadow, you can still spook her way too easy. And what she’d said was true. Ugly, but true.

  “If so, we may never know. But until we can prove all other leads are kaput, we don’t assume that.”

  oOo

  He was angry with her. Ellen knew she was too sensitive, too quick to assume she’d done something wrong, too fast to apologize. You spend ten years with everyone thinking you were crazy, a burden, a problem, you learned all of that. But she knew anger when she saw it, even when he was trying to bite it back, not take it out on her. She forced her breathing to stay even, soothing the static-jangled core inside her so she didn’t destroy the brand-new coffee maker, or worse, his laptop in the back office.

  “Don’t assume anything.” He was still lecturing her, his body tense like he was trying really hard not to yell, or throw something. Not that he would - not at her, anyway - but it still triggered every protective reflex she had, to make herself small, invisible, inoffensive. She placed her hands palm-down on the desk, taking comfort in the heavy wooden weight of it. It wasn’t the same as grounding, where she’d tie herself into the energy of the granite underfoot, letting it hold any sudden sparks or snaps in her current, but it was enough for now. She knew she wasn’t in any danger, she just had to convince her body of that.

  “You know I won’t,” she said mildly, and he sighed, all of a sudden the air going out of him. He ran his hands through his hair, the small, curved horns appearing briefly, then hidden again. She still had never seen him shoeless, so she didn’t know if his feet were hoofed or not. She couldn’t imagine his usual cowboy boots would be comfortable if they were, but…

  “Yeah, I know,” he was saying, and she forced her attention back into focus. “Sorry. This case…”

  “Is it because,” and she lifted one hand cautiously, making a vague gesture with it, “because, you know…”

  “Because the baby’s a cross-breed like me? No. And usually I’m better with infant abductions, there’s less chance of something going wrong.” He must have seen some expression change on her face, because he elaborated. “Teenagers, they’re at risk. Young kids, seriously at risk. There are a lot of fucked up bastards out there who consider them easy or preferred prey. But babies… most times, they’re stolen for the breeder biz. Adoptions for profit. So they’re well taken care of, relatively speaking, and mostly given into good hands. I still want to get them back, but there’s less…”

  Ellen had seen enough to know what he wasn’t saying. Less risk of abuse. The kind of stuff you couldn’t ever rescue someone from, not really. She didn’t feel capable of pushing any further; something else was bothering him but he’d have to figure it out on his own.

  He flipped back to business. “So the mother’s gone missing, and soon after the baby goes missing, and we’ve got no leads on either one of them. If the Lilin find anything, they’ll tell us - if only to keep us from poking into their business any further. So we go back to focusing on daddy, for the moment. Specifically, how he got the hell off that roof.”

  “Something winged took him.” It was the only reasonable explanation, for Cosa levels of reasonable. “Unless we have a helicopter that’s so silent that the woman inside the house doesn’t hear it hovering over her head?”

  “What, like a hang glider?” He shook his head, even as Ellen tried to figure out how a hang glider could swoop a full-grown man off his roof. “All right, so what? Not a great wyrm, they’d be too noticeable, even in the ‘burbs. What else was large enough? And wouldn’t be noticed?”

  “How do you not notice something winged flying through your back yard?” But Ellen knew the answer to that already. The same way her family had not-seen any - all - of the things she had seen, over the years. Because they didn’t want to see. All the things that had happened to her, around her, they had just not seen, so they wouldn’t have to deal with it. You had to see before you could -

  “Underneath.”

  Danny tilted his head to the side. “What?”

  “Check underneath. That’s what the raven said.”

  Narrowed eyes joined the tilted head. “A raven talked to you? Shadow, you need to tell me these things. Seriously - maybe Talent don’t think about it, but every fatae knows: when a raven speaks to you: pay attention.”

  Ellen bit the inside of her cheek, to keep from responding. He was right, she hadn’t known, hadn’t thought about it that way. She’d been thinking of the bird as a bird, not… well, any of the things it might be. She had also thought that it was about her vision. But what if it wasn’t?

  “Underneath what?” she wondered, turning it around in her head.

