Tricks of the Trade

five

Much to my surprise, I’d managed a hard seven hours of dead-to-the-world sleep, got up in time to not rush through my shower, and still made it to the office by 8:00 a.m, even stopping on the corner to grab a bagel with a-schmear from the coffee cart guy.

The teenagers were missing from the stoop again.

I forced myself to take the elevator, shivering slightly as I did so. But the doors opened safely on the seventh floor, and that felt like victory. Someone had just gone into one of the two offices across the hall – the photographer’s – closing the door softly behind them, but other than that the hallway was empty.

I unlocked our door, shucked my jacket, and hung it in the closet. Only one coat there – Pietr’s – but the weather was nice enough that that didn’t mean anything. There was the low murmur of conversation from the small workroom, and a light showing under the door, down the hallway in Stosser’s office. Since we’d long ago tossed the idea of nine to five out the window, I wasn’t surprised not to be the first one in, despite being early.

I went back to the break room and grabbed my mug – Sharon’s gift, with a brightly feathered, very dead parrot painted on the side – out of the cabinet, filling it with coffee and doctoring it to a proper consistency, and took a long hit, feeling my brain start to kick in for real. There were, as I saw it, two options. I could hang around and see what was happening, or I could get to work.

I got to work.

“Steady... ”

It took real willpower not to growl at the helpful – and unwanted – voice in my ear. “I do know how to do this.”

The voice backed off – a little, and the sense of current up against my back, supporting me, faded. “Right. I’ll go fetch you some coffee then, shall I? Decaf?”

I waitted until Pietr left the room – double-checking to make sure he actually had left the room, and not just disappeared – before letting out a heavy sigh and lowering my shaking hands to the table. I shouldn’t have snapped. He was right; I wasn’t at top form. There were too many other things crowded into my head – Venec, mainly, and the damned Merge. But I was still better at reconstruction than he was, so his advice really wasn’t all that damn useful, and he knew it.

I looked down at our work, trying to see it with an impartial eye.

The diorama Venec had asked for was an outgrowth of the re-creation spell we used to glean and then display crime scenes, when we needed an overview rather than an eyewitness view. The thing was, the diorama was made entirely of current, built out of the observer’s original memory made three-dimensional. That meant the caster had to maintain control at all times, or it would snap back and burn you. Not fun. The spell Lou and Nifty had been working on when he got ashed, apparently, was a variant that would make a stable diorama, allowing the creator to anchor the current used to create the display into the diorama itself, so that it would self-maintain. So far, no matter what they tried, it still snapped back the moment they took control off. That had been what caught Nifty.

Lou had been able to avoid getting powdered with current, but even with their newest modifications, the spell still required the caster to be aware of it constantly.

In terms of pure current-use, a gleaning display was easier for me to set up and maintain, but it left the remains tucked into your head like pond scum, which was both unpleasant, and allowed for shifting memories or external influences to blur details. The diorama-spell scraped everything out and put it into real, if miniature, form, leaving your own memory free to fade normally. I preferred the risk for that return, me. Some things you didn’t want to remember in that much detail.

The real added benefit to the diorama, though, is that it wasn’t a gleaning-display but a true re-creation. A gleaning showed you exactly what was there, forever static. A diorama, you could play with, run scenarios... play hunches and see how they worked out.

I moved the concrete-block building back a little more, trying to gauge exactly how far it had been from where the body was, and added a few more cars to the parking lot, rearranging the scene to my satisfaction, and then stood up, looking at it from all sides. The current was solid; to anyone looking with plain sight, it appeared like a solid model of the dump scene. Or, more accurately, the discovery scene, where the NYPD Harbor Patrol had spotted the body, and laid it out for display. Where the actual dump occurred was what I wanted – needed – to find out.

All I had to do was set things in motion.

Since the diorama was constructed from my own current, I didn’t have to draw down anything more to trigger it. With my hand palm down a few inches over the surface of the water running under the concrete pier, I commanded it: “Water, flow naturally. Bring the body back to me.”

The uneven surface of the East River stirred and began to move. A tiny lump – the corpse – disappeared from under the tiny orange tarp as the magic cycled back through its movements in time. Sympathetic magic, with a twist. The body should appear from upstream, caught in the currents, and hit the underground net where the cops found it.

