An Interrupted Cry

by Laura Anne Gilman

  But that awe never stopped her from being very cautious around them.

  There were high-res Talent and low-res, law-abiding and less so, but all Talent, far as anyone had ever been able to determine, were human. There were certain rules that held true for all humans, in terms of what they wanted, needed, could be held to—or they would suffer consequences.

  The crash course Ellen had gotten on the fatae, the non-human members of the Cosa Nostradamus, said that there were at least thirty-seven distinct breeds, or species, who stayed still long enough to be counted and named, not including demon, who might or might not be a distinct breed—the jury was still out on them. Thirty-seven, most but not all of whom interacted with their human counterparts, some of whom would be just as pleased to eat their human counterparts, if it weren’t for the censure that would follow.

  And at least half of those thirty-seven, in some form or another, had enclaves in New York City or the suburbs surrounding the city. Danny had contacts in most of them, but Ellen…. She swallowed, and firmed her chin. They knew her, some of them. They knew she was Danny’s protégé, and Wren’s mentee, even if they didn’t know her for herself, yet. It would be enough.

  It would have to be enough.

  She considered asking Bonnie or Lou for a translocation directly to her first destination, but they were both busy, and some fatae took it the wrong way if you just appeared on their doorstep without proper warning. So she did it old school, and went down to the street to hail a cab.

  It was still a few hours until dawn, but Ellen thought she could tell the difference in the sky; the stars seemed dimmer, the moon higher but less radiant. A cyclist sped past her, tiny red and white lights blinking as they went somewhere in a hurry, before one of the fare-hungry cabs glided to a stop at the curb.

  “Hell of a thing, huh?” This cabbie seemed slightly more cautious than the one earlier, although he too swerved through an intersection, barely checking to see if anyone was coming the other way. Ellen hadn’t taken many cabs, she thought maybe they were always like this? “I mean,” he went on when she didn’t respond, “they’re saying maybe no power until tonight, can you believe it? Fucking ConEd, man. They never get their shit together.”

  “Mmmm.” Ellen tried not to dig her fingers into the upholstery as the cab slid around another corner. Another sign that morning was coming: two busses lumbered along the right hand side, and a few other cabs and hired cars slid alongside, but the usual press of cars on the avenue seemed absent.

  “People stay home, when it’s all-dark,” the cabbie said, clearly noticing her gaze via the rear view mirror. “Sun comes up, then people’ll think about maybe going to work but mostly we’re gonna have a snow day, so ta speak. Mayor’ll probably tell all non-essentials to stay home. But we make out like bandits when the subways aren’t running.”

  He grinned, and she noted that his teeth were oddly spaced, and a little too sharp for human comfort. Her gaze instantly flickered to the door handles, and her shoulders relaxed only when she saw the handles were intact, the locks unengaged.

  “Relax girlie. You pay your fare square and we’ve got no problems,” the kelpie said. “Everyone’s got to make a living, right?”

  “Right” she said, leaning back with studied casualness. He had a TLC medallion, giving him the right to pick up fares; if passengers disappeared too often, they would have yanked it by now. Right? And he’d pegged her for Talent, or at least not a Null, so they were on relatively even terms.

  Ellen heard a giggle escape her, and waved away the cabbie’s quick look of concern. It was just…. She was heading to a den of non-human iniquity, driven by a creature out of one of the darker fairy tales, to try and rescue her boss, who was part-faun, from an unknown danger. And people used to think she was crazy because she had visions?

  Getting herself back under control, she asked, “You hear any rumor about the cause of the blackout? Anyone pointing any fingers?”

  “For once, not a peep,” he said, and both of them knew they weren’t talking about generators blowing up or power lines going down. “This could be a totally natural whoopsie. Or maybe someone just fell asleep at the switch. Sometimes bad news is just, you know, the universe shitting on us.”

  Cabbie philosophy 101.

  “And nothing else happening—nobody flipping out?”

  “You mean, other than you people, like a bunch of addicts cut off at the nip?”

