Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [66]
The swerve had brought them into an open doorway, and Sergei turned his head, frowning at a faint noise.
“What?”
“Probably nothing.” He looked over his shoulder for the cop, but he was gone. There was another probable cop, in a similar windbreaker, down the street, but too far away to call without attracting too much attention.
“Stay here,” he said, his right arm pushing Wren against the wall as his left bent, his hand reaching to the small of his back.
Gun? All that talk about how safe it was and he brought that damn gun?
But his hand came away empty, so either he hadn’t brought the pistol, a nasty-looking thing she hated with a passion, or he had second thoughts about pulling it there and then. “Stay,” he said again, like he was talking to a mostly trained dog, and slid noiselessly into the open doorway.
Wren waited all of three seconds before she followed. Stay my Aunt Petunia. She actually did have a Great-Aunt ’Tunia. Oh yeah, partner, we’re so going to have to talk someday real soon about this overprotective thing you have going…Between this and the whole not telling me things, we are so going to have a talk.
But conversation was going to have to wait, Wren realized when she caught up with her partner. He was struggling with a guy—a kid—dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. Another teenager was on his knees, bent over. Wren could sympathize—Sergei had taught her the move that left you like that, and it wasn’t fun for a woman, either.
As her eyes adjusted a little more, she realized that the shape she had taken for a pile of rags or something was moving. A pale, narrow-fingered hand reached up to grasp the wall, pulling itself up bit by bit. First a shoulder, curled in, then a straightening spine, and then a head, square-shaped, with a fine Roman nose and an impressive rack of antlers, six pointers, with shards of velvet still hanging from them.
Fatae. One of the rarer types, too. Not one you’d ever expect to see in the concrete jungle. The fatae shook its head, as though its slender, slightly pointed ears were ringing, then curled its shoulder again and head-butted—antler-butted?—a third assailant who had been drawing his leg back to kick the fatae while it was down.
Wren winced as the human hit the wall and bounced off. He didn’t look quite stunned enough, so she wrapped a ball of current around her fist and threw it as hard as she could, recalling every softball game she’d ever pitched. She’d been a lousy pitcher, but current was forgiving, and it caught the guy directly in the breastbone, barely an inch above where he’d been gored by antlers.
This time, he went down and stayed down.
The fatae turned to look at her, and she saw its brown-lined eyes widen in alarm just as she felt her arms being grabbed and held from behind.
“Interfering witch.” The voice was accompanied by incongruously sweet-smelling breath, as though he had brushed and flossed before heading out for a night of fatae-bashing.
“Wren!” She heard Sergei call, and then the grip in her arms was loosed and she whirled, another ball of current forming in her fist. But the attacker was down, and she was confronted by a man, coffee-skinned and on the older side, dressed too well to be either a cop or a street person, and with too direct a gaze to be either john or druggie.
“Thanks,” she said, gesturing to the junior-sized baseball bat he held in his hands.
“No prob,” he said, his eyes wary. She realized suddenly her palm was still sparking and fizzing, and damped the current immediately, reabsorbing it as quickly as she could. “That, um, I…”
The stranger shrugged it off. “After a while, you see stuff, you can’t blame the drugs for it, man. Just didn’t want to see you or the deer-boy get bashed by some fucking out-of-towners.”
Sergei limped to her side, watching as the dealer hooked the bat into his belt and went back out to the street to finish his business. “I love New York. Such an insane town. And what’s most insane of all is that it’s perfectly sane.”
The fatae got to its feet. It was taller than both humans, but not as much