Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

The thing about the Cosa Nostradamus is that it’s pretty polarized. You have the human Talent on one side, and the non-human fatae on the other, and they don’t often mingle. Not socially, anyway. Lucky for me, horns and hooves made me fatae enough to be able to ask the questions that would get a human hurt. That didn’t mean I could go in like an Appalachian cave dragon on a bender, though. You had to know the players. That was what had made me useful on the force, and was a lot of what made me successful now: I could work both sides of that street. And I knew that there was one fatae breed that not only gossiped like a knitting circle, but was amenable to some gentle bribery.

“For me?”

The salamander looked longingly at the glowstick, but didn’t take it out of my hand. We were on the West side of the Park, just below the Rambles, at dawn. I’d hauled my ass out here to make sure I caught one of the firebrands before they were really up and moving. Sure enough, one of them had been having breakfast along the stone wall, catching the early morning rays and hotfooting the occasional jogger for laughs.

“A gift for you,” I agreed, placing it on the top of the stone wall. The salamander considered it without touching it, then looked up at me, its lidless eyes surprisingly expressive. It wanted it, oh so very badly, but it wasn’t sure why I was just handing it over. It assumed I wanted something.

It was right.

“I’m looking for someone who has gone missing. A young girl. Her parents miss her.”

It picked up the glowstick in its front leg, the tiny claws snapping it so that the chemicals started to glow. “Pretty,” it said. They could burn without scorching, but the concept of a cool light fascinated them. I guess you always want what you can’t have — or do.

It cocked its slender head at me, the foot-long body still stretched out along the wall, managing to be both relaxed, and ready to scamper at the slightest threat. “How young the girl?”

“Fifteen. Rumor says she’s been dusted.”

“Blond or redhead?”

“Blondish.”

That’s where the ‘smart one’ myth comes from, by the way. Brunettes. Less likely to get dusted. Other trouble, yeah, but not by following the pretty little man into the greenways. Don’t ask me why, it just is.

“How long?”

“Five days. Five. Four days too long for a girl to be dusted. Once it takes, it’s tough to ever get out of your system. Seven days, seven years — seven is the magical number. I had a very real deadline.

The salamander nodded. “Maybe. Maybe. We hear talk. You need to go low down to talk to someone. Down into the metal caves.”

Gnomes. Wonderful. This case just kept getting better and better.

Fortunately, I knew where to go for help.

The door was opened by one of the least attractive women I’ve ever met.

“Heya doll,” I said, swooping in to steal a kiss. She let me, rolling her eyes and taking my hat.

“What trouble are you bringing this time, Danny-boy?

Unlike her face, her voice was lovely, a gentle alto that would have put any of my full-blooded cousins into unstoppable heat. I admitted to myself that I wasn’t totally immune.

“No trouble, doll, I swear. Not for you, anyway.

“And for my husband, who doesn’t know how to say no?”

“I just want to ask his advice. He won’t even leave his studio.” I hoped.

Lee was a Talent who had an unbelievable gift that wasn’t magical at all, at least not as Talent went. He was a sculptor, working with metal to create figures that totally baffled me, but sold for large amounts of money. His studio, on the top floor of their narrow townhouse, had huge windows, and a floor half-covered in an electrostatic carpet.

Lee used current to meld his metal, not fire. One bad day, if he forgot to discharge after working, he could take out his entire grid. The fact that he never had told you a lot about the man.

He was working on something when I came in, so I took one of the cushioned chairs at the far end of the room and waited. About ten minutes later the sparks stopped flying, and he stepped over to a thick black mat to ground himself.

“What’s up, Danny?”

“I need your advice on how to approach gnomes.”

Lee stopped short, clearly not sure if I was joking or not.

“They’re metal. You work metal. I figured you’d know something that could help me out, some spell or something that would make them, I don’t know, malleable?”

Lee shook his head sorrowfully. “Your ignorance of magic is terrifying.”

Tough to argue with that, especially since I do it intentionally. My kind — fatae in general — don’t use magic, as such; we are magic. As a human, I’m basic Null — can see magic, sort of, but can’t use it at all. Some Nulls can’t even see it, can’t even see the fatae strap-hanging beside ‘em on the subway. It’s a sliding scale.

“Seriously, Lee. I have to go down and deal with the gnomes. They have something I need back.”

“And you think that I have an answer. Man, they‘re fatae — you should have a better grasp of them than I ever could.”