Laura Gilman - Dragon Justice

“Stay down,” I said, still annoyed, when one of the humans tried to get back up, and she subsided. A fierce looking chica, maybe midteens, with dirty blond hair in a braid and a pair of brown eyes that were currently trying to glare me in half. She was pissed and wanted to get back into the fight. Despite myself, I started to grin and had to force it back. Now was not the time to admire her scruff.

The magic, amplified through the metal spike, had hit the ground hard, hard enough that there were still sparks in the dirt, moving like miniature whirlwinds. When one of the fatae shifted, it sparked him—her, it?—hard enough that it uttered a clear yelp and turned to glare at me with the pained expression of its human counterpart.

Apparently, I had ruined their party.

“Life sucks, kids,” I said to both of them.

There was a scuffling noise behind me, somehow managing to sound graceful, and I knew even before the fatae all looked in that direction that Rorani had decided to join us.

“This will not do,” she said. “This is not acceptable.”

The human children—and this close I could see that they were in fact all children, none of them past fourteen, probably—went wide-eyed in astonishment and fear. The fatae were just very attentive. I’d never seen—hell, I’d never even heard of a dryad losing her temper, but that was very much what was happening next to me. It took every bit of control I had not to step away.

Rorani wasn’t sparking, or yelling, or waving her arms. She had, in fact, gone very still and very tall, and the impression was not of a delicate, willowy lady but an ancient tree, deep-rooted and stern, standing beside me.

“Sweet Dog of Mercy,” I whispered, barely audible even to myself. Rorani was an American Chestnut.

To survive the blight, to live so long after her tree-kin had died out and been replaced by lesser trees… There was a lot about the Lady of the Greening, and the way the fatae reacted to her, that made more sense now.

“The Greening is large. Treaties exist. Even if these humans did not know, you did.” She was talking to the fatae then. “You knew, and were warned to behave, and yet…this? This attack?”

The pissy-looking fatae shifted its gaze, and the others all looked down at the ground. In that moment I realized something: these fatae were teenagers, too. Or whatever passed for it, in their lifecycle.

We’d interrupted the equivalent of a teenage gang turf war.

“You.” I pivoted slowly and took on the brown-eyed human. “Where are the rest of your folk?”

She glared at me, utterly defiant. She’d get up in an instant and start the fight again, not cowed by the magic show I’d just put on or the fact that her opponents looked like something from a high-budget sci-fi flick. She might be Null, but magic didn’t impress her much. If I were a high-res user, or could make with the mojo, I’d change that, fast, but I’d always been brutally honest about my capabilities. I was smarter, faster, and able to outthink most other Talent, thanks to J’s and Venec’s training, but I would get blown off the curb in a real power-off. And pulling all that wild current, without warning, had given me the start of a serious stomachache.

“I’m not the enemy here,” I said impatiently. “In fact, I just saved your asses. You might have won this fight, but you might not have, and even if you did, you’re outnumbered here. You know that, right?”

“We’re protected.”

That was from another of the girls, the one who had been reading up on the rock. She was about the same age, still skinny, still looking like someone needed to tuck her into bed, not toss her into the street.

“Protected?” Rorani had said that their leader was a Null. Was Rorani wrong? Or was another person, a Talent, protecting them? If so, why? I held up a hand, the current still sparking under my skin, making it look like it was wreathed in bright blue smoke, and showed it to her. “Like this?”

She glanced at my hand, swallowed, and looked away. Not scared, but…disturbed? They definitely knew magic, same as they knew fatae; enough to deal with it, but not anywhere enough to be comfortable. Or, probably, understand exactly what they were dealing with.

Their leader had taught them, but not well. That probably meant they weren’t as protected as they thought, either.

I looked at Rorani, whose lovely face was still set in stern lines that would have made me quake if it was directed at me. The fatae certainly knew they were in deep shit, the way they were still flat on their bellies.

“You,” she said now. “Take your fellows and be gone. This place is now mine.”

The lead fatae actually had the cojones to try and protest. “We…”

“I have spoken.”

And that was that. It and its fellows got up, moving slow and careful, and slid back out the way they came.

“Will they cause trouble later?” I asked her, watching them go.

“They will not. Their elders…possibly. It will depend.” She looked over the remaining humans and sighed, the sound of wind through leaves. “These are your people. You will be able to manage it?”

To most fatae, humans were all one breed: Talent or Null, lonejack or Council. I’d expected more of Rorani, but it wasn’t as though I could hand these idiots over to her. And I still had my own case to follow up on, something I’d nearly forgotten in the current-rush and the confusion of the fight.

My stomachache got worse. The thought of my girl being somewhere among these would-be toughs meant there might be others stolen away, too. Maybe all of them.

Even if babygirl wasn’t here, I couldn’t walk away from this, not without knowing who was teaching them and who was—allegedly—protecting them.

“Yeah, I’ve got it,” I told Rorani.

“Then I shall leave you to your work, and I shall manage mine.” She offered me her hand, and I took it. The flesh was hard but soft at the same time, like velvet over bone, and I had the moment’s thought that I should bow over it, not shake it.

Then the moment passed. Rorani turned away, blending into the landscape the same way she’d appeared, and I was left with four uncowed, unbiddable teenage girls who clearly saw no reason to answer any of my questions.

Chapter 5

“You say you’re protected.” I had settled with my butt on an outcrop of rock, giving me the double advantage of covering my back and making it look like I was just lounging, totally in control of the situation. The first rule of interrogation, as per Benjamin Venec, was to proceed as though you were utterly certain that you would be given all the answers you wanted, in time. Let the perp worry about how you planned to get those answers.

“You can’t make us talk,” the third girl said, all spitfire defiance. Oh, darling, I just did. But I only smiled and nodded my head. “You’re right, I can’t. Well, I could, but that would be messy and you’d probably lie, anyway. At first.”

I let that sink in for half a breath.

“Seriously,” I continued, girl-to-girl. “You’re not dumb. You know what I am—you weren’t surprised by the magic—so you know I can do stuff you can’t.”

There was a twitch at that, just the slightest twitch, but I caught it. Rorani had said these girls were all Nulls, hadn’t she? I tried to remember. The missing girls were all Nulls, mine and Danny’s. Did they think they could do magic, too? Had their protector gathered them here to be some kind of modern hedge-witch coven? Well, stranger things than that had happened in the Park before, the past few hundred years, but…

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