Or so I would have said, before today. Now—I wasn’t sure how much being a Cosa-cousin meant. But if Danny came here, it was probably going to be okay.
“So how much do you know about what we do at PUPI?” Pietr asked. “You looking for a job?”
“Hah. You are looking at former Patrolman Daniel Hendricks. Before the physical exams got so, erm, invasive. Went into the private sector, after that. Investigations for hire. So it’s my job to know when there are new players in town.”
Oh, that was interesting. Danny’s value as an informant just skyrocketed—which, sadly, also meant that his potential as a playmate went down. Drat. “I thought we were the only ones doing what we do” was all I said.
Danny downed half his drink in one smooth swallow. “You are. I’ve got an unapologetic bias—I’m working for my client’s interests, whatever they may be, and will do what’s required to get them forwarded, within legal limits. You’re…you’re more like cops.”
“Now you’re getting nasty,” Pietr said, only half joking.
“Hah. You don’t know half of it.” Danny got serious. “What I do, there’s a call for it, but it is what it is, and sometimes it doesn’t come out clean. Like I said, I have a bias. The city needs you guys, hell of a lot more than they need me.” He finished off his drink, and lifted it so the bartender would know he needed a refill. “Used to be maybe a fifth of the force was Cosa, or knew their partner was Cosa, and we could actually do something about a current-based or fatae-specific incident, even if not officially. Now? Not so much. And forget about a Talent moving up in the ranks, especially if he’s lonejack. So stuff that we used to be able to slap hands over gets out of control, because the lonejacks can’t get their shit together and Council doesn’t see anything that’s not served upon china platters.”
Harsh, but I couldn’t say it was untrue. Council—and therefore us—were involved here only because of the ki-rin, and the potential for political fallout.
“I’m not going to ask you anything about the case ’cause I don’t want to know. I’m only snoopy when I’ve got a paycheck on it. But I will tell you what you need to know, if you don’t already, no charge for the telling. City’s on edge. Your reception this afternoon? I’m seeing it, more and more. And you guys’re Talent. Nulls?” Danny shook his head, and forked a bunch of green beans into his mouth.
“I wouldn’t want to be a Null in a dark alley if that schiera was in a pissy mood. I’m not saying he’d attack unprovoked…but I’m not confident he wouldn’t, either. Not anymore. And nobody’s paying any attention. It’s just…simmering.”
“This is recent,” I said. “I mean, really recent. When I came to New York this past summer it…it was off, a little, but not this bad.” There had been that fatae in Central Park, the one I’d pointed out to Nick our first month here, but he hadn’t menaced us, just…not been friendly, not even in the Cosa-passing-on-the-street way I’d been used to, in Boston. There hadn’t been active dislike—or fear.
“Yeah.” Danny thought about it. “Yeah, it started around then. Whispers and rumors, mostly.”
Beside me, Pietr was taking notes in the little spiral books we all carried for exactly that, while I kept Danny talking. For all the cantrips and current-tricks we were learning, in the end it all came down to information.
“When something simmers,” I said, keeping Danny focused on me so that he wouldn’t get self-conscious about Pietr writing down his words, not that I didn’t think he didn’t know exactly what we were doing, “it means that the heat’s being kept on it, at a steady pace. Coincidence—or is someone monitoring the heat?”
Danny didn’t have an answer for me, not that I’d really been expecting one. “I’ve been hearing about a friend of a friend, a guy he knew, or her cousin’s lover…but the stories were all the same. Fatae, roughed up by a human.”
“Talent?” It wasn’t impossible—piskies were pranksters just asking for a beating, and other fatae like redcaps and the angeli didn’t always play nice, and some grudges were species-wide and went back generations. A Talent looking for payback wouldn’t be unusual, although mostly they knew better. A Null, on the other hand, could be unpredictable as hell, if they suddenly found themselves confronted with something out of a fairy tale—or a bad acid trip.
Danny actually laughed at that, a dry, husky chuckle. “You think most fatae can tell the difference? You’ve got two legs, no wings, no horns, no fur. Hrana was right about that much. You all look the same.”
Ow. The feeling of depression and self-doubt that had fled earlier returned, settling against the back of my neck like the push of a ten-pound weight.
“Fatae don’t trust Council,” he went on, “and everyone knows lonejacks won’t do shit about other lonejacks unless there’s profit in it for them. That leaves you guys. Maybe.”
There really wasn’t much you could do with the topic, after that. The rest of the meal we tried to talk about other things: Danny was a fabulous storyteller, in addition to being good-looking, and more than once I got the feeling he, at least, would be interested in something off-the-clock. He might be more subtle than his full-blood kin, but not by a hell of a lot.
But I wasn’t going there. Partially because I’d learned my lesson the hard way about playing with anyone who might be relevant to the case, even remotely, and partially because I had the feeling that, unlike his fatae kin, Danny was looking for a One True Love. Me? Not so much. So when the meal was over, and we’d argued over who was picking up the tab—we won, since it was a business expense—I shook his hand, got his card, and went home. Alone.
I had just come up out of the subway when someone knocked politely at my awareness.
