The Work of Hunters

by Laura Anne Gilman

  He drew in a breath, as though he were about to protest my assumption of his assumptions, then exhaled and nodded. Again, I like working with professionals.

  “Noted. So the probable target community knows they’re being targeted. Do they have any idea by whom?”

  “None. Like your people, nobody’s seen anything, nobody’s heard anything, and nobody I spoke to personally knew anyone who’s gone missing. But they’re all on edge. Like gazelles who are damn sure there’s a pride of lions over the hill.”

  “Nice image. And you’re planning to go back there tonight and blend with the locals, see if a lion bites at your heels?”

  “Yes, and no. If the killer is focusing on the pattern of the first murder, then they’re targeting humans who are not only out of the mainstream, but have done so for less than savory means. Pimps, pushers, abusers… basically, un-nice people. So odds are, whoever it is won’t go after me. I’m many things, but unsavory isn’t one of them.”

  I wasn’t being entirely truthful: there was a pinprick in my thoughts, that my original connection to the first murder’s cover-up might be unsavory enough to draw attention. But there was no need to mention that to the PUP.

  If the killer went for me, so much the worse for the killer.

  “Plus, all three vics have been human,” Pietr pointed out. “You probably smell wrong, or something.”

  “Yay me,” I said less than enthusiastically. But he was right, and I’d stupidly missed that: so far, this had been an all-human affair. “Ping Ellen, see if she’s on her way. She never has her phone turned on when she’s working, and I need lunch before I fall over.”

  And, if we were lucky, she’d found some other parts to the puzzle we could use.

  oOo

  Ellen didn’t respond to Pietr’s ping, but she showed up about five minutes later, out of breath and slightly flushed from more than her fast—paced stride.

  “Sorry. I didn’t want to risk putting them off by looking at the clock, and I didn’t want to rush them, either, so — ”

  “I take it from that you got luckier than we did,” Pietr said, cutting off her flustered explanation.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Paul, he’s the counter guy at LaLa’s — it’s a bakery,” she explained to Danny. “Really good one. Anyway, it’s where a lot of Talent who work night shifts hang out. Wren took me there a few times to meet, um… ”

  “People I should officially take no notice of?” Pietr said dryly.

  “Yeah. Them.” She shook off the moment. “So, I asked around and managed to get … one of the employees there to talk.”

  She paused, and on cue Danny said “attagirl,” and grinned at her. “And by ‘managed’ I assume you mean ‘bribed them with a favor to be named later?’”

  She made a face at him. “I don’t make that mistake twice, thank you very much. And no, I didn’t have to promise anything. I think he wanted to talk, he just didn’t know who to talk to.”

  “And you were it?” Pietr sounded almost hurt.

  “And Wren Valere’s protégé was it,” she corrected him. “Once I reassured him it wasn’t one of her jobs I was working, anyway. First time I’ve ever played on her reputation.”

  “How did that feel?” Danny asked.

  “Unpleasant,” she admitted. “But useful.”

  “Good,” Danny said. “So you’ll use it when you need to, and not lean on it.”

  “Everything’s a teachable moment with you, boss, isn’t it?”

  He made a face back at her. “Report, Shadow.”

  “Right. So he and some buddies were out one night, doing things we’re not talking about, and were heading home around two, three in the morning, crossing past Fourth Calvary cemetery, pausing to pay their respects. Because that’s what you do at three am, apparently.” She sounded deeply dubious of that. Considering their last experience in a graveyard at night, neither man contradicted her.

  “Anyway, they were coming off work, so none of them had been drinking, he swears it on his mother’s name. And all of them saw the same thing exactly.” She paused, holding it long enough for both of them to give her ‘get on with it’ gestures.

  “Ball lightning, forming over a gravesite.”

  “That’s odd, but — ” Danny started to say, then stopped when Pietr held up a hand.

  “Did they notice a color to it?”

  She nodded. “It was several shades of green.”

  Danny looked from one Talent to the other. “And that means something?”

  Pietr gave a half-shrug. “We’re still not sure what the colors current manifest as mean, but —”

  “Wait, current?” This time Danny interrupted him. “On its own? Admittedly I’m not Talent, but it’s that unusual?”

  “That’s what freaked them out, boss. Wild current running alongside lightning or a ley line is one thing, we know how to deal with that. Or, I do now anyway,” and she gave him a rueful look. “But it has to be sourced from something; it doesn’t just appear on its own.”

  Basic stuff. Current ran alongside electrical energy, like well-mannered twins. A Talent was a Talent because they could siphon off that current with their bodies, filter it into raw and manipulatable power, where a Null — an ordinary human — would become a crispy critter. Some of the fatae could interact with current, but mostly on an autonomous level; they couldn’t direct it.

