Miles to Go

by Laura Anne Gilman

  From what I’d already figured about Shadow, she didn’t have a hell of a lot of self-confidence, and doubly so when it came to what she could do, what she was. So ‘maybe-yes’ was enough for me. “But we need to get out on the water. I can’t follow it from here.”

  Oh, I so really hadn’t wanted to hear that.

  4

  Once I’d accepted the fact that we were going to have to get our toes wet, metaphorically if hopefully not literally, we had to find a way to get out there. I considered and then discarded the idea of renting one of the two-person kayaks that people took out on the Hudson - with my luck we’d capsize and drown, and no thanks. There were half a dozen charters and ferries that worked the rivers, but they all kept to a regular route, and I wasn’t going to rely on Shadow’s scent trail, such as it was, sticking to regular routes. If our missing kids had been taken, odds were low it had been on a registered passenger ferry. So I went an alternative route. Or tried to, anyway.

  “So, you want to hire me, but you don’t know for how long, or where you want to go?” The guy leaned against the wooden sign advertising his fishing boat, and shook his head. “Sorry, no.”

  “It’s nothing illegal. Or even immoral.” I’d already showed him my PI license, but that hadn’t impressed him much. To be fair, it didn’t impress many people. I might look like the quintessential ideal of a New Yorker, as filtered through Hollywood, but I didn’t look much like a hard-bitten PI, I guess. Maybe I should switch out the baseball cap for a fedora, or something.

  “Ffffft.” The captain made his opinion of illegality or immorality clear. “S’not the laws it’s the cost. Fuel’s too expensive to be doing that. You want to wander, you want a smaller boat. Or a sailboat.”

  Those were actually two things I really didn’t want. But he had a point.

  “Got someone in mind?” I asked. Recommendations were always useful, even if I didn’t take them.

  “Talk to Tal Berthiaume, captain a’ the Mercy Me. They’ve got a slip up at the Basin. Mercy Me doesn’t do charters, but you’re interesting enough a request, Tal might bite.”

  oOo

  I’d never actually been to the Boat Basin – it was out of my usual range, as far on the Upper West Side as you could get without actually hitting New Jersey. It had the usual blend of rundown and very expensive that you get at working marinas, but the view up and down the Hudson was definitely millionaire’s row. I could see why people lived here, year round.

  Shadow, and I needed to stop thinking of her as that before it stuck, was, well, shadowing my heels without a word, but her gaze was taking everything in. Clearly, she’d never been here before, either. “Can you imagine living on a boat?” she asked, her voice sounding younger and more gleefully innocent than it had been before.

  “No.” I could, actually, but it wasn’t a pleasant thought. Give me a nice apartment in a nice building, where the bathroom has room to turn around, and you don’t get seagulls crapping in your morning coffee.

  “That’s the Mercy Me,” she said, pointing down one of the wooden extensions, clearly a lower-rent section of the Basin.

  She was a sailboat. Maybe there was a technical term for the size or how many sails or whatever, but “sailboat” summed it up for me: sails the color of, well, canvas run up on masts, the ship itself trimly built, painted a dark blue, with pale yellow trim. The railings were varnished wood, and you could see the care that maintained them, even from here.

  “Anyone home?” I called, as we reached its berth.

  “Hang on,” a voice called, and then someone appeared from below the floor – the deck.

  Legs. Long legs, but not skinny, curving under shorts that came a respectable way down the thigh, connected to a torso clad in a white T-shirt, arms just as long and curved, and my gaze connected with the face that went with that body, and it was looking at me with bemused patience.

  Next to me, Shadow let out an unkind snicker.

  “I was told you might be agreeable to a day-hire,” I said. If they thought getting caught staring was going to discomfit me, they were in for a surprise. I might not give in to the more basic urges of my faun genetics, but lack of shame was one of the things I’d found useful.

  “Today? Local charter, out and back again by sunset?” When I nodded, the ship’s master went on, “Cash, in advance. Five hundred. There’s an ATM at the dock, if you need it.”

