The Work of Hunters

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Now… her visions still scared her. But that was okay. Anyone who saw people getting hurt, killed, and knew it was about to happen, that she was seeing the future, and wasn’t scared, was an idiot. The difference was she knew what it was, now. And she knew that she could do something about it now. That was why Wren, her mentor, had sent her to Danny in the first place. So she could do something about it, so she didn’t feel so helpless.

  But if he was going to hold something back, if there was something so bad he couldn’t tell her….

  “Boss.” She swallowed, fought back the old bad habit of fear, and forced herself to meet his gaze squarely. “Whatever it is, I need to know.”

  He didn’t want to tell her, but she waited, and waited him out. He was the one who’d said they were partners. Partners told each other what was going on. Right?

  Five long breaths, and he exhaled, giving in.

  “What you saw.” He closed his eyes, and ran his fingers through his hair, flattening the brown curls so that the tips of his horns showed, briefly. “It happened already. Years ago.”

  “No.” She shook her head. That couldn’t be right. “I See things that are going to happen. That’s how it works.”

  “I know, kid. But you need to trust me on this. The murder you’re seeing? It already happened.”

  His certainty made no sense. Unless…. She remembered the thing she’d almost forgotten. That she’d recognized a voice in the vision. “You were there.”

  “What?” He froze, his hand halfway through his hair again, and glared at her, his face like stone. “No, that’s not possible.”

  Possible or not, she knew what she’d heard. Her hearing might not be as acute as his, but she knew what his voice sounded like. “I heard your voice. I didn’t know it was you, it didn’t sound like you, but it was.”

  He knew better than to argue about what she saw in a vision: she might not understand what she saw, not at first, but she knew. She scowled at him. Danny had been a cop, long time ago. Had she seen something from his past? But she didn’t see the past. All she could think was that everyone said being a Seer was rare, maybe there was something they didn’t know, some quirk—

  He stood up, shoving the chair back with the violence of his movement, and stalked to the door to his office, then stopped, both hands on the door like he wanted to shove it away. “So it’s going to happen again,” he said. “Fuck.”

  oOo

  Ellen was staring at me, her nostrils flared and her eyes too wide, the stink of fear and uncertainty like expensive perfume, tendrils reaching delicately into the air. A predator would be salivating: I just felt sick, my gut hurting like I’d been punched from the inside. What Ellen had described wasn’t possible on half a dozen levels, but the two most important were; the murder she’d described to a T had happened decades ago, and I hadn’t been on the recovery site. I’d made a point of staying far the hell away, in fact.

  So if she’d heard me in her vision…. Either she was wrong, or I was going to be there. At an event that had already happened.

  My brain joined my gut in hurting.

  Ellen was never wrong. Sometimes she didn’t interpret what she saw correctly, but her Sight was never wrong. And while I’d seen a hell of a lot in my life, I hadn’t seen anything that said time travel was possible. So we were left with one final option: that she’d Seen something about to happen, and that it overlaid the thing that had happened, somehow, to almost perfect detail.

  Which, logically, meant that the same killer had left both scenes.

  That wasn’t possible. I knew that, knew it for a cold hard fact. But every gut instinct I had told me to trust Ellen.

  Believing that deeply in two contradictory things might break some people, and it was doing its best to break me, too. But I’d seen enough impossible things happen in my life — hell, I was a near-impossible thing, or at least highly improbable — to know that thinking ‘that can’t happen’ was a pretty damnsure way to have it happen.

  “So…?” she said, clearly waiting for me to pull a brilliant plan out of my ass.

  Maybe it was a copycat. Maybe it was coincidence. “You said we had time?”

  “A little. I think.” She didn’t sound at all certain.

  We could go to the scene, but I couldn’t be sure it was the right where, and without a clear idea of when, we had as likely a chance of getting there too late, or — worse yet — just in time to be considered suspects. This might be a case where we were the clean-up crew, not the heroes.

  “I saw them dead,” Ellen said, echoing my thoughts. “Right at the beginning. It was all about the aftermath.”

  I turned on the police scanner, made another pot of coffee, and pulled out the chess set, to try and fill the time while we waited.

  Half an hour later, halfway through a game that was probably going to be stalemated, we heard a callout on the scanner, units responding to a too-familiar location I’d never — to the best of my knowledge — been.

  “That’s it,” I said, bile rising into my throat.

  Twenty minutes later we were out of the office, trying to hail a cab — the subway would take too long to get where we were going, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with my fellow New Yorkers.

  I raised my hand and a cabbie slid into place, which on a normal day would have been cause for self-congratulations and a little smugness. I opened the door and ushered Ellen inside, then gave the cabbie his direction.

  We didn’t talk, the entire trip. That only left me more time with my thoughts, none of which were good.