  “On its own.” Danny was having trouble processing that, and Ellen felt a twinge of sympathy. She had probably looked much the same when Paul had told her what he’d seen.

  Pietr, meanwhile, was already thinking several steps ahead of them. “Did they mark what grave it was forming over? Was it a new burial? Maybe the body was releasing its core after the fact. It’s rare, but it does happen.”

  “The grave was an old one, in an older section,” Ellen said. “No new residents in that entire row, they said. Just the ball of current, swirling and snapping.”

  “And?”

  “And they ran like hell, assuming that the entire thing was going to implode. But nothing happened, that they heard or heard about later. I think they’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, ever since.”

  “And when did this happen?” Danny asked.

  “A week ago.”

  Her boss lifted an eyebrow. “The same week since the first body was found?”

  “That week, yeah.”

  “I don’t suppose they took down the name of the stiff in the grave they were observing?” Pietr asked.

  “They did not.” She’d asked, and gotten an ‘are you insane?’ look in return. “Not everyone has the stoic determination of a PUP, you know.”

  “And thank god for that, otherwise I would be out of a job. So what now, Hendrickson — we go graveyard-hiking?”

  Her boss nodded glumly. “Might want to bring a shovel, too.”

  oOo

  Walking through a graveyard in the daylight is an oddly soothing thing, green leaves and green grass and a relative silence in the middle of a city. People used to picnic in cemeteries once up on a time. Hell, Pietr had greeted my suggestion of a shovel with a suggestion that I remember who I was talking to, so we even looked like picnickers, carrying nothing more potentially distressing than a thermos.

  My thermos, specifically, that I’d filled with holy water before we left Manhattan. I had no idea if it would be useful against anything we might encounter, but my mother raised me to consider the angles and cover my odds. Then again, tossing holy water onto wild current might blow half the city up. It’s uncertainty like that that makes my job fun.

  “Could be worse, boss.” Ellen said, walking by my side, while Pietr strode ahead of us on the path, checking each row of headstones as he went. He’d spent half an hour back-and-forthing with Bonnie while we were in transit, and come back with what they called a cantrip, that should lead us to where the current-burn should be.

  Might. Should.

  I turned my attention back to Ellen. “Oh?” That hadn�
��t been a very Ellen—like thing to say, she wasn’t a natural optimist, nor did she generally embrace snark.

  There was no snark in her voice or in her expression when she said, “No missing kids.”

  That was a nasty gut-punch, both the thought and the truth of it. I hadn’t planned on specializing in missing teenagers, it was just that kids tended to fall through the cracks between official and not-official more often than adults, and too often the not-official involved the fatae. Impressionable teenagers and some of my cousins… bad mix.

  “Yeah, just some unknown Talent killing random adults and leaving them in Dumpsters. So much better.” But it was, and if that made me a bad person, well, I’d come to terms with that a long time ago.

  “Over here,” Pietr said, interrupting the moment, and calling us over. He then ruined the brief burst of adrenaline by adding, “I think.”

  “You think? That’s reassuring.” Too sharp: ‘think’ was better than we’d had before. Without a name to search on, finding the place they’d seen it would have been impossible except for the fact that PUPI didn’t accept impossible. Either their cantrip had worked, or it hadn’t; we had to trust that it had.

  We caught up with him, standing over a grave that looked pretty much identical to every other path in its row: plain headstone, the carving still fresh enough to be readable, without any particular design.

  “A cop,” I said, because that was the first thing that caught my eye, even before the guy’s name. “A Talent?”

  Pietr gave me an epic side-eye. “You think I know the name of every Talent in the city aboveground, much less under?”

  All right, it had been a stupid question. “You can find out?”

  “Yeah.” He got that unfocused look, and I figured he was pinging someone back in the office. They could say it wasn’t actually telepathy all they wanted, if it looked like telepathy and got results like telepathy, it was telepathy in my book.

  “David Kovar,” Ellen said, tracing her fingers over the headstone, then looking down at the grass covering his mortal remains. There was nothing I could see that indicated anything other than mediocre groundskeeping, and nobody visiting to care.

  I’d already arranged to be cremated. Graves were just depressing.

  “You picking anything up?” I asked Ellen, who had cocked her head as she studied the grass, like she expected it to tell her something. Maybe it was, who the hell knew. I shifted, and looked around to make sure we weren’t being watched by a suspicious groundskeeper or legitimate mourner.

  “I’m not that good,” she said reluctantly. “Scraps, maybe. Aftertaste. Definitely current,” she added, lifting her chin, her nostrils flaring like she was catching an actual scent. “And definitely wild-sourced. It… tastes different. Or not different, but, like the difference between the wind coming off the ocean versus a breeze over a lake?”

