Dragon Justice (2 page)

Then, all of a sudden, it was like the floodgates opened. Okay,
a steady trickle through the gates. The Eastern Council hadn’t given us their
gold seal of approval yet, but the rank-and-file Council were bringing us their
troubles.

The problem was, most of them held the “above the rules”
attitude that had made Ian Stosser decide there was a need for us in the
Cosa Nostradamus
to begin with. It’s tough to solve a
supernatural crime. It’s almost impossible when the client doesn’t give over all
the gory details at the start.

Nicky had gotten one of those.

I’d gotten pretty good at holding back exasperated sighs. “At
some point, they’re going to have to realize that we’re not going to judge them.
Right?”

Nick snorted in response, and I flopped down on the sofa next
to him, swinging my feet up into his lap and unwrapping the sandwich. “Okay,
maybe not.”

Nick shoved my feet back onto the ground and went back to
marking something in his notebook. Since current messed with electronics
something fierce, most Talent couldn’t use recorders or cameras, so we all
carried notebooks around like twentieth-century beat cops. I’d added a
sketchbook to my kit, but Nick couldn’t draw a straight line if you gave him a
ruler. I know, I’d tried.

“Just be glad you weren’t here when the smoke detector went off
again,” he said.

I groaned. “What’s that, the third time this month?”

“Yeah. Scared the crap out of Nisa.”

“Poor kid. She so doesn’t deserve to be stuck here with
us.”

Nicky just snickered.

“I didn’t see anything on the board—I wonder if I could get
tomorrow off,” I said, biting into my lunch. Ham and cheese. Not bad. Time off
would be nice. I’d gotten an invite to go sailing from a woman I’d met the week
before, and I wanted to take her up on it before she decided I wasn’t
interested. Despite the Merge, I was trying to keep some semblance of a normal
social life, even if very few of my hookups ended up with an actual hookup these
days.

“Doubtful,” Nick said, not looking up. “Stosser took a new
client into the back office about ten minutes ago. Got your name all over
it.”

“Oh, gods above and below.” I took another bite, that news
suggesting that lunch might be abbreviated. “Can’t someone else handle it?”

“Fatae.”

That one short word made me put down my sandwich, thoughts of
my new acquaintance and a lazy afternoon on the water not quite forgotten but
shoved aside. “Seriously?”

Nick finally looked up from his notebook. “Serious as a heart
attack. No idea the breed. They were cloaked like it was midwinter. Human-tall,
human-wide, no visible tails or fur.”

That didn’t rule much out—most of the fatae in New York City
were human-shaped, enough to get by on a casual glance, anyway. There were a few
horned and hooved types, and a few clearly not-human breeds living in the parks
or underground, but they were the minority. And when they had a problem, most of
them dealt with it internally. In fact, most of the breeds dealt with their own
shit. For one of them to come to us…

It could be good, or it could be seriously bad. The last time
we’d gotten tangled in fatae business, we’d had to drag a ki-rin into disgrace.
Never mind that the Ancient had brought it on itself; we were still the ones who
had exposed it. The fact that the honored one had chosen suicide rather than
live with the knowledge of what it had done…

Technically, and what passed for legally among the fatae, what
happened wasn’t our fault, nor our responsibility. But I still felt sick about
it and suspected the others did, too. I didn’t want to deal with a fatae
case.

“Still.” I was running through excuses and justifications in my
head, if only for the practice. “Someone else could handle it. What about
Sharon? She’s good with delicate situations.”

“You’re the fatae specialist,” Nick pointed out with damnable
reasonableness. “Stosser will put you on it, if there’s anything to be put
on.”

Right on cue, there was a touch of current against my
awareness. *torres*

The feel of that ping was unmistakable. I sighed and got to my
feet. “I hate it when you’re right,” I grumbled, shoved my lunch back into the
fridge, and headed into the office to face my fate.

We had started two years ago with one suite, taking up a
quarter of the seventh floor. About a year back the guys acquired the second
suite of offices on our side of the building and combined the space, repurposing
the original layout into a warren of rooms that gave the illusion of privacy
without sacrificing an inch of workspace. Nice, except when you were doing the
Tread of Dread, as Nifty had dubbed the walk from the break room to Stosser’s
office at the very end of the long hall.

I knocked once, and the door opened.

“Sir?”

Usually I’d have started with “you rang, oh great and mighty?”
but what worked with humans could backfire spectacularly with fatae. The fact
that I knew that—the result of years more experience interacting with the
nonhuman members of the
Cosa
than anyone else in the
office except possibly Venec—was why I’d been called here. Nick had it in
one.

