“I do not understand,” Malkin said. “This … hat … does what?”
“We couldn’t beat the thing,” Marla said. “You told us yourself, it’s immune to everything, and what it’s not immune to, it gets immune to. So, if we can’t defeat it, I figured, why not give it what it wants?”
“Think of it as an illusion,” the Chamberlain said, having been briefed on the plan — the whole plan — in a phone call earlier. “The beast believes it is back in Felport in the early days, before there were settlers, alone in the woods.”
“The simulation was easy enough to create,” Langford said. “There are geographical surveys, so reconstructing the landscape wasn’t difficult. Likewise the weather. Woodland creatures are simple to emulate, too, and there are hardly any humans, just the occasional native for the beast to dismember.”
“The beast has been enchanted to believe it dwells in the past?” Malkin blinked, clearly wrongfooted by the whole situation.
“Well, at least a third of it is technology,” Langford said. “Creating false experiences by manipulating electrical impulses in the brain is within the grasp of science, though outside the bounds of most ethical systems. I did use magic to bridge the impossible bits, admittedly.”
“But the beast fights enchantments,” Malkin said. “And when it wakes —”
“Why would it fight?” Marla said. “It’s got what it wants. If this thing is capable of being happy, it’s going to be happy. But don’t worry. We’re taking it to a little place outside the city, called the Blackwing Institute. It’s where we keep sorcerers who go crazy and pose a danger to themselves, and others, and the substance of reality.”
“And the sorcerer who runs it, Dr. Husch, is totally hot,” Rondeau said.
Marla rolled her eyes. “We’ll keep the beast in a cell deep in the basement, with every kind of technological and magical countermeasure we can think of, in case it ever wakes up. Don’t worry. It’s a secure site.”
“We’re sure you’ll like it there,” Langford said, and shot Malkin with the tranquilizer pistol.
“We could have given Malkin a perfect fantasy life, too,” Langford said. “It would have to be far more complex than the one I created for the beast, but it’s certainly possible.”
“Fuck that,” Marla said. “Why would I want to make him happy? He called me the weaker sex.”
“Carry on, then,” Langford said, and waved as Rondeau drove the truck off into the night.
“His real name is Barry Schmidt,” Marla said, sitting with Dr. Husch before the security monitors. Malkin was on screen, sleeping on a bed in a pleasantly-appointed — but escape-proof — apartment in the Institute’s east wing. “An apprentice from out west. Poor bastard actually thinks he’s Everett Malkin, the first sorcerer of Felport, you believe that? He came to the city and started talking about how he was the rightful ruler, demanding I give him my dagger, crazy stuff like that.”
“Hmm,” Husch said, a vertical worry line marring her smooth pale forehead.
“And then he summoned the beast of Felport from, you know, the primordial whatever,” Rondeau chimed in. “So he’s got some magical chops, no doubt about that. Better to keep him in maximum super-isolation, we figure, with every magic-nullifying countermeasure you’ve got.”
“Heck, keep him sedated forever,” Marla said. “That’d be fine with me.”
“You know I believe in therapy, not mere containment,” Husch said. She looked at the Chamberlain. “Tell me, Chamberlain — do you think there’s any chance he is Everett Malkin? The beast of Felport is bound, dreaming peacefully, in my basement, and if one creature can come from the past, can’t another?”
Marla tried not to tense up. The Chamberlain was the key here. Rondeau was trustworthy, and Langford was both trustworthy and uninterested, but the Chamberlain could change her mind. She had a potent connection to the early days of Felport through her relationship with the ghosts, and she didn’t really like Marla all that much. But, on the other hand, Malkin had ordered her around like a servant, and the Chamberlain said the ghosts who’d known Malkin — especially his apprentice Corbin — had really hated the guy, so maybe she’d stick to the plan.
“Oh, no,” the Chamberlain said, smooth as her own silk gown. “That man is not Everett Malkin. I checked with the ghosts, and they say he’s nothing like Malkin was. He is merely a madman, I’m afraid, a troubled soul who read too many histories. But his delusion is very fixed. He’s clever, too — he might pretend to be cured, even if he isn’t. Be careful.”
