Free Dragon Justice by Laura Anne Gilman

just
run away to join a bunch of would-be park-dwellers, my job was to find out and
bring at least one of them safely home.
    I started walking again, briskly, as though to leave the unease
behind simply by outpacing it. “Torres, get your head out of your ass, your
self-pity back in its box, and get to work.”
    The kenning was never wrong—but it was always vague. The unease
might be related to this case. It might not. I had no way of telling, without
more info, and even if the kenning was related, it would hardly be the first
time one of our cases ran us into trouble. So. I would check up on the lead,
reconnoiter a bit, and see if there was anything actually going down in the
Park. If not, well, checking on leads was part of the game. If yes…then I could
go on from there.
    The one thing I couldn’t do was let my feeling of being shunted
off into a low-importance case interfere with my ability to kick ass.
    * * *
    Central Park is large. If you don’t live in New York
City, you may not realize that, or think that the small portion that you see is
all there is, just a breath of greenery in the middle of the concrete
jungle.
    The truth is, Central Park is more than eight hundred acres of
lawns, woods, lakes, playgrounds, fields, and rambling paths that never actually
go in a straight line. There are bridges and underpasses, tunnels and
suddenly-appearing gazebos, restaurants and castles, and god knows what else
tucked into the utterly artificial and incredibly lovely grounds. Something like
thirty thousand trees, according to the stats, and rumors of coyotes to go with
the birds and rabbits and squirrels and occasional seriously confused deer.
    And there are fatae. Exactly how many Cosa- cousins live in the Park is unknown—even if we tried to run a
census, they’d either refuse to answer or lie. Piskies, flocks of them nestling
in the trees and building, their nests tangled in the roots. Dryads, not as many
as we might wish, but enough to help keep the rooted trees healthy and well.
Some of Danny’s full-blooded faun cousins, and at least one centaur. I didn’t
think the lakes were deep enough to support any of the aquatic fatae, but I’ve
been wrong a lot before, enough that I’d be very careful leaning too far over a
watery surface. City fatae tended to abide by the Treaty…but water-sprites were
changeable and moody and saw most humans as annoyances at best. Venec and
Stosser would be peeved if they had to ransom me from the bottom of a lake.
    The moment I entered the Park at West 77th Street, I knew that
I was being watched. Fatae don’t use magic the way we do, but they’re part of
it, and they know it when it walks by. I could pretend I wasn’t aware of the
surveillance, make like I was just out for a nice afternoon stroll, or I could
stop and deal with it now.
    I stopped.
    The closest person to me was a woman pushing a stroller a few
yards ahead of me. Other than that, the walkway I was on appeared deserted. I
waited until she was out of earshot, then cocked my hip and addressed the air
around me.
    “If you’ve got something to say, say it. I’m listening.”
    Silence. Not even a rustle or a giggle, which meant that it
probably wasn’t piskies. When no pinecones or other shot hit the back of my
neck, I decided it definitely wasn’t piskies.
    “Come on, this is boring. You have a question? Ask. Got a
warning? Go ahead. But don’t just skulk silently. It’s creepy as hell.”
    The sense of being watched didn’t go away, and I was starting
to get annoyed. “You know who I am.” It wasn’t a question this time; last I’d
gone hunting in the Park I’d almost managed to set off an interspecies incident,
riling a Schiera to the point that it spat poison at me. That was the kind of
thing that got retold. And I wasn’t exactly subdued in my appearance—I didn’t
dye my hair the extreme colors I used to, after being told in no uncertain terms
it wasn’t a good look for an investigator, but the