Promises to Keep

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Just saying it made him feel better, a little stronger. Yeah. He should have told Christie at the start. She was a clear thinker, she might have figured out a way to find the baby - or understood that it wasn’t their matter to meddle in at all, that the baby was already with good parents and this crazy fatae was only trying to stir up trouble. He’d go home and tell her everything, and he could finish fixing the roof before winter hit.

  “No.”

  “Yes.” He stared at the fatae, his own eyes narrowed. “Enough. Whatever you think needs to be done, whatever you’re planning to do, I’m out.” If the creature needed him to find the baby, walking away was the best thing he could do, for both of them. Even if the kid wasn’t his.

  There was no warning, only the clack of the thing’s beak, before a talon hit him across the face. Then again, the blow of one feathered arm against the chest, and another blow to the side of his head. None of them were made with any sort of precision, but the sheer force behind them made that less important, and Alfred went to his knees, his head ringing and his vision already starting to haze over.

  He hoped the kid was his. He’d like to think his last act had been protecting his own.

  10

  Ellen was sitting on her desk, legs crossed under her, the gryphon feather in her hands. Or rather, hovering just above her hands, the quill’s tip balanced pointing down onto her palm but not actually resting on the flesh. Little sparks of current flickered around it, which made me think that there was a hell of a lot more current actually in use, if I was able to see that much.

  Fatae couldn’t use magic, any more than a Null human could. But it ran in our bodies, according to all the reading I’d done, making us more attuned to it than non-Talent humans. I always - almost always - knew when it was being used around me, and it would take a skilled Talent to use it against me.

  Damnable thing was, I seemed to know a lot of skilled Talent. Even when I was back on the force, it seemed like half the guys I knew on the street were high res. Just lucky, I guess.

  “Anything?”

  She shook her head, letting the feather come to rest. “No. I mean, there’s a sense of it there, the guy himself, and definitely a guy, but… I don’t know if its because I’m not strong enough, or because I don’t know enough about gryphons. When Genevieve taught me this, we used a strand of PB’s fur, and a drop of Sergei’s blood, and I was able to identify them right away, but…”

  “But you know them both. All right, get yourself settled down, and come back into the office.”

  Any current-use she did, she did out here. It would be easier to replace another coffee maker and a mini-fridge than it would my laptop, safe-lined drawer or no. But it would take her a little while to shake down her current and smooth it out, or whatever it was they did. I went into the inner office and closed the door behind me, taking a moment.

  Ellen had been right: this case was shaking me a little. It wasn’t the baby-in-jeopardy part; I knew my weaknesses and was used to dealing with them. Kids in jeopardy hit all my buttons, yeah. But it wasn’t that, and it wasn’t that this was a cross-breed, either. I didn’t think that was it, anyway.

  I sat down at my desk and pulled the laptop out of its drawer, booting it up at the same time and checking email. The formal reports from Rashada, confirming what she’d told Ellen. A note from Fagan at the precinct, confirming that no known female fatae bodies had shown up anywhere without clear I.D. Now that I knew what breed she’d been I could guarantee that she would be a Jane Doe: Lilin who ended up in bad places generally didn’t have soft landings.

  “Boss?” Ellen came in just as my cell phone rang. I held up a hand for her to stay where she was, just in case. Static was a natural by-product of Talent.

  “Hendrickson. Yeah, I got it.” I waited. “Really? All right.” I didn’t insult Fagan by asking if she was sure: she wouldn’t have called me if he wasn’t. “Yeah, I should be able to confirm. Can you send - all right, thanks. Yeah, take care.”

  I hung up the phone and gestured for Ellen to come all the way in even as I was checking to see if the promised email had come in.

  “They found our missing man. He’s at Mother of Mercy.”

  “Hospital, not morgue. He’s alive?”

  “Only just. No ID, but they’re pretty sure it’s our guy.”

  “So what happened to him?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? I’ve got a file coming in…now.” I paid extra for high-speed internet. I would have been better off spending the money on beer and pissing it away. But eventually the file downloaded.