  “You don’t want to know-“

  “Nope. You’re hiring me to take your lady on a romantic cruise around the island, that’s your business. I got rent to make. The money gets you on-board, soda and water included, but if you want food you gotta bring your own. No glass, no drugs, no booze. If the cops board us and you’re not clean, I’ll hand you over to them without a second thought.”

  “Got it.” I turned to Ellen, meaning to give her my ATM card and send her to get the cash out while I discussed any further terms with our captain, then realized that handing my ATM card to a Talent – a powerful and mostly untrained Talent – was one of my less thought-out ideas, unless I wanted to have to stop by the bank and get a new card after her current had demagnetized the damn thing.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  oOo

  By the time I got back – after having a slight panic about leaving enough money in my account to cover the bills that would be paid in the next day or so – Ellen and our Captain had settled in, Shadow curled up on a wooden locker that was doubling as a bench, and the Captain doing competent-looking things with ropes.

  I hesitated, then gave myself a hard shove, and climbed, rather inelegantly, onto the ship itself. The moment my feet hit the deck, my entire body swayed once, a slow rolling movement I felt from the soles of my feet all the way up my spine and into the back of my head, and it took every bit of stubborn I had not to turn around and get the hell off that boat.

  My mother might have been a sailor, but water and I did not get along.

  “Captain Tal says all I have to do is stand in the front of the ship and point, and she can get us there,” Ellen said.

  Tal – I was guessing it was short for Talia, or something – shrugged. “You’re paying, you get to choose. If we start to get somewhere we shouldn’t be, I’ll tell you.”

  “I could always use some help with that,” I said, not even meaning to turn on the charm, but Tal’s face melted a little, the way people always did.

  If I’d been full-blood, she might have offered me more than a smile. If I’d been full-blood, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.

  oOo

  Tal Berthiaume – Tal was short for Thea Anna-Louise, Ellen had learned while I was gone and no, the good captain apparently hadn’t forgiven her parents yet – was a good sailor, and the Mercy Me seemed to be a good ship. I spent the first hour trying not to throw up, and the second hour wondering why I hadn’t let myself throw up more often.

  “You’re really crap on boats, aren’t you?” Ellen seemed surprised, and not inclined to tease, although I suspected it was less having to do with kindness and more not being sure how I’d react. Someone had told her to sit down and shut up a load too often, but I didn’t have the energy to do any reassuring just then.

  “Yeah well, I’m built for ground.” I took a sip of the ginger ale Tal had provided, trying to ignore the rise and dip of the boat as we cut through the water. We couldn’t go exactly the direction Ellen pointed at, but the winds seemed to be behaving, far as I could tell, taking us sideways in the direction we wanted.

  If all else failed, we’d been told, there was an engine that would get us there.

  “Landlubber?” Tal had used that phrase first, less kindly than Ellen did.

  “I’m half-faun.” She knew I wasn’t human, but she was still learning the Cosa Nostradamus, and even Talent had trouble with all the various breeds. Hell, I wasn’t sure I could name them all, and it was my job to know ‘em. “Named for the god Faunus, although we could just as easily have taken Pan’s name. Woodland revels
are more our thing, not seaborne hijinks.”

  Woodland revels, meaning indulgences of all sorts, especially sex. The few cousins I’d met over the years took the “life is a party” philosophy to heart and groin, and they were charming enough to make humans – and a lot of other fatae – go along with them. Unfortunately, they matched charm with an utter and absolute inability to think about consequences, long or short term.

  I didn’t spend a lot of time with my cousins.

  The Mercy Me hit another swell, and I had to interrupt my explanation with another bolt for the bucket.

  “Nice impression you’re getting of me,” I said wearily. I’d done worse, in front of more people – the first dead body we found on my first month on the job, in mid-summer, was high up there – but this wasn’t so good for my ego, either.

  “Actually, it is kind of nice,” Ellen said. “Everyone I’ve met in the city so far is so… competent. It’s unnerving.” She swallowed, her throat working visibly, and looked away, like she thought she’d said too much and didn’t know how to take it back.