  “Got it.” She’d learned to use nature metaphors with me. I might be a city boy down to my boots, but there’s some resonances that are bone-deep and bred in.

  “But it’s gone now,” she said. “It went somewhere else.” She looked up at me and frowned. “Current doesn’t do that. If it’s not gathered, it just… finds the nearest line to connect with.” She looked around, then down again. “There’s no obvious man-made electricity out here, and there isn’t a ley line for miles…. And we haven’t had a half-decent storm in weeks. So where did it go?”

  She was asking Pietr more than me, for obvious reasons. He had that same pose; like a hunting dog trying to pick up the scent in the wind.

  “I’m assuming it couldn’t just get up and walk away?” I raised my hands when they both shot me looks, the kind that asks if you were dropped on your head as a child or just naturally stupid. “Hey, you ask me how to track down a gnome or out-annoy a piskie, I’m your guy. Current? Really not my thing.”

  “For god’s sake, don’t even mention piskies,” Pietr said, swallowing hard. “That’s the last thing this day needs.”

  We may or may not have paused long enough to listen for the unmistakable chittering sound of piskies snickering in the underbrush or tree branches overhead. Nothing.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. But my point is, you guys are the experts, not me. So…what causes a ball of current to form, and what could carry it away?”

  “Another Talent, maybe,” Pietr said. “Someone who could handle it. Or maybe several someones. Venec could. Valere. Maybe a few others.”

  “Not you?” Ellen asked.

  “Not me. I’m reasonably high-res — ” Understatement, since no PUP was low-res, it was a job requirement to be powered-up, but I took his point — “but something that hot would burn me significantly. You could handle it though,” he said to her, eying her appraisingly. “Probably even better than Venec.”

  “Me?” Ellen looked slightly nauseated at the thought.

  “You’re a Storm-seer, Ellen. Natural affinity to wild current, remember?” He shook his head. “You, and Valere, and maybe Solange, but that’s about it. But it’s none of you, and if someone that supercharged had come into the city, we’d have heard about it by now.”

  ‘We’ meaning the PUPs, not us.

  “So, what carried it out, then? And I’m still waiting for an explanation of how it formed.” I didn’t like the idea that wild current could just suddenly spark into life in the middle of a graveyard. What if it had happened somewhere more populated by people who were actually breathing? Odds were, even the nullest of Nulls would notice something weird going on, and the last time that happened, the entire Cosa paid the price.

  “Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, we have theories but…” Pietr studied the ground. “I need to run some tests.”

  That explained the dark blue case he had slung over his shoulder; he’d brought his lab with him. “You do that. Ellen, you said it went elsewhere, Pietr says you can handle it. The question is, can you track it?”

  She blinked at me, thinking. “Maybe?”

  “If anyone could, she should be able to,” Pietr confirmed. “Gather the scraps and braid them together,” he said to her. “That’s what I’d do.”

  She nodded, looking thoughtful, and more than a little nervous.

  “Even if you can’t follow it,” I told her, “anything you learn will be useful.” Even if we couldn’t find where our suspect went, there was a lot you could tell about someone by how they went. And you never knew what piece was going to suddenly make the puzzle complete.

  oOo

  Ellen wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, but one of the first things Bonnie had told her, and Wren kept repeating over and over, was that half of using current was letting your body do what it did naturally. The other half was controlling it.

  She’d almost died before, had almost gone insane, because she hadn’t known how to control it. Now she did. Grounding had been the first and hardest lesson she’d learned, those first few weeks with Bonnie and the PUPs, but she had learned it.

  Focus. Be aware of the body, aware of the core inside her, the strands of current coiled loosely around some place that wasn’t, that might have been at the base of her spine, or the pit of her stomach. Ground. Keep the current controlled and calm, the static energy ready but not active, waiting but not anxious.

  She’d spent the first twenty years of her life being anxious without knowing why: it was still odd to know it had a cause, that she could control that cause, soothe it.

  Focused and grounded, she opened her eyes and looked with what Wren called magesight, where she could see the flickers and flares of current running through everything. Even now, it was still slightly terrifying, and hypnotic, but she managed to narrow it through focus, until the flares specific to the wild current came clear, and everything else faded slightly.

  Red and orange. Vibrant, neon sparkles, some of them barely large enough to see, others snapping like firecrackers, swirling in a tight ball like… well, like ball lightning, she guessed.

  “Which way?”

&n
bsp; The boss’ voice was quiet, controlled, and that made it easier for her to maintain control, too. She turned her head, and watched how the flickers moved — no, not the flickers, the echo of flickers. Ghost—sparks, the current strong enough to linger as trace, even now.

  She didn’t want to think about how powerful the original had been, then. Or what it must have taken, to control it.

  “That way. I think.” She took a step forward, then another, and the trail remained, giving her confidence. “It moved this way.”