Those Who Fight Monsters Part 2

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 n.o.body 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, n.o.body 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.s 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, f.u.c.k."

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 a.s.s 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 a.s.sumed 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 c.o.c.ked 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.

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 cus.h.i.+oned 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.

"Seriously, Lee. I have to go down and deal with the gnomes. They have something I need back."

"And you think that I have an answer. Man, they*re fatae - you should have a better grasp of them than I ever could."

I shrugged, craning my neck to look up at him. I'm not short, but Lee was one d.a.m.n long drink of water. "They don't much like the flesh-folk."

He winced. "They're not really made of metal. You know that, right?"

"We know that. I'm not sure they do."

"Yeah." He leaned against the wall and thought. I let him.

"All right. There's one tribe, I've done some trading with them."

"Hah!" I crowed, making a subtle fist-pump gesture. "I knew it."

"Shut up. I've done some trading with them, I said. Not enough to figure out how their brains work and I'd sure as h.e.l.l never use current on them; it would be bad manners, and I'd never get supplies from them again, anyway."

"So you can tell me who to talk to?"

"No. But I can talk to them for you."

Oh h.e.l.l. "Your wife is going to kill me."

Lee just laughed. I think he's used to that reaction.

The metal tunnels were actually long, large metal pipes that had been fitted in shafts decades ago, for some MTA project or another, and then abandoned. No wonder we always ran a deficit, the way they lost materials. You went in through the waterways, everyone knew that, if they knew about gnomes at all, but that's where things got hazy. For me, anyway. Lee sloshed along in his galoshes like he was going to market. I guess for him, he was.

"Who is that?" The voice came out of the gloom without warning, cranky and suspicious.

"Who the h.e.l.l do you think it is? Lee held up a hand, and sparks flickered at his fingertips, illuminating the small circle in front of him. A gnome sat on a metal shelf that had been grafted into the tunnel, blinking in the current-light. "Who else has to bend over double in these d.a.m.n tunnels, and sounds like a f.u.c.king moose slogging through this d.a.m.ned sewage?"

It took a minute and then my brain kicked back in. Lee, calm-tempered, soft-spoken Lee, was in trading mode. Was that how gnomes spoke to each other, or how they expected humans to speak, overall?

"Ah. You. Wasn't expecting you." The gnome was about knee-high to me, which meant that Lee could have stepped on him and barely noticed.

"Well, I'm here. You have any redweight?"

"You want redweight, you gotta call ahead. Not grow on trees down here." The gnome giggled like it had said something unbearably witty. My eyes had adjusted enough to take in details: I'd known that gnomes were small, but I hadn't realized how much they looked like Beaux Arts fairies. Pretty little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. No wonder they were able to enrapt stupid Null children into following them underground into the sewers.

"How about black ash?" Lee asked.

"Maaaaaaaaybe. What you got in trade?"

Lee reached into his pocket and pulled something out. I craned my neck to see what gnomes considered fair trade for their handiwork, but his hand was tilted so I couldn't see into his palm. Secret of the trade, I guess. Talent were just as secretive in their way as the fatae.

"Too much," the gnome said in alarm. "Too much for black ash."

"Hrm. So it is." Lee started to put whatever it was back in his pocket, and then stopped. "But maybe we could deal, anyway. You answer a question, a small question, and I call it fair trade."

"Hrmmmm. Small question. And black ash?"

"I call it fair."

"Then not small question."

"Small question, important answer. If not truth, then all deals end."

Oh, the gnome did not like that, not at all. It hopped from one foot to the other, tilting its head as though it was listening to something far away. Maybe it was: I bet these tunnels carried sound unspeakably well, and I doubted there was only one guard along this stretch of sewer.

"Ask," the gnome said, finally.

"Did you dust a young human girl, near-grown, blonde, in the past sevenday. Is she here?"

"That two question." But it considered again, and this time I was d.a.m.n sure I heard the high-pitched echo of other voices, up and down the metal tunnel.

"Blonde girl come freely," it said finally, and with finality. "Honored guest."

I snorted at that. For honored guest read *slave'... The fatae liked to have someone else to do the housework. I didn't think they'd hurt her, but there were other things living in the underground city, and gnomes were notoriously careless of their guests. Metals, they protected. Humans - disposable.

"Give. We bring you black ash. Now go."

Lee made the exchange, and they shook hands on it, the gnome's hand absurdly lost in his.

"Come on. Let's go." Lee said to me.

Waitaminute. "I need to-"

"We need to go. Now. Lee looked over his shoulder, clearly worried.

I'd asked him for help because he knew the underground kingdom. We went.

"You can't go back there."

"I have to."

"Danny. Daniel."