Authors: Laura Anne Gilman
I started walking again, briskly, as though to leave the unease
behind simply by outpacing it. “Torres, get your head out of your ass, your
self-pity back in its box, and get to work.”
The kenning was never wrong—but it was always vague. The unease
might be related to this case. It might not. I had no way of telling, without
more info, and even if the kenning was related, it would hardly be the first
time one of our cases ran us into trouble. So. I would check up on the lead,
reconnoiter a bit, and see if there was anything actually going down in the
Park. If not, well, checking on leads was part of the game. If yes…then I could
go on from there.
The one thing I couldn’t do was let my feeling of being shunted
off into a low-importance case interfere with my ability to kick ass.
* * *
Central Park is large. If you don’t live in New York
City, you may not realize that, or think that the small portion that you see is
all there is, just a breath of greenery in the middle of the concrete
jungle.
The truth is, Central Park is more than eight hundred acres of
lawns, woods, lakes, playgrounds, fields, and rambling paths that never actually
go in a straight line. There are bridges and underpasses, tunnels and
suddenly-appearing gazebos, restaurants and castles, and god knows what else
tucked into the utterly artificial and incredibly lovely grounds. Something like
thirty thousand trees, according to the stats, and rumors of coyotes to go with
the birds and rabbits and squirrels and occasional seriously confused deer.
And there are fatae. Exactly how many
Cosa-
cousins live in the Park is unknown—even if we tried to run a
census, they’d either refuse to answer or lie. Piskies, flocks of them nestling
in the trees and building, their nests tangled in the roots. Dryads, not as many
as we might wish, but enough to help keep the rooted trees healthy and well.
Some of Danny’s full-blooded faun cousins, and at least one centaur. I didn’t
think the lakes were deep enough to support any of the aquatic fatae, but I’ve
been wrong a lot before, enough that I’d be very careful leaning too far over a
watery surface. City fatae tended to abide by the Treaty…but water-sprites were
changeable and moody and saw most humans as annoyances at best. Venec and
Stosser would be peeved if they had to ransom me from the bottom of a lake.
The moment I entered the Park at West 77th Street, I knew that
I was being watched. Fatae don’t use magic the way we do, but they’re part of
it, and they know it when it walks by. I could pretend I wasn’t aware of the
surveillance, make like I was just out for a nice afternoon stroll, or I could
stop and deal with it now.
I stopped.
The closest person to me was a woman pushing a stroller a few
yards ahead of me. Other than that, the walkway I was on appeared deserted. I
waited until she was out of earshot, then cocked my hip and addressed the air
around me.
“If you’ve got something to say, say it. I’m listening.”
Silence. Not even a rustle or a giggle, which meant that it
probably wasn’t piskies. When no pinecones or other shot hit the back of my
neck, I decided it definitely wasn’t piskies.
“Come on, this is boring. You have a question? Ask. Got a
warning? Go ahead. But don’t just skulk silently. It’s creepy as hell.”
The sense of being watched didn’t go away, and I was starting
to get annoyed. “You know who I am.” It wasn’t a question this time; last I’d
gone hunting in the Park I’d almost managed to set off an interspecies incident,
riling a Schiera to the point that it spat poison at me. That was the kind of
thing that got retold. And I wasn’t exactly subdued in my appearance—I didn’t
dye my hair the extreme colors I used to, after being told in no uncertain terms
it wasn’t a good look for an investigator, but the naturally white-blond puff of
curls, matched to my normal urban goth-gear, was easily identifiable. Lot of
Talent in the city, but the combo of Talent, appearance, and showing up to poke
my nose directly into things that other folk looked away from? Savvy fatae knew
who I was, and unsavvy or ignorant fatae wouldn’t have lingered once I called
them out.
“Come on. Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
My heart went into my throat and my eyes probably bugged out,
and I resisted—barely—the urge to drop to my knees and apologize for every
thoughtless, stupid, or mean thing I’d ever done. The woman standing in front of
me tilted her long, solemn face to one side and lifted one long, gnarled hand to
my hair, touching it as gently as sun touches a leaf.
“I startled you. That was not my intent.”
