The Work of Hunters

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Ellen reached for the memory, but it was melting away, running and blurring.

  “Is there… ” Was there a fatae that looked human, but could change its skin color? She couldn’t ask that out loud, not here. Danny had said that there were Talent in the police force, but not many fatae any more, not since the rules changed — that was why he’d gotten out, years ago. And you didn’t talk about stuff like that around Nulls, especially not Nulls with badges and training to be suspicious. “There’s no way skin can change? I mean, not…”

  “Not even with all the blood loss in the world.” His voice was tight, thin, and usually Danny had the best voice, like a slab of bittersweet chocolate. “You have enough?”

  “I… yeah.” There wasn’t anything to get: the person she’d seen in danger was dead. She didn’t know who’d done it, and there wasn’t anyone here who was going to hire them to look into it — it was, as Sergei sometimes said, ‘a matter for the cops,’ only with no sarcasm, this time. But she didn’t say any of that, just nodded her thanks to the nearest cop, and followed him back out under the tape.

  The old guy they’d talked to when they arrived was gone, as were most of the squad cars, making the alley considerably quieter as two people wheeled a stretcher past them, she guessed to take the body out and to the morgue.

  “Why did I… ” She changed tactics. “What happened, before?”

  “Not here,” he said.

  oOo

  The cab ride home was as quiet as the one out to the crime scene. Ellen — knowing that ‘not here’ meant ‘wait until we’re back in the office’ — stretched her legs out in front of her as best she could, and pulled her notebook out of her bag, staring at the open page, and the handwriting she barely recognized as her own.

  “Let me see,” Danny said, and she handed it over, trusting him not to flip pages beyond that one entry. She didn’t write anything she was ashamed of, but there were personal things there, too. But he marked the spot with his finger, reading only the day’s entry.

  She leaned back against the seat, and closed her eyes, exhaling and letting her barriers down, less from relaxation than exhaustion.

  *Okay?*

  The ping was a bare sensation in the back of her thoughts, a scrape of concern and worry, mingled with annoyance, the ‘tone’ of the sender as familiar as her own breathing, now: Wren, checking up on her. She closed her eyes to block out any distracting stimuli, and shaped a pulse of confirmation and reassurance, then sent it back.

  Some Talent could ping actual words, not just emotions or sensations, but it took more out of her than she had to spare just then. She wasn’t supposed to be in a cab, smelling of trash and dead person. She was supposed to be in her mentor’s apartment, being put through some new test or another, or getting a lecture on ethics — which would be funny, coming from The Wren, the best Retriever on the East Coast, if Wren didn’t take it so seriously — or… some other new torture thought up to see how grounded she was, how much control she had over her core.

  Core. It was still unnerving to her, even though learning about it had been the best thing to ever happen to her. That she could not only manipulate magic, but it was part of her? That it was real? Her hand went to her stomach involuntarily, even though she knew that her core wasn’t actually there, that was just her mind trying to enforce some kind of normality on magic.

  Not magic, she corrected herself, though she still totally thought of it as magic. Current. The Talent called it current. Magic was old world and fussy and using the word made both her mentor and Sergei wince, even though Danny laughed.

  Danny was old-fashioned too. She had asked him once how old he was and he’d ducked the question, but Pietr said that Danny’d been a cop back in the 90’s, so that meant he’d been in his early twenties back then, which would make him late-fifties or something, now.

  She glanced sideways at her boss. If he’d been a hundred percent human she’d have tagged him for mid-thirties, max. Hair still thick and dark, lines around his eyes but nothing extreme, and while he wasn’t her preferred type — she liked them bulkier, and a lot darker — he filled out jeans and a t-shirt respectably enough to get second looks on the street.

  Danny was half-faun. She didn’t know much about the fatae yet, despite meeting many of them in the past year, but she thought fauns might be one of the long-lived species. Her boss might look middle-aged until he was a hundred. The thought still boggled her.

  He wouldn’t die any time soon. The thought was not as soothing as it normally was: death could come to anyone, at any moment.

  She must have leaked some of her exhaustion and worry, because Wren’s second ping — a harder, more worried *what?* — demanded a more detailed response. Ellen tilted her head back against the upholstery and formed actual words in her head, shaping them with deliberate care, then wound a thin tendril of bright blue current around them, imagining them lighting up like a Broadway marquee.

  *Person in vision already dead. Heading back to office. Need to stick around a bit.*

  She didn’t add any of her confusion, the weird echo of a previous death, or the fact that Danny was upset. She loved her mentor, and depended on the older woman for a lot, but the work she did with the P.I… They were partners. Partners protected each other.

  Even if they were keeping secrets.

  When she looked at Danny again, he had tilted his head, watching her, a look of amused patience on his face. “You clear the rest of the day with Herself?”