*busy?*
My visitor was pretty much the last person I expected to have ping me after hours: Sharon.
*wassup?*
The ping came back not in words, but an image—of the local art-house theater halfway between her place and mine—and a time. She was inviting me to the movies.
I totally had not been expecting that. Sharon and I worked well together, and the entire team socialized off-hours, but she and I weren’t buddy-friends, not the way Nick and I were.
Thinking about what waited for me back at my apartment; an empty space, a cold bed, I made my decision.
*be there in thirty*
And so the night I’d planned to spend following my mentor’s directive to rest and recharge, I instead spent at a moth-eaten movie house with my coworker, eating overly buttered popcorn and watching a Cary Grant movie. Her idea, not mine, but I have to admit, the acting was great, the plot—even as silly as it was—didn’t make me wince, and the eye candy, although stylized, was quality. And watching it gave me a little unexpected insight into my coworker. Plus, getting outside my head for a while made the self-doubt and depression take a powder. All good.
After, neither of us seemed to want to go home, and so we ended up in a 24-hour restaurant the size of a shoebox, and drank too much bad coffee and didn’t talk about anything other than the movie. It was…nice.
“Y’know, if you think Irene Dunne was cute, I have a friend I should introduce you to.”
I was weirdly touched. “Shar. You fixing me up with your friends?”
“Friend, singular. If you’re interested. She’s about a year out of a bad breakup, so the worst of the psychotic behavior should be over, and the rest would probably just amuse you.”
I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or not that she had such an accurate read on me. But then, that was what Sharon did. I read scenes; she read people.
“It doesn’t bother you? That I double-up my dating pool?” I’d wondered that; she and Nifty were both such straight arrows, pun intended.
Sharon arched one of those neatly shaped blond eyebrows at me. “You’re bi. Big deal. I’m more worried that you’ll go through the available dating pool here and we’ll have to import people from the left coast to keep you occupied.”
I made a ha-ha noise.
“Not likely. Y’know, thanks for the offer but…not right now. I’m not really in the dating mood right now.”
Sharon paused before taking a sip of her coffee and looked at me over the top of her mug. “Who are you and what have you done with Bonita Torres?”
“Very funny.” Okay, it was. I had a definite reputation, and normally I didn’t mind it at all. But it was more reputation than fact, these days, and not just because of this case.
A sudden flash of dark eyes and the memory of a touch, skin-to-skin, shivered through me, and I shut it down, hard. “I just…I’m tired, Sharon. Aren’t you?”
“Yes. Of course I am. You’re the Energizer Bunny, not me.”
Sharon was the oldest of the pack by six years, but we’d mostly broken her of reminding us of that fact. Mostly.
Now that we’d gotten on the topic, sort of, I wanted to ask her about the case, to find out if anything about it was bothering her, if she was finding her reactions to people slightly off-kilter or unusual, if she was feeling the same depression and doubts that I could feel hovering, just waiting for a way back in. But the nonwork atmosphere we’d established over popcorn and bad coffee was like a mist around us, keeping the words from getting said. I wanted to know, but I didn’t know how to ask, and the moment passed.
Around 2:00 a.m. I finally staggered back to my apartment for the second time that night. My sheets were cold, and even a quick hit of current to warm them up didn’t replace the feel of another body next to me. I could’ve had a warm companion for the asking. Hell, I had a little black book with names I could have called, even now, if I didn’t want to be alone.
“There was a time,” I told the dark blue ceiling, “when my bed had hot-and-hotter running company. I was young and energetic and… And god, now I just want to come home and sleep.”
All right, that was just a smidge of exaggeration. But I had told Sharon the truth—I was tired. And right now, the way I was feeling, it was probably better I not have anyone in my space who wasn’t me. My nerves were shot and my sense of the universe needed adjusting.
The world wasn’t any colder or darker than it had been a week before. I hadn’t discovered any terrible truth about males of any species I didn’t already know before. I hadn’t learned anything about my own gender that I didn’t know.
Intellectually.
Emotionally, that was another issue entirely.
I pulled the covers over my head, snuggled into my pillows, and searched for a happy place to take into my dreams. It was a long time coming.
Benjamin Venec wanted to be in bed. It was almost dawn, and good, law-abiding, reasonable adults were snuggled in comfortable beds, or just waking up to face the day, not shaking down dubious characters in even more dubious back offices.
“Man, I don’t know nothing!”
Venec let a sigh escape him, not entirely feigned. “That? I find very easy to believe.”
Lizard was a skinny skank of a human, skin like the underside of a rock and the morals of a squid. He ran a massage parlor—legit, not a skin house or gambling cover—down in Chinatown that was gossip central for a certain type of Talent, “certain” meaning criminally minded. That was why Venec had decided to pay him a little social visit.
Well, that, and the need to actually do something more than just sit around and worry. Let Ian ride the desk and deal with the theory and the politics and the make-nice with clients. He was more the hands-on sort, and sometimes hands-on was exactly what was needed. For the situation—and his own sanity. Being the boss was starting to make him a little crazy, like someone was pushing on his chest and the back of his neck at the same time, trying to squeeze him thin, and not even the training sessions with his pups were really scratching the itch to do.
