The Work of Hunters

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Drink your coffee,” he said. “Look natural.”

  He set his coffee down on the bench next to her, and started to add sugar. If you didn’t know him, or weren’t looking carefully, it seemed like he was devoting all his attention to making sure the right amount of sugar went in and was stirred carefully. But she could see his eyes, the way they scanned across the plaza, seeing things — noting things — that she could probably look for an hour and still miss.

  He wasn’t only an ex-cop and a trained PI. He was fatae. Impossibly, she forgot that sometimes.

  “You okay?” he asked, and she started to give her ‘fine’ response when she realized he was asking something different.

  “I… yeah.” Did she sense anything, he meant. Was the killer nearby. “I’m okay.”

  His question made her realize that her nerves were running off the past, not something right now. They were here before the killer, just like Danny’d hoped. They had time to set the scene.

  She dipped slightly into her core, letting a tendril test the area, to see if there were any other Talent around. A few, passing by, but none of them with the same flavor of hot sparks she’d felt from the killer. These were people with their cores calm and under control.

  “Nothing yet,” she said, and licked her lips as a thought occurred to her. “What if they’re not coming now? Didn’t the murders happen at night, before? How long —” She stopped, and her mouth opened again but no words came out. She looked sideways at where Danny had finished preparing his coffee and was standing up now, seemingly without a worry in the world. “You son of a bitch.”

  Danny didn’t quite smile, but there was a definite flicker of satisfaction on his face, like she’d just passed a test. The bodies had all been killed at night, and dumped somewhere isolated, not in the middle of a plaza, when the sun was still up. If they were coming here, it was for something else.

  A seer sees things that are to come. If a seer sees something a seer sees…. Who saw it first?

  It didn’t matter, if they had a faun to twist it to his benefit.

  “All right.” She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of arguing. First, because it would waste time and energy, and make them conspicuous, and second, because as pissed as she was at him, it was a damn good plan.

  If it worked.

  oOo

  The coffee was crap, but it gave me something to do with my hands. It had taken Ellen a while to figure out what I was planning, but considering the pressure she was under, it was still a decent job. She figured it out, considered objecting, then accepted it as the only workable plan we had: I could see it all flicker across her face.

  I could also feel the nerves coming off her, like heat off a radiator. I wouldn’t have blamed Ellen if she’d told me to take a flying leap, or something even more physically improbable. I probably would have done the same, if I’d told me what I had in mind. But she was a smart girl, with good training. Once she saw the pieces she knew how they had to go together. I still deserved a lot more than that muttered ‘son of a bitch,’ though.

  I consoled myself that she wasn’t being used as bait, exactly. Not entirely, anyway. It’s not being bait if you’re also the trap, is it?

  “It’s a risk,” I admitted. “What you saw, and felt, it didn’t match the evidence of the other killings, so there had to be something else. A low-level seer might not be able to pick up all the details you do, but there might have been enough to, I don’t know, throw a line in your wake.” To draw him here, to the place where she’d seen him. It was convoluted as hell, but the kind of convoluted that might appeal to a crazy person.

  Ellen, not being crazy, looked dubious.

  “So. How do we — how do I do this?” She was still sitting on the bench, her coffee in her hands, more as something to hold onto than something to drink. She was watching a couple across the plaza from us, leaning into each other on their own bench. I shifted, drawing her attention back to me. Those dark eyes and arched nose, tight-drawn mouth, everything about her face was determination, not fear.

  Nobody else would die, if she had any say in it. I felt bad for depending on that, except she wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that determination. And we were back to the complicated knots visions tangled us all in.

  “We can do this, kid.” Ideally with minimal bystander interaction, but we don’t always get what we want. Fortunately, most people were good at not seeing what they couldn’t explain. “I’d feel more comfortable if we’d some information on how the killer gathered and held all that current,” I said, “but with our usual run of luck, Pietr’s going to call just after we wrap things up on our own.”

  There, just a tiny twitch, a hint of a curve, but it was there, before her mouth flattened again. “Probably,” she agreed. “Without backup or further information, what’s the plan? Do we stand in the middle of the plaza and bellow out a challenge?”

  “Do I look like Nick?” Pietr’s teammate was a damn solid investigator, which I’d never say to his face, but he had all the subtlety of a garbage truck. “No. I want you to sit here very quietly, and wait. ”

  Truth was, I didn’t actually have a plan. I had a scrap of an idea, a thread of a suspicion, and the only person I knew of who could identify the killer. That would have to be enough.

  oOo

  Eventually I drifted off to the side, leaving her there, seemingly unprotected. Seemingly, because I’d seen Ellen shut down a would-be masher with a flick of her eyes and a single, firm ‘no.’ And if anyone pushed, they’d find out why most wise people left Talent alone.

