Miles to Go (8 page)
“Don’t know,” I admitted cheerfully. “Don’t know where they’ve been assigned, either. But they’re mer.” As I spoke I pulled my cap off and ran my hand through my hair.
It was a risk – this kid was human, not even Talent, and he might be a pure Null for all I could tell. But the fact that two fatae had been assigned gatekeepers meant the probability that this was an integrated crew was high.
“Mer?”
Bingo. The boy was playing dumb but his body language gave him away: he was ready to sprint in the opposite direction if I made one wrong move.
I spent most of my days passing – cross-breeds were rare enough that the fact that I’d lived as human my entire life trumped the obvious fatae aspects of my appearance. But I knew how to switch that out, at-need. I’d never look wholly faun, but there was no doubt that I was fatae.
Especially to a teenaged kid who – despite his sullen act – was no fool. His gaze flicked from my eyes to my horns, and then did a quick once-over, skimming along my body as though he were trying to adjust his initial perception. Then his gaze came back to my face, and I smiled. It wasn’t, I admit, a pretty smile. In fact, I’d spent a lot of time practicing it to display just the right amount of arrogant shit.
“Mer,” I said again. Two girls and a boy, teenagers.”
There was a flicker, an awareness, and then something fell behind his eyes, and he took a step back. “I’m sorry. I don’t know anyone like that here. Not too many of your folk around here, and none of ‘em my age.”
“Never said they were your age,” I said softly. “Just teenaged. Wide range, there.” I could have been wrong, it could just have been the normal teen ego assuming everything revolved around them. But I didn’t think so.
“Mister I swear, I don’t know anything. There’s nobody like that working here now.”
“But there was, before?” I could feel Ellen tense beside me, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the kid to check on her. Some of the fatae, they could wring the truth out of you, like it or not. That wasn’t my skillset. My glamour was hail-fellow-well-met, and it wasn’t effective once they’d gotten skittish.
“Lots of kids come through. They think it’s a glee, an easy gig for the summer. That they can drink all night and sleep all day and make money and then go home again when the summer’s done. Most of ‘em don’t last a week. Mer wouldn’t last a day, unless they were working the dunktank.”
He wasn’t wrong. But we also weren’t looking for someone who was working here. Not willingly, anyway.
“Who does the hiring and firing?”
Passing the buck, Sullen could do. “Perkins. His office is back of the back, the one with the flags flying, that means he’s in. I can go now? I gotta get to work.”
“Yeah, go,” I said, and he was halfway across the lot before I’d gotten the second word out of my mouth.
Ellen had seen me dead, too. And maybe dead here, or at least in danger, here, with a gun.
“How much control do you have?” It was way too goddamned late for me to be asking that.
She licked her lips, and rubbed the bridge of her nose, like it itched. “More than I did six months ago.”
Not much of an answer.
“The first thing Genevieve did was teach me defensive spells. She said there were enough people eyeballing her and Sergei, I had to be ready to duck and cover without her worrying about me, just in case.”
That was a better answer. I reached around under my jacket, and pulled out my Glock. I hadn’t needed to use it even for show in almost a year, and I didn’t think I’d need it here… but the moment you weren’t ready was the second you’d need it. And if she was seeing a gun, I’d rather it be mine than someone else’s.
The grip was warm and familiar in my palm, my fingers curling around it as easy as clicking a mouse. I’d had the damn thing since I was in the academy, same as the boots on my feet. The boots had seen more use.
I checked the chamber, then reholstered the pistol. “Can you Translocate?”
She shook her head.
“Damn. Would have been useful. All right. Stay low and quiet.”
I should send her back to the car, but that probably would be worse – I didn’t trust the goons out back not to be stupid again, if they saw her alone.
oOo
The trailer was as advertised – four flags hanging limp over the roof: one American flag, one MIA, and two I didn’t recognize. The door was open, a concrete brick holding it ajar. I knocked anyway.
“Yo, in.”
The thing you learn, after a few years, is that most stereotypes and clichés become stereotypes and clichés for a reason. Perkins might’ve singlehandledly created the cliché of the stogie-smoking, scowl-faced carnie owner. I hadn’t expected him to be Korean, but that was a minor dissonance in the cluttered, dingy office that also looked like the cliché of every carnie office, right down to the three generations out-of-date computer and the pile of fast food wrappers.
Perkins had a thing for Arby’s.
“What can I do for ya?” He looked me up and down professionally, and I returned the favor. “Cop? Not local. Who’re you looking for? I don’t hire runaways, they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”
I believed him. That didn’t mean I trusted him.
“Not a cop. Private citizen.” If he asked, I’d show him my I.D. but not unless he asked. He didn’t. “Looking for three teenagers, traveling together. They came through here, we know that already so don’t waste my time denying it. I want to know where they went.”