“M’lady—” And unlike with the Lady this morning, the title came
easily to my mouth, without resentment. “You do not startle but amaze.”
Rorani. Not merely a dryad but The Dryad. It was rumored that
her tree predated the Park itself, making her well over three hundred years old.
Nobody had ever seen her tree, at least not and spoken about it, but Rorani was
always there, moving through the Park the closest thing to a guardian spirit it
had. If the fatae in New York had any leader at all, or one soul they would
listen to without hesitation, it was Rorani. Her willowy green-and-brown
presence could stop a bar fight in progress, halt a bellow midsound, and make
edged weapons disappear as though they’d been magicked into fog.
“You are here about the children.”
“What, everyone knows about this except us?” I sighed and
dragged a hand across my face as though to erase the words. “I am sorry. I
just…”
“I have been watching them,” she said, accepting my apology
without acknowledging either it or my rudeness. “I worry. But I did not know who
to speak to, or even if I should. Humans…are difficult sometimes.”
“As opposed to the logical, tractable, and obedient fatae?”
At that, she smiled, a small, almost-shy grin that could break
your heart. “Even so.”
That grin didn’t mask her concern, or soothe my unease, but it
put paid to my thinking this job wasn’t worth my skills. Even if this had
nothing to do with my case, I was glad I’d come. Anything that worried the Lady
of The Greening, Stosser would want to know about.
“These children. Show me?”
I was surprised when the dryad hailed a pedicab. I don’t know
why—even dryads must get tired of walking, eventually. I always felt guilty
using a pedicab—I was in better shape than a lot of the drivers—but Rorani
stepped as gracefully into the carriage as a queen into her coach, me the
awkward lackey trailing at her heels.
“To the Meer, please,” Rorani said, and the pedicab headed
northeast.
My first thought was to be thankful that I had encountered
Rorani the moment I entered the Park, saving me probably hours of searching… and
that thought led me to the suspicion that it hadn’t entirely been coincidental.
Accusing a dryad of collusion with a da-esh, though, took cojones I did not
have. And it changed nothing, save that the fatae of the city were helping in an
investigation without being prodded, coerced, or paid, and that was…new.
I had no expectation that we were all going to join hands and
sing “Kumbaya” anytime soon; we might have stepped back from the edge regarding
human-fatae relations, but there were still generations of tension built into
every encounter. If Rorani had given word that we were to be helped… that was a
very good sign.
We skirted the Reservoir and got off a little while after 102nd
street, vaguely on the east side of the Park. Rorani waited, and I belatedly dug
into my bag for cash to pay the cabbie. He sneered at my request for a
receipt.
“This way,” she said, as he pedaled away. We walked past the
Lasker Pool and off the roadway, down a worn path, and into surprisingly deep
woods.
This part of the Park had been designed to mimic a natural
forest, and once within it, you could not see—or hear—any hint of the city
around us, not even the tallest skyscrapers. I was pretty sure that a slender
beech winked at me as we passed, but I didn’t have time to stop and say
hello—and I might have imagined it, anyway.
We walked down the deer path, single file, until Rorani
stopped, waiting for me to see whatever it was she wanted me to see.
There was a decline, sloping gradually into a little
flat-bottomed valley, with another higher, rocky rise on the other side. The
floor was covered in grass and ground cover, the trees midheight and leafy,
and—then the scene shifted, the way some paintings do when you stare at them too
long.
I saw the bedrolls first. They were tucked under a clump of
thick-trunked trees, concealed under tarps painted to mimic the ground, but the
shapes were wrong, jumping out at me like they were splashed with bright orange
paint. The storage container was harder to find; they’d found one the same gray
as the rocks and cluttered it up so that the lines resembled a small boulder. I
was impressed.
Once I saw that, the bodies came into focus. Three skinny forms
in dark hoodies and jeans, curled up against each other like kittens, and
another higher up on a rock, his or her legs hanging over the side, reading a
book. It was a quiet, peaceful scene, and I couldn’t see a thing about it that
would have worried Rorani, other than the fact that all four were young enough
to be living at home, not out here on their own. But that was a human concern,
not a fatae one.
