The Work of Hunters

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “You were a little stressed,” he said. “You’re probably going to need a new ATM card, too.”

  “Damn it.” That would be the second one this year already. And never mind that the bank manager at her branch was Talent and wouldn’t ask embarrassing questions, it was still embarrassing. “I hate that part of this. And yes, I know, every gift has a price tag, even if we don’t see it.” That was Sergei’s favorite saying, and she and Wren would both roll their eyes when he trotted it out, even though it was completely true.

  Nothing came without a cost. To help people, she had to See bad things. But when the person was already dead… The theory was that the current- surge picked up strong emotions, things that were so strong even a Null could project them, and her skill was strong enough that she picked them up out of the storm, siphoning them off automatically along with the current. Lucky her.

  But this vision… there hadn’t been a victim’s distress. Only the killer.

  “There’s too much overlap in the way the bodies were disposed of for me to think they’re two utterly unrelated killers,” Danny said, and his voice was the one he used when he was puzzling out clues, smooth and weirdly disinterested-sounding. He didn’t shut his emotions away, he said they were his most useful tools, but he didn’t let them get tangled in the facts. She tried to match that.

  “The same person, thirty years apart? Wouldn’t they be too old, now?” She thought about Danny’s age. “Unless they weren’t human?”

  “People kill well into their seventies and eighties,” he said. “But generally not with the violence that required.” He started pacing again, one hand running through his hair, scratching lightly behind the nub of his horns, mostly-hidden under his curls.

  “If the vision somehow overlapped, if you were feeling what happened in the past, too, reading the echoes or something, we’ll leave that to the Pups to figure out how, that’s another point saying they’re connected, too. But this second one… ” he hesitated. “I hate to ask this,” and for Danny to say that he really did not want to ask, “but when you were in his thoughts… did he know you were there?”

  The question was like running nose-first, going eighty miles an hour, into a brick wall. She couldn’t even imagine the look on her face, but it was enough to make Danny sigh, and run his hands through his hair again. “We need to talk to Valere.”

  oOo

  My mother raised me reasonably well: I’m confident in my own skills, but not so arrogant that I think I know everything or can handle everything. So I sent Shadow off to wash her face and shake out the last of the vision-tatters clogging her brain, and I called her mentor back, and told her to meet us at the coffee shop down the street from us, stat.

  Wren Valere. There were any number of retrievers in the Cosa Nostradamus, but when someone said the Retriever, there was never any doubt who they were talking about. If you had something that needed to be reclaimed by means less-than-legal, and you had the funds, you went to Wren Valere. Or you used to, anyway. I studied the woman across the table from me, by now used to the way my gaze slid over her features, never really taking anything in. That was part of her success, that utter — and apparently natural — invisibility.

  Five foot-ish, brown hair, brown eyes, white skin… as a trained observer I should have been able to tell you the exact shade of her eyes, the tone of her skin, if she had high cheekbones or a mole over one eyebrow. I couldn’t have said with any certainty if her face was round or square. She was…unmemorable.

  She was also the one who had, not quite singlehandedly, brought down a highly-funded not-as-secret-as-they-thought anti-fatae organization, helped save the Cosa from tearing itself apart, and probably saved the entire city from burning down in the aftermath. All before she was forty.

  She also put too much sugar in her coffee. My teeth hurt just watching her.

  I drank my own coffee, and waited. Ellen had just caught her mentor up on all the details since this morning, with the occasional assist from me.

  “I’ve been reading up on Seers, since Ellen landed on my doorstep,” Valere said. “Most of ‘em, something like this, I’d say no way. They See the future, not the past, and that’s all there is to it. But El’s a Storm Seer. And that’s… there’s less specifics on that, mainly because there are so few.”

  Few, powerful, and slightly terrifying, all the more so because Ellen’s skillset focused on the dead or dying. Nothing is feared so much as the person who brings that inevitable news.

  “So it’s possible? That I saw something that had already happened?” Ellen clearly wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  Wren gave her a Look they must teach you in mentor training — my first partner’d had it in spades. “The moment you say something’s not possible, someone will do it. But it’s not probable.”

  “You’ve been with Didier too long,” I told her, because that was a line right out of his mouth. She gave me the finger without taking her attention off Ellen, but the exchange seemed to have drawn some of the tension out of the both of them.

  “But it happened today,” Ellen went on. I saw that, too? But the details weren’t right. And when Danny invoked a vision… ”

  “Yeah, we are going to talk about that,” Valere said to me. I nodded. She had a right to be pissed, but I still thought it had been a risk worth taking.

  “I think what happened in your first vision was an echo between the first murder and the one … today? Last night?”