Instead, it appeared across the river, barely a few feet upstream from the net, and splashed into the river without a sound. I sucked my cheeks in and leaned back from the table in surprise.

“Huh.” Either the spell wasn’t working – entirely possible – or our theories had just been thrown for a very interesting loop.

*c’mere*

Nick’s ping was like a horsefly: unwanted, irritating, and impossible to ignore. *busy* I sent back, a flick of irritation and a sense of actually being, yes, busy.

*now* That came from Venec, not Nick, and carried the flavor of an order. Venec knew what I was working on, so if he wanted me to leave it... something was Up.

“Damn it.” I glared at the diorama. Shutting it down was difficult enough, but letting go wasn’t an option. I had no idea if I’d be able to re-create it so well a second time, and the fact that the body had been dumped so close meant it had also been dumped much later than we thought – once it hit the net and the sensors went off, it couldn’t have been more than an hour or so before someone was sent to investigate. That was the point of the city-installed nets, after all.

Could I freeze it successfully, without snap back? If I could, yay. If not... ow. And the ow could hit whenever the snap happened.

I decided to risk it.

Sliding back into a faint fugue-state, I looked at the current with mage-sight, noting the weave and warp of the threads. Seen this way, it was a chaotic and yet ordered mass. I wondered if that’s what atoms looked like to Null scientists, when they broke us all down to our basic parts. J might know, or he’d know who to ask.

“Freeze and hold,” I told the combined threads, my voice scarcely above a whisper. It wasn’t volume but control that made it work. “Hold and wait.”

The threads shimmied, like they were trying to break free, but the motion of the water halted, and a stillness fell over the diorama, like a cold winter morning seemed to make the world quieter.

I swallowed hard, and moved my hand away from the display.

It held.

I stepped backward, one careful shuffle.

It held.

I turned my back on it, slowly, and felt a quiver from the current-shape. I stopped, and it stilled, just like J’s sheepdog, Rupert, when he’d been a puppy learning his commands.

“Hold,” I told it again, my voice as even and composed as I could make it, willing myself not to brace against any anticipated snap back. “Hold.”

It held.

When I followed the voices toward the break room at the front of the office, I could feel the diorama still waiting. It took everything I had not to flinch, not to anticipate it breaking control and recoiling back into my core... until I walked through the open doorway and saw why Venec thought it worth dragging me away.

A klassvaak. Not on the same level of a Great Worm, thank god, but it was like being visited by the Pope, if you were Catholic – you knew damn well you weren’t worthy, and the place was a mess, and why the HELL was he in your living room?

“This is Bonita Torres,” Venec said, indicating my late arrival. I guessed that the others had already been introduced. Pietr was forgiven for not coming back with the coffee.

The fatae made a sort of half bow, its elongated head dipping toward its chin. I had no idea how to respond, so just returned the gesture, dipping my head slightly lower than it had, and hoped that was right. Of the entire team, I probably had the most formal training in dealing with dignitaries, because of J’s once-and-future status within the Eastern Council, but my mentor had never covered this particular circumstance.

“This is our entire team,” Venec said, glossing over the fact that Stosser wasn’t present. Where was the boss, anyway? “Will you now share with us what you came here for?”

The klassvaak turned back toward him, seemingly with relief. I had no way of reading the fatae’s body language, but I thought it was uncomfortable as hell, with everyone looking at it. That made sense, I guess. It wasn’t exactly an exhibitionist.

I ran over what little I knew of this particular breed, which wasn’t much. Not because I hadn’t been paying attention to J’s lectures, but because there wasn’t much to know. The klassvaak had come over with the first Dutch settlers. It was, as far as anyone knew, the only one of its kind, although opinions were mixed whether that had always been the case – making it closer to an Old One than I was comfortable with – or if the others had died out or otherwise drifted out of the mortal world. The klassvaak was a night-dweller, its moon-pale skin a little too reminiscent of a corpse’s tinge for human comfort, its eyes round, lashless, and deep blue over a tiny little nose and thin mouth.

I wondered, suddenly, if the klassvaak had been the inspiration for Nosferatu.

