Promises to Keep (3 page)

“And there’s this sound… dry. Dry and fast. Like…” She squinted her eyes shut, trying to recapture it, and I flipped the notebook closed. Nothing she said after this would have the clarity of her first words.

“Like cicadas,” she said. “Like a thousand cicadas.”

It was the wrong season for cicadas to flock. But I knew what else made that noise.

“All right. Let’s go check that out.”

Ellen gave me another Look. “We’re on a case.”

“And you had a vision. The missing take second place to those in imminent risk of death.”

The missing might also be in danger of imminent death. She didn’t point that out. We had an understanding. Or rather, I had an understanding, and she understood that she didn’t have a say in the matter.

“You need to go after-“

“It’s one thing to run down separate leads. Another entirely to split up cases. You’re not ready yet to do this on your own.”

I’d nicknamed her Shadow for a number of reasons, part of which was because that’s what she was supposed to be doing. Shadowing me, learning. Not haring off with her heart askew and her brain still vision-fogged.

“Alfred McConnell can wait,” I told her, and hoped to hell that was true.

Cart Hollow was one of those suburban New Jersey towns that you only knew about if you lived there, or knew someone who lived there. Bedroom communities, nothing more than houses and schools, no reason to go there if you didn’t already live there. Most of the residents worked in the city, commuting on a daily basis and bringing their considerable paychecks home to spend. People were nice, polite, but they weren’t accustomed to strangers walking up to their door and ringing the bell, especially mid-morning on a weekday.

The man waiting at the door had thick black hair that was running heavily to silver, the face underneath handsome enough but starting to show signs of wear. If he’d been wearing a suit and tie, he could have passed for a lawyer, or maybe a banker, the kind that dealt with individual clients, managing money rather than making deposits. But he had on paint-splattered jeans, sneakers, and a red Rutgers sweatshirt, instead.

“Please,” he said. “Let me see her.”

“Her who?” The owner of the house shook her head, holding her body between the doorframe and the door, just in case he tried to rush her, to get inside. “Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Please. All I want to do is see her. To make sure that she’s all right.”

The door closed in his face, not roughly but firmly, and he stepped back off the stoop. The house was a nice one, a narrow, four-story rowhouse, still zoned for single use. The steps and front yard were small but well-maintained, the paint was fresh, and the man who had answered the door looked like a college professor type, no obvious tats or scars, or any indication that he was holding anyone against their will.

Not that a baby could have much will, and facades were deceptive. He knew that for a fact.

“I just want to see her,” he said to the house. “I wouldn’t take her away from you, not if you love her.” He was too old to raise a child now, even if Christine were willing - and she probably would, he’d lucked out and married a woman with enough heart to deal with him. He just wanted to see her, to know…

He turned to his companion. “Are you sure that she’s here?”

It nodded. It was sure. That was why it had brought him here.

“All right. Then we’ll keep trying.”

He owed it to the child’s mother, if nothing else. He’d failed her before, hadn’t known about the child, hadn’t been there when the child was born. He had to make sure the child was safe.

Stepping back onto the sidewalk, so the residents couldn’t complain that he was on their property, Alfred started to walk away, his companion at his side. The fatae hadn’t left him alone more than thirty seconds, including bathroom breaks, since swooping him off the roof, as though it were afraid the human would run.

Where would he go, if he ran? Even assuming a sixty-something human could outrun a winged fatae - unlikely - where would he run to? Back home, where the creature had found him in the first place? This creature was, for whatever reason, also interested in his daughter - and the word was still so impossible, so unexpected, it made his heart clench when he thought it.

No. He had gotten nowhere eight months ago, hiring a detective, had gotten nowhere playing the usual bureaucratic phone tag. If this fatae who had not given him a name, had not told him anything other than it too had an interest in finding this child, that it could help…

Then he would do whatever it asked. Even if it did seem, so far, to involve harassing the alleged adoptive parents until they could prove that the girl wasn’t there.

“Sir?”

He looked up, and up. Two of New Jersey’s Finest were in front of him. They didn’t look happy.

