Promises to Keep (4 page)

“I’m not underage.” She hadn’t been, mentally, since she was around twelve, and started seeing things out of the corner of her eye, making her parents think she was crazy. Since she’d manifested as a Talent, on a family that didn’t have a clue magic existed.

“You know what I mean.” Genevieve had given her that Look, the one that said she’d expected better, smarter, from her mentee, and that had been the end of that conversation.

The shower was hot, almost to the point of scalding, and at this hour of the evening, when most people were just heading home or making dinner, there was actual water pressure. Ellen would have been content to stay there for an hour, except that ten minutes was about as long as she could count on the water staying hot.

She debating washing her hair, and then decided it didn’t need it yet, and she really didn’t have the patience needed to deal with it, after. Pulling on sweats, and tossing her day’s clothing into the hamper, Ellen curled up on the sofa on her living room/dining room/work area, and reached for her notebook.

Danny had done his Q&A, right after the vision, because he thought the first reactions were the best, the clearest. Ellen didn’t disagree, exactly, but she was starting to think that what lingered was important, too. Like in a dream, the details that sunk in and stayed were often pointing toward the thing you needed to remember. Or what might trigger an understanding of the dream.

She shivered, and pulled a blanket up over her legs, even though the apartment was a reasonable temperature. The problem with that theory was that visions weren’t dreams. They didn’t come from her subconscious, but someone else’s energy, getting caught up in the current and arrowing in to her. They called her a storm-seer because storms picked up and tossed current around like whoa, and she caught the brunt of that every time, but once she’d gotten a little of her own current stored, the visions started finding her whenever there was the slightest surge.

Most of them were small twinges, a sense of something being wrong, but not enough information to act on. Enough to wake her up in the night, but not enough to tell anyone about. She held the fragments close, and tried to remember what she could, knowing that she might be the only person in the world to know that someone was in danger.

She couldn’t control them, that was the problem. She couldn’t close the door and say “sorry, busy.” Danny had taken her in to make use of those visions - both Genevieve and Bonnie were right, he couldn’t say no to someone in need - but she was distracting him from someone else who needed help, now.

That…sucked. That more than sucked.

And yeah, they could get one of the Pups to stake out the place - stake out a cemetery, ok the jokes just wrote themselves - but that felt wrong to her. Not that they wouldn’t do a fine job but…the visions came to her. She was the one supposed to do something about them. It was her responsibility.

“Tomorrow, we need to be focusing on Mister McConnell,” she said, staring down at her open notebook. “Danny shouldn’t be stressing over this, too.”

So what did she have? The vision had been quiet, except for the chittering noise. And not-bright. Not dark, exactly, not like it would have been at night, but red-shadowed, like…dawn.

She knew where, and now she knew when. She just didn’t know who, or why.

Only the who mattered.

She was off the couch and pulling a clean pair of jeans out of the drawer before she realized that she’d made a decision.

And she wasn’t going to call Danny. This was her deal. She was going to watch, and shout an alarm, and that was all. Let the boss sleep.

Despite the urgent feeling driving her, Ellen was smart enough - despite what some people thought - not to just rush out to the cemetery, especially at night. She dressed carefully in layers, so that she wouldn’t get cold while she was waiting, and brewed a thermos of coffee to take with her. She packed that in a backpack from her days living in Central Park, threw in the leftover half of a deli sandwich from the day before, and a pear, just in case she got hungry, then reconsidered and added a chocolate bar, too. She’d been hoarding it for a bad day, but she thought sitting on cold grass all night waiting to see if someone got killed, qualified.

Her mother’s voice sifted through the back of her head where she usually kept it locked down, reminding her that sitting on cold grass all night wasn’t required. Her mother had been not the best mother in the world, maybe, but it hadn’t been because she was a stupid woman. Ellen went into her closet and pulled out the folding beach chair she’d bought on the off chance that she might have a day she wanted to go to Coney Island or something, and put that by the door, too. Collapsed into its carrying case, it was small profile enough she shouldn’t get too many dirty looks.

In fact, she did get looks, but mainly because she caught the tail end of rush hour, and there wasn’t really enough room for both her backpack and the collapsed chair, crushed in with so many other people. She made herself as small and unimposing as possible, but she wasn’t Genevieve, who could make herself disappear even when you were looking at her. Ellen was tall, with broad shoulders and sharp features, and people
saw
her, even when she didn’t want them to. Especially when she didn’t want them to.

Slowly, the train emptied out as they got further into Brooklyn, and Ellen was able to exhale slightly, letting her shoulders slump. Genevieve was always telling her to listen to the subway cars, feel the current running with them, and learn how to pick up a little of that, siphoning it off in a slow but steady trickle. It was hard to find it, though, when there were so many other people around. She couldn’t relax enough to feel it, wasn’t comfortable opening her own core to take it in. But she hadn’t done a full charge in a while, and her mentor hammered into her head enough times that the moment you ran down was when you’d need to pull up something massive. Ellen had the advantage over most other Talent for being able to find and use ley lines easily, but you couldn’t count on there being a line within reach. So: trickle charge, whenever and wherever she could.

