The Work of Hunters Read online

  The Work of Hunters

  Sylvan Investigations #3

  Laura Anne Gilman

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  November 20, 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-564-9

  Copyright © 2015 Laura Anne Gilman

  It was night, but the immediate scene was lit with neon flickering against the walls and bringing up bluish highlights on faces and hands. Figures in dark clothing moved back and forth, talking quietly enough not to be overheard, while others bent to various tasks.

  A crime scene. A city. Any city, in the just-before-dawn darkness there’s not enough to identify it, save the cars are American, the figures mostly male, a mix of white and Hispanic, some black, a few women, almost all of whom are black.

  Something about it says New York. There’s a familiarity to it she can’t quite name, can’t quite catch, but she knows.

  Then suddenly the sound was turned up from 1 to 9. Someone yelled — “bring it over here!” — and another someone in a gray jumpsuit hurried over, carrying a bulky object in both hands, like it’s a precious thing. He set it down, knelt beside it, and fiddled — and the area was filled with a grey-white light.

  There is a dumpster shoved against one wall of the alley, purple-green in the illumination, letters stenciled in white on one end, but all focus is on the body being removed from it, gingerly, by white-coated, white-gloved technicians. It is male, the skin grey, the face mangled and bitten beyond recognition. Bare feet also bloody, bare chest, the jeans covered with stains that could be anything, after time in a dumpster.

  “Two in two days,” a voice says, tired and frustrated. “You boys are going to start catching some heat on this.”

  She knows that voice. She knows it very well.

  Ellen hated it when a vision came in public, especially on public transit. It’s not that people notice, or try to do anything — at most they get uncomfortable that the person next to them has gone rigid and staring, and try to move away as quietly and quickly as possible. But sometimes she’d come out of it, trying her damnedest not to shake or scream, and there’d be someone staring at her, like it was all for their own entertainment, or worse yet, like they wanted to help but didn’t know how to, or were afraid to.

  All she wanted to do then was be invisible, to get off the subway, find a place to sit and process, write down what she’d Seen in the notebook Danny insisted she carry, and remember how to breathe. Kindness, just then, made her want to break things.

  This time, she got lucky: it was 11am on a Tuesday and people were either already at work or in school, or off doing more interesting things. The only other people in the subway car with her were a couple more interested in each others’ tonsils than anyone around them, and an old woman wrapped in a leather coat who’d clearly given up giving a shit what anyone else was doing a few decades ago.

  Being ignored was good. Her arms were trembling, like she’d done one set too many pushups, or tried to carry something too heavy, but that was normal. She folded her hands in her lap and breathed, waiting for the train to pull into the next stop. It wasn’t hers, a stop too early, but she got out anyway. Her legs felt rock steady, carrying her up the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, although she had to hold onto the side rail the last few steps, and was glad that she was wearing sensible sneakers, not heels. A white man heading down into the subway gave her an odd look as he passed, but didn’t try to talk to her. She thought he might have been another Talent, but she couldn’t spare enough energy to do the tendril-touch thing Wren had taught her, to be certain.

  She was blocking the stairs, she realized, and moved to the side, leaned against the rough brick of the building, and kept breathing, in and out the way her mentor had taught her. More people went past her, up and down the stairs, and there was a comfort in the normalcy, the routine of it all.

  Ellen was a big fan of routine. She had a schedule, and she liked to keep to it. This had not been in today’s schedule.

  When the trembling stopped, and she didn’t feel like a squirrel in a too-small box, she walked down the street until she found a bench outside a Le Pain Quotidian. Sitting down, she reached into the battered leather case she never left her apartment without these days, and pulled her notebook out.

  “Do it quick, without thinking.” Danny’s voice in her ear, even though he’d said it more than a year ago. She clicked the pen, and started to write. Automatic writing, not thinking about grammar or punctuation or even making any of it make sense, just the images she’d seen, the things she’d felt, any impressions made, before it drifted away.

  Not that she was ever lucky enough for it all to disappear. She’d remember. She remembered all of them.

  The ones they’d saved, and especially the ones she hadn’t.

  oOo

  Tuesday morning started bad, and went worse. I’d been working a stalker case all weekend and through Monday, and was running on too little sleep and too much caffeine as I sent my conclusions and final invoice to the client. The last thing I needed right after that was a deceptively calm Talent not-quite-yelling in my ear. When Talent get too worked up, things tend to explode around them. The woman I was talking to was high-res enough that she could explode things in my area, and I’d replaced enough coffee makers and cell phones already this year, thank you very much.

  “For the third and final time, Valere, no, I have no idea… do I look like her keeper? She’s not supposed to work today, you’ve got custody, so why — ”

  I heard the external door, the one that led in from the hallway, open, and shut my mouth, trying to hear who was out there. We were, technically, open for business, but would—be clients tended to knock. Anyone who didn’t knock, but came right in, quietly enough that a human probably wouldn’t have heard the door over the sound of his own voice? I moved to the desk, and unlocked the drawer that housed my handgun.