  “Earlyish in the morning,” I said, “going by what the scene looked like. That’s not a drop site you can use much after dawn.” Not unless you knew exactly when the garbage trucks would pull by, and being wrong by ten minutes could mean getting caught with your hand in the till. “And that’s when the weather was acting up, according to the weather daily site, so it would make sense.” I’d done my research when Ellen first came to me, too: Storm Seers didn’t need an actual storm to pick up their signals, but atmospheric disturbances did seem to up the oomph, as it were.

  “An echo?” Ellen was mulling that. “So it wasn’t that I couldn’t see or remember the vision clearly, it’s that there were… ”

  “Overlays,” Wren said. “Or maybe a reflection in a mirror of another reflection. One of the PUPs could explain it better, and given half an opening probably will, at length. But it makes sense, why the details were off.”

  “Except it doesn’t.” I didn’t want to be the one to point it out, but there was a major flaw in the theory. “It doesn’t explain why — and why her last vision was from the killer’s point of view. Why would she be catching echoes from him, not the victim, like usual?”

  That stumped both of them, from the silence I got in return.

  “And,” because the devil’s in the details, “Ellen said that it was warm, in her third vision. It wasn’t warm last night, and the first one happened in the autumn. So is this a third killing we don’t know about, or one that’s yet to happen, or… ”

  There couldn’t be a third to come. There couldn’t even be a second one. Except there had been.

  I looked up, and Valere was giving me a side-eye — not accusingly, more of a ‘what aren’t you telling us?’ consideration. I wide-eyed back at her, lifting my eyebrows to ask ‘What? You have something to ask me?’ She looked away, and the question was dropped. For now. I was going to have to tell them, though. It was pure D stupidity not to, stupidity to not have told them from the start.

  But my mouth stayed shut.

  “There’s always a logical reason, some kind of connection.” Ellen was clearly parroting one of her lessons, the way Valere was nodding along. “Maybe it was because we tried to force it, coax the vision, instead of it coming naturally? I might have gotten the echo of the first murder on the second, because there were so many similarities, and then… I’d seen it and I’d been there, so when I reached back, I hooked into the killer, not the victims? And maybe he was thinking about another kill, one that took place in the summer?”
>
  “How?” Everything they’d told me was that it was the victim who triggered the vision, that their imminent death — realized or not — plucked whatever strings Ellen was tuned into.

  “If the killer was Talent,” Wren said slowly. “And not just Talent, but a Seer, too.”

  That, I hadn’t been expecting.

  oOo

  “I thought seers were rare.”

  “They are. Maybe one-in-fifty-thousand rare, maybe a hundred thousand. Or maybe there are more, and most of them never know what they are, or make an actual fuss about it, so nobody ever knows.”

  We’d moved on from coffee to desert, a huge plate of baklava the waitress had brought over, with three forks. A refreshing thing, working with Talent: current burned calories, so there was no “oh I’m watching my diet” among the more high-res folk. In fact, I had to stab a few hands to get my fair share.

  “So someone could be a seer, and never show any sign of it?” I didn’t blame Ellen for sounding dubious: her visions slammed into her like a semi, and there was no way she could pretend they didn’t happen. She’d been called insane — and worse — by Nulls before she understood what was happening to her, because she couldn’t just shake it off.

  “You’re exceptional, El. Most seers aren’t anywhere near as strong as you were even without training, and now…” Wren Valere was many things, but modest wasn’t one of them. “And now” clearly meant “and now that I’ve gotten you trained up, you’re awesome.”

  “So a low-res Talent, who also happens to be an equally lo-res seer, kills someone, or plans to kill someone, maybe thinks hard about the next time they plan to kill someone, and tangles their stream with Ellen’s?”

  “It’s a logical explanation.”

  And whatever Nulls might think about current — magic — it was, above all, a logical phenomena at core. I nodded, trying to rejigger my brain to fit that into the puzzle.

  “Unless there’s something else you’d like to add to the discussion?”

  “Seriously, you need to spend some time away from Didier, your mimicking is getting creepy,” I told her, and swiped the last bit of baklava from under her fork, distracting her from that line of questioning.

  Ellen, younger but smarter than both of us, asked, “If you’re right, and the killer’s Talent — is it the same killer from thirty years ago? Or a copycat with a really strong visual sense?”

  Wren looked at me. “How much evidence was there of the first killing?”

  My utter and absolute lack of desire to think about it, much less talk about it, didn’t matter a fuck any more. “The usual.” I shrugged, trying to reach for a casual indifference. “Wasn’t my case, but there was some talk about it. Photographs, mainly, and the original reports, on the scene and post-mortem. So yeah, someone could have got hold of the old file. If they were turned on enough to replicate it, they’d have to have a strong emotional reaction. Pre-deed jollies?”

  Ellen made a vague noise of disgust.

  “Sorry, Shadow, but that’s how people like that roll. You want to get their reasons for doing something, you gotta deal with that.”

  “I just…. That person was in my head,” she said.

  I thought about what she’d said and what it meant, and winced. “Yeah. Sorry.”