  “The roof,” they both said at the same time.<
br />
  oOo

  Ellen hadn’t returned the rental car the night before, extending their reservation through the end of the week. I wasn’t sure if she was developing a twitch of precog, or just playing a hunch. The difference between the two was millimeters in my experience, anyway. If she was able to find consistent free street parking, we might have a new revenue stream in the making, through. Hire-a-parker could be seriously popular, especially around the holidays, and-

  “We’re here, boss.”

  The house wasn’t anything particularly special: a well-maintained Colonial on a street filled with an assortment of similarly well-maintained houses, all built around the same time, probably mid-fifties. There weren’t any white picket fences visible, but you could practically feel their ghosts running along the lines of every lawn.

  “And why didn’t we come here first?” I asked. Ellen glanced over at me as she scouted for a place to park, then decided this must be a Teaching Moment, because she just shrugged. “Because you hate coming out to Westchester?”

  “I don’t hate Westchester. I just find it pointless. No, we didn’t come out here because by the time the client contacted us, she would have had time to set up anything she wanted us to see, and anything actually relevant would have been tidied up and put away, intentionally or not.”

  Ellen tapped the wheel with her fingers, frowning. “Is that pragmatism, or bitter cynicism?”

  “A little of both, neither unwarranted. They’re Council members, so she had the right to go to them for help, and instead went first to an outsider, and then to me. What does that tell you?”

  “That our client wants us to find her husband, but she doesn’t want a fuss. She knows the baby’s half-fatae?”

  “Or, more likely, she knows that the girl was young, and Lilin. Having a husband who cats around is one thing. Having one who gets off with a succubus… that’s just tacky. I did do an Internet search on the neighborhood, though. God bless the Internet.”

  Ellen made a face, and I laughed. Yeah, all right, I wasn’t above rubbing it in a little, occasionally. On the other hand, I couldn’t move from one place to another by thinking about it, or any of the other things I’d seen her use current to do, so I figured we were about even.

  She parked around the corner, and we walked back to the McConnell house. There was no car in the driveway, and a quick look inside the garage revealed empty space. Good. I hadn’t planned on ringing the doorbell, but this made things easier. There was a ladder leaning against the side of the house, and I walked over to it, testing its sturdiness with a rough shake.

  “Seems safe enough.” Even to me, my voice didn’t sound convinced.

  “If a sixty-something guy could climb it, you can too,” Ellen said. I didn’t point out to her that I wasn’t much younger; I had enough vanity to maintain the illusion that I was still in my late thirties, thank you very much. But I set my foot on the first rung, and started climbing. It was a little nerve-rattling, but I made it to the top and hauled myself onto the roof, looking over the side to see if Ellen was going to follow me.

  “Nice view.”

  I didn’t quite fall over the edge, but it was close. I turned and glared at Ellen, who was standing next to me. “Cough next time you Translocate, okay?” The line of sight from ground to roof must have been clear enough that she’d felt she could manage it without a spotter. “All right, we’re up here. Now where do we actually look?” Trust a raven not to be specific, and there were a lot of tiles.

  “Where had he been standing?”

  “Over there,” I said, pointing to the area near the chimney. “According to the police report, he’d been looking at the flashing around the chimney, to see if they needed to have someone come out before winter started.”

  We did a crab-crawl over there, neither of us trusting our balance enough to walk upright on the slightly-slanted roof. If any neighbors happened to look out their curtained windows to see us, they weren’t inclined to come out and raise a fuss. God bless suburbia.

  The tiles around the chimney looked intact, but we started lifting the edges with out fingernails, anyway, searching for something, anything that might explain the raven’s words.

  “You know the raven might -“

  “Keep looking,” I said. “Ravens elsewhere might be anything. A raven in a graveyard - in that graveyard, at that hour of the morning? Even if it was screwing with us, which is always a possibility, we can’t ignore it.”

  It took us about fifteen minutes, and several splinters under fingernails, before Ellen let out a surprised, somewhat worried “oh.”

  “What?” I turned carefully, letting the shingle I’d been testing go back into position, and looked over at her. She held up her hand, and I heard myself go “oh,” too.

  She was holding a feather in her hand, the quill’s point between forefinger and thumb. There wasn’t any breeze, but it moved gently, the cloud-muted sunlight catching it just enough to illuminate the silvery tone of the vane.

  “Fuck,” I said. “Oh, fuck.”

