Miles to Go

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Within those parameters.” Like saying a cobra wasn’t dangerous, within the parameters of it being able to kill you with one shot if you disturbed it, and oh guess what, you won’t see it until you step on it.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “No.” I was used to working with high-res Talent, and poking at temperamental fatae, and going toe-to-toe with the least-appealing of humanity. Relatively speaking, this was a piece of cake. “I just wanted to know where the stress lines were.”

  “So we shouldn’t expect her home tonight?”

  And damned if Didier didn’t have the Big Bad Daddy voice down perfect. I almost felt guilty.

  “I need her to keep me on track, to find these kids.” I could do it myself, but it would take longer. And, I’d promised her.

  “If she can help you, it will help her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell her to ping Wren if anything, and I mean anything goes to hell.”

  I blinked, and cursed myself for an idiot. Just because I couldn’t use the ping, and neither could a human like Didier, that was no reason to ignore a damned useful tool.

  “I’ll do that.”

  The external door to the office opened, and I reached across my desk for the box I’d pulled out of the lower drawer, before Didier had answered the phone. “Gotta go. Give the little woman my best,” I said, and hung up before Didier finished laughing.

  “Danny?”

  She came into the inner sanctum’s doorway, but didn’t pass the threshold. She wasn’t carrying anything, so I assumed that she’d put the bags down already.

  “Checking in with another client,” I said, lying smoothly. If her self-esteem issues were as serious as it seemed, then the idea that I was checking in with her mentor – okay, her mentor’s significant other – wouldn’t help any, no matter how normal a thing it was.

  Normal if she were a normal teenaged Talent, I reminded myself. She wasn’t normal, and she wasn’t a teenager. I was painfully aware of both facts just then, as she leaned against the doorframe, for once not over-conscious of herself, and watched me.

  She was a long drink of water, strong-shouldered and nicely tapered, and when she stopped worrying about other people noticing her, she had a regal sort of grace that matched her face. She was young, yeah, but in no way shape or form a child.

  Fortunately, I was older and had learned how to put a lockdown on my libido before she was even born. No matter her age, she was damaged; the usual flirt-work pattern I had with Bonnie was not the way to go here.

  “Car’s reserved. There’s a toiletries kit in the bathroom, under the sink. Grab it and let’s go.” I opened the box in my hand, and took out the extra case of bullets. I hadn’t needed to shoot at anything other than a target in years, but I never assumed that was going to be the situation going forward.

  oOo

  “She’s doing what?” Wren Valere put down the set of locks she had been playing with, and looked incredulously at her partner. “She was supposed to tell him what she Saw, and then come home, not run off playing Private Eye.”

  Sergei didn’t disagree with her, but Hendrickson had been telling him what was going down, not asking permission. “Danny said that she was helping him track down the missing teens, something about her vision maintaining a thread?”

  “Huh.” Wren considered that. “A variant on a signature, maybe?” She wasn’t all that interested in the hows of current, just so long as she could make it work. “Okay, I can see that, and why he’d take full advantage. No dummy, our Danny. But–” She bit down on what she was going to say. “No, I’m overreacting. Danny’s a perfectly responsible adult, most of the time, and he won’t let her get into trouble. And it’s good that she get a first-hand look at the fatae community, right?”

  “Right.”

  Sergei didn’t quite trust her calm. His partner, normally unflappable, had been decidedly flapped ever since she accepted the mentorship of a half-grown, totally untrained Talent, and this should have sent her into a small panic, not calmed her down.

  “And he’ll be able to take care of her. Unless they run into another Talent. If they do, she’s helpless. She barely knows how to maintain her own core, she’s barely at first-level cantrips, and if she gets hit with another vision? She’s a sitting target when that happens.”

  Wren Valere took a shallow breath, and leaned back against the sofa, staring out at the brilliant view out her apartment windows. Sergei waited.

  “I’m doing that thing where you roll your eyes and tell me every mentor in the entire history of mentoring has had the exact same doubts and panics.”

  “You are.”

  “And Ellen’s smart, and reasonably savvy, and oh by the way not an idiot teenager amuck with hormones and the need to show off.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And the best way for her to stop being afraid of her visions is to see, first-hand, that they can be used in a proactive way, too. That she’s not helpless, she’s actually incredibly powerful.”

  She knew that already: Ellen had been part of the circle that caught a serial killer team. Admittedly, Bonnie and the other PUPs had been in control but it was Ellen’s storm-seer sense that had allowed them to harness the storm.

  “And if she really needs help, she will ping for it.” Wren frowned. “She will, won’t she? She won’t go all stubborn and independent and decide she can handle it herself?”

  “What, you mean like you would?” Sergei’s lips twitched as she glared at him. “No, I don’t think so. Even if she hadn’t seen how well Bonnie and her crew work together, Danny won’t let her.”

  But inwardly, shoved far below even the levels his partner could read, Sergei wasn’t so sure. Ellen had something she needed to prove, even if she wasn’t vocalizing that need yet. And, he knew all too well, a Talent with something to prove…sometimes took stupid risks.