  She made a helpless shrug: you didn’t argue with someone you were trying to get information from, she’d known that even before coming to work for Danny.

  “There was some squalling over by the east docks, ‘bout midnight or so,” he said thoughtfully. “But they’re always squalling over something or ‘nother, ever since they put those nets up. But you want to know about fusses, don’t go to Lala’s. Go ask Alice.”

  She blinked at him. “Who?”

  Alice lived along the lower stretch of the Harlem River Drive, in what looked like a cave made of tumbled-down concrete. Ellen made her way through the darkness with the aid of the current-light Bonnie had quickly taught her, thankful for the fact that the pathway was cleared and even. Whoever or whatever Alice was, she clearly didn’t mind visitors.

  Hopefully, she didn’t mind letting the visitors leave, either. But a quick ping to Bonnie to let her know where she was and what she was doing—and with whom—left Ellen confident that, worst case scenario, the Pups would come after her. Eventually.

  Having both members of Sylvan Investigations go missing would just be bad for business.

  She stood outside the cave entrance, and hesitated. There wasn’t exactly a doorbell, or door knocker. Or a door to knock on. “Hello?”

  The response was a thin but strong voice, echoing from within. “Come in, come in, no reason to stand outside.”

  “Said the spider to the fly,” Ellen couldn’t resist, and the cackle that replied told her that Alice had damn good hearing, too.

  It took a few steps to get past the crumbled, unpleasant facade, but once inside, the concrete cave seemed as comfortable as Ellen’s own apartment: thick rugs were layered on the ground, insulating it, and there were several lanterns casting a better glow than her own current-light, so she extinguished it, curling the remaining current back into her core.

  She could hear traffic distantly, the rumble of occasional trucks and emergency vehicles, she thought, and the occasional low toll on a foghorn on the East River, just a few hundred yards away. During rush hour it might get noisy, but now it was an almost pleasant white noise. There was a shadow at the back, perched on a sofa. Angular, too angular and narrow to be even the skinniest human, but Ellen still wasn’t prepared for what she saw, drawing closer.

  There was nothing about Alice that could have passed for human even in a crowd. From the silver-green body to the oversized head topped with bent-over feelers—antenna?—she was clearly one hundred percent fatae. But the expression on her face was perfectly readable, despite the compound eyes and a rigid mouth: she was amused.

  “I’m not going to eat you, girl.”

  “Good. I’m told I’m occasionally hard to swallow.”

  The soft clacking of forelegs was, Ellen, thought, the laughter she had heard earlier. “Only people who come here are people who need listening to. What do you need to tell me, girl?”

  Ellen shook her head. “I need to know what you’ve heard, what others might have said.”

  Alice settled further on her sofa, tilting her head. “And you think I know those things?”

  “I was told that if there was anything happening in this city, you would know. Second only to Madame.” And, the cabbie had told her, safer to bargain with. The Great Worm of Manhattan did not make cheap bargains.

  “Speak to me, then. Tell me the things you need someone to hear.”

  Ellen thought about trying to correct Alice again, then decided the fate knew damn well what she meant, and was either being difficult, or really couldn’t respond any ot
her way. “My boss went missing tonight, and there was—” There hadn’t been a body, actually, just the place where one had been. “And someone’s probably dead. We’re trying to track down what happened, if anyone saw or heard anything. If any of the fatae heard or saw anything, or were part of anything.”

  Alice just sat there, and Ellen had a moment of despair, that they were really going to just listen to her, and not actually offer anything. And meanwhile, time was wasting—why had she listed to the cabbie?

  Finally, Alice shifted, forelegs touching each other to make a dry, scratchy sound. “Why would the doings and deaths of your boss be of interest or concern to the fatae?”

  Ellen licked her lips, and hoped to hell that his reputation had spread this far, into this corner of the city. “My boss is Danny Hendrickson.”

  “Ahhhhhhhhh.” The forelegs stilled, and a secondary pair took up the clacking. Ellen didn’t know what that signified. “The meddler. The mender.”

