Miles to Go

by Laura Anne Gilman

She seemed to be waiting for me to say something. “That sucks.”

  Her laughter was bright, unforced, and an unexpected surprise, even if it didn’t come with a smile. “Everyone else says I’m rare, or special. I spent my whole life wanting to be special. But yeah. It sucks.”

  7

  Shadow fell asleep in the car. She slept like a little kid, her head lolling forward, snoring faintly. I kept the radio off, and drove through the night. I took route 35 up, rather than getting onto the Parkway, and had to focus on where I was going. Even so, my mind wouldn‘t let go of the case, and the echoes that every case invariably, inevitably, stirred.

  Every case I take, when kids are involved, I hope to hell that they’re runaways. Runaways, there’s a reason they left. You can deal with reasons, whether it’s getting them help, or getting them out of that situation and into a healthier one. You don’t always get a happy-ever-after, but you get a better-for-now.

  And most of my cases are runaways. Just not all of them.

  This one could have been – three teenagers ditching a bad situation or boring relatives for something they hope will be better, in the relative wilds of the summer shore. Fatae teens were dumb as human ones. Even with Ellen seeing people in death’s way, it could have been accident, or random chance…but it didn’t feel like it.

  These kids had been taken.

  There were three reason why teenagers are abducted, as opposed to the myriad of reasons little kids are abducted. None of them were good. Some of them were worse. The fact that these kids were fatae didn’t change any of that. In fact, an “exotic” would probably bring twice the money, for the discerning predator.

  One, they were taken for the sex trade. Horrible as that sounded, it was almost the best option, because I could find them, then. And, assuming they didn’t put up too much of a fight, they wouldn’t be permanently damaged. Physically, anyway.

  I had to unclench my fingers from the steering wheel when they started to hurt. Calling that the best option was only relative to the others. Option Two was that they’d been taken as slaves. The slave trade could be sexual or non-sexual, but there was less value, more turnover there… the moment a slave became trouble, they’d be killed. Three….

  I’d never run into the third, but I knew about it. There was a small but very profitable market for victims. Disposable flesh, designed only to be hurt. When I was a cop, I’d seen the end result, fished out of basements, and buried in a closed casket.

  Ellen had only seen one of the three in her most recent vision. The other two might have been asleep, or taken elsewhere. But they could also already be dead.

  “There.”

  Ellen’s voice was sleepy, but she was alert enough to catch the signpost I almost missed. Three quarters of a mile later, we were taking the exit for Light Bay.

  “I don’t suppose you have any sense of where to go?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. But it was residential, and near the beach. So away from downtown.”

  Such as downtown was, a single street of storefronts, all closed and dark for the night already. This wasn’t a hotspot. In fact, it was barely a warm spot on the map. I could imagine, in the daylight, it was cozy and quaint, the ideal place to take your pre-teens for a week down the shore, eat ice cream every afternoon and everyone’s in bed by 10pm. The year-round locals were probably blue-collar, solidly working class of all races – probably a fair sprinkling of fatae, too. Two or three generations in one place, and the ones who leave probably come back, eventually, because once you’ve seen the rest of the world, this starts to look pretty good.

  “This looks right,” Ellen said, after I’d gone a few blocks east, driving slow enough to see but not so slow a late-patrolling cop would think to stop me. The local boys might be useful, but more likely we’d waste time and energy on territorial markings. “The houses look right.”

  They were seaside cottages, probably two bedrooms and a front parlor that could hold a pull-out bed, maybe another bedroom shoved into the attic. But they were all well kept-up, even in the moon and lamplight, the yards tended and the streets recently repaved. We drove along, and her attention scanned back and forth, not so much with her eyes but that weird blind look Talent got sometimes, the one that could seriously weird you out if you didn’t know what they were doing.

  I didn’t plan it, but my right hand left the wheel, and reached out to touch her leg. Just a touch, my fingertips barely resting on the cloth, but it was enough to catch her attention. She looked down, smiled, just a corner of her mouth and a rise of her cheek, and then she went back to scanning.