  I clicked on the attachments, and grunted.

  “What?” Ellen came all the way into the office, leaning over my shoulder to see better. I could feel the gentle static hum of her core for a moment, like standing next to a portable generator, then it was locked down, still and cool.

  I touched my hand to the screen, tapping one area of the photograph. “Those look like claw marks?”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “There, and…there.” She didn’t touch the screen, but I saw what she was looking at. “The bruising - he was beaten?”

  “By someone, or something with a very heavy hand.” Or wings. “McConnell’s in no position to answer questions; they’re not sure he’s going to remember anything when he wakes up, assuming he does wake up. We need to find that gryphon.”

  There was a heavy weight of silence over my shoulder, and I could tell she was thinking. Technically, the case was over. We’d been hired to find the missing man, and we’d done that, more or less. But there were questions that needed to be answered – a missing child to be found – and nobody else was going to do it, if I didn’t. If we didn’t.

  “Boss, you’re awesome at finding people, solving puzzles, that overt, detail-oriented stuff. Given time, you could learn where a gryphon hangs out. But getting it? I mean, laying hands on it? If you need something retrieved…”

  “As a Retriever. I know.” I shut the lid of the laptop, and stared at the matte black surface. “You’re injuring my professional pride, Shadow.” She wasn’t wrong, though. I could find the gryphon, but it would take time, and odds were I’d never get anywhere near it. But Wren… the Wren could.

  “Call your mentor. Let’s see how well she plays with others.”

  oOo

  I’d barely had time to put the order in for two large pizzas - Talent ate like horses when they were using a lot of current - before I heard voices in the outer office. Wren must have Translocated, which meant no Sergei. I was outnumbered.

  “Hi.” I stood in the doorway and looked at the two women standing there. If you didn’t know, you’d think Ellen was the more impressive one, tall and broad-shouldered, with glossy dark skin and hair, while the woman next to her was slighter, mousy-brown and seemingly insignificant. The emphasis would be on “seemingly.” Retrievers, by their very nature, deferred the eye and muddled memories. Had Wren chosen to become an assassin…. Fortunately, she was at heart a kleptomaniac, not a killer.

  “I hear you’ve got a job that needs my delicate touch.”

  “We getting the mentor discount?” Sergei wasn’t just her partner, he was her business manager, too. He’d have a suitably pithy comment about her working for free.

  “I’ll call in a favor at a later date,” she said, and I nodded, agreeing. As much as I hadn’t wanted to call her in, she’d be at death’s door before she asked me for help, and at that point I’d have given it anyway. We were just saving face, here.

  “I have a feather from the gryphon’s wing, I think.” Ellen said. “I already used it to try to trace him, but I wasn’t able to get anything.”

  “Underwing,” I said. “From the size, probably close to the claws.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Photos of his victim. The guy’s in the hospital now; if you needed to be in contact with him…”

  “Huh.” She considered that. “No. Let’s try without, first. I’d be able to slip in unseen but it w
ould take some time, and it might not be needed.” She held out her hand, and Ellen placed the feather down on her palm.

  “Yo, wait.” I went back into my office and shut the laptop down completely and put it in the shielded drawer, and then turned off my cell phone and put it in the drawer as well. I’d heard stories about what happened to electronics around Wren, and my replacement budget was already stretched to its limit. Then I unlocked the drawer below it, and took out my service pistol, and loaded it.

  “All right. Do you need anything?”

  “For you to shut up and stay out of the way?” Wren’s voice was low, sweet, and utterly focused on the feather in her hand.

  “I can do that.”

  This was the first time I’d seen Ellen interact with her mentor. My Shadow wasn’t a Retriever, that wasn’t her skillset. But she was a Seer, and I was guessing that they were going to use that to tie into Wren’s own skills. Magic - current - was beyond my pay grade. I leaned against the wall and, as per orders, shut up and stayed out of the way.