His companion was gone, of course. Alfred hadn’t heard it leave, any more than he’d had warning when it swooped down on him, feathers glinting in the sun.

“Is there a problem?” The moment he said the words, he knew they were the wrong ones. “Can I help you?” would have been better, innocent citizen with nothing to fear. Asking about a problem implied that there was one.

“You don’t live around here?”

“I…no.” He lived well north of here, in another state entirely. And he didn’t have a car to get into, to leave, couldn’t point to the mass transit he’d used to get out here, had no excuse for being here that wouldn’t land him in trouble. Sixty-plus years of being a law-abiding citizen, and he had no way out of this one.

“Do you have some identification on you, sir?”

“I…” he made a motion for his back pocket, but knew it was useless. He’d been working on the roof, who brought their wallet with them when they were doing home repair chores? In his old workboots, weekender jeans, and sweatshirt, he could have been anyone, from a comfortably-retired banker doing chores to a homeless person.

One of the cops looked up and down the street, obviously looking for something. The other one took a step back, indicating their patrol car. “If you’ll come with us, sir?”

He went with them.

They were very polite, asking him again what he was doing there. He shook his head, and couldn’t tell them. How did he get there? He shook his head again. He waived his phone call - what would he do, call Christine and tell her…what? No. Better to wait. He would say nothing about feathered companions, or stolen changeling babies. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Eventually, they would decide he was harmless, if a little crazy, and let him go.

Eventually - after they gave him a half-stale turkey sandwich and a decent cup of coffee - that was what happened.

“You want a ride to the station?” Officer Breidbart asked him.

“No, I’m good,” Alfred said. “I think I’ll walk.”

He knew Breidbart was watching him. They had pointed out where the train station was, only a few blocks away. They had given him a schedule, and a twenty dollar bill to get him home - or somewhere that wasn’t their town. He couldn’t fault them in any regard.

He also knew that there was no point in going back to the house, even if he could find it. If the child had been there, she was gone now. It had been the pattern at the last three houses they had gone too, as well. His companion - captor? guide? - could scent the child somehow, although it had a beak rather than a nose, but it could not gain entrance to the house. It needed Alfred for that.

So he kept walking, and waited for his companion to find him again.

oOo

Ellen tried to stare her boss down. It was doomed to failure - she couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes long enough to win a contest like that - but she gave it the best shot she could.

“You’re getting better.”

“Fuck you.”

That she could say that, mutter it really, still surprised her. She wouldn’t dare say that to Genevieve, or Sergei, or anyone else. Well, she might say it to PB, the demon who was her mentor’s best friend, but PB took that sort of thing as his due.

Danny pulled out his cell phone and told it to call someone nicknamed Bookpusher. Ellen didn’t exactly slide across the bench to get away from the phone, but she might have shifted a little backward. Instinct: the more current she used, the more a menace she was to electronics, and cell phones were among the most sensitive.

“’Pusher, hi. How much do I owe you, right now? Yeah? Okay, add to the pile.” He pulled the sheet of paper toward him and fact-checked himself, then said “St. Luke’s, between six and twelve months ago. All female infants born there, no matter what happened to them after. Yeah, preemies, stillborns, Apgar 10s and everything in-between. Can you do that for me?” He paused. “Woman, if I had a name, I could do this myself.”

Bookpusher had something to say to that, apparently. Danny leaned his head against the back of the booth, the phone held to his ear, and tried to look like he was paying attention.

“All right, okay. Yes, you’re brilliant, you’re wonderful, and we’re now up at the fly-you-to-Rome for that dinner stage of IOUs, I get it. Just compile the names and who they went home with, if they went home. Yeah, if they didn’t go anywhere I need to know that, too.”

Ellen thought that maybe Alfred McConnell would have known if his daughter died at birth. But then again, he hadn’t hired Danny, or gone to Mahiba to ask. So maybe he didn’t even know where she’d been born, to check. It must be awfully easy to lose track of a baby, if you didn’t even know where it had been born.

“You’re, as always, the light in my research darkness. Talk to you soon.”