  5

  Once Ellen had identified our probable destination, I’d started working on a plan. Like most plans, it depended on a dollop of luck, a smidge of skill, and the smile of the gods. But then, that was pretty much the MO of the boardwalk, any given night.

  My shadow, apparently, had never been down the Shore.

  “Wow.” Ellen had a strange look on her face, like she wanted to grin, but was afraid it would be impolite. “It really is…. It really is.”

  I looked around, trying to see it through her eyes. “Yeah, it really is.” The boardwalk was transitioning between day and night, some sunbathers still sprawled out on the sand even as the workers in the game booths began their calls, to win a prize and impress your girl. I could remember coming here as a teenager, and it had seemed exactly the same, back then. Even the people seemed the same: the teenagers in packs, the families with a small child wide-eyed and babbling with excitement, the occasional senior citizens walking slowly, and every now and again the bright “beep beep beep” of an electric cart bringing people from one end of the boardwalk to the other, almost but never quite running someone over. The booths were garish and overly-bright, the darkness hanging over the ocean somehow comforting and threatening all at once, the sound of the cold Atlantic surf a scarce murmur under the many voices.

  I’d worked one of those booths as a teenager, lived in a house off the beach with seven other guys, worked all night, slept most of the day, not worried about anything except saving enough of my paycheck that my mother didn’t kill me at the end of the summer. Hadn’t been back, since.

  This wasn’t a vacation. The clock was ticking, a metronome in the back of my head, driving me on. Lives at risk, and I was the only one looking.

  “How are we going to find anyone, or anything here?” Ellen asked. “It’s a zoo.”

  “Ask a zookeeper,” I said.

  Ellen had to show I.D. at the bar, which was a difference from when I’d been down here, but the inside of Doblosky’s was what I’d been expecting: bare wood walls and benches, a long bar that would be three-deep by midnight, and bartenders wh
o already looked tired. We moved up to the bar, and I leaned against it, removing the baseball cap and ruffling the sweat-damp hair so that my horns didn’t show through. Ellen leaned in at my side, not too close but clearly with me.

  The bartender took a professional look, the kind that didn’t see anything but remembered everything in case it was needed later. “What can I get you folks?”

  “Yuengling, draft.”

  “Two,” Ellen said. I was pretty sure she wasn’t a drinker, but Yuengling was a good basic lager: decent enough to not get you sneered at, common enough that nobody would think you were trying too hard. And if she left it half-drunk it wasn’t going to break the budget.

  The bartender nodded once. “PI?”

  I spread my hands, fair-caught. “After a while, it starts to show.” Actually, it didn’t, not on my face. The bartender was good, and experienced – he might even have been here twenty years ago when I did my time. “I bet you get a lot of that down here.”

  The guy shrugged. He had hands like baseball gloves, and a torso to match, but his face was more like a college professor’s: narrow, with dark hair slicked back, and thoughtful eyes.

  “Missing kids, mostly. Sometimes a missing spouse.”

  “Kids. Late teens. Two girls and a boy.”

  “Runaways?”

  “Maybe. Probably not.”

  The bartender finished pulling our beers and set them down in front of us, hearing what I wasn’t saying. “This ain’t back when. Not much like that going down here.”

  “Not much isn’t none.”

  Ellen stirred next to me, but only reached out to pick up her beer, and take a sip. I wondered what she’d been about to say, and why she’d stopped herself.

  The bartender went down the line, dealing with other customers, and Ellen let out a little sigh.

  “What?”

  “How do you know what to say? How do you know if something’s too much to tell them?”

  “Experience.” That probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but it was all I had.

  “If it was just boys, I might have something for you,” the bartender said, coming back like the conversation’d never been interrupted. “House downtown is the place for that, lost boys end up there. But girls aren’t their thing and the cops are watching too close for anything else to go on right now.”

  I looked sideways at Ellen, who was staring down into her beer like answers to a test she hadn’t studied for were written in the foam. Anyone would have thought the faint shake of her head was her reaction to the taste. I wasn’t anyone.

  “They’re together, last we heard,” I said. “So yeah, probably not our scene.” I made note of it, though. Prostitution was, my way of thinking, a valid lifestyle choice – hell, I sold my physical skill and a breed of comfort too, if you wanted brass tacks – but only if the people involved were of legal age and consent. A few unofficial pokes into the house’s business would determine if official notice should be taken. I’d been a city cop, not Jersey, and I’d never worked Vice, but I still knew who to call.

  “Nothing else floating under the surface?” I paid for our drinks, an additional two twenties folded into the tab.

  “The usual graft and corruption, but it’s been under control for a couple-three years by now. Bad business to let anything else in. You know how it is.”

  Yeah, I knew. The casinos had taught everyone else how to keep their backyards clean, the better to rake money in through the front door. If you kept under their radar you could survive, but pop up once….

  “Thanks.”

  “Good luck,” the bartender said, and one of my twenties came back to me, along with a handful of dimes in change. “I got teenagers, myself.”

  I nodded, and drank my beer.

  “So what now?” Ellen had gotten halfway through hers, and then pushed it away, reaching instead for the bowl of bar-mix. “Got more bartenders to hit up, or are we going to pile back into the car and drive around randomly until we find them?”