“Torres. Come in.”

I came in, closing the door behind me, uncertain of where to go
after that. The office was large enough to hold five people comfortably, seven
if we all squeezed. Right then, there were only four—me, Stosser, and two
figures, cloaked, with their backs to me—but it felt crowded as hell.

Then they turned around, and all the air left my lungs in a
surprised, if hopefully discreet, whoosh.

* * *

Benjamin Venec took good care of his investigators. If
they were stressed, he gave them something to snarl at. If they were worried, he
could provide a sounding board. If they were pissed off, he was willing to fight
with them. But he couldn’t force them to relax; even if that had been his style,
his pups were stubborn. They’d decide when they went down, not someone else,
opponent or boss.

So he could have told Torres to go home and get some sleep. She
might even have gone—or at least started to. But he knew her: something shiny
would catch her attention, either a case or a person, and she’d be off again.
That was just…Torres.

The fact that he had given up any right to be jealous of either
things or people she deemed shiny didn’t seem to help the slight burning
sensation to the left of his gut when he felt her sudden rush of surprise,
followed by a shimmer of glee and anticipation that was uniquely Bonita
Torres.

Her signature was like coconut liquor, spicy and warm, and he
let himself enjoy the taste—offsetting the burning sensation, or enhancing it,
he wasn’t sure.

The pleasure was balanced by a sense of moral discomfort,
though. They’d agreed to stay out of each other’s headspace unless invited.
Bonnie had been scrupulous about maintaining that agreement. He hadn’t. And
claiming that it was part of his job, as her boss and teacher, nothing more than
he did for the others, only went so far in justifying what his mentor would have
called a blatant misuse of Talent.

Ben didn’t even try to justify it, not to himself. He might be
a bastard, but he was an honest one. He simply couldn’t avoid the overlap: even
with his walls up, he was hyperaware of every strong emotion that passed through
Torres, and the girl never felt anything halfway. It should have been annoying
to his more cynical, jaded self, the way she threw herself wholeheartedly into
every step of her life and dragged him along, via the Merge, without even
realizing it. Instead, the experience amused, exasperated, frustrated, and
invigorated him, sometimes all at once.

He let it ride. The first rule of dealing with the Merge, they
had discovered, was not dealing with the Merge, and so far, he had been able to
ignore the other, totally unprofessional urges. Mostly.

The fact that Bonnie took other lovers had been established—by
her—early on. Also established: it was none of his damn business. She kept her
private life private, but the Merge… If she knew how much leaked, even when she
thought her walls were up, she’d be horrified. And mortified. Thankfully, she
was as particular as she was omnivorous, and they had been few and far between
lately. He always knew, though.

He waited a minute, just letting the Merge-connection wash over
him, and the sense of surprise and excitement faded, her thoughts settling into
the focused hum that meant that whatever was making her quiver was
work-related.

Work was within his purview. Ben tapped his pencil against the
desk, resisting temptation for all of ten heartbeats.

*new job?* he queried his partner.

*interesting problem* Ian sent back, not so much words as a
perception of something sharp and dark, versus Bonnie’s sense of shiny.

Ben tapped the pencil harder.

*too much* he suggested, with just the sense of scales tilting
too far to one side. The past few months they’d been getting a steady stream of
work, from piddling jobs like the one they’d tested Farshad on to the more
complicated blackmail-and-possible-murder case he’d given Sharon, Pietr, and
Jenna.

There was silence from Ian, which could mean anything from
disagreement to his being attacked at knifepoint by the supposed client.

No, if that were the case, even if Ian were his usual cool
self, Torres would have reacted. So: he was being ignored.

In its own way, that was reassuring. Torres and Stosser both
had the kind of focus that didn’t miss much. Whatever was going on there, he
could safely ignore it for now in favor of…

Ben paused his pencil-tapping. Actually, there was nothing
pending on his desk. Lou, their office manager, had the day-to-day things
running smoothly, and with the exception of Ian’s new project, whatever it was,
nothing new had come in needing his attention.

Ben exhaled, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nothing did.
Everyone was either out on a job or finishing up their paperwork. Nothing new
needed to be evaluated and assigned. That meant he was free to pick up the job
that had come across his desk this morning. Not a PUPI investigation; something
from his previous line of work. He’d given up his sidelines while they got PUPI
running, but not gotten out of the game entirely.

