An Interrupted Cry

by Laura Anne Gilman

  I’d already asked myself that, and run through a series of possible answers, based on the smooth, almost oily texture of the bindings. I didn’t want to tell her what I’d determined, though.

  “There isn’t any give at all?”

  “No. In fact, I think they got tighter.” She sounded pissed about that.

  I lifted my head a little at that, like I’d gotten a whiff of fresh air. “It was reactive?”

  I could practically hear the scowl in her voice. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means the more you struggle, the tighter it’s going to grip.”

  “Oh.” There was another noise, and a grunt of discomfort. “Yeah.”

  “And when you slipped your arm free, the binding around it kind of slipped free?”

  “Yeah,” she said again. “Slid, actually. Gross.”

  Oh, if only she knew. My brain left that alone, though, working on possible hacks. “All right, so here’s what you need to do. Don’t tug or pull at the rope. Scratch it.”

  “Scratch?”

  “Like you would a scab.”

  “Ick.”

  “Don’t get girly,” Paul said, sounding slightly panicked. “Get it off me.”

  It took longer than any of us were comfortable with, every ear cocked for a hint that our captors were returning set against the steady scratch-scritch-scritch of her fingernails. I tried not to think about how fortunate it was that she’d been the one able to slide free, because my nails were trimmed close, and I would bet everything in my wallet Paul’s were the same, if not bitten down even lower. Even when they didn’t go for talons, the females of every species seemed to pay more attention to their nails. I wondered idly if it was because they were vain, or they were aware that nails were weapons?

  Probably both, I decided, as Paul let out a soft noise that sounded like triumph, mixed with panicked relief. “Right arm’s free,” he announced, and I could hear him shaking it loose, probably trying to work out a cramp. “What now?”

  “Do the same to your left arm, you idiot,” Lisa said, and from the scratching noise that started up again immediately, I presumed she was doing the same to her own. Two of them working on their own arms was more efficient than one of them getting free and then trying to free the other, but it made my own skin itch, hanging there waiting, unable to do anything at all.

  It was our luck that they’d been tied up to each other. I also suspected I’d been tied more thoroughly; whatever our captors were, they’d probably made the mistake every other breed, including humans, did, underestimating the threat of a half—grown teenager versus an adult male. The young of any species are terrifying, trust me. Babysitting should be required training for evil overlords.

  “Arms free,” Lisa announced in a breathless whisper. “Going to try for my legs, but I don’t know…”

  “Do a little at a time, then lift yourself up again,” I told them. If she spent too long with her head bent that low, she’d get dizzy, and I had no idea if they’d actually been injured, if she had a concussion, anything that might affect her balance and blood pressure. I took an inhale through my nose, relieved when I didn’t smell fresh blood anywhere. Whatever damage we’d taken, it was dried and crusted, now.

  Internal injuries would have to wait until were free and out of here, to check. Hopefully we’d get that far, where it would matter.

  They’d both set back to work, the scratch-scritch-scritch making me tense with the need to tell them to go faster, and the knowledge that they were already working as fast as they could. If they could reach my knife…. well, if they could they’d already be free, and I didn’t know how these pseudo-ropes would react to a sharp edge, anyway. With our luck so far, it would scream for help, or something, like a rope out of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Was it the Beanstalk legend that had the talking rope? My brain was fuzzier than I’d thought, if I couldn’t remember that.

  “What’s your name, anyway?” Lisa, her voice sounding stronger than before, though still low. Someone had told her that whispers carried better than low voices, and she’d remembered. Good kid.

  “Danny,” I said. “Danny Hendrickson.”

  “I’m Lisa Mays, that’s my cousin Paul. You have any idea what it was that grabbed us, Danny Hendrickson? Because I’m pretty sure they weren’t human.”

  Her voice was calm, even, but there was an undercurrent to it I’d heard before, the desire to be reassured and told that they were being silly, that they’d misread the signs, had been hallucinating, that of course there was nothing in the world beyond what they’d always known.

