Talents didn’t make great electricians, generally, although we knew theory inside and out.
Bonnie?
The familiar mental ping was like mashed potatoes: comfort food.
On my way back to the hotel. J. had been good, staying out of my space, but I knew that he was worried, too.
“He was working,” I told him twenty minutes later. We were sitting in the lounge of the hotel, which was pretty decent without being wildly overpriced, and they didn’t ask for ID when I ordered a vodka martini. I had ID, of course, but it was always easier to just project “legal drinking age” at them, and not worry about an ex-cop being behind the bar. J. had settled in with a beer. He might have been Council, which is sort of the equivalent of being the country-club set of Talents, but he never did seem like it.
“Claire said it was a job with a construction guy, over in Staten Island. He was doing some detail work.”
That was one thing Zaki was good at, no question. Give him a chunk of wood and his tools, and he’d hand over a banister, or a mantel, or some other bit of house that you could point to decades later and say, “Yeah, we had this handmade, and it was worth every penny.”
He made a decent living at it. Only he kept insisting he knew how to play poker, too. As a gambler? Zaki made a damned good carpenter.
“The job was set to go on for another couple of weeks. Sometimes he’d stay out there, stay in a hotel room overnight rather than lug back to Brooklyn. She had a couple of trips”—Claire was a flight attendant for Air Cheapo—”so she didn’t think anything of it when he wasn’t home when she got back. But then she went to pay the rent”—the apartment was hers, not his, which was the smartest thing both of them had ever done—”and the money he was supposed to have left for her was gone. She got suspicious, because she does know Zaki, and went to look—and her stash was gone, too.”
“How much?”
“Twenty thousand. And no, I don’t know why she kept that much in the apartment. I guess dragons aren’t the only ones who like to be able to fondle their hoards. Anyway, that’s when she went looking for him. Only the guy who hired him said he hadn’t been there all week, had asked for time off to, and I quote, ‘deal with some family shit.’ “
I was the only family he had, far as anyone knew. Zaki would be the type to rush off and embrace a new alleged offspring, but he’d be busting to tell someone—me—about it, first.
I actually would have liked a kid brother or sister. Claire had never seemed interested in producing, though, and they’d been together for almost ten years, so…
“Bonita, you are not focusing.”
J.’s reprimand got me back on track.
I pulled the letter out of my backpack. It was a little rumpled from being shoved into my psych textbook, but it wasn’t like I’d ever gotten points for neatness. “ ‘I’m going to take care of this,’ “ I read, “ ‘and then I swear, never again. And I won’t ever trust a dragon to hold my marker again, even if it swears up and down I can have a full decade to repay. ‘ “ I folded the letter and stared at J., thinking hard.
“You still know people who know people?” J. had worked for the state before he retired early at fifty-eight, about the same time he took me on. And yes, the two events were probably connected.
“I might. What do you want me to do?”
“Get them to pull his records. Credit reports, stuff like that. Maybe we jumped to the wrong conclusion for all the right reasons. See if he took out any loans, or had been bouncing checks, stuff like that.”
“Not a problem.” J. had friends who had friends who had friends all the way down, I sometimes suspected. He was the kind of guy who collected people. And it was something he could do sitting in the hotel bar, sipping his beer, which was where I wanted him. He might still be rough and tough mentally, but he was pushing seventy, even if he didn’t want to admit it, and I worried like any dutiful mentee.
“And in the meantime, you will be doing what?” he asked, waving the waitress over for a refill.
“His tools and stuff are still on the job site. I think I need to go sniff at them.”
Ask anyone in the tristate area what that smell is, and more than half the time you’ll get back the wiseass response of “Staten Island.” Unless the speaker is from Manhattan, in which case it’s a toss-up between Staten Island and New Jersey. But the truth is that the little borough gets very little respect. And with good reason: it’s the kind of place you grow up in, and get the hell out of, as soon as possible. Why? Because it’s boring.
The ferry over was kind of fun, though. I liked the feel of the wind on my face, and the fact that it was off-hour meant there weren’t many people crowding the bright orange deck—the old ladies and older men with their shopping bags and snot-nosed grandchildren were inside, glomming the molded-plastic seats.
The job site was a reasonably ordinary-looking house. I don’t know much about architecture—I grew up in a series of apartments, until I got to college and dorm housing—but it seemed pretty nice without standing out. In other words, classic suburbia.
Inside, though, I could see why they’d hired Zaki. Wood everywhere. And not just wood, but WOOD. The kind that has texture, and almost glows from within. Wood like current, actually, the more I looked at it.
Zaki must’ve loved this job. He wouldn’t have just walked out on it.
“Can I help you?”
Guy, big. Foreman, my brain whispered to me.
“Hi. I’m Bonita Torres. Zaki’s daughter? I called, about his kit?”
Foreman guy melted. He must be a dad, too. You can always tell. “Right, right. Damnedest thing. I hope everything’s okay.”
“Me, too,” I said.
The guy showed me where Zaki stashed his stuff, and looked like he was going to hover. I plucked a thread of current like a harp string and listened to it resonate. Go. Deal with something important. This isn’t important. I’m trustworthy.