He hung up the phone, turned it off, and put it back in his pocket, muffling the jangling chiming noise it made as it shut down. His hand came out again with something else in his fingers.

“Tell you what. We’ll flip a coin. Heads, we keep on with the case. Tails, we hunt down your vision. Deal?”

That was insane. But Ellen just shrugged, having used up her store of protest already.

He flipped it elegantly into the air, catching it flat on the back of his wrist. Heads. Danny tilted his wrist, and the harsh overhead light caught the metal, making it glitter.

“So, right. Vision it is.”

The subway took us into Brooklyn, letting us off a few blocks from our destination, and we walked the rest of the way to the cemetery in silence. I avoided the main entrance, skirting to the side. The arch overhead was massive, easily three times as high as a tall adult, and wide enough across for two cars to pass, one going in the other heading out, without risk of scratching. It was marble, what looked like one single piece, and deeply carved with images that had been worn down over the past two hundred years to where they were only lovely shadows.

“The main entrance is worse,” I told her. “I mean, glorious, but worse. And too many people. It’s better to slip in quietly.”

“This is the back door?” Ellen looked up at the archway as we walked under it, and shook her head. “Once you’re dead, you don’t much care, so why-“

“It’s not for the dead. Cemeteries are for the living.” There was no other reason the grass on either side of us was trimmed as lovingly as a golf course, or the huge trees ringing each section were so gorgeously placed, creating a dappled oasis of shadows and cool even on the warmest summer days.

“It feels like it should be a college campus, or park, or something.”

“It used to be. Well, sort of like a park. Back when, people came here every weekend for picnics.”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah well, not to my preference either, but green spaces are green spaces, and hey, why not come to visit grandma while you were at it?”

We’d been walking along one of the side paths as we talked, skirting around a funeral in progress down at the bottom of the hill. I had a destination in mind, but was taking the indirect route. It was polite, when dealing with certain sects of the Cosa Nostradamus, to make like you’d stumbled on them by accident, rather than taking the straightaway.

We heard them first. Or, I heard them, and from the way my Shadow stumbled on perfectly smooth grass, I was guessing she did, too.

“That’s…”

“What you heard?”

“Yeah.”

I could see her gather up her courage, and stick it into place. Ellen doubted herself, but I knew better. Guts of steel and nerves of whipcord, even if she didn’t know it yet. Like any rookie, she had to learn.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Fatae.”

“I figured that out already,” she said, her voice terse. I shouldn’t screw with her, not when it came to her visions. Most Talent I know, they’re happy to be what they are. Ellen, burdened with the extra “gift” of being a storm-seer, wasn’t there yet. She would be, eventually. There was too much that was glorious in magic for her to resist it, even I knew that. But not yet.

We crested the hill, and had a choice of paths, when the one we were on branched. The left-hand choice went back down the hill at a slant. The right-hand choice turned into a series of steps, and led not into the valley, but to a rocky alcove set in the hill, complete with benches carved out of the rock. It was pretty, but not where we were going.

“Left,” I said, but Ellen was already heading down the path. Her rough-tread hiking boots were better for this than my cowboy boots. I should have changed before we came out here, but neither of us had wanted to take the time to go back to the office, much less my apartment uptown. The trip out here was a pain on mass transit, and I wanted to get here before night.

Not that I hadn’t spent time in cemeteries at night, but never willingly, and this one… this one had a reputation. Both good and not-good.

The noise got louder, as we went down the hill. It wasn’t loud, in and of itself; you wouldn’t have heard it if there was heavy traffic. It was like walking under a tree full of chattering birds, except it was coming from ground level, and it sounded…worse.

I should have warned Ellen, but how the hell do you prep someone for this?

“Ack!” She jumped back, damn near into my arms, and I caught her as gently as I could. “Steady…”

The figure in front of us was about four feet tall, and barely a foot wide, and looked a hell of a lot like a bulked-up preying mantis, if preying mantis’ had unnervingly human faces behind the mandibles. Exactly who I’d hoped to run into.