“The poor dear. It’s good you brought him to me. At the very least, I’ll make him comfortable.” Husch raised one perfect eyebrow. “He really demanded you relinquish your dagger of office, Marla, and said he was going to take over the city?”
“He did.”
“I suppose he’s lucky you left his head attached, then.”
“Hey,” Marla said. “Don’t ever let anybody tell you I’m not a benevolent and enlightened ruler.”
T. A. Pratt’s stories have won a Hugo (and lost a Nebula and World Fantasy Award), and have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and other nice places. He lives in Oakland CA and has a website at www.timpratt.org
Despite lacking much in the way of tact and having a tendency to solve all her problems with violence, Marla Mason has been chief sorcerer and protector of the city of Felport for a few years now, and no one’s succeeded in assassinating her yet.
Dusted: A Cosa Nostradamus Story
by Laura Anne Gilman
“Sylvan Investigations. Daniel Hendrickson speaking.”
People tend to be surprised when they hear the name of my agency. I guess it’s not what they expect from a big city PI. They don’t expect the investigator to pick up the phone, either. In all the movies the PI has a cute secretary/gal Friday answering his phones and trying to block the bad guys from rushing into his office.
I handle the cute myself, and I answer my own damn phone. Overhead’s bad enough without having to pay someone else’s salary, too, and I prefer to work alone.
The caller didn’t care about my dimple or my boyish grin. He wanted to sell me a subscription to the Post.
“Not if you paid me,” I told him, and hung up. Some day they’d invent call discarding. Like call forwarding, only it would hang up preemptively on telemarketers.
I really needed a job. Not for the money — my pension from the NYPD took care of the basics, and I lived a pretty simple life. But I was bored. Bored was bad. Bored was boring.
“Mr. Hendrickson?”
I looked up to see a man standing in my doorway. Fifty-ish, solidly built, with graying brown hair and worried eyes.
“I was told you … you find missing people?”
I pushed back my chair and considered him. “That I do.”
Parent, I pegged him. Runaway. Boy. Maybe. Maybe girl. And where’s … ahh.
Behind him, the mother. Petite without being tiny, with brown curls and doe eyes that were red-rimmed, now. Daughter. Definitely daughter.
“Come in, please.” I stood up and gestured to them, indicating the chairs by my desk. They came in, looking around. I let them take time to size up the place. Whatever brought them here, it wasn’t easy, and they needed to be reassured. It also gave me the chance to size them up.
I had the basic two-room suite set-up, but I kept all the action up front. The furniture was basic brown wood, the chairs comfortable but not elegant, and the sofa was leather, but scruffed just enough that people felt comfortable sitting on it. The wall behind my desk was covered with photos and citations from my PD career and a few since then, for show. The letters from clients went on the wall to my right, so I could see them, on bad days. I’m not much for modesty — if you’re selling your skills, put ‘em front and center.
His name was Jack, and she was Ellen, and their absent daughter, age fourteen, was Susan. All-American family: mom and pop and loving daughter, like a
picture book, except someone had ripped Miss Susan out of the picture.
Or she had cut herself out, neatly and quietly, leaving behind two very worried, self-blaming parents.
I actually preferred it when they blamed themselves. It was easier to get information out of them.
The first thing I knew was that they were Null. Talent — the humans who can use magic — always enter my office like they’re about to apologize. At least until they see that I don’t have any electronics in sight for them to fry, either accidentally or on purpose. Talent feed off current, the hip term for magic, and current, like its name, runs cheek and jowl with electricity. Imagine the fun when they tangle. Yeah. There’s a reason I keep the computer in the back room.
No, this couple were Null, and they didn’t know about the Cosa Nostradamus, either. You can always tell if they do. For one thing, they notice things about me.
Like the fact that I‘m not entirely human.