“Okay, I gotta deal with some stuff—you’ll be okay?”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” I gave him my very best virtuous-daughter look. “I’m good. Don’t let me distract you.” Really. Don’t let me distract you.
He left, and I turned my attention to the tools Zaki had left behind. A metal locker, which my occasionally not-so-useless dad had lined with a cushion of foam padding. Even when you weren’t using current, you tended to leak, and using tools with metal—good conductors—meant you ran the risk of transferring it. Metal to metal, with current? Could be bad.
That was the stuff you learned from your mentor. My dad never told me anything about his mentor, so I guess I’d figured he didn’t know much.
Live and learn. Revise impressions. If Zaki was still with us, I was going to have to apologize. After I kicked his ass for putting us through hell.
I looked, first. Two hammers, each a different size. A plastic case that, when opened, revealed a series of chisels, each of a different size. One of them had a fleck of something on it that looked like rust.
Zaki would never let rust get on his tools. Never.
A chamois cloth wrapped around a larger chisel that had some kind of carving in the wooden handle.
One pair of work gloves, dirty, and another pair, clean. A small bottle of hand lotion—unscented, half-empty.
My brain felt like it was going at half speed, taking in the details, but at the same time really revved up, like everything was flooding in all at once, giving me all these impressions and ideas, most of which didn’t seem to make any sense.
Slow down. Let them come. Don’t push.
J.?
The voice went away when I pinged at it. It hadn’t felt like J., but who else would be hovering around my brain?
Dad?
No response.
Right, then. I looked at the tools, and didn’t touch anything, letting my impressions filter in without distraction.
“Tell me something, guys,” I said, then lifted my hand and placed it inside the locker, palm dow
n, about six inches over the tools.
“Tell me something.”
Love.
That was first. The absolute love that only comes from joy, and the joy that builds out of love.
If I hadn’t already known that Zaki totally followed his bliss, his tools would have told me. In that instant, I think I probably forgave him almost every horrible un-dadlike thing he’d ever done to me. Not that he deserved forgiving, but because I understood that he couldn’t help it. He loved me, but he was always going to be dragged in another direction, too.
I wondered if Claire knew that, too. She probably did.
Never love an artist.
I moved my hand slightly, so that it was over the chisels. The current-hum intensified.
Exasperation.
Huh. That was different. I cast my memory back over the site, what little I had seen of it. The banister had looked like it was almost done—they had installed it and were doing some kind of treatment on it; it had smelled like varnish or something. The mantel over the fireplace had looked done, too. Was it prefab? Probably not, in that house. But that didn’t seem right.
Think, Bonnie. What else? There had been wooden doors leading into the room with the fireplace, hadn’t there? Sliding doors, with some kind of pattern carved into them. I let my finger dip down just enough to touch the plastic case, and thought about the quick glimpse of the doors I had gotten.
Zaki’s current-signature reacted to my memory, an irritable growl rising from the tools.
It wasn’t anything that would stand up to even a sympathetic Talent’s questioning, but I was convinced. Zaki had been working on those doors when he disappeared, and there had been something about them that had bothered him.
“Where are you, Dad?”
I dipped my finger again, and touched the chisel with the rust stain on it.
Wings. Teeth. Thick leathery skin, and heat and brimstone. Red, red eye in the darkness, and a snarl that would and did scare the piss out of a cougar, and make a bear back up and apologize.
I clenched my finger and pulled my hand out of the locker, sweating slightly.
Dragon blood. There was dragon blood on my dad’s work chisel.
I pulled on the clean gloves and bundled everything in the foam padding, and shoved it into my backpack. It made it heavier than hell, but I didn’t want to leave anything behind.
Look at the door.
That voice again, tapping at my brain. I grabbed at it, trying to get a taste of who was trying to instruct me, but it danced away and disappeared.
Good advice, though.
The site was busy, but everyone had seen me with the foreman, so they assumed I had the right to be there, so long as I didn’t bother anyone. Maybe he’d told them I was Zaki’s daughter, but if so, they declined to stop work long enough to say hi or ask after my old man. That worked for me.
The door was absolutely Zaki’s work, and equally as obviously unfinished. The pattern at first looked like some kind of leaves falling, but when you looked at it carefully, you saw there was a face in the leaves. At first I thought Zaki had gone all Celtic and done the Green Man, but no, it was a woman’s face, delicate and fey.
I checked: no pointed ears, no antennae, and no wings. Not any of the fatae species that I knew, anyway. Zaki was just feckless enough to have used one of the nonhuman species as a model, thinking that nobody would ever notice.
Was the owner of the house a Talent? The Cosa Nostradamus wasn’t all poor, far from it, and they would know about Zaki’s skills…
But no. From what I’d seen of the wiring going into the walls, this place was going to be high-tech. Not a cosa household, then.
Zaki! I didn’t expect a different response than I’d gotten before, but I was frustrated enough to try it. Zaki, you stupid son of a bitch, where are you?
No answer.
“You sure about this?”
“Hell, no.”