  Call me paranoid, but you can also call me still alive, so it’s a wash.

  There was the unmistakable — and familiar — sound of keys dropped on the wooden desk outside, and I exhaled, my fingers easing away from the blued metal, pushing the drawer closed again and hearing it lock. I tested the pull anyway, just to make sure. “Yeah, I think your duckling just walked in the door. I’ll call as soon as I know something. Do me a favor and don’t freak any more until there’s something to be freaked out about, okay?”

  I hung up with her still protesting in my ear. Once upon a time Wren Valere had sworn she’d never act as mentor, that it wasn’t her thing — she didn’t want to be responsible for anyone other than herself and her partner. That had lasted about ten minutes, when Shadow was dropped in her lap.

  But then, I really didn’t have much room to mock. I’d sworn never to take on an apprentice, and yet here I was. Here we all were.

  I leaned in the doorway between my office and the main room, trying not to carry any of Wren’s agitation with me. “Hey,” I said, making a quick scan for bloodshed, mayhem, or any other reason to panic.

  The outer room looked a hell of a lot better than it used to, when I worked alone. There were a few semi-flourishing green plants there, now, and several framed prints on the wall, weirdly soothing art I couldn’t identify at gunpoint. The desk was still the same beat-up wooden monstrosity it had always been, but the chair behind it was the most ergonomic money could buy — and I knew, because I’d paid the bill.

  Shadow wasn’t sitting in the chair, though. She was standing in front of the desk, hands resting on the wooden surface, staring at her chair like —

  No. She wasn’t staring at anything. She was just staring.

  I’d learned what that meant, the hard way.

  “You wrote it down.�
�

  “Yeah.” It hadn’t been a question, but she shook her head, then nodded, and looked at me. “Yeah, I got it.”

  I did a quick once-over while her head was up and facing me. Her dark eyes were too wide, the pupils still blown, but her skin tone was good, and her breathing was steady. She’d handled it — but she’d come to me, instead of meeting with her mentor, as scheduled. That wasn’t good.

  It was never good. Ellen was a Storm-Seer. She didn’t see happy-go-lucky yay fun visions. She saw violence. Death. Murder.

  “Valere called,” I told her. “She was a little wigged out when you didn’t show up on time, and weren’t responding to pings. You might want to — ”

  “Oh.” Anyone who says that black women can’t blush doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, because the dark red on her cheeks was clearly visible. Her eyes got that look that Talent have, and I knew she was reaching out to her mentor, letting her know what was up.

  Talent can do that. I’m not Talent. I get to deal with Valere over the phone, and pray her static doesn’t take down the line while she’s on it, and I get to deal with Ellen, who was at least as powerful, and pray she didn’t fry my synapses if she lost control. Lucky me.

  “Ideally, in the future you’ll loop her in before she attempts to send my ass out looking for you,” I said calmly, years of walking the beat giving me plenty of practice in staying cool. “Or answer her when she pings?”

  “Yeah boss, I know, I’m sorry. I was so focused on remembering, I didn’t hear her.” Ellen hit send, or whatever it is Talent do when they’re pinging each other like some kind of psychic instant messenger, then sat on the corner of her desk, long legs crossed at the ankles like a dame out of a Bogie movie, and stared at me until I started to wonder if I’d left some breakfast on my face. I pulled the visitor’s chair out from where we stashed it against the wall — if a client showed up early they’d damn well wait — and hauled it over so I could sit in front of her, close enough that my hands could rest on her knees.

  Her eyes were starting to ease a little: it had been at least half an hour since the vision, then. If she’d been heading uptown, she’d had to’ve turned around and come here, so probably closer to forty minutes. I owed Valere an apology: she had waited a reasonable time before starting to panic.

  “What level?” I asked her.

  “I… don’t know.”

  We have a scale, one to nine, to pinpoint the urgency of one of her visions — is this something we have minutes to deal with, or is it days or weeks to come? She’s not accurate to the hour, but usually we get a sense of the timeframe.

  “Yes you do,” I told her, not to be an ass but because I knew that she did know. She just didn’t want to commit to anything, not yet. My poor Shadow, still half-convinced, deep down, that if she voices an opinion someone’s going to tell her she’s wrong, she’s crazy.

  She’s about as far from crazy as anyone I’ve ever met.

  “Come on.” I kept the pressure on her knees soft and steady, something for her to focus on, come back to. “What level?”

  She nodded, listening as much to herself as me. “Okay, yes. It felt urgent, really urgent, but there was a sense of… of not having to rush, too. That’s what threw me, I think. It was like… the vision itself wasn’t sure?”

  That had never happened before. Usually the urgency is the one thing she’s really clear about, and everything else we have to figure out.

  “What was it sure about?”