  “How do you do that?” Most fatae couldn’t sense current, or only vaguely. But Danny always knew when she was dipping into her core, somehow.

  “You get this look on your face,” he told her. “Somewhere between constipated and pissed off.”

  “Oh, great.” She felt herself flush, and crossed her arms across her chest and looked out the window, refusing to acknowledge his faint chuckle.

  He paid the cabbie — technically this wasn’t Sylvan Investigations billable time, but they’d agreed that any follow— up they did on her visions fell under the ‘training’ portion of their agreement, until such a time as they actually acquired a client, so he covered expenses like this, rather than taking it out of her very small paycheck.

  Just as well: she’d expected to be working with Wren today, so hadn’t bothered to take more cash out. The more core she gathered the more likely she was to erase a credit card — as well as destroy the innards of small electronics — so she had a credit card only for special purposes, and rarely carried it with her.

  Sometimes it made her feel helpless, dependent on others, to not be able to carry a cell phone or use a laptop without worry. Then Wren would remind her that it was a side effect of her own core, because she was powerful in other ways, and that made it better. A little better, anyway.

  She needed all the little better she could get, just then.

  They got into the elevator, sliding the gate closed behind them and feeling the jerky movements as the cage started to glide upward. “Now will you tell me what’s going on?”

  “You’re certain that the man you saw in your vision wasn’t the same man as the scene?” He wasn’t doubting her, she reminded herself. He wasn’t questioning what she Saw. He was trying to determine why she was seeing two different things…and how it matched with whatever it was that he knew.

  “Tell me,” she said, instead, and he looked away.

  oOo

  She wanted to know what was going on. So did I. But I didn’t want to talk about it. I wasn’t sure I could talk about it, bluntly, enough. You pack something down deep enough, for enough years, and the words won’t come with chisels and hammers.

  “Tell me,” she said, and that was the first tink of a hammer, the first bite of a shovel, trying to unearth what should have stayed buried. When I looked away, she pushed. “The older cop, he said something about this being a carbon copy of something. And you said what I saw, it had happened before. The exact same thing, everything I saw. That’s why yo
u flipped, because I see the future, but you knew it was the past.”

  I’d trained her to listen, to hear, and to remember. And to put the pieces together. Hollow victory when she used those skills against me, but I couldn’t help feeling a rush of satisfaction.

  “Thirty years ago,” I agreed. “But the victim was black, then.”

  I hadn’t been there when they pulled it from the dumpster, only read the report, later. Fingertips and toes shredded, face destroyed, wearing only a pair of pants, with no identification or identifying marks. Back then, there hadn’t been a way to identify the body, not if they weren’t already in the system.

  “And they never caught the killer?”

  “No.” Regret caught in my throat, tasting like bile. Never caught the killer. Not that we hadn’t known.

  “You worked the case?”

  “There really wasn’t much of a case,” I told her as we reached out floor, holding the cage open as she moved past me, down the wall toward our office. Nobody else was around; it was that kind of building. “No identification meant nobody yelling to get results, meant it got shoved down the priority list. And no other bodies surfaced in the same way, so we weren’t dealing with a serial killer.” Just homicide.

  “And he was black.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, and he was black.” Not even the black community had rallied around that body, though. He’d been nobody in life, and remained nobody in death.

  But now, thirty years later, someone else had been killed in the same way. And Ellen had Seen it. And Seen me, there.

  I had to figure out why.

  I unlocked the door to the office, and ushered Ellen in, closing the door carefully behind me and making sure to lock it. We didn’t have any appointments scheduled for today, and I didn’t want to be disturbed by anything new. “I want to try something. If you’re game.”

  Ellen perched herself on the edge of her desk again, crossing her arms across her chest, game, but uncertain. “I’ll try anything once,” she said, which was a total lie: She was a conservative beast, until she’d scoped out all the angles.

  “I want to try and invoke a vision.”

  Her entire body tensed, but not in a flight-or-fight way. “Wren and I do that,” she said. “Only she sources wild to do it.”

  Wild sourcing — pulling current out of the atmosphere, usually through a hovering lightning storm or up out of a ley line. Made sense, since Ellen was a storm-seer, triggered by those same natural currents.

  “Yeah well, not an option for me.” Thank any god you wanted to name, I wasn’t Talent. My mother had been a lovely woman, but Null. And fatae were magic, but very few used it. “We’d be doing this Null-school,” I told her. “No current, just your brain. And I’ll be here to walk you through it.”

  She thought about that for a bit, then nodded. “Okay.”

  It took a few minutes to set up, most of which involved unplugging anything electric, and having Ellen kick off her shoes and untuck her blouse, getting comfortable.

  “Just breathe naturally. Keep your eyes closed lightly, don’t force it, like you’re ready to fall asleep.”