  And it didn’t help that Ellen was sitting next to me, practically vibrating with her need to know what was going on, what I hadn’t told her yet. Even if I couldn’t read it in every bone of her body, she was a normal, intelligent twenty-something with an unhealthy dose of curiosity and probably more compassion than was good for her, and she knew what she’d Seen bothered me far more than I had admitted, more than just a blast from the past echoing in our present, for reasons I hadn’t — wouldn’t — explain.

  I didn’t tell her anything. Partially because you don’t prejudice the scene before you’ve had a chance to look it over, and partially because the last thing I ever wanted to do was talk about that. Ever. My male genetic donor might be higher up the list, but just then I couldn’t have said for sure.

  And having daddy undearest suddenly show up at my front door would have been less a shock than this.

  We arrived before she actually imploded from impatience. I paid the cabbie by credit card — this might not be a case, officially, but I was going to claim it on my taxes anyway — and escorted Ellen by the elbow down the street to where my former co-workers had gathered.

  Cops, tape, flickering lights… walking into that alley between two 1950’s-era brick houses in Maspeth didn’t make me feel twenty-nothing again. Not much could — except the sound of Scott’s voice, booming over the softer voices and radio static.

  “Hendrickson!” He didn’t have the decency to sound surprised. “Get your ass over here.”

  That was enough to get us under the tape, although we got more than a few sideways looks. Most of the cops here didn’t know me from Eve, and the ones who did, I was just ‘the PI who’s not entirely an asshole,’ endquote.

  Scott was listening to a short, balding uniform when we reached him, and it didn’t look like he was enjoying what he heard.

  “Great. Wonderful. Tell Marge if she misses a single hair I’m busting her back down to lab assistant. Or gopher. Hendrickson. Why am I so fucking not surprised you’re here.”

  The uniform grabbed his dismissal and ran with it, back, one presumed, to tell Marge to be careful.

  “Sir.”

  He glared at me. “Don’t fucking sir me, you pointy-headed bastard. What do you know?”

  Scott had been in my class at the academy. We’d been bright-eyed and eager, that first year on the force. Now Scott was a captain out in Queens, graying and bitter, and me… well, thanks to
my fatae genetics, I looked like I could be his son. The fact that Scott could joke about it, tried on occasion to set me up with his actual daughter, was one of the reasons we were still friends.

  Most people outside the Cosa, once they figured out I wasn’t entirely human, backed off and forgot me, out of self-preservation. And I didn’t blame them.

  “This is Ellen,” I said, and waited while Scott sized my girl up. On the surface she looked impressive enough: tall, with mid-scale black skin, a regal nose an Egyptian queen would be proud to claim, wide-set eyes and otherwise even features, her hair close-cropped after an inebriated dryad tried to grab at it during our last case. If you were Talent, I’d been told, she was even more impressive, her core of current strong enough to be sensed by anyone paying attention.

  What she was, Valere’d told him once, kind of whispered itself in your ear — if you were Talent. I wasn’t, neither was Scott. Scott had been able to accept the fatae, the supernatural creatures of the world, but humans who could use magic? That was more than he’d wanted to know, and I’d respected that. He was an intuitive bastard, though. He knew there was something about her, something to be respected.

  “Heard you picked up a sidekick,” was all he said, now. Normally, under other conditions, that would be followed by a wisecrack, a challenge, a poke, to see how she reacted to being razzed. But not today. Scott was all business, and so were we.

  “Yeah. You know what’s over there.” I was asking, but it wasn’t a question.

  “I took a once-over when we hit the scene.”

  “Is it…” The words stuck in my throat, and I forced them out. “Is it the same?” Scott had been around for it, too, had heard the briefings. It was just a momentary blip in a long career, an ordinary atrocity that gets overlaid with others soon enough, but you still remember. You remember all of them.

  “Far as I can tell, carbon copy. That’s why you’re here? You think our boy’s resurfaced after thirty years?”

  No. No I didn’t think the killer had resurfaced. But I had no proof one way or the other, so I kept my mouth shut. “Okay if I take a look?”

  “Yeah sure go ahead. Fuck anything up and I’ll shred your license myself.”

  “I should…?” Ellen lifted her chin in the direction of the activity, then cut her eyes sideways to look at Scott. It was a tossup which was a worse idea, taking her to see the body, or leaving her here with the old man.

  “Come with me. If you think you’re going to throw up, back up ten paces and turn around before you let fly.”

  She nodded, and swallowed, then followed at my heels.

  The sound and motion around us wasn’t soothing — there’s no way a crime scene can ever be anything other than jarring, unpleasant — but not enough had changed since I left the force for it to not be familiar. This far in, people assumed I had a right to be there, and let me pass, Ellen keeping close.

  The dumpster was standard issue, the lid flipped open and the regulation scent wafting out. Nowhere near as bad as it had been in the late 70’s, but nothing you wanted to bottle and bring home, either.