This project would only take a day or three, and it would be
good to get out of Big Dog mode, use his other skills before they got rusty…and,
he admitted, get himself out of Bonnie’s immediate vicinity, give the connection
between them time to cool off a bit. She’d been single for a couple-three months
now, but every time she did hook up with someone, he could feel himself hovering
between an all-out confrontation or sliding the knife in deep, in places only he
knew about. He was capable of both, he knew. Both would end badly.

Yeah, time away would be a good thing.

*taking a few days off* he told his partner and got a
distracted mmm-hmm back. Not that he needed permission, but with Ian it was
better to clear the decks anyway, in case he had something tucked up his sleeve
that Ben would be needed for.

Looking at the packet of papers on his desk again, he picked up
the landline—an old-fashioned rotary, thrice-warded against random
current-spikes—and dialed the number in the letterhead. He let it rotate through
the phone-tree options until an actual operator came to see what the problem
was.

“Extension 319, please.”

He waited while he was clicked through, and a familiar voice
picked up at the other end.

“Allen? It’s Ben. Usual plus expenses, and I can be there this
afternoon.”

Chapter 2

Holy mother of meatloaf, the atmosphere in Stosser’s
office didn’t just hum—it fricking crackled.

The boss did the introductions. “This is Bonita Torres.”

“The Torres is known to us.”

It took me a second, then my manners flooded back and I made as
graceful a salutation as I could. A properly elegant curtsy requires yards of
skirts and a fitted corset, but I didn’t think the Lord would be offended, so
long as the proper respect was shown. How the hell was my name known to him?
That wasn’t good. Or it was very good. I wasn’t sure.

The other unknown figure in the room laughed at my response, a
low noise that sent a different kind of shiver down my neck. Oh, fuck. Stosser,
damn him, looked utterly unaffected.

“She will be acceptable,” the other, still-hooded figure said.
Her voice was low, a smoky contralto, but not even remotely masculine. It was
the voice that could lure otherwise sane men to their doom with a smile on their
lips and a sparkle in their eye.

A thought passed through my head that it wasn’t really a
surprise Stosser was unaffected: he had already trooped merrily along to his
doom, that being us, here, this.

I wanted very badly to know what the hell was going on, but
also knew damn well to keep my mouth shut unless spoken to.

“Our guests have come to us about a child who has gone
missing.”

I turned my head slightly, to indicate that I was listening to
the Big Dog, but I kept my gaze on the Lord. Not that I distrusted him, exactly,
but I wanted to keep him in my sight at all times. The Lady didn’t worry me—I
might like guys and girls, but the Fey Folk kept it pure vanilla when they
deigned to mess with mortals. At worst, she’d try to make me a lapdog, and my
kinks didn’t bend that way.

“A Fey child?” Even as I asked I knew that wasn’t it. Not just
because Fey children were rare and protected, but because the Fey would not
involve mortals in their own business. While not nearly as arrogant as the
angeli, the Fey were still about as insular as a breed could get, in the modern
world. Which, in my opinion, was good for all concerned.

Every fairy tale you ever heard? The truth was worse.

“A mortal child.” Stosser clarified the case. The Lord did not
move away from my gaze, allowing me to watch him, and I knew damn well he was
allowing me to do so. His cowl lay against his shoulders, and his face was
clearly visible, a Rackham sketch come to life, but twice as vibrant and three
times as dangerous, if he desired. “A seven-year-old girl, abducted from her bed
during the dark of the moon.”

Which had been last week. “Not quite seven, I bet.” It wasn’t a
guess; a child past that birthday would be safe from the Fey; I didn’t know if
Catholicism set seven as the age of reason because the Fey stopped being
interested in human children around then, implying that God had claimed them, or
if the Fey stopped being interested because the child actually had developed a
moral backbone. It didn’t matter which came first so long as you could keep your
offspring safe until then.

Someone hadn’t.

“And you came to us because…you didn’t take her? And her
parents think you did?” That made no sense; they wouldn’t care what mortals
thought. Especially if nothing could be pinned to them.

“Our Troop abides under the Palisades Treaty,” the Lord said. I
was starting to get—not used to his gaze, but able to ignore it. Sort of.

“But you think someone slipped up, maybe couldn’t resist?”
Stosser asked.

No. Not that. It didn’t feel right.

“Or another Troop is poaching?” he continued.

Poaching in their territory and letting them take the blame.
Yes.