There was a sound behind me, and Ellen stepped forward, not quite stepping in front of me, but fully visible. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her hands moving, a palms-up gesture that would have looked like a peace offering if you didn’t know she was Talent. If you did, it looked an awful lot like she was gathering current. Perkin‘s gaze went to her hands, then to her face, and he let out a curse in a language I didn’t know. Then, without warning, he broke.
“Bad crowd. Damned bad crowd. But the locals, they like their cut, and they’re going to get it somehow, and a man’s got to make ends meet, so I lease them space, every year.” He scowled at me like it was all my fault, and a few things suddenly made sense.
“Cost of doing business,” was all I said, though. Whatever deals he’d made with the locals, cops or criminals, human or otherwise, wasn’t my business except if and as it led me to my targets.
“Yeah.” His expression was sour, but his voice was as matter-of-fact as mine. Cost of doing business. When both cops and criminals require payoffs, what’s a businessman to do?
“I threw them out, mid-season. Got to be too much, no matter how much money it brought in.” He was sulky, not apologetic. I suspected they’d tried to undercut him, or something had gotten too expensive to pay off to cover up.
“So, my kids were with these people you didn’t want hanging around your show. What were they doing?” The list of things a legit carny owner would spit at was pretty short, and matched with my expectation of where this case was going, but I wanted to put him on the burn, just a little
“I don’t know. I didn’t go into their tent. I didn’t want to know.” His body language flashed from annoyed to distinctly uncomfortable, and back to annoyed again.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell?” Ellen said, not really a question. “You knew something bad was happening, and you looked away.”
There was something dark in her voice that hadn’t been there before, not even when the current was flooding her system, speaking through her. My skin prickled, and I felt the urge to step away.
“El…” I said. Not a warning, not a question, just a reminder. We were in an enclosed space, a
metal
enclosed space, and she’d admitted that she didn’t have all that much control yet.
“I saw them. I
Saw
them. And he looked away.” She took a step forward, now ahead of me, standing between me and Perkins, and things had suddenly gone from in control to not in control.
“Where did they go?” I willed the idiot to answer me, and in detail. As much as I didn’t want to cause a fuss here, I wasn’t sure I’d be willing to get between a pissed-off Talent and her target, either, especially since she had a damned good point. If I thought it would do any good at all, I’d take him outside for a little come-to-Jesus myself.
“I don’t know.” His eyes shifted to the left, and I coughed. “I swear. But they’ve got winter quarters outside town. An old warehouse. I’ve never been there, ever wanted to go there, but it’s all I got.”
“Thanks ever so much for your help.” The darkness was still in her voice, but it was tinged now with a note of snark that was pure Sergei Didier. Wren might be Ellen’s mentor, but her partner was leaving his mark, too.
That was both reassuring, and unnerving as hell.
Whatever I’d been expecting to find at the warehouse, this hadn’t been on the list.
“A sideshow?”
“A freak show.” I considered the neon sign, leaning against the car and crossing my arms against my chest, aware that – in my boots and baseball cap and leather jacket – I probably looked as disreputable as the building I was studying. Ellen was next to me, trying to mimic my pose and failing. It looked easy, but took years of practice.
“You think they have them there….” She looked puzzled. “Maybe… a front for prostitution? Or drug-running?”
“Maybe.” I’d be surprised as hell if there wasn’t some of both of that going on here. “But they’ve got an interesting cover. Freak shows are better suited to carnivals, not somewhere like this, where you don’t get a lot of casual traffic. Even if they wanted to set themselves up for off-season customers, why not somewhere closer to a tourist area, where you get casual traffic? God knows, I doubt zoning laws would get in their way, if they’re able to throw money around.”
Ellen tilted her head, and made a face, understanding that this was a test. “Because there’s something about this location that’s important. Or they want to stay under the radar, here.”
“And how do we find out?”
“We go in.”
She didn’t sound thrilled. I understood: when you’re a freak yourself – and we both were, to the rest of the world – you were cautious about gawking at other freaks. Never mind that this was probably no different than any other Barnum-inspired funhouse with Fiji mermaids and mummified monkeys, and maybe a down on their luck fatae flashing a little wing or tail for the Nullbies.
“Seventeen bucks. There had better at least be an egress,” I muttered. Ellen have me a confused look, but the woman taking our cash almost-smiled. I do appreciate a woman who knows the classics.
The first few rooms were the basics, the expected mummified monkeys, and what I was pretty sure was a piskie skeleton mislabeled as a tooth fairy. The thought of one of those kewpie-troll-doll menaces acting as tooth fairy was almost worth the $17 right there.