Grabbing an open seat, Ellen set her bags between her knees for safety, leaned her head back and closed her eyes, trying to feel the thrum of current sliding around her. It was faint, like a dry tickle in her throat, but she found it, touched it. Her breathing slowed, and she tried to remember what Genevieve had taught her. Find, touch. Open. Everyone visualized it differently, everyone handled it differently. In Ellen’s mind, her core was like her mother’s yarn stash, if the yarn were alive. Different colors, different textures, mostly either wrapped in a skein or coiled in a ball. It was hard to imagine closing or opening it the way Genevieve talked about, but she could unwind it, slip the end of the new current in, and rewind it into the appropriate skein…

Distracted by what she was about to do, worried about how she was going to sneak into the cemetery, and what she might face, thinking that she should have packed something that could act like a weapon, Ellen almost didn’t notice when the first thread of train-current wound itself into her hands, and her hands automatically fed it into the existing ball of current, and it wound itself around and curled up inside her core like a contented cat.

“Huh,” she said, once she realized what had happened. She didn’t feel any different, but there was a sense of…well-being that trumped her worries, just for an instant. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” By the time they reached her stop, Ellen was humming under her breath, and as she left the train, she patted it once, like saying thank you.

Aboveground, night had already descended. She walked toward the gate, trying to remember everything Genevieve had ever told her about no-see-mees, the cantrip she used to keep people from seeing her. Her mentor was a natural Retriever; the cantrip merely enhanced her skills. Ellen would be starting from the opposite end.

“On the plus side, I already have an advantage she doesn’t,” Ellen said, amused despite herself. Genevieve was smart and skilled, and white. Being black couldn’t be called an advantage most days, but paler skin would be more visible, if a guard were patrolling.

In the end, though, it was anticlimactic: there were no guards, and the wrought-iron gates closing the arch were designed to keep cars out, not people. Ellen slipped between the gates without too much trouble, then pulled her bags through after her.

It took her seeming forever to find the path Danny had led them along, but there were signs at the intersections of the roads, just like real streets, and the hill they’d climbed was marked by a squat marble tomb with a marble cat perched on the roof. She paused at the ridge, squatting down so that she didn’t stand out if anyone where looking that way, and considered her options.

There was no way that she could patrol the entire cemetery - it was
huge
. But she didn’t need to: Danny had said that the direful, direlings, whatever, mostly stayed in one place, where the city’s fatae were taken to be disposed of. So the guys in her vision would have to be there, if she’d heard that much of their noise. But what-

“Hey, Ellen.”

Ellen turned, still squatting, and almost busted up her knee, crying out on shock and pain.

“Whoa, hey, sorry,” and hands caught her, helping her up. The other person squatted next to her. Male, slender build, pale skin smudged with dirt, a black watch cap pulled down low over his forehead, and eyes….

Calm gray eyes that she knew. “Damn it, Pietr.” She sat down hard on the grass and stared up at one of the senior PUps. “What the hell are you doing here?” She kept her voice low, so it wouldn’t carry, but shoved as much annoyance into the words as she could manage, to irritated and embarrassed to be afraid.

“Your boss asked us to keep an eye on the place tonight. He didn’t send you?”

“No.” She glared at him, then relented. He hadn’t meant to spook her like that, probably. And Danny… the boss could be a bastard sometimes, but it was so like him to do this. Like the two-sided coin he thought she hadn’t figure out yet. “It’s not his case,” she said. “It’s mine.”

Pietr had been there when she’d first learned what she was. He’d understand what she meant.

“Oh. Huh. Okay, you’re the boss, then. What’re we looking for?”

“Two men. One’s black, I’m pretty sure the other one’s white, but he might be Asian. Same height, broad-shouldered. I didn’t see their faces.”

“And they’re coming here, why? I mean, generally the only folk who come here are dead folk, people burying dead folk, and people planning to unbury dead folk. Different bait needed for all three.”

“Your world is a terrifying place,” she told him.

“Yeah.” Pietr didn’t smile, but she heard the humor in his voice. “Yeah, it is.”

oOo

Pietr approved of her chair, his muttered “Wish I’d thought of that” giving her a brief glow of satisfaction. He had scouted the area before she arrived, and determined that the rocky ledge on the left hand path actually had a nice overlook of the slope, and the area where the direlings gathered. “If that’s where you think the guy will come, then that’s where we should scope out.”

And by “we” he meant her. Pietr disappeared into the shadows, almost as easily as Genevieve did. His plan was to go closer, make sure that they didn’t miss anything. “If anything happens - anything at all, you hear me? Ping. I’ll be there in a blink.”

From anyone else she might have thought that meant he’d come running, but Piet was a Pup and that meant he’d probably learned to Translocate pretty well, especially after he’d taken a good look around her location, practically memorizing the space.