It clicked at us, and tilted its head.

“Sorry to interrupt you,” I started to say, but those pop-set black eyes looked past me, right at Ellen, and chittered at her. I turned to look, just in time to see her shock slide back behind her usual poker face. Good girl, you don’t ever let them see you be shook.

“You are not dead,” it said, almost accusingly. “Only the dead come to us.”

“We are not dead,” I agreed. “But we have an interest in the dead. Not the same interest you have,” I hurried to clarify, just in case it thought we were competition. “Only in knowing if you have recently…” encountered? Eaten? “If anyone new has been brought to your attention.”

“There are always new, always old.” It couldn’t seem to stop staring at Ellen, which was making both of us uneasy. I realized that there were others gathering, a few feet away. All right, I’d known they would be in a pack, or whatever they called themselves, but knowing that and seeing it up close and personal was a bit much. Normally I could handle anything the city threw at me with a certain level of calm, but this… These things would strip the flesh from my bones, when my time came, and crunch the bones into dust. It was what they did, it was their purpose in the circle of fucking life, but I hadn’t expected to ever actually face it while still breathing.

“These would be…two men,” I managed to say, keeping what I thought - hoped - was a calm, cool note in my voice. “Humans. One black, one white?” I had no idea if it could even differentiate, with those eyes. “Still alive.”

“The living do not interest us.” Its gaze was still stuck past my shoulder.

“Yeah. Could have fooled me about that.” I shifted so that Ellen was entirely behind me, and tried to catch its attention again. “If you saw these men, would you tell me about it?”

“If you came and asked me after I had seen them.”

Took me a second to puzzle that one out, and I suspected that was as good as I was going to get. Doubtful they’d have access to telephones, much less the internet, and none of them were going to leave the grounds. Specifically, they
couldn’t
leave the grounds. Old story, of which I knew only the base legend: turf war; they lost.

I didn’t bother to say thank you: carrion-eaters weren’t notorious for their adherence to Ms. Manners’ finest, and I wanted to get Ellen - and myself - away from them soonest possible.

The slope back up seemed steeper than it had coming down, and neither of us stopped to talk until we were at the ridge again, and then back over the other side.

“The
hell
?”

I flinched. My mother used to have that same tone of voice: not shouting, but strong enough to break a ten-year-old’s nerve. “They’re called Direlings. They’re categorized as mostly harmless.”

“Unless you happen to be dead. Or me. That thing wanted to touch me. What is it with fatae trying to
touch
me?”

“It’s all that current you have coiled inside you,” I said, remembering my informant down the seaport, who had wanted very badly to touch my Shadow, too. I couldn’t think of any others, offhand, but she sounded like there had been a few. I frowned. I’d never felt any urge to touch her, not like that, but… I spent a considerable about of time around Talent, and I knew better. If Valere didn’t chop my hand off, Bonnie would. “They - we - can feel it, like electricity on our skin. And some of ‘em,” and I looked over my shoulder, an instinctive gesture, to make sure nobody was following us. “Some of ‘em are just damned creepy.”

“Yeah creepy as fuck. You take me to all the best places, boss. I want to go home and take a long, hot shower. With a scrub brush.”

oOo

We caught the subway just as it pulled into the station, slipping into a half-full car as far away from a noisy bunch of teenagers as we - and the other adults in the car - could manage. It had been a long day, and Ellen had done well, but there was something in her eyes that I didn’t think was just because she’d gotten ooked out by the direlings. Or not only because. I kept silent the first few stops, then leaned into her personal space just enough that we could keep the conversations semi-private.

“The guys you saw, they were alive. And you heard the sound when they were still alive. So whatever was going to happen to them, it happens there. Direlings have no reason to hurt the living, so maybe now that they’re aware of it -“

Ellen stared at one of the ads telling us in English and Spanish that the only way to get ahead was to learn radiology skills. “Do you really think those things will stop someone getting killed? Why should they interrupt someone giving them more to eat?”