“Is that…” Ellen poked one finger at a glass case leaning over it to see better. “Is that a serpent’s skin, like the one we talked to?”
“Yeah. They shed on a regular basis, when they’re young. Might have washed up on the beach, or even been traded for something. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Prettier than when it’s on it,” Ellen said. She wasn’t wrong: in the artificial light, the old skin glinted with a definite iridescent shimmer that the sea water had muted.
There was a scattering of other people walking through the rooms, one group of teenagers gathering around one case, giggling nervously, a father and daughter pair, dad making sure to keep her smaller hand in his, no matter how she tugged to rush ahead, and an older couple, moving slowly, with evident pleasure, through the exhibits. And a woman, leaning against the far wall, near a sign that did, indeed, say “This way to the egress.”
The employee saw me looking, and smiled. It was a carny smile. I sighed, and put on my best dumb mark expression.
“You like our exhibit?” she asked as I wandered over in her direction. Her nametag said she was Kerry, and she was good, mixing her professional shiller mode with an undercurrent of bored-with-this-job and a hint of actual physical interest. Just the thing to hook a male mark who needed his ego stroked by a little casual flirtation.
“It’s okay.” Casual, playing it cool, too cool to give in but definitely interested, even though I was there with someone. She wasn’t human. She thought I was, though. “None of it’s real, though, obviously.”
“Yeah?”
“Please.” I invested the word with male dismissive behavior, guaranteed to irk any female with a brain.
Ellen wandered up slowly, hanging back like she wasn’t sure that she was welcome to join. I had a bad feeling that she wasn’t playing – that she really was that unsure of her place, even now – but it worked too well for me to wave her closer yet. I’d apologize and explain later.
“You want to see something that’ll really blow your world away?” Kerry said, her tone a come-on and a challenge, paired with one raised eyebrow.
I narrowed my eyes at her and cocked my head, playing the overly-confident rube. “And how much is it gonna cost me?”
She laughed, leaning in like she was going to tell me a secret. “High-rollers pay thousands, because they’re suckers. For you?” She gave me another once-over, not even trying to be subtle. “For you, ten bucks more, that’s all. Another ten dollars for the stuff tourists don’t get to see.”
It wasn’t the best hook I’d ever heard, but I’d have bit no matter what. I pulled out my wallet, and counted out twenty dollars, handing it to her. She took the cash, and leaned back to press open a door that had been hidden in the wall behind her. “Go on in,” she said. “Enjoy.”
The door led into a landing, and then a short flight of stairs leading down. The stairwell was barren but well-lit, and the steps were clean and in good repair. I tensed up anyway, and reached back to take Ellen’s hand, squeezing it once in warning before letting go. The door closed behind us, and I had the Glock in my hand, dipped down but ready. I didn’t think this was a trap, but I didn’t know
what
it was. Prepared was better.
oOo
At the bottom of the stairs there was no ambush, no guards, and no goons of any species waiting to get shot. There were, however, cases. Large cases and small ones, a dozen or so, each lit with professional quality lighting.
Gun still in-hand, I stepped forward and looked into the first case. A face looked back. My breath caught, even as part of my brain was categorizing what I saw, the way I used to scan a crime scene. Ridged forehead, pearlescent skin yellowed with age, eyes wide and milky-white, and a jaw that, dropped open, showed a double row of sharp, shark-like teeth.
A Nagini. Just the head, and a chunk of her neck: the muscled serpent’s body missing, maybe lost, maybe cut off for easier display.
My throat tight, I moved on to the next case.
“Danny?” Ellen’s voice was too small, too quiet, and I abandoned the display of what looked like a centaur’s forearm to see what she had found. She was standing in front of one of the full-sized cases, at the back, and her hands were palm-flat on the glass, as though trying to reach inside.
The case was set up like a diorama, with a painted backdrop of leaves, green and vibrant, while a three-dimensional tree trunk filled the center of the case, and in front of that…
No, not in front of.
Nailed
to the tree was the body of a woman, her skin smooth and brown, her arms twined above her head, her hair falling over one shoulder, down to her hips, her face…
God, her face.
Most people – Nulls, maybe even some Talent – would assume this was more of what was upstairs, frauds expertly done. I knew better.
“A dryad,” Ellen choked out. “They did this to a dryad.”
And another fatae had sent us down here, knowing what we’d see. Not that we had any great claim to the moral high ground compared to humans, overall, but… I’d trained myself to hold back emotion, to never let the anger interfere with the job. This took a hard shove, but it stayed down.
“Come on.” I used my free hand to gather Ellen in closer, and we moved away from the ghoulish display, moving toward the back of the room, where a short hallway led us to another room, both of us bracing to find our missing trio, even as I prayed that I was wrong, that this wasn’t what it was.