  “I have the feather. I’ll be able to work a seeking cantrip, I think. It’s the same thing I use when I’m scoping out a site, doing a little advance research. You’ve seen me do it.”

  Ellen nodded, intent on her mentor’s words. “I should follow along?”

  “No. I want you to go into your core and open up. See what I stir up.”

  She said “see” but even I knew she meant See.

  “All the way open,” Wren said, glancing up from the feather to look at Ellen directly. “I’m here, and this place is as grounded as anywhere in the city. It’s an old building, solid foundations, built on bedrock. You can ground all the way down, brace yourself that way. And goat-boy over there will watch over us physically, right?”

  I hefted the pistol in my hand. “Anything that comes in, deals with me, first.”

  “Try not to shoot us while you’re doing it.”

  “If I yell duck, don’t quack.”

  Pre-fight nerves, even though there wasn’t a fight brewing. Ellen was looking back and forth between us, then down again at the feather, and I wanted to do something say something to bolster her courage. I didn’t. This wasn’t my place; Wren was her mentor. I was just her boss.

  “Breathe, ground and center.” Wren’s voice was soft, steady, and Ellen exhaled and then drew a fresh breath, her shoulders softening, her hands resting against her thighs.

  The feather rose off Wren’s palm, hovering in the air between them, dancing slightly as though tugged by a thread. The air was thick and electric, and I could practically hear the new coffee maker shorting out. I hoped Ellen had thought to unplug it, but I wasn’t going to interrupt to check.

  “Feather, fly

  Return to the bone

  But remain”

  I hadn’t expected spellcasting to be quite so…poetic. The sense of static in the air increased, and the feather spun around frantically, turning quill-side up and then pointing back down again.

  “Let me See.” Ellen’s incantation or whatever they called it, was simple, but heartfelt. She reached up a hand and closed her fingers around the feather, stopping its movement. Her entire hand, underneath the skin, was alive with a pulsing yellow-green neon, like… like nothing. I felt a little ill, watching, so I looked away. Wren’s hands were blue-green. The feather was sparkling with a paler silver glitter, turning faster and faster within Ellen’s grasp.

  “He’s dying. He’s hurt so bad inside, and he was so tired, he’s dying.”

  My first impulse was to grab my notebook and write down her words, but that would have required putting down the gun. I listened as hard as I could, trying to remember.

  “Feather, fly,” Wren repeated. “Return to the bone, to the bone.”

  The feather quivered again, and Ellen cried out as though the quills had suddenly got hot, but she didn’t let go. I kept my grip loose on the grip of my handgun, and breathed out, trying for my own form of grounding, the way we’d been taught to do before a raid or during a standoff.

  “In a building, an old building. It’s built a nest but I can’t see where it is, can’t…oh.”

  This was the first time I’d seen her try for a Seeing, rather than having one come on her, and as far as I knew, the first time she’d consciously tried to scry for someone we knew was still alive. The only difference I could see was the play of current-light under her skin; that was new. She was facing away from me so I couldn’t tell if the glazed look in her eyes was the same. The shiver in my horns and the back of my neck was less for what was happening in front of me than the potential even I could feel, working beneath the surface.

  When I’d first met Ellen, I knew that others were wary of her. I’d understood why, intellectually - but now I knew why, bone-deep. A Storm Seer wasn’t just a high-res Talent. Ellen was a perfect conduit, a lightning rod that could use the lightning that hit her. If she was trained.

  That was why Wren was her mentor. And some day, maybe, the student would be more powerful than the teacher.

  I was, weirdly, calm about that. I knew Ellen. She was a good kid. Careful, cautious, and maybe a little too cautious, yeah, after the family life she’d had, but that was no bad thing, either. Power corrupts, but only so far as we let it.

  “I have the nest,” Wren said, her voice thin but steady. I’d known her for years, but never seen her when she was working. I realized I was holding my breath. “An abandoned building, yes. Not a warehouse; maybe an old school? Further west… Trenton, maybe, one of the older, smaller cities. Smart, to stay the hell out of Madame’s territory.”