“No pleasure in being here, me,” the klassvaak said. Its speech was thick, as though it didn’t use English – or any human language for that matter – very often. I wasn’t even sure how its needle-thin lips could form the words, honestly. “But warning you deserve. The Roblin’s come to town.”

“The Roblin?” Sharon asked, leaning forward, and then realized her mistake when Venec glared at her. The klassvaak didn’t even seem to notice or hear, still looking at a spot somewhere to the left of Venec’s head. That was high-end manners, among the fatae – a direct stare was a challenge. Like cats, they preferred to look indirectly, even when in the middle of a conversation.

Most Westerners, human ones, anyway, found it distressing or rude, historically labeling it an indication of sly deceit. Venec didn’t seem bothered by it at all.

“The Roblin’s come to town,” it repeated, as though speaking to a slow but not disliked child. “Mischief calls it, and mischief it will do.”

I looked at Venec, trying to gauge if he knew what the hell the klassvaak was talking about. His face, and his core, were still, not giving anything away. Nobody else had a clue: I could tell that from the way they were watching Venec, waiting for a cue, the same as me. There was – not tension, exactly, but a sense of frustrated impatience building.

“Mischief toward whom?” Venec asked, and his voice was that low, not-quite-cajoling tone he used when we were working our way through a problem, the one that said “you can say anything to me, no matter how crazy, I’ll back your play.”

“Mischief it does,” the klassvaak repeated. Its gaze shifted from the side of Venec’s face; just for a second, but I caught it. Exasperation? No, annoyance. And a desire to be gone, clear as if it had shouted. The fatae was not used to interacting with those who spoke, only those who dreamed. It was uncomfortable here, being confronted and questioned.

“Elder Cousin,” I said, in passable-but-not-fluent German, playing a hunch. “We do not know this name, The Roblin. Inform us?”

I hoped to hell that’s what I had said, anyway, and that I used the proper formal verbs. My language classes were years ago and I hadn’t had time to travel and polish them since well before graduation.

The klassvaak switched to German with what seemed like relief. “The Roblin is.”

Well. That was helpful.

The klassvaak shifted its too-pale body again; whatever had driven it here, out of its comfort zone, to talk to us, clearly done and dealt with. It wanted to go now.

“Thank you,” Venec said, standing and bowing like a Japanese diplomat. Our unexpected visitor didn’t even bother to acknowledge it, but was zippity gone. I didn’t know anything that old could move that fast. At least, not without wings.

I rubbed at my eyes, feeling a headache building.

“What the hell was that, and what the hell is a Roblin?” Nick was the first one to speak after the door closed, of course. From being fanboyishly intrigued with fatae when he first started, through to a deep distrust of them, Nicky now usually projected a very New Yorker attitude of “yeah, yeah, whatever.” But this had been bizarre even by our standards.

“I have no idea.” Venec turned the straight-backed chair he’d been sitting in around, and sat back down on it, straddling it like a cowboy. I forced my brain not to go where my body wanted. “Lou, go through every source you can find, look for any reference at all for this ‘Roblin,’ any spelling variants you can think of. Don’t limit yourself to the Cosa – if it’s as old as our guest, you’re more likely to find it in the fairy tales.”

Lou nodded, and whipped out her notepad, taking notes, I presumed of any variant spellings she could come up with. Nifty leaned over her shoulder, idly scratching at his arm, to make suggestions.

“Can we trust it? I mean, it’s fatae, and... ” Nick saw the look I gave him, and stared back, refusing to be cowed. “Give me a break, Bonnie. I’m not being a bigot – you know what I mean. Fatae – especially the older breeds, the ones that don’t much like humans – they’re tricksy. History proves that, over and over. What if our visitor is this Roblin, or whatever, messing with us, trying to get us chasing after something, distracting us from, hell, I don’t know, something going on, or something it wants to do?”

I blinked, and leaned back against the door frame. Okay, that was tricksy, worthy of a fatae. I was impressed, and admitted I’d never have thought of it. My thought process was too linear, in a lot of ways, but Nick more than made up for it, the way he could swerve and dodge.

“No.” Venec was positive of that. “Unless this Roblin’s a shape changer, that’s not it.”

