An Interrupted Cry

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Not quite. I was now pretty certain that—unlike five seconds ago—I wasn’t alone any more.

  Add to the known facts: my captor or captors not only didn’t need light to see, they were also silent-moving bastards. Not gnomes, then. That was good; gnomes and I had an uneasy relationship, at best. And it wasn’t just the caves versus groves bullshit, despite what Rorani said: I disliked them for completely non-racist reasons. They had a bad habit of stealing preteens away from the aboveworld and not letting them go when the fun wore off. But they were also noisy bastards, movement-wise. All the metal in their diet didn’t make for stealth.

  Another mark in the unknown column, then.

  Something brushed against me, running up my arm, and I would have flinched if I’d anywhere to go. The touch was papery-soft, and the smell, this close, was deeply unpleasant and completely unfamiliar.

  “You have the advantage of me,” I said, pleased that my voice came out without cough or hitch. “Danny Hendrickson. And you are?”

  There was silence, then another pass of that papery-smooth skin over mine, down to my knuckles, and this time a full-body shudder took me. Warm-blooded, whatever my captors were, and very clearly fatae, not human, not with that smell. But what breed were they? I was wracking my brain, trying to remember the breeds that lived underground, were warmblooded and smooth-skinned, smelled something like damp, moldy cotton, and didn’t need even the slightest bit of light, but all I could come up with was Attack of the Mole People.

  Definitely too many horror movies.

  And then there were two, maybe three figures around me, from the displacement of air and where the sliding touches were coming from. Either that or a single figure with at least five arms. Dear brain, please stop trying to help.

  But the multiples helped me identify the odor. Graves. This close, this many, and they smelled like old blood and graves, not wet cotton, and my mind decided to switch reels and go for Nosferatu instead. But there was no such thing as vampires in all the Cosa Nostradamus, no creatures that existed to feed on blood alone. Everyone knew that.

  There was a puff of dry, putrid breath in my face, and a touch on my neck, just at the jugular, the heavy weight of what have been the tip of a claw on my skin, and I was forced to accept that everyone might be wrong.

  oOo

  “Why can’t you translocate us to the office?”

  “Because it takes energy,” Bonnie said. “Hauling myself around is work, hauling another person around is twice as much work. And we may be topped-off with current right now, but splashing it around needlessly isn’t going to do us any favors.” Her voice softened, even as she stepped off the curb, raising her hand to summon a cab. “And it’s not as though it’s going to take up all that long to get to the office, under the circumstances.

  Her hand twitched once, and a cab swerved around Columbus Circle, the lack of traffic lights making it appear like a yellow shark in murky waters. Bonnie grabbed the door, and Ellen was scrambling inside, giving the driver the address even as Bonnie crawled in after her.

  They’d barely shut the door when the cabbie was off again. He clearly was enjoying the lack of traffic, or traffic lights, keeping just under a speed the cops would have no excuse not to pull him over for, barely slowing down to check for opposing traffic at street corners as they roared down West 59th. Ellen liked to think she’d become a properly jaded New Yorker, but riding the subway had nothing on this cab ride, and all she could do was hold on and glare enviously at Bonnie, who seemed as comfortably at home as if she were on her own sofa, nothing moving at all, much less whipping around corners at 60 miles per hour.

  Ellen had grown up avoiding cops as a matter of course, but at that moment she wouldn’t have minded one pulling the cab over. But they made it to their destination without a ticket or an accident, and she was out the door and onto the sidewalk while Bonnie was still reaching for her wallet.

  “Save the receipt,” she said, when Bonnie joined her.

  “Oh, I was planning on it,” the PUP agreed, and gestured for Ellen to lead the way into the building.

  The guard looked up this time when they walked in—a different guard, Ellen noted, and she pulled her ID from her pocket, shoving it across the desk for him to scan with his penlight.

  “Elevators out,” he said, handing it back to her and shoving the visitor’s ledger at Bonnie for her to sign, his penlight barely enough light for her to make out the lines. “Don’t break your neck on the stairs.”