I was sitting in the passenger seat of a tough little SUV, staring at a thirty-foot-high wall of stone. Becky, my room-mate, could probably have told me exactly what the stone was, and how old it was, and what kind of critters roamed the earth when it got folded and shoved up from the crust, but all I was thinking about was what waited above it.
“Here.” Steve was in his forties, maybe. A good guy, if a little skeevy and one of the people whom J. knew. He had met me at the Albany airport and loaded me into the SUV, checked my gear, and given me the bag he was shoving into my arms.
“You know what to do?”
“Yeah.” No.
“Just be polite. But not unctuous. Act like you would with a grandmother you really liked.”
That was helpful. Not.
“Right. Let me get this done.”
I got out of the car, the bag slung over my shoulder. I was wearing jeans and work boots, a heavy sweatshirt and a hoodie over that. It might be spring, but it was damned cold up here in the Adirondacks, colder even than it had been in Boston. Trust Zaki to find a cave dragon in the boonies.
I stepped and squelched. Cold, and muddy. “Nice,” I said in disgust, and Steve, still behind the steering wheel, laughed. “A little wet dirt won’t hurt you,” he said.
No. Mud wouldn’t hurt. Not like screwing this up might.
“Stay here. I’ll be back soon.”
There was a path, if you could call anything that narrow a path. In drier weather the stones would have been a footing hazard, but the mud kept them in place, and all I had to worry about was not stepping off the trail and falling off the side of the cliff.
“Zaki actually dragged himself up here?” My father was a lazy SOB, and his love of woods was restricted to dead and polished ones, not things with bark and leaves. I made sure my footing was secure and tested the current in the air.
“Oh yeah.” The swirls and swoops in the air ahead matched the signature I’d gotten off the blood on the chisel. The dragon that had bled lived there.
Probably, from that letter, the same dragon who had given him the loan he needed to get out of the trouble that he was in, whatever that was.
Which meant that, not knowing who he had been in trouble with, the dragon was probably the last to see Zaki before he disappeared. And, therefore, was the most likely suspect for causing that disappearance. Especially considering the blood.
“The things I do for you, Zaki, you don’t know…”
Some part of me still hoped that he was alive. That I’d track down the pieces and rush in just in time to save him. But dragon’s blood didn’t suggest anything good.
“Were you moron enough to attack a dragon?”
I’d know, soon enough.
The cave was nice, as caves went. Maybe ten feet wide, and six feet high, dry and well cleared. The inside was smooth, like someone had sanded it for a long time… or hit it consistently with really hot breath.
“You’re psyching yourself out. Stop it. Cave dragons don’t eat people.”
Usually.
“Think of something else. Like, who’s been pinging you with suggestions, and where are they now when you could use the helpfulness?”
There. That was a nicely unanswerable question to annoy myself with while I walked.
I adjusted the bag over my shoulder, turned on the flashlight, and walked into the cave.
Ten paces in, and it made a sharp left turn. Wind baffle. Smart. The ground underneath had been smoothed the same way the walls were, and was slightly rounded, like something had dragged itself back and forth across it for a very long time.
The beam from the flashlight reflected off the walls, catching bits of stuff in the stone.
“Pretty.”
“I’m so glad you approve.”
I am not ashamed to admit that I yelp like a girl. There’s a biologic reason for that.
Fucking dragon was behind me!
“What did you do, hold your breath?” There hadn’t been any warning, not even the faintest whiff of heat or brimstone.
The voice wa
s deep, sweet, and not at all what I had expected.
“Yep.”
It was also almost sinfully proud of itself. I was in love.
I turned, trying hard not to move in any way that might be considered even remotely aggressive. Or disrespectful. Or sniveling.
Cave dragons weren’t big. But “not big” when you’re talking about dragons? Trust me, that’s not like saying “not big” when talking about cars.
The body blocked out the entire cave behind us, his belly low to the ground like a cat skulking through the grass. The wings were furled close to the body. Thick legs tapered into clawed paws the size of hubcaps. But the body was totally secondary to the head, which loomed barely a foot away from my face.
It looked like the head of a snake, with wide nostrils at the pointed end rising to two wide red eyes that stared without blinking. If you could imagine an arrowhead two feet across and three feet long. And the neck… only a few feet, and not sinewy like I’d expected, but thick and muscular, like a python’s body. Wasn’t that a lovely thought, being crushed to death by a dragon’s neck. It might, I suppose, be better than being eaten. Or torn apart by those claws. Or burning to death in its breath…
“And I really need to stop thinking about those things,” I said out loud, somewhat desperately.
“What do you want, cosa-cousin?”
“An exchange.”
Dragons, even cave dragons, didn’t have eyebrows. But if they did, this one would have raised them. “Please.” The head moved slightly, as though to invite me to continue. “Let us take this into my office.”
I swear to God, I don’t know why that invitation made me feel better. But it did.
I walked forward, the dragon directly behind me. Once I knew what to listen for, I could hear his breathing, like the sound of the ocean, or rain. Which was weird, a creature that breathed fire sounding like water, but there it was.
“What is your name?”
Unusual Suspects: Stories of Mystery & Fantasy Page 18