  My shadow had claws. Tiny milk-claws, but claws. That was good to know.

  “We could do a survey of all the bars,” I said. If the missing kids had been human, that’s what I would have done. But what she’d Seen changed that plan. “But no to both of your questions.” I’d stopped here to eliminate possibilities. Now it was time to open them up again.

  Unfortunately, I’d have to wait until full dark for that. Some of the fatae could wander the beaches and boardwalks without being noticed – all right, some of us in bathing suits would probably make people do a doubletake or three – but the one in particular I needed to question raised a massive fuss every time, and I was in no mood for fuss. So there was some time to kill.

  We stopped outside the bar to pick up dinner – a hot dog for Ellen, two slices of cheese pizza for me – and an extra pastrami sandwich, hold the slaw and mustard. The guy gave me a doubting look, but made the sandwich anyway.

  “For later?” Ellen asked, as we walked away, heading not down the boardwalk but toward the nearest ladder down to the beach itself.

  “For bribes.”

  The sand was almost too soft to walk on, courtesy of all the sunbathers, but we took off our shoes and slogged toward the water, a dark glint in the distance. I could see the city’s lights, and something that was probably Staten Island, plus a couple of larger ships out beyond the markers. And, off to the side, the movement of something sliding through the water, then disappearing again.

  I decided not to mention the shark to Ellen. It wasn’t like we were going to go in all that deep. Just enough to be polite.

  I took the sandwich out of the waxed paper bag, and peeled off the bread, shoving it back in the bag – no use wasting good rye, after all.

  “What are you doing, going fishing?” She wasn’t being snarky: she really had no idea. Valere had been slacking on this side of her education.

  “Not exactly. But kind of. Stay here.”

  I left her ankle-deep in the surf, and moved forward, holding the meat in my left hand. With my luck I’d end up either getting nibbled at by a shark, or hit on by an inquisitive fendha. Neither of those would be useful, right now. Or, actually, ever.

  “I’m looking for information,” I said, trusting the night air and ebbing tide to carry my words. “No tricks, no traps. Looking for information on a trace carried in these waters, from Manhattan to here. Three traces, unhappy or angry or scared.”

  No answer. I didn’t want to influence the witnesses – you never gave them any info they could build off, so nobody could say you led them – but a little glide for the ride could be overlooked. I shook the meat gently, letting the smell of it carry on the night air. “I’m offering dinner, to seal the trade.”

  There was no response, although I could hear something slapping the surface a few meters out. Unlike in the city, when I could play on my rep, I had to be more cautious here. This wasn’t my turf, and the politics of who answered to whom could tangle me up badly, if I wasn’t careful.

  Still. Not as bad as the time I had to go to Denver.

  “Nobody out there knows anything? I guess the Shore’s reputation is oversold, then.”

  When in doubt, insult the fatae. It’s not advice I’d give to humans, but I’ve found it remarkably effective over the years.

  A louder slap on the water, and then something moved under the dark waves, a too-large mass coming too fast at me.

  I held my ground. Sand. Whatever.

  The mass stopped just shy of ramming into me, and a darker, more solid shape rose from the waves. The head was the size of a football, and shaped about the same, with a neck that managed to be both muscular and sinewy at the same time. The shadow underneath suggested that a more massive body was attached to that neck, but I wasn’t going to poke it to find out.

  “Yes.” The voice was high, but masculine. As far as you could make assumptions about that sort of thing, anyway.

  “Yes, what? Yes you have information, or yes, nobody kn
ows anything?”

  “We know.”

  I had no idea what breed this kid was, but it was clearly a groupthink type. Or maybe kid here was a split personality. So long as one of them had the info to share, I didn’t give a fuck.

  We stared at each other for a bit – or I stared, and it waited. If it had eyes, they weren’t immediately obvious, just long whiskers dripping from either side of the football, the entire thing covered in gleaming black scales. Even its mouth was a narrow slit, the jaw dropping when it talked, but no teeth visible.

  That didn’t mean this thing wasn’t dangerous, though.

  “You want?” I held up the meat carefully, trying not to give any invitation for it to snap it out of my hand – and maybe take my hand along with it.

  The head lowered slightly, and it took the meat from me like a cat tasting treats, soft and steady. One second the chunk of corned beef was in its mouth, hanging over the side, and the next it was gone, swallowed whole like…well, like a snake would snork down a mouse. I guess the analogy made sense, all structural resemblance considered.

  It wavered back and forth in front of me like a damned sea-cobra, either digesting or getting ready to strike, and then it said, “Five night ago. We heard them screaming.”

  I tensed: screaming was never good. But “heard” was open to interpretation, especially coming from a breed that didn’t seem to have ears. “A little more detail than that, please?”

  “We were feeding. Over us, a ship. Not-large, not a barge, but larger than the usual ones that come here.”

  This was a public beach; anything larger than a two-person sailboat would probably get waved off by the lifeguards, assuming they didn’t get grounded on a sandbar. But if this was late at night, there would be no lifeguards, and if they came in at high tide…