Laura Gilman - Dragon Justice

Being Talent didn’t mean you got a pass on the rest of the crap life could hand out. Mentorship was supposed to be a safety net and a lifeline, but it didn’t always work out that way. And Null kids… They didn’t even have that.

I got off at my stop, giving a hairy eyeball to the guy who tried to use the in/out crush at the door as an excuse to grab my ass, and made my way to Sylvan Investigations.

I didn’t bother knocking, and the door, as usual, wasn’t locked. Danny’s office still looked like it was straight out of Dashiell Hammett, with a front room staged with a secretary’s desk, padded guest chairs, and some anemic-looking potted plants, waiting for some bright but world-wise dame to answer the phone, while the detective slept off a bender in the back room.

Danny didn’t have a receptionist, and he usually slept off his hangovers at home.

A weary voice called out, “What do you want?”

Or, maybe not.

I took myself all the way into the back room and shut the door behind me. “You look like hell.” Danny was a good-looking guy, the product of an attractive woman—I’d seen pictures of his mom, stern but lovely in Navy blues—and an unknown, unlamented faun who, like all of his breed, had the strong, stocky body that Danny had inherited, along with the short, curved horns that were only barely hidden by his thick brown hair. Right now, though, Danny was slumped in the chair behind his desk, cowboy boots up on the aforementioned desk. His eyes were closed, and his face was lined and gray, like he hadn’t slept in a week.

He might not have, for all I knew. We hadn’t had a chance to schmooze lately, with the workload Stosser kept handing the pack. I felt a flare of bad-friend guilt.

“Are you okay?” I had no idea what a fever would feel like on a mixed-breed, but moved forward to touch his forehead, anyway. He batted my hand away and opened one eye enough to glare.

“I’m fine, Torres. It’s just been a crappy week. What do you want?”

I didn’t want to lay anything more on him, but there wasn’t any point in walking away without at least asking.

“I have a case I was hoping you could help with. It’s about a missing kid.”

Danny’s boots hit the floor so fast and hard I didn’t even see him move. “What kid? When? How old?”

Whoa, hadn’t been expecting that. A bit of an overreaction, even for Danny’s known soft spot. I stumbled my reply, then recovered. “Seven years old. Missing a week now.”

“Oh.” He settled back a bit then, his shoulders not exactly relaxing, but no longer looking like he was about to leap out the door at a full run. “Not mine, then.”

Oh, fuck. The pain in my stomach got worse. “You have another missing kid?”

“Two, actually. Probably dusted.”

That was slang for being lured by one of the more seductive fatae breeds—like Danny’s.

“One almost fifteen, the other a legal adult, just turned twenty-one, but parents still worried.”

The difference—and that they were older—made me feel slightly better, and I relaxed, too, pulling one of the client chairs around the desk so I could sit next to Danny, not be separated by the expanse of wooden desk. “Nope, mine’s seven, like I said.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl. Yours?”

“Girls, too.”

That still didn’t mean any connection. “Do boy-children or girl-children go missing more often?” I’d never wondered that before.

“NISMART numbers say slightly more males than females, out of about a million-plus reported every year. Most are runaways, teenagers, or known-adult abductions. Only a small but ugly percentage are nonfamily kidnappings.” Of course Danny would know. “Most are white. Yours?”

“No. Mom’s Asian, dad’s Caucasian.”

Danny frowned. “Mine are mixed, too. Statistically that’s odd, although within range for New York.”

I thought about that and let it go. “Even if we had a full-scale kid-snatch going on, which I doubt, I can’t think of any fatae breed who would be looking for the full range of age and—”

Something ticked in my brain, and I pulled out the file again, flipping through. “Seven. Fourteen. Twenty-one…”

“What?” Danny was watching me intently now, his skin still tired-looking but his eyes alert and focused, his usual energy back.

“Magic.” I said it like a curse word. It fit, damn it. It all fit....

“What?”

I forgot sometimes that Danny was fatae, not Talent. They looked at—and reacted to—things differently than we did. Also, they got told different stories as kids. “Old magic, pre-current.” Before the modern age, before Founder Ben: when things were messy and magic was as much hope and prayer as science. “Seven was a magic number, really strong, potent. Even today, some people like to run things in sets of seven, hedge their bets. And here we’ve got my girl, seven. Yours, if fourteen, twice seven, and twenty-one, thrice seven. Three’s a strong number, too. All gone missing in the same city, the same time, and you think there was Cosa involvement in your cases, too, otherwise you wouldn’t have mentioned the fatae.” Danny handled Null cases, too, but he wouldn’t immediately have associated something I was working on with one of those.

By the time I’d finished, the words spilling out of my mouth, he was already reaching across his desk, pulling a pile of folders toward him. Being fatae, Danny could use computers, but he tended to do that stuff away from where Talent might drop by. He ran a shoestring operation, and we were hard on electronics, especially when we got emotional.

“Melinda, fourteen. Went missing two weeks ago. I’ve been on the case for three days, after the NYPD dumped her in with the runaways. Haven’t turned up a whisper of anything. Started with the street kids, got nothing. Was starting to wonder if she’d skipped town or hooked with a dead-end john when Gail’s parents called me. She’s been missing almost a month, and all the stats are the same—smart, pretty, but not overwhelmingly brilliant or beautiful, everything to stay home for, suddenly up and gone between midnight and dawn.”

He put his hand palm-down on the file, like he was trying to hold them safe, and turned his head to look sideways at me.

I stared at his hand. They were blunt-tipped, his fingers, strong and scattered with coarse brown hairs. Venec’s hands were strong, too, but more tapered and smooth. I shook my head, dismissing the thought. “My girl’s too young to be really slotted—but she’s definitely cute. Smart… Unless they’re genius level, how do you tell at that age?”

Danny snorted. “Don’t ask me.” He was an only child, and despite his breed’s proclivities—or maybe because of them—he wasn’t the type to sleep around. I’d sussed early on that Danny was looking for One True Love, god help him. “Talent family?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“So how did they come to you?”

I hesitated, then went for broke. “They didn’t.”

That got me a closer look, squinty-eyed, like they must teach in the academy, the kind of look that makes you talk too much when a cop asks to see your ID. “Spill, Torres.”

Stosser was going to kill me. But, damn it, Danny might have the info that broke the case. And he took discreet into artistic levels. And the Big Dogs had taught us to trust our gut instincts. “The Fey Folk asked us to look into it. Rumor is that they were responsible for my girl’s disappearance. They say no. They don’t want people claiming they’ve broken Treaty.”

“An’ if PSI says they’re clean, most folk will stand by that.” Danny nodded. “Sounds like Stosser’s long-term plan to own the Cosa is working.” He shook his head then, dismissing the boss’s plans as unimportant, which, to him, they were. “Damn it, Bonnie, I think we’re onto something. My girls are Null. Yours?”