They’d just come off one, an emotionally grueling case of a political zealot, a man who had once been a beloved father, husband, baseball coach, killing a small-time politician and his family in their beds.The team had tried hard to take him alive—finding out where the crazy came from, making it public, wassoimportant—but he’d had a semiautomatic weapon in a public place, and just the sight of Natalia and Garcia had made him fire randomly.Crosby, back from the hospital early but still on restricted duty, had been overwatch, and he’d been so fucking smart he’d stunned them all.On his direction, Joey had made the kill with one of his wicked knives, silently, and Gideon had seen then the way his boy could pull on pieces of his armor like tiny panels around his heart.He’d made the kill two days before, and that night he’d been caught outside Gideon’s apartment.
If Gideon had half Joey’s skill at tracking, he would have followed his bleeding wolf home.
But yesterday had been paperwork, and today had been physical training or cryptography classes—at least that’s what had been on the roster.
Then Clint had shown up at briefing typing furiously on his tablet, his craggy face folded into a scowl of concentration.“No,” he muttered.“That’s our case.It is.Yes, it is.See?Yes, asshole, that’s our case.Good.Now back off.”
He said that last with a flourish of his fingers pounding out a message on the tablet and then glanced up at the expectant faces around him.
“So,” he said, as though they hadn’t all seen him fighting for turf.“We’ve had two kids disappear from a local LGBTQ shelter—fifteen and sixteen, both assigned male at birth, but trans.Their supervisor said that both kids were in full dress, very female in appearance, because they were going to a school dance.He’s….”Clint looked up and swallowed.“He’s afraid they might have been bullied, and the local law enforcement thinks that, and I’m quoting here, ‘Any tranny in a dress is probably out tricking.’”
The unit sucked in an angry breath, and Clint nodded grimly.Special Crimes Task Force was there for all sorts of reasons—serial killers, fugitives on a spree, organized crime—but also, clearly stated in their mission statement, they were in charge of “crimes against marginalized persons or vulnerable communities.”This meant that Gail—leg freshly healed—and Garcia had spent a week tracking down a poor Amish drug addict who’d just wanted to go home.And it meant that these two trans youths, who had probably been kicked out of the house and had landed in one of the most organized shelters in Brooklyn, were suddenly the two most important teenagers in the world.
“So this is definitely our case,” he said in the silence.“Pearson, Crosby, you got five minutes to bring us up to speed.”
Gideon used that time to get their two IT rats coffee, but found Calix Garcia was there first, black eyes snapping in a little circle of a face.
“I got Crosby,” he said, as though he hadn’t just joined the task force four weeks ago, in time for Crosby to get hurt.
Gideon let him, getting Gail’s coffee without comment, making sure to use the special cat-with-a-knife coffee cup that was Gail’s signature.He and Joey had called it that moment in bed that Garcia and Crosby were a thing.Theymight not know it yet, but Garcia’s possessiveness was unmistakable.
Gideon yearned to be that possessive, but he knew he’d need both hands and all ten fingers to negotiate what was to come.Joey was smart, agile, and could plan ahead to take an objective, but true to most warriors, he didn’t think of what came after: How does one occupy territory?
Gideon had to make his wolf occupy Joey’s.
There were worse occupations to have.
His musings were interrupted by Joey at his elbow, taking the coffee carafe so he could brew another.“You got your eye on that?”he asked nonchalantly, as though the idea of hitting on Gail Pearson wasn’t abhorrent, like sleeping with a sibling.
“No,” he said shortly, adding cream and sugar.And then for spite, because he was stung, he added, “Work entanglements never work out.”
He left Carlyle glaring at his back and sat down next to Crosby for the briefing.He’d missed Crosby’s no-bullshit flatfoot perspective since he’d been out, and while Judson Crosby’s wide cheekbones and blue eyes weren’t really to his taste, hey, Crosby and Garcia weren’t sleeping togetheryet, so he might as well pisseverybodyoff today, right?
But then Crosby and Pearson launched into their spiel, and Gideon forgot about office lonely-hearts games and really focused on the two missing girls.
They’d been captured without makeup in one shot, both of them growing their hair long, plucking their brows, using moisturizer and toner to minimize their pores.And after a bare breath of adjustment, Gideon could see them—seethem—for who they wanted to be.Two dark haired girls with squirrel-bright brown eyes and wide laughing mouths.The taller one looked a little sadder—there was something in her eyes that said this laughing moment wasn’t easily found—and the smaller one held her hand over teeth that might have been crooked while biting her lip.Self-conscious, Gideon thought with an aching heart.Both of them self-conscious, a little afraid—like every other girl in high school, except these two girls had generations of hatred and ignorance to overcome every time they put on their makeup and fluffed their hair.
But God, they were pretty and happy and young.
Even happier in the next picture, which, Pearson pointed out, had been taken last night—hours before they’d disappeared.They were dressed in sequined party dresses with sleeves and appropriate wraps (so not like whooores, Garcia said bluntly, giving the extra-sluttyoosto the word), and while Chadwick couldn’t see them, he assumed they were wearing heels.
“I’m going to give you their deadnames in your briefing,” Crosby said, “because we may have to deal with the parents who kicked them out, and you need to have that information.But to us, they’re Tasha, to the left, and Arietty, on the right.”
“I read those books when I was a kid,” Gail said softly, and when they all looked at her, she said, “The Borrowers.It’s about little people who steal things from the human world to live.Arietty was….”Her full mouth quirked.“She was feisty and smart, and the only person like herself that she knew.”
“Oh,” Natalia Denison said next to her, and they didn’t need any elaboration after that.Poor Arietty.
Gail cleared her throat and went on, explaining how both girls had left for school that night, taking a bus to a dance at a nearby high school.While they attended school at the shelter, the high school aged students were often involved in activities at a larger public school, and the shelter administrator, Eli Engel, had assured the police that the girls had been welcome to the dance—and that they hadn’t been a “surprise,” as the officer taking his statement had intimated.
“It says here that the high school is very LGBTQ friendly,” Gail read.“And it has a very strong antibullying policy—apparently Mr.Engel is something of a bulldog, trying to make sure his students have access to the high school amenities that the shelter doesn’t have, but also that his kids stay safe.”
“What did the principal of the other school say?”Garcia asked, sounding dubious.
“He said the same thing,” Crosby told them.“But he said the girls didn’t show.He was expecting them—they were coming early to help decorate—but when they didn’t get off the bus, he called Engel to make sure they were on their way.”
A diagram of the bus route popped up on their big screen, with a route penciled in.The high school was only ten blocks away.Most New Yorkers could walk that easy, Gideon thought in detachment, but the girls had been wearing heels and their best dresses.They hadn’t wanted to arrive sweaty and messy when this had been a big deal to them.
“Two stops,” Pearson said, using the tablet to put two dots on the map between where they’d gotten on and where they should have gotten off.“We’ve got two places to search, although both schools have had service groups canvassing the stops all morning.This place—” She tapped what on the map looked like a small series of alleys.“—is a nest of drug dealers and gang activity.It’s actually a drugmart, one the police crash at least every two weeks, but I guess they do too much business to move it someplace else.We’ve advised Rainbow House to steer clear of that area—too many kids, too much danger.This other place”—she tapped the other stop—“has small shops lining both blocks—two small bodegas, one on either side of the street, a check cashing place, a cobbler, a diamond seller, and a watch repairman.Those are the street-level businesses.Most of them have two or three businesses in the upper levels before they become walkups.”