  Ellen was in her chair — mine might be more comfortable but her body knew hers, and that was more important right now. Her head was tilted back, chin dropped just slightly, the faint lines that were beginning to form around her eyes and mouth eased as she went through the breathing exercises.

  “Let me know when you feel ready,” I told her, watching the turn of her elbows, the lines of her neck. She would tell me when she felt ready, but her body would tell me when she was ready. Slowly, a breath at a time, the sharpness of her elbow softened, her neck relaxed, and when she said ‘ready’ in a quiet, still voice, she actually was.

  “You’re standing next to a dumpster,” I told her. “It’s right in front of you, but you’re not looking at it yet. Your arms are at your side, you’re calm, there’s nothing there except you, and the dumpster.”

  Some like to set the stage completely, control everything except what they want the subject to recall. I always thought that bled over into the recall, that it was better to leave the subject to fill in those blanks on their own.

  “It’s warm,” she said, like reading off a placard. “Summer-warm.” It wasn’t warm today, the weather still clinging to spring’s fresh chill. The first body had been found in the late autumn. No match either end. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. Her nose wrinkled, her upper lip rising in an expression of distaste. “It smells. Bad. Worse than trash.”

  A corpse, heated by warm metal. I didn’t have to imagine: I knew the smell too well.

  “Are you ready to look, now?”

  Normally when we walked someone through this, it was their memory of an actual event, something they’d seen; trying to get them to recall all the details that fled the conscious mind. But when I asked Ellen if she was ready to look, it was with a capital L.

  “Not yet,” she said, her voice soft, almost lethargic. I waited while she took another breath, then another, still drawing in through her mouth and out through her nose, despite the smell she was ‘remembering.’

  “It’s warm. And my feet hurt.” Her voice hardened a little, taking on almost a whining edge. “I hate this part.”

  Alarm ran through me. That was her voice, but it wasn’t her voice. The accent was wrong, the intonations off. But I waited: working with Talent always threw a few wrenches into the plan, and the worst thing I could do right now would be to startle her.

  “Taking out the trash. That’s all this is.” Her hands lifted and clenched, her head tilted, and then her eyes were open, too wide, the whites around the pupils visible, her nostrils flared, and she was lurching out of the chair into my waiting hands, even as I heard the sizzling noise of the lights overhead popping and blowing out.

  The office plunged into darkness, and I suspected even unplugging the coffee maker hadn’t protected it, even as my hands were running down her arms, using the familiarity of touch and scent and the sound of my voice to bring her back to Now and Here.

  “Ellen. Ellen. Come on, open your eyes sweetheart, look at me. You see me?”

  Slowly, her eyes focused again on me, and the trembling of her skin stilled.

  “That wasn’t me,” she said. “Don’t make me do that again.”

  “I won’t, sweetheart, it’s okay.” I let my hands rest at her elbows, not holding so much as cradling the sharp joints, waiting for her to make the decision to move away.

  I had no idea what had just happened.

  oOo

  It took Ellen nearly half an hour to move away from Danny’s hold, thankful that he didn’t protest, or ask her how she felt. She thought it was probably pretty obvious: she felt like she wanted to throw up, or throw something. Or both.

  “Sorry about the lights.” He was up on a step-ladder in the gloom, a flashlight in one hand, replacing the bulbs that had blown out.

  “Standard office supply deduction” he said, finishing the last one, and stepping off the ladder. “Hold your breath… ” When he flipped the circuit breaker back on, the room filled with light again.

  He turned off the flashlight and put it on the desk.

  “That wasn’t me.” She had to say it, before anything else, had to affirm and confirm that the thing she had felt wasn’t her, hadn’t come from her. It felt like curdled milk, smelled like sunburn, and if she could scrape it outside of her and burn it to ash, she would.

  “No. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I just don’t know how…” His voice trailed off.

  “That was the killer.”

  He nodded. “From what you said, yeah I think so.”

  “How? And was it the one back then, or now?” Danny seemed certain the killers couldn’t be the same, but… There had been no sense of time in what she had felt, no visual she could connect with. Nothing except the feeling of it, leaving her sick and disoriented. “I don’t ever want to do that again. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay.”
/>   He had already promised her that, but she needed to hear it again. “Promise?”

  “Solemn oath,” he said, and that was what she’d needed.

  She had a headache, though, and her mouth tasted like the vision had smelled. She got up and pulled a soda from the little fridge: it was still cold, even though the fridge had been unplugged. She plugged it back it back in, but the condenser didn’t start to hum. “Damn it. Coffee maker dead?”

  “Can’t imagine it survived.” She wanted to hide her head: bad enough to blow light bulbs, they were easy targets. But that coffee maker had been nice — and Danny was impossible without his morning caffeine.