There were seven known, verified shape changers among the fatae breeds, and each of them moved from one specific form to another, not whatever caught its fancy. Of course, if there was a breed that could do that, how would we ever know?

That thought gave me the very unpleasant woogies.

“All right, everyone back to work,” Venec said, breaking the shocky, contemplative mood. “We can’t do fuckall right now, until we get more information, and meanwhile there are paying clients waiting on us. Bonnie, why were you so het over leaving the diorama, before this?”

I had completely, utterly forgotten about the diorama. With an unpleasant jolt, I reached back to check the status of the current-hold... and found nothing

“Damn it.” I smacked the flat of my hand against the door frame, taking a weird comfort in the sting against my flesh. “I lost the diorama, and I had something useful there, too.” Or I thought it was useful, anyway. And I hadn’t had time to really study it, worse luck, so my near-perfect memory was utterly useless.

“Did it burn you?” Venec was in my face all of a sudden, taking both my hands in his and turning them over like he was expecting to see current-burns scarring my skin.

“No.” And that was weird. No, that was really weird. Not only should I have felt it, I should have gotten at least a current-zing, like a first-degree burn, when the control snapped, even distracted by our visitor.

I stared at my hands, like the answer would ooze from the lines on my palms. “It was like it melted, instead of breaking. I didn’t even notice it, and I should have... ”

“Um. That might be my fault.”

Sharon stood next to us, although I noted, vaguely, that she was keeping a little more distance than was normal when we were in the office, like she was afraid to intrude on a private conversation. Pietr was hovering on the edges, the others hanging even farther back.

“How?” Venec asked, not letting go of my hands. I didn’t mind, exactly, but it made it kind of difficult to focus on what Sharon was saying.

“Last night, I was building my own diorama, and I was worried, being alone – I didn’t stay late,” she added quickly, “but I was the last one out and I was worried if there was a problem, if my concentration broke like Bonnie’s did, I wouldn’t be able to get help.”

Which was exactly why Venec didn’t let us work late, when the Big Dogs weren’t around. There wasn’t anyone else in the building we could call on, and by the time someone heard and Translocated, it could be too late.

“So I... sort of upped the wardings. A little.”

I wondered if Venec was aware that his thumb had started stroking the inside of my palm, in slow, thoughtful strokes; it was less seductive than reassuring, but the action still sent a shiver right up my spine.

“Enough to dampen the shock of a break in control?” Now that she had his full attention, the thumb motion paused while he looked at her. He didn’t let go of my hands, though.

“I don’t know. I guess so? I thought I’d taken them down, after, but it might have lingered in the wardings we already had established?” Sharon sounded uncertain, which was unusual for her.

Wardings were old-school, something Venec had taught us when we started. Unlike the Old Times, most modern Talent work on the go, so you don’t have specific places set up for rituals or anything like that, which was all very nineteenth century. It made sense that Sharon hadn’t really thought about what layering in protections on established protections, building up over time, might do.

“Thank you,” I said, breaking into what I could tell was some heavy-duty self-questioning going on in her brain. I meant it. Sharon might not have left it there on purpose, but I would have been in a lot of pain – and felt really stupid in front of our visitor – if I’d gotten burned while it was speaking.

“No problem. And speaking of that stuff, um, you, um, think you guys could stop that, now?”

I blinked, surprised at her blunt reference, and looked down at my hands, and then blinked again as I saw what she was referring to: lazy sparks of deep purple current arcing from my hands to his, or maybe the other way around.

For all my awareness of Ben’s touching me, I hadn’t even noticed. From the way Venec reacted, neither had he. He dropped my hands so fast I almost felt them go into free fall, and my nerve endings protested even as I was taking a step back, out the door.

As I fled down the hallway, I heard someone – Nick – snicker, and Pietr offer to up the bet-holdings.

I didn’t want to know what, specifically, they were betting on, or what the under/over was. I retreated into the workroom and closed and warded the entrance behind me, then leaned against the door like I’d just outrun a giant purple Talent-eater.

“That,” I said to the empty room, “was Not Good.”

And then, because I was a professional, damn it, I went to work trying to reconstruct the diorama, one memory-detail at a time.