  “It was in the city, not Manhattan though. Queens, maybe? Tall buildings, wide alleys. And a dumpster, and a body.”

  “Time of day?”

  “Night.” She reached down and patted the bag at her side, as though reassuring herself that something was still in there, and continued. “No, early morning. Really early. The body was in the dumpster. Hanging feet-out, bent at the knees. It was barefoot, shirtless. The feet and face were bloody.”

  Live as many decades as I have, see as much as I have, and you get pretty hard to shock. But every word out of my Shadow’s mouth was making something deep in my brain start to spaz out, like a huge white space as expanding in my brain, pushing out all rational thought. “Black or white?” My voice was a croak, but I couldn’t be bothered by that right now

  “Black.” She said the word, but she wasn’t entirely convinced of that; I could hear it in her voice. “Maybe Hispanic? It was hard to see. Not-white, though. And something had messed up his face, like it’d been scraped off?”

  I’m a grown-ass man with full control of his body. I don’t faint, or pass out, or lose consciousness without losing at least two pints of blood, first. But just then, I was fair to making a real good impression of it. What she was describing… it was impossible.

  “Boss?” Her voice had gone from the distant remembering tone, to a sharper, more worried one. She’d picked up on my reaction. Damn it.

  I wanted to ask her if she was sure, if she’d remembered everything perfect, but I knew she had. I’d been the one to talk her through most of her visions, I’d been the one who taught her how to recall details before she could contaminate them. If she said that’s what she Saw, then that’s what she Saw. The last thing she needed was me throwing more doubt on her.

  I nodded, forcing the dizziness away. We didn’t have time for this. “You said it wasn’t right-now urgent?”

  “Maybe a… two? Or three? Soon, but not right now.”

  I had to stand up, move. There wasn’t enough room in the front office to pace, but I did my best attempt anyway. “You always see the future, don’t you?”

  “You know that.” Her voice was sharp. She had gone from being confused to being worried, and when Ellen got worried she got angry. I couldn’t complain: it was better than how she used to react, pulling in and trying to hide. I’d rather she yell at me than go back to being Shadow.

  I knew that. I knew that Ellen always Sees the future. Always. She’s never seen the past, not once since we started working with her, and not before then, far as she knew. But what she was describing… happened nearly thirty years ago.

  “Tell me everything,” I say. “Every damn thing.”

  Ellen had survived adolescence by keeping a weather eye on the people around her, and working at Sylvan Investigations had only honed that skill. So even in the middle of her own trauma, she knew something was wrong.

  “Boss?” She watched as her boss paced back and forth, his hands shoved into his pockets, face blank. “You’re making me nervous.”

  That wasn’t a good thing to do to a Talent. The first lecture she’d ever gotten was that the ability to manipulate current — what people used to call magic, back before Founder Ben codified the connection between current and electricity — came with a price, and part of that price was that if they slip up on their control, or pull too much power, they fry things nearby. Computers, mostly, but also people, if the Talent in question is high-res and nervous enough. Ellen was, she’d been told, high-res. And she was getting very nervous.

  “Boss?” She tried again. Normally, Danny was already forming a plan by the time she’d finished telling him about a vision. He was smart, and he was quick, and he was pretty much unflappable. Part of it was a career in the NYPD before she’d ever met him, part of it was that fauns just didn’t get flapped by much. He was only half-faun, but he’d said once that he got the useful part — the stone-cold liver, and the ability to take weirdness pretty much in stride.

  She’d never pointed out to him that he’d also gotten the quirky charm-and-looks combo that made most fauns such cocky sons of bitches. He knew, he just tried not to use it.

  Her words finally reached him, at least enough to make him stop pacing. “You saw the cops already there? So we can’t stop it. The person’s already dead, or he’s going to be dead. I’m sorry, kid.”

  He only called her kid when something was wrong. Shadow, when he was worried. Ellen, or Miss Ellen when he was in a particularly good mood, the courtesy
he said his mom had drilled into him coming to the fore in a weirdly playful way. But ‘kid’ was “I have to tell you something bad” territory.

  “Do you think that’s why it felt urgent but not urgent?” Like the merfolk she hadn’t been able to save. No. When she saw dead people it still felt urgent, because there was someone else at risk, someone alive. She looked at him, her face scrunched in a frown. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “El — ”

  “I may not have Sergei’s bullshit detector — ” her mentor’s husband was a Null, but he could smell a lie before you even thought it — “But I know you pretty well now, and you’re not telling me something.”

  Two years ago Danny Hendrickson had terrified her. Two years ago, everything had terrified her. Her entire life, people had told her she was crazy, that her visions were hallucinations, that everything that happened around her wasn’t normal, that she wasn’t normal. Discovering about Talent, about current, learning that she was — not normal, maybe, but that everything that happened to her had a name and an explanation — had been like breathing for the first time after a life of holding her breath.