  His concern was overwhelming. “Right, thanks.”

  In the stairwell, the fire door clunking shut behind them, the red lighting overhead was suddenly washed with a cooler white light. Ellen glanced at Bonnie, not surprised to see a stream of current wrapped around her hands emitting the glow. “You need to teach me how to do that.”

  “Valere’s slacking, if she hasn’t shown you already.” She reached out with one glowing hand, and touched the back of Ellen’s wrist. “It’s just—no, Torres, this isn’t the damn time,” she muttered, and dropped her hand. “Later. Come on.”

  Ellen didn’t remember going down the stairs taking this long—then again, she didn’t remember much of her flight down, several hours earlier, only the feeling of bile in her throat and panic fluttering in her chest.

  That flutter returned when they exited onto their floor. The hallway was silent, their steps echoing on the bare floor, knocking against closed and empty office doors. They, and the desk guard, might be the only people in the entire building.

  The office door was wide open. Ellen couldn’t remember not closing it, but she didn’t remember not-closing it, either. Bonnie pushed past her, going directly to the back office. By the time Ellen joined her, Bonnie had tweaked the current-light to shine up at the ceiling, redirecting illumination into the entire room rather than a specific angle, much more useful than a flashlight would have been. Ellen made note to definitely get the cantrip the other woman used, then turned her attention to the inner office, trying to see anything that she might have missed before.

  “You’re sure he was here.”

  Ellen didn’t bother to respond to that with a glare, much less words. Yes, she was sure. He’d been in the office when he called her: she knew the sounds of him moving around, the wheels of his chair on the hardwood floor, the crackle of the phone lines because there was so much interference from the antennas on the building across the street… she could identify the sound of Danny in his office the way she knew the subdued hum of electricity in Wren’s building, familiar and soothing.

  She didn’t feel soothed at all, right now. “He was working on the filing,” she said, touching the papers left out on the wooden desk. “He hates filing, but he won’t let me do it. Says it would take longer to teach me the system than to do it himself.”

  “Hendrickson is borderline OCB,” Bonnie said. “Obsessive compulsive bossy. Trust me, I know the type.”

  “Mmmm.” Ellen hadn’t planned on going there, not having an actual death wish, but given the opening and the distraction… “And how goes that?”

  “Everything’s great this week,” Bonnie said. “Ask me again next week.”

  Bonnie Torres and her boss were either the love story of the century, or the soap opera of the year. Or probably both, considering how much they argued and how often Bonnie announced to anyone who would listen that she was done with relationships forever, but somehow never seemed to actually break it off. Pietr had 7—2 odds that they’d have a kid and she’d still be insisting she was a free agent in the delivery room.

  “He was filing,” Ellen said again, picking up one of the folders, and then placing it back down again in the same spot. “And then he stopped. Mid-act?”

  “He’s not easily distracted, our Danny.” Bonnie had known him longer than Ellen had, if not so closely.

  “No. And something did distract him, because otherwise he’d have put his laptop away.” Security issues aside, her boss was the kind of guy who washed out the coffee
pot before he went home, every night without fail. It wasn’t OCD, he just hated the taste of stale coffee. “What could distract him?”

  “A noise?” Bonnie suggested, looking around as though some echo of the sound might be visible. With Bonnie’s current-skills, it might have been, Ellen didn’t know.

  “Sound, maybe. Or a sight?”

  Bonnie turned to her, frowning, the current-light making her skin seem even paler than usual. “It’s a blackout, after sundown, and Danny’s not Talent, so there was no light to see anything, unless he took a flashlight with him.”

  “He’s not Talent, but he’s not human, either,” Ellen said. “Not all, anyway.”

  “Oh.” Bonnie put two fingers to her lips, and huffed a laugh. “I forget that, sometimes. Fauns have good night vision?”