Ben waited for a moment, giving his remaining pups a glare that dared them, just dared them to make a single comment, and then made as dignified a retreat as he could. The moment his back was turned, he heard them upping bets about when he and Torres would admit that something was up, and sighed. Not that he would have wanted them to be cowed by him, exactly, but it would be nice if they had a little bit of fear to go with the resppect.

Bonnie was back in the workroom; he could feel the hum of her current as she, he presumed, tried to reconstruct the busted diorama. He was curious as to what she’d found, but there was no point in pushing; when she was ready, she would be ready. Jumping to present evidence was as bad as waiting too long and letting it grow stale.

He had barely gotten back to the small office at the far end of the hallway that Ian had claimed for his own private retreat, and thrown himself into his usual chair in the corner, when there was a whisper of incoming current and Ian himself Translocated in from god knew where.

It took their fearless leader a second to recover from the shift in location, and notice that he had company. “You look particularly pissed. Which of the children are misbehaving?”

Ben was in no mood to play. “Where the hell have you been?”

Ian gave a slight shrug, shaking out the nonexistent wrinkles in his dress shirt. “I had things to deal with. You were handling everything here perfectly well without me. Was I wrong?”

Ben stared at his partner. Beyond the unusually flippant speech, Ian’s normally narrow face was even more drawn, and his hair had a dull sheen to it, making it seem more orange than red. He was dressed in an expensive-looking suit, with his hair tied back, and looked not only tired, but dispirited. That was not only unusual, but alarming.

“If I asked you for details, would you give them?”

Translation: is it your idiot sister Aden causing trouble again? Do I get to dump her in the river, this time?

“It’s nothing that involves the team,” Ian said, taking a seat behind his desk and leaning back to stare at the ceiling, and Ben knew that was all he was going to get. But at least it wasn’t his partner’s crazy-ass sibling making more mischief; Ian would have dodged that question differently.

Without looking away from the acoustic tile overhead, Ian deflected the question back at him. “What’s been going on here, to make you look so off-color? Is there a problem with one of the cases?”

Benjamin Venec could do an end run around a question just as well as his partner. Ian was his best friend as well as his partner, but there was no way in hell he was going to tell the other man anything about the unexpected current-surge he’d shown – in front of the entire damn pack – with Torres. That loss of control was something he was going to deal with himself.

Fortunately, there was enough to tell Ian, without going anywhere near that.

“We had a visitor. A klassvaak.”

Just that one word, and Ian abandoned all fascination with the ceiling, leaning forward across the desk, and listening intently.

Normally, focusing on a problem isn’t a problem for me: Nick may call me “Dandelion” but I’m not at all scattered – what I might lack in relative current-power, I made up for in control and concentration. And yet, after an hour or so of trying to manipulate my memory of the scene back into diorama-shape, I gave up. It wasn’t going to happen; my brain was too busy buzzing around all this new information to really focus.

I shut everything off, took down the wards, and checked out at the board, leaving a Post-it to say that I was following up on a long shot lead.

And then I went to see Madame.

The difference when you traveled from our not-quite the-Barrio to Madame’s neighborhood was significant. No teenagers hung out on the stoop, here, only rows of uniformed doormen, and livery cars cruising the street. The same little maid as from my previous visit met me at the door of the penthouse suite and took my coat with a welcoming smile. Unlike last time, though, because it was after 5:00 p.m., there was a small cut-crystal glass of sherry waiting on the sideboard.

“Madame is in a good mood,” Li told me, her wide eyes sparkling with delight. “A someone sent her roses.”

I took the glass of sherry and sipped at it. I wasn’t a huge fan of the stuff, but it was only good manners to accept the house’s hospitality. “Roses, hmm?” I had an instant’s image of Madame holding a bouquet up to her snout, sniffing delicately.

But no, when I entered the solarium where she held court, it was to find the Great Worm not sniffing roses, but eating them.

“Thorns and all, Madame?”

“Bonnnnita.” She delicately spat a peach petal out of her mouth, and I watched as it lazily floated its way down to the parquet floor. “If you would like, take sssssome home with you. They are a treat, but my digestion is nnnnnot what it once wassss.”