  Ellen raised her eyebrows and cocked her head to the side, but had to admit those were two words that summed him up pretty well, yeah.

  “And you tell me he has gone missing. Or dead.”

  “Missing, in the darkness.” She wasn’t going to believe he was dead; belief was half a step away from being truth. The body they saw had to be the missing CPA he’d gone to investigate. “With no warning, no note. And left his gun behind.” Ellen wondered at how the words spilled out: she knew she had trust issues, even with humans, but this… Alice, drew confidences from her in a way even Bonnie and Wren didn’t.

  “And you go after him.”

  Ellen blinked. “Of course.” It was as simple as that.

  All four legs now rubbed together, creating a sound like shallow water rushing over rocks, echoing against the concrete walls, disappearing into the muffling effect of the carpets underfoot.

  “The Hendrickson. There are few who know him, here, who would harm him. Even those who hate him know he has too many friends, too many bindings, otherwise. But there are those in the darkness who know nothing, care for nothing. And the darkness below is as the darkness above tonight. Look there, if you would find him, I think, yes.”

  A hint, a direction—at least, Ellen thought it was a direction. “Where?”

  “In the caves below the tunnels, the deeps below the shallows. Where the shadows live, but do not go.” When Ellen couldn’t hold back her irritated sigh, there was a moment of that soft whispering laughter-sound again. “Did you think this would be easy, little girl?”

  “I live in hope,” Ellen said. “Just once.”

  Caves below the tunnels, below the shallows. It wasn’t “Seventh Avenue at 57th street, ring the bell and ask for Charlie,” but she’d been over the city enough times with Danny on cases, during training runs with Wren, that she thought she knew where to begin.

  oOo

  *I don’t like it*

  *I don’t like anything about any of this*

  Pinging didn’t carry exact words, but Bonnie’s worry and Ellen’s exasperation were palpable things, carried on short bursts of current. But even that was taking too much time.

  *You follow your leads, I’ll follow mine. I’ll be in touch.*

  And with that, Ellen pulled current inside, shoving it into her core and telling it to be still. It simmered and shimmered, but quieted, like a lake after a motorboat went through. If Bonnie tried to ping her again, she was concentrating too much to hear it.

  She’d pay for that later, probably. But even at her most pissed off, the PUP had nothing on Wren’s partner Sergei when he was irritated, so Ellen figured she’d survive.

  “So go on,” she told herself, pulling the loaner jacket more tightly around herself, well-aware that the chill she felt wasn’t from the night air.

  “In the caves below the tunnels,” Alice had said. Gnomes lived in the tunnels underneath and alongside the subways, mostly the older ones, the ones that went deep into the ground, so you had to haul up three flights of stairs, or take an elevator down. Danny had never taken Ellen down into gnome territory—he had some kind of running feud with them—but he’d shown her the major entrances, in case she ever needed to know. They mostly lived out in Brooklyn and Queens, since the Bronx didn’t have many tunnels to start with, and Staten Island didn’t have any. And Manhattan—after they rebuilt most of the A, C, E and R stations in lower Manhattan, word had it that most of the fatae living there had moved out.

  Gentrification was a bitch for everyone.

  But they were known to linger in a few spots in Manhattan, too stubborn to move. Considering they’d been hauling a solid, six-something male who couldn’t weigh much under 150, she’d started with the spot she knew closest to the office, one of the three in Manhattan proper. The 2nd Avenue subway had torn up the area while it was being dug, but they’d also re-opened the tunnels originally laid down in 1929, before the Great Depression put an end to those plans.

  “In the deeps below the shallows, she said.” The 2nd Avenue line wasn’t as deep as the A, across town. And it wasn’t being used yet—they were still building it—so that would be appealing to fatae who didn’t like to mingle with humans aboveground, right? It wasn’t the best leap of logic, maybe, but it felt right to Ellen. And Danny and Wren both told her, over and over, that her gut was to be trusted.