There were four exhibits in this room, each in a full, floor to ceiling case. And they were moving.
My first instinct was to break the cases, to free the beings inside, but Ellen’s hand on my arm held me back. I looked back, and her face was strained, stressed, her eyes too wide and intently focused.
“Current,” she said, looking at the half-dozen piskies fluttering around inside their case. “They’re not alive, not really. Just…moving.”
Magic. A Talent did this. Not that I had any particular love for the squirrel-sized tricksters of the fatae, but not even piskies deserved this.
And the other cases….
Ellen let out a harsh cry, and fell to her knees, a howl rising out of her throat that made me want to kill something, anything, just to feed the bloodthirst I could feel in that sound. The rage that escaped my control, finally, was cool and hard, implacable, and in need of something to hit.
In the other case, the largest one, were three mer, one perched on a rock, combing out her long green hair, the other two half-submerged, their tails flicking underwater, as though they were telling each other stories, or competing for her attention.
Ellen keened, and I dropped to my knees beside her, trying to keep my gun out and ready while still trying to offer some useless support, some reminder that she wasn’t alone, my arm over her shoulders, holding her to me the way I would any injured, frightened child.
Too late. Far too late to save them; whatever Ellen had seen must have been echoes of their road to this place, this end. “Are they aware?” I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to ask, but I needed to.
“I don’t…” She choked back a sob, the sound thick with phlegm and sorrow. “I don’t know. There’s…” She stared at the case as though trying to memorize it. “There’s current there, but it’s wrapped around them so tightly, I can’t tell if anything’s beneath any more.”
Current was kin to electricity. Life ran on electricity, too, the pump of hearts, the tingle in our brains. The thought that they might be aware, turned into conscious waxwork displays to horrify and titillate… it was worse than any horror movie I’d ever seen, because it was real.
“Why?” So much pain in that voice, so much anger. “Why do I see things I can’t change? What’s the point?”
Everything she’d hoped to do, tagging along with me, had shattered. I wanted to comfort her, but there was no comfort in this room.
“We know what happened to them,” I said. “There’s no more uncertainty for their families. Sometimes, that’s the best we can do.”
It sounds weak, but being able to give a family closure can be enough. When you know it’s not going to end well, having it end with even a small kindness…you take the gifts you get.
“Not enough. They change out the exhibits, the sign on the door out front said, new ones every six weeks.” Ellen’s voice was raw but clear. “This is new… they had others before. They’ll have others again.”
She looked up at the mer display, and something in her face changed, like the ocean had washed under her skin. “This is wrong.”
On so many levels. But this misuse of magic, and fatae involved with the actual freak show, from the security to the door guard… it was going to get messy.
“We can sic the PUPs on them, but for now we need to keep moving.” I could feel the time ticking down again – not for the teens, but for us. At some point, someone was going to start talking, and this place was not exactly the kind of place that liked official notice. If we wanted to bring them down, we had to make sure they didn’t spook.
And I hadn’t forgotten that she’d seen me dead, too.
“All right.” Ellen got to her feet, wobbling a little, but her back straightened and her chin went up, and I didn’t know how far it would carry her, but it was enough for now.
We made it as far as the exit – and this one had an actual exit sign on it, not egress – when someone came in through the out door.
“Not so fast,” the person said. Perkins. And he had a gun, too.
“Oh, fuck me,” I said.
oOo
Ellen had gone through too many emotional switches already. She’d been scared, and sad, and horrified and too many other things she wasn’t quite able to grasp. When the carny owner confronted them, she reacted without thinking following not instinct – to hide – but the way Genevieve had been training her, to grab hold of her current and let it flow through her, opening herself up to it, so that she was ready to defend herself.
And when she did that, something pushed at her. Something large, not powerful in and of itself, but large enough to make itself known. It didn’t feel like current, but it didn’t
not
exactly, either. She tried to ignore it, keeping her gaze on the man in front of them, trying to see what Danny was doing, in case they had to make a sudden run for it, or if she was supposed to drop or-
That something pushed at her again, enough to slide through, a tendril, no, a gnat, biting at her, shoving something into her awareness, finding a tiny hole and forcing its way through.
“You bastard.” She knew, suddenly, as though the mers had told her, their last whispers in her ear. “You sold them. You told them they’d have jobs, lured them here, and then you sold them!” Once she opened herself to it, the whisper grew into a wave, swamping her, explaining everything without having to say anything at all. The other fatae in the cases were too weak, their awareness too faint to start, or gone too long. But the mers were fresh, the magic animating them keeping electrical impulses running in their brain, too, enough that she had
Seen
them,
Seen
their despair, their sense of betrayal, the way they’d been moved from place to place…
They had called her here. Nobody else could hear them. Nobody else could do this.