Ellen might have felt slighted, put in an observer’s position, but she was just as thankful to not get any closer to the carrion-eaters than she had to. It wasn’t only the way their leader had looked at her, there was something about their smell that made her uneasy, as though her visions had somehow tainted her, made her smell like death, too.

She settled into her chair, pulled out the thermos of coffee, and lifted Pietr’s binocs to her eyes, scanning the slight valley below.

Nothing happened. Ellen let her senses open as wide as she could, the way Genevieve taught her, but there didn’t seem to be any current moving at all; she couldn’t even sense Pietr. Her legs went to sleep, and she got up to pace, waking them from pins and needles. She got bored, and reached for the nearest ley line, finding it a few miles to the north. She wondered what would happen if they built a cemetery over a ley line and decided that’s when you got zombies. She did a few yoga moves, then went back to her chair, suddenly worried that she’d missed something.

“Midnight.”

Ellen jumped out of her chair, turning in the direction of the voice.

A huge black bird was perched on the stone bench, staring at her. Ellen blinked, slightly nervous. The thing was huge, with a wicked beak, and it was staring at her, way too intently. Like she was dinner.

“Did you say that?” she asked.

The bird - a raven, she thought, or the biggest damned crow she’d ever seen - shifted on its legs, back and forth, and kept staring at her, not saying anything.

“It’s not midnight, bird,” she said finally. “It’s got to be closer to 3am.” She hoped, anyway. The thought of having to sit here another five hours made her want to cry.

The bird made a noise that wasn’t words, but Ellen thought uncomfortably might have been a laugh, like it knew what she was thinking. “Look underneath,” it said, and then spread those huge wings and flapped off, disappearing into the darkness.

“What?” She didn’t know if she was asking the now-departed bird, or the dead around her, or a God she wasn’t sure was paying attention any more. Either way, she didn’t get an answer.

The coffee had gotten cold and bitter, but Ellen drank it anyway. She thought about pinging Pietr, but decided that she’d sound like a spooked kid if she did so.

“So, a talking raven. Happens all the time in New York,” she said, trying to mimic Pietr and failing miserably. She thought she sounded more like Sergei with a head cold. “So yeah, a talking raven. Who said midnight, maybe, and look underneath, probably.”

No, definitely. She hadn’t been paying attention when the first noise came, but she’d been listening, the second time.

Ravens talked, she knew that much. Or, they could mimic words. Did the words actually mean anything? Once, she would have assumed it was a hallucination, just another bit of proof that she was crazy, her brain constantly playing tricks on her.

The fatae existed. Talking, advice-giving ravens? Not so much a stretch, after that. But did it
mean
anything?

“Coincidences happen.” That had been one of the first lessons Danny had given her. He meant that sometimes you could look so hard to find a connection, trying to solve a case, that you forgot that the universe was random, and sometimes shit just happened. No deeper meaning or pattern, or at least, none that was relevant to the question at hand. On the other hand, it wasn’t as though she had anything else to do, just then.

“Look underneath what? Under the ground?” They were in a cemetery, so that would make sense, she supposed. “Under the skin? Ugh. Under the hat? Undertow?” She picked up the binocs and went back to searching the landscape. “Stupid bird. What was wrong with “nevermore,”anyway?”

*almost dawn. looks like tonight was a bust*

Pietr’s ping was as stealthy as he was: she barely realized it was someone else’s impression in her head, not just her thinking the same thing.

*the light was iffy in my vision* she sent back, not so much the words as the memory of the vision. *not giving up until the sun’s up*

*fair enough* a sense of understanding, and a hint of a salute. Ellen shook her head: Pups took orders from no-one except their boss, Benjamin Venec, and not always even then, from the stories she’d heard. Genevieve admitted that she wasn’t sure what to make of the Pups - they were the only ones who’d ever been able to track her down, even if they hadn’t been able to stop her, and that colored her opinion - but Ellen liked them. Bonnie had been the one to step in, when Ellen fell in with the wrong crowd, and who had matched her with Genevieve, and if it was Bonnie and the other pups who’d also shown her what she was, what her visions meant… well, it was better than being scared she was losing her mind, wasn’t it?

That thought tickled another one, some connection or correlation. Ellen looked again through the binocs, then rested her eyes for a moment, and looked again. The thought slid closer, almost within reach, and the vision unfolded in her memory, as delicate as dandelion fluff and just as likely to blow away if she disturbed it.

Two men, black and white. Same build, same height, same…

Same.

Losing her mind. Twins? Look underneath
.

She tucked the binocs into her backpack and slung it over her shoulder, but left the chair behind as she moved down the stairs, down the left-hand path, following some instinct: no, not even an instinct, a whisper of a thought. She knew she should ping Pietr, tell him where she was going, but she didn’t know, and even the second it took to form the ping and send it might lose that whisper.