“Thank you, Madame. Will your admirer mind?”

“If he doesssss, he will nnnnnot dare sssssay anything,” she said, a delicate whiff of rose-scented air accompanying her words. “He wishessssss a favor of me? Let him earn it through kinnndnessss to my friennnds.”

Being named the friend to a Great Worm is... it takes your breath away. Never mind that I claimed her acquaintance solely because J had once done a rather diplomatic favor for her back when he was my age, and she now found me amusing; I treasured the moment.

I knelt to pick up the petal, and placed it in the pocket of my skirt, thankful I’d thought to dress nicely this morning. Madame might not note the difference between cargo pants and a skirt on humans, but I did. Respect was earned, but it was also demanded in certain situations, and I would have felt awkward coming here in my grubbies. As it was, I hid my stompy boots under the hem of the skirt, and was glad I’d at least buffed them to a gloss over the weekend past.

“But you did not come to discusssss horticulture with me.” Madame’s great head came closer as her neck arched down, her body adjusting so that she could meet me, more or less, eye to eye. “Yesssss? Thissss isss a work call, little Bonnnnita?”

“I am afraid that it is, Madame.” I met her gaze, struck again by the jeweled tones of her eyes. Her much lesser cousin, the cave dragon, had eyes the color of fired clay bricks, his entire body barely twice the length of her neck. His voice had been like hers, though: smooth and cultured, like rose water and honey. The old legends of serpents with smooth tongues? They’d been speaking, literally, of dragons.

“So.” Madame settled herself comfortably, a great-aunt indulging a favorite niece. “What isss it you wissssh to know?”

What did I want to know? That was the question, wasn’t it? What didn’t I want to know? Madame was an Ancient, older and wiser even than today’s visitor. Anything I asked her, she would either know, or know someone – or something – who knew.

But even before I’d gone to study with J, my dad had me reading fairy tales. And one of the first rules ever when dealing with dragons, no matter how polite, is don’t waste your questions on things you can find out for yourself – or things you really don’t want to know.

“Madame, you know I have the kenning?” It wasn’t the sort of thing that you brought up in polite conversation, but the skill set was unusual enough that odds were J had told her, sometime over the years I’d been his student.

She tilted her head slightly, waiting. Yes, she knew. My pulse raced slightly, my heart pounding a little harder. I wasn’t frightened of Madame... exactly. No more than I should be, at least. But I didn’t know if I was violating a protocol here, pushing a boundary I couldn’t see, and that unnerved me more than I’d realized.

“Last evening, I scryed a dragon, Madame.” She knew me, she knew J, she knew I didn’t scry lightly, or speak often of what I saw. “My vision showed it flying overhead. Filled with rage and fire... attacking the humans below.”

Her head pulled back, sharply, and the half-dozen bouquets of peach-petaled roses crashed to the ground, the vases spilling water over the parquet floor.

“You sssssaw thisssss?”

“Madame. I did.” I was so very damn impressed that my voice didn’t shake or stutter, and that my body hadn’t flinched at her outburst. “But I do not know what it means. Have any Ancients bearing ill will toward humans come to ask your leave to enter this island?”

Because this was Madame’s territory, from South Ferry to Inwood, Hudson to East River, and no one would dare intrude without her permission... unless they meant to take it from her.

“None. None would dare. This island is mine.”

I’d misjudged her. Madame didn’t lose her cool. Her voice didn’t thunder, and she did not hiss fire. In fact, her voice got damned near frosty, with none of the usual near-lazy sibilants and slurred n’s I’d thought were indelible speech patterns.

I stood my ground, but clasped my hands respectfully and bowed over them, my gaze hard on the sparkling scales of her left shoulder. “My kennings are often of things yet to come, Madame. But they are always true. Be watchful.”

Her eyes went half-lidded and her delicate chin-whiskers twitched as she considered my words.

If Madame thought I’d come to warn her, so much the better. I had what I’d come here hoping for: the knowledge that there were no other dragons nearby, and none with ill will toward humans. Even if they’d been in another borough – and I suspected, based on things I’d heard, that there was at least one in Queens, albeit not of Madame’s status – they were not likely the one I had seen. That meant we had a little time yet, at least.