  It was, Ellen guessed, about an hour before dawn. She’d been awake now for almost twenty hours, nearly six of them in the dark, both literally and figuratively. Her eyes were gritty and sore from exhaustion, but the few 24-hour bodegas in this neighborhood had probably shuttered the moment the power went down, and the single street cart she saw was selling bagels and muffins for the oh-god-early shift, but spread his hands in apology when she asked about coffee, and all the sodas he had were warm. She took one anyway, grimacing at the taste. She bought a chocolate muffin, too, and shoved it into her pocket for later.

  The subway entrance was dark, like the toothless mouth of something rising from the concrete, and Ellen had to steel herself to take that first step onto the stairs. “Ridiculous,” she told herself, forcing her voice to above a whisper. “You run up and down stairs like this a couple times a day, and never think anything of it.

  But then, even late at night or early in the morning, there were other people around, and warm, welcoming lights to show the way. She was the only person visible or audible, and the steps now leading down into the subway were dark and too-quiet, so still that she could hear the scurrying of the rats along the rails, the darkness encouraging them to forage more brazenly. She concentrated, remembering the cantrip Bonnie had taught her earlier that night. When she thought she had it right, she pulled a thread of glowing current up, wrapping it around her ankles and feet to illuminate where she stepped, while still allowing her eyes to adjust as much as possible to the gloom.

  Once she made it down the stairs, there were faint red emergency lights, and here and there the clearer white of generator-run illumination, few and far between, and she used them, plus her own glow, to find the section of the wall she was looking for. Danny had said it was obvious, if you knew what to look for…

  There. The mural—normally an exuberant swirl of colored tiles, now only a shadowed pattern—was set in a thick black frame that was bolted to the wall itself. She was tall enough to run her fingers over the top of the frame, then down along the side to where there was a faint bump.

  “Come on, come on, don’t fuck me over….”

  Her handspan was too narrow, but a few inches past that, there was a section of the wall that shifted slightly when she pressed down on it, and then a crack in the wall appeared, opening just enough for someone slender—or malnourished—to slip through.

  Ellen had never been particularly slender, and was nowhere near malnourished, but she knew the trick of bending and sliding, and didn’t mind risking a tear in her jeans or a skinned elbow. The edge passed skin-scrapingly close to her nose, and she was pretty sure she left a strand or two of black hair behind,
but pulling her torso in and pushing her shoulders down got her through.

  “Ugh.” Ellen had never wanted to be one of those pipe cleaner girls, the ones with no butt or thighs, but they had a definite advantage when spelunking.

  Inside, thankfully, the tunnel widened, giving her enough room to swing her arms without hitting the walls, and the ceiling overhead was high enough that she could walk upright without fear of a concussion. It was also lined with a bioluminescent moss of some kind giving off a light similar to her current, illuminating the tunnel evenly, if dimly. Ellen was surprised, and then annoyed at herself for being surprised. The fatae didn’t use current, not the way Talent did, but they weren’t lacking in other skills, including things humans had forgotten, or never bothered to learn.

  Including, it seemed, moss-lamps.

  “So, where now?” Her voice sounded too spooky in the tunnel, not because it echoed but because it didn’t, the moss soaking up all sound the moment it was made. She’d never gotten around to memorizing the tunnel maps—something she was going to remedy the moment she got back—but Danny had said that they were all pretty much the same, that gnomes didn’t have much in the way of imagination or innovation. If so, then she was pretty sure that this tunnel would meet up with a larger one, if she went in just a bit further.

  She counted off fifty-seven steps in her head, and on the fifty-eighth a puff of cooler air told her she’d reached it, even before the light showed her the second passageway, angling off in both directions, left and right.

  “Of course. Just once, a signpost?” The moss ate those words, too, and she reminded herself to shut up, before she freaked herself out or, worse yet, alerted someone that she was there. Gnomes probably wouldn’t bother her, but probably wasn’t a definite. And she didn’t know what else was here, what Alice had said was below.