Dragon Justice by Laura Anne Gilman Read Free Book Online Page B

stories as kids. “Old magic, pre-current.” Before the modern age,
before Founder Ben: when things were messy and magic was as much hope and prayer
as science. “Seven was a magic number, really strong, potent. Even today, some
people like to run things in sets of seven, hedge their bets. And here we’ve got
my girl, seven. Yours, if fourteen, twice seven, and twenty-one, thrice seven.
Three’s a strong number, too. All gone missing in the same city, the same time,
and you think there was Cosa involvement in your
cases, too, otherwise you wouldn’t have mentioned the fatae.” Danny handled Null
cases, too, but he wouldn’t immediately have associated something I was working
on with one of those.
    By the time I’d finished, the words spilling out of my mouth,
he was already reaching across his desk, pulling a pile of folders toward him.
Being fatae, Danny could use computers, but he tended to do that stuff away from
where Talent might drop by. He ran a shoestring operation, and we were hard on
electronics, especially when we got emotional.
    “Melinda, fourteen. Went missing two weeks ago. I’ve been on
the case for three days, after the NYPD dumped her in with the runaways. Haven’t
turned up a whisper of anything. Started with the street kids, got nothing. Was
starting to wonder if she’d skipped town or hooked with a dead-end john when
Gail’s parents called me. She’s been missing almost a month, and all the stats
are the same—smart, pretty, but not overwhelmingly brilliant or beautiful,
everything to stay home for, suddenly up and gone between midnight and
dawn.”
    He put his hand palm-down on the file, like he was trying to
hold them safe, and turned his head to look sideways at me.
    I stared at his hand. They were blunt-tipped, his fingers,
strong and scattered with coarse brown hairs. Venec’s hands were strong, too,
but more tapered and smooth. I shook my head, dismissing the thought. “My girl’s
too young to be really slotted—but she’s definitely cute. Smart… Unless they’re
genius level, how do you tell at that age?”
    Danny snorted. “Don’t ask me.” He was an only child, and
despite his breed’s proclivities—or maybe because of them—he wasn’t the type to
sleep around. I’d sussed early on that Danny was looking for One True Love, god
help him. “Talent family?”
    I shook my head. “No.”
    “So how did they come to you?”
    I hesitated, then went for broke. “They didn’t.”
    That got me a closer look, squinty-eyed, like they must teach
in the academy, the kind of look that makes you talk too much when a cop asks to
see your ID. “Spill, Torres.”
    Stosser was going to kill me. But, damn it, Danny might have
the info that broke the case. And he took discreet into artistic levels. And the
Big Dogs had taught us to trust our gut instincts. “The Fey Folk asked us to
look into it. Rumor is that they were responsible for my girl’s disappearance.
They say no. They don’t want people claiming they’ve broken Treaty.”
    “An’ if PSI says they’re clean, most folk will stand by that.”
Danny nodded. “Sounds like Stosser’s long-term plan to own the Cosa is working.” He shook his head then, dismissing
the boss’s plans as unimportant, which, to him, they were. “Damn it, Bonnie, I
think we’re onto something. My girls are Null. Yours?”
    One of the first things I’d checked. Talent kids tend to wander
down slightly different rabbit holes, when they go missing. “Yeah.”
    It might not mean anything, all these facts. Sometimes, even
the most suspicious of circumstances turned out to be flutterby, unrelated and
unconnected. But there was a thick, heavy feeling in my core and a tingling of
my kenning, the sense that sometimes, often unpredictably, hinted at the future,
that told me otherwise. A full eighty percent of this job was listening to the
facts and sorting the evidence, and then fitting them together. Sometimes it
took logic; sometimes it took a