“Shadow, you know how many fatae die every day in the city? No direling has ever gone hungry.” All right, maybe that wasn’t the best thing to think about. I gripped the pole and let myself sway with the movement of the subway car as we pulled out of Brooklyn and headed under the river to Manhattan. “You need to trust your instincts.” This was an on-going argument: she trusted her instincts about as much as I trusted the Mayor’s office. That is to say, we trusted them to screw it up.

“Okay, you need to trust me that I trust your instincts. How’s that?” It felt like dirty pool, and not what I was supposed to be teaching her, but if it got that look out of her eyes, I could let her go home to that much-needed hot shower and hopefully a decent night’s sleep.

The train curved around a corner and she got a minute as everyone shifted to adjust before having to answer.

“Okay?” I was pushing. I could hear myself pushing. Ellen was starting to turn into a solid investigator: she had an eye for details, the ability to think on her feet, and a deep-seated suspicion of everyone’s story. But she doubted her own, too, and that was a problem.

Most PIs are assholes not because we’re assholes, but because we’ve learned that the only thing we can trust us our own gut. And the gut, as my old partner used to say, is directly connected to the asshole. Ellen still tried to please and placate as a way to stay off everyone’s radar. I should be pushing her to fight me, to stand her ground… but not today.

“All right,” she said finally. “Yeah.” And then with a little more certainty, “Yeah, you’re right. But what are we supposed to do? I mean we can’t stake out the cemetery, not and follow up on the case, too.” She tilted her head at me, and I was struck again by the lines of her face. Most young women would be self-conscious about that strong a nose and jawline, but Ellen didn’t seem to even notice. Cleopatra herself would have been proud. Now to get the rest of her to follow suit…

“I don’t know, kid. That’s why we only take one client at a time. You can’t spread yourself thin and expect to make a real difference.” It wasn’t a consoling thing to say, but if I’d bullshitted her here, she’d know. She’d heard me talk about focus often enough before.

“My visions are-“

“Your visions are important.” I headed that one off at the pass, before she started to wonder about a certain double-headed coin in my pocket. “If we need to call in help to cover all the corners, we will. It’s not like we’re alone in this. The PUPS would love to have a chance to out-spook the spooks, given a chance.” I grinned at her, and she smiled, reluctantly, back. Venec would hop at the chance to train some of his newbies, at our expense.

We split at South Ferry, me heading back uptown, her off to the tiny apartment she’d gotten in the East Village. It was about the size of my bathroom, but the building was solid - both Didier and I had checked it out - and the landlord wasn’t on any of the NYPD slumlists, so it was about as good as an underemployed twenty-something without a trust fund was going to get, without leaving the island, and Valere had been clear that she was to stay within reach. The mentor-mentee thing used to involve fostering as well, I’d been told, but Ellen’s case was slightly beyond that, considering her age.

It was funny, really. To look at us, you’d think there was only about a decade’s difference. She’d had to grow up fast, and I’d… well, fauns age slower than humans. My hair was still dark and my bones didn’t creak, but there were days I felt older than dirt. Today - staring a carrion-eater in the mandibles - I felt every grain of it.

oOo

Ellen slogged her way up the three flights of stairs to her apartment, unlocked the door, and fell inside, shedding clothes as she went. She hadn’t been joking, entirely, about needing that shower. The way the direling had looked at her, its hand-claw-things opening and shutting like it wanted to measure the density of her bones just before it crunched into her…ugh.

It wouldn’t have touched her. Danny wouldn’t have let it. Her boss might come across as being sort of laconic, maybe a little slow, with the way his body slouched and especially when he pulled the baseball cap down low over his face, but she knew that there was muscle under that jacket, and an inhuman strength that could throw a full-grown human off it tracks without breaking a sweat. Plus, he had the seriously overprotective thing going on, even when he tried not to let it show.

Genevieve had warned her about that, months ago. “Danny’s a good guy. But he’s got…a thing.”

“About women?”

“About throwaways.” Her mentor was a lot of things, but subtle wasn’t one of them. That was why she left negotiations to her partner. “He wants to save the world, especially the underage part of the world.”