A missing kid could go anywhere. It all depended on who she was, and what she wanted. I started with her last sighting: the lobby of her high school, up on East 74th. She’d been there on Tuesday afternoon, hanging with her homegirls, or whatever the slang was around the 14-year-old set these days, and then, an hour later … she wasn’t. The police had already questioned her friends and boyfriend, and I had — through my ex-partner — gotten copies of those reports. They were all unsurprisingly unhelpful. Normal day, normal traumas, normal schedule. The kids broke to go their separate ways, and nobody knew anything until Susan’s parents started calling and texting her peer group that night, looking for their wayward daughter.
Talking to the friends didn’t get me much further, either. They seemed like good kids, all worried about Miss Susan. Nothing they said sounded suspicious or questionable, and none of them were suspects. Just … normal kids, as much as that sort of thing was possible.
So Miss Susan became an official Missing Person. My former compadres in the NYPD did their usual sweep of the obvious places; the bus station creepers and ladies’ room Lotharios who like to sweet-talk young girls into unsavory arrangements. No luck. They were still looking, but if you knew how many kids go missing every year, you’d know why they weren’t busting their humps over a girl who might or might not have gone under her own power.
But now I was on the job. The fact that I’d been a cop wasn’t in my favor among the dirtirati, but the fact that I was part of the Cosa Nostradamus won some of those points back. One outcast recognized another. If there had been gossip around about Miss Susan, I would have gotten wind of it.
No such luck. Human or fatae, nobody was talking. To all intents and purposes, Susan had walked out of her high school, and disappeared.
To a human, that might mean anything. To me, it suggested something entirely different.
I walked out into the street, blinking a little at the sunlight, since the baseball cap I’d jammed over my curls didn’t do quite enough to shield my eyes. My father’s species wasn’t much for sunlight, except maybe to nap in while recovering from their hangovers, and I’m willing to admit I’d inherited significant night-owl tendencies. That, and the pair of thumb-sized horns that my thick curls didn’t quite cover, were about all I’d gotten from him, thankfully.
All right, that and a way with the ladies. The fact that my father had been a charmer was supported by the fact that my human mother, on discovering that her weekend of passion with a faun during Fleet Week had resulted in a pregnancy, decided to keep the result of said pregnancy: me.
I wondered sometimes if she’d made the right decision.
“Hey.”
The piercing whisper was all too familiar. I looked up, squinting and cursing again at the sunlight, to see a small creature perched in the overhang of the building to my left, like some kind of furry gargoyle. A piskie. I stepped back, leaning against the wall as though contemplating the midday traffic passing by on Broadway.
“Hey Boo. You got something I should listen to?”
“Your skidoodle.”
“I’m listening.” Boo had brought me scoops before. If there was something useful, I’d reward the little pisher, and he knew it. If it was useless I’d kick his ass to Pretoria for wasting my time. He knew that, too.
“She got dusted” Boo told me.
I dragged the toe of my boot against the cement. “Aw, fuck.”
I’d been afraid of that. Dusted, from a fatae, doesn’t mean what it does in human slang. It’s worse. It’s what happens when a Null teenager — usually a girl, but not always — discovers that the fatae are real. They want nothing more than to traipse off with their newfound discovery, to go play with the fairies. Unfortunately, most of my fatae cousins are just as tricky and unreliable, if pretty, as human fairy takes suggest, and the playing … rarely ends well.
If my Miss Susan had taken up with Manhattan’s answer to Trooping Fairies, I might as well hand her parents back their check and call it a night. The fatae rarely give back what they take, especially not if they thought someone else wanted it.
“Who with?” I asked my informant, who shrugged his furry shoulders, and scampered off.
Great. Well, that was why there was an “I” in “Investigator — I was the one who actually had to work.