  Wren had started drawing something on the table with the tip of her finger. She might have been using current to make a mark: if so, I couldn’t see it. “It would make more sense for it to be the same killer.”

  “Except like I said to Ellen, the guy — or woman, not to make assumptions — would be at least fifty by now, probably older. Not to be ageist, but there comes a time when beating someone’s face in and hauling them to a dumpster disposal takes more upper body strength than most mid—life crisis have. And his being a Talent rules out fatae involvement.”

  His being Talent also ruled out it being the same killer. But I couldn’t tell them that, or how I knew. I rubbed my face and shoved my fingers through my hair, trying to stave off the headache pushing its way in. I needed to tell them, but the thought of the words it would take made my throat squeeze shut.

  “Maybe a partner,” Wren said, trying the idea out. “A younger partner, picking up where he left off?”

  “No.” Ellen frowned, then shook her head. “No.” She seemed certain, and she’d been the one in the guy’s head, however briefly, so we didn’t push it.

  “The new killer’s Talent, then. At the risk of going all shrink-like, maybe they read about the original killing, and it triggered something in them?” I wasn’t going to comment on the link between Talent and crazy, not where Ellen could hear, but I was thinking it. The proportion of slightly nuts was consistently higher in the Talent community, be it an effect or cause of Talent, nobody was saying.

  “We tend toward power-mad, not bloodthirsty,” Wren said dryly, knowing damn well what I was thinking.

  oOo

  “There’s nothing we can do right now, without more information,” Danny said. His hair was sticking up in all directions, the tips of his horns barely visible through the dark curls. Ellen raised an eyebrow at him and he reached down to grab the baseball cap on the bench next to him, jamming it on his head. Most people in New York — everywhere — ignored what looked bizarre, or assumed it was a costume, but Danny tended to keep his differences hidden, when he was out in public. The fact that he’d been so careless told her something was going on — more than just the question of what was going on with her vision.

  “You two go do whatever it was you were originally going to do,” he said. “Let me work my own magic, see what I can dig up about today’s incident.”

  “All right,” Wren said, shutting Ellen’s objections down with a sideways glance. “Call when you get something.”

  They left him to settle the bill, and took the subway uptown, neither feeling the need to fill the silence with words while they were in public.

  The thought that the killer was Talent — and a seer! — lingered in Ellen’s thoughts, all the way back to Wren’s apartment. Talent killed. She knew that — knew it firsthand — but it still felt wrong somehow. It didn’t fit with what she’s seen — or what she’d Seen. Bonnie — one of the paranormal investigators who’d first explained to Ellen what she was, what her skill set did — had said once that when Talent kill it’s generally a crime of passion, and usually they use current to do it, because that’s their natural, instinctive weapon. They don’t beat someone to death.

  And the dumpster? That was… specific. You toss a body in the trash, you’re saying it was trash. Garbage. Something to be disposed of, rather than buried or cremated.

  Was that significant? Yes, she decided, following her mentor off the subway, and up to the street. Yes, it was. But was it significant to the first killing, and carried over by the copycat? Or did both killers feel it?

  Walking into Wren’s apartment, surrounded by the familiar sense of current-grounding and elemental locks, was a relief. Ellen sank into the sofa, but the tension didn’t flow out of her the way it usually did. She closed her eyes, and listened to the sound of her mentor in the kitchen, opening the refrigerator and taking something glass out. A snap, and the sound of something being poured.

  When she opened her eyes again, there was a tall glass of ice water waiting on a coaster on the coffee table in front of her, as well as a familiar white plastic binder. Wren sank into the chair opposite her, but didn’t seem relaxed, either.

  “He knows something.”

  Ellen didn’t roll her eyes at the statement, only because she respected her mentor too much. Also because Wren would make her pay for it somehow, eventually. “Yeah, I know. Danny likes to think he’s subtle as shit, and he’s really not.” He could be sneaky and cajoling and persuasive, but not subtle. Probably the faun genetics; she’d heard enough about his father’s people to know that ‘subtle’ wasn’t even in their dictionary.

  “But I don’t think it’s anything really relevant. He’s not subtle, bu
t he’s also not stupid. He wouldn’t keep anything back that could give us” and she almost said answers, and at the last minute said “solutions.”

  She didn’t know why she was defending him. No, she knew why: because Danny was holding something back and Wren was going to poke at it, and that meant conflict, and she didn’t like the feeling of being torn between mentor and boss. She hadn’t even heard about the Cosa Nostradamus until she was an adult, long past when she should have been in mentorship, but she knew that the relationship between her and Wren was supposed to trump everything. But Wren — and Bonnie and the rest of the PUPs — had decided that working with Danny Hendrickson would be part of her mentorship too, to give her an outlet, the chance to do something with her abilities, give her some kind of hope, she guessed, and now….

  And now Danny was as much her mentor as Wren, in some ways, and most of the time it worked and sometimes it didn’t.