  There was a food cart down at the other corner, one of the classic Halal lunch trucks. I drifted in that direction, and bought two gyros, one without tomatoes, two bottles of water, and an extra packet of pita with a container of tzatziki sauce. It was going to be a long wait, and I didn’t know if we’d get another shot at food, after this. And you couldn’t overfeed a Talent.

  As I was starting to drift back toward her, I was aware of something shadowing my heels. Literally: it was about the size of a cat, sinuous as a snake, although it looked more like a badly—designed marionette.

  “I’m going to sit down over there” I said casually, dropping my voice low, and changed direction to suit my words. The bench I’d chosen was slightly shaded, with greenery behind it, and had a clear line of sight both across the plaza and of the street in front of us, while the glass pyramid behind us prevented anyone from getting a drop from behind.

  ‘lynau were paranoid bastards, and it was rare to see one out before nightfall. More to the point, they hung with gnomes and gnomes and I didn’t have a very good relationship, having to do with me having cheated them out of a prize — said prize being a teenaged runaway — a number of years ago. So if they were searching me out, that was either very good or very bad.

  I opened the packet of pita, and left if on the bench next to me, with the tzatziki. It wasn’t a bribe, that would be tacky. This was two Cosa members, sharing a meal. If the offering was ignored, it was bad news. If the offering was shared… well, it could still be bad news, but possibly useful, too.

  When I looked down again, half the pita was gone, along with all of the sauce. All right, then.

  “What’s shaking, cousin?”

  There was a muted burp, then a scratchy voice said, “thank you. That was very good.”

  I waited.

  “The cold ones have a message. Something came into their tunnels two nights ago. They could not chase it away, could not stop it.”

  “Did it harm any of them?” Shit. We’d been so focused on the human victims, the established MO, I hadn’t even thought that it might go after the fatae, too.

  “No. It… stared at them. But in the end, it went away. But the cold ones told me to tell you, it smells of blood and hunger.”

  I took a bite out of my own gyro, careful to put Ellen’s on the side away from the ‘lynau so it wouldn’t get any ideas. I had no idea why the gnomes would tell me th
is, but they had, and thought it important that I know.

  “Thank you, cousin,” I said. “Tell the cold ones that I appreciate their sharing this with me.” I wasn’t going to promise them a damn thing until I knew the value — or lack thereof — but this was the most civil we’d been to each other in years. I wasn’t going to be rude.

  There was a rustling of paper, then a used napkin landed on the bench next to me, and I was alone. I packed everything back into the bag, and went to join Ellen.

  “Lunch? Excellent.” She ate like a teenager — worse, she ate like a teenager in mentorship, burning calories at a terrifying rate.

  “Got some new information,” I said, as she ate not only her gyro but what was left of mine as well. “Our suspect paid a visit to some cousins of mine. Spooked them, considerably.”

  That made her pause, mid-bite. “Nobody was hurt?”

  “No. Didn’t seem interested in them. Or no… was definitely interested, but took no action.” That tickled one of the pieces in my brain, but didn’t move it anywhere.

  “You’re sure it was our suspect?”

  “Good question,” I said. “No, I’m not sure, but my cousins were. They’re not very nice, in fact they’re not nice at all, so they wouldn’t bother to tell me anything unless they thought it was a threat…” My words trailed off, and I stared up at the sky, the pale blue starting to shade darker as the sun passed behind the western skyscrapers.

  “Shadow, why would it be a threat?”

  She couldn’t read my mind — every Talent I knew swore up and down that mind-reading wasn’t a current-skill — but she read my mind.

  “Because they’re not very nice.” Her voice was flat, not with a lack of emotion, but with a pipeline of repressed emotion, the kind where you want to jump up and punch the air but you can’t. “Because the first victim, way back when, was someone not very nice…. And the ones who were sniffed at and left alone and unbothered were nice — or at least not not-nice — and your cousins were left bothered because they’re not-nice.”

  We had our victimology.

  “And the trigger point was a hit-and-run. Pretty much the definition of not-nice. Someone’s raised wild current to become a vigilante? That’s… ”

  “If you say brilliant I may disown you,” I warned her, busily shifting puzzles pieces to fit this new theory.

  “I was going to say extreme,” she said, mildly reproving. “Have you ever seen Wren pull down a storm?”

  “No.” That was something I’d like to keep an entire city between myself and the event, if possible.

  “It’s amazing. It’s like cocaine, probably, the minute it hits your system. Like one of my visions a thousand times, except it all feels good. But… when you pull down tame current, something that’s already been running with electricity, something manmade, it’s…already gotten used to being controlled, diluted. You can weave it into your own core without too much difficulty, once you know what you’re doing.”

  Talent were normally trained in their early teens: Ellen’d come to it nearly a decade late, her training still fresh in her mind, and hard-won.

  “But wild current… it resists, and it… it surges. Like thinking you’re going to take a sip of water and getting hit in the face with an ocean wave. And it can drown you — well, burn you out, actually — if you’re not careful.”