  “Like a cat’s, Danny said once. Or comparable. If there’s moonlight, he can see by it, mostly.”

  “Moon wouldn’t have risen then. But the security lights?”

  Ellen shrugged, having run out of useful information. “I don’t know if it would be enough to read by, red light and black print are a crap combination, but if something moved, he’d —”

  She got up, and turned slowly in a three hundred and sixty degree circle, scanning the room until her gaze fell on the window. The window that had no shades, no curtains. Danny usually sat at the desk, here, slanted sideways so his back wasn’t entirely to the window…. But if he’d been filing?

  She stepped forward: it was two strides for her to reach the filing cabinet, so maybe about the same for Danny, who was only slightly shorter than she was—about the same, in his boots. “There couldn’t have been anything in here, not if he was caught by surprise.” And if he had been, there would have been some disarray, some sign one of them would have noted. “But he’d have to pass by the window. If he saw something out here?”

  She tried to imagine being at the desk, at the file cabinet. This high up, what could catch his eye? The window looked out over the narrow courtyard, and a sliver of the street, but without half-hanging out the window it was hard to see down. But across….

  There were three windows she could look directly into, from here. That side of the building mirrored their own, meaning three offices that also didn’t have shades drawn.

  She paused, imagining the scene the way Danny’d taught her to, blocking out the unknown, moving what was known into place, setting the scenario and letting possible outcomes play out, one after another.

  “Come on,” she said, already heading out the door, assuming that Bonnie would follow.

  Bonnie agreed to transloc them to the other side of the building, rather than having to go up and down the stairs again. It was just as still and empty, although Ellen would have sworn it felt colder, somehow. She didn’t say that to Bonnie, though, only taking a minute to get her bearings, then leading the PUP down the hallway to the first of the three offices she’d seen from Danny’s window.

  The first one they checked hosted a graphics designer; the office itself was empty, the door locked and showing no signs of having been picked previously, no evidence of trouble inside. Even the chairs had been squared up evenly before whoever it was left for the night.

  The second office had no sign on the door, the door itself unlocked, and—based on the sheen of dust visible when Bonnie cast the mage-light inside—nobody had been inside in weeks.

  The third office had a small brass plate that said a CPA by the name of D. Kovar worked there. And occasionally slept there, from the state of the loveseat shoved up against one wall and the laundry strewn across the floor, revealed by Bonnie’s current-light, now muted to behave more like a flashlight in case anyone stopped to investigate.

  “Either someone’s messier than I am, or—a struggle?”

  “Maybe.” Bonnie made a ‘stay there’ gesture, and Ellen, well-trained, froze on the spot. The PUP did something with another strand of current, weaving a pale blue net that settled over the floor in front of the clothing, dimmed, and then disappeared.

  Footprints appeared, two sets, and an oddly elongated shape sprawled across the floor.

  Ellen had to remind herself to keep breathing. “Is that a body?” Was. Was where a body had been. The current showed what had been there.

  “Mmmm.” Bonnie stepped around it, studying it carefully. “Too short to be Hendrickson,” she decided, and Ellen let out a breath of relief.

  “But who? And where did it go? And where’s Danny?” She scanned the room as though he might suddenly appear, and then her breath caught. “Oh.”

  Without waiting for Bonnie’s all-clear, she stepped forward, skirting the still-glowing prints and the body outline, and bent down to pick up the gun she’d seen glinting in the current-light. An actual gun, not the evidence of one.

  “It’s his,” she said, something turning and twisting in her gut, current gone ice-cold. “It’s Danny’s.”

  The claw-tip rested against my skin for I don’t know how long. It’s hard to tell time when you’re wrapped in pitch darkness, an unknown distance below-ground. All the tricks I had for figuring distance, time, location—all useless. Time boiled down to that single sharp point scraping across my jugular, something deeply unpleasant leaning into my personal space in a way I didn’t enjoy.

