Like the fact that I‘m not entirely human.

A missing kid could go anywhere. It all depended on who she was, and what she wanted. I started with her last sighting: the lobby of her high school, up on East 74th. She’d been there on Tuesday afternoon, hanging with her homegirls, or whatever the slang was around the 14-year-old set these days, and then, an hour later … she wasn’t. The police had already questioned her friends and boyfriend, and I had — through my ex-partner — gotten copies of those reports. They were all unsurprisingly unhelpful. Normal day, normal traumas, normal schedule. The kids broke to go their separate ways, and nobody knew anything until Susan’s parents started calling and texting her peer group that night, looking for their wayward daughter.

Talking to the friends didn’t get me much further, either. They seemed like good kids, all worried about Miss Susan. Nothing they said sounded suspicious or questionable, and none of them were suspects. Just … normal kids, as much as that sort of thing was possible.

So Miss Susan became an official Missing Person. My former compadres in the NYPD did their usual sweep of the obvious places; the bus station creepers and ladies’ room Lotharios who like to sweet-talk young girls into unsavory arrangements. No luck. They were still looking, but if you knew how many kids go missing every year, you’d know why they weren’t busting their humps over a girl who might or might not have gone under her own power.

But now I was on the job. The fact that I’d been a cop wasn’t in my favor among the dirtirati, but the fact that I was part of the Cosa Nostradamus won some of those points back. One outcast recognized another. If there had been gossip around about Miss Susan, I would have gotten wind of it.

No such luck. Human or fatae, nobody was talking. To all intents and purposes, Susan had walked out of her high school, and disappeared.