  I just laughed. “Yeah. Seeing as who you’ve been hanging with, I can imagine the competence level has been nauseatingly high.” Maybe I should have used another word… but no, my stomach stayed quiet for the moment. “If it helps any, Valere unnerves everyone.”

  “She didn’t want to take me. I know that. I don’t know why –” She broke off what she was saying, coming to point like a rescue dog catching scent of a live one.

  “There.”

  I followed where she was looking, and sighed. “South Jersey. Well, could have been worse, could have been Staten Island.” I don’t usually indulge in the time-honored borough-bashing so beloved of my fellow citizens, but I’d a grudge about Staten Island that wasn’t going away any time soon.

  oOo

  Danny had Captain Tal cruise along the coastline, just outside the markers that showed where they shouldn’t go, until Ellen could say for certain where the trail led, and he marked it on a map he’d pulled out of his jacket pocket. Then Danny nodded at Tal, and the Mercy Me headed back to the Basin, where the captain saw them off with an invitation to hire her any time again. Apparently, having someone spend most of the day throwing up in a bucket wasn’t enough to put her off, so long as they paid in cash.

  The investigator still looked a little green, and he was staggering rather than swaggering as they walked down the pier, but Ellen wasn’t going to point out any of that. The sway of the boat had actually felt a lot like current, the outsides finally matching the way she felt inside during a thunderstorm, or when Genevieve had her try to draw down current from a man-made source and then reshape it to her own needs.

  She wasn’t going to say any of that, either. But she held the knowledge to herself, that this was a thing she could do. It was a small thing, probably a stupid thing, but it was hers.

  “So what now?” The more she focused on the connection, the more the need to find those three teenagers chewed at her. Now that they had an idea where to go, she wanted to go now.

  “The fact that you were able to pinpoint them probably means that they’re still alive,” Danny said. “And the fact that they’re still alive means that whoever has them intends to keep them around for a while longer.”

  Ellen listened to what he was saying, and thought that she heard something else, underneath.

  “But what do they want them for?” she asked. “And…” And what is being done to them? She didn’t ask that, either. She knew enough to know that it probably wasn’t good.

  Danny sighed, and shook his head, removing the baseball cap and wiping his arm across his forehead, to clear away the sweat. His curls were sea- and sweat-damp, the fine lines around his eyes more visible now than they’d been under direct sunlight. If you could ignore the horns more visible through his damp curls, he looked a hundred percent human, and really tired.

  “I want to look at a better map, see if I can pinpoint exactly where you were targeting, and also figure out the best way to get there. I don’t suppose you drive?”

  Ellen blinked. “Of course I do.”

  That got a laugh out of him. “Right. Suburban girl, right?”

  “City boy” making it sound like an insult. The words slipped out of her mouth, and she almost didn’t realize they’d come from her. She knew – she knew – he wasn’t going to yell at her for sass, or get pissed off, but her breath still hitched for a second, her body bracing itself.

  “I can drive,” he said, mildly. “Only last time I did, it was a patrol car, and my instincts are not what you want out among civilians.”

  She was diverted, trying to imagine him in a uniform. “Did you ever do a high speed chase?”

  “Never once. But I do occasionally forget to stop for red lights. Or stop signs. It’s safer just to not let me behind the wheel.”

  “I don’t have a job, to rent a car, though.” Ellen felt she should make a clean breast of everything. “I don’t even have a bank account, or a cable bill, or anything. They ask you for all that, when you rent.” She’d come to New York with a friend, who had rented their car, and she remembered the excess of paperwork that had been required.

  “So I rent, and we put you down as a driver. You’re staying with Valere?”

  ”No.” She had slept on the couch for the first month, until Genevieve got her office cleared out. Now she had her own place, an off-the-books sublease, but it was so tiny, and she spent so little time there, she’d never gotten around to acquiring Stuff. Not that she had much; she’d left home with just her backpack, and living in the Park the way she’d done, you didn’t keep much in the way of belongings. Even if you tried, they’d disappear pretty soon.