  You can’t make a sarcastic rejoinder to a threat that isn’t talking. That isn’t making any noise at all. I tried not to breathe through my nose again, and let my muscles go as slack as I could, to be of as little interest, as little threat as possible.

  Eventually, the creatures—and I hated using that term, but not knowing what breed it was or even if they were a known breed at all, I didn’t know what else to tag them in my brain—left. Not that I heard them go. I was aware of the sharpness now resting just under my left ear, and then suddenly it was gone, the pressure, the presence, all of it.

  But they didn’t leave me there alone. There was heavy breathing in the space with me now, the thick, slobbery kind of heavy breathing you only get when someone’s trying very hard not to cry. Or panic.

  Unwilling guests, then. We’d have that much on common, at least. “Hey there,” I said, pitching my voice into what my old partner called the calm-and-console mode. “Hey.”

  The noise stopped on a choking noise and the pull—through—the—nose people do when they’re surprised.

  “Who…. Who’s there? Someone’s there?”

  “Who are you?”

  Two voices, speaking over each other. One male, one female. Human, I’d lay odds. Both young, from the sound of it—not preteen but they weren’t carrying the authority of being legal-and-adult yet, either. I’d gotten good at estimating shit like that.

  “Did they hurt you?” Important things first.

  “I…not yet?” That was the girl, who’d spoken first.

  “Knocked around a little,” the boy said, reluctantly. He’d fought, and lost, and didn’t want to admit it even now, tied up in the darkness. Sixteen, seventeen at most. Kids. I needed to get them out of here.

  “You’re tied up?” Maybe our unpleasant hosts had underestimated them, or run out of rope. Maybe.

  “Hands and ankles,” the boy said, sounding disgusted now, more than scared.

  “Same here, we’re back to back, on some kind of pole.” There was a grunt, then the sound of a body moving. “I think I can get a hand free, though.”

  “That’s gonna hurt,” the boy said to her. He could see what she was doing? No, they’d been tied up together, he could feel whatever she was trying.

  “I don’t think they tied us up for milk and cookies,” she shot back, over the sound of another grunt.

  Whistling in the dark, literally. But I could use that. More, they could use that. Sass would keep your feet on the ground when everything else was gone, that’s why it surfaced under stress. I had a flash of my old partner lecturing me, his nightstick tucked under some teenaged kid’s chin to keep him still. “A perp sasses you, boy, he ain’t dissing you. He’s try
ing to show he’s tough, he’s strong. So you have two choices: you can beat him down and show him he ain’t so tough, or you can respect the strength under the sass, and work with it, and nobody has to get bloody.”

  Hopefully, nobody would get bloody this time, either.

  “If you can get even a finger free,” I told her, “do it.”

  There was silence, then the harsh exhale of someone bracing themselves to do something they knew would be painful, and a series of small, pained grunts. I realized that she was dislocating something, probably her shoulder, maybe her elbow. Her companion hadn’t been kidding: that had to hurt like hell. Gymnast, maybe, or she’d taken up yoga young, or was just naturally agile, but either way after a few minutes of that she gave a short, triumphant bark. “Left arm free.” There was a pause, then, less triumphant, she admitted, “I can’t do anything with it though, can’t reach my right side or my feet, there’s something around my middle. More rope, I think.”

  “Can you reach…boy, what’s your name?”

  “Paul.”

  “Can you reach Paul? Work on his ties?”

  “I… yeah, I think so.” There was another silence, then Paul let out a muted yelp. “Careful where you’re poking, Lisa!”

  “Sorry not sorry,” she said, singsong, and I updated my evaluation: siblings. “Can you shift at all, now?”

  There were a series of muffled grunts, I presumed from Paul trying to shift within his bindings. If they were like mine, and he didn’t have his sister’s flexibility, he’d be able to twist his torso, but not much more. Apparently, that was enough.

  “I can touch the ropes around his arms,” Lisa said. “Just barely though. And it hurts like hell. But there aren’t any knots I can find. Ugh, what are these made of?”