The Complete Sylvan Investigations by Laura Anne Gilman

The Complete Sylvan Investigations by Laura Anne Gilman

Author:Laura Anne Gilman [Gilman, Laura Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-951612-26-9
Publisher: Faery Cat Press


Ellen had survived adolescence by keeping a weather eye on the people around her, and working at Sylvan Investigations had only honed that skill. So even in the middle of her own trauma, she knew something was wrong.

“Boss?” She watched as her boss paced back and forth, his hands shoved into his pockets, face blank. “You’re making me nervous.”

That wasn’t a good thing to do to a Talent. The first lecture she’d ever gotten was that the ability to manipulate current — what people used to call magic, back before Founder Ben codified the connection between current and electricity — came with a price, and part of that price was that if they slip up on their control, or pull too much power, they fry things nearby. Computers, mostly, but also people, if the Talent in question is high-res and nervous enough. Ellen was, she’d been told, high- res. And she was getting very nervous.

“Boss?” She tried again. Normally, Danny was already forming a plan by the time she’d finished telling him about a vision. He was smart, and he was quick, and he was pretty much unflappable. Part of it was a career in the NYPD before she’d ever met him, part of it was that fauns just didn’t get flapped by much. He was only half-faun, but he’d said once that he got the useful part — the stone-cold liver, and the ability to take weirdness pretty much in stride.

She’d never pointed out to him that he’d also gotten the quirky charm-and-looks combo that made most fauns such cocky sons of bitches. He knew, he just tried not to use it.

Her words finally reached him, at least enough to make him stop pacing. “You saw the cops already there? So we can’t stop it. The person’s already dead, or he’s going to be dead. I’m sorry, kid.”

He only called her kid when something was wrong. Shadow, when he was worried. Ellen, or Miss Ellen when he was in a particularly good mood, the courtesy he said his mom had drilled into him coming to the fore in a weirdly playful way. But ‘kid’ was “I have to tell you something bad” territory.

“Do you think that’s why it felt urgent but not urgent?” Like the merfolk she hadn’t been able to save. No. When she saw dead people it still felt urgent, because there was someone else at risk, someone alive. She looked at him, her face scrunched in a frown. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“El — ”

“I may not have Sergei’s bullshit detector — ” her mentor’s husband was a Null, but he could smell a lie before you even thought it — “But I know you pretty well now, and you’re not telling me something.”

Two years ago Danny Hendrickson had terrified her. Two years ago, everything had terrified her. Her entire life, people had told her she was crazy, that her visions were hallucinations, that everything that happened around her wasn’t normal, that she wasn’t normal. Discovering



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