Dragon Justice Read Free

close
your ticket?”
    Nicky shook his head mournfully. “Held over by popular demand.
Seems our client wasn’t quite forthcoming on all that was stolen.”
    I snorted in a way that would have made my mentor shake his
head in genteel dismay. “Surprise. Not.”
    After the ki-rin disaster we’d somehow gotten a few more jobs,
but then came the Tricks case, that damned prankster, and the horse-trading
Venec had indulged in to satisfy his sense of fair play. In the aftermath, there
had been a month of utter silence when we’d figured it was all over, nobody
would trust us to find a missing gerbil. I’d even started browsing the want ads,
not that there was anything there I was qualified for, much less interested
in.
    Then, all of a sudden, it was like the floodgates opened. Okay,
a steady trickle through the gates. The Eastern Council hadn’t given us their
gold seal of approval yet, but the rank-and-file Council were bringing us their
troubles.
    The problem was, most of them held the “above the rules”
attitude that had made Ian Stosser decide there was a need for us in the Cosa Nostradamus to begin with. It’s tough to solve a
supernatural crime. It’s almost impossible when the client doesn’t give over all
the gory details at the start.
    Nicky had gotten one of those.
    I’d gotten pretty good at holding back exasperated sighs. “At
some point, they’re going to have to realize that we’re not going to judge them.
Right?”
    Nick snorted in response, and I flopped down on the sofa next
to him, swinging my feet up into his lap and unwrapping the sandwich. “Okay,
maybe not.”
    Nick shoved my feet back onto the ground and went back to
marking something in his notebook. Since current messed with electronics
something fierce, most Talent couldn’t use recorders or cameras, so we all
carried notebooks around like twentieth-century beat cops. I’d added a
sketchbook to my kit, but Nick couldn’t draw a straight line if you gave him a
ruler. I know, I’d tried.
    “Just be glad you weren’t here when the smoke detector went off
again,” he said.
    I groaned. “What’s that, the third time this month?”
    “Yeah. Scared the crap out of Nisa.”
    “Poor kid. She so doesn’t deserve to be stuck here with
us.”
    Nicky just snickered.
    “I didn’t see anything on the board—I wonder if I could get
tomorrow off,” I said, biting into my lunch. Ham and cheese. Not bad. Time off
would be nice. I’d gotten an invite to go sailing from a woman I’d met the week
before, and I wanted to take her up on it before she decided I wasn’t
interested. Despite the Merge, I was trying to keep some semblance of a normal
social life, even if very few of my hookups ended up with an actual hookup these
days.
    “Doubtful,” Nick said, not looking up. “Stosser took a new
client into the back office about ten minutes ago. Got your name all over
it.”
    “Oh, gods above and below.” I took another bite, that news
suggesting that lunch might be abbreviated. “Can’t someone else handle it?”
    “Fatae.”
    That one short word made me put down my sandwich, thoughts of
my new acquaintance and a lazy afternoon on the water not quite forgotten but
shoved aside. “Seriously?”
    Nick finally looked up from his notebook. “Serious as a heart
attack. No idea the breed. They were cloaked like it was midwinter. Human-tall,
human-wide, no visible tails or fur.”
    That didn’t rule much out—most of the fatae in New York City
were human-shaped, enough to get by on a casual glance, anyway. There were a few
horned and hooved types, and a few clearly not-human breeds living in the parks
or underground, but they were the minority. And when they had a problem, most of
them dealt with it internally. In fact, most of the breeds dealt with their own
shit. For one of them to come to us…
    It could be good, or it could be seriously bad. The last time
we’d gotten tangled in fatae business, we’d had to drag a ki-rin into