  “Anything?”

  “It’s not like a whatchamacallit, a GPS.”

  “You use a GPS?” The higher res a Talent, the less they were able to use tech. I’d thought that Shadow would be high res enough to warrant a strict low-tech ruling – and her lack of training would make the situation even worse.

  “My dad. At least now I know why it never worked properly when I was in the car.” Her smile was gone, now. “He was right to blame me.”

  I’d already gotten the picture of her life before Bonnie and her crew dragged her in, but confirmation was always a kick in the gut. Bonnie said I had a white knight syndrome thing going, always wanting to rescue the helpless. She was only half right. I wanted to rescue everyone.

  “Yeah, you guys are hell on electronics.” There wasn’t any point in candy-coating it: her parents hadn’t been winners on the support front, but expecting them to know, or understand, what was happening…might as well ask a dog to do your taxes.

  “They’re gone.”

  “What?” I might have overreacted a little, because Ellen’s hand covered mine suddenly, pressing down in reassurance. “Not gone-gone. Not here, gone. The feel of them’s faded.”

  “Do you know where?”

  She frowned, her eyes narrowing. “This would be easier if they were Talent,” she said. “I think I’ve touched them enough, I’d be able to follow their signature.”

  I’d only ever heard the PUPs talk about signature, the feel of an individual’s personal current. She’d learned that from Bonnie, not Wren.

  “But you can’t do that for fatae?”

  “No, like I said, you feel …different. And this isn’t signature, what I feel through the vision. It’s… deeper, and softer, and…signature’s something you follow. This is, it’s leading me.”

  I wasn’t Talent, I didn’t give a damn about the technical aspects of current. From the look on Ellen’s face, though, I suspected she was going to be cornering the PUPs, the Cosa’s technicians, when she had a chance. “So they are fatae?” I was pretty damn sure, just based on her sketches, and the fact that the serpents had bothered to hear them, but…

  “They feel… human but not. And the gills? So, yeah. Close enough to pass…”

  “Like me?” We were still cruising the streets, although with less direction now. I came to the end of one road, facing the low seawall that kept the shore from the city, and pulled the car over to the curb. “What do I feel like, to you?”

  It was a stupid question. I didn’t even know why I was asking, or what she was going to say.

  “Wood and wine, and a warm dirt road.”

  Okay, I absolutely hadn’t expected that. From the look on her face, neither had she. I rolled the words around in my thoughts, and laughed. “Yeah, close enough. My genetic donor was a faun, so that makes sense. I-“

  She wasn’t listening. She’d gone glassy-eyed again, her fingers convulsing around my hand, her body bending over tense as a bowstring. Even I could feel the current crackling over her, even as I heard the book of heat-thunder in the distance out over the ocean.

  “Ellen?” I didn’t know what to do, if I should hold onto her, or pull away, or talk to her… my instinct was to protect her, to shield her from whatever was slamming into her so hard, and I couldn’t, all I could do was sit there and watch.

  I’m not good with being helpless. Never have been, that
’s why I ended up a cop in the first place.

  “Danny. Danny, no.”

  She wasn’t talking to me. Or, she wasn’t talking to the me who was in the car. I unhooked my seatbelt and turned sideways, ignoring all doubt to yank her into my arms, holding her the way you would someone just yanked off a ledge, arms curved around her, keeping her steady without actually holding her down. One of the few things we learned in the academy that was actually useful on the street. That, and learning how to duck, mainly.

  Slowly, her breath came back to normal, and she pushed away, a gentle request to back the hell off. I let go, but stayed alert.

  “I saw you. Alone this time. At a…carnival? There were lights, booth lights, like the Boardwalk but it was…grubbier, and daylight. And banners flying and.. a gun.”

  “The other three?” I kept my voice soft and low, like I used to coax kids out of hiding places. Me and a gun, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  “I didn’t see them. Only you.”