  Gryphons were fierce, but you didn’t fuck with a centuries-old Great Wyrm who claimed Manhattan for her own, no.

  “I think I’ve got him,” the Retriever said, finally. “Nice lead, Ellen. We can-“

  “There’s something else,” Ellen said. Her face had lifted toward the ceiling, and I half-expected a bolt of current-lightning to come through the roof and hit the tip of her nose. Maybe it did; this Null couldn’t see it. “There’s a connection.” She held the feather again, this time so tightly the edges were crushed. “The man and the gryphon…blood.”

  “Spilled blood, from the fight?”

  Wren glared at me, like I should shut up. I glared back.

  “No.” Ellen shook her head, and her hand shook, too. “Contained. Shaped, formed….”

  Wren lifted her hand as though to touch Ellen’s hand and the feather, but stopped. Yeah, I didn’t think that would be a good idea right now, either.

  “New form. New life. Three swirls of blood, swirling together.”

  Wren looked confused. I, on the other hand, knew exactly what my Shadow was saying. The baby wasn’t a cross-breed, she was a tri-breed. Alfred’s daughter… the gryphon’s grand-daughter.

  “Fuck me,” I said, half-awed, half-horrified. “That’s not good.”

  11

  Wren frowned at me, a truly terrifying sight. “Is that even possible?”

  “Possible, sure. Probable? Likely? Good? No and no and no.”

  “Why?” Ellen asked. “I mean, why’s it a bad thing?”

  “People - and by people I mean fatae, specifically - flip out over cross-breeds. It’s like, oh god, like miscegenation in the 1930’s. Cats and dogs, living together, end of the world etc etc. Except for a tri-breed… that could actually happen. End of the world, I mean. Not in the Mayan prophesy way, but people flipping like mammals and doing incredibly stupid shit in reaction.”

  I didn’t have a high opinion of most fatae, when it came to hard-wired speciesist reactions. I didn’t have a high opinion of humans, either. Even a year on the force of any major city will burn optimism out of you.

  “So why -“

  “We need to find the gryphon, if we’re going to get any answers. Wren, can you Translocate me there?”

  Her eyes narrowed, then she shook her head. “Third-party transloc isn’t my thing. I’ve done it, but it’s…iffy. And Ellen isn’t skilled eno
ugh yet to risk that distance, to a place she’s never been.”

  “Fuck.” I could feel the timetable running out on us. Yeah, the guy we’d been hired to find had been found, no thanks to us. But there was still a baby out there, and none of us believed that the gryphon had its best interest at heart, not after the beat-down it had presumably given daddy.

  “What about Pietr? I mean, since you felt comfortable enough to call him in for other stuff.”

  Wren looked at me. I looked at the ceiling. Ellen didn’t sound pissed, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t. I needed to remember to tell her when I did things like that going forward, clearly. “Yeah. Ask him.”

  There was a moment of blankness in her eyes, and a couple of minutes later, the soft sucking-pop noise of someone Translocating in.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any way to lock you people out?”

  Pietr, being a PUP, took the question seriously. “There is. I’ll teach hot-stuff here when we get back. Where are we going?”

  “Not we. Me.”

  “What?” Ellen started to protest.

  “Just me.” I stared Ellen down, which only took a minute. Valere, wisely, kept her mouth shut. I considered tucking the pistol into my waistband, then decided keeping it in my hand was the less-stupid move. “This is my gig, Shadow. You’re not trained” - not ready - “for it. Yet.”

  The “yet” placated her. For now.

  oOo

  I hate being Translocated. It’s roughly akin to being blindfolded, thrown into one of those sideways carnival rides, and then dumped out somewhere other than where you started, with no idea of what’s waiting for you on the other end. No, actually, that’s exactly what it’s like. Also, it makes me want to throw up, which isn’t the best way to come into an unknown situation.

  Especially when the unknown situation contains a pissed-off, bloody-taloned gryphon.