The campsite, now that I was aware of it, looked well
established. Without using magic to hide it, I was amazed they’d been able to
keep it from being discovered even a week, much less a month or more. I guess if
nobody’s looking, it’s easier to hide.
Had anyone been looking for these girls, before us? The cops
had…but in a city this size, kids go missing at such a rate it must be
impossible to keep up, even on a purely Null basis. Add in the fatae, and the
risk of being dusted or—well, nobody had been eaten in years. That we knew
about, anyway.
“How many are there?” I spoke softly, although I was pretty
sure that they couldn’t hear us from up here.
“I’m not sure,” she said, equally as quiet. “They come and go,
and I cannot stay to watch them as I might. I have seen as many as a dozen
gathered. A dozen, and their leader.” She paused, and her hand touched my
shoulder, the fingers folding around my skin. “Their leader. She…worries
me.”
Ah. I had thought Rorani would not mind teenagers gathering
peacefully among her trees; there was something else going on. “An adult?”
“Yes. A Null. And yet there is magic there. She holds them in
sway. A glamour, save she has none. She speaks, and they gather around. She
points, and they scatter.”
I chewed on my lower lip, listening. What Rorani was describing
was a charismatic, like Stosser. Take a charismatic, Talent or Null, add a bunch
of under-twenty-somethings, and put them out here, with no other distractions?
You have a cult.
Most cult leaders were male, from what I’d ever read, but
most
doesn’t ever mean
all.
A females-only cult? If they were religious, I’d lay money on
Dianic—or Artemic—or any of the other mythological interpretations. No stag to
hunt here, though.
“What do you—” I started to ask, when something caught Rorani’s
attention. “Oh, dear,” she said, in a tone of voice that put every nerve I had
on edge. There was “oh, dear, that’s too bad,” and then there’s “oh, dear, this
is very bad,” and hers was the latter.
We weren’t alone. Out of the stillness, a dozen creatures
flowed over the hill behind the campsite. They were long and lean and shimmered
a pale silver like sunlight on water, and I had no idea what the hell I was
looking at except I was pretty sure they weren’t bringing milk and cookies. As
we watched, the first one started picking a careful, silent route down the
hill.
The kids below had no idea they were about to have company.
“Landvættir,” Rorani said. Her fingers moved restlessly, her
lovely face grave, but she remained still by my side, merely watching. “They
claimed this area before the humans came. I tried to warn them, but they did not
hear me.”
I wasn’t sure if she had tried to warn the humans or the breed,
but it didn’t matter. Dryads were negotiators, not fighters; she wasn’t about to
get involved in what was about to happen. I’m not much of a fighter, either.
Every time I’m near a fight—any kind, even a scuffle—my heart starts to pound
and my stomach hurts. But I couldn’t stand by and watch someone get hurt,
either.
Any faint hope that the fatae meant no harm was dashed when—the
moment they hit ground—they attacked. The humans were caught off guard, but
rallied in a way that suggested they’d been taught at least some fighting moves:
they rolled away from the first attackers, then went back-to-back in pairs,
grabbing whatever was nearest to hand as weapons.
My move into the clearing was more hasty than graceful, but a
few bruises and dirt on my clothes were the least of my worries. The fatae had
sharp claws and blunted snouts that still looked like they could do some harm,
and the four humans had what looked like pocket knives, a baseball bat, and a
large rock. That wasn’t going to do it, even if they had the first idea where
the fatae were vulnerable.
I had no idea, either—I’d never encountered these lan-whatevers
before. But I had a trick these Nulls didn’t; one that any fatae would recognize
and respect.
I hoped.
Reaching up with my current-sense—the thing that makes your
hairs stand on end and your skin vibrate when there’s an electrical storm
overhead—I grabbed the first bit of wild current I could find and dragged it
down into my core. I’m normally not much for wild-sourcing, but in this place
and this instance, it seemed the right thing to do.
The new current sizzled hot and fierce, and I didn’t give it
time to settle into my core before I was pulling it up and out again. Thin,
sharp blue lines sparked along my skin, like electric veins, and crackled and
popped in the air around my hands.