  “So we have no reason to believe that anything has changed. They’re still alive,” I said, although truthfully this could be taken either way. But hope keeps us moving, and she looked like she needed to move. “Let’s go.”

  8

  In the end, finding a carnival somewhere near Light Bay was easy. Danny pulled into a diner, they slid into a booth, and he asked the waitress. Between the menu being handed over, and Danny’s second cup of coffee, they had not only directions, but gossip about how long the carnival had been coming around, who they probably had to pay off to keep those rides going, and how many times the local church had tried, and failed, to get them shut down for moral offenses, etcetera.

  “Seriously?” Ellen’s eyes were wide in a combination of awe and too-much-information as the waitress, finally, left them to their coffee in peace.

  Danny nodded. “Seriously. People, mostly, want to tell you things. If someone doesn’t want to talk, they’re scared. Take the toughest, most morose bastard on the face of the earth, and give him a platform, and he’ll talk for hours. They might not answer your questions, but they’ll let enough slip that you can draw conclusions.”

  Despite the hour, the seriousness of everything, and her utter exhaustion, Ellen felt for the first time like they had a chance.

  “Drink your coffee,” he said, letting his lips curl in just the hint of a smile, suggesting that he felt the same way. “We have our destination.”

  oOo

  At night, the fairgrounds were near-magical to little kids and love-struck couples. During the day, before the lights came up, it was probably borderline seedy, worn and workmanlike. This early in the morning, with dew glittering on the grass and canvas tents, the sun just barely lighting the sky, dark purple streaks fading away to pale blue, it had an unexpected, calm beauty.

  “I used to love county fairs when I was a little kid,” Ellen said. “We’d go once a year, morning to midnight, and we got to run wild. Ate such disgusting things…”

  “I’ll buy you a deep fried something,” Danny said.

  “Yeah, thanks anyway.” She couldn’t quite work up a real smile, not with the vision of him, and the gun, and the sensation of death still creeping around in her head, but she did appreciate the effort. “I suppose we…what? Go knock on the door?”

  “You already did.”

  She yelped a little, jumping back as two men appeared in front of them. One of them was lean and long, the other low and square, like they’d been designed to be a salt and pepper set. The lean one was covered in a soft grey fur, like a pelt, and had a feline face. The squat one was softer, like a beanbag chair with feet.

  “So you’re here, and you have our attention. What do you want?” The human was silent in their question, but the way they were looking at them said it, pretty loud.

  “My name’s Daniel Hendrickson,” Danny said, taking off his baseball cap and running his hand though his hair. It could have been the mark of nerves, if you weren’t paying attention. Or, if you were, it would highlight the horns showing through the curls, shutting down the accusation of human in their tone.

  Ellen tried to shrink in on herself, calling on years of staying invisible, unseen, unnoticed. She wasn’t a Retriever, though; it only worked when people wanted to discount and ignore her.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I’m a private investigator,” Danny went on, lifting his right hand to indicate he wasn’t making a threat, while he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a little fold-over wallet, opening it one-handed to show the laminated card tucked inside.

  “Yeah, so?” the fatae repeated, unimpressed without even looking.

  “So you can either help a cousin out, quietly, or I can walk away and come back with a lot of official paperwork that will make your life more difficult than it has to be,” Danny said, matching him tone for bored tone. He wasn’t threatening, exactly, Ellen thought. He was…promising. Not bravado: a fact, backed by confidence. She wanted that, she wanted to learn how to do that so badly it made her teeth hurt.

  Danny tilted his head a little to the left, and almost-smiled at the two figures blocking them. “And we both know that even a hint of red tape is going to screw your day a lot worse than answering a few uncomfortable questions.”

  “We’ll take that chance,” the second fatae said, finally speaking up. “Town and us have an understanding.”

