hidden talents (2 page)

“God,” Tony said, tapping the back of his head against the van"s rattling wall.

“I hope this isn"t another thing like the bridge.”

“Amen,” Carmine agreed. The stocky were was the oldest member of their

squad, the only one who was married, and - yes - another of Adam"s cousins.

Before he could smile, Adam"s earpiece beeped.

“You"re four blocks out,” Dana said. “The gargoyle is reporting another series of power flares. Still nothing higher than a Four.”

That was good news. Unless, of course, the Talent was warming up.

“Okay, people,” Adam said. “Watch your tempers once we get inside. Be

safe but no killing unless you have no choice.”

He didn"t warn them against hesitating. Given their inbred hair-trigger werewolf nature, hesitating wasn"t an issue.

∞

The defunct tire store sat on a small parking lot between a very well locked print shop and a transient hotel. Apart from the hotel, which wasn"t exactly bustling, the area wasn"t residential. A cheap liquor outlet on the corner drew a few customers, but the main business done here after dark was drugs. Most of the product filtered in from the human world. Since this was Resurrection, some was also exotic. If you knew who to ask, you could score adulterated vamp blood or coke cut with faerie dust. Demon manufactured Get-Hard was popular, though it tended to cause more harmful side effects than Viagra. Every EMT Adam knew had asked why they couldn"t get GH off the street. All Adam could answer was that they were doing the best they could.

Policing Resurrection couldn"t be about stamping out Evil. It had to be about making sure Good didn"t get swallowed.

The reminder braced him as he and his team ran soundlessly from the van onto the buckled and trash-strewn asphalt of the parking lot. His scalp prickled half a second before a soft gold light flared around the edges of the boarded-up back windows.

Adam had answered previous calls to this location. The rear section of the tire store was where vehicles had been cranked up on lifts for servicing.

Fortunately, there was plenty of cover for slipping in. Unfortunately, lots of flammables were inside. Adam took the anti-burn charm that hung around his neck and whispered a word to it. That precaution seen to, he hand-signaled Rick and Tony to split off and block escape from the front exit.

This left Adam, Carmine and Nate to ghost in the back.

The flimsy combination lock on the door to the service bay had been snapped

- probably magically. Adam and his two detectives ducked under the low opening.

Inside, the scent and feel of magic was much stronger, the air thicker and hotter than it should have been in autumn. A male voice moaned in pain farther in, standing Adam"s hair on end. Without needing to be told, Nate peeled off to the right. Adam and Carmine took the left.

Scattered heaps of tires allowed them to creep up on their goal without being seen. One bare bulb dangled from a wire, lighting the far end of the garage. In the dim circle beneath it, the Talent had her moaning victim tied to a plastic chair.

The sight of her stopped Adam in his tracks. Christ, she was little. Five foot nothing and probably a hundred and small change. She looked to be in her twenties and wore the kind of clothes street kids did. Ripped up black jeans.

Ancient T-shirts that didn"t fit. Her oversized Yankees jacket had its sleeves torn out and was decorated with unidentifiable small objects. Her hair was a shade of platinum not found in nature, standing in white spikes around her head. A swirling red pattern was dyed it, as if her coiffure were her personal art project.

What really got him though, what had his breath catching in his throat, was the clean-cut innocence of her face. Outfit and hair aside, she looked like a tiny Iowa farm girl.

It made his chest hurt to look at her. The part of him that needed to protect others wanted to protect her.

Knowing better than to trust in appearances, Adam shook the inclination off.

He tapped the speaker fixed into his vest with the signal for everyone to hold. The victim was still alive. They could afford to take a minute to discover what they were up against.

As they watched, the girl lifted her right hand. Pale blue fire outlined her curled fingers. Her already bloodied victim shrank back within his ropes. He was some kind of elf-human mixblood with long gray hair. He was a lot bigger than the Talent, but that didn"t mean their fight had been fair. Despite the elfblood, he didn"t give off much of a magic vibe. A near-null was Adam"s guess. His run-in with the Talent had left damage. He looked bad: both eyes swollen, bruises, shallow cuts bleeding all over. Though he seemed familiar, as injured as he was, he was hard to identify. Even his smell was distorted by blood and fear.