The thing about the Cosa Nostradamus is that it’s pretty polarized. You have the human Talent on one side, and the non-human fatae on the other, and they don’t often mingle. Not socially, anyway. Lucky for me, horns and hooves made me fatae enough to be able to ask the questions that would get a human hurt. That didn’t mean I could go in like an Appalachian cave dragon on a bender, though. You had to know the players. That was what had made me useful on the force, and was a lot of what made me successful now: I could work both sides of that street. And I knew that there was one fatae breed that not only gossiped like a knitting circle, but was amenable to some gentle bribery.
“For me?”
The salamander looked longingly at the glowstick, but didn’t take it out of my hand. We were on the West side of the Park, just below the Rambles, at dawn. I’d hauled my ass out here to make sure I caught one of the firebrands before they were really up and moving. Sure enough, one of them had been having breakfast along the stone wall, catching the early morning rays and hotfooting the occasional jogger for laughs.
“A gift for you,” I agreed, placing it on the top of the stone wall. The salamander considered it without touching it, then looked up at me, its lidless eyes surprisingly expressive. It wanted it, oh so very badly, but it wasn’t sure why I was just handing it over. It assumed I wanted something.
It was right.
“I’m looking for someone who has gone missing. A young girl. Her parents miss her.”
It picked up the glowstick in its front leg, the tiny claws snapping it so that the chemicals started to glow. “Pretty,” it said. They could burn without scorching, but the concept of a cool light fascinated them. I guess you always want what you can’t have — or do.
It cocked its slender head at me, the foot-long body still stretched out along the wall, managing to be both relaxed, and ready to scamper at the slightest threat. “How young the girl?”
“Fifteen. Rumor says she’s been dusted.”
“Blond or redhead?”
“Blondish.”
That’s where the ‘smart one’ myth comes from, by the way. Brunettes. Less likely to get dusted. Other trouble, yeah, but not by following the pretty little man into the greenways. Don’t ask me why, it just is.
“How long?”
“Five days. Five. Four days too long for a girl to be dusted. Once it takes, it’s tough to ever get out of your system. Seven days, seven years — seven is the magical number. I had a very real deadline.
The salamander nodded. “Maybe. Maybe. We hear talk. You need to go low down to talk to someone. Down into the metal caves.”
Gnomes. Wonderful. This case just kept getting better and better.
Fortunately, I knew where to go for help.<
br />
The door was opened by one of the least attractive women I’ve ever met.
“Heya doll,” I said, swooping in to steal a kiss. She let me, rolling her eyes and taking my hat.
“What trouble are you bringing this time, Danny-boy?
Unlike her face, her voice was lovely, a gentle alto that would have put any of my full-blooded cousins into unstoppable heat. I admitted to myself that I wasn’t totally immune.
“No trouble, doll, I swear. Not for you, anyway.
“And for my husband, who doesn’t know how to say no?”
“I just want to ask his advice. He won’t even leave his studio.” I hoped.
Lee was a Talent who had an unbelievable gift that wasn’t magical at all, at least not as Talent went. He was a sculptor, working with metal to create figures that totally baffled me, but sold for large amounts of money. His studio, on the top floor of their narrow townhouse, had huge windows, and a floor half-covered in an electrostatic carpet.
Lee used current to meld his metal, not fire. One bad day, if he forgot to discharge after working, he could take out his entire grid. The fact that he never had told you a lot about the man.
He was working on something when I came in, so I took one of the cushioned chairs at the far end of the room and waited. About ten minutes later the sparks stopped flying, and he stepped over to a thick black mat to ground himself.
“What’s up, Danny?”
“I need your advice on how to approach gnomes.”
Lee stopped short, clearly not sure if I was joking or not.
“They’re metal. You work metal. I figured you’d know something that could help me out, some spell or something that would make them, I don’t know, malleable?”
Lee shook his head sorrowfully. “Your ignorance of magic is terrifying.”
Tough to argue with that, especially since I do it intentionally. My kind — fatae in general — don’t use magic, as such; we are magic. As a human, I’m basic Null — can see magic, sort of, but can’t use it at all. Some Nulls can’t even see it, can’t even see the fatae strap-hanging beside ‘em on the subway. It’s a sliding scale.
Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives Page 3