“Madame?” So long as I was here, and she thought I’d done her a favor... “Have you heard of a fatae called The Roblin?”

That got her attention, in a way I hadn’t expected. Her eyelids rose again, and a faint puff of burnt-rose smoke rose from her nostrils. “The Roblin? Here?”

“Yes.” My mouth had gone dry, but I got the words out. “A fatae, the klassvaak, came to the office, to warn us... said it came to do mischief.”

It was difficult to tell with dragons, but I thought, rather nervously, that Madame looked worried.

“Missschief he isssss, missschief he doesss,” she said. The same thing the fatae had said, earlier that day.

“Madame?” I was hoping for something a little more specific – or useful – than that.

“Sssstay far from The Roblin, Bonnnnita,” she said, drawing back and curling her body into a pose I recognized as dismissal. “Sssstay far from it, and hope it ssstays far from you.”

And that was all she would say. I took a single bouquet of the peach roses, the scent of their bruised petals filling my nostrils, and went home.

“Attn pssngrs. The gee trn will be making all stops to sebthmurph and then going express. Pls take the mumble train to... splutterstatic... . There will be no service on the... splatterstatic... . Shuttle buses willl be available.”

It was a normal enough occurrence in a city the size of New York, with a mass transit system as old and vast as the Electric Apple, even without the added complexity of Talent occasionally shorting things out. Except, when the passengers piled out of the station and looked, there were no buses waiting; the drivers had received orders to assemble two stations down the line. A series of grumbles, groans, and exasperated sighs met this turn of events, which also would have been a normal enough occurrence, except that across Queens, similar areas of confusion broke out as trains were diverted for no reason, buses didn’t arrive, and transit workers and passengers alike began to lose their cool, trying to get home.

With digital communication carrying the news across the city via mobile phones and laptops, the mood soured, feeding the feelings of persecution and annoyance until it felt as though a chain of riots would break out, with everyone blaming the transit authority, and the transit workers not knowing what was going on, either.

“Folks, just wait for the bus – ”

“There is no bus!”

The cop was outnumbered, and out of energy. “There will be, ma’am, if you’ll just wait... ”

“Don’t you tell me that! I’ve been waiting for half an hour already. There is no bus!”

A mutter of agreement greeted that, with more than one person checking their cell phone or watch again to prove how long they’d been there.

The cop glared at the commuters, almost daring them to do something. His eyes were odd in the evening light, the blue turning almost to gold, and several of the passengers shuffled away, suddenly awkward or nervous despite their anger.

A black sedan slid along the curb, with two others coming down the crowded street behind, like sharks drawn to a blood-spill. The window of the first car rolled down and the driver, a middle-aged man in a suit, asked “Anyone need car service?”

Two minutes later, he was full up, pocketing cash, and the next livery car was taking his place even as he pulled away. The cop watched, frowning, as the crowd faded, either waiting for more cars, or setting off on foot, their anger pushed aside under the grim determination to not waste any more time, but get home.

Too quickly, what had seemed like surefire chaos became an empty street corner, not even the usual pedestrians normally visible this time of evening left to stir up.

“That wasn’t as much fun as I thought,” the cop said, rubbing his chin with one oddly gnarled hand. “What is it with this city, anyway?” He took off his cap and scrubbed at his white hair, then slammed the cap back on as inspiration hit. “More challenge, that’s what’s needed. These people are all too simple – simple wants, simply fixed. I need something – no, someone more complicated.” It cocked its head as though listening to something, its leathery nostrils twitched, scenting something, and then a disturbing grin spread across its face, showing more, and more jagged teeth than a human would have.

“Yes, yes. I remember you. I caught scent of you when I came in... . Not larger, but trickier. Sometimes a small trick is the best. Let’s do that then, yes,” it said in satisfaction. “But first, to find out where your prickly, pokey, pullable spots are... ” It grabbed at the air in front of it, like opening a cupboard door, and was pulled through a hole that didn’t exist, and out of sight.

Left behind, the broken loudspeaker continued to squawk instructions and directions nobody could understand, befuddling the passengers of the next train that pulled in and out of the station exactly on schedule, as though nothing had ever been wrong.