“That,” the Lady said, and her voice was the growl of a
sweet-tuned sports car, clearly annoyed that Stosser seemed oblivious, “is what
you must discover.”

“We must?” The words slipped out, even though I’d have sworn my
mouth was shut. Oh, not smart, Bonita, not smart questioning one of the Fey. I
didn’t think they would do anything here—hell, I knew they wouldn’t do anything
here, not within our walls. That would be rude. But once I was out on the
street, once I left the protection of human habitations… Being well over the age
of reason didn’t protect you from anything save abduction. There were far worse
things the Fey could—and did—do to humans who crossed them. And they could make
you like it.

The Lord seemed to be in command of these negotiations, from
the way he stepped in. Or maybe he just wanted to keep the Lady from saying
anything more. “If the human child was taken within our Troop, we will deal with
it. If she was taken by another, infringing on our lands and agreements…then we
will deal with it.” I did not like the sound of that, and from the way Stosser
went even more still, neither did he. But neither of us said anything. “If she
was taken by another, one not-Fey, and a trail was left to indicate that a Troop
had done it, breaking the Treaty…”

The Lord looked me direct in the eye then, his gaze unshadowed,
and the tawny-gold of his irises was exactly like an owl’s, just like legend
claimed. “It was not so many turns of the moon past that this city was at
shattering point, mortal and breed,
Cosa
and
Null.”

Understatement, that. The battle of Burning Bridge last winter
had been a high point in human-fatae cooperation, but the before and after… I
knew I didn’t know how close to the brink the city had come and was pretty sure
that I didn’t want to know.

“We have no wish for that point to return.”

No. Nobody did, not even the most rabid antihuman fatae. We’d
scared ourselves sober, for once.

If someone was trying to set up the Fey, we needed to be on it,
to prevent any more damage from being done. A PUP’s word that the Fey were not
guilty would be trusted; we’d earned that, at least.

“You have the best contacts within the fatae community,”
Stosser said to me. “If anyone knows anything, they’ll tell you.”

The boss knew better than to use his usual glamour of
competence with not one but two Fey in the room, but he practically glowed with
such utter confidence in my abilities, I almost believed it, too. Sure, not a
problem, boss.

“It is done, then,” the Lady said, her voice still disturbing
but not so obviously fishing for bait. We weren’t interesting enough for her to
keep playing with, I guess. The Lord lifted his hood back over his head, making
them a matched set, and they swept out of the room like the arrogant bastards
they were. I was pretty sure I never saw either one of them touch the door; it
opened for them like it was eager to do their bidding.

Or maybe just to be rid of them. I know I breathed a little
easier once I sensed they had left the office entirely.

Only then did I turn to Stosser. “Who’s on—”

“Just you.”

“What?” We did not go out alone. That was the first rule,
hammered into us from day one, by Venec. Pups worked in pairs, to make sure
someone always had your back.

“I don’t want this looking like an investigation. Not yet.
Ideally not ever.”

I tended toward the blunt—tactless, Venec said, often—but my
mentor had been a politician to match Stosser, once upon a time, and I knew when
a game was on. “You want me to solve it quietly, have them owe us without anyone
knowing they owe us, and have them know that we kept them out of it, but without
ever being tacky enough to say so.” Shit. “We’re doing this pro bono?”

Stosser’s expression didn’t change, which meant absolutely
nothing. “For a fee to be determined later.”

“Uh-huh. They’re really worried, if they’re agreeing to that.”
The Fey were the ones who gave the fatae some of the worst reps—even more than
redcaps or angeli. Not because they were violent, but because they were sneaky
to a level that would make a corporate lawyer jealous. Agreeing to a deal
without having all the terms nailed down hard-and-fast and in their favor? That
was the kind of mistake they anticipated mortals doing, not one they made
themselves. I was immediately, worryingly suspicious.

“Um, boss?”

“Let me worry about that, Torres. You just do your job.” There
was a sudden sparkle in his eyes that I distrusted. “Manage this without getting
anyone killed, and we’ll make a Council schmoozer out of you yet.”

On that threat, I turned and ran. Slowly, decorously even, but
I ran.

The doors off the hallway at this end were all closed, but I
could still feel the steady hum of activity throughout the office as I made my
way back, pausing in the half-open doorway of the main conference room at the
other end. There was a single pup in residence, working at the long, polished
wood table.

“Kill me now, please.”

Pietr made a gunlike shape with his right hand and mimed
shooting me, even as he kept writing with his left.