“I can do this all night,” the Talent said in a voice that was way too sweet for a torturer. “Or you can tell me where to find the Eunuch.”

Carmine and Adam came alert at that. This was a name they knew too damn well.

“Lady,” said her bloodied victim. “I have no idea who you mean.”

The girl closed her glowing hand gently. The man she was interrogating

arched so violently he and the plastic chair fell over. He screamed as blood sprayed from a brand new cut on his chest. Carmine started forward, but Adam gripped his shoulder.

“Wait,” he murmured. “That cut was shallow. He"s not in immediate danger.”

Carmine shook his head but obeyed. When the man stopped writhing, the girl drew a deep slow breath. With no more effort than gesturing upward with one finger, she set man and chair upright. Despite the situation"s danger, something inside Adam let out an admiring
whoa
.

“Clearly,” she said, “you think you ought to be more afraid of your boss than me.”

“Lady,” panted the injured man, “
everyone’s
more afraid of him.”

The girl"s lips curved in a smile that had Carmine shivering beside him.

Admittedly, the expression was a little scary. For no good reason Adam could think of, it made his cock twitch in his jockstrap.

The Talent spoke silkily. “I"m glad we"ve established you know who I"m

looking for.”

Adam expected her to cut him again. Instead, discovering her victim did know the Eunuch inspired her to up the ante on her torture. The blue fire she"d called to her hand now began gleaming around her feet. She was drawing energy from the earth - and no piddling amount either. Her glowing hand contracted into a fist, and her victim"s face went chalky. Adam was pretty sure she was telekinetically squeezing his beating heart. Unless she was really good at medical manipulation, she was going to kill him.

“
Go
,” he said sharply into his vest microphone.

Even in human form, werewolves weren"t slowpokes. What went down next

was textbook perfect. Adam and his men were on the Talent so fast she didn"t have a chance to shift her attack to them. Nate got her nose squashed down on the oil-stained floor, then snapped electrum plated cuffs snug around her wrists. The cuffs were charmed so she couldn"t break them, no matter how powerful she was.

The Talent struggled, then cried out as Nate yanked her roughly onto her feet.

He dropped a depowering charm around her neck for good measure.

Immediately, the energy-charged air settled back to normal. The girl gaped at the enchanted medal, then straight up at Adam. Adam"s heart stuttered in his chest.

Her eyes were a breathtaking corn-fed blue, her lashes a thick dark brown. The twitch she"d sent through his cock morphed into a throb. Carmine shot him a look of surprise. Adam fought an embarrassed flush. The smell of his arousal must have gotten strong enough to seep through his clothes.

“"bout time you showed up,” the girl"s victim huffed. “This bitch needs to be locked up.”

Carmine flipped up his face shield and turned to consider him. The man

flinched back, obviously wishing he"d refrained from complaining.

“Aren"t you Donnie West?” Carmine asked. “"Cause I know we"ve got a

handful of outstandings on your drug dealing ass.”

“Uh,” said Donnie, abruptly recognizable under his bruises.

“That"s what I thought,” said Carmine, and let out his belly laugh.

Through all of this, the Talent"s eyes moved from one of them to the other, taking in their gear and their guns and getting wider by the second. When Rick and Tony caught up to them from the front, Tony"s upper canines had run out and his amber eyes were glowing. The girl sucked in a breath like this shocked her, though a partial change when younger wolves got excited wasn"t uncommon.

“What the -” she said before having to swallow. “What the hell kind of cops are you?”

Still holding her from behind, Nate"s slash of a mouth slanted up in a devilish grin. “Well, what do you know,” he drawled. “Looks like we"ve got ourselves an Accidental Tourist.”

Nothing Ari had encountered since arriving in Resurrection had been normal.

First, the air smelled funny, like a light flowery perfume, even near the sewer grates. It felt funny too, as if Ari had thrown back one too many shots of espresso.

The hair on her arms was prickling and the sidewalks - despite having the usual cracks and stains - were strangely buzzy underfoot. She caught herself tiptoeing and had to force herself to stop.

