Free Dragon Justice by Laura Anne Gilman Page B

part of the Park had been designed to mimic a natural
forest, and once within it, you could not see—or hear—any hint of the city
around us, not even the tallest skyscrapers. I was pretty sure that a slender
beech winked at me as we passed, but I didn’t have time to stop and say
hello—and I might have imagined it, anyway.
    We walked down the deer path, single file, until Rorani
stopped, waiting for me to see whatever it was she wanted me to see.
    There was a decline, sloping gradually into a little
flat-bottomed valley, with another higher, rocky rise on the other side. The
floor was covered in grass and ground cover, the trees midheight and leafy,
and—then the scene shifted, the way some paintings do when you stare at them too
long.
    I saw the bedrolls first. They were tucked under a clump of
thick-trunked trees, concealed under tarps painted to mimic the ground, but the
shapes were wrong, jumping out at me like they were splashed with bright orange
paint. The storage container was harder to find; they’d found one the same gray
as the rocks and cluttered it up so that the lines resembled a small boulder. I
was impressed.
    Once I saw that, the bodies came into focus. Three skinny forms
in dark hoodies and jeans, curled up against each other like kittens, and
another higher up on a rock, his or her legs hanging over the side, reading a
book. It was a quiet, peaceful scene, and I couldn’t see a thing about it that
would have worried Rorani, other than the fact that all four were young enough
to be living at home, not out here on their own. But that was a human concern,
not a fatae one.
    The campsite, now that I was aware of it, looked well
established. Without using magic to hide it, I was amazed they’d been able to
keep it from being discovered even a week, much less a month or more. I guess if
nobody’s looking, it’s easier to hide.
    Had anyone been looking for these girls, before us? The cops
had…but in a city this size, kids go missing at such a rate it must be
impossible to keep up, even on a purely Null basis. Add in the fatae, and the
risk of being dusted or—well, nobody had been eaten in years. That we knew
about, anyway.
    “How many are there?” I spoke softly, although I was pretty
sure that they couldn’t hear us from up here.
    “I’m not sure,” she said, equally as quiet. “They come and go,
and I cannot stay to watch them as I might. I have seen as many as a dozen
gathered. A dozen, and their leader.” She paused, and her hand touched my
shoulder, the fingers folding around my skin. “Their leader. She…worries
me.”
    Ah. I had thought Rorani would not mind teenagers gathering
peacefully among her trees; there was something else going on. “An adult?”
    “Yes. A Null. And yet there is magic there. She holds them in
sway. A glamour, save she has none. She speaks, and they gather around. She
points, and they scatter.”
    I chewed on my lower lip, listening. What Rorani was describing
was a charismatic, like Stosser. Take a charismatic, Talent or Null, add a bunch
of under-twenty-somethings, and put them out here, with no other distractions?
You have a cult.
    Most cult leaders were male, from what I’d ever read, but most doesn’t ever mean all. A females-only cult? If they were religious, I’d lay money on
Dianic—or Artemic—or any of the other mythological interpretations. No stag to
hunt here, though.
    “What do you—” I started to ask, when something caught Rorani’s
attention. “Oh, dear,” she said, in a tone of voice that put every nerve I had
on edge. There was “oh, dear, that’s too bad,” and then there’s “oh, dear, this
is very bad,” and hers was the latter.
    We weren’t alone. Out of the stillness, a dozen creatures
flowed over the hill behind the campsite. They were long and lean and shimmered
a pale silver like sunlight on water, and I had no idea what the hell I was
looking at except I was pretty sure they weren’t bringing milk and cookies.