My fellow investigator and sometimes lover had just finished a
three-week-long investigation into a missing sculpture, an alleged magical
Artifact that turned out to have been a spell-cast but otherwise ordinary
figurine pawned by the owner’s stepdaughter. I wasn’t sure why the boring jobs
generated the most paperwork, but it always seemed to be the case.

I stood in the doorway and watched him awhile longer. Pietr was
the quiet one, among all of us. He thought first, and then thought again, and
then when he did something he did it well and thoroughly. And yes, that included
sex. He also had the interesting and occasionally useful, more often annoying,
tendency to fade from sight, literally, when under stress. That little quirk
made it problematic, at times, to work in the field with him. He was sharp and
clear today, though.

He looked up at me, just then, as though suddenly realizing I
was watching him. “New assignment? Need help? I’m just about done here.”

Pietr would have been useful as backup, but Stosser’s orders
were, well, orders. I shook my head. “No. I’m good. Just some Q&A among the
fatae the Big Dog wants done. One-person gig.”

“Lucky you.” He knew that was against standing procedure but
didn’t push.

“Yeah. Lucky me. We still on for dinner next week?”

“Assuming no last-minute disasters, yeah. Wear your dancing
shoes.”

I nodded and went the rest of the way to the break room, where
there was no sign of Nicky. I eyed the coffeemaker on the kitchenette counter to
my right, then decided that more caffeine wasn’t what I needed. Sleep, now, that
would have been nice. And I needed to re-source my current; I’d been too busy to
dig deep recently, and I could feel a hollowness inside that had nothing to do
with hunger.

Calories weren’t the only thing we had to replenish after
working. A Talent’s core stored their current, and the longer it stayed there
the more it conformed to that individual’s signature, making it easier to
use.

It also made it easier for us to track down the Talent who had
used it, like matching fingerprints to fingers. So far, we’d kept that bit of
info to ourselves. Trade secrets—no reason to give up what slight advantage we
had over our criminally minded peers.

I thought about making a second try at lunch, but my appetite
had fled. The Fey suspected someone was interfering with the Treaty and had
given us the chance to stop it. If we couldn’t…

Yeah. Suddenly, a sandwich wasn’t so appetizing.

If I wasn’t going to eat, and I wasn’t going to tell Stosser
where he could stick this job, it was time to get my ass out of the office. I’d
always hated the “soonest begun, soonest ended” crap, but it had the nasty
flavor of truth.

I went over to the small board that hung on the wall next to
the main door and marked myself “out, on job.” Lou had set the system up after
one too many confusions about who was where, when, and god help the pup who
forgot to check in or out. I left my work-kit in the closet; I wouldn’t need the
external tools of my trade for this—just my brain.

I hoped.

The external hallway was empty, as usual. There were two other
offices on our floor, but it was rare that we saw anyone go in or out save the
UPS guy. I paused a moment at the elevator and then told myself taking the
stairs was exercise, nothing whatsoever to do with the lingering memory of the
boy who had died there when the power failed, now almost two years ago. Nothing
at all, nope.

The six flights down were easy, but the moment I hit the
outside air, I felt sweat break out on my skin. It wasn’t that hot outside yet,
but the air still had the feel of an oven. I plucked at the fabric of my T-shirt
and scowled. It was barely June. This was going to be a bitch of a summer, you
could tell already. Great. Still, maybe a lot of people would take the summer
off, go cool down somewhere else, which would mean fewer people rubbing raw
nerves against each other, making life easier for the rest of us in the
city.

Yeah, and cave dragons were suddenly going to start giving
interest-free loans.

So. Scouting the fatae. Where, and how to begin? It’s not like
this gig came with a bunch of guidelines or clues…

Try acting like a trained professional, an acerbic voice in my
head suggested. My own voice, this time.

Right. First things first. I dipped a mental hand into my core,
the pool of current all Talent carry within us as a matter of course, and tested
my levels. Blue-and-green threads brushed against me like slender little snakes,
sparking and snapping as they moved, crackling when they touched each other.
Low, definitely low. Discretion would probably be the better part of valor,
then. There was a power generator on the West Side I could dip into without
inconveniencing anyone, while I made my plans.

Current—magic—liked to run alongside electricity. In the wild
state, that meant ley lines, electrical storms, that sort of thing. For the
modern Talent, though, the best, most reliable source of power was, well, a
power plant. The trick was learning how to take enough to satisfy your needs,
without draining so much you blew the source.