No one stared at her, luckily. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention.

She"d managed to find Resurrection"s Chinatown, the general location of which the MapQuest maps hadn"t lied about. Though the Eunuch wasn"t Asian, he was addicted to Chinese food. If he wasn"t holding court over a plate of Peking duck somewhere, his goons were getting him take-out. Ari figured if she lurked here long enough, she"d have a chance to spot one.

What she spotted instead was seriously weird. Lots of Chinese restaurants in Manhattan hung ducks in their windows. It was an assurance that they roasted good birds in there. What hung in these windows wasn"t birds. To be absolutely truthful, they looked like miniature skinned people.

At first, she"d thought the streetlights must have confused her eyes, but the creepy things were displayed everywhere. One restaurant had taped an English translation to the glass under the bold swish of its Chinese sign.

Gnomes
, it declared.
Freshly caught
.

Surely, this was the locals" idea of an inside joke.

Ari had shuddered and tried to avoid looking ... which was when she noticed the placard inside the entrance doors:
No Flaring Beyond This Threshold
.

What did that even mean? Were people trying to do gymnastics on the tables?

She just could not figure this place out. Deciding to take a break and get her bearings, she left the five-block stretch of Chinatown to slip as unobtrusively as she could into a packed coffee house. From experience, she knew crowded places were good for hiding in. This one"s
No Flaring
sign was compensated for by the one that said
Free Hot Spot
. Sadly, Ari"s tablet didn"t work when she pulled it out, though the other customers" seemed to.

They were a motley bunch. Young. Middle aged. A lot of older guys with

long hair. She found a spot the next table over from two high school girls in prissy plaid uniforms. They were chattering a mile a minute in a language she couldn"t for the life of her recognize. They were also texting at the same time - normal enough, she guessed, given what she"d observed of her more popular peers when she was their age. What wasn"t normal was that beneath their long shiny hair, their ears were pointy.

O-kay
, she thought. Interesting fashion trends around here.

“Coffee?” inquired a kind looking older waitress who"d snuck up on her from nowhere.

“What?” Ari asked, taken by surprise.

The woman gestured with a well seasoned stovetop espresso pot. “You have to order if you want to use the hot spot.”

“The hot spot doesn"t work for me,” Ari said, though no doubt she still had to buy something.

“It should work,” said the waitress. “Our magician refreshed it just this morning.”

Ari blinked. Maybe this was their pet name for their IT expert. She was trying to come up with a sensible response when she spotted one of the Eunuch"s occasional go-to guys on his way out the door. Even in this crowd, his long shining gray hair stood out.

“Excuse me,” she said, sliding out from her seat. “I see someone I need to say
hello
to.”

Once outside, she followed Donnie West until he stepped into an alley to light one of his sickening clove cigarettes. Oddly enough, it smelled like nirvana here. It must have tasted like nirvana too. He took a drag so deep he might have been trying to pull it into his toes.

With his eyes closed in bliss, he wasn"t hard to sneak up on.

“Hey,” she said, judging a brash approach was best. “Got one of those for me?”

“Shit.” He jerked straight with shock, his cigarette falling to the ground.

“Don"t you know better than to take people by surprise?”

She suspected he recognized her. They"d never spoken or been this close before, but she"d seen him talking to the Eunuch lots of times from across a room.

In addition to which, she wasn"t easy to forget, what with her hair and her special gift. She sighed at the realization that he wouldn"t even admit that much.

She"d need more than a bluff to get what she needed out of him.

She only meant to give him a telekinetic nudge, to remind him she was a scary chick whose questions ought to be answered. Somehow, the energy that rushed into her when she pulled was a heck of a lot more than she was used to.

The power swooshed out of her into him, slamming him into the brick wall and nearly coshing him senseless.

Whoa
, Ari thought, even as she tried to pretend she"d meant to do exactly that. Talk about chugging too much caffeine. Her heart pounded like an old-fashioned locomotive behind her ribs.

“Shit,” Donnie cursed, on his knees with one hand checking for bumps

behind his head. “You can"t be here like this.”