  In other words, they’d paid off enough people that they weren’t worried. Ellen might not be a trained PI but she knew enough to understand that. Danny could try to force the issue, but even if they could get backing from the cops, it would be at least a day and she didn’t know what would happen to the kids then; the tension she’d felt during each vision, the knowledge that death was sliding its fingers around them, just waiting for the right moment to yank them into its domain.

  The thought shivered in her core, and there was an odd echo of that shiver on the soles of her feet. Frowning, Ellen glanced down. They were standing on ordinary dirt, hard-packed and worn from a summer of foot traffic. Using the sense Genevieve had taught her, Ellen clicked over into mage-sight and tried to look again.

  Ordinary dirt…but deep below, there was something that pulsed, a thick shimmering rope twisting like a slow heartbeat, running under her feet and off into the distance.

  A ley line. Current ran with electricity, both man-made and natural. Most Talent looked in the air, but it was under their feet, too.

  She pulled a strand of current from her core, letting the dark blue thread curl around her mental finger, and then sent it down the way she’d learned, letting the leading end touch the ley line.

  It was a different energy than what she felt when a storm touched her: thicker, less a jolt than a shove. It felt… like Danny, she realized suddenly. Solid, steady, and weirdly calm for something that was inherently unstable. Storm-current was harsh, unpredictable, as likely to burn your core as fill it, if you weren’t careful. This… ley lines were easy enough to find, but harder to draw on, Genevieve had said; harder, and less powerful, diluted through the earth the way they were. That was why most Talent didn’t bother using them. The power flowed through it, Ellen could feel it. Only, rather than forcing power into her the way air-current did, the flow enticed her in, surrounded her, soaking down into her core like rain.

  Her visions, unlike most other usage, didn’t drain her core because they came in from outside, an external force. Still, the sensation of topping off the tank was like an endorphin kick, making her feel competent and capable, too… or at least able to bullshit others into thinking that she was.

  Five seconds, that had taken her. But in five seconds, things had gone from casual to tense.

  “So why don’t you both get back into your car, and drive back somewhere safer?” the squat fatae said, and it didn’t sound like a suggestion. “This is our space, and we don’t want you in it. Cousin.” He smiled, showing teeth like a shark’s, and the lean fatae next to him took a step forward, bring a knife up
out of nowhere. He held it casually, but Ellen had no doubt that it could become a threat as easily as it had appeared.

  For an instant, she thought about using some of the cantrips that Genevieve had taught her, maybe to call fire, or levitate something. But she couldn’t think she had enough control to do more than piss the two fatae off, and maybe making things worse. But she needed to do something: the thought that the missing kids might be here, and they were going to be turned away, was too much for her to bear.

  Something inside her core clicked and turned, the ley-current sliding into place and her eyes glazed over even as she stepped forward, in front of Danny, and placed her left hand, palm out, on the chest of the first fatae.

  It took a lifetime to sort through the possibilities rushing at her, instinctively not looking too closely at anything but waiting until that right moment in time came to her.

  “Cancer,” she said. “It’s already in you, moving through your body. Nasty.”

  Before he had time to react, she turned to the other. He tried to evade her, and her hand closed on his shoulder, instead. “Car wreck. Drunk. You won’t die immediately though.”

  She let go, not wanting to keep the vision any longer than needed, and stepped back, blinking at them. They both looked like frogs, mouths open and eyes blinking.

  “You want to know what else she can find out about you?” Danny asked, and that soft voice didn’t disguise any of the menace underneath, this time. “No, I don’t think so. Why don’t you just let us in, walk around, ask a few questions…and nothing has to get ugly.”

  Ellen breathed in and out, letting the current surge through her. Ordinary humans – Nulls – couldn’t actually see current, but even though the fatae didn’t use, it they could still sense it. That was what she’d been told, anyway, and from the way Tall and Squat were backing up, she was willing to believe it.

  Nobody had ever been scared of her before, not even when they thought she was crazy. It didn’t feel as good as she’d thought it would.