  “What is it?” Ellen’s voice was still worried, but I could tell she was fascinated by the feather, too. It was small, maybe six inches long, max, and could, if you weren’t thinking about it, be mistaken for, well something ordinary, fallen from a dove’s wing, maybe. But that particular shade of silver, the deep red of the shaft, clearly visible? That came from only one place.

  “That’s a gryphon feather,” I told her, my mouth dry, but going for my best teacher-tone, rather than the flipped-out awe I was feeling. “The only fatae with silver feathers are gryphons. They’re generally solitary, more than a little cranky, and pretty damned rare.”

  “So why was one so interested in our missing human? I mean, other than the missing child, there’s nothing particularly unique or odd about Alfred. Why would a gryphon be interested in a cross-breed child that wasn’t one of theirs?”

  “I don’t know.” But even if Ellen didn’t have any precog, my spidey senses were tingling.

  9

  They’d ended up at the edge of a park, after the last house was another no-go, the owner there an older woman who seemed to have no idea at all what Alfred was talking about. The fatae claimed it was following a trail, but Alfred wasn’t sure he believed that any more. The child had been in all of these places? How long ago, and for how long, and why did they keep moving her? None of this made sense.

  It was late afternoon, the park was deserted except for a couple at the far end, snuggling on a bench. He wanted, suddenly, to sit down, even on a cold bench, and just not move. He was beyond tired; he was weary. His core, never all that strong to begin with, was near-depleted, and the thought of reaching out to restock made his bones turn to ash. There was only so far a human could push himself, and he was nearly there.

  The creature reached for him, clearly intending to hoist him into the sky and off to another house and another dead end. Alfred stepped back. “No. No more. Not again.” He’d reached the end of his rope. “I can’t do this anymore. It’s insane, we’re not getting anywhere, and I don’t think you’re right about where the infant is, anyway, because there’s no way they can be shifting her like this, even with the best translocation skills ever. So no, no more.”

  “You must. You owe a life.”

  “I don’t owe jack-shit. I don’t even know for certain this child’s mine, only just what you’ve told me. What happened to Kerrieon? Where is she? Why did she abandon the child like that? Why didn’t she call me?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  That was the first actual answer he’d gotten from the creature. The problem was, that wasn’t actually an answer at all.

  “What the hell do you mean, you don’t know? You knew to find me, so you must know something.” He’d been on this insane hunt for three days, which was two days longer than he’d thought it would take, when the fatae landed on the roof and told him he was needed. Three days without decent sleep, without a bath, without a decent cup of coffee
. He wasn’t thinking straight any more, and he wanted it done.

  “The child must be found.”

  “You keep saying that but you won’t tell me why. Fuck that. Take me home.” He was pissed, but not so pissed off that he forgot he was, effectively, stranded here in this town, and calling his wife to pick him up.

  Screw it. He could deal with her yelling at him all the way home, so long as he got home. Turning on his heel with near-military precision, he walked away. Or tried to, anyway. The fatae’s claws had been nearly gentle as they held him in flight, keeping him safe so far above ground, but now those talons dug into his flesh, the jacket and shirt no barrier.

  “You owe a life.”

  Alfred stared across the park, seeing freedom out of reach. “What the hell is your problem? You haven’t shown me any proof that she’s in danger! That was the only reason I came with you, the only reason I went looking, because I thought she was in danger. But so far - nothing. If she’s in one of these houses, which I doubt, they’re well-off enough to give her a proper life. But if you don’t know where she is, how do you know she needs me?”

  He couldn’t shake off that claw, so he turned into it, uncomfortably close to that fierce beak, and the deep golden eyes glaring over it. “Unless you can tell me, right here and now, that you know for a fact that she needs my help, that she’s in danger, and not being perfectly well cared for by whoever took her home from the hospital, then this. Is. Over.”

  “The child is not in danger. The child is danger.” Those golden eyes were too wide, the pupils too small and black. Alfred felt he was in danger of falling forward, falling into them and never getting out.

  “What?”

  “The child. It is an abomination. It must not be allowed. Only humans thought it could be saved, should be saved. It should have never happened, should have been allowed to die.”

  “What?” Alfred knew he sounded like an idiot. He felt like one, too. “You’re insane. Never mind about taking me home. I’ll call Christie and deal with the fallout the way I should have two days ago.”