Not that he was down here on PUPI business, tonight. Not officially. Tonight he was conducting his own investigation, for his own peace of mind. The two “exterminator” flyers he had found had sent him out into the street, talking and listening, and the gossip he got back was making him uneasy. While he didn’t have Bonnie’s kenning, or Ian’s skill of reading the moment, or even Sharon’s ability to truth-sense, uneasy feelings usually meant problems coming down the road, things you sensed, even if you couldn’t quite see them yet. Maybe not now…but eventually. Benjamin Venec was a firm believer in being prepared for problems.
“Liz, if I find out that you’ve been withholding information, I’m going to be deeply disappointed in you.”
The speech, and his pose, was right out of a diet of too many mafia movies as a teenager. It seemed to work, though, because the Lizard turned an even nastier shade of pale, and his stubby little nose twitched like a rabbit’s.
“I swear.” He made a production out of shuffling paper on his desk, but never let his hands go anywhere near the intercom, or the panic button set on the side of the desk. Not when Ben was watching. Lizard wasn’t Talent, but he knew enough to predict what a pissed-off Talent could do. “We got some hotheads come in here after a day of work, talking trash, but that’s it. Nothing like what you’re talking about. No violence, not even a shove. The supernaturals, they’re good folk, mostly. Everybody gets along down here, so long as they’re not the IRS.”
Cash-and-carry industry; rake in the dollars and don’t worry about anything except not getting caught. Ben felt a sneer curl at his lips. He’d brought in coked-up bikers and current-wizzed Talent, and they’d all been good folk—when they weren’t trying to take his limbs off or fry his brain.
“All right.” He leaned back, giving Lizard some breathing room. “If you do happen to hear something, anything, from anyone, you’ll let me know, right?”
“Of course.” Lizard, deciding that the danger had passed, plastered on an ingratiating smile. “So, why don’t you stay a while, relax, now that business is done? I have a new masseuse working, hands like silk over steel, she’d work those tension-knots out of you like something indecent I’m too much of a gentleman to mention.”
The offer was tempting, Christ knew. Two years ago, before Chicago and the fallout from there, he’d been a single operator chasing down bail jumpers and errant spouses, hiring himself out for short-term security gigs on the side. Not much glamour, and damn few thanks, but only himself to ride herd on, and the money was good. But when Ian had called him, out of the blue and ten years after they’d last said goodbye, he’d dropped everything and gone up to the Midwest. And then…and then Chicago, and everything After. That was how he judged time these days: before, and After.
But After had PUPI. Ian wanted perfection, and Ben had to ride herd on the kids every minute, make sure they were as good as they thought they were, and then build them back up when they realized that they weren’t. Keep them focused on the job, and not their hormones or…
Especially not their hormones. Or his own, for that matter.
His brain served him a flash of impossibly fluffed hair, and laughing eyes, perfume like warm peaches, and the whisper of an impossible blend of Boston upper crust and New York Latina in her voice, and he felt himself grow hard at even that memory.
Bonnie Torres. The moment he had first sensed her, searching the ether for her father’s killer, he had known there was something about her, something they would be able to tap for the still-nascent PUPI team. He’d been intrigued by the feel of her thoughts, at first, the way she balanced passion and logic so cleanly. He hadn’t expected the impact her physical presence would have on him. His own personal hell every day, the way she could flick his switches without even trying. And at night…
At night, when he didn’t have to be Big Dog, didn’t have to be the boss, the teacher…in the privacy of his own overheated imagination, sometimes her face overrode his current partner’s appearance, and he let himself pretend, just for a moment.
“Thanks, but no,” he told Lizard, not without some regret. “I kind of like my knots where they are.”
six
What happened in New York City didn’t always stay in New York Cit
y. In this case, what happened there was of great interest to a man in a quiet office building in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Two men, actually, although Ray West was more concerned with his brother’s interest than his own.
William West did not, at first glance, appear particularly important or imposing, despite the luxurious corner suite he occupied. Seen on the street a bystander would notice that his hair was brown and slightly shaggy, his suit was nice but not particularly stylish, and that he had the attitude of a man who had somewhere to be, right now, and get out of his way. And that bystander would, if he or she were a smart human, get out of his way.
Ray had worked for his brother for twenty years now, and not even the memory of the scrawny kid with a lisp Bill used to be kept him from feeling a sense of awe and menace hanging around his brother as an adult. Something had changed in Bill during college, or maybe it had just come to the fore once he had enough power to not worry what others thought, but Ray didn’t question it. Not when that hard, cold willingness to use people made them all a great deal of money.
As his right-hand man, Ray worked very hard to keep Bill from getting upset. Some days it wasn’t possible—there seemed to be so many things that annoyed his brother. Today, though, would be different. He had just gotten in from the airport, barely stopping to drop his bags off before coming to report on the results of his trip. “She agreed to your proposal. Things are already in motion.”
Ray had brought their pet Talent—a young man with the ability to do what they called the Push—with him, ready to start work, assuming that his negotiation would be successful. You assumed success, you got it; that was the West way.
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