  “I could have gone the rest of my life without ever smelling a decomp again.”

  “Picked the wrong line of work then,” someone responded automatically, then did a doubletake. “Er, sorry, sir?”

  If a guy out of uniform shows up at a crime scene, even wearing jeans, especially if he’s a white male with a female black companion at his heels, assume he’s either brass, or a politician. Cop 101. I waved him off — accepting his apology would bring too much attention to myself, trying to reassure him would make things worse. “How long’s the body been there?”

  “Guestimate’s twelve to twenty — stiff’s still stiff.”

  Inappropriate humor, the hallmark of…pretty much everyone in this city, actually.

  “Who called it in?”

  “Union’s finest,” and he lifted an elbow to indicate the men in grey coveralls, standing just outside the tape, leaning against a wall in a pose best described as “tired of this shit.”

  “They getting overtime to wait on you?”

  The shrug indicated that it wasn’t his problem. Not mine either, come to think of it.

  “Danny…”

  I turned, expecting Ellen to be making a break for the tape. I needed to stop underestimating her — she was a little green around the gills, but she was holding steady. “This is it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” We tried not to say things like “seen” or “vision” around Nulls. It tends to freak them out. “Come on.” We went closer, and the smell got worse. Another uniform handed me a tube and I swiped some balm on my top lip, then handed the tube on to Ellen, who used it and handed it back to the cop with a murmur of thanks. The obviously artificial pine-lemon scent doesn’t really help, but it gives your nose something nominally less disgusting to focus on.

  The details clocked in my brain: the body was adult, male, the skin bloodless enough to suggest it had been stored feet—up since being dumped. I was going to guess he’d originally been a dark-skinned Hispanic man. The first murder had been lighter-skinned. I went close enough to look at the toes. Ignoring the bloody mess where his toeprints would have been, there were ragged nails, ridged and slightly yellow. Not someone who went for regular pedicures. Then again, a guy with hooves shouldn’t point fingers.

  The flashes had stopped, and only one suited-up tech was lingering by the dump — they were going to remove the body soon. “Look quick and deep,” I told Ellen. “Don’t look for things that are similar — look for anything that might be different. Anything that jumps out at you.”

  She gave me a sideways glance, a clear ‘yeah boss I know’, then redirected her attention to the scene, circling around slowly, keeping out of the cops’ way. Hard to believe, watching her, that two years ago she didn’t know crap about this business, and a year before that she didn’t know crap, period.

  I’m a pretty good teacher, if I did say so myself. And yeah, maybe having a partner again wasn’t all bad. Not that I was ever going to admit to Valere and Torres that they’d been right.

  oOo

  Danny’s reminder lingering in her ears, Ellen studied the scene, letting her gaze flick over everything quickly the way she’d been taught. If you looked for something, you might miss something else even more important. If you let the scene speak for itself, that’s when you saw what was important. Or, like Danny had said, what was different, what stuck out.

  The menthol rub under her nose was distracting, and she almost wiped it off before remembering what it was covering up. Ugh.

  Body, check. Dumpster, check. Big bastard, high up enough that the killer would have to be tall to throw the body in, or have a ladder… or help. She looked down at the ground, but it was bare pavement. Any evidence that had been there, the cops would have already bagged and tagged, right?

  Danny wasn’t telling her something, either about this murder, or the one that had happened before. Not that this was new — he’d usually held stuff back. Sometimes it was because he wanted her to figure it out herself. Sometimes he just thought she didn’t need to know. But this…this was different. Because she’d seen him in the vision? No, she’d seen him before, had seen him dying, before. It wasn’t that. It had to be what had happened before.

  The problem was, her gift only told her when people were at risk of dying — or about to be dead. It didn’t give her any hints about the living. That she had to do the old-fashioned way, and Danny was way better than her at body language, both reading it and hiding it. There was —

  She stopped, not turning her head, not staring, just letting whatever it was creep into clearer focus.

  The cuff of the pants, fallen back away from the ankle. That was different? No. Her vision had the same dark jeans, fallen away from the same ankle, the same bare, bloody foot…

  No. “His skin was different.”

  “What?” Danny came closer, close
enough to keep their conversation private. “Whose skin was?”

  “In my vision?” She frowned at the body. “No. Yes.”

  Hadn’t it? Looking down, now, she wasn’t as certain. She’d never been that confused about a vision before. The surroundings, sure, and once even the time of day, but the victims she always saw clearly, their fear and panic reaching out to her through the current in some way nobody’d been able to explain, yet. She knew what she saw, even if she didn’t understand what she was seeing, yet. She saw the future. That was a thing she’d learned, clung to, when everything else was too much. She saw the future and she could change it.

  The body she’d seen in her vision had to be the one in front of her now. Nothing else made sense. But the skin had been different. And she hadn’t heard the words she’d heard Danny say. Had she?