  “And if you’re not high-res enough?” Both Wren and Ellen downplayed their strengths, unlike certain PUPs I could name.

  “Yeah.” She looked pensive. “That would explain why I felt them, rather than the victims. If they’re that strong, and surging — working off wild current alone — they’d be… incredibly powerful. And scary-close to wizzing out, to losing control. And if they’re also a seer…. They’d be able to tell, if someone they ran into was planning to do something bad?”

  I didn’t have a clue about what a Talent could or couldn’t do, and she knew that. But I did know a thing or two about getting inside a killer’s mind, even though it left me feeling filthy, afterward.

  “They were trolling the …my cousins,” I said. “Drawn by their particularly nasty little minds. But they didn’t kill them. Because they were fatae?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “It would make sense? Whoever’s doing this, they’re focused pretty tight. Not-nice, and human. Like you said, victimology.” She made a face. “They think they’re cleaning up the city. Like…. That’s why you didn’t say anything the first time. Because one fewer creep on the streets, and where’s the bad? That’s what they’re thinking now — that there’s no downside to what they’re doing, that it’s… maybe not right, but Just.”

  I felt my body still, almost afraid to breathe. Ellen’s voice had taken on a weirdly gentle hardness totally unlike her usual tones. This wasn’t her thinking things out; this was her bringing up what she’d gotten from the contact, all unknowing, siphoning off some of the killer’s own … not thoughts, but emotions, intentions. There was a reason I preferred to do all our brainstorming indoors, in our own office. Most humans were Null, often to the point of not being able to see current—work or recognize a fatae right in front of their nose, but all it took was one would-be supernatural hunter, or worse yet a gossip rag writer with a camera and a recorder, and a Talent losing control, and we’d have another mess on our hands.

  I was trying to think of a way to snap her out of it, bring her back to center, when her hand reached out blindly, and grabbed at my sleeve. Ellen wasn’t a toucher, not like that. “Boss, we had this all wrong. It’s not a someone. It’s a something.”

  oOo

  Danny was, as a rule, unflappable. But when he got flapped, he did it with a seriously impressive level of swearing, in languages Ellen didn’t recognize. Another time and place she might have sat back and listened to him go, waiting for the stream to dry up before getting back to the matter at hand.

  They didn’t have that luxury.

  Other people might say that bad luck was just negative expectations catching up with you, or sheer chance, but Ellen not only believed in bad luck, but was pretty sure it was sentient, and had a nasty sense of humor. Because the instant after she told Danny what she’d realized than she felt it again — not stirring in her thoughts this time, but racing full-on toward her, a bolt of current-energy practically screaming with rage.

  They’d been right: it had been aware of her. Had been following her, sniffing around the way it had sniffed around the others. But in recognizing it, she’d gone from not-of-interest to Threat.

  “Boss, down!” she shouted, and a lash of current slipped from her, wrapping around his knees and pulling him to the ground, spreading quickly into a thin curtain to keep his face from hitting the pavement. She heard the startled “ommmph” as he went down, and then it was all she could do to protect herself as a howling rush of current slammed into her.

  Not a storm-seer: a storm.

  *Help!* The ping was punched out of her by the blow, its usual tight-focus blown wide by the impact, and she didn’t know if it would reach her mentor, or be scattered into silence, but she didn’t have time to worry. Having failed to take her down with the first attack, the killer had regrouped, shaping itself again into something human-formed.

  In the falling dusk, it looked like an art installation, performance art with neon. Deep yellows, almost gold, twined with electric blue and hatchmarked against an eye-watering green, a scarecrow of a figure, with no face but deep holes where eyes would be, the lack of light there more shocking than anything else as it lifted its head to stare at her.

  It wasn’t human. It wasn’t fatae. It wasn’t a single killer but many, the wild current not taken within itself but making itself. Ellen had no idea how such a thing was possible, but she couldn’t give a damn just then, too busy fighting down both anger and panic.

  Her own core surged under her fear, and she pressed mental hands against it, not to soothe but to shape and control it, tendrils slipping along her bones, coating her, covering Danny who
was wise enough to stay down until he figured out what was going on. She hoped that anyone else lingering in the plaza had the sense to run, or if they were Null, that that would protect them. If they weren’t a threat to the entity, didn’t read as whatever it decided was ‘bad,’ it should ignore them.

  Should.

  Another shock of wild current hit her, and she fought to hold control, even as her core surged at the challenge. Current-duels were deadly; Wren had told her that when she first learned what a core was, and how to use it. Current was all about control, about using only what was needed, and not overloading yourself, or you’d blow just like a transformer, and with just as bad a result.

  Another strike hit her, and she reached back along it instinctively, found what she thought was a weakness at the other end. She focused, sending an arrow of her own current toward it, and shrieked with vicious, if silent, glee when she felt it hit. The current-figure staggered back, black sparks dancing where the blow had connected.