  “Hrm.” He made a noise she didn’t understand, but then they were on the street and he was raising his hand to hail a cab, and she didn’t want to ask any more questions, while they were in public, even if it was only one cabbie listening in.

  “How urgent does it feel?” he asked, out of the silence. Ellen was taken aback suddenly – she’d slipped easily into follow-the-lead, and wasn’t expecting to be put on the spot again.

  “Urgent,” she said. She didn’t know what not-urgent felt like; the people she Saw were about to get dead, so urgent was the only way she knew to feel. Then she thought about it a little more. When she’d Seen Genevieve and the guy who had died, Stosser, it had felt urgent, too. But nothing had happened for a couple of days after, and Genevieve hadn’t died at all, because… because something had changed. Because she had changed something, by telling them.

  So. Urgent, yes. Death was always urgent. But maybe they had time.

  “They’re not dead yet.” She was pretty sure about that, especially after what Danny had said. Pretty sure, but not absolutely. She licked her lips, trying not to think about the cabbie who might or might not be eavesdropping. She tried not to think about her mother, who had told her all these things she said she saw meant that she was crazy, or lying. She tried not to think about anything, except the sense of three figures, ghostly but real, lingering in her brain.

  No, not her brain. Genevieve had explained that. Her core. The place where current coiled inside, the magic everyone had access to, but only Talent could handle, channel, and manipulate. Only Talent, like her, could hold inside.

  She was a Storm-Seer. She Saw things in the current that even other Talent couldn’t. She saw Death, and the dying. She wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t lying, and Danny needed her in order to find them.

  Had Genevieve felt different, after the other one, Stosser, had died? Yes. A subtle, slight difference, like feeling silk under your hand instead of silky cotton, but there. Maybe. If that’s what the difference was.

  She needed more visions to learn what they meant, but she never wanted to have another vision, ever.

  “Can you feel anything more than that?” He was pushing, but he wasn’t pushing her, he was pushing for them. That made it okay.

  “Hurt. Weak. Angry. Afraid. An
gry most of all.” That was what had reached her, their anger and fear; they did not want to die.

  “At risk?”

  She thought, reaching mental hands down the way Genevieve had taught her, stroking the waves of current in her core, letting the ripples run over invisible fingers until the knowledge reached her brain.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you need to get anything from your apartment?”

  He was taking her with him. He’d promised, and yet the confirmation was equal parts relief and fear. Relief, because she needed to do this, needed to see it through, to know that yes, she had helped, that it wasn’t just chance, that there was a reason that she Saw all this. And fear because… well, she might be crazy but she wasn’t stupid.

  “No.” She’d spent days in the same clothes, before. She could buy a toothbrush and a comb, if needed, and they weren’t about to go hungry. Everything else was just details.

  “Right. I need to get a few things from the office, and,” he checked his watch, “yeah, there’s enough time to swing by and rent a car.”

  Ellen decided not to tell him that the Mission: Impossible theme just started playing in her head.

  oOo

  When we got back to the office, I sent Ellen off to pick up some road trip essentials – water, soda, sandwiches, and a stack of whatever daily newspapers were still on the stands. We could have picked all that up once we were out of the city, but there was something I needed to do that required her being out of earshot.

  But the voice that picked up on the other end of the line was male, not female.

  “Exactly how fucked up is she?”

  To give Didier credit, he didn’t hesitate, or ask what I was talking about, or who.

  “We don’t know. Bad, but not broken.”

  “If I’d thought she was broken I wouldn’t have let her stick around,” I said impatiently. Jesus, did they think I was an idiot, or that masochistic?

  “A purely clinical assessment?” Sergei went on. “She’s got some serious self-worth issues, probably inevitable from second-guessing her sanity for the past ten years, once her Talent kicked in and nobody told her what was happening. She then fell in with a group that first told her she was special and then rejected her, and was then informed that she was not only not-crazy, but she had a skillset that was going to direct her life for, well, the rest of her life. Within those parameters, she’s not fucked up at all.”