  I thought about lying to her, then figured the odds of them getting out of here alive on a lie, versus knowing what they were up against.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure they weren’t, either.”

  There was a pause that felt longer than it probably was, then, “Are you?”

  I laughed, not having expected that. I probably should have. “Former NYPD at your service,” I said, which wasn’t really an answer, but they both took it for one, based on the sigh of relief Paul let out. They were still young enough that my having been a cop gave them comfort.

  I wished I were still that young.

  There was a thump, and a muttered curse. “I’m free,” Lisa announced. “Can’t… ow. Gimmie a minute, though.”

  Considering how numb my limbs were, I could imagine it would take her more than a minute or two to be able to stand and walk without pain. But tension was creeping back up my spine: we’d been left alone long enough, odds were that someone would be coming to check on us, and like Lisa, I was pretty sure milk and cookies weren’t on the menu.

  “Sooner would be better,” I warned her, and was rewarded by a shifting of darkness within the darkness, less seen than sensed, as she crawled toward the sound of Paul’s scratching. Between the two of them, they seemed to make better progress, and it wasn’t as long before I heard another thump, and a muffled curse that told me they’d broken him free. But before I could call them over, I sensed something nearby: the smooth, nearly soundless pace of invisible ninja unknowns.

  “They’re coming,” I said, and both kids stilled immediately. “You’re only going to get one chance. The moment they come into range they’ll know you’re down, they can see in this gloom. So you need to be ready and go. No hesitation, no stopping, rush right by them and don’t stop for anything.”

  “But…you…”

  I appreciated the concern but it was pointless. I was still tied, hand and foot. “There’s no time. Head up, every chance you get. We’re deep underground, so up is your best chance.”

  The not-sound came closer, and I took a deep breath, ready to shout, scream, whatever it took to get our captors’ attention for the second or three they were going to need.

  “Danny…” Lisa, agonizing, guilty.

  “Don’t fucking waste time,” I told her, and then started to howl.

  oOo

  Ellen was not going to cry. She wasn’t going to cry, and she wasn’t going to swear, and she wasn’t going to throw anything. But Ellen very much wanted to do all three of those things.

  Instead, she slid Danny’s gun into her jacket pocket, the weight of it keeping her off-balance, and watched while Bonnie used current to erase any sign of their having been in the office.

  “Should we call the police?”

  Bonnie gave her a side eye. “Really?”

  Ellen shrugged. “We don’t know that it was Cosa business.” The PUPI had been formed to deal with crimes by and against the Cosa Nostradamus, the kind of thing you couldn’t explain to the local cops. But Danny had been a cop, once. And this…

  “He’s an adult, El. And there’s no evidence that he’s done anything other than go walkabout. You think they’re going to have time in the middle of a massive blackout, to worry about one missing PI?”

  “But—” Ellen had no response to that. Bonnie was right, and worse, the idea of going back to her apartment and waiting for him to sh
ow up again, waiting for news to come about the missing teenagers—or worse, another vision—to come, seemed the worst of all possible options.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  Another slightly less unnerving cab ride uptown, and they found Lou, the PUP’s office manager, already at the desk, a faint white glow of current-light illuminating the front room.

  “Why in god’s name are you even here?” Bonnie asked, taking Ellen’s borrowed jacket and hanging it with her own in the front closet.

  “Carly called me, because hey, who needs sleep?” Lou handed over a sheet of paper. “You asked about this?”

  Bonnie took a quick look at the sheet, then handed it to Ellen. “Any of those names look familiar?”

  Ellen took it, squinting in the current-light. Eleven names, male and female, written in block print. “No.”

  “Those are all the kids of the age and basic description described, currently known to be missing in this area. It would be in this area?”

  Ellen nodded. “We think so. Every vision I’ve had that we’ve been able to follow up on, it’s been within fifty miles, more or less. It’s like it knows where I am.”

  “It?” Bonnie looked intrigued, then shook her head. “A discussion we’re going to have another time. None of the names strike a chord?”

  “It doesn’t work like that.” Ellen’s voice was sharp, but she didn’t apologize. Bonnie and the other PUPs had seen her visions in action, but she’d never really discussed it with them, not with anyone except Wren. And Danny. “There are clues, things that tell us where to look, and then we…dig.”

  “But you didn’t get any clues from the vision?”

  “No. Just…dark. And they’re dirty. That’s it.” She tried to remember more, regretted now that she hadn’t written it all down when she should have. Was there something she’d missed, so worried about Danny? Panic fluttered, and she forced it down. Wren said that panic got more people killed than bullets ever did.

  “Dark and dirty. Lou, do we have anyone on the stringer who’s good with dirt of the actual dirt kind?”

  “Alan. Geology major, did time in the oil business —” and she pronounced it ‘awl bidness,’ in an exaggerated drawl. “You want I should wake him up?

  “Please,” Ellen said, when Bonnie indicated with a glance that it was her decision. “It was wet dirt, muddy, and….” Her gaze unfocused. “Not brown? Not black. Red? Like clay.”

  “Clay, check. Local sources thereof. Dark less helpful, it’s fucking dark everywhere.”

  “Oh, and we need to know more about the guy who had the lease on this office,” and she scrawled something on the pad on the desk. “Come on, El, if Lou is here, there’s coffee on.”

  The reminder that it was well past 1 am, meaning she’d been awake for over eighteen hours, made coffee suddenly the most appealing thing in the world.

  The ability to light up the office didn’t extend to making any of the heavily-warded electronics work, apparently, and they didn’t use laptops. “Batteries are delicate. It’s why cell phones are so easy to fry.”

  Ellen licked her lips, drumming her fingers on the table in front of her. It was dark wood, gloss-finished, and made a solid noise under her hand. “I could grab Danny’s laptop.”

  “Picking up your mentor’s bad habits?”

  “I’m…not very good at it yet. But most of that’s familiarity with the object. I know his desk, the laptop.” Translocating, for most Talent, required familiarity with both the person or thing being moved, and the origin and destination locations. Inanimate objects were easier, moving yourself more complicated, moving another person with yourself a rare—and exhausting—skill set that few Talent ever learned.

  “You think you could yank it here without frying it?”

  That, Ellen thought sourly, was the real question. Getting it here in one piece was pointless if it was then useless. And Danny would kill her when he got back.

  “Okay, so no computer. No questioning. No…what can I do?” Her frustration swelled, forcing her body up and out of the chair, even as she realized that there was no room to pace in the conference room, barely large enough for the table and four chairs around it. “Kids are in trouble, Danny’s missing, and I’m not doing anything!”

  “Ellen. Sit. Down.”

  Ellen was back in her chair before she realized her body was moving. Bonnie was still in her own chair, leaning back but not looking at all relaxed.

  “This is the part that sucks,” the PUP went on. “When you’ve got a case but you don’t have leads. But running after maybes and mights in the middle of a blackout is not smart time management. There are people out there who are chasing down possibilities for us. Our job is to be ready to go when they come in. Okay?”

  “That’s not how Danny does it.”

  “That’s because Danny is a throwback cowboy with a two-person operation, and he’s too stubborn to ask for help.”

  All of that was entirely true. Ellen went back to drumming her fingers on the table, as though the rhythm would somehow make thing happen more quickly.

  “I screwed up. I didn’t write down the vision, I was too focused on getting to Danny.”

  “Wait.” Bonnie sat forward in her chair, her gaze meeting Ellen’s. “Why were you focused? Did you know something was wrong?”

  “I…” she thought back, amazed that it was only hours before, not days. “No. But…. He’d called me, when the power went out. When he was in the office. I’d told him I was planning to stay in, but after I hung up the phone I was, I don’t know, restless?”

  “Not unusual in a blackout,” Bonnie said. “We’re used to feeling the thrum of the city, all that current being generated; having it suddenly disappear can freak us out a little, even subconsciously.”

  “Oh. Yeah, maybe that explains it. But I just started walking, and found myself outside the office, when the vision hit. You don’t think it’s connected?”

  “I think we don’t know enough about how your visions work to even venture a guess. Sorry.” But Ellen could see the gears churning in Bonnie’s brain: the PUP might not have a theory yet, but she would, eventually. Ellen was just as willing to leave it in her hands.

  “I don’t—”

  The door opened, and Lou stuck her head in. “Got a name for you. David Kovar. CPA. No known enemies on the radar, no contacts within the Cosa that we can find, and if they were there, we’d have found them, and no reason so far as the cops or the gossip chain know for Anon to drag his bloody body parts off to places unknown.”

  “And Danny? Did he have a connection to Danny?”

  “Nothing on the radar.”

  “So your theory is probably right—he saw something, and went to poke his extremely Roman nose into it. Damn it, Hendrickson…. You,” and Bonnie poked a finger in Ellen’s direction. “You won’t ever do anything without backup, right?”

  “I called you, didn’t I?”

  “All right.” That seemed to be enough to appease her. “We’re currently on hold for anything new about the kids; either wait for your boss to come back on his own, or we go hunting. You know him better than me, these days: what’s your call?”

  Ellen looked at her fingertips, the candles—lit to conserve current—flickering odd shadows around the room. “If he could come back, he would have. Or called my home line, or Sergei’s line, and left a message.” He hadn’t done any of those things. “If he couldn’t, that means he’s in trouble. Real trouble. And probably having to do with whatever did the damage in Kovar’s office. ” She could see it in her mind, what must have happened. Danny had been working, had looked out the window at exactly the wrong moment, and seen something that made him go investigate, armed.

  Alone.

  And then what? Had he been injured, dragged off, too? Or had he followed under his own power? She could imagine him doing that, but…. He would have left word, somehow.

  She refused to think that he was dead and dumped somewhere. She couldn’t
think about that, or she’d curl up under the desk and not be able to function.

  “Shake the bushes we can reach,” she said. “That’s what Danny would say.”

  “And that would mean what, exactly?” Bonnie managed not to sound exasperated, but there was a line of tension strung through her words that suggested it.

  “Same thing you’ve been preaching to me. Play to our strengths. Use the contacts we have.” A vague, very thin plan was forming in her mind, and it would worry her how thin it was, if she had time to look at it too long. So—contrary to her nature but wholly in line with Danny’s—she didn’t. “Keep reaching out to Talent, especially the Talent who would be out and about on a night like this. The skulkers and lurkers, the ones who normally cause problems, not solve them.”

  “That’s more Wren’s style, maybe we should call her…”

  “Wren’s on a job. And she doesn’t poke, she goes in and grabs. We need to ask questions, not intimidate people.” Ellen was fiercely fond of her mentor, but Wren Valere only had two modes: invisible, and terrifying. Neither of those would be useful just now.

  Bonnie made a face that said she wasn’t going to disagree with that assessment. “Skim the sewers, check. It’s almost dawn, I’ll haul everyone in. And where will you be, while I’m doing that?”

  Ellen inhaled, held it a moment, and looked up at the inky shadows of the ceiling before exhaling slowly. “Talking to the fatae.”

  oOo

  Ellen had spent most of her life being told that there were no such thing as…well, pretty much anything other than humans. That the things she saw in the corner of her eye, heard in the dark, or early hours of the morning, weren’t real. Imagination, they told her. Crazy, they muttered. And of all the things that had haunted her, growing up not knowing that she was Talent, the half-seen images of fantastical creatures had been the most disturbing.

  The few years she’d been aware of the Cosa Nostradamus, the time she’d spent working for someone who wasn’t a hundred percent human, the fear had been wiped